Module 2. Current Trends and Issues PDF

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MODULE 2CONTEMPORARY WORLDM2 Introduction and Learning Objectives Introduction This module uncovers the physical and imaginary divisions of the world in the age of Globalization. The lesson The Global Divides: The North and the South, the sharing of ideas and experiences focuses on the concepts of t...

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MODULE 2 CONTEMPORARY WORLD

Philippines and Western countries. Some of them come home as “one-day millionaires” giving out presents to their family, relatives neighbours, and friends, Although their incomes are relatively highe than is they work in the Philippines, they realize that life is still tough despite the remittances they send to their families and the taxes tha the country gains from these. Furthermore, they cannot escape the reality that their occasional vacations in the Philippines are temporary because they would need to go back to work to continue making a living in another country. This is a reflection of the globa divide between the north and the south as experienced by these Filipinos

What is the difference between the Global North and the Global South? M2 Introduction and Learning Objectives Introduction This module uncovers the physical and imaginary divisions of the world in the age of Globalization. The lesson The Global Divides: The North and the South, the sharing of ideas and experiences focuses on the concepts of the Global South and the Third World as socioeconomic and political labels or outcomes. The second lesson Asian Regionalism deals with the integration of the world’s most immense landmass and population.

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Learning Objectives: At the end of this lesson, students should be able to: • Compare and contrast between the Global North and the Global South; • Analyzing how a new conception of global relations emerged from the experiences of Latin American countries; and • Analyze how different Asian states confront the challenges of Globalization and regionalization. M2 Lesson 1: Global Divides | North and South Since the process of Globalization is uneven, it follows that there is an imbalance in the socio-economic and political categories of the world. The world is divided into north and south, and first, second, and third.

The term Global South is a metaphor for interstate inequality and a product of Western imagination (Claudio, 2014). Historically, there had been divisions and labelling among the different nations of the world. Countries that were colonized by the Spaniards in the southern part of the American continent are collectively called Latin America.

There is also a split based on labour - the core, the semiperiphery, and the peripheries. From these divisions, the Global South refers to the hemisphere of the 1569 Mercator map which consists of Africa, Latin America, and Asia, including the Middle East. These nation-states are not aligned with nation-states located in the northern hemisphere that adhere to fair labour practices, rights, free trade, reduced tariffs, and policies on sustainable development. The Global South also connotes developing countries as opposed to rich, industrialized, and wealthy nations. On the contrary, The Global North is the home of all members of the Group of Eight (G8) - Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the United Kingdom, Russia, and the United States of America. It is also the abode of the four influential permanent members of the United Nations Security Council. It also refers to the developed countries in Asia, Australia, and New Zealand. It “continues to be imagined and re-imagined by those who dominate it even as movements from below reshape these constructions through resistance.” (Claudio, 2014) Although usually associated with developing nations, the Global South is also found in developed countries. Economically low-income families underprivileged individuals, unfair labour practices, and suppression of human rights, and other violations of fundamental rights in Europe. Australia, the US, and Canada are the pieces of evidence that people from developed countries also share similar experiences with people from developed countries.

Overseas Filipino workers (OFWs) in Europe, Australia, and America tend to see the big difference between the ways of living in the

Conversely, a trip to the metropolis of Metro Manila by someone from Tupi, South Cotabato - denoting high

standard of living, availability of better transport system, the prevalence of banking and financial institutions, presence of big commercial establishments, and centrality of the national government - is that person’s experience of the “Global North.” The Global North, therefore, is also relatively experienced within the geographical boundaries of the Global South.

M2 Lesson 1: Global Divides | Third World What is the third world? By now, one can say that the terms Global South and Third World are conceptually the same. They both refer to conditions usually found in developing countries. The term Third World is the antecedent of the Global South (Claudio, 2014). Arguably, the term ceased to exist when the Cold War ended. Historically, the world was once categorized based on the economic ideology of Western capitalism against the Soviet Union’s socialism. As formal economies, capitalism sustains consumer choice, private property, and economic freedom. At the same time, socialism is characterized by state control of the means of production, distribution, and exchange. Capitalist economies were considered First World and socialist economies were referred to as Second World. Those that did not belong to either type of formal economies belong to the Third World. The term was initially used to refer to the former colonies of European countries. For example, India was considered a Third World country for it was a colony of the United Kingdom. Following this categorization, the Philippines was classified as Third World. Later, the category was used to refer to countries that were neither capitalist nor socialist. Since many countries were impoverished, the term was also used to refer to these. These countries were considered to be non-industrialized and newly industrialized, lacking the standard systems in banking, finance, and trade.

