Senior Editor George Clack

Contributing Editors Alexandra Abboud

David A. Denny

Rebecca Ford Mitchell

Charlene Porter

Jonathan Schaffer

Robin L. Yeager

Associate Editors Mark A. Betka

Paul Malamud

Cheryl Pellerin

Editors Kathleen E. Hug 

Chandley McDonald

Reference Specialists Anita N. Green

Martin Manning

Kathy Spiegel

Vivian Stahl

Graphic Designers Chloe D. Ellis

Christian Larson

Photo Researcher Ann Monroe Jacobs

Publisher Judith S. Siegel

Executive Editor Richard W. Huckaby

Production Manager Christian Larson

Assistant Production Manager Chloe D. Ellis

Editorial Board Alexander C. Feldman

Jeremy F. Curtin

Kathleen R. Davis

Kara Galles

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One new journal is published monthly in English 

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GLOBAL ISSUES 

GLOBAL ISSUES / FEBRUARY 2006 eJOURNAL USA

COVER PHOTOS: © PETER BECK/CORBIS; AP/WWP
1 GLOBAL ISSUES / FEBRUARY 2006

The World Bank defines globalization as “the 

growing integration of economies and societies 

around the world.” Wikipedia, the Internet 

encyclopedia, describes globalization as “the changes 

in societies and the world economy that result from 

dramatically increased international trade and cultural 

exchange.” The British magazine 

The Economist recently likened 

globalization to a line from a John 

Lennon song, “Imagine there’s no 

countries. It isn’t hard to do.” Clearly, 

globalization means different things 

to different people. 

In this issue we consider these 

and other aspects of globalization. The 

experts we have chosen examine the 

topic from a variety of angles, yet we 

offer no prescriptions, no definitive 

answers: Our goal is for our readers to 

come away with a better understanding 

of a deep-seated, complex phenomenon that affects us all.

We begin with an exchange 

on where globalization is headed. 

Journalist James Glassman moderates 

the discussion between Venezuelan 

economist Moisés Naím and 

American trade expert Claude 

Barfield. These two knowledgeable 

observers delve into everything from 

whether globalization helps more 

people than it harms to its effect on 

religious attitudes. Next Josette Shiner, under secretary 

of state for economic, business, and agricultural affairs, 

explains the connection between liberal trade policies 

and a country’s economic growth rate. This section closes 

with an interview with Daniel Pink, author of two recent 

influential books, Free Agent Nation and A Whole New 

Mind. Pink theorizes that globalization is changing the way 

we work and even the way we think.

The next section takes up a hotly debated question—

the effect of American popular culture on the local 

cultures of countries around the world. University of Texas 

professor Richard Pells makes the case that American 

culture itself is a stew of foreign influences, that it is in 

a sense really world culture. German professor Jessica 

Gienow-Hecht answers with an analysis of how various 

foreign intellectuals and officials have perceived American 

culture over the years. A photo gallery highlights current 

pop musicians, film stars, and athletes from around the 

world. 

The journal’s last section 

considers the new threats and new 

opportunities raised by globalization. 

Daniel Griswold, of the Cato 

Institute, finds a connection between 

economic progress and a growth 

in freedom, human rights, and 

democracy in countries most affected 

by globalization. Louise Shelley, a 

professor of international relations 

at American University, examines a 

downside of globalization—the way 

more open borders and high tech can 

also make life easier for criminal and 

terrorist networks. Public health expert 

Dr. Donald Henderson reflects on 

the threat posed by global pandemics 

in an age when people and viruses 

can jet around the world in hours. 

A sidebar points out a positive side 

of the “global village” effect—how 

communications make possible better 

cooperation among nations after a 

natural catastrophe like the Indian 

Ocean tsunami in 2004. Professor 

Stephen P. Heyneman, of Vanderbilt 

University, considers the common ambitions of colleges 

and universities in many countries.

One indisputable point through all the discussions is 

that globalization is here to stay. “There are all sorts of likeminded groups, interest groups, people that share interests, 

passions, technologies, hobbies, who get together across 

borders and create virtual communities that ... develop 

all sorts of new political dynamics,” says Moisés Naím 

about the Internet. “That is irreversible. The prior waves 

of globalization were institutional, were commercial, where 

the central actors were trading companies. Today there is 

a globalization of individuals, and that is a very important 

difference.” 

About This Issue

eJOURNAL USA

A Chinese tourist takes a break in front of a 

Starbucks coffee shop in Shanghai, China.

EUGENE HOSHIKO ©AP/WWP
2 

THE CHALLENGES OF GLOBALIZATION

U.S. DEPARTMENT OF STATE / FEBRUARY 2006 / VOLUME 11 / NUMBER 1

http://usinfo.state.gov/pub/ejournalusa.html

THE FUTURE OF GLOBALIZATION

A Conversation About Globalization

JAMES GLASSMAN, RESIDENT FELLOW AT THE AMERICAN

ENTERPRISE INSTITUTE; MOISÉS NAÍM, EDITOR-INCHIEF OF FOREIGN POLICY; AND CLAUDE BARFIELD, 

RESIDENT SCHOLAR AT THE AMERICAN ENTERPRISE

INSTITUTE

James Glassman moderates an exchange of ideas 

about globalization.

Sidebar: Arctic Monkeys: England’s First Superstars of 

the iPod Age

Sidebar: The Travels of a T-Shirt

PIETRA RIVOLI, ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR OF FINANCE AT

GEORGETOWN UNIVERSITY

U.S. Transformational Economic 

Policy: Linking Trade, Growth, and 

Development

JOSETTE SHEERAN SHINER, UNDER SECRETARY OF STATE

FOR ECONOMIC, BUSINESS, AND AGRICULTURAL AFFAIRS

A high-ranking official of the U.S. State Department 

discusses the relationship between trade and 

economic growth.

The Changing Workplace: An Interview 

With Daniel Pink

Business consultant, lecturer, and author Daniel Pink 

offers insights into several aspects of globalization.

 WHOSE CULTURE? A DIALOGUE

Is American Culture “American”?

RICHARD PELLS, PROFESSOR OF HISTORY AT THE

UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS AT AUSTIN

An expert on American culture examines the nature 

and worldwide popularity of “American” culture.

A European Considers the Influence of 

American Culture

JESSICA C.E. GIENOW-HECHT, PROFESSOR OF HISTORY

AT THE JOHANN WOLFGANG GOETHE-UNIVERSITÄT

FRANKFURT AM MAIN

A German expert on German-American relations 

presents a view of American culture from the other 

side of the Atlantic.

Big Around the World

A photo story about celebrity in a globalized world. 

NEW THREATS AND NEW OPPORTUNITIES

Globalization, Human Rights, and 

Democracy

DANIEL GRISWOLD, DIRECTOR OF THE CENTER FOR

TRADE POLICY STUDIES AT THE CATO INSTITUTE

An expert on trade, immigration, and globalization 

discusses the connection between trade, 

development, and political reform.

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GLOBAL ISSUES / FEBRUARY 2006

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3 GLOBAL ISSUES / FEBRUARY 2006

The Globalization of Crime and Terrorism

LOUISE SHELLEY, PROFESSOR IN THE SCHOOL OF

INTERNATIONAL SERVICE AT AMERICAN UNIVERSITY

A noted scholar and author describes the effect of 

globalization on the “unholy trinity” of crime, terror, 

and corruption. 

The Global Health Connection

D.A. HENDERSON, PROFESSOR OF MEDICINE AND

PUBLIC HEALTH AT THE UNIVERSITY OF PITTSBURGH

The former chief medical offi cer for smallpox 

eradication of the World Health Organization 

describes how the health of individuals has become 

interdependent in the age of globalization. 

Sidebar: Adapting International Health Regulations to 

a Smaller World

Sidebar: Cooperation on Tsunami Warning Systems

Global Issues in Higher Education 

STEPHEN P. HEYNEMAN, PROFESSOR OF INTERNATIONAL

EDUCATIONAL POLICY AT VANDERBILT UNIVERSITY

A U.S. professor discusses higher education in a 

globalized world.

Bibliography

Internet Resources

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50

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eJOURNAL USA

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A CONVERSATION ABOUT

GLOBALIZATION

(PAGE 6 IN THE PRINTED VERSION)

• What Is Globalization?

• The “Downside” of Globalization. 

• Where Is Globalization Going?

The entire discussion is also available as 

an MP3 download. 

http://www.usinfo.state.gov/journals/

itgic/0206/ijge/ijge0206.htm

ONLINE VIDEO

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4 

I

n the year 2000 the International Monetary Fund 

published an Issues Brief with the evocative title 

“Globalization: Threat or Opportunity?” IMF staff 

described globalization as “a historical process, the result 

of human innovation and technological progress. It refers 

to the increasing integration of economies around the 

world, particularly through trade and financial flows.”

It’s true that many people think of a liberalized 

approach to trade when they consider globalization, and 

in recent years economic effects have come to dominate 

discussion of this phenomenon. But there is also a 

powerful psychological dimension to globalization. 

Media analyst Marshall McLuhan coined the famous 

phrase “global village” in the 1960s, describing a profound 

cultural shift in a world where radio waves connected 

all parts of the planet. Long before the wired world we 

live in, McLuhan analyzed advances in communications 

technology that disrupted both traditional and modern 

societies. 

Many scholars have analyzed the topic further. Arjun 

Appadurai, the Indian anthropologist who is now provost 

of the New School for Social Research in New York 

City, sees globalization as “the name of a new industrial 

revolution (driven by powerful new information and 

communication technologies) which has barely begun. 

Because of its newness, it taxes our linguistic and political 

resources for understanding and managing it.” Appadurai 

classifies five kinds of interconnectivity that characterize 

globalization: cross-border movements of people, money, 

ideas, media images, and technologies.

Where people disagree about globalization—often 

passionately—is in whether its effects are mostly good 

or mostly bad. As the World Bank’s Web site puts it, 

globalization “has been one of the most hotly debated 

topics in international economics over the past few years. 

Rapid growth and poverty reduction in China, India, 

and other countries that were poor 20 years ago, has 

been a positive aspect of globalization. But globalization 

has also generated significant international opposition 

over concerns that it has increased inequality and 

environmental degradation.”

Economic globalization often appears to be a kind of 

race, with real winners and losers. “Globalization offers 

extensive opportunities for truly worldwide development 

but it is not progressing evenly,” in the words of the IMF 

Issues Brief. “Some countries are becoming integrated into 

the global economy more quickly than others. Countries 

that have been able to integrate are seeing faster growth 

and reduced poverty.”

“In the United States and in the 10 or so most 

wealthy countries of the world,” says Appadurai, 

“globalization is certainly a positive buzz word for 

corporate elites and their political allies. But for migrants, 

people of color, and other marginals (the so-called ‘South’ 

INTRODUCTION

GLOBAL ISSUES / FEBRUARY 2006 eJournal USA

“Look, I’ve got nothing against globalization, just 

as long as it’s not in my backyard.”

©THE NEW YORKER COLLECTION 2001 ROBERT MANKOFF FROM CARTOONBANK.COM. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
eJOURNAL USA 5 GLOBAL ISSUES / FEBRUARY 2006

in the ‘North’), it is a source of worry about inclusion, 

jobs, and deeper marginalization.”

But globalization also inspires considerable anxiety in 

the United States and other parts of the developed world 

when it takes the form of outsourcing—the movement of 

factory and service work to countries with lower wages.

The British economist Phillipe Legrain, by contrast, 

recently pointed out the cultural benefits of globalization. 

“The beauty of globalization,” Legrain writes, “is that 

it can free people from the tyranny of geography. Just 

because someone was born in France does not mean they 

can only aspire to speak French, eat French food, read 

French books, visit museums in France, and so on. A 

Frenchman—or an American, for that matter—can take 

holidays in Spain or Florida, eat sushi or spaghetti for 

dinner, drink Coke or Chilean wine, watch a Hollywood 

blockbuster or an Almodovar, listen to bhangra or rap, 

practice yoga or kickboxing, read Elle or The Economist, 

and have friends from all over the world.”

New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman is 

also in the optimist camp about globalization’s effects. 

According to his recent best-selling book, The World 

Is Flat, new Internet-based technologies mean that 

work can be moved anywhere in the world in search of 

expertise and low labor costs. Creative collaboration is 

enhanced. Doctors in Bangalore, India, are reading the 

x-rays of American patients as they sleep—a development 

that benefits both nations in Friedman’s view. To use 

the metaphor he favors, the playing field of economic 

competition has been leveled.

Even for Friedman, however, globalization has its 

disquieting elements. “The flattened world means we 

are connecting all the knowledge centers on the planet 

together into a single global network which—if politics 

and terrorists do not get in the way—could usher in a 

new era of prosperity and innovation,” he writes. “But 

contemplating the flat world also left me filled with dread 

... my personal dread derived from the obvious fact that 

it’s not only the software writers and computer geeks who 

get empowered to collaborate in a flat world. It’s also 

al-Qaida and other terrorist networks. The playing field 

is not being leveled only in ways that draw in and superempower a whole new group of innovators. It’s being 

leveled in a way that draws in a whole new group of angry, 

frustrated, and humiliated men and women.” 

Claude Smadja and Klaus Schwab, two founders of 

the World Economic Forum, the Swiss-based foundation 

that brings business and government leaders together 

to improve the state of the world, have summed up the 

primary challenge globalization faces. “At a time when 

the emphasis is on empowering people, on democracy 

moving ahead all over the world, on people asserting 

control over their own lives, globalization has established 

the supremacy of the market in an unprecedented 

way,” they wrote in 1999. “We must demonstrate that 

globalization is not just a code word for an exclusive 

focus on shareholder value at the expense of any other 

consideration; that the free flow of goods and capital 

does not develop to the detriment of the most vulnerable 

segments of the population and of some accepted social 

and human standards. ... If we do not invent ways to 

make globalization more inclusive, we have to face the 

prospect of a resurgence of the acute social confrontations 

of the past, magnified at the international level.”

 George Clack

 Senior Editor
6 eJOURNAL USA 

We convened three experts for a discussion of 

globalization and its discontents.

Our discussion moderator, James Glassman, resident 

fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, is a former 

editor, publisher, and Washington Post columnist who 

now hosts the Web site TCSDaily.com, which concentrates 

on the connection between high tech and public policy. 

Moisés Naím, currently the editor-in-chief of Foreign 

Policy magazine, is a Venezuelan economist who has 

served as a World Bank official and as minister of trade 

and industry for Venezuela in the 1990s. His justpublished book is Illicit: How Smugglers, Traffickers, 

and Copycats Are Hijacking the Global Economy. 

Claude Barfield is a trade expert, former consultant to 

the U.S. Trade Representative, and resident scholar at the 

American Enterprise Institute. He is the author of Free 

Trade, Sovereignty, Democracy: The Future of the 

World Trade Organization. He is currently writing a 

book about China. 

While many see globalization as a recent development, 

our experts explain that it is a phenomenon that has been 

going on for a long time, in a variety of forms, virtually 

since people of one nation began trading with those of 

another. In fact, the period from the 1870s until the First 

World War, a time of tremendous change in transportation 

and communication, was once seen as a golden age of 

globalization. The wide-ranging discussion that follows 

also touches on recent changes in China and Eastern 

Europe, the future of the nation-state, counterfeiting and 

other forms of illicit trade, how globalization affects the 

developing world, its connection to a resurgence in religious 

fervor, and globalization’s effect on both democracy and 

dictators. 

Glassman: Let’s start with a basic question. What is 

globalization?

Barfield: Well, everybody has a different definition, I 

suppose, but in the terms that I am comfortable with, 

I think it is the impact of changing technology on 

individual countries, individual societies over time. And 

I think globalization is very much technology-based. 

The tighter-knit globalization we are experiencing today 

would be impossible without the breakthrough over the 

past several decades in transportation efficiency (just-intime manufacturing and delivery), underpinned by the 

communications revolution that now allows for instant 

A CONVERSATION ABOUT 

GLOBALIZATION

GLOBAL ISSUES / FEBRUARY 2006
7

messaging to 

individuals and 

organizations all 

around the world.

Glassman:

Is this a new 

phenomenon?

Barfield: No, I 

think you can 

go back to the 

Greeks. Any 

time you’ve got 

commerce among 

different nations or different societies, you’re beginning to 

have globalization, because what you’re having are ideas, 

movements, transactions—commercial transactions—

between different peoples. And that’s the beginning, as it 

were, of globalization. You’re not in an isolated, human 

community that has no other contact.

Glassman: So you’re defining it in terms of trade?

Barfield: Well, I’m trying [to define it] in terms of societal 

contexts as well as trade. The two most recent periods 

that people look at are the late 19th and early 20th 

century, from roughly the 1870s to the First World War, 

where you had technology changes in transportation and 

communication, you had a knitting together of what we 

would call the developed world very, very closely, in fact 

more closely than the developed world is today. And some 

people look back on that as a golden age, as it were, of 

globalization. And then you could just pick up gradually 

after 1945 the gathering force in the ’70s and ’80s into the 

‘90s, where you really have this burst of new technologies 

in terms of instant communication and very quick travel. 

I think public policy certainly can have an impact on 

globalization. If one looks at the policies after 1920-21 in 

the United States, and then after the Depression began in 

the early ’30s in Europe and the United States, as well as 

those countries like Argentina—which was quite advanced 

at that point—all of those countries had policies that we 

would call autarkical [aimed at creating self-sufficiency 

or economic independence]. They drew back into 

themselves. They cut trade and cut investment.

Glassman: So these “autarkical” countries—are there any 

significant ones that are left? 

Barfield: You could 

take North Korea as 

the obvious example 

today, but even that 

is breaking down. 

So that I think 

you had autarkical 

systems that the 

Soviets set up in 

Eastern Europe with 

internal policies 

where you didn’t 

really have much 

trade. 

Glassman: Some people say that globalization is an 

American idea, that the rest of the world is adopting an 

American concept. Is that accurate?

Barfield: Only to the extent that I think the United 

States, given its position as the 20th century evolved, was 

always on the cutting edge of technology. And that was 

true even during the Depression. 

Glassman: What are the benefits of globalization?

