1.4 Globalization and Development

Globalization

US President George H. W. Bush gave a speech during his presidency (1988–92) indicating the real possibility of a New World Order. The speech, given during the Persian Gulf War when Iraq occupied Kuwait, was quite surprising to many, and it created questions about what he meant. Geographers and professionals in other disciplines understand that the world is not static. Cultural forces continue to act on human activities as globalization creates new alliances and global networks. The goal is to understand globalization and to make sense of what is happening. The better we understand the world and human dynamics, the better we will be prepared to address the changes that are occurring. Geography provides a means to spatially examine these changes.

Globalization is a process with a long history. People have been exploring, migrating, and trading with each other throughout human history, and these activities have created interactive networks connecting the different parts of the planet and producing dependent economic relationships. In modern times, globalization can be recognized by noting iconic global corporations, such as Walmart, McDonald’s, or Toyota, that trade across international borders and integrate labor and resources from different countries to sell a product or service in the global marketplace. In a number of countries, people have protested against the building of new Walmarts or McDonalds’, and such protests exemplify concerns about globalization and the growing expansion of dominant global economic units into local communities. These ubiquitous corporations represent corporate interests that are primarily concerned with company profits. Global corporations tend to view countries or communities as either markets for their products or sources of labor or raw materials. Globalization can seriously impact local communities for better or for worse, depending on local circumstances. The main force that encourages globalization is economic activity based on technological advancements. Cultural and societal changes often occur as a consequence and are no less significant.

Political geography examines geography’s influence on political systems and globalization, which are related to issues concerning the development of borders and the distribution of government types. One of the most significant events in political geography was colonialism, which is connected to the development of capitalism. Eric Wolf, in his book Europe and the People without History, details the expansion of European powers throughout the world to control both human and natural resources as well as expand a country’s world power and promote Christianity. The British parliamentary system of government was exported to various areas of the British Empire. Now the parliamentary system is used throughout the world in former British colonies and throughout the British Commonwealth. Additionally, colonialism helped spread the English language throughout the world, for example, to India and the United States.

European colonialism was an early wave of globalization that changed the planet and shaped most of the world’s current political borders. This early wave of global conquest was fueled by the Industrial Revolution. Colonialism transferred technology, food products, and ideas around the globe in merchant ships that centered on the European power bases of the colonial empires of Europe—mainly Britain, Spain, France, Portugal, and the Netherlands. When the United States became independent of these European colonial powers, it began to extend its power and influence around the world. Thus the first major wave of globalization was a result of European colonialism.

The space race and the information age of the latter portion of the twentieth century initiated a second major wave of globalization. The space race was a competition between the United States and the Soviet Union to develop space-related technologies, including satellites, and to land on the moon. The end of the Cold War, with the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, coincided with advancements in computer technology that fueled the second major wave in modern globalization. Technology and corporate activity have stimulated a wave of globalization that is impacting the economies of countries around the world. In European colonialism, the land and people were physically conquered by the mother country and became colonies ruled by the European colonizer’s government. Great Britain was the most avid colonizer and amassed great fortunes through its colonial possessions. One difference between European colonialism and globalization today is that globally active multinational corporations do not wish to own the country or run the government directly. Corporations are not concerned with what government type is in power or who is running the country as long as they can operate and make a profit. This neocolonialism (new colonialism or corporate colonialism), like European colonialism, continues to exploit natural resources, labor, and markets for economic profits. Its critics claim that corporate colonialism is nothing more than a legal method of pillaging and plundering, and its supporters claim it is the most efficient use of labor and resources to supply the world with the lowest-priced products.

Examples of corporate colonialism can be seen in the trade relationships between the United States and places such as Mexico and China. US corporations move their manufacturing plants to Mexico to earn more profits by exploiting cheap labor. The corporations do not take over Mexico politically; they exploit it economically. The many US corporations that have started manufacturing their products in China do not attempt to overthrow the Communist Chinese government; they want to exploit the cheap Chinese labor pool and open up markets to sell products to Chinese consumers. Desire for profits drives corporate colonialism.

