I wrote this essay to assess whether globalization – especially “Globalization 3.0”[term from Thomas L. Friedman's The World is Flat to describe the third and current stage of globalization] – strengthens and promotes democracy.
Stats: [For those who want to read random stuff :p]
Words: 837
Chars: 4661
Sentences: 23
Words per sentence: 36.3
Chars per Word: 5.4
Flesch-Kinaid-Score: 20.1
Generally democracy and globalization interconnect and coexist. In the past decades, the cost for getting information from other countries of the world and the travelling costs dropped by a great extent, meaning that people have access to an abundance of information from all over the world without it being censored beforehand. By extension, this implies that democracies are now able to promote their ideals and values to those who are autocratic, with much less complications. Another advantage of globalization is that it “flattens” the world and it “flattens” borders and walls, which in turn strengthens the distribution of democratic values over borders. With the increasing amount of democratic countries in our world, more democracies adjoin non-democratic countries and hence there is a greater chance for this country to become democratic. In balance, there is also the potential for the opposite to occur, particularly in countries with dictators ready to use violence, and that those dictators are going to be terribly worried about losing their political position and henceforth completely isolate the country and consequently its inhabitants. Nevertheless, such a situation would likely be in the minority of instances; rather than encapsulating their country and not being able to benefit from the economic features of globalization, dictators would try to find a compromise in which he can do both, staying in power and having a pleasant life and allowing his country to become partially democratic.
Through the information revolution in globalization 3.0, people “from every corner of the flat world” are offered a glimpse of the plethora of different potential political systems and therefore how they “are being empowered” in those political systems. A few decades back Central and Eastern Europe opened up to the world economy, which entailed the labefaction of Soviet-led communism and authoritarianism in the aforementioned parts of the world. In the same way as this refinement is particularly impressive, so is the economic outward orientation of Latin America since the wave of democratization that began in 1978. The democracy-globalization nexus is further reinforced by the positive response to political democratization from economic and financial globalization. While exchanging goods, we automatically exchange ideas and thence since most goods are produced in democratic countries, democratic morals and values are spread to those countries receiving the products, implying an overall more democratic mindset in the people of this world. Literary parallels enrich our understanding of this idea, for example the chapter “Globalization and Its Impact on Politics” of Thomas L. Friedman’s renowned evocative, political bestseller The World is Flat, which in detail explores the impact of the driving forces of Globalization and especially “Globalization 3.0” on the different political systems of the world and how those forces spread and promote democracy. Friedman precisely depicts how the flattener ‘in-forming’, helps to change the political attitude towards a desire for democracy, which sped “the march towards a more egalitarian society”. In the Arabic country Bahrain, which is ruled by the al-Khalifa family, it happened that through images on Google Earth the population got informed of the size of the houses of the authoritarian rulers and hence of the unequal distribution of commodities in their country, which thereupon “also provided more ammunition to democracy activists ahead of [the 2006] parliamentary elections”. Thus, through information spread around the world due to globalization and its driving forces, without being censored beforehand, democracy is more strongly present in every part of the world.
In the globalized world, the economy is financially open, which means that the government and the banks must be transparent in order for the markets to trust them and as we know transparency is annihilation for autocratic governments. As we examine statistics, it is easy to interpret them in a way to come to the conclusion that there is a strong correlation between the spread of globalization and the spread of democracy. Between 1975 and 2002, there was a quadrupling in the amount of democratic countries and during the same period the global trade being a share of the gross domestic product rose from 7.7 to 19.5 per cent. The International Monetary Fund (IMF), which works to foster global growth and economic stability, measured that the proportion of countries open to international capital flows, raised from 25 to 38 per cent.
Thus, the economic part of globalization, is partly dependent on a democratic political system, implying that for a country’s economy to be globalized the country needs to become democratic first, meaning that countries are literally forced to become democratic, in order to keep economic standards, due to the introduction of globalization.
Whilst, globalization has its negative side-effects, such as making the rich countries richer and making the poor countries poorer, it would be remiss to neglect the overweighing positive effects, such empowering the individual, more transparency of businesses and governments and lastly the spread of democracy over all parts of the world. By considering the innumerable amount of statistics and cases, illustrating and demonstrating the democracy-globalization nexus, the idea that globalization strengthens and promotes democracy seems to be inevitable.
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