Barfield: I think the main benefits are the ability to 

consume better goods and better products at cheaper 

prices, to have a better quality of life. That begins in 

economics, but it doesn’t end there, because people have 

other goals in their lives besides just economic goals. But 

I think that globalization is a means by which they can 

reach those other personal and national and societal ends.

Glassman: Moisés, in your new book Illicit: How 

Smugglers, Traffickers, and Copycats Are Hijacking the 

Global Economy, you talk about globalization in terms of 

not just technological, but also political, change: “One 

major change that this most recent wave of globalization 

often brings to mind is the revolution in politics, as 

deep and transformational as the one in technology.” 

Tell us, this revolution in politics, was this caused 

by the revolution in technology or the revolution in 

communications? How has this happened?

Naím: I don’t think we know. All we know is that it 

happened at the same time, and there is a very good, 

solid case to say that the more information people have, 

the more free they are to learn how others live. That has 

“I think you can go back to 

the Greeks. Any time you’ve 

got commerce among different 

nations or different societies, 

you’re beginning to have 

globalization because what 

you’re having are ideas, 

movements, transactions—

commercial transactions—

between different peoples.”

eJOURNAL USA GLOBAL ISSUES / FEBRUARY 2006

Claude Barfield
8 

created strong incentives for them also to strive and fight 

for freedom. And so there is a connection between new 

communication and transportation technologies and the 

political revolutions of the 1990s that opened borders and 

created a wave of democratization. It’s going to be very 

hard to really decide on causality, but it doesn’t matter. All 

we know is that these two things converged, and I think 

it’s very important. 

One of the things I try to do in the book is to 

decouple the very common association between 

globalization and trade, or globalization and investment, 

or globalization and economics. I think it’s very important 

that we understand that the world now is connected in 

ways that go beyond economics, and beyond trade. You 

know 9/11 is an example of globalization. The attack on 

the World Trade Center was driven by political turmoil 

on the other side of the world. The terrorists relied upon 

the tools and technologies of globalization. They also 

took advantage of the opportunities created by more open 

borders due to the political changes. 

Barfield: I agree with that. And I’m not sure what the 

dimensions were of the political revolution. But I do have 

a cautionary note. And this is a puzzle that we will have 

to work out in the next years, not just we, but all nations. 

With globalization you get technology coming over the 

borders, and governments not having as much control 

over their populations as they did, but the nation-state is 

still the only focus of democratic legitimacy. There is no 

democracy above the nation-state. It may be at some point 

you could have it. But you’ve got to work at this with the 

approach of what is possible, or what is legitimate for a 

nation to do, and what it should give up. And we argue 

about that. I mean the U.S. administration’s position on 

the International Criminal Court, or what powers we 

should give to the United Nations, or the World Trade 

Organization for that matter.

Glassman: A lot of people have said that with 

globalization technology, the nation-state would wither 

away. Now, maybe it’s a little early to see it withering away, 

but do you think that’s going to happen?

Naím: No. And I do agree that the nation-state is a core, 

central organizing element of the international system. 

There is a lot of discussion about the withered nationstate, and I frankly think that’s a silly conversation. I 

think the nation-state is going to be with us for a long 

time. What is happening is that nation-states are being 

transformed by globalization, are being transformed by the 

liberal politics inherent in the new technologies. And the 

constraints on nation-states are narrower and tighter than 

in the past. You talk to any head of state today, even those 

that exercise the role of an authoritarian government, and 

they will tell you that they’re very limited, or more limited 

than in the past. 

Glassman: So what kind of constraints? Is it that the 

population has more contact with the outside world, or is 

[it] also [the] flow of capital into countries?

Naím: All of that. Authoritarian leaders have to contend 

with bond markets and international financial systems 

that constrain their economic choices. They have all sorts 

of trade constraints and possibilities. But also they have 

international standards. They cannot torture as freely 

and as openly as in the past. It happens, and it continues 

to happen. But one interesting change we now have as 

a result of globalization and the changes of the ’90s, is 

that dictators no longer sleep as easily at night as before. 

Dictators don’t always now go from the presidential palace 

to houses and villas on the Riviera. They may end up like 

Milosevic on trial. 

Glassman: I’d like to talk about the downside of 

globalization since Claude had earlier talked about the 

upside, which is economic growth and more exposure to 

new ideas and perhaps, as you say, more democracy, less 

control by dictators. Your book actually talks about one 

of those deficiencies of globalization. You say that you’re 

eJOURNAL USA

WTO Director-General Pascal Lamy, right, and John Tsang, Hong Kong’s 

commerce secretary and chair of the Sixth WTO Ministerial Conference, 

congratulate each other following the conclusion of the six-day summit 

in December 2005. 

BULLIT MARQUEZ ©AP/WWP

GLOBAL ISSUES / FEBRUARY 2006
9 GLOBAL ISSUES / FEBRUARY 2006

convinced that more and more ideas and things are being 

stolen or plagiarized. You begin with a terrific anecdote 

about how Bill Clinton’s autobiography was stolen in 

China and rewritten to some extent. Is that something 

that we really should be worried about? Is it a drain on the 

resources of countries that more and more are devoted to 

producing intellectual property?

Naím: That’s a great question. When one thinks about 

countries and the explosion of the international trade in 

counterfeits, the examples that come to mind are the very 

expensive sneakers that you can buy for a fraction of the 

price if they are counterfeited, or the elegant ladies’ bags, 

or the DVDs of the movies and music that are constantly 

copied and used without payment. And then the question 

is, who is this, in effect, damaging?

But one tends to forget several things. First is that 

illicit trades are connected, and very often the person 

that is selling you the elegant bag, the street vendor, is as 

illicit as the bag that he or she is selling you. He probably 

was trafficked from another country, and he’s being used 

and exploited by the networks that traffic in people to 

peddle these counterfeited items. He’s the equivalent of 

an indentured servant trying to pay back the debt that he 

owes to the traffickers.

Very often they are not the happy volunteers, these 

workers. Very often they have been—in the case of 

the international trade in women—enticed with the 

opportunity, with the notion that they’re going to be 

taken from Eastern Europe to Western Europe to work 

as domestic workers, and then they are coerced into 

prostitution and exploited. And that is a huge element of 

that trade.

Going back to the counterfeiters, we can joke about 

the watch that costs $5,000 and one buys for $20 in the 

streets of Manhattan and that’s fine, but there are other 

things that are counterfeited and they are very dangerous. 

There are counterfeit airplane parts that are defective and 

cause plane crashes. There are counterfeit medicines that, 

instead of curing, kill. There are all sorts of dimensions 

associated with these trades that are not as easy to tolerate 

as watches and handbags. 

Glassman: Claude, let’s talk about some of the more 

popular images of globalization. I just attended the World 

Trade Organization meeting in Hong Kong and there were 

some South Korean rice farmers who got a lot of attention 

for their demonstrations, and their complaint was that 

if South Korea opens itself up to trade in rice, then we’re 

going to be out of a job. We can’t do anything but farm 

rice, they say. We’re not very good at anything else. They’re 

older people. And rice doesn’t cost that much anyway. So 

is the rice farmer’s dilemma part of the negative force of 

globalization, or is it actually ultimately positive?

Barfield: I think all nations are delinquent in dealing with 

the negative sides of opening up your markets to trade 

or investment basically because the policies are not very 

good. Those South Korean farmers, that’s what they’ve 

done for generations, and nobody has stepped in to try 

to—except by attrition, which is actually what’s happening 

in Korea—to try to ease that change, the transition of the 

adjustment. I think all nations are delinquent. We don’t 

really have a handle on how you make this adjustment, 

but there certainly is a moral or a social obligation of the 

nation that is involved with this, whether it’s Korea or the 

United States or the British or the Europeans, to step in. 

And it can be a wrenching situation. 

There is another side to this, though. When you get 

into the anti-globalist movement, there is a lot of sort 

of romanticism that we should leave these tribes in the 

upper part of the Amazon or the impoverished farmers 

in Southern Mexico, that somehow this is a terrible thing 

that’s happening to them, that Mexico is being opened 

up. Well, think of the life those people are living. You 

know, we think about the good old days here—a great 

agricultural life in the 19th century. But even on our 

American farms in the Midwest and the South, those were 

long days, people were not educated—there was drudgery. 

South Korean rice farmers prepare to demonstrate against lowering 

barriers to trade in rice at the WTO Ministerial Conference in Hong Kong 

in December 2005.

BULLIT MARQUEZ ©AP/WWP

eJOURNAL USA
10 eJOURNAL USA 

And so it’s the transition questions, in terms of public 

policy, that I think are important. But as the other speaker 

said, you’re not going to be able to stop it. It’s how do you 

make the adjustment more socially acceptable, or morally 

acceptable?

Glassman: Do you think that one way to make it 

acceptable, as some people say, is to have a different pace 

of taking down of trade barriers for developing countries 

compared to developed countries? 

Barfield: The United States and the Europeans and the 

developed countries said, we just need a decade or decadeand-a-half on textiles and clothing, which are the most 

protected parts of many economies. So in the early ’90s 

we said give us that decade. The developing countries are 

similarly saying, well, give us that extra decade or decadeand-a-half, but the problem you face is nobody does 

anything. 

So I don’t have any problem with giving more time, 

but it has to be a time certain set as much in concrete as 

possible. And you have to also keep in mind that—what 

the developing countries often talk about when they talk 

about so-called special and differential treatment—is to 

allow themselves to be plagued by their local monopolies, 

their inefficient industries, for a longer period. So you’re 

not really doing them a great favor. 

Glassman: Besides this illicit trade in counterfeiting, does 

globalization have a downside? 

Naím: It has negative consequences, and some of the 

consequences we are already seeing. There is a generalized 

sense of uneasiness in the population. You know, a lot 

of their resistance is the sense that something big is 

going on—changes that are very, very profound in the 

way people live, in which companies can survive or not 

survive. Entire sectors are being redefined. We just heard 

in this country, the United States, in the last year a very 

furious debate about outsourcing, about the whole idea of 

utilizing employees in Asia, in India, to do work that used 

to be done here, and you could detect a lot of anxiety that 

went way beyond the job losses. If you measure the job 

losses with outsourcing, it’s very small. And then the big 

debate would lead you to think that we’re talking about 

hundreds of thousands of Americans losing their jobs, and 

that’s not the case. 

So there is a general anxiety about globalization 

because there is a sense that there are changes going on 

that are touching all of us, and we don’t know how, at the 

end of the day, our families, ourselves, our companies, our 

communities are going to end up being hit or not hit.

Glassman: I always had the feeling that globalization 

is an example of something where the benefits are very 

widespread, and that the costs are very narrow and they 

hurt specific industries—the American shoe industry or 

the Korean rice industry—and those people are yelling 

and screaming, but you’re talking about something, a 

more widespread anxiety. Does that have a basis in fact? 

Naím: The best example is an example you yourself 

gave of the South Korean rice farmers, because I wonder 

where the consumers of rice were in those meetings? Of 

course there is a whole generation of South Korean rice 

farmers that are going to suffer from what’s happening to 

the international trade rules in rice. But far more people 

are going to benefit from the opening of trade and the 

elimination of subsidies—the trade-distorting subsidies in 

rice. These are consumers that are not represented there 

because each one of them is going to benefit in a tiny way, 

in often an imperceptible way, whereas the Korean farmers 

are going to be hit right now in a very measurable way. So 

it’s easier to mobilize them and organize them. 

Your point is that, yes, that is happening, but there is 

something wider. And I think that we are still adjusting 

our minds to a new world where the traditional ideologies 

of the past—you know, socialism or Soviet Union-type 

communism—gave a lot of people anchors on how to 

think about the world and how to interpret changes, a 

Chinese customs officials check confiscated counterfeit electronic products 

in a case involving some 460,000 fake Sony batteries and 30,000 fake Sony 

earphones in May 2005.

HUANG SHENGANG ©AP/XINHUA/WWP

GLOBAL ISSUES / FEBRUARY 2006
eJOURNAL USA 11

world in which you 

had two superpowers 

that balanced each 

other. Now there is 

only one, and every 

day we get news 

of changes that we 

don’t know how to 

interpret, from cloning 

to things brought 

by the Internet, to 

the illicit trades, to 

the war in Iraq, to 

international suicidal 

terrorists that are 

willing to kill and die. 

Barfield: But that’s not just true in the closed-off societies; 

it’s true in the United States, too. We are a society that has 

traditionally been mobile, accepting new ideas, and [with] 

much greater capacity to do that and not be worried 

than other societies. But I do think that looking beyond 

economics, there is a greater sense now that there are a lot 

of forces that are out of your control. I’m talking about 

the individuals; I’m not talking about governments. And 

it would come from anything from biotechnology through 

the extraordinary impact of the information revolution. 

Young people, I think, accept a lot of this stuff and 

understand it. They understand how to deal with their cell 

phones and all the computers, et cetera, but they’re still 

even more aware of the fact that this is something when 

the technology is really mind-boggling, even for them. 

Glassman: But are things really more out of people’s 

control than they used to be, or is it that we know more 

about what’s going on in the world than we used to 

know? In other words, I’m bringing up again the role of 

communications, which may have overall beneficial effects 

but could also produce a lot more anxiety. For example, 

we’ve seen the number of natural catastrophes is on the 

rise, but actually a lot of scientists believe that it’s not 

really on the rise, it’s just that we happen to know what’s 

going on. 

Barfield: I think the combination. People talk—you 

get these stories in the early to mid-19th century when 

people first saw a train and it scared the hell out of them. 

Or you first got a radio and you could get beyond your 

own county or city in the United States. But I think—I 

just think it’s the scope 

of change coming 

from all directions and 

from various kinds of 

disciplines—technology 

as well as science.

Glassman: Moisés, 

is there a connection 

between globalization 

and the rise in 

religious fervor—

some people call it 

fundamentalism—that 

we see not just in the 

Muslim world but in other religions?

Naím: We see it in the United States. There is no doubt. 

The results are a movement toward more religiosity and 

more formalized practice of religion, and even a bigger 

presence of fundamentalist interpretations of religion 

in daily life, and even in politics. I think behind your 

question there is a powerful hypothesis; that, as the world 

changes, either because of globalization or the information 

revolution, that as all of the changes you two have 

discussed touch all of us, people are looking for anchors. 

What is happening is that predictability has declined. 

People used to have a sense that their lives could proceed 

more or less like those of their neighbors and parents. 

Now the sense is that many things can happen to your 

lives—many wonderful things but also some very terrible 

things that will make your life and that of your family not 

look like the ones of your neighbors or your parents or 

your brothers or sisters.

So with that sense of uncertainty, of anxiety about 

where this is going—people need to have something to 

grab on to, and I think there is a very forceful opportunity 

to do that through religion. That is in some countries. 

In other countries religion has replaced the hope for 

prosperity as a way of thinking. In a lot of the Middle 

East, as we know, the economic performance, even in 

countries that are wealthy, is dismal. And if you combine 

that with the demographics where there are a lot of very 

young people that essentially have no hope, no hope for 

better politics or for participating in the public life and 

the political life of the country, or no hope for really 

prospering and having more material goods, then religion 

becomes a very interesting option. It’s often the only 

option in terms of devoting one’s life to a cause, to an 

“Is there a connection 

between globalization 

and the rise in religious 

fervor—some people call 

it fundamentalism—that 

we see not just in the 

Muslim world but in other 

religions?”

GLOBAL ISSUES / FEBRUARY 2006

James Glassman
12 eJOURNAL USA 

idea, to a hope, or to a sentiment, a religious fervor.

Barfield: The really fascinating thing, though, I think, 

is the Middle East certainly has to be front and center. I 

mean, just think about what’s going on. We talked about 

lives being uprooted and changed. Think about a young 

person, let’s say in the 1960s or the ’70s or ’80s in China, 

what they’re saying. Then think of this generation that’s 

coming along, let’s say teenagers in China now. We have 

some young people at my institute—young Chinese who 

are convinced that there will be some form of democracy. 

These are practical MBA types, they’re not dreamers, and 

yet that transition is going to be very difficult.

Glassman: Let me ask that question, which is almost 

a cliché, but I’d still love to know the answer: Does 

globalization—let’s just define it in economic terms as 

meaning a more open economy, a more market-oriented 

economy—does that naturally lead to democracy? 

Naím: I think it’s too soon to tell. We don’t know. 

Glassman: Not just in China but anywhere?

Naím: Anywhere. We don’t know. Remember, we have 

had waves of globalization throughout history. This is not 

the first time that the world has experienced a very intense 

integration of different economies. This one started 

at great speed in the ’90s. It is, again, the information 

revolution coupled with the collapse of the Soviet Union, 

the opening of countries that were closed before. And 

it’s happening as we speak, and it’s happening at a speed 

and in ways that we still do not fully comprehend. In 

some areas globalization is creating better conditions 

for democracies. In others, globalization is hampering 

democracy.

Glassman: Where is it hampering democracy?

Naím: I am thinking of, for example, oil countries where 

globalization has created very large markets. The price of 

oil these days is in large part very high because of what’s 

happening in China and because the global economy 

is growing quite significantly. That creates a stream of 

revenue for authoritarian governments, and those very 

high revenues are inhibitors of economic and democratic 

reforms.

Barfield: I don’t disagree except I think the unfortunate 

thing for them is they have this one resource, so the forces 

of globalization don’t hit them as much. 

Glassman: I think the bigger problem is that one resource 

is owned and controlled by the government.

Barfield: Well, that’s true, but the whole thing is that 

these oil countries don’t have to scramble as they had 

to do in Brazil, Argentina, or Chile, for example. This 

whole question—to go back to your original question, 

does globalization “naturally” produce democracy?—The 

answer is no. However, this is a fight that is going on in 

intellectual circles—that I think Mr. Naím’s book takes 

on—between realists and so-called liberal internationalists. 

And we have, at the institute at which I work, those who 

work in security and diplomacy say that economists, or 

people who favor globalization keep saying it’s going to 

lead to democracy. Well, look at the Chinese; it doesn’t 

seem to have done that. And I agree with that. I do not 

think there is a natural progression. 