Opportunity and Advantage

Considering the drive of individuals to increase their opportunities or advantages is one way to understand our world. People who have access to opportunities and advantages can generally achieve a higher standard of living than people without. This can be true for individuals, global corporations, or whole countries. Countries that have an opportunity or an advantage over others can achieve a higher standard of living for their people, and countries without such opportunities or advantages will struggle in a global economy. A country’s opportunities and advantages can be determined by various factors, such as the amounts of available natural or human resources, arable land for farming, forests for timber, and freshwater for fishing or a specific location that provides a greater access to the world markets. Examples of human resources are a large labor pool or a high percentage of educated professionals. Individuals seek to gain opportunities or advantages by increasing their education, learning new skills that can translate into higher earning power, or migrating to a place with improved employment prospects.

Rural-to-urban shift occurs when people move from rural agricultural areas to the cities for employment or in search of a better life and is an example of a migration pattern based on people seeking greater opportunities or advantages. When people migrate from a poorer country to a postindustrial country, they are seeking opportunities or advantages in life. The “have” countries are those with opportunities and advantages; the “have-not” countries are those with fewer opportunities and advantages for their people or for their country’s future. Migration patterns around the world usually shift people from places without resources to places with resources. These migration patterns, which are evident in rural-to-urban shift and periphery-to-core migration, allow individuals to seek a greater opportunities or advantages for the future.

Core-Periphery Spatial Relationship

Economic conditions vary across the globe. There are wealthy countries and there are poor countries, and the determination of which countries are wealthy and which countries are poor has generally been determined by the availability of economic opportunities and advantages. There are three core areas of wealthy industrialized countries, all of which are found in the Northern Hemisphere: North America, Western Europe, and eastern Asia. The main market centers of these regions are New York City, London, and Tokyo. These three core areas and their prosperous neighbors make up the centers of economic activity that drive the global economy. Other wealthy countries can be found dispersed in regions with large amounts of natural resources, such as the Middle East, or places of strategic location, such as Singapore. The world’s poorer countries make up the peripheral countries. A few countries share qualities of both and may be called semiperipheries.

The periphery countries and the core countries each have unique characteristics. Peripheral locations are providers of raw materials and agricultural products. In the periphery, more people earn their living in occupations related to securing resources: farming, mining, or harvesting forest products. For the workers in these occupations, the profits tend to be marginal with fewer opportunities to advance. In the periphery, there is a condition known as brain drain, which describes a loss of educated or professional individuals. Young people leave the peripheral areas for the cities to earn an education or to find more advantageous employment. Few of these individuals return to the periphery to share their knowledge or success with their former community.

Brain drain also happens on an international level—that is, students from periphery countries might go to college in core countries, such as the United States or countries in Europe. Many international college graduates do not return to their poorer countries of origin but instead choose to stay in the core country because of the employment opportunities. This is especially true in the medical field. There is little political power in the periphery; centers of political power are almost always located in the core areas or at least dominated by the core cities. The core areas pull in people, skills, and wealth from the periphery. Lack of opportunities in the periphery pushes people to relocate to the core.

Power, wealth, and opportunity have traditionally been centered in the core areas of the world. These locations are urbanized and industrialized and hold immense economic and political power. Ideas, technology, and cultural activity thrive in these core areas. Political power is held in the hands of movers and shakers who inhabit the core. The core depends on the periphery for raw materials, food, and cheap labor, and the periphery depends on the core for manufactured goods, services, and governmental support.

The core-periphery spatial relationship can be viewed on various levels. On a local level, one can select eastern Kentucky, with the city of Morehead as an example. Morehead has a population of about ten thousand people and is the only significant town in its county. Morehead, with a university, regional hospital and retail services, serves as a core hub for the surrounding periphery. The hinterland of Morehead has an economy based on agriculture, coal mining, and timber, which is typical of a peripheral region. The city of Morehead has the political, economic, and educational power that serves the people of its local area.

If we move up a level, we can understand that entire regions of the United States can be identified as peripheral areas: the agricultural Midwest, rural Appalachia, and the mountain ranges and basins of the western United States. The large metropolitan areas of the East and West Coasts and the Industrial Belt act as the core areas. Los Angeles and New York City anchor each coast, and cities such as Chicago, St. Louis, Denver, and Indianapolis represent the heartland. All the other large cities in the United States act as core areas for their surrounding peripheral hinterlands. Southern cities such as Atlanta, Memphis, Dallas, or Phoenix act as core centers of commerce for the South in a region known as the Sun Belt.

