All right, so we've got these massive flows of things and of people. Now we've got to figure out, how do we manage this? Who's in charge of this whole process? And let me give you a few— a few sort of oversights over this. So globalization in this way is the process of linking disparate parts of the world through flows of governance, and that can be treaties, alliances, NGOs, interventions. That is that governance, or the imposition of some kind of a particular kind of political order, is now, in a sense, globalized. You are forced to believe in certain things and hold certain things to be valued. Now, a lot of those—there's all these rules, there are all these laws. You also need a policeman, and in a sense, the United States has functioned as the policeman of globalization. And the United States is unique in that it has the military capacity— for example, the locations of its fleets, that it can project its power across the world. Also, if you think about it, with its Air Force, and certainly with its nuclear weapons, it can enforce itself, it can export violence. The United States also has soldiers in a remarkable number of countries, and again, it can use these bases with which to expand or impose its power and its rules. Now, this is not to say that globalization is purely an American creation, but we cannot understand contemporary globalization without the central role that the U.S. military has played. What are those agreements? For example, you have international investment agreements. These are agreements that, basically, establish a set of laws about if you invest in this country, this is what you have the right to do, that they are agreements between countries to standardize some part of their laws so that you feel safe taking your money out of your country and investing it somewhere else. You have trade agreements, and these clearly take off in the 1990s and 2000. These are regional trade agreements. That is, these are agreements between countries about how to regulate flows of things between them. And again, that's part of the governance of globalization, as countries agree to have this common set of rules, which might be foreign to one or both of the partners, but in a sense, it's part of the new rules of the game in order to play at globalization. There are also policy agreements. There's a concept called global isomorphism, that policies of countries have become more and more similar. So you've got treaties, and protocols, and amendments that basically tell those who sign onto them, "Well, you have to behave this way." The most obvious example of this is the global climate agreement that was signed in Paris, where it was in a sense an imposition of governance over all the countries agreeing to live by certain kind of standards. You have much subtler versions of this. For example, you've got a globalization of particular practices, even a globalization of things like cabinet agencies, where before, you might not have had a cabinet agency for sports, or for environment, or for women issues. That becomes more and more common as it spreads throughout the world. The problem is, you've got this trilemma of global governance. So you've got this deep economic integration, all right, that we've seen. You've got still a powerful nation state, all right? This powerful nation—there is no global government, all right? So you've got this deep economic integration, which is handled through these powerful nation states, and they are also responding to democratic politics. So it—global governance is very complicated. Yes, you've got this integration, but power still lies, even in non-democratic regimes —it's defined territorially. And even non-democratic regimes have internal domestic politics that they have to worry about. So who's running globalization? In some ways, nobody. It runs itself. And again, we're going to talk about this, why this is important when we talk about the notion of systems, but think about these various parts of governance, how we can come together, yet we are—remain separate, and those each separate parts have to respond to these domestic politics. What this produces is the possibility of the Tragedy of the Commons. The Tragedy of the Commons is, you've got a good that everybody wants to use, and their increased use, okay, will not cost them anything. And everybody wants to use this common good. The classic example is of a commons. Everybody wants to use the commons to feed their sheep. That's fine, as long as people limit the number of sheep that are on the commons. If you get too many sheep, you can kill that common. Well, similarly, this is an illustration from traffic. "If these idiots would just take the bus, I could be home by now." We've all been in this situation. If all these other idiots hadn't decided to get on the highway at that particular moment, I would be home. Well, you're part of the problem. You're part of it, and this is part of the Tragedy of the Commons, which is at the heart of many of the governance issues of globalization, which we will talk about later on. Globalization is also—speaking of governance, and the failure thereof— it's also about the flow of viruses, diseases, and medicines, as we have come to know in the last eight months, if not before. And we're living in a world of disease. We're living in a world of diseases that previously had been fairly isolated inside their territories, and now can flow through any part of the world. The Ebola virus, drug-resistant malaria, the West Nile virus, monkeypox, Chikungunya, the Zika virus, yellow fever, and of course, COVID. Let's take a look at those. So cholera is a major disease that has been transported across the world, largely in the poor parts of the world, and it can be transmitted from one part of the world to the other. You don't have to just worry about controlling cholera in your country. You also have to worry about controlling cholera in the neighboring countries, because it can sneak up. It can sneak into your society. Similarly, AIDS, the scourge of the '80s and part of the '90s— that became a global disease, spreading from particular pretty isolated places to becoming the scourge of just about every single part of the world. Fortunately, fortunately, somewhat controlled over the last 10 years as to new infections, and certainly the number of deaths. Nevertheless, it's an AIDS pandemic across the world. Malaria's another disease that can be moved across different parts of the world. You can imagine malaria flowing. Malaria does not recognize borders, in some ways. Malaria can cross those borders, and obviously, COVID-19. A simple illustration, the countries impacted by COVID-19. In January 20th, there were four. By February 15th, there were 28. By March 1st, there were 66, and by March 20th, basically every single part of the world had been affected by COVID. So this is the kind of governance problem that we have to address. How do we—when you've got a disease that does not respect borders, how do you control that? How do you manage that? How do you manage the needs to protect my population from the needs to protect your population's rights? This is a perfect example of the kind of governance trilemma or dilemma by which—that haunts globalization. Now, we've talked about viruses. We've talked about how things are run. We've talked about trade. We've talked about people. Now, let's talk a little bit about the highways, the linkages that make all this possible. Let's talk a little bit about that pipe system we referred to at the very beginning. What do those pipes look like?