However, it is also true that with globalization, and 

even with the fact that the Chinese government can 

control the Internet in part, and they control these other 

information sources, it is just impossible today to control 

your population in terms of information, in terms of 

sealing them off, as you could do in Eastern Europe, in 

Hungary and Czechoslovakia in the 1950s and ’60s, or 

China in the 1960s. And then you realize that the Chinese 

are also letting their students go all over the world. If 

you’re an authoritarian at the top, you’ve unleashed 

Thanks to the spread of modern technology, Amina Harun can 

communicate on her cell phone while selling watermelons at Kenya’s 

largest fresh fruit and vegetable market.

KHALIL SENOSI ©AP/WWP

GLOBAL ISSUES / FEBRUARY 2006
13 GLOBAL ISSUES / FEBRUARY 2006

forces that you will ultimately not be able to control. 

Whether it will produce democracy, I don’t know, but it is 

certainly true that it is going to be unsettling for whatever 

government is in power.

Glassman: Do you agree with that?

Naím: Yes, I fully agree with that. Let’s remember for a 

second that the majority of mankind today lives in nondemocratic regimes. It is normal. A normal human being 

today is a person that does not eat three meals a day, who 

does not get information from independent sources, if 

at all. A third of humanity today doesn’t have a phone 

and has never made a phone call, and most of humanity 

doesn’t live in democracies. 

The majority of children in the world do not go to 

school. The majority of people in the world don’t have 

formal paying jobs.

Barfield: But I think we need to be careful. I think you 

would have to say that more than any other time in 

human history, you’ve got people living under some kind 

of democratic state.

Glassman: I think the number of democracies has 

actually tripled in the last 30 years, although the majority 

of people don’t live in democracies, if we count China as a 

non-democracy, as most people would.

Let’s just talk about where globalization is going. Is 

this—well, we’ve had periods in history when there was 

globalization, but it did come to a screeching halt for a 

fairly long period of time, for at least 40 or 50 years. Is it 

possible that we’ll see the same thing again? Is 

globalization here to stay or is it cyclical? 

What particularly concerns me is that in 

the developing world, we’re talking about a 

lot of people who have really not joined this 

globalization process. Is there anything that 

can be done about that?

Barfield: I think if you look at developing 

countries—forget about what the politicians 

say and what they will sign to, or the heads of 

state will sign to in Hong Kong trade talks. 

Just take East Asia or even Latin America 

and just go back to the question. They refuse 

to sign up to treaties that lock in investor 

rights or investment, but they’ve thrown their 

borders wide open.

And the other thing to keep in mind is that, in 

trade terms, the amount of just voluntary opening of 

markets—forget about the negotiations—is enormous in 

almost every region except maybe Africa or the Middle 

East. What Argentina did and what Indonesia has done in 

investment over the last 20 years is far beyond anything 

they would put on paper, but it’s happening. In other 

words, they are convinced. They see that this is the way 

to go, but they’re very nervous about being hauled before 

the World Trade Organization or some other international 

organization and being told you have to do this. They 

want to be able to throw it open to foreigners, to 

General Motors, or General Electric, but they don’t want 

somebody to say that you have to have the same rules that 

you have in your autonomous company there in Brazil or 

in Chile or in Mexico.

Glassman: But you’re generally optimistic about the 

developing world as well as the rest of the world?

Barfield: Yes.

Naím: Again, if you take the definition of globalization 

and heavily imbue it with trade and investment, then it is 

true. Trade cycles may go up and down, and we may have 

a spur of protectionism.

Glassman: By the way, do you think that’s happening 

right now?

Naím: No. I think that trade is very strong and free. Every 

year international trade grows, and has been growing 

eJOURNAL USA

Indian customers stroll in one of the malls in Gurgaon, south of New Delhi. MANISH SWARUP ©AP/WWP
14 

more than global 

GDP. So, yes, 

there are all 

sorts of trade 

impediments, 

and there are all 

sorts of subsidies 

and distortions, 

but trade is 

moving. 

Take a 

broader definition 

of globalization 

that includes not 

just trade and 

investment, and 

you compare it 

with the 19th century. When the telegraph came, there 

was this furor of communication around the world. But 

the telegraph was mostly used by institutions. Instead, the 

Internet is being used by teenagers that get together with 

like-minded teenagers across the world. There are all sorts 

of like-minded groups, interest groups, people that share 

interests, passions, technologies, hobbies, who get together 

across borders and create virtual communities that have 

all sorts of activities and capabilities and develop all sorts 

of new political 

dynamics. That 

is irreversible, 

because as Mr. 

Barfield said, you 

can control the 

Internet but there 

are limits to how 

much you can 

control it.

So the cat 

is out of the 

bag. People are 

organizing. We 

have more—this 

is more individual 

globalization 

than we have ever seen in history. The prior waves of 

globalization were institutional, were commercial, where 

the central actors were trading companies. Today there is 

a globalization of individuals, and that is a very important 

difference. 

The opinions expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect the 

views or policies of the U.S. government.

“The Internet is being used by 

teenagers that get together with 

like-minded teenagers across the 

world. There are all sorts of likeminded groups, interest groups, 

people that share interests, 

passions, technologies, hobbies, 

who get together across borders 

and create virtual communities 

that have all sorts of activities 

and capabilities and develop all 

sorts of new political dynamics.” 

GLOBAL ISSUES / FEBRUARY 2006 eJOURNAL USA

Moisés Naím

S

heffield, England’s newest under-twentysomething 

indie band, the Arctic Monkeys, exemplify teenagers 

using the Internet to get together with like-minded 

teenagers around the world. Together, lead vocalist Alex 

Turner, bass guitarist Andy Nicholson, drummer Matt 

Helders, and Jamie Cook on guitar currently hold the 

British record for fastest-selling 

debut album after theirs amassed an 

incredible 360,000 sales in its first 

week.

Credit this success to their 

utilization of the Internet. The Arctic 

Monkeys began distributing free 

demo CDs in 2003–2004. Their fan 

base quickly grew once these demos 

were transferred to the Internet 

for other like-minded teenagers to 

download and listen to. Soon fans were traveling great 

distances to make it to their gigs and surprised the band as 

they began singing back the words as they were performed. 

Some are now hailing the Arctic Monkeys as the 

first superstars of the iPod age. Whether this is true 

or not remains to be seen. However, their success does 

demonstrate how modern technologies, 

such as the Internet, are bringing 

together people with similar interests. 

This accomplishment also enabled the 

band to exend their global reach by 

releasing their debut CD in the United 

States on February 21, 2006. 

Arctic Monkeys: England’s First Superstars of the iPod Age

PHOTOGRAPH BY TABATHA FIREMAN / REDFERNS MUSIC PICTURE 

LIBRARY
eJOURNAL USA 15

It all started at a 

1999 World Trade 

Organization meeting. 

An activist protester 

asked Pietra Rivoli, 

associate professor of 

finance at Georgetown 

University’s McDonough 

School of Business, 

“Who made your Tshirt?” In her quest to 

find the answer, Rivoli 

traveled to China, 

Texas, and Tanzania 

experiencing firsthand 

the complexities of the global economy. She tells the story 

in her book The Travels of a T-Shirt in the Global 

Economy: An Economist Examines the Markets, 

Power, and Politics of World Trade. In the following 

article, she reflects on her experiences and marvels at how 

trade has the power to pull diverse peoples together.

When I decided to follow my T-shirt around 

the world, what I wanted most of all was to 

tell a great story. I didn’t start out trying to 

prove a point or convey a lesson, though lessons surely 

emerged from my travels. I just had a sense that this 

very simple thing had a complicated, fascinating story 

to tell, a story that could resonate with anyone who 

gets dressed each morning, and I wanted to tell that 

story. 

I found that all over the world people like to be 

able to explain things to professors. It must be some 

kind of perverse thrill. Whether I was at a Texas 

cotton farm or an African T-shirt stall, people wanted 

me to understand their place in the global economy, 

wanted to explain to me how their small microcosm of 

globalization worked; they wanted me to understand 

how complicated, how hard, but also how interesting it 

was to face their challenges each day. 

As I traveled around the world doing interviews 

for the book, I heard a lot of contrary views, opinions 

about cotton subsidies and trade policy, about China 

and about job losses. But I didn’t meet any villains. 

There are no bad guys in my T-shirt’s life story. Every 

business, every entrepreneur, every politician involved 

in my T-shirt’s life was just trying to make their way 

in a competitive market, a market that often changes 

under their feet. 

I wrote this book through tumultuous and often 

tragic times, through 9/11 and wars in Afghanistan 

and Iraq, through terrorist bombs in Europe and 

through a bitterly contested election in America. But 

as I traveled from a Texas cotton farm to a Chinese 

factory, from Washington bureaucrats to a thirdgeneration used-clothing dealer descended from Jewish 

immigrants, to Muslim importers in East Africa, I 

kept marveling at how well everyone got along. While 

bombs were dropping, these Muslims, Jews, blacks, 

and whites stayed friends because of my T-shirt. The 

yarn and cloth and clothing bound them together; 

world trade bound them together. They had no choice 

but to keep talking to one another. The little guys 

got along just fine while the big guys were fighting. 

Whatever the debates about trade, it was clear to me 

after my travels that trade is very clearly an instrument 

of peace and understanding. I feel privileged that 

everyone I wrote about is my friend now, and I hope 

the readers like all of the players in my T-shirt’s life 

story as much as I do. 

I have been teaching in a business school for a 

long time, so I know how easy it is to bore people 

with talk of trade deficits, or competition, or 

unemployment. But everyone loves a good story. Some 

business professors avoid stories in their teaching and 

research, concerned that stories lack credibility or 

intellectual heft. But as long as we do our best to tell 

The Travels of a T-Shirt 

PIETRA RIVOLI

GLOBAL ISSUES / FEBRUARY 2006
16 eJOURNAL USA 

the whole story, not simply anecdotes selected to prove 

our point, stories can go a long way in helping us to 

understand the complexities of trade and international 

business. I hope my T-shirt’s story has done just that. 

As a first-time book author, I have had a few “pinch 

myself” exciting moments since the book was released. 

The first was when I learned that Time was reviewing 

the book, and the second was when I picked up the 

phone and found National Public Radio international 

business correspondent Adam Davidson on the line. 

He loved the book, he said, and wanted to make an 

NPR series out of it. And then he gave me the highest 

compliment for a professor when he said the book had 

changed the way he thought about globalization, and 

even how he would report on international business in 

the future. 

The NPR series came together over a month or 

so, as Adam and I traveled back to many of the places 

that I had written about, back to Texas cotton farms 

and Chinese factories. On the radio, we had just 24 

minutes to condense my work of five years and travels 

over thousands of miles, just 24 minutes to tell the 

biography of this most complicated simple thing. As I 

listened to the background sounds that Adam recorded 

for the radio series—tractor noises, sewing machine 

noises, cotton gin noises, and the creepy silence of a 

padlocked T-shirt factory in Alabama—I realized that I 

had never thought about the sounds that globalization 

makes. If you close your eyes and listen, you can hear it 

all working. 

The opinions expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect the 

views or policies of the U.S. government.

GLOBAL ISSUES / FEBRUARY 2006

© DOUGLAS WHYTE/CORBIS, COURTESY OF JOHN WILEY & SONS, INC.
eJOURNAL USA 17 GLOBAL ISSUES / FEBRUARY 2006

U.S. Under Secretary of State for Economic, Business, and 

Agricultural Affairs Josette Sheeran Shiner discusses the 

relationship between trade and economic growth.

Why do some countries enjoy robust economic 

growth while others do not? Between 1975 

and 2003, more than half the countries of 

the world had annual per-capita GDP growth rates of less 

than 1 percent. About one-third of all countries actually 

got poorer. This number would be even greater if one 

could include data on more than 35 additional countries 

with institutions too weak to collect reliable statistics. 

Economists and development specialists seeking 

answers are increasingly finding a link to trade. If one 

looks at the world broadly over the last century, it is 

hard to find systematic evidence for the benefits of 

protectionism. Yet examples of ill-conceived protectionist 

policies abound: U.S. isolationism following the stock 

market crash of 1929 precipitated the Great Depression; 

developing countries’ import substitution schemes in 

the 1960s and 1970s discouraged economic growth; 

and communism stunted productivity, innovation, and 

economic freedom. Protectionism provides no sustainable 

benefits. 

On the other hand, trade liberalization is making 

a significant contribution to economic growth, poverty 

reduction, and stability around the world. Economic 

studies confirm that countries with more open economies 

engage in increased international trade and have higher 

growth rates than more closed economies. Among 

developing countries, those with the greatest engagement 

in international trade had growth rates three times higher 

than lesser trading countries in the 1990s. 

China and India are the two most visible examples 

of the power of trade liberalization. Thirty years ago, 

both countries had widespread poverty. They still have 

essentially the same natural resource bases they had then. 

And their political systems have remained relatively 

unchanged over the years. Yet today they both enjoy 

among the highest economic growth rates in the world. 

What changed? They opened up their markets to the 

world, contributing to the greatest, most rapid decline 

in poverty in global history. The nongovernmental 

organization Oxfam reported that if Africa, East Asia, 

U.S. TRANSFORMATIONAL ECONOMIC 

POLICY

Linking Trade, Growth, and Development

JOSETTE SHEERAN SHINER

UNDER SECRETARY OF STATE FOR ECONOMIC, BUSINESS, AND AGRICULTURAL AFFAIRS
18 

South Asia, and Latin America were each to increase their 

share of world exports by 1 percent, the resulting gains 

in national income could lift 128 million people out of 

poverty.

The United States is a leader in furthering economic 

opportunities like these around the world by advancing 

new and innovative economic policy approaches that link 

trade, aid, and development.

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has emphasized 

the power of trade and growth to transform societies: 

“There is perhaps no more important tool for the United 

States as we think about the spread of stable democracy 

and liberty than to make use of our economic diplomacy, 

the benefits of free trade, the benefits of development 

assistance ... .”

LOWERING TRADE BARRIERS

Through global trade negotiations in the World Trade 

Organization (WTO), we are advancing bold proposals 

to eliminate tariffs, quotas, and trade-distorting subsidies. 

And we are challenging others to do the same. Much of 

the strength of the American economy can be attributed 

to the lowering of trade barriers by the United States and 

its main trading partners. For goods, average tariff rates 

dropped from 40 percent around World War II to less 

than 4 percent today among OECD (Organization for 

Economic Cooperation and Development) countries. 

Lower tariffs encourage competition, innovation, 

efficient allocation of resources, an exchange of ideas and 

technology, and foreign investment. Lower tariffs also 

reduce the production costs of industries and help them 

compete globally. Developing countries have a unique 

opportunity to reap the gains of freer trade, as average 

tariffs in those countries are significantly higher than those 

in the developed world, and 70 percent of tariffs paid in 

developing countries are paid on items imported from 

other developing countries.

Reforming agricultural trade is widely recognized 

as an important step toward expanding economic 

development, and opening access to agricultural markets 

through ongoing WTO negotiations could lift millions 

out of poverty. According to the World Bank, increased 

market access would account for 93 percent of the benefits 

from global agricultural trade reforms. For developing 

countries, nearly all of the benefit would be from 

reduction of their own import tariffs.

But trade alone does not automatically lead to 

growth, jobs, and the reduction of poverty. If countries 

want to capitalize on freer trade and encourage economic 

growth, they also need to have in place other sound 

national policies: good governance, rule of law, strong 

institutions, sound monetary and macro-economic 

policies, and a commitment to invest in people. These 

types of sound policies can be difficult to sustain in 

the best environments. Yet many developing countries 

are hamstrung by their own policies that inhibit 

entrepreneurship. On average in sub-Saharan Africa, it 

takes more than 63 days to start a business and more than 

200 percent of annual per-capita income to register it. In 

Australia, it’s two days and 1.9 percent. As countries take 

steps to develop sustainable economies, investors feel more 

confident to trade with, and invest in, those markets. 

A business-friendly environment helps to attract more 

foreign direct investment, contributing to more jobs, 

revenues, and economic growth

THE MILLENNIUM CHALLENGE ACCOUNT

Recognizing this, President Bush proposed a new, 

innovative development assistance program called the 

Millennium Challenge Account (MCA). The Millennium 

Challenge Corporation (MCC), which administers the 

Millennium Challenge Account, draws on lessons learned 

about development over the past 50 years—linking 

sound economic policies to new trade and investment 

opportunities. MCC functions as primarily an aid 

program, but it also helps create an environment that 

supports the benefits of freer trade.

The United States has also pioneered programs 

that pair trade capacity-building (TCB) initiatives with 

trade initiatives and has made TCB an integral part of 

our global, regional, and bilateral trade agenda—giving 

An Indian stockbroker works at the Bombay Stock Exchange, where the 

index reached an all-time high on February 14, 2005. 

RAJESH NIRGUDE ©AP/WWP

GLOBAL ISSUES / FEBRUARY 2006 eJOURNAL USA
eJOURNAL USA 19 GLOBAL ISSUES / FEBRUARY 2006

developing nations the tools they need to take advantage 

of open trade. Indeed, the Office of the United States 

Trade Representative has created a special office 

specifically to work on trade capacity-building issues. 

These efforts have made the United States the largest 

single-country donor of TCB assistance, providing more 

than $1.3 billion in 2005 and pledging to double that to 

$2.7 billion annually by 2010. 

America’s innovative approach to linking trade, aid, 

and development is already delivering real results. The 

U.S. Free Trade Agreement (FTA) with Central America 

marked the first time that TCB was an integral part of 

FTA negotiations. In one example, the United States 

helped farmers in El Salvador expand into new markets 

by improving their marketing techniques, food standards, 

productivity, and business support services for their crops. 

Their average income more than doubled. This model 

has since been used in U.S. FTA negotiations with the 

Andean countries, Southern Africa Customs Union, 

Thailand, and others.

The MCC is also advancing this record. Since 

its establishment in 2004, it has signed assistance 

programs totaling more than $900 million with five 

nations: Madagascar, Honduras, Cape Verde, Nicaragua, 

and Georgia. A little more than two years after the 

announcement of MCA indicators in February 2003, 

the median number of days to start a business dropped 

from 61 to 46 in MCA candidate countries. According 

to World Bank officials, because of MCA’s incentive 

effect, Paraguay adopted significant policy reforms in 

2004 that both improved their MCA score on the “days 

to start a business” indicator and catalyzed an increase in 

registration of approximately 20 percent more firms than 

usual.

