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Globalization And Sustainable Development In Africa
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Obviously, many scholars see globalization as a mere economic
phenomenon, involving the increasing interaction or integration of
national economic systems through the growth in international trade,
foreign investments and trans-border capital flow. However, one can
also point to the rapid increase in cross-border socio-cultural and
technological exchange as important and integral dimensions of
globalization. In this light, Anthony Giddens, a renowned sociologist,
simply defined globalization as the “decoupling of space and time.â€[1]
He emphasized that through instantaneous communication, knowledge and
culture can be shared around the world simultaneously.
This idea is more explicitly portrayed by Rund Lubbers, a Dutch political economist, who defined globalization as
A process in which geographic distance becomes a factor of diminishing
importance in the establishment and maintenance of cross-border
economic, political and socio-cultural relations.[2]
In agreement
with the afore-mentioned scholars, David Held and Anthony McGrew, in
their entry for Oxford Companion to Politics, made a subtle attempt to
characterize globalization and its effects on socio-cultural as well as
on political structures. They conceived globalization as
A process (or set of processes), which embodies a transformation in the
spatial organization of social relations and transactions, expressed in
transcontinental or interregional flows and networks of activity,
interaction and power.[3]
Observably, a common denominator here is
the optimism of these scholars about globalization. For them, it is a
universal process of transforming humanity into a single society or what
Marshall McLuhan termed the global village.[4] This transformation, for
Henry Alapiki, is usually accompanied by the intensification of
universal social relations “which link distant localities in such a way
that local happenings are shaped by events occurring many miles away and
vice versa.â€[5] In fact, Jan Scholte expressed this view more
elaborately when he wrote that:
Globalization refers
to processes whereby social relations acquire relatively distanceless
and borderless qualities, so that human lives are increasingly played
out in the world as a single place … Globalization is thus an on-going
trend whereby the world has - in many respects and at a generally
accelerating rate – become one relatively borderless social sphere.[6]
While
these scholars view globalization from a “social relationsâ€
perspective, others emphasize a more specific economic dimension. The
tendency here is to view globalization as a rapid increase in
cross-border socio-economic exchange under the conditions of
capitalism. A typical representative of this school is Prof. Oyejide
who states that:
Globalization refers to the increased
integration, across countries, of markets for goods, services and
capital. It implies in turn accelerated expansion of economic
activities globally and sharp increases in the movement of tangible and
intangible goods across national and regional boundaries. With that
movement, individual countries are becoming more closely integrated into
the global economy. Their trade linkages and investment flows grow more
complex, and cross-border financial movements are more volatile. More
importantly, globalization has been created, and continues to be
maintained by liberalization of economic policies in several key
areas.[7]
However, the anti-globalization schools view the phenomenon
as a worldwide drive towards a universal economic domination by
supranational institutions that are not accountable to democratic
processes or national governments. Thus, from the perspective of
international “political economy,†Aja Akpuru- Aja and A.C. Emeribe
argue that:
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