One World

Integrating societies into a world economy has been brutal and wrenching since at least the voyage of Columbus in 1492
-Peter Dauvergne

Extract from Peter Dauvergne's Environmentalism of the Rich 

“Wars mark the making of the international society of states; slavery and violence accompanied the rise of multinational corporations and world markets...Even the very idea of 'one world' – of one people living on one earth – can only be understood as emerging out of a history of imperialism and colonialism, of bloodshed and cruelty, where Western values and ways of knowing have come to dominate.

  

 

Forgetting this history can make globalisation seem innocuous, as if it's nothing more than the process of new technologies connecting up the world, so people, money, and ideas can travel faster and farther. Being globalised entails far more, though, than just being able to fly from Los Angeles to Sydney in 16 hours, or regularly eating food grown a half-world away, or connecting billions of people on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.

 

Globalisation can be violent and exploitative, little different from imperialism. Manifestations include world powers forcing developing countries to deregulate economic affairs, offering grants and demanding loan repayments to open borders to trade, natural resource investors, and foreign manufacturers.

One sign of the resulting financial cost is the rising external debt of the developing world, which has gone from $2 trillion in 2000 to more than $5 trillion today. The private sector accounts for more than half of this debt – a debt that reinforces highly uneven and unequal South-North trade flows, with developing countries exporting large quantities of natural resources and low-priced goods (partly to earn foreign exchange to service debt).

 

Rising inequality and concentrating financial power are further signs of the globalisation of unsustainability. Just 1 percent of the world population holds half of global wealth. Around 45,000 people are now worth over $100 million while 124,000 people are worth over $50 million. And the rich keep getting richer. We see this with the thirteen-fold increase in the number of billionaires since the mid-1980s.

 

At the same time around 2.2 billion people were still earning less than $2 a day in 2011 – a figure not far off what it was in 1980. This crude measure, moreover, misses much of the hardship in the poorest countries, where monocrop plantations have displaced subsistence farming, where good jobs in rural communities are rare, where working-age adults have left villages, and where hundreds of million of people live in slums, some even surviving by scavenging for food and recyclables in rancid mountains of garbage.”
Peter Dauvergne, 'Environmentalism of the Rich'

Peter Dauvergne is an author and environmentalist. He is Professor of International Relations at the University of British Columbia.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Dauvergne