Globalization is really the primordially operational definition of the internationalization of financial markets, trade, and commerce. The term has earned a certain stigma because, unfortunately, the world stage can never be a democratic level playing field as far as trade is concerned. Thus, globalized trade can result in global trade imbalance that causes global trade deficits from which the current international financial crisis sprang.

Globalization is defined as a complex process of integration and disintegration where the geographic entity which is the state, as the classic form of political organization in the contemporary world, has lost the monopoly and exclusivity of its political and economic undertakings. Traditional boundaries, including territorial borders, have been blurred because they have become an obstacle to the complex interdependent relationship that has characterized the economy in the last two decades. Think of it in terms of the Indians in Silicon Valley and the Americans in Bangalore. Over to the extreme side, globalization may also be explained in terms of the Islamist al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb threatening to retaliate when Sarkozy banned the burqa in France and when the Muslim Uighurs continue to be persecuted in China.

Globalization, therefore, was not an idea whose time has come. It was an inevitable development of the need of nations to expand their coffers, presence, interests, and influence over the entire stretch of the world stage. The crucial factor is the element of ‘need.’ As some resources had started to signal their impending shortage, there was the ‘need’ to seek out ways and means to augment those dwindling resources, while looking for places to dump those resources that were in surplus.

The negative effects of the current international financial crisis have revealed the complexity of an international arena where all the actors of globalization have grown interdependent with one another. This is clearly shown by the fact that those countries dependent on their trade exports have been the ones suffering the most in this global recession, as opposed to those who do not rely too much on their export capability. And since the US is practically everyone’s biggest trade partner, when it caught the colds, everyone started to sneeze.

With all these evidences, one is left to wonder whether protectionism can ever be for real. Because of that element of ‘need,’ nobody can ever exclusively ‘buy local.’ So, the biggest lesson the world is learning from this global recession is that we can all fall united. There is no way now to reverse globalization – and that is not another apocalyptic fantasy.

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