This timeless picture of the Earth was handled Dec. 7, 1972, by the team of the last Apollo objective, Apollo 17, as they took a trip towards the moon on their lunar landing objective. For the very first time, the Apollo trajectory made it possible to picture the south polar ice cap, revealed here together with heavy cloud cover in the Southern Hemisphere.
(Courtesy of NASA)
Last week, talking about the vagaries of global commerce in a time of pandemic, war and the environment emergency situation, I’m afraid I utilized the words “globalism” and “globalism” relatively interchangeably. The previous is preparing economics on an international basis; the latter, the method businesses run worldwide. Both include hopes and worries.
That’s what I spoke about with the existing director general of the Thunderbird School of Global Management in Phoenix the other night. Sanjeev Khagram has flawless internationalist qualifications: of Indian heritage, and a Hindu, as a kid his family got away from Idi Amin’s Uganda, and pertained to the United States in 1973 by means of refugee camps in Italy. He has 3 Stanford degrees: a bachelor’s in advancement research studies and engineering, a master’s in economics and a Ph.D. in political economy. He’s resided in Brazil, India, Kenya, Mexico, Nigeria, South Africa, Thailand, Germany and the United Kingdom.
I asked him: Has the globalism his school — my school — preaches actually gone south?
“If we are rigorous about what we are talking about, there are two or three concepts to think about, historically, now, and in the future,” he said.
“Globalism and globalization — these are dynamic processes. They bring the world closer together, connecting us more deeply, so we are more enmeshed. They are not just economic phenomena — they are cultural, environmental. It’s not ‘the end of history,’” as Francis Fukuyama so infamously stated in 1992.
Khagram says Globalism 1.0 was the age of expedition as much as the very first commercial transformation, in the 19th century, in the age of manifest destiny and empire. World War II was definitely a worldwide occasion, however resulted in regression in globalization — and the starting of Thunderbird. Era 2.0 seeks the Bretton Woods Conference and a brand-new global order, and likewise, from 1945 to ‘73, the Cold War in between the West and the Soviet Union. “But changes were happening,” he keeps in mind, with global telephone, the fax and the web. With the fall of the Berlin Wall, “3.0 is post-Cold War to the global financial crisis of 2008.”
And today?
“4.0 is the messy now,” he says. “We have the breadth and depth of international economics across borders. We have technological and commercial advances, and governmental and environmental problems. Is everything better? It’s much more complicated than that. But 3.0 led to the greatest decline in human poverty ever, and the greatest growth in wealth. Nations are interconnected like never before. At Thunderbird, we are founded on the maxim that borders frequented by trade seldom need soldiers. And that connectedness is not just economic. Connected culture is happening globally in deep ways.”
I note that some blame the COVID-19 pandemic on globalism, that it revealed the risks of travel and of a shut-down supply chain.
“But the greatest panacea for it was vaccines, which were completely dependent on global corporations and cooperation by governments,” he responds.
And the Russian intrusion of Ukraine?
“Governments do nasty things, like other actors do. It does not mean the end of globalism. It means we have to figure out an equitable globalization. It’s not an end point. But there is fear, anxiety and loss as well as gain. Globalism means winners and losers — it’s change. But we also now know a tremendous richness. We experience different ways of thinking, foods, art; the beauty of the human experience gets multiplied in so many incredible ways. How bereft we would be if we went to a world of island states! We are all in this quest for a stable and interconnected world.”
Larry Wilson is on the Southern California News Group editorial board. [email protected].
