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Rising tides: Is globalization still lifting these boats?

No. That is, not unless you believe that globalization is mainly about international trade and investment. But it is much more than that, and rumors of its demise—such as Princeton economic historian Harold James’s recent obituary for “The Late, Great Globalization”—have been greatly exaggerated.

Jihadists in Indonesia, after all, can still share their operational plans with like-minded extremists in the Middle East, while Vietnamese artists can now more easily sell their wares in European markets, and Spanish magistrates can team up with their peers in Latin America to bring torturers to justice. Globalization, as political scientist David Held and his coauthors put it, is nothing less than the “widening, deepening and speeding up of worldwide interconnectedness in all aspects of contemporary social life”—and not just from one Bloomberg terminal to another.

Around the world, all kinds of groups are still connecting, and the economic crisis will not slow their international activities. In some cases, it might even bolster them.

Global charities, for instance, will face soaring demand for their services as the economic crisis greatly expands the number of those in need. Religions, too, will benefit, as widespread hardship heightens interest in the hereafter. At a time when cash is king and jobs are scarce, globalized criminals will be one of the few, if not the only, sources of credit, investment, and employment in some places. And transnational terrorists will not be deterred by a bad economy. The collapse of the credit-default swap market didn’t prevent 10 Pakistani militants from wreaking havoc in Mumbai in November.

It’s true that private flows of credit and investment across borders have temporarily plummeted. By the end of 2008, for example, U.S. demand for imported goods fell drastically, shrinking the country’s trade deficit by almost 30 percent. In China, imports dropped 21 percent and exports nearly 3 percent. Last November, capital flows to emerging markets reached their lowest level since 1995, and issuance of international bonds ground to a halt.

But as private economic activity falls, the international movement of public funds is booming. Last fall, the U.S. Federal Reserve and the central banks of Brazil, Mexico, Singapore, and South Korea launched $30 billion worth of currency arrangements for each country designed to stabilize their financial markets. Similar reciprocal deals now tie together central banks throughout Asia, Europe, and the Middle East.

Yes, some governments might be tempted to respond to the crisis by adopting trade-impairing policies, imposing rules that inhibit global financial integration, or taking measures to curb immigration. The costs of doing so, however, are enormous and hard to sustain in the long run. What’s more, the ability of any government to shield its economy and society from outside influences and dangers has steadily evaporated in the past two decades. There is no indication that this trend will be reversed.

Globalization is such a diverse, broad-based, and potent force that not even today’s massive economic crash will dramatically slow it down or permanently reverse it. Love it or hate it, globalization is here to stay.

Yes it is. Historians such as A.G. Hopkins have argued in recent years that the wave of globalization that surged in the 1990s is just a continuation of a long-term process that started as far back as when migrating pre-modern human communities first encountered each other. They also note that the steamship revolutionized transportation as much or more than the advent of containerized cargo shipping and that the printing press, the telegraph, and the telephone were technologies as disruptive in their day as the Internet. In short, there is nothing new under the sun.

Still, the current wave of globalization has many unprecedented characteristics. As Internet access penetrates the most remote corners of the globe, it is transforming the lives of more people, in more places, more cheaply than ever before—and the pace of change is accelerating faster than we can hope to chronicle it.

Today’s globalization is also more individualized than ever. The telegraph was most intensively used by institutions, but the Internet is a truly personal tool that allows Spanish women to find marriage prospects in Argentina, and South African teenagers to share music files with peers in Scotland. Contemporary globalization is also different in that the speed at which it is integrating human activities is often instantaneous and almost costless. Moreover, the quantitative change in each of globalization’s components—economic, cultural, military, etc.—is so enormous that it creates a qualitative change. This alone has opened possibilities that are completely new—and also consequences that humanity has never seen before.

It never did. For some critics, globalization has been little more than an American project aimed at expanding U.S. economic, military, and cultural dominance. Yet, since the 1980s, Japanese sushi has gone as global as Latin American telenovelas or fundamentalist Islam, while massive inflows of Hispanic immigrants have had a huge impact on U.S. society.