So, all these people, all this money, are often following goods, and at the very heart of globalization is this idea of trade. So, we can think of globalization as the process of linking disparate parts of the world through commerce. And this can be clothes, food, autos, services, and here's an illustration of the kind of container shipping I was talking about. You're no longer moving just individual items. Okay, you are now moving these lots of items that are stored in these. Now some of this trade consists of international commodities, all right? And a huge part of the trade consists in this, obviously oil being, perhaps, the biggest commodities market of all. So, as oil is flowing from West Africa, from Venezuela, both of these going through the United States through the Straits of Hormuz, largely making a left turn to feed the hunger for oil in China, and from the former Soviet Union into Western Europe. But you can also think of it as a trade in copper. You can see the soybeans are a major product in Brazil and Argentina. Again, crude petroleum, precious metals, etc. All these are part of the international commodities market, and that's what often global trade was, was shipping something that can only be mined out of the ground or grown in one part of the world and shipping it to somewhere else where it could be consumed. Today, we have to add the global supply chain, and again, we're going to be dealing with this in more detail later on. That is, it's not just these basic commodities, but it's something called "intermediate goods." That is, that a good is no longer simply made in one factory, but as it becomes more sophisticated, as it grows, if you will, that good moves from one factory to another. Or you have various factories that are producing the parts of the good that go and then meet at the central factory where it's all put together, and we can think of this as almost a tri-polar system. You have the United States and NAFTA. You've got China and the rest of East Asia, and you've got Germany and the rest of Europe. And these three units, these three large networks or transaction networks, are exchanging these set of intermediate goods over and above these basic goods that we associate with trade. Where the goods are from also makes a very big difference. You will notice that most of the manufactured goods, particularly manufactured goods, are going to come from, again, three different places. Where we might call around NAFTA, or the EU here, and centered on China, Japan and Korea, and East Asian. And there are flows, not only between these various— so, East Asia will sell something to North America, North America will sell something to Europe, etc.— But increasingly, trade is really occurring inside these. So, globalization, you might want to say that globalization can often be reduced to what we might call regionalization. That it's intraregional trade, and if you look here, this is intraregional trade from 1990 to 2014, and you see this massive increase. Also, intraregional trade is also increasing, but the heart of a lot of globalization is not so much things crossing oceans as simply crossing seas, if you will, or crossing land frontiers. So, globalization is not necessarily a global phenomenon. That only part of the world is flat. Its growth has been largely restricted to a few set of countries with an increasing regional effect. Now again, that does not mean that there isn't this transoceanic, large movement or long-distance movement of goods, it's that the heart of globalization are these three networks around NAFTA, around the EU, and around China, Japan, Korea. And newly industrializing countries, the countries that in 1960 were considered very poor, only the Asian countries and some of the Asian countries have been able to achieve the centrality in global trade. Again, China, Japan, Korea, Singapore, Thailand, Taiwan, etc., but you have not seen the same kind of increase, let's say, coming out of Africa or coming out of Latin America or even South Asia, and there are repercussions for that, and we're going to be talking about that in a little bit as well. Now globalization is not just about goods. It's not just about people. It's not just about money. It's also about ideas, and it's the process of linking disparate parts of the world through flows of culture, and this can be religion, political ideology, aesthetics, mass media, or in the case of these two products, an ex-student of mine designed this about 20 years ago, and I still love it as an image. One is the magic bean shop of Starbucks and how Starbucks, as a concept, as a cultural icon, in a sense, has taken over the world. Or McDonald's, how McDonald's has expanded. Now it's easy to see these cultural forms as simply copying an American food form, but think, also about the globalization of a food like sushi where 40 years ago you would've been very, very hard-pressed to find sushi outside of Japan. Now you can probably find sushi in any large capital city around the world. Religions. Religions have become globalized, and this is a movement that really precedes the 20th and the 21st century. If we think about the major religions of the world and where they're focused, think first about Christianity. Well, certainly Christianity moves from Europe where it has its— well, it's origins are, obviously, in the Middle East, but its institutional practice is centered in Europe— in the 16th century is transported over to the Americas with very serious consequences that we will also talk about. But again, that was a globalization. Islam. Again, arising in the 8th century very much in the same part of the world and spreading across North Africa and large parts of Asia all the way to the very far eastern islands of Indonesia, and you have a similar story with Buddhism. You have a similar story with Confucianism, etc. Religion, in a sense, is a form of spreading. In the 21st century, we've seen versions of this. We've seen, for example, the popularity of the Mormon church increase throughout large parts of Latin America. We've seen the adoption of some— not necessarily religious, but ritual and philosophies associated with the East such as yoga, etc., and they having an acceptance. You travel, if you arrive in Seoul, for example, even though you're in Asia, you'll be very surprised as you drive down the highway at the number of churches. So, religion is part of this process by which we share ideas, or in some cases, we impose ideas on each other, and the world, again, is no longer so separated by these religions. These religions, in a sense, spread out of their boundaries. Revolution. Revolution can be, in a sense, a product of globalization as something that occurs in a country next-door or relatively far away, inspires some people. We can talk about the globalization of communism following the 1917 revolution in Russia. You can see 1968, and the student movements associated with 1968, spreading throughout the world. The Arab Spring is another one where movements in one country promoted, or inspired, other movements. And finally, the last five years, we can talk about the movement towards what we might call nationalism. Now here's a contradiction. That nationalism may be also a product of globalization, not just in terms of reaction to globalization, but the idea of favoring your nation or favoring your ethnicity, favoring your group, might also be a process that is globalized, as it passes from one society to the other. Beauty standards and aesthetics. We're changing what we consider beautiful. What we considered beautiful is one of the most obvious social constructs. There's very little—our genetic hardware makes for few markers of what is considered beauty. Usually, it's signs of underlying health, but the more finely tuned dynamics of what we consider beauty are also changing. Where, certainly, in the late 19th and early 20th century, or even through the mid-20th century, a particular kind of beauty, physical beauty, associated, let's say, with Northern Europeans was universalized, was globalized. We're seeing a pushback on that. We're seeing a new definition of what is beauty, which is more global, which can consist of all sorts of traits from all sorts of parts of the world. Cultural production. We see that some cultural products go beyond their frontiers: Harry Potter, there's Star Wars. My particular favorite from when I was a kid Tin-Tin, rap music. We've seen all these. We see that these particular cultural icons get adapted and adopted in a whole variety of countries. So again, a kind of movie, a kind of book, a kind of poem, a kind of story is no longer going to be limited to its origin, but it's actually dispersed throughout the world. Now we've got ideas. We've got people, we've got money, we've got trade, we've got all this. How do we govern all this? And we'll turn to that next.
