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The enemies of globalization -- whether
they denounce the exploitation of poor countries by rich
ones or the imposition of Western values on traditional
cultures -- see the new world economy as forcing a system
on people who do not want it. But the truth of the matter,
writes Daniel Cohen in this provocative account, may be
the reverse. Globalization, thanks to the speed of twenty-first-century
communications, shows people that they do want -- a vivid
world of promises that have yet to be fulfilled. For the
most impoverished developing nations, globalization remains
only an elusive image, a fleeting mirage. Never before,
Cohen says, have the means of communication -- the media
-- created such a global consciousness, and never have economic
forces lagged so far behind expectations.
Today's globalization, Cohen argues, is
the third act in a history that began with the Spanish Conquistadors
in the sixteenth century and continued with Great Britain's
nineteenth-century empire of free trade. In the nineteenth
century, as in the twenty-first, a revolution in transportation
and communication did not promote widespread wealth but
favored polarization. India, a part of the British empire,
was just as poor in 1913 as it was in 1820. Will today's
information economy do better in disseminating wealth than
the telegraph did two centuries ago? Presumably yes, if
one gauges the outcome from China's perspective; surely
not, if Africa's experience is a guide At any rate, poor
countries require much effort and investment to become players
in the global game. The view that technologies and world
trade bring wealth by themselves is no more true today than
it was two centuries ago.
We should not, Cohen writes, consider globalization
as an accomplished fact. It is because of what has yet to
happen -the unfulfilled promises of prosperity -that globalization
has so many enemies in the contemporary world. For the poorest
countries of the world, the problem is not so much that
they are exploited by globalization as that they are forgotten
and excluded.
Daniel Cohen is Professor of Economics
at the Ecole Normale Superieure and the Universite de Paris.
He is also a member of the Council of Economic Analysis
for the French prime minister and a op-ed columnist for
Le Monde.
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