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BAYLIS. Globalization of World Politics_-12 CHA...doc
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Historical Origins

It is hard to determine a specific moment when globalization started. Periodization is always impre­cise and contentious, largely because change and continuity are invariably intertwined. History shows no obvious and exact watersheds on which everyone will agree. Researchers have variously dated the onset of globalization from the dawn of human civilization (e.g. Gamble 1994), or from the start of the modern era (e.g. Modelski 1988), or from the middle of the nineteenth century (e.g. Robertson 1992), or from the late 1950s (e.g. Rosenau 1990), or from the 1970s (e.g. Harvey 1989). However, if we conceive of globalization as the rise of supraterritoriality, then its chronology lies in a combination of the Robertson and Rosenau positions. (See Box 1.2 for a chronology of some major events in the development of global­ization.)

Box 1.2. Some Key Events in the History of Globalization

1866 first permanent transoceanic telegraph cable comes into service

1865 creation of the first global regulatory agency (the International Telegraph Union)

1884 introduction of worldwide co-ordination of clocks (in relation to Greenwich Mean Time)

1891 first transborder telephone calls (between London and Paris)

1919 initiation of the first scheduled transborder air­line services

1929 institution of the first offshore finance arrange­ments (in Luxembourg)*

1930 first global radio broadcast (the speech of George V opening the London Naval Con­ference, relayed simultaneously to 242 stations across six continents)

1946 construction of the first digital computer

1949 introduction of package holidays sets the stage for large-scale global tourism

1954 establishment of the first export processing zone (in Ireland)

1954 launch of the 'Marlboro cowboy'

1955 first McDonald's restaurant

1956 first transoceanic telephone cable link

1957 advent of intercontinental ballistic missiles 1957 issuance of the first euro currency loan (by a Soviet bank, in US dollars, on the London mar­ket)*

1960 Marshall McLuhan coins the phrase 'global vil­lage'

1962 launch of the first communications satellite

1963 introduction of direct dialing of transborder telephone calls

1963 issuance of the first eurobond (by a borrower in Italy, in US dollars, on the London market)*

1966 first photographs of planet Earth from outer space

1969 construction of the first wide-body passenger jet (the Boeing 747)

1969 creation of the first large-scale computer net­work

1971 establishment of the first wholly electronic stock exchange (the US-based NASDAQ sys­tem)

1972 first global issue conference (the United Nations Conference on the Human Environ­ment)

1974 US Government eliminates foreign exchange controls (other states follow in later years)

1976 launch of the first direct broadcast satellite (i.e. transmitting to rooftop dishes)

1977 first commercial use of fibre-optic cables, vastly increasing capacities of telecommunications

1977 creation of the SWIFT system for electronic interbank fund transfers worldwide

1987 appearance of a near-complete 'ozone hole' over Antarctica raises global ecological aware­ness

1987 stock-market crash on Wall Street spreads world-wide overnight

1991 introduction of the World Wide Web

1997 completion of a continuous round-the-world fibre-optic cable link

* The terms 'offshore', 'eurocurrencies', and 'eurobonds' are further clarified in Chapter 22 on Global Trade and Finance

Robertson is right that early signs of global­ization appeared scores of years ago, although to a much smaller extent and at a far slower pace. For example, telegraphic communication commenced in the 1840s. Several global social movements (e.g. feminism) and regulatory bodies (e.g. the Universal Postal Union) emerged later in the nineteenth century. Intercontinental short-wave radio pro­grammes multiplied in the 1920s. Intergovern­mental meetings on transboundary pollution were held as early as the 1930s.

On the other hand, globalization did not figure continually, comprehensively, intensely, and with rapidly increasing frequency in the lives of a large proportion of humanity until around the 1960s. indeed, almost all of the illustrations of globalization given earlier relate only to the second half of the twentieth century, and not before. Worldwide direct dialing was not available before the 1980s, for example. It is only since the 1960s that the world has acquired most of the 1990s figures of 830 million television receivers, 40,000 transnational corporations, several thousand operational satel­lites, 15,000 transborder citizens associations, US$ 1,230 billion in foreign exchange transactions every day, over a billion commercial airline passen­gers per year, various global ecological problems, and metaphors of a global village. Fully-fledged globalization—a process with such weight that it requires us to make fundamental adjustments to our understanding of world politics—is a fairly new development.

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