Hence, it is outdated to say that countries in Southeast Asia belong to the Third world. Though some of the citizens in these countries experience a Global North within their territories, these countries are classified as Global South. M2 Lesson 2: Dependency Theory, the Latin American Experience, and the Modern World-System

Starting in the 15000s, European explorers spread throughout the Americas, Africa, and Asia, claiming lands for Europe. At one point, the British Empire covered about one-fourth of the world. The United States, which began as colonies, soon sprawled out through North America and took control of Haiti, Puerto Rico, Guam, The Philippines, the Hawaiian Islands, and parts of Pamana and Cuba. With colonialism came the exploitation of both natural and human resources. The transatlantic slave trade followed a triangular route between Africa, the American and Caribbean colonies, and Europe. Guns and factory-made goods were sent to Africa in exchange for slaves, who were sent to the colonies to produce goods like cotton and tobacco, which were sent back to Europe. As the slave trade died down in the mid-nineteenth century, the point of colonialism came to be less about human resources and more colonized. Under colonial regimes, European countries took control of land and raw materials to funnel wealth back to the Wets. Most colonies lasted until the 1960s and the last British colony, Hong Kong, was finally granted independence in 1997. After the Second World War, there were many questions about international relations. One of those questions was “why are many countries in the world not developing?” The traditional answer to the question was because these countries are not pursuing the right economic policies or their government is authoritarian and corrupt. Latin American scholars, however, are critical of that answer and are intrigued by their region’s underdevelopment (Sanchez, 2014). Dependency theory was a product of this experience. The Dependency Theory Dependency theory was a product of this experience. Dependency is the condition in which the development of the nation-states of the South contributed to a decline in their independence and an increase in the economic development of the countries of the North (Cardoso & Felato, 1979). It argues that liberal trade causes greater impoverishment, not an economic improvement, to less developed countries (Toye, 2003). Trade protectionism through import substitution is the key to a self-sustaining path to development, not liberal trade or export. In other words, rather than focusing on what developing countries are doing, protectionist economies focus more on restricting imports by imposing import quotas or tax, or other regulations. It further argues that the prospects of both wealthy and developing countries are inextricably linked. Lastly, it argues that in a world of finite resources, we cannot understand why rich nations are rich without realizing that those riches came at the expense of another country being poor. In this view, global stratification starts with colonialism.

Dependency theory was initially developed by Hans Singer and Raul Prebisch in the 1950s and has been improved since then. The two main sub-theories are the North America Neo-Marxist approach and the Latin America structuralist approach (Sanchez, 2014). The terms “core nations” and “peripheral nations” are at the heart of the dependency theory. Peripheral nations are countries that are less developed and receive an unequal distribution of the world’s wealth. Core countries, on the other hand, are more industrialized nations that receive the majority of the world’s wealth. Although generally divided into the core of peripheral dependency, theorists recognize that there are several different kinds of states in the world (Grosfoguel, 2000). Another common assumption of the theory is that “even after decolonization, there are still important ties between the developed and less developed countries, which mainly consist in the exploitation of peripheral natural resources and workforce by the center “ (Anton, 2006, p.2). Dependency theorists saw that the development of peripheral nations is stagnant because of the exploitative nature of the core nations (Ferraro, 2008). Less developed periphery countries are said to primarily serve the interests of the wealthier countries and end up having little to no resources to put toward their development. The theory points out that the economies of periphery countries rely on manual labour and the export of raw materials to core nations. The core countries then process these raw materials and sell them at a much higher price. Some of these manufactured goods go right back to the periphery countries from which the raw materials came. Periphery nations end up spending more money on processed goods. Their small economies may also rely on core nations for medical and nutritional aid. The dependency theory describes a vicious cycle that enforces a hierarchy of nations across the globe. Some countries were not developing around the world because the international system was preventing them from doing so. Andre Gunder Frank (1969) espoused the North American Neo-Marxist approach. He contended the idea that less developed countries would develop by the following path taken by the developed countries. Developed countries were underdeveloped in the beginning but not underdeveloped, which means that the path taken by the developed countries does not guarantee the same fate for the underdeveloped countries. Frank also rejected the idea that internal sources cause a country’s underdevelopment; instead, it is their dependency on the capitalist system that causes a lack of development. The Structuralist Approach A less radical theory, the structuralist approach, was developed mainly by Latin American scientists. Palma (1978) noted that chief among the arguments accounting