Trade liberalization is a key and necessary ingredient 

to a successful economic growth program. The United 

States is committed to helping countries prosper 

economically and to reducing global poverty. And we 

are at the forefront, working hard with the international 

community and individual countries to increase those 

opportunities. Our 135 embassies and consulates around 

the world are actively engaged in promoting this policy. 

Many developing countries now recognize the vital link 

between trade liberalization and economic growth. It is 

increasingly important that we set in motion programs 

that support this effort. Working together, we are 

confident we can increase global economic prosperity as 

we move forward in the 21st century. 
20 

Business consultant, lecturer, and author, 

Daniel Pink has written about the 

global economy and its effects on people 

worldwide in two well-received books, 

A Whole New Mind and Free Agent 

Nation. His essays on people who have 

opted out of the corporate world to work 

for themselves, outsourcing, and the search 

for meaning through work have appeared in the New York 

Times, Harvard Business Review, and Fast Company 

magazine. A contributing editor with Wired magazine, 

Pink also writes a column for Yahoo! Finance. Pink was 

interviewed by U.S. State Department staff writer Paul 

Malamud. 

Q: What is globalization, in your view?

Pink: Globalization is the broad movement among 

economies and societies and technology that is knitting 

the world closer together and affecting capital markets, 

technology, and the exchange of information.

Q: What is making this happen?

Pink: I think it’s a number of things. One 

of them is certainly the advent of new 

technology like the Internet, which allows 

a child in Zambia to find information 

almost as fast as the head librarian at 

Cambridge University. It allows people to 

stay in touch with their native countries 

more easily; it allows capital to move across the world to 

the place where it can be used most advantageously. It 

confers a greater amount of transparency on governments 

and political institutions than ever before. It erodes trade 

barriers. When I think of globalization, I think of it being 

basically about flows: whether the flows of ideas, flows of 

capital, flows of goods and services, flows of people—all 

of which have been made easier and have been accelerated 

because of globalization.

Q: Are we better or worse off as a result?

Pink: We’re better off. In my view, globalization is good, 

not perfect. And we can’t let perfect be the enemy of 

good. Globalization in general has lifted living standards 

THE CHANGING WORKPLACE

An Interview With Daniel Pink

GLOBAL ISSUES / FEBRUARY 2006 eJOURNAL USA

“Globalization is 

good, not perfect. 

And we can’t let 

perfect be the enemy 

of good.”
eJOURNAL USA 21 GLOBAL ISSUES / FEBRUARY 2006

throughout the world. Now there have 

been obviously some dislocations from 

that. If you are an American worker and 

your manufacturing job goes to a country 

in the developing world where someone is 

going to get paid one-fifth of what you’re 

earning, then you have been in some 

fashion harmed by globalization.

At the same time, that manufacturing 

worker and his or her family benefit from 

the lower cost of goods and services because of falling 

trade barriers. And they benefit obviously from all the 

technology that helps enable globalization. So my view 

is that globalization is mostly a plus. And the challenge 

of public policy, the challenge of political leadership 

nationally and trans-nationally, is to make sure that people 

get the benefits of globalization, and that for the downside 

of globalization, governments and political institutions 

step in to mitigate its negative effects.

Q: Are there statistics showing that globalization lifts all 

boats?

Pink: It depends on whose standard of living. Certainly 

U.S. per capita GDP over the last 50 years has tripled. 

I am certain living standards in much of the rest of the 

world have also improved. That said, you’ve still got more 

than a billion people on this planet living on less than 

a dollar a day. So it’s not like everybody is living in a 

land of milk and honey by any long shot, but in general 

globalization has made things better rather than worse, 

and in general the present is better than the past. In 

general, I am almost certain, not because I am a woollyeyed optimist but because I’m a realist, that the future will 

be better than the present.

Q: In your book A Whole New Mind, you predict that 

more routine white-collar jobs will flow out of developed 

nations and into developing ones, and you say that they 

will be made up for by more creative jobs in America 

and other developed nations. Yet, this assumes that most 

people are capable of being highly creative. Suppose most 

of us are not?

Pink: I disagree with the premise that most people 

don’t have these kinds of abilities. My argument is that 

economies are automating and off-shoring routine 

white-collar work—basic accounting, basic financial 

analysis, even basic legal services—and this is the same 

sort of pattern that we saw with routine 

manufacturing work. Today anything that 

is routine—that is, anything that can be 

reduced to a script, to a spec sheet, to a set 

of rules—this kind of work increasingly is 

going to disappear from the United States, 

Canada, Western Europe, and Japan, 

because that kind of work can get done 

more cheaply by computers and by people 

overseas.

Now, what that means is that in order to survive in 

the economy, you have to do something that isn’t routine. 

That tends to be work that is artistic, creative, empathic, 

about the big picture. And I think that the idea that 

human beings in general and Americans in particular can’t 

be creative, empathic, big-picture-oriented is flatly wrong.

For example, consider the time when America was 

moving from an agricultural economy to a manufacturing 

economy, and people said, “Well, everybody can’t go 

to high school, everybody can’t learn to read and write. 

A good education is only reserved for a certain elite 

population.” What I’m talking about here is not that 

everyone becomes Salvador Dali, but that everybody 

becomes adept at these sorts of high-concept, high-touch 

abilities. And I think that is eminently doable.

No one would say, “The masses of men cannot 

become literate.” Not everybody can become Toni 

Morrison. But nearly everyone can become literate. “The 

masses of men can’t become numerate.” Well, I don’t 

agree with that. I don’t think that everyone can be Albert 

Einstein, but they can certainly be numerate. And they 

can go beyond that.

Illustrating recent developments in the use of technology in medicine, 

Dr. Arjun Kalyanpur in Bangalore, India, discusses a patient’s scan with an 

American doctor in Connecticut.

GAUTAM SINGH–AP/WWP 

“In order to survive 

in the economy, 

you have to do 

something that isn’t 

routine.” 
22 

Q: What happens to people in developed nations when 

people in developing nations of the world become equally 

well educated and find their own creativity?

Pink: I think that’s an excellent point. Tom Friedman 

deals with this issue in his writing. There are two different 

schools of thought. One is that China and India are racing 

us to the bottom. The other one is that they are racing us 

to the top. Friedman believes—and I agree—that they are 

racing us to the top, again not because I’m an optimist, 

but because that’s always been the pattern, that’s always 

been the trajectory. Now that doesn’t mean that it is 100 

percent certain to be the trajectory again, but that’s what I 

would bet on.

And so I agree that Americans have absolutely no 

monopoly on these kinds of creative abilities, and what we 

Americans have to do is shake off our complacency and 

become a lot better at this stuff because, as Tom Friedman 

says, these other countries are racing us to the top.

Q: The nature of work is changing in other ways. 

Computers are becoming more complex and capable. 

How soon would you expect computers to compete with 

humans for professional-grade work?

Pink: I think in some ways that they are doing certain 

kinds of professional work. Look at TurboTax [a software 

program that helps people prepare their taxes]. We have 

all this concern about off-shoring and outsourcing. There 

were 3 million U.S. tax returns done in India last year 

by Indian tax-preparers, but there were 21 million tax 

returns done by TurboTax. So in some fashion, software 

already can do certain elements of professional work, and 

increasingly it’s going to do more and more.

What that means is that the accountants who want 

to survive can’t make a living off of doing the same sort 

of thing that a piece of $39.95 software can do. They 

have to do things that are harder to reduce to computer 

code, which is a more sophisticated type of advising—

understanding what peoples’ financial needs are and 

giving higher-level financial advice.

It’s the same thing to some extent with stockbrokers 

and investment as well. Nowadays many Americans do 

their investing on line. Information is widely available, 

Internet brokerage transactions are cheap because you can 

execute them on your own computer, and you no longer 

need a stockbroker on the phone to perform the routine 

transactions.

At some point that stockbroker is going to try to 

become a financial adviser, to understand your situation in 

a more detailed way and offer you kinds of advice that a 

computer program can never do.

Q: What about robots? How do you expect them to affect 

available work?

Pink: If you go to a manufacturing floor today, what you 

see is not the manufacturing floor of the 1920s or even 

of the 1950s, where you had a bunch of guys in greasy 

overalls turning wrenches on an assembly line. What 

you see are people, often with associate’s degrees, who 

are basically running these robots. The robots have no 

autonomy or will of their own. They answer to software 

code. So someone has to write the code, someone has to 

monitor those robots. So this is increasingly what a lot of 

manufacturing work is. This calls on obviously a much 

higher level of skill.

Q: Do most of the world’s workers have the intelligence, 

the IQ, to adapt to all of this?

Pink: Let me disagree with the premise of that question, 

that IQ is a measure of aptitude. IQ is a measure of one 

particular kind of reasoning, but that is hardly the only 

form of reasoning, and the evidence is overwhelming 

that the correlation between IQ and career success is 

essentially zero. What IQ correlates to is what profession 

you enter. Also, IQ as measured by standard tests has gone 

up over time too—the median IQ has increased. IQ is 

part of what it is to be smart, but it’s only a small aspect 

of it. Look at the work of Dan Goleman in emotional 

intelligence; look at the work of Howard Gardner at 

Harvard and his multiple intelligences. I don’t put much 

stake in IQ as a measure of human ability.

GLOBAL ISSUES / FEBRUARY 2006 eJOURNAL USA

Watching real-time video taken from inside a sewer line, technician Jeremy 

Vanrite maneuvers a Sewer Access Module (SAM) robot through an 

Albuquerque, New Mexico, sewer via interactive computer controls. 

PAT VASQUEZ-CUNNINGHAM–AP/WWP
eJOURNAL USA 23 GLOBAL ISSUES / FEBRUARY 2006

Q: Do you feel human dignity is threatened by some of 

the by-products of globalization? Some argue that bonds 

of family, clan, community, hierarchy are loosening—that 

even the dignity of individual achievement based on the 

development of individual skills means less because roles 

shift so frequently in a globalized economy.

Pink: That’s an interesting question. If you consider 

the Western world a harbinger of the future, the family 

connections here are much more diffuse than in other 

parts of the world. You have much greater mobility, where 

people don’t live necessarily where their parents live or 

where their brothers and sisters live. There is an array of 

different family forms now that call into question the 

nuclear family. The point about identity coming from a 

lifetime of skills is interesting. I think there is a change 

there, because the half-life of every sort of ability today 

is shrinking and shrinking. You cannot make a living by 

plying one trade for 40 years because it doesn’t work that 

way. The lifespan of a particular set of skills is literally 

a couple of years. So there’s a premium now obviously 

on learning and learning how to learn and constantly 

upgrading.

Now I don’t know whether that erodes human 

dignity. One could argue that it might enhance it. It 

allows people to constantly do better, to not fall into 

stagnation, to have more chance to flower. But, obviously, 

individual stories differ and the question is a valid one.

Q: In A Whole New Mind, you tend to refer to people 

as “she.” Do you feel that globalization highlights the 

role of women? Do you also mean to imply that the 

androgynous side of the human spirit has some sort of 

advantage in the new economy?

Pink: There is lots of evidence that people with more 

androgynous minds that can reason both in a typically 

“left-brain,” masculine way and a typically “right-brain,” 

feminine way have a comparative advantage in the 

modern economy. I think that a lot of the abilities that 

are often dismissed as “feminine” or “soft”—things like 

empathy, to some extent 

even creativity itself—are 

more valuable nowadays, 

and that might confer a 

slight advantage on women. 

But I think that the future 

does belong to people with 

androgynous minds, people 

who have that analytical 

capability but people who also 

have that artistic, empathic 

ability.

Q: Is that really true? Aren’t 

most people comfortable with 

traditional gender attitudes?

Pink: Well, look at the U.S. 

military, in many ways a 

macho profession. You have 

a lot of women serving in the 

military, and the tasks that 

today’s soldiers are called on to perform sometimes involve 

a more sophisticated set of skills. They have to understand 

local culture; there are peacekeeping missions—keeping 

the peace is quite different from going directly into 

combat. In my view, all men have some capability to 

think androgynously, and those who aren’t willing to 

develop it might be in trouble.

Q: One of the changes somehow linked to globalization 

is the widespread use of cell phones, the Internet, even 

computer games. Are these phenomena, in their playful 

form, really linked to a globalized economy?

Two Omani participants in the U.S. Business Internship Program at Duke University speak with Sally Morton 

(back to camera), international vice president of statistics and epidemiology at the Research Triangle Institute in 

Durham, North Carolina, in December 2005.

SARA D. DAVIS ©AP/WWP
24 

Pink: It’s hard to say. But even video 

games, like any entertainment form, can 

become a lingua franca that can cross 

cultures. Even the constant connectedness 

of cell phones may be related to 

globalization, though as a somewhat 

distant cousin.

Q: In your book, you say that globalization 

seems to have led to an increased search 

for spirituality in the United States. Why 

is this?

Pink: There’s a huge amount of evidence 

that above a certain relatively modest level, more 

money doesn’t create all that much more satisfaction 

and happiness in one’s life, and that what ultimately 

confers satisfaction and happiness are nonmonetary 

things: satisfying work, close relationships, living a life of 

meaning. I think that as more people are liberated from 

the struggle for survival, you’re going to have more people 

who have the luxury of seeking meaning, seeking a sense 

of purpose, a sense of transcendence.

Look at the work of the Nobel-prize economist 

Robert William Fogel, talking about “the fourth great 

awakening.” He talks about how the quest for selfrealization has expanded from a tight fraction of the 

planet to much more of it, especially in the developed 

world. Others call it “meaning-want”—parts of the planet 

have gone from “material-want” to “meaning-want.” 

Ronald Inglehart of the University of Michigan calls it a 

move from materialist values to post-materialist values. 

I think there’s a certain luxury that comes from being 

materially well off that liberates people to seek something 

more.

Q: In your earlier book, Free Agent 

Nation, you said that a globalized 

workforce will consist more and more of 

people in business for themselves. What 

did you mean by that?

Pink: I define a free agent as someone 

who works untethered from a large 

organization—a free-lancer, a sole 

proprietor, the operator of a very small 

business. That form of working is 

becoming more common because of 

technology, because of the radically 

changed social contract between 

individuals and organizations, because of structural 

change within organizations themselves, in part because of 

the search for meaning we were talking about.

Those are the forces that are causing a lot of people 

to jump the corporate ship and go out on their own, and 

other people to be pushed. As for the connection of all 

this to globalization, it’s connected to the extent that it 

gives people more mobility. There are people who do work 

for North American companies who might live in Europe 

or in other places overseas. The buyers of talent now 

have access to a labor market that isn’t just local, that is 

potentially worldwide, even though this is just beginning 

to develop. As economies evolve, I think you are going 

to see more and more people around the world seeking 

to invent their own ways of working rather than latch 

themselves permanently on to one organization. 

The opinions expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect the views 

or policies of the U.S. government. 

“The buyers of 

talent now have 

access to a labor 

market that isn’t 

just local, that 

is potentially 

worldwide, even 

though this is 

just beginning to 

develop.” 

Small-business owner Rafael Cardenas works on his elgolfero.com golfing 

Web site from his home in Los Angeles.

DAMIAN DOVARGANES ©AP/WWP

GLOBAL ISSUES / FEBRUARY 2006 eJOURNAL USA

© THE NEW YORKER COLLECTION 2000 DANNY SHANAHAN FROM 

CARTOONBANK.COM. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

“Working at home has been a mixed blessing.”
eJOURNAL USA 25

Richard Pells is professor of history at the University of 

Texas at Austin. He is the author of three books: Radical 

Visions and American Dreams: Culture and Social 

Thought in the Depression Years; The Liberal Mind 

in a Conservative Age: American Intellectuals in the 

1940s and 1950s; and Not Like Us: How Europeans 

Have Loved, Hated, and Transformed American 

Culture Since World War II. He is currently at work on 

From Modernism to the Movies: The Globalization 

of American Culture in the Twentieth Century. He 

has held six Fulbright senior lectureships and chairs, as 

well as other visiting professorships, at universities in the 

Netherlands, Denmark, Germany, Austria, Finland, 

Brazil, Australia, and Indonesia.

From the beginning of the 20th century, people 

abroad have been uncomfortable with the global 

impact of American culture. In 1901, the British 

writer William Stead published a book called, ominously, 

The Americanization of the World. The title captured a set 

of apprehensions—about the disappearance of national 

languages and traditions, and the obliteration of a 

country’s unique “identity” under the weight of American 

habits and states of mind—that persists until today.

More recently, globalization has been the main 

enemy for academics, journalists, and political activists 

who loathe what they see as the trend toward cultural 

uniformity. Still, they usually regard global culture and 

American culture as synonymous. And they continue 

to insist that Hollywood, McDonald’s, and Disneyland 

are eradicating regional and local eccentricities—

disseminating images and subliminal messages so 

beguiling as to drown out competing voices in other 

lands.

Despite those allegations, the cultural relationship 

between the United States and the rest of the world 

over the past 100 years has never been one-sided. On 

the contrary, the United States was, and continues to 

be, as much a consumer of foreign intellectual and 

artistic influences as it has been a shaper of the world’s 

entertainment and tastes.

In fact, as a nation of immigrants from the 19th to 

the 21st century, the United States has been a recipient 

IS AMERICAN CULTURE “AMERICAN”?

RICHARD PELLS

GLOBAL ISSUES / FEBRUARY 2006
26 

as much as an exporter of global culture. 

Indeed, the influence of immigrants 

on the United States explains why its 

culture has been so popular for so long 

in so many places. American culture has 

spread throughout the world because 

it has incorporated foreign styles and 

ideas. What Americans have done more 

brilliantly than their competitors overseas 

is repackage the cultural products we 

receive from abroad and then retransmit 

them to the rest of the planet. That is why a global mass 

culture has come to be identified, however simplistically, 

with the United States.

Americans, after all, did not invent fast food, 

amusement parks, or the movies. Before the Big Mac, 

there were fish and chips. Before Disneyland, there 

was Copenhagen’s Tivoli Gardens (which Walt Disney 

used as a prototype for his first theme park in Anaheim, 

California, a model later re-exported to Tokyo and Paris). 

And in the first two decades of the 20th century, the two 

largest exporters of movies around the world were France 

and Italy.

