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Abstract
This paper unravels the implications of globalization for overall social development, cohesion, and nation-building. A comparative examination of the experiences of Mexico, South Korea, and South Africa provides a clearer apprehension of the nature, basis, and socio-strategic agenda of globalization. Its central hypotheses are first, that the hidden agenda behind globalization is to further weaken Third World economic structures such that Western industrial economies - the "owners" of globalization - can penetrate them with foreign capital with a view to consolidating their hegemony over the entire global economic system; and second, that globalization weakens internal social cohesion in Third World nations, impeding and complicating nationbuilding and promotion of egalitarianism. This study concludes that states and their members cannot resist globalization and must therefore strive against all odds to collectively position themselves in the globalized economy to maximum advantage.
Key Words: Globalization, Economic Crisis, Social Dislocation, Mexico, South Korea, South Africa
I. The Context
Attenuation of the Great Depression in the late 1930s and the new problems that ensued fostered a new world order that effectively made globalization as inevitable as it was imperative at the close of the 20th century. The post-Depression monetary order created a relatively stable exchange rate system designed to rekindle global trade, which Depression era beggar-thy-neighbor policies had considerably assailed. It propelled whole-scale liberalization of the prevailing import-export regime, including dismantling of sundry tariff and non-tariff trade barriers, and facilitated fresh global commitment to investment.
That the most leveraged elements within all previous orders in human history have crafted those orders to secure better opportunity and fresh advantage for themselves is axiomatic (Mimiko, 1997: 45). What emerged as the post-Depression U.S.-led global economic order was therefore distinctively capitalistic and marketdriven. The U.S. and West in general similarly dominated the political realm, where a new order predicated on highly restrictive global control was put in place, abetted by the entire UN system and peculiar security Council power configuration.
Despite early-mid 1970s stress on this Breton Woods arrangement due to the oil crisis and Nixonian monetary reform, and sustained challenge from the Soviet communist alternative worldview, the basic market orientation of the monetary order survived. The collapse of East European command socialism as the 1980s closed therefore effectively created the...