for Latin America's underdevelopment was the “excessive” reliance on exports of primary commodities, which were the object of fluctuating prices in the short term and a downward trend in relative value in the long haul. Studies by Hans Singer documented a secular deterioration in terms of trade of Latin American countries, whereas Presbich can be credited for explaining the factors underlying this downward trend (Sanchez, 2014). In his status as head of the UN’s Economic Commission for Latin America (ECLA), Presbish’s ideas came to have far-reaching political influence and profound policy implications. As a result of strategies, nominally conducive to autonomous, selfsustaining development (Seers, 1981). In essence, they sought to diversify exports and accelerate that would reduce the region’s dependence on foreign manufacturers, and thus on the developed North. While Raul Prebisch focuses more on the technical details of development economics, other authors like Cardoso and Faletto set the foundations of the historicalstructural variant of the dependency theory. For authors in this tradition dependency is not a general theory of underdevelopment, but rather a “methodology for the analysis of concrete situations of dependency” (Cardoso & Falletto, 1979) believed that Latin American economies were the results of capitalist expansion in the United States and the economic and political system can exist and function in its connections with the world productive structure. In other words, the “dependency” was used to underscore the extent to which the economic and political development of poor countries was conditioned by the global economy, whose center of gravity was located in the developed nations. This variant of dependency school, however, did not just focus on the asymmetrical relations between countries. It also held that dependency was perpetuated by the ensemble of ties among groups and classes both between and within nations (Sanchez, 2014). This is the concept of “linkage.” In Dependencia y Desarollo, the authors describe it thus: “We conceive the relationship between external and internal forces as forming a complex whole whose structural links are not based on mere external forms of exploitation and coercion, but are rooted in coincides of interests between local dominant classes and international ones…” (Cardoso and Faletto, 1979). This is one of the concepts that most distinguishes the historical structural version of dependency from previous ones: “the identification of interest network business, technocrats the military, the middle class that bind the dynamics of local political and economic processes to material and political interest in the industrialized world” (Sanchez, 2014, p. 4). This version saw development as historically open-ended and allowed for the possibility that the nature of dependent relations could change over time.

The Modern World-System This history of colonialism inspired American sociologist Immanuel Wallerstein's model of what he called the capitalist world economy. Wallersteindescribed highincome nations as the “core” of the world economy. This core is the manufacturing base of the planet where resources funnel in to become the technology and wealth enjoyed by the Western world today. Low income countries, meanwhile, are Wallerstein called “periphery,” whose natural resources and labor support the wealthiest countries, first as colonies and now by working for multinational corporations under neocolonialism. Middle-income countries, such as India or Brazil, are considered the semi-periphery due to to their closer ties to the global economic core. In Wallerstein’s model, the periphery remains economically dependent on the core in several ways, which tend to reinforce each other. First, poor nations tend to have few resources to export to rich countries. However, corporations can buy these raw materials cheaply and then process and sell them in richer nations. As a result, the profits tend to bypass the poor countries. Poor countries are also more likely to lack industrial capacity, so they have to import expensive manufactured goods from richer nations. All of these unequal trade patterns lead to poor nations owing lots of money to richer nations and creating debt that makes it hard to invest in their development. In sum, under the dependency theory, the problem is not that there is a lack of global wealth; it is that we do not distribute it well. Just as modernization theory had its critics, so does the dependency theory. Critics argue that the world economy is not a zero-sum game - one country getting richer does not mean other countries are getting poorer. Innovation and technological growth can spill over to other countries, improving all nations’ well-being and not just the rich. Also, colonialism certainly left scars, but it is not enough, on its own, to explain today’s economic disparities. Some of the poorest countries in Africa, like Ethiopia, were never colonized and had very little contact with richer nations. Likewise, some former colonies, like Singapore and Sri Lanka, now have flourishing economies. In direct contrast to what dependency theory predicts, most evidence suggests that, nowadays, foreign investment by richer nations helps and does not hurt poorer countries. Dependency theory is also very narrowly focused. It points the finger at the capitalist market system as the sole cause of stratification, ignoring the role of things like how culture and political regimes play in impoverished countries. There is also no solution to global poverty that comes out of dependency theory - most dependency theorists just of global socialism. However, these ideas do not acknowledge the reality of the modern world economy, which makes them not very useful for combating the real pressing problem of global poverty.

The growth of the world economy and expansion of world trade has coincided with rising standards of living worldwide, with even the poorest nations almost tripling in the last century. But with increased trade between countries trade agreements such as the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) have become a major point of debate, pitting the benefits of free trade against the cost of jobs within a country’s borders. By learning about economic Globalization, we can know about the issues and debates about it. We are also able to think critically about solutions to the various problems brought about by Globalization. Questions about how to deal with global stratification are certainly far from settled, although there is some good news: it is getting better. The share of people globally living on less than $25 per day has more than halved since 1981 going from 52% to 22% as of 2008. M2 Lesson 3: Regional and Economic Integration & Market Integration China is the home of more than 1.4 billion people based on the 2018 population projection of the United Nations. It is becoming one of the economic supergiants of the world. After the Second World World War, Japan was able to adapt its policies to the dictates of the West and consequently incorporated itself into the global economy. On the other hand, Singapore has become one of the emerging centres of different cultures. It has turned itself into a tremendous cosmopolitan city-state. All these countries belong to the continent of Asia, a term that originated from the West, particularly from Ancient Greece. Among all the continents, Asia has the largest population of at least two-thirds of the world’s inhabitants. The continent also comprises one-third of the world’s landmass. In terms of economy, the emerging and developing Asian countries and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) 5 have an average of 6.3% and 5,1% GDP growth, respectively, compared to the average world growth of 3.5% as of 2016 (Obiols, 2017). In 2016, China was the world’s leading exporter of goods valued at $1.99 trillion, followed by the United States with $ 1.45 trillion (Dillinger, 2018)....