THE INFLUENCE OF MODERNISM

So, the origins of today’s international entertainment 

cannot be traced only to P.T. Barnum’s circuses or Buffalo 

Bill’s Wild West Show. The roots of the new global culture 

lie as well in the European modernist assault, in the early 

20th century, on 19th-century literature, music, painting, 

and architecture—particularly in the modernist refusal 

to honor the traditional boundaries between high and 

low culture. Modernism in the arts was improvisational, 

eclectic, and irreverent. Those traits have also been 

characteristic of American popular culture.

The artists of the early 20th century also challenged 

the notion that culture was a means of intellectual or 

moral improvement. They did so by emphasizing style and 

craftsmanship at the expense of philosophy, religion, or 

ideology. They deliberately called attention to language in 

their novels, to optics in their paintings, to the materials 

in and function of their architecture, to the structure of 

music instead of its melodies.

Although modernism was mainly a European affair, it 

inadvertently accelerated the growth of mass culture in the 

United States. Surrealism, with its dreamlike associations, 

easily lent itself to the wordplay and psychological 

symbolism of advertising, cartoons, and theme parks. 

Dadaism ridiculed the snobbery of elite 

cultural institutions and reinforced an 

already-existing appetite (especially among 

the immigrant audiences in the United 

States) for “low-class,” disreputable 

nickelodeons and vaudeville shows. 

Stravinsky’s experiments with unorthodox, 

atonal music validated the rhythmic 

innovations of American jazz. 

Modernism provided the foundations 

for a genuinely new culture. But the new 

culture turned out to be neither modernist nor European. 

Instead, American artists transformed an avant-garde 

project into a global phenomenon.

POP CULTURE POTPOURRI

It is in popular culture that the reciprocal relationship 

between America and the rest of the world can best 

be seen. There are many reasons for the ascendancy of 

American mass culture. Certainly, the ability of Americanbased media conglomerates to control the production and 

distribution of their products has been a major stimulus 

for the worldwide spread of American entertainment. But 

the power of American capitalism is not the only, or even 

the most important, explanation for the global popularity 

of America’s movies and television shows.

The effectiveness of English as a language of mass 

eJOURNAL USA

“The influence 

of immigrants on 

the United States 

explains why its 

culture has been so 

popular for so long 

in so many places.”

Welsh-born Catherine Zeta-Jones and Spanish-born Antonio Banderas 

pose before the premiere of The Legend of Zorro in October 2005.

RENE MACURA ©AP/WWP

GLOBAL ISSUES / FEBRUARY 2006
eJOURNAL USA 27

communications has been 

essential to the acceptance 

of American culture. Unlike 

German, Russian, or Chinese, 

the simpler structure and 

grammar of English, along with 

its tendency to use shorter, 

less abstract words and more 

concise sentences, are all 

advantageous for the composers 

of song lyrics, ad slogans, 

cartoon captions, newspaper 

headlines, and movie and TV 

dialogue. English is thus a language exceptionally well 

suited to the demands and spread of American mass 

culture.

Another factor is the international complexion of 

the American audience. The heterogeneity of America’s 

population—its regional, ethnic, religious, and racial 

diversity—forced the media, from the early years of the 

20th century, to experiment with messages, images, and 

story lines that had a broad multicultural appeal. The 

Hollywood studios, mass-circulation magazines, and the 

television networks have had to learn how to speak to a 

variety of groups and classes at home. This has given them 

the techniques to appeal to an 

equally diverse audience abroad. 

One important way that 

the American media have 

succeeded in transcending 

internal social divisions, 

national borders, and language 

barriers is by mixing up cultural 

styles. American musicians and 

composers have followed the 

example of modernist artists 

like Picasso and Braque in 

drawing on elements from high 

and low culture. Aaron Copland, George Gershwin, and 

Leonard Bernstein incorporated folk melodies, religious 

hymns, blues and gospel songs, and jazz into their 

symphonies, concertos, operas, and ballets. Indeed, an art 

form as quintessentially American as jazz evolved during 

the 20th century into an amalgam of African, Caribbean, 

Latin American, and modernist European music. This 

blending of forms in America’s mass culture has enhanced 

its appeal to multiethnic domestic and international 

audiences by capturing their different experiences and 

tastes.

EUROPEAN INFLUENCES ON HOLLYWOOD

Nowhere are foreign influences more unmistakable 

than in the American movie industry. For better or 

worse, Hollywood became, in the 20th century, the 

cultural capital of the modern world. But it was never an 

exclusively American capital. Like past cultural centers—

Florence, Paris, Vienna—Hollywood has functioned 

as an international community, built by immigrant 

entrepreneurs and drawing on the talents of actors, 

directors, writers, cinematographers, editors, composers, 

and costume and set designers from all over the world. 

Moreover, during much of the 20th century, 

American moviemakers thought of themselves as acolytes, 

entranced by the superior works of foreign directors. From 

the 1940s to the mid-1960s, for example, Americans 

revered auteurs like Ingmar Bergman, Federico Fellini, 

Michelangelo Antonioni, François Truffaut, Jean-Luc 

Godard, Akira Kurosawa, and Satyajit Ray.

Nevertheless, it is one of the paradoxes of the 

European and Asian cinema that its greatest success was 

in spawning American imitations. By the 1970s, the 

newest geniuses—Francis Ford Coppola, Martin Scorsese, 

Robert Altman, Steven Spielberg, Woody Allen—were 

GLOBAL ISSUES / FEBRUARY 2006

New Zealander Peter Jackson, director of the Lord of the Rings trilogy, holds 

the original King Kong stop-action figure used for special effects in the 1933 

movie at the world premiere of his latest film, King Kong.

JENNIFER GRAYLOCK ©AP/WWP

“The heterogeneity of America’s 

population ... forced the media, 

from the early years of the 20th 

century, to experiment with 

messages, images, and story lines 

that had a broad multicultural 

appeal.”
28 eJOURNAL USA 

American. The Americans 

owed their improvisational 

methods and autobiographical 

preoccupations to Italian neoRealism and the French New 

Wave. But the use of these 

techniques revolutionized the 

American cinema, making 

it even harder for any other 

continent’s film industry to 

match the worldwide popularity of American movies.

Still, American directors in every era have emulated 

foreign artists and filmmakers by paying close attention 

to the style and formal qualities of a movie, and to 

the need to tell a story visually. Early 20th-century 

European painters wanted viewers to recognize that 

they were looking at lines and color on a canvas rather 

than at a reproduction of the natural world. Similarly, 

many American films—from the multiple narrators in 

Citizen Kane, to the split-screen portrait of how two 

lovers imagine their relationship in Annie Hall, to the 

flashbacks and flash-forwards in Pulp Fiction—deliberately 

remind the audience that it is 

watching a movie instead of a 

photographed version of reality. 

American filmmakers (not only 

in the movies but on MTV) 

have been willing to use the 

most sophisticated techniques 

of editing and camera work, 

much of it inspired by foreign 

directors, to create a modernist 

collage of images that captures the speed and seductiveness 

of life in the contemporary world.

Hollywood’s addiction to modernist visual 

pyrotechnics is especially evident in the largely nonverbal 

style of many of its contemporary performers. After 

Marlon Brando’s revolutionary performance in A 

Streetcar Named Desire, on stage in 1947 and in the 1951 

screen version, the model of American acting became 

inarticulateness—a brooding introspection that one 

doesn’t find in the glib and fast-talking heroes or heroines 

of the screwball comedies and gangster films of the 1930s. 

Brando was trained in the Method, an acting 

technique originally developed in Stanislavsky’s Moscow 

Art Theater in pre-Revolutionary Russia. The Method 

encouraged actors to improvise, to summon up childhood 

memories and inner feelings, often at the expense of 

what a playwright or screenwriter intended. Thus, the 

emotional power of American acting—as exemplified by 

Brando and his successors—often lay more in what was 

not said, in the exploration of passions that could not be 

communicated in words. 

The influence of the Method, not only in the United 

States but also abroad where it was reflected in the acting 

styles of Jean-Paul Belmondo and Marcello Mastroianni, 

is a classic example of how a foreign idea, originally meant 

for the stage, was adapted in postwar America to the 

movies, and then conveyed to the rest of the world as a 

paradigm for both cinematic and social behavior. More 

important, the Method actor’s disregard for language, the 

reliance on physical mannerisms and even on silence in 

interpreting a role, has permitted global audiences—even 

those not well-versed in English—to understand and 

appreciate what they are watching in American films.

HUMAN RELATIONSHIPS

Finally, American culture has imitated not only the 

modernists’ visual flamboyance, but also their tendency to 

be apolitical and anti-ideological. The refusal to browbeat 

“The refusal to browbeat an 

audience with a social message has 

accounted, more than any other 

factor, for the worldwide popularity 

of American entertainment.”

American “Method” actor Marlon Brando and British actress Vivien Leigh in 

A Streetcar Named Desire.

©AP/WWP

GLOBAL ISSUES / FEBRUARY 2006
eJOURNAL USA 29 GLOBAL ISSUES / FEBRUARY 2006

an audience with a social message has accounted, more 

than any other factor, for the worldwide popularity of 

American entertainment. American movies, in particular, 

have customarily focused on human relationships and 

private feelings, not on the problems of a particular time 

and place. They tell tales about romance, intrigue, success, 

failure, moral conflicts, and survival. The most memorable 

movies of the 1930s (with the exception of The Grapes of 

Wrath) were comedies and musicals about mismatched 

people falling in love, not socially conscious films dealing 

with issues of poverty and unemployment. Similarly, the 

finest movies about World War II (like Casablanca) or the 

Vietnam War (like The Deer Hunter) linger in the mind 

long after those conflicts have ended because they explore 

their character’s most intimate emotions rather than 

dwelling on headline events.

Such intensely personal dilemmas are what people 

everywhere wrestle with. So Europeans, Asians, and 

Latin Americans flocked to Titanic, as they once did to 

Gone With the Wind, not because those films celebrated 

American values, but because people all over the world 

could see some part of their own lives reflected in the 

stories of love and loss.

America’s mass culture has often been crude and 

intrusive, as its critics have always complained. But 

American culture has never felt all that foreign to 

foreigners. And, at its best, it has transformed what it 

received from others into a culture everyone, everywhere, 

could embrace—a culture that is both emotionally and, 

on occasion, artistically compelling for millions of people 

throughout the world.

So, despite the current resurgence of antiAmericanism—not only in the Middle East but in Europe 

and Latin America—it is important to recognize that 

America’s movies, television shows, and theme parks have 

been less “imperialistic” than cosmopolitan. In the end, 

American mass culture has not transformed the world 

into a replica of the United States. Instead, America’s 

dependence on foreign cultures has made the United 

States a replica of the world. 

The opinions expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect the views 

or policies of the U.S. government.

Brazilian director Fernando Meirelles’ City of God (2004) and The Constant 

Gardener (2005) were nominated for four Academy Awards each.

JOHN D. MCHUGH ©AP/WWP

A Chinese woman buys tickets to the movie Titanic at a Beijing theater. GREG BAKER ©AP/WWP
30 

Jessica C.E. Gienow-Hecht teaches history at the Johann 

Wolfgang Goethe-Universität Frankfurt am Main. Her first 

book, Transmission Impossible: American Journalism as 

Cultural Diplomacy in Postwar Germany, 1945-55, was 

co-awarded the Stuart Bernath Prize for the best first book 

in diplomatic history. Her second book, Sound Diplomacy: 

Music and Emotions in German-American Relations 

Since 1850, will be published by the University of Chicago 

Press. She has taught at the University of Virginia, the 

University of Bielefeld, the Martin-Luther-Universität HalleWittenberg, and Harvard University.

I

n the 1981 film The Gods Must Be Crazy, a pilot 

flying across the Kalahari Desert of Botswana drops 

an empty Coke bottle into the midst of an African 

tribe. The natives instantaneously regard the bottle as a 

gift from their gods. But “the gift” changes the traditions 

and social mores of their world for the worse. Finally, the 

natives send a member of the tribe to cast the bottle away 

over what they believe is the edge of the earth. 

This film offers insight into what has come to be 

known as “The Grand Debate”: Are Americans “cultural 

imperialists” who conquer and corrupt the rest of the 

world by spreading popular culture everywhere?

It is true, as Richard Pells writes, that much of what 

constitutes American popular culture today originated in 

a mélange of foreign influences during the 20th century. 

But this does not explain why so many people around 

the world are critical of what they perceive as “American 

cultural imperialism.” Nor does it explain why this idea 

has become such a force over the past century. If we wish 

to better understand this perception, we need to consider 

both the makeup and the influence of American culture 

abroad—as Pells does—and also its reception by nonAmericans.

HISTORICAL BACKGROUND

It is a curious paradox in American history that a 

nation whose cultural transfers became so controversial 

started out with little interest in the export of culture. 

Historically, Americans have found their distinctiveness 

primarily in their political system rather than in their 

A EUROPEAN CONSIDERS THE 

INFLUENCE OF AMERICAN CULTURE

JESSICA C.E. GIENOW-HECHT

GLOBAL ISSUES / FEBRUARY 2006 eJOURNAL USA
eJOURNAL USA 31 GLOBAL ISSUES / FEBRUARY 2006

poets, artists, and novelists. They generally view their 

popular culture as a source of private entertainment 

rather than as an instrument of foreign policy. They have 

never seriously contemplated establishing a department 

of culture in the federal government. In 1938, the 

State Department established the Division for Cultural 

Relations, but many U.S. officials criticized the use of 

culture as a diplomatic tool. Even today, most Americans 

believe that culture belongs to the realm of creativity, 

public taste, and free enterprise, not government.

But following World War II, the situation was 

different. During the Cold War, American diplomats 

decided that the United States needed to make the case 

for the American way of life abroad. At a time when the 

Soviet Union sought to export communism, public figures 

as well as policymakers sought to exert more influence 

through culture around the world. In the years following 

VE-Day, the U.S. government created a number of 

organizations and programs, such as the United States 

Information Agency and the Fulbright exchange program, 

which promoted the transmission of information on 

American culture.

From an objective point of view, of course, the 

United States was not the first nation to export its way 

of life. Since the Renaissance, European powers have 

fostered a variety of cultural exchange programs. The 

British in India and the Middle East, the Germans in 

Africa, and the French in Indochina all sent their own 

culture abroad as a powerful tool to strengthen trade, 

commerce, and political influence and recruit elites for 

their own purposes. A 1959 study by UNESCO revealed 

that more than half of the 81 states queried, including all 

the larger ones, had official cultural relations programs. 

Some of the European Community’s activities today rest 

on collective cultural diplomacy—that is, the creation of 

organizations promoting languages and the exchange of 

cultural information.

Argentina, Mexico, Egypt, Sweden, and India 

traditionally export their media to adjacent countries. 

Moreover, the takeover of Hollywood movie studios in 

recent years by foreign-based corporations has raised 

the question of whether Americans have changed from 

“cultural imperialists” to takeover victims. But even if the 

United States was not the first nation to export its way of 

life, foreign critics have consistently focused their fears of 

the future on the United States. 

In the 1970s and ’80s, for example, Western Europe 

saw rising anti-American protests, peace groups, and mass 

demonstrations against the American military presence. 

In Europe, this anti-Americanism soon expanded to 

cultural matters. Critics believed that American products 

exerted an influence that went far beyond their popularity 

among consumers. U.S. goods seemed to dominate not 

only foreign markets but foreign minds as well. To many 

European intellectuals, mass culture, Hollywood movies, 

and commercialism seemingly threatened European 

sovereignty, traditions, and a social order based on 

print culture. Mass culture also seemed to blur social 

distinctions, override nation-state boundaries, and spread 

the capitalist marketplace. 

Yet what Peter tells you about Paul tells you more 

about Peter than about Paul. What people around the 

world think about American culture may tell us more 

about these people than about the United States.

CULTURE AND GLOBALIZATION

Today, many politicians and cultural critics around 

the world lament the influx of U.S. movies. European 

representatives, for example, are concerned about their 

cultural distinctiveness and fear that they have already 

lost much of their audience to American products. Under 

the headline “The Higher the Satellite, the Lower the 

Culture,” the former French Minister of Culture Jack 

Lang vehemently condemned U.S. cultural imperialism 

in a 1991 interview. This criticism was not new. In the 

1970s, Chilean professor Armand Mattelart and novelist 

and critic Ariel Dorfman had written an influential 

pamphlet titled Para leer al pato Donald (How To Read 

Donald Duck), which excoriated Hollywood’s distorted 

vision of reality and advocated liberation by the Chilean 

people of their own culture.

Tiny nations, remote people, and unknown tribes 

U.S. Ambassador to Pakistan Ryan Crocker talks with Pakistani recipients of 

Fulbright Scholarahips in April 2005.

ANJUM NAVEED ©AP/WWP
32 

find their way into the 

headlines of international 

journals through their vocal 

protest against Western 

influences. From Iceland to 

Latin America, Central Africa 

to the Philippines, representatives reportedly deplore the 

demise of their cultures with the rising influence of AngloAmerican television and culture. 

In many ways, however, the idea of “American 

cultural imperialism” is inadequate. The American 

sociologist John Tomlinson has argued that this 

phenomenon may simply be the spread of modernity, a 

process of the loss of local cultures and not of cultural 

expansion. Global technological and economic progress 

and integration simply lessen the importance of national 

culture. It is, therefore, misleading to place the blame for 

a worldwide development on any one nation. Instead, all 

countries are affected by a global cultural change.

In the future, the term “globalization” has the 

potential to replace the criticism of U.S. cultural 

imperialism. Globalization refers both to the compression 

of the world and to the growing perception of the 

earth as an organic whole. Although many speak of 

globalization as simply an economic phenomenon, it 

is multidisciplinary in its causes and its effects. The 

rather vague term includes many characteristics of 

modernization, such as the spread of Western capitalism, 

technology, and scientific rationality. The central idea 

remains, however, that cultures and societies do not 

necessarily overlap with the boundaries of the nation-state. 

In other words, the spread of modern mass culture may 

not be the responsibility of the United States.

