| {{B}}
It was the anti-globalization movement that really put globalization on the map. As a word it has existed since the 1960s, but the protests against this allegedly new process, which its opponents condemn as a way of ordering people's lives, brought globalization out of the financial and academic worlds and into everyday current affairs. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, the business model called the "globalized" financial market came to be seen as an entity that could have more than just an economic impact on the parts of the world it touched. Globalization came to be seen as more than simply away of doing business, or running financial markets - it became a process. From then on the word took on a life of its own. So how does the globalized market work? It is modern communications that make it possible; for the British service sector to deal with its customers through a call centre in India, or for a sportswear (运动服) manufacturer to design its products in Europe, make them in south-east Asia and sell them in north America. But this is where the anti-globalization side gets stuck in (关注). If these practices replace domestic economic life with an economy that is heavily influenced or controlled from overseas, then the creation of a globalized economic model and the process of globalization can also be seen as a surrender of power to the corporations, or a means of keeping poorer nations in their place. Not everyone agrees that globalization is necessarily evil, or that globalized corporations are running the lives of individuals or are more powerful than nations. Some say that the spread of globalization, free markets and free trade into the developing world is the best way to beat poverty - the only problem is that free markets and free trade do not yet truly exist. Globalization can be seen as a positive, negative or even marginal process. And regardless of whether it works for good or ill, globalization's exact meaning will continue to be the subject of debate among those who oppose, support or simply observe it. |