GLOBALISATION
The last twenty years have seen a precedentless increase in the global
exchange of goods, services, investment, information and cultural assets
and values, based on high speed communication links and powerful transportation
networks. After the end of the Cold War, the globalisation agenda was
boosted by the opening of markets formerly inaccessible for western economies
and an emerging neoliberal attitude advocating the unlimited flow of tradeable
assets: products and services -- and money. This implies major shifts
in the composition and location of production and consumption activities
and reduce the ability of national and local governments to act independently.
As a result, it has reshaped the way millions of people earn their living
and the way societies are organised which in turn has serious consequences
for the environment.
Globalisation creates a new hierarchy of space: the 'global cities' stand
at the top of the pyramid, closely bound together across frontiers by
high-speed air and land links and by glass fibre cables, while at the
bottom whole regions or even continents - Africa or Central Asia, for
example - constitute 'black holes' in the informational universe (Castells
1997), not connected to one another in any significant degree.
Alongside the economic globalisation, the
international community has witnessed an ecological
globalisation, driven by the fact that levels of production and consumption
have reached a stage where one's activities in one country can have major
impacts on neighbouring countries or even the rest of the world. Even
if people have only begun to learn to live in 'one world', it is widely
accepted that there are a number of ecological problems that simply cannot
be solved by one country acting alone. This has been addressed in an increasing
number in intergovernmental negotiations to formulate international environmental
treaties.
What is missing, as many people argue, is a political globalisation,
a process to ensure that the emerging global market or the global ecological
policy is managed in the best interest of the maximum number of people,
on the basis of 'good governance', particularly equality and justice.
Instead, when governments meet to further the rules for economic globalisation,
they often do so to the best interests of their own national economies;
when they gather for regulations in the context of ecological globalisation,
this is always accompanied by a spirit to keep the impacts to their individual
national economies on the lowest possible level.
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