"Economic Globalisation," too convenient a phrase?

Winston Churchill once remarked that “We shape our buildings, then our buildings shape us.” Historical consequences often seem to become drivers of change in and of themselves. Economic globalisation is a complex instance of this general trend, and this essay will question its significance. Has it indeed become the most significant force for change by the end of the twentieth century?

The grammar of the question is unfortunate, because it is unclear what makes a historical contingency significant: to be so, must it exert more of a ‘push’ (or ‘pull’) than any other we can name would alone? Or must it instead be the root of a chain of causality that matters? In relaying the philosopher Hegel, Francis Fukuyama has supported the thesis that the ‘struggle for recognition’ is the most significant driver of history, simply because all human action would stem from that struggle. Alongside that struggle, a number of circumstances had to accrue before globalisation – let alone economic globalisation – could become so important, and this would happen over thousands of years: populations would grow, trade would develop between rising centres of wealth, this trade would allow minerals from disparate sources to unite and form the basis for advances in technology such as the industrial revolution, which further sped along the growth of rapid communications of information, and a particular form of that information, currency. All being necessary for this massive interdependence of economic units that falls under the moniker ‘globalisation,’ are these factors any less significant? What instead this discussion considers is the idea that economic globalisation is instead a convenient proximate cause, a label that conveniently encapsulates the many prior justifications we could make for the events that occur today.

A vivid – though often hidden – corollary of indulgence in modern technology throughout the more developed nations are the conflicts that this demand only makes more heated. Minerals sourced from the Democratic Republic of Congo, for example, are used in the construction of modern consumer goods, and our demand for these goods drives up the prices of these minerals. Rather than being a boon to the Congolese economy, this only enflames the ethnic conflicts there. Though these arose from a nationalistic fervour that erupted with the inundation of Tutsi refugees from the genocide in neighbouring Rwanda, they are spurred on by outside countries’ dependence.

The strong division of labour and sources of minerals that our economy has become dependent on has itself become a sort of butterfly effect. Small changes in far off countries that many have never heard of can have significant consequences for all of us. Rising labour costs in one country (perhaps due to simple changes in legislation promoting better rights) could cause a profit-seeking company to find talent – or just numbers – elsewhere, in turn damaging that country’s economy. This interconnectedness makes any changes inherently more unpredictable and far-reaching, though it would be simplistic to call the economic globalisation evident here significant. It is just a convenient catch-all label for its more basic preludes.