On a global scale, we can understand why North America, Western Europe, and eastern Asia represent the three main economic core areas of the world. They all possess the most advanced technology and the greatest economic resources. Core regions control the corporate markets that energize and fuel global activity. Peripheral regions include portions of Africa, Asia, Latin America, and all the other places that primarily make their living from local resources and support the economic core. These peripheral regions may include key port cities. A semiperiphery would be a transitional area between the core and the periphery, which could include countries such as Russia, India, or Brazil that are not exactly in the core and not really in the periphery but might have qualities of both. World migration patterns follow the core-periphery spatial relationship in that people and wealth usually shift from the peripheral rural regions to the urban core regions. The “have” countries of the world are in the core regions, while the “have-not” countries are most likely in the peripheral regions.

National Income Methods

It is easier to understand why people move from rural to urban, from periphery to core, from Mexico to the United States when one begins to understand the global economy. Economic conditions are connected to how countries gain national income, opportunities, and advantages. One way of gaining wealth is simply by taking someone else’s wealth. This method has been common practice throughout human history: a group of armed individuals attacks another group and takes their possessions or resources. This is regularly practiced through warfare. Unfortunately, this pillage-and-plunder type of activity has been a standard way of gaining wealth throughout human history. The taking of resources by force or by war is frowned upon today by the global economic community, though it still occurs. The art of piracy, for example, is still practiced on the high seas in various places around the globe, particularly off the coast of Somalia.

The main methods countries use to gain national income are based on sustainable national income models and value-added principles. The traditional three areas of agriculture, extraction/mining, and manufacturing are a result of primary and secondary economic activities. Natural resources, agriculture, and manufacturing have been traditionally targeted as the means to gain national income. Postindustrial activities in the service sector would include tertiary and quaternary economic activities, which make up a large part of a nation’s economy but might not hold the same value-added quotient for national income as the traditional three areas.

Agriculture is the method of growing crops or trees or raising livestock that provides food and some raw materials. The excess is usually sold for profits. This is a renewable method of gaining wealth, as long as conditions are favorable. Profits for agricultural products might be low because of global competition. Countries with minerals, oil, or other natural resources can earn income from the extraction and sale of those items. Saudi Arabia and other countries with abundant petroleum reserves can gain wealth by selling that resource to other countries. Since these resources are not renewable, once the minerals or oil run out, the country must turn to other activities to gain national income.

Places around the world have sometimes been named after the methods used to gain wealth. For example, the Gold Coast of western Africa received its label because of the abundance of gold in the region. The term breadbasket often refers to a region with abundant agricultural surpluses. Another example is the Champagne region of France, which has become synonymous with the beverage made from the grapes grown there. Banana republics earned their name because their large fruit plantations were the main income source for the large corporations that operated them. Places such as Copper Canyon and Silver City are examples of towns, cities, or regions named after the natural resources found there. The United States had its Manufacturing Belt, referring to the region from Boston to St. Louis, which was the core industrial region that generated wealth through heavy manufacturing for the greater part of nineteenth and twentieth centuries

Manufacturing has offered the industrialized world the opportunity for the greatest value-added profits. From the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, solid profits have been made by turning raw materials into useable products that can be mass-produced and sold in high quantities. The core areas of the world have all made enormous wealth from manufacturing profits. Today, information technology and high-tech manufactured products generate substantial wealth. The Microsoft Corporation manufactures information by placing data in the form of computer programs on inexpensive disks or in digital files that are then sold at a profit to a world computer market. The geographic region of California south of San Francisco was labeled Silicon Valley after this type of information-generating activity.

For a country to gain national wealth, income must be brought in from outside the country or be generated from within. Other than the big-three methods of agriculture, extraction/mining, and manufacturing, there are additional ways a country can gain wealth, such as through tourism and services. Postindustrial economic activities (the service sector) contribute to a large percentage of employment opportunities in industrialized countries and generate a large percentage of their national economies. However, the service sector does not have the high value-added profits traditionally provided by the manufacturing sector. In the gaming industry, for example, casinos do not have a large wealth-generating potential for the country unless they can either attract gamblers from other countries or provide for other wealth-generating services. Gambling shifts wealth from one person to another and provides little national income. The activity of gambling does, however, generate service jobs for the gaming industry.