In recent decades, much of the international criticism 

of “cultural imperialism” has moved away from its 

anti-American line to a more global level, with no one 

identifiable enemy. Even major critics of the United 

States have aligned their earlier reproaches along these 

lines. Already in 1980, Armand Mattelart warned of the 

broad and inappropriate usage of the notion of “cultural 

imperialism.” He emphasized that the term did not imply 

an external conspiracy but could only be effected by a 

combination of international and native (elite) forces.

If the concept of U.S. cultural dominance is so 

questionable, why then has anti-Americanism ballooned 

nearly everywhere in the past decades and today? The 

reasons often have less to do with the United States than 

with the protesters themselves. In a sense, there is no 

one cultural anti-Americanism but only a variety of very 

heterogeneous expressions of 

this phenomenon, conditioned 

by geographical concerns and 

historical cycles. The shape and 

content of the phenomenon 

not only differ according to 

dimensions of space but also according to dimensions 

of time: Each époque and each group has its own forms 

of anti-Americanism. In the 20th century, much of this 

criticism focused on the economic aspect of U.S. cultural 

exports. In the 21st century, it seems, people around the 

world worry more about the global political implications 

of American power.

In the Cold War, French anti-Americanism originated 

in the rift between communism and socialism. Public 

debates denounced American expansionism, NATO, and 

what was seen as the corruptive influence of American 

art, all of which horrified French elites but not the mass 

of voters. Instead, the “American Way of Life” fascinated 

a generation of young French in love with consumerism, 

better living standards, and economic growth.

The French case is instructive because it points to the 

most fundamental paradox of cultural anti-Americanism: 

At any point in time this criticism was and is unthinkable 

without the flipside, philo-Americanism. The tension 

between the two represents the very condition necessary 

to support the existence of both: High expectations and 

bitter disillusion are always joined at the hip.

Still, most powerful states have experienced the 

basic historical lesson that power generates suspicion, 

and the more power a dominant nation exerts the more 

antagonistic other nations turn. In the interwar period 

and even during the early Cold War years, a number of 

political and cultural observers grasped this point, and 

they alerted U.S. policymakers to the consequences of 

this development. As the United States became a world 

superpower, it was inevitable that people abroad, in the 

words of American theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, would 

“hate those who hold power over them”—this is true in 

both cultural and political terms When pondering the 

future of globalization and the role the United States will 

play in this context, we may wish to remember the words 

of this wise man. 

The opinions expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect the views 

or policies of the U.S. government.

GLOBAL ISSUES / FEBRUARY 2006 eJOURNAL USA

“In many ways, however, the idea 

of ‘American cultural imperialism’ 

is inadequate.” 
eJOURNAL USA 33 GLOBAL ISSUES / FEBRUARY 2006

BIG AROUND THE WORLD 

I

n today’s globalized world, celebrity is no longer confi ned to one’s home country. Movie stars, musicians, athletes, 

designers, and entrepreneurs are among the many groups of people who have “made it big” by sharing the 

uniqueness of their talent and culture with the global community. The following photo story highlights some 

of these personalities, many of whom have also used their celebrity to improve the lives of others less fortunate. For 

example, a well-known humanitarian, Congolese basketball star Dikembe Mutombo, below, donated millions to open 

the fi rst modern medical facility in Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of Congo. Mutombo, of the Houston Rockets 

basketball team, is fl anked by teammates Chinese star Yao Ming and American David Wesley. (All images ©AP/WWP)
34 

AP/WWP PHOTO BY MICHAEL OKONIEWSKI

Irish rock star Bono, the lead singer of U2, plays to the 

crowd in the first of five sold-out nights at Madison 

Square Garden in New York City. In 2006, U2 won 

five Grammy awards, the top award in the American 

music industry. Besides his musical fame, Bono is 

internationally known for his work in helping to fight the 

spread of HIV/AIDS in Africa. zzriure dunt lum ipit lutpat, vulputatie ming 

er sit lor sed dionulla ad dolutat. Ut utat. Ut lam

Bollywood actress Neha Dhupia and Pakistani 

actor Moammar Rana pose during promotion of 

their forthcoming movie Kabhi Pyar Na Karna

(Never Fall in Love). India’s Bollywood, a word 

play on Hollywood, is the world’s most prolific 

movie industry, churning out hundreds of movies 

each year that are watched by hundreds of millions 

across the world. Many big Bollywood stars, 

directors, and producers worked together to raise 

funds for tsunami victims in 2005. 

New York Yankees outfielder Hideki Matsui, left, 

and Seattle Mariners outfielder Ichiro Suzuki have 

successfully made the transition from playing baseball 

in Japan to become all-star major league players in the 

United States. According to mlb.com, 29.2 percent of 

the major league baseball players on the opening day 

rosters in 2005 were born outside the United States. 

These players represented 15 foreign countries, Puerto 

Rico, and the Virgin Islands.

Moammar Rana

Neha Dhupia 

Bono

GLOBAL ISSUES / FEBRUARY 2006 eJOURNAL USA
eJOURNAL USA 35 GLOBAL ISSUES / FEBRUARY 2006

Renowned director/producer Stephen Spielberg, Malaysian actress 

Michelle Yeoh, and Japanese actor Ken Watanabe appear at the 

premier of Memoirs of a Geisha. Yeoh also starred in Crouching Tiger, 

Hidden Dragon and Tomorrow Never Dies. Spielberg’s credits include 

such blockbusters as the Indiana Jones and Jurassic Park series. 

Watanabe also starred in The Last Samurai.

Stephen 

Spielberg

Michelle Yeoh

Ken 

Watanabe

During the 1950s, ’60s, and ’70s 

Brazilian footballer Pelé played in four 

World Cups with Brazil’s National Team 

and scored 1,280 goals in a 1,360-game 

career. He continues as a living legend 

in Brazil, forever known as the man who 

took soccer to America. He has also 

done extensive work for children’s causes 

through UNICEF. 

Audrey Tautou

Pelé Jackie Chan 

French Actress Audrey Tautou became an 

international star with her performance in 

Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s romantic fable Amélie. She 

also stars in A Very Long Engagement, a French/

American collaboration.

Jackie Chan’s fi lms frequently combine slapstick 

humor with high-energy martial arts action. 

Much like Yeoh, Chan performs his own stunts. 

His movie credits include New Police Story, 

Rush Hour, Rush Hour 2, and Shanghai Noon. 

Jackie Chan is also a 

UNICEF Goodwill 

Ambassador, who 

has contributed 

$65,000 to help 

victims of the 

tsunami. 
36 

Singer/actress Björk is arguably Iceland’s most famous pop personality. She was named 

Best Actress for her role in Dancer in the Dark at the Cannes Film Festival in May 2000. 

The movie also earned her a nomination for best song at the 2001 Academy awards for 

“I’ve Seen It All.” Björk also performed at the Live 8 Japan concert to promote aid for 

Africa. Her album Army of Me was released as a benefit album for the victims of the Asian 

tsumani. 

Eiji Aonuma is a Japanese designer and director of video games such as the popular 

Nintendo series The Legend of Zelda. The fact that many video games are interactive, 

entertaining, and tend to appeal to people’s competitive nature contribute to their 

international popularity. Many offer gamers the option to play alone against the computer, 

against their friends, 

or online against other 

players across the world. 

Grammy award winner Maria Rita is the daughter of the 

late Brazilian vocalist Elis Regina and jazz and pop pianist, 

arranger, and composer César Camargo Mariano. Her 2003 

self-titled debut CD garnered not only critical and popular 

praise but three Latin Grammy Awards, including best new 

artist, best MPB (Musica Popular Brasileira) Album, and best 

Brazilian Song (Portuguese Language). The New York Times 

has called her “the biggest phenomenon to hit Brazilian 

popular music in years.”

Eiji Aonuma 

Björk

Maria Rita

GLOBAL ISSUES / FEBRUARY 2006 eJOURNAL USA
eJOURNAL USA 37 GLOBAL ISSUES / FEBRUARY 2006

Los Angeles-based System of a Down’s music has been described as 

combining elements of goth and funk with hard-edged music that appeals 

to younger fans and lyrics that attract the 20-somethings. All of Armenian 

heritage, two of the band members were born in Lebanon, one in Armenia, 

and one in California. 

Colombian singer Shakira has established herself as an international star 

with a groundbreaking blend of pop and rock styles. She won a Grammy 

for Best Female Pop Vocal Performance (“Ojos Asi”) at the inaugural 

Latin Grammy Awards in 2000. Her superstar status was further cemented 

the following year when “Laundry Service” broke into the Top 5 of the 

mainstream U.S. pop charts.

Seiji Horibuchi, founder of Viz 

Communications and publisher of 

Shonen Jump, stands by a number of 

comic and animation characters at the 

entrance to his company’s offices in San 

Francisco. Japanese animation, toys, 

and video games are popular around 

the world because they cut across 

gender and age boundaries. Japanese 

“manga” comics and animation known 

as “anime” are rapidly changing from a 

niche market to a mass phenomenon in 

the United States.

System of a Down

Shakira 

Seiji Horibuchi,
38 

Sean Paul’s 1996 release of “Baby Girl” was the first 

of a series of undeniable reggae smashes that proved 

that authentic Jamaican dancehall reggae could be 

embraced as popular music on a global scale. His 

double-platinum album Dutty Rock sold nearly six 

million copies worldwide and received numerous 

prestigious awards, including the Grammy for Best 

Reggae Album in 2004. 

Singer Beyonce Knowles and fashion guru Tommy 

Hilfiger attend a launch party for a new Hilfiger fragrance. 

Beyonce, a native of Houston, Texas, is an accomplished 

composer and sings in French as well as English. The 

recipient of numerous Grammy awards, she often performs 

at benefit concerts, such as a 2003 AIDS benefit in South 

Africa. In a true family enterprise, her father serves as her 

manager and her mother as costume designer. Originally 

from Elmira, New York, designer Hilfinger took what 

started as a men’s jeans and sportswear company to a halfbillion-dollar global empire encompassing women’s wear, 

children’s wear, footwear, eyeglasses, fragrances, and home 

furnishings. 

Gérard Depardieu is arguably the leading actor in France 

today. He has played roles on stage and screen including 

Cyrano de Bergerac, the Count of Monte Cristo, Napoleon, 

and comic character Obélix, and has appeared in American 

movies such as The Man in the Iron Mask and Green Card. 

He will also star in Sam Weisman’s Knights of Manhattan, 

due out in 2006.

Sean Paul

Beyonce 

Knowles

Gérard Depardieu

GLOBAL ISSUES / FEBRUARY 2006 eJOURNAL USA

Tommy 

Hilfiger
eJOURNAL USA 39

GLOBALIZATION, HUMAN RIGHTS, 

AND DEMOCRACY

DANIEL GRISWOLD

Daniel Griswold is director of the Center for Trade Policy 

Studies at the Cato Institute in Washington, D.C. He 

is the author of numerous studies and articles on trade, 

immigration, and globalization, including the January 

2004 study “Trading Tyranny for Freedom: How Open 

Markets Till the Soil for Democracy,” available at 

www.freetrade.org.

When trade and globalization are discussed in 

the U.S. Congress and in the American media, 

the focus is almost entirely on the economic 

impact at home—on manufacturing, jobs, and wages. But 

trade is about more than exporting soybeans and machine 

tools. It is also about exporting freedom and democracy.

Since September 11, 2001, the Bush administration 

has articulated the argument that trade can and must play 

a role in promoting democracy and human rights in the 

rest of the world. In an April 2002 speech, President Bush 

said, “Trade creates the habits of freedom,” and those 

habits “begin to create the expectations of democracy and 

demands for better democratic institutions. Societies that 

are open to commerce across their borders are more open 

to democracy within their borders.” 

TRADE, DEVELOPMENT, AND POLITICAL REFORM

The connection between trade, development, and 

political reform is not just a throwaway line. In theory and 

in practice, economic and political freedoms reinforce one 

another. Political philosophers from Aristotle to Samuel 

Huntington have noted that economic development and 

an expanding middle class can provide more fertile ground 

for democracy. 

Trade and globalization can spur political reform 

by expanding the freedom of people to exercise greater 

control over their daily lives. In less developed countries, 

the expansion of markets means they no longer need to 

bribe or beg government officials for permission to import 

a television set or spare parts for their tractor. Controls 

on foreign exchange no longer limit their freedom to 

travel abroad. They can more easily acquire tools of 

communication such as mobile phones, Internet access, 

satellite TV, and fax machines. 

As workers and producers, people in more open 

countries are less dependent on the authorities for their 

livelihoods. For example, in a more open, marketdriven economy, the government can no longer deprive 

independent newspapers of newsprint if they should 

displease the ruling authorities. In a more open economy 

and society, the “CNN effect” of global media and 

consumer attention exposes and discourages the abuse 

of workers. Multinational companies have even greater 

GLOBAL ISSUES / FEBRUARY 2006
40 

incentives to offer competitive 

benefits and wages in more 

globalized developing countries 

than in those that are closed.

Economic freedom and 

rising incomes, in turn, help 

to nurture a more educated 

and politically aware middle 

class. A rising business class 

and wealthier civil society create leaders and centers 

of influence outside government. People who are 

economically free over time want and expect to exercise 

their political and civil rights as well. In contrast, a 

government that can seal its citizens off from the rest of the 

world can more easily control them and deprive them of 

the resources and information they could use to challenge 

its authority. 

INCREASED DEMOCRATIZATION

As theory would predict, trade, development, and 

political and civil freedom appear to be tied together 

in the real world. Everyone can agree that the world is 

more globalized than it was 30 years ago, but less widely 

appreciated is the fact that the world is much more 

democratized than it was 30 years ago. According to 

the most recent survey by Freedom House, the share of 

the world’s population enjoying full political and civil 

freedoms has increased substantially in the past three 

decades, as has the share of the world’s governments that 

are democratic. 

In its annual survey, released in December 2005, 

the human rights research 

organization reported that 

46 percent of the world’s 

population now lives in 

countries it classifies as “Free,” 

where citizens “enjoy open 

political competition, a climate 

of respect for civil liberties, 

significant independent civic 

life, and independent media.” That compares to the 

35 percent of mankind that enjoyed a similar level of 

freedom in 1973. The percentage of people in countries 

that are “Not Free,” where political and civil liberties are 

systematically oppressed, dropped during the same period 

from 47 percent to 36 percent. The percentage of the 

population in countries that are “Partly Free” has remained 

at 18 percent. Meanwhile, the percentage of the world’s 

governments that are democracies has reached 64 percent, 

the highest in the 33 years of Freedom House surveys. 

Thanks in good measure to the liberating winds of 

globalization, the shift of 11 percentage points of the 

world’s population in the past three decades from “Not 

Free” to “Free” means that another 650 million human 

beings today enjoy the kind of civil and political liberties 

taken for granted in such countries as the United States, 

Japan, and Belgium, instead of suffering under the kind of 

tyranny we still see in the most repressive countries. 

Within individual countries, economic and political 

freedoms also appear to be linked. A 2004 study by the 

Cato Institute, titled “Trading Tyranny for Freedom,” 

found that countries that are relatively open to the global 

economy are much more likely to be democracies that 

respect civil and political liberties than those that are 

relatively closed. And relatively closed countries are far 

more likely to deny systematically civil and political 

liberties than those that are open. 

FROM ECONOMIC REFORM TO POLITICAL REFORM

In the past two decades, a number of economies have 

followed the path of economic and trade reform leading to 

political reform. South Korea and Taiwan as recently as the 

1980s were governed by authoritarian regimes that did not 

permit much open dissent. Today, after years of expanding 

trade and rising incomes, both are multiparty democracies 

with full political and civil liberties. Other countries that 

have most aggressively followed those twin tracks of reform 

include Chile, Ghana, Hungary, Mexico, Nicaragua, 

Paraguay, Portugal, and Tanzania. 

eJOURNAL USA

“The application for U.S. 

foreign policy is that trade and 

development, along with its 

economic benefits, can prove to 

be powerful tools for spreading 

broader freedoms and democracy 

around the world.”

In October 2004, leather exporter Girma Hagos reads the news on the 

Internet in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, to check up on the upcoming U.S. elections.

ANTHONY MITCHELL ©APWWP

GLOBAL ISSUES / FEBRUARY 2006
41

In other words, governments that grant their citizens 

a large measure of freedom to engage in international 

commerce find it increasingly difficult to deprive them 

of political and civil liberties, while governments that 

“protect” their citizens behind tariff walls and other 

barriers to international commerce find it much easier 

to deny those same liberties. Of course, the correlation 

between economic openness and political freedom 

across countries is not perfect, but the broad trends are 

undeniable.

The application for U.S. foreign policy is that trade 

and development, along with its economic benefits, can 

prove to be powerful tools for spreading broader freedoms 

and democracy around the world.

In mainland China, for example, economic reform 

and globalization give reason to hope for political 

reforms. After 25 years of reform and rapid growth, an 

expanding middle class is experiencing for the first time 

the independence of home ownership, travel abroad, 

and cooperation with others in economic enterprise free 

of government control. The number of telephone lines, 

mobile phones, and Internet users has risen exponentially 

in the past decade. Millions of Chinese students and 

tourists travel abroad each year. That can only be good 

news for individual freedom in China, and a growing 

problem for the government. 

Free trade and globalization can also play a role in 

promoting democracy and human rights in the Middle 

East. In a May 2003 address outlining his plan for a 

Middle East free trade area, President Bush said, “The 

Arab world has a great cultural tradition, but is largely 

missing out on the economic progress of our time. Across 

the globe, free markets and trade have helped defeat 

poverty, and taught men and women the habits of liberty.”

Economic 

stagnation in the 

Middle East feeds 

terrorism, not because 

of poverty but 

because of a lack of 

opportunity and hope 

for a better future, 

especially among 

the young. Young 

people who cannot 

find meaningful work 

and who cannot 

participate in the 

political process are 

ripe pickings for 

religious fanatics and 

terrorist recruiters. Any 

effort to encourage 

greater freedom in the Middle East must include an 

agenda for promoting economic liberty and openness.

THE FUTURE

On a multilateral level, a successful agreement 

through the World Trade Organization (WTO) would 

create a more friendly climate globally for democracy and 

human rights. Less developed countries, by opening up 

their own, relatively closed markets and gaining greater 

access to rich-country markets, could achieve higher rates 

of growth and develop the expanding middle class that 

forms the backbone of most democracies. A successful 

conclusion of the WTO Doha Development Round of 

trade negotiations that began in 2001 would reinforce the 

twin trends of globalization and the spread of political and 

civil liberties that have marked the last 30 years. Failure 

would delay and frustrate progress on both fronts for 

millions of people.

For the past three decades, globalization, human 

rights, and democracy have been marching forward 

together, haltingly, not always and everywhere in step, but 

in a way that unmistakably shows they are interconnected. 

By encouraging globalization in less developed countries, 

we not only help to raise growth rates and incomes, 

promote higher standards, and feed, clothe, and house the 

poor; we also spread political and civil freedoms. 

The opinions expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect the views 

or policies of the U.S. government.

eJOURNAL USA GLOBAL ISSUES / FEBRUARY 2006

A child rescued from indentured servitude 

sits at a rehabilitation center in Accra, 

Ghana. Hundreds of such children have 

been freed in recent years thanks to 

international attention.

CASSANDRA VINOGRAD ©APWWP

Kamel, the robot jockey, rides a racing camel in a test-run in Doha, Qatar, in 

April 2005. Qatar plans to replace the traditional child jockeys with robots.

KAMRAN JEBREILI ©AP/WWP
42 

Louise Shelley is a professor in the School of International 

Service and founder and director of the Transnational 

Crime and Corruption Center at American University in 

Washington, D.C. A leading expert on transnational crime 

and terrorism, she is the author of Policing Soviet Society

and Crime and Modernization, as well as numerous 

articles and book chapters on all aspects of transnational 

crime.

At the end of the 20th century, a new phenomenon 

appeared—the simultaneous globalization of 

crime, terror, and corruption, an “unholy trinity” 

that manifests itself all over the world. It can be found 

in the poorest countries of Latin America and Africa, 

but also in the heart of prosperous Europe. Facilitated 

by corruption, crime and terror groups operate together 

from the tri-border area in Latin America to the regional 

conflicts of West Africa and the former Soviet Union 

to the prisons of Western Europe. Crime and terrorism 

also intersect in Australia, Asia, and North America, as 

evidenced by criminal cases that document the extensive 

blending of their activities.

This unholy trinity is more complex, however, 

than terrorists simply turning to crime to support their 

activities or merely the increased flow of illicit goods 

internationally. Rather, it is a distinct phenomenon in 

which globalized crime networks work with terrorists and 

both are able to carry out their activities successfully, aided 

by endemic corruption. 

The artificial distinction made between crime and 

terrorism is based on an antiquated concept of both. 

The adage that criminals engage in crime for profit and 

terrorists operate exclusively for political motives belies 

the contemporary reality of these two groups. Criminals 

no longer belong to hierarchical organizations that do 

not threaten the state itself—as was true of the Sicilian 

Mafia or the Japanese Yakuza. Terrorists, often supported 

by crime, frequently move between identities as criminals 

and terrorists. The network structures of both allow them 

to hook up, conscious or unconscious of each other’s 

identities: The two groups may work directly together, or 

they may connect through their facilitators. For example, 

in Los Angeles, the same language school that provided 

some of the 9/11 hijackers their visa documents also 

provided them for the prostitutes of a major traffickingin-persons ring. In turn, the trafficking ring engaged in 

stolen identities that could facilitate terrorist activities.

eJOURNAL USA

THE GLOBALIZATION OF CRIME 

AND TERRORISM

LOUISE SHELLEY

GLOBAL ISSUES / FEBRUARY 2006
43 GLOBAL ISSUES / FEBRUARY 2006

Contrary to the view that all this has come about 

with globalization, both organized crime and terrorism 

have historically operated across borders. Already in the 

1930s, members of the Italian Mafia in the United States 

were traveling to Kobe, Japan, and Shanghai, China, for 

drugs, and members of various U.S. crime gangs took 

refuge in China to avoid the reach of American law 

enforcement. Members of the Irish Republican Army 

found sanctuary in Irish communities abroad, which also 

provided financial support for the organization in Ireland.

What is new, however, is the speed and frequency 

of their interactions, and the intensity of cooperation 

between these two forms of transnational crime. 

Both criminals and terrorists have developed 

transnational networks, dispersing their activities, their 

planning, and their logistics across several continents, and 

thereby confounding the state-based legal systems that are 

used to combat transnational crime in all its permutations. 

Transnational criminals are major beneficiaries of 

globalization. Terrorists and criminals move people, 

money, and commodities through a world where the 

increasing flows of people, money, and commodities 

provide excellent cover for their activities. Both terrorists 

and transnational crime groups have globalized to reach 

their markets, to perpetuate their acts, and to evade 

detection. 

THE GLOBALIZATION CONNECTION

International organized crime has globalized its 

activities for the same reasons as legitimate multinational 

corporations. Just as multinational corporations 

establish branches around the world to take advantage 

of attractive labor or raw material markets, so do illicit 

businesses. Furthermore, international businesses, both 

legitimate and illicit, also establish facilities worldwide 

for production, marketing, and distribution needs. Illicit 

enterprises are able to expand geographically to take 

advantage of these new economic circumstances thanks 

to the communications and international transportation 

revolution. Terrorists have also globalized, taking 

advantage of the ability to recruit internationally, to be 

close to diaspora communities that can support them 

logistically and financially, and to have access to more 

affluent communities. 

The end of the Cold War had an enormous impact 

on the rise of transnational crime. With the end of superpower confrontation, the potential for large-scale conflict 

has diminished, but since the late 1980s there has been 

a phenomenal rise in the number of regional struggles. 

Unfortunately, often the arms and manpower fueling 

these conflicts are tied to transnational criminal activity 

through illicit trade in drugs, diamonds, and people. 

In turn, these conflicts have produced unprecedented 

numbers of refugees and have damaged the legitimate 

economies of their regions, which then become fertile 

recruiting grounds for terrorists or havens for the planning 

and training of terrorists. 

The growth in illicit transnational activities has been 

aided enormously by the great technological advances 

of the post-World War II era. The rise in commercial 

airline traffic, improvements in telecommunications 

(including telephone, fax, and rapid communications 

through the Internet), and the growth of international 

trade have facilitated the ready movement of goods and 

people. Criminals and terrorists exploit the anonymity 

of chat rooms on the Internet and other forms of 

computer-based communications to plan and execute 

their activities. The terrorists of 9/11 used public-access 

computers to send messages and buy their airline tickets. 

Similarly, Colombian drug traffickers use encrypted 

telecommunications to plan and execute their trade.

Globalization is coupled with an ideology of 

free markets and free trade and a decline in state 

intervention. According to globalization advocates, 

reducing international regulations and barriers to trade 

and investment will increase trade and development. 

But these very conditions that promote a globalized 

environment are crucial to the expansion of crime. Crime 

groups and terrorists have exploited the enormous decline 

in regulations, the lessened border controls, and the 

eJOURNAL USA

Miners pan for diamonds in northeastern Sierra Leone near the Guinean 

border in June 2004. Exporting diamonds from Sierra Leone was banned 

by the United Nations from 2000 until June 2003 because these “conflict 

diamonds” had been used to finance deadly fighting in the region. 

BEN CURTIS ©AP/WWP
eJOURNAL USA 

resultant greater freedom, to 

expand their activities across 

borders and to new regions of 

the world. These contacts have 

become more frequent, and the 

speed at which they occur has 

accelerated. Whereas the growth 

of legal trade is regulated by 

adherence to border control 

policies, customs offi cials, 

and bureaucratic systems, 

transnational crime groups freely exploit the loopholes 

of state-based legal systems to extend their reach. They 

travel to regions where they cannot be extradited, base 

their operations in countries with ineffective or corrupt 

law enforcement, and launder their money in countries 

with bank secrecy or few effective controls. By segmenting 

their operations, 

both criminals 

and terrorists reap 

the benefi ts of 

globalization, while 

simultaneously 

reducing their 

operational risks. 

Global trade 

increased enormously 

in the second half 

of the 20th century. Included in the 

enormous fl ow of legitimate commodities 

was an increase in illicit merchandise. 

Finding the illicit fl ows within the licit is 

quite a challenge. A very small percentage 

of container ships have their cargo 

checked, thus facilitating the movement 

of drugs, arms, and contraband. 

Therefore, drugs can be moved on tuna 

boats, escaping easy detection, and a 

honey business can be used to move 

money and generate profi ts for al-Qaida. 

Recent decades have seen a rise in many forms of 

globalized crime. The drug trade was the fi rst illicit sector 

to maximize profi ts in a globalized world. Criminals 

received huge profi ts from dealing in drugs, and many 

terrorist groups used drug traffi cking as an important 

source of funding. But as the market for drugs became 

more competitive and the international law enforcement 

response to it increased, profi ts were reduced through 

competition and enhanced risk; many criminals and 

terrorists consequently 

exploited other forms of 

crime facilitated by the global 

economy. Both criminals and 

terrorists have subsequently 

benefi ted fi nancially from the 

increase in arms traffi cking 

and trade in people. There has 

also been an enormous rise 

in illegal trade in endangered 

species, hazardous waste, stolen 

art and antiquities, counterfeiting, and globalized crime 

connected to credit cards. Organized crime and terrorists 

exploit all of these activities, sometimes even in tandem.

A major service 

industry has also 

developed to serve all 

forms of transnational 

criminals. This 

includes providers 

of false documents, 

money launderers, 

and even highlevel professionals 

who provide legal, 

fi nancial, and 

accounting services 

to both groups. 

Illustrative of this trend is the fact that 

Riggs Bank in Washington, D.C., whose 

legitimate clients had included American 

presidents and many in the world 

diplomatic community, was prosecuted 

for laundering money for the dictator of 

Equatorial Guinea and for facilitating the 

transfer of funds to terrorists, resulting in 

a $25 million fi ne. This case shows that 

the activities of criminals and terrorists do 

not always stay in the shadow economy 

GLOBAL ISSUES / FEBRUARY 2006

“Crime groups and terrorists have 

exploited the enormous decline in 

regulations, the lessened border 

controls, and the resultant greater 

freedom, to expand their activities 

across borders and to new regions 

of the world.” 

Illustrative of this trend is the fact that 

1

44

2

3

Photos: 

1. Police offi cers verify the arrival of 200 kilograms of cocaine seized in 

Guatemala in November 2005.

2. A Pakistani customs offi cial looks at some of the nearly 1,500 antiques, 

worth millions of dollars, confi scated in Karachi in June 2005. The smuggler 

was arrested.

3. A tiger skin and other artifacts were displayed at the United Nations 

Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna in 

Bangkok, Thailand, in October 2004.

DAVID LONGSTREATH ©AP/WWP

JESUS ALFONSO ©AP/WWP

SHAKIL ADIL ©AP/WWP
45 GLOBAL ISSUES / FEBRUARY 2006

but often intersect with the 

legitimate economic system.

WHAT CAN BE DONE?

There must be a major 

paradigm shift in the way 

we approach international security. By adhering to the 

artificial and obsolete distinctions that criminals are 

motivated only by profit and terrorists only by political 

or religious impulses, policymakers, law enforcement, 

and military strategists are failing to deal effectively with 

the new phenomenon of transnational crime networks 

generally.

States and multilateral organizations must move 

away from the Cold War-era security paradigm that 

views conflicts between nation-states as the major threat 

to international security and assumes, therefore, that 

states are capable of controlling international security. 

For example, a strategy for controlling the proliferation 

of weapons of mass destruction by merely locking up 

the materials needed to make them may be brilliantly 

engineered but fatally flawed, because without addressing 

the additional threats posed by the pervasiveness of 

corruption, and the operations of criminal and terrorist 

networks, states may be creating a false sense of security. 

Addressing the intersection of crime, terrorism, 

and corruption in the global environment also requires 

addressing the social, political, and economic environment 

that generates and sustains them. All three evils are linked 

to profound problems with the economic imbalances 

among countries, authoritarian governments, and the 

lack of opportunities in many regions of the world. A 

viable solution must recognize and deal with the sense 

of disenfranchisement that motivates much terrorism, 

especially among Islamic populations. The availability 

of jobs and means of obtaining a livelihood is crucial 

for many in the developing world, so that, for example, 

Afghan and Latin American farmers are not dependent on 

drug cultivation to support their families.

Crime is often viewed as a peripheral issue to 

terrorism. Since September 11, 2001, numerous resources 

have been shifted in the United 

States and elsewhere from 

addressing transnational crime 

to fighting terrorism. This 

could be a serious mistake for 

the military, for intelligence 

communities, and for others. 

The need to combat crime is not a peripheral issue, but 

absolutely central to the fight against terrorism. The 

terrorists who bombed Madrid trains on March 11, 2004, 

might have been thwarted if prison authorities had been 

sensitive to the plotting going on within their facilities.

One example of a successful strategy is found 

within the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD), 

which merges local police efforts with those of federal 

law enforcement. By combining expert analysis with 

traditional police work and closely following the 

criminal activity within its communities, the LAPD 

has been enormously successful in disrupting potential 

terrorist activity and the organizations that fund and 

facilitate terrorism. Working cooperatively and reducing 

bureaucratic barriers, the police in Los Angeles have been 

able to combat terrorism without any special legal tools 

and without violations of legal rights.

If the threat of non-state actors such as transnational 

criminals and terrorists continues to rise in coming 

decades, the future will demand greater international 

cooperation, more harmonized legislation, and increased 

sharing of intelligence. In implementing a policy against 

transnational crime and terrorism, we must, nonetheless, 

respect human rights and avoid measures that will lead 

to further radicalization and foment terrorism. How 

we manage this paradigm shift of seeing and treating 

criminals, terrorists, and corruption as interconnected will 

determine how successful we are in saving the benefits of 

globalization from their dangerous misuse in the area of 

international security. 

The opinions expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect the views 

or policies of the U.S. government.

eJOURNAL USA

“The need to combat crime is not 

a peripheral issue, but absolutely 

central to the fight against 

terrorism.”
46 

D.A. Henderson, M.D., is a professor of medicine and 

public health at the University of Pittsburgh. He is 

resident scholar at the Center for Biosecurity, an adviser 

to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services 

on public health emergency preparedness, and formerly 

chief medical officer for smallpox eradication of the World 

Health Organization (WHO).

During the past 20 years, a surprising number of 

new infectious diseases have been discovered, 

some afflicting only one or a few countries, 

while AIDS has spread inexorably to eventually become a 

global epidemic and the fourth leading cause of death in 

the world. Others have also appeared—in all, at least 30 

new diseases. Many more may be anticipated because over 

recent decades, there have been dramatic demographic, 

technological, and social changes that have markedly 

altered the potential for disease transmission, and these 

changes are progressing exponentially.

Of special concern today is the global threat of 

pandemic avian influenza, a new type of influenza 

virus that poses a serious threat to every country. The 

avian influenza threat clearly shows how advances in 

global technology may help spread diseases, but it 

also demonstrates how global cooperation may lead to 

effective countermeasures. Influenza outbreaks normally 

recur every year throughout the world. Although these 

are capable of causing severe illness and death in the 

elderly and those with chronic lung or heart disease, 

most persons experience little more than fever and 

respiratory symptoms for a week or so. About every 30 

years, however, a new and different strain of influenza has 

emerged and spread across the world, causing widespread 

epidemics, known collectively as a pandemic. 

THE BIRD FLU THREAT

One of the most serious pandemics occurred in 1918, 

when a new type of influenza virus arose that proved to 

be much more lethal than ever before. It resulted in the 

deaths of at least 50 million persons worldwide. Concerns 

about the possibility of an equally serious pandemic 

were reawakened in 1997 when a new, more threatening 

strain of influenza (now identified as the H5N1 strain 

of avian influenza) was discovered in Hong Kong. It was 

exceptionally lethal for poultry, especially chickens, but it 

THE GLOBAL HEALTH CONNECTION

D. A. HENDERSON

GLOBAL ISSUES / FEBRUARY 2006 eJOURNAL USA
eJOURNAL USA 47 GLOBAL ISSUES / FEBRUARY 2006

also claimed 18 human victims, 

of whom six died. Never before 

had an influenza strain caused 

such a high human death 

rate. The cases all occurred 

among those working with sick 

chickens. 

Fortunately, at that time, 

the disease did not spread 

from human to human. Public health authorities quickly 

destroyed millions of chickens, and the virus seemed 

to have disappeared. Unfortunately, six years later it 

reemerged once again in chickens and soon began to 

spread throughout Southeast Asia. Tens of millions of 

chickens have died from the disease or have been killed in 

attempts to control the further spread of the virus. Close to 

150 human cases have occurred, almost half of which were 

fatal. Almost all patients had been in close contact with the 

sick birds or provided health care to one of the patients. 

Wild fowl are 

now infected and, as 

a result of migration, 

the virus has spread 

to western Asia, 

Eastern Europe, and 

Africa. As the disease 

continues to spread, 

there is justifiable 

concern that, at any 

time, the virus might 

change its character 

and begin to spread 

from person to 

person. Because of 

today’s volume of air 

passenger traffic, it is 

certain that it would 

spread worldwide 

within weeks.

A vaccine will be 

needed to protect humans against the disease. However, 

the vaccine, to be effective, must closely resemble the virus 

that is capable of spreading from person to person, though 

that viral strain does not yet exist, as far as scientists 

know. Thus, an intensive international effort involving 

laboratories, public health staff, and industry is under 

way to obtain, as quickly as possible, the virus as soon 

as it begins to spread from person to person, and to use 

new approaches in vaccine production that will permit 

large quantities of vaccine to be 

produced rapidly. 

THE NEED FOR GLOBAL

COOPERATION

The influenza threat aptly 

illustrates the need for greater 

international cooperation 

to discover and counter disease threats, wherever they 

may occur. Such cooperation is needed more urgently 

today than at any time in history. In the microbial 

world, countless species are continually multiplying at 

astronomical rates, each species mutating, adapting, and 

changing to assure its own survival. Inevitably, from time 

to time, microbes with different characteristics arise, some 

highly lethal to humans and some with a capacity to grow 

and to spread readily. In agrarian societies with scattered 

populations and small towns or villages, new agents had 

much less of a chance of being transmitted from person to 

person, and soon they would die out. Even if significant 

spread of a new disease did occur in one area or country, 

further dissemination often was curtailed because of 

the limitations of travel. The ease with which we travel 

the globe may spread the most threatening diseases, but 

advances in communications may also serve to facilitate 

cooperation to find cures—a global health connection.

Today, cases and outbreaks of disease, whatever their 

cause and wherever they may occur, pose a threat to the 

health of people throughout the world. No major city in 

the world is more than 36 hours distant from any other. 

In 2003, some 642 million international air travelers 

disembarked at 750 different airports in 135 countries. 

Once-common border controls and inspections have 

proved to be of no value in the prevention of disease, 

as was clearly shown during the 2003 SARS epidemic. 

More than 35 million passengers were screened with the 

intent of quarantining those with fever. No cases were 

found. If travelers had been infected, they were most 

likely in the silent, incubation phase of illness and could 

not have been identified, whatever screening measures 

had been employed. We are now experiencing population 

movement of a magnitude and speed such as has never 

before been witnessed.

The likelihood of new microbial agents gaining 

a foothold is greatly enhanced by the rapid growth of 

urban populations. As recently as 50 years ago, there were 

only two cities with populations of more than 7 million 

persons (New York and London); only 20 percent of the 

“The influenza threat aptly 

illustrates the need for greater 

international cooperation to 

discover and counter disease 

threats, wherever they may 

occur.”

A research worker displays human vaccines 

for bird flu in Beijing, China, in November 

2005.

©AP/XINHUA/WWP
48 

world’s population lived in 

urban areas. Today, there are 30 

cities with populations of more 

than 7 million, and seven of 

these, in fact, have populations 

larger than 15 million. Many 

such cities are in tropical 

and subtropical areas where 

crowding, malnutrition, poor 

sanitation, and environmental 

pollution are predominant 

features. This is fertile soil indeed for establishing a new 

disease.

Another major influence in disease dissemination 

is the industrialization and internationalization of food 

supplies. Only a few decades ago, most foodstuffs were 

grown locally on small farms and preserved or prepared 

for commercial use in small establishments, few of which 

engaged in international trade. If contamination occurred 

at any point, few persons were affected. With larger-scale 

food production and processing and the potential for 

refrigerated and air shipment of food, contamination 

at any point in the food production chain can result in 

massive epidemics extending across many countries. A 

small illustration of this was a severe diarrhea epidemic 

caused by an organism called shigellosis in August 

2004. It resulted from contamination in a United States 

airline food preparation kitchen. In all, 241 cases were 

specifically identified, but it was estimated that 9,000 

cases had actually occurred on 219 different flights going 

to 24 states and four foreign countries.

A seldom considered but major factor facilitating the 

spread of disease is the extensive proliferation of hospitals, 

especially in countries and areas where economic resources 

are taxed and professionally trained personnel are sparse. 

Many such hospitals have no provision for the isolation 

of contagious patients and little or no equipment to 

permit adequate sterilization of needles and syringes as 

well as surgical instruments. Blood-borne diseases may 

result, and, indeed, this factor has been an important 

contributor to the spread of AIDS in some nations. At the 

same time, it is customary in such medical care settings 

for large numbers of family and friends from villages and 

towns scattered over a very wide area to visit the patient. 

In consequence, sudden explosive epidemics of disease 

extending over a wide area are not uncommon. Recent 

experience has shown that 

hospitals have been the primary 

site for epidemic transmission 

of measles and hemorrhagic 

diseases such as those caused by 

the Lassa, Ebola, and Marburg 

viruses.

In this global age, the 

health of every human being on 

the planet has become relevant 

to the health of every other. 

We have yet to fully grasp the implications of this fact, 

although both AIDS and avian influenza are proving 

to be important 

in communicating 

this message. There 

is a need to attack 

infectious disease 

problems wherever 

they occur. An 

epidemic today in 

the most remote 

areas of Africa 

or the Americas, 

for example, can 

tomorrow result in 

cases and perhaps 

outbreaks almost 

anywhere else in the 

world. In practical 

terms, the May 

2005 adoption of 

updated WHO 

International Health Regulations is a positive step 

toward undertaking the shared research and development 

necessary to deal with disease problems wherever they 

occur, and in fashioning effective international networks 

for research and education such that important findings 

and observations can be more rapidly and effectively 

transmitted and applied. 

The opinions expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect the views 

or policies of the U.S. government.

GLOBAL ISSUES / FEBRUARY 2006 eJOURNAL USA

“A seldom considered but major 

factor facilitating the spread 

of disease is the extensive 

proliferation of hospitals, 

especially in countries and areas 

where economic resources are 

taxed and professionally trained 

personnel are sparse.”

An Afghan youth sits under a banner that 

says, “HIV/AIDS, Resist against difficulties. 

It is everybody’s responsibility,” in Kabul, 

Afghanistan.

MUSADEQ SADEQ ©AP/WWP
eJOURNAL USA 49 GLOBAL ISSUES / FEBRUARY 2006

Adapting International Health 

Regulations to a Smaller World

On May 23, 2005, the World Health Assembly 

(WHA) approved International Health Regulations 

to manage public health emergencies of international 

concern. The new rules are geared to “prevent, protect 

against, control, and provide a public health response 

to the international spread of disease,” according to the 

World Health Organization (WHO). The regulations 

also reflect the changing nature of global diseases since 

adoption in 1969.

U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Mike 

Leavit, speaking to the WHA on May 16, 2005, said, 

“Adoption of the revised regulations will be a very 

effective tool in our efforts to respond to the challenges 

posed by biological, chemical, and radiological 

threats to public health, whether naturally occurring, 

deliberate, or accidental.”

According to the WHO, the original International 

Health Regulations adopted in 1969 were designed 

to help monitor and control four serious infectious 

diseases—cholera, plague, yellow fever, and smallpox. 

The new regulations require states to notify the WHO 

in the event of all events and diseases that “may 

constitute a public health emergency of international 

concern.” States must also report evidence of public 

health risks outside their territory that may cause 

international disease spread. 

The revised regulations stress broader obligations to 

build national capacity for routine preventive measures, 

as well as to detect and respond to public health 

emergencies of international concern. These routine 

measures include public health actions at ports, airports, 

and land borders, and other means of transportation 

that are used to travel internationally.

As noted by the WHO, the purpose of the 

International Health Regulations is to ensure the 

maximum protection of people against the international 

spread of diseases, while minimizing interference with 

world travel and trade.

“The existing regulations were written for a very 

different world from the one we live in today. Air travel 

was a luxury, and the movement of goods and people 

around the world was relatively slow,” said Dr. Guenael 

Rodier, WHO director of communicable disease 

surveillance and response. “Today, travel and trade 

have expanded far beyond what was envisaged under 

the original regulations. The new rules respond to a 

globalized, 24-hour world in which a disease outbreak 

in one country can rapidly move around the world.” 

The opinions expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect the 

views or policies of the U.S. government.

SOURCES:

http://usinfo.state.gov/gi/Archive/2005/May/20-

582917.html 

http://www.who.int/mediacentre/news/releases/2005/pr_

wha03/en/index.html

A couple stands in front of a display of 2,000 candles lighted in memory 

of the victims of HIV/AIDS in Copenhagen, Denmark, on World AIDS 

Day.

JOHN MCCONNICO ©AP/WWP
50 

I

n the 14 months since a magnitude 9.15 earthquake 

and tsunami killed more than 200,000 people and 

displaced millions in a dozen Indian Ocean countries, 

those nations and their international partners have 

worked hard to make sure that future natural disasters 

never again take such a toll. Plans for an early warning 

system for the region took form at meetings held 

throughout 2005 in the diverse locales that reflect the 

many contributing international partners—Japan, 

France, Hawaii, Australia, and, most recently, India.

In Hyderabad, India—where the second session of 

UNESCO’s International Oceanographic Commission 

(IOC) Intergovernmental Coordination Group (ICG) 

for the Indian Ocean Tsunami Warning and Mitigation 

System was held—representatives from many Indian 

Ocean nations met from 

December 14 to 16. Along 

with observers and advisers 

from Germany, Japan, 

and the United States, 

participants discussed 

the technical details of 

a fledgling system for 

detecting tsunamis and 

other natural hazards. 

The new system is taking 

shape in Australia, India, 

Indonesia, Malaysia, the 

Maldives, Sri Lanka, 

Thailand, and other 

countries, where nothing of its kind existed previously.

Since the tsunami occurred, many countries, 

including the United States, have offered financial 

and technical support for the complex undertaking. 

Through the U.S. Indian Ocean Tsunami Warning 

System Program, U.S. agencies will spend $16.6 

million over two years to help develop early warning 

capabilities for tsunamis and other hazards in the 

Indian Ocean and to support the IOC’s lead in 

developing an international warning system with 

seismic and ocean data sharing for 16 countries.

Developing such a system takes time, because 

warning people about imminent tsunamis and 

other hazards requires an end-to-end system—one 

that includes hazard and risk assessment for each 

nation, hazard warnings and preparedness, ocean 

observations, data management, forecasting, forecast 

and warning dissemination, capacity building for 

hazard detection and prediction, population warning 

and communication, and disaster preparedness. Each 

component of such a multinational system must be 

able to communicate within the system and with other 

systems around the world.

On December 26, 2004, when the Indian Ocean 

tsunami occurred, such a system existed only in the 

Pacific Ocean basin, where more than 85 percent 

of the world’s tsunamis occur. The Pacific Tsunami 

Warning Center (PTWC) 

in Hawaii is part of the 

U.S. National Oceanic 

and Atmospheric 

Administration (NOAA) 

National Weather Service. 

Before that date, the 

PTWC served the Pacific 

Basin as a regional and 

long-distance tsunami 

warning center and as a 

local tsunami warning 

center for Hawaii. 

Today it is serving as an 

interim warning center 

for the Indian Ocean—in cooperation with the Japan 

Meteorological Agency (JMA), which issues bulletins 

for hazard-related events in the Indian Ocean—and the 

Caribbean until systems are in place for those regions.

Thanks to a massive international effort, the 

elements of such a system are coming together in the 

Indian Ocean. Over the last 12 months, according to 

UNESCO, 25 Indian Ocean nations have established 

communications centers that allow them to receive 

hazard advisories based on seismic information from 

the PTWC in Hawaii and the JMA in Tokyo.

The U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) is establishing 

eJOURNAL USA

Cooperation on Tsunami Warning Systems

GLOBAL ISSUES / FEBRUARY 2006

A technician analyzes seismic data recorded by a digital seismograph at 

a geophysical station in Banda Aceh, Indonesia, in November 2005.

DITA ALANGKARA ©AP/WWP
51 GLOBAL ISSUES / FEBRUARY 2006

several new seismic monitoring stations at the source 

zone of the December 2004 tsunami—near the Sunda 

fault off the island of Sumatra in Indonesia. To do 

this, the agency is working with the governments 

of Indonesia, Thailand, Sri Lanka, India, and the 

Maldives to improve the monitoring, detection, 

and notification of potential tsunami-generating 

earthquakes.

Because there is only a 15- to 20-minute warning 

time between when an earthquake occurs and 

when waves strike the shores of Indonesia, seismic 

methods—rather than ocean sensors—are the best way 

to detect an earthquake there. Up to 60 seismometers 

are being installed, mainly in Indonesia but also 

in surrounding countries; the long-term goal is to 

have more than 100 seismometers in the region. In 

this effort, the USGS is working with the JMA, the 

German Ministry of Science and Technology, and the 

Chinese Earthquake Administration.

Seismic information can tell these national centers 

that an earthquake of a certain magnitude has occurred 

in a specific location, but not whether a tsunami is on 

the way. Deep-ocean tsunami detection instruments 

are needed to detect a teletsunami—one that is moving 

across the ocean toward distant coastal areas. No such 

instruments are operational in the Indian Ocean, 

but several countries in the region—including India 

(with help from Germany), Australia, and Malaysia 

(with help from a commercial company, Fugro, in 

the Netherlands)—are working to deploy deep-ocean 

tsunami detection instruments.

Tide gauges can also help determine whether a 

tsunami threat is real. In the Indian Ocean region, 32 

such gauges have been upgraded so they can be used 

for tsunami detection as part of an international IOCWorld Meteorological Organization (WMO) network 

called the Global Sea Level Observing System for 

climate, oceanographic, and coastal sea-level research.

Another international system has also been 

pressed into service for tsunami detection. The Global 

Telecommunications System is a global network for 

transmitting meteorological data from weather stations, 

satellites, and weather prediction centers that has been 

modified, with help from WMO and NOAA, to carry 

tsunami-relevant information.

“As we found on December 26 [2004],” says 

Eddie Bernard, director of NOAA’s Pacific Marine 

Environmental Laboratory in Seattle, Washington, 

“a tsunami can be a global phenomenon, so it’s really 

important that when someone has a tsunami, the rest 

of the world knows about it.” 

—Cheryl Pellerin, staff writer

U.S. Department of State

eJOURNAL USA

This buoy is part of a tsunami warning system developed by GITEWS 

(German-Indonesian Contribution for the Installation of a Tsunami 

Warning System). Sensors on the ocean floor and buoys on the surface 

of the sea transmit data about earthquake and tsunami activity to 

observation stations.

FADLAN ARMAN SYAM ©AP/WWP 
52 

Stephen P. Heyneman is professor of international educational 

policy at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee. A 

frequent contributor to professional journals, his experience 

includes 22 years with the World Bank and travels to dozens 

of countries.

Global influences have affected many aspects of 

daily life, and hence our strategies for coping. In 

the 1970s, for example, it was common to rely 

on government finance to stimulate economic growth. 

Today private investment outstrips foreign aid and public 

assistance. 

It was once also common to make industrial decisions 

on the basis of suppliers located nearby who speak one’s 

own language. Today industrial decisions are made 

on the basis of worldwide comparative advantage. A 

computer assembly plant may be located in Nashville, 

Tennessee; Northern Ireland; or Malaysia; a textile plant 

in Bangalore, India, or Sonora, Mexico; a farm for winter 

fruit in Florida, Chile, or Morocco. 

AMBITIONS FOR EDUCATION

Global influences also affect higher education. 

Today virtually every country has three higher education 

ambitions. First is a demand for greater levels of access, 

and in every part of the world access to higher education 

is rising rapidly. In the late 1960s, there was no nation in 

Western Europe where the proportion of the age group in 

higher education (18 to 22) was greater than 8 percent; 

today there is no nation in Western Europe where the 

proportion in higher education is lower than 35 percent. 

Worldwide enrollment is growing between 10 and 15 

percent per year, including in middle- and low-income 

countries of Asia, Africa, and Latin America. 

The result: There are few parts of the world where 

higher education constitutes “elite” education, that is, 

where it reaches less than 15 percent of the age cohort. 

Higher education has become “mass education.” 

Enrollment at Universidad Nacional Autónoma de 

México is 269,000; the University of Delhi has 309,000 

students; Anatolian University (Turkey) has over one 

million; and enrollment at what may be the world’s 

largest private university, the Islamic Azad University 

in Iran, with its 145 campuses, is 850,000 students. 

The traditional image we may have of higher education 

institutions as cloistered retreats from the world educating 

a select few may have to change. The fact is that higher 

education today is often impersonal—long lines to enter 

antiquated lecture halls, libraries with many missing 

books, cracking walls, falling paint, leaky faucets.

The second ambition in every country is to improve 

the quality of higher education. Over the last decade 

there has been a revolution in the criteria that help define 

GLOBAL ISSUES IN HIGHER 

EDUCATION

STEPHEN P. HEYNEMAN

GLOBAL ISSUES / FEBRUARY 2006 eJOURNAL USA
eJOURNAL USA 53 GLOBAL ISSUES / FEBRUARY 2006

higher education 

quality. Highquality higher 

education now 

requires electronic 

modernity in 

classrooms, dorms, 

libraries, science 

laboratories, study 

halls. Students are 

often older, work 

part time, and live 

far away from the 

campus. Highquality syllabi are 

no longer based on 

textbooks but on 

the most up-todate information 

from print and 

electronic sources. 

Information 

for students is 

scanned and 

available online. 

Students have 

access to curricular 

information 

wherever they live 

or travel. 

What’s more, classroom instruction has changed. 

Class time is no longer devoted to providing information 

for students; instead it is devoted to the analysis of 

information absorbed prior to class. The Internet and 

other forms of electronic information have changed the 

academic library and enhanced its quality. There is less 

need for faculty or students to visit the physical place. 

A high-quality academic library used to be defi ned by 

the quantity of its holdings. Today it is defi ned by the 

quantity of its access to information. The difference 

is enormous. Every high-quality academic library has 

enough money to join exclusive “information networks” 

where holdings are shared with one another. 

Networks of academic libraries are transnational, 

and cover university libraries in Europe, Asia, and 

North America. Access to information is what separates 

the excellent libraries from the mediocre. All academic 

services, both teaching and bibliographic, are delivered 

though broadband facilities. Rankings of universities, 

in fact, now 

include the size 

of a university’s 

bandwidth (see 

accompanying 

chart). Universities 

with low bandwidth 

cannot compete 

in quality with 

universities with 

large bandwidth. 

A third 

common ambition 

of universities 

worldwide is to 

improve equity, 

that is, to offer 

scholarships and 

fellowships to 

the able students 

from impoverished 

families or 

disadvantaged 

regions. Many fi rstclass universities 

will have enough 

resources to offer 

scholarships to 

about one student 

in three, over and above what may be available through 

public resources. 

FINANCIAL RESOURCES

But all three ambitions, taken together, are expensive, 

and there are few countries where all three can be fi nanced 

out of public resources alone. With the increase in student 

numbers and rising expectations for quality and equity, 

public resources are insuffi cient. The scarcity of public 

resources is likely to be permanent, and this poses a global 

dilemma: How can higher education successfully fi nance 

its own objectives, including its traditional objectives for 

serving the public good? 

This dilemma pertains to both public and private 

institutions. Public universities in the United States, 

for instance, now receive only 15 to 20 percent of their 

recurrent budgets from the state legislatures; the university 

itself is responsible for raising the remainder, hence 

making high-quality public and private universities similar 

in fact, now 

include the size 

of a university’s 

bandwidth (see 

accompanying 

chart). Universities 

with low bandwidth 

cannot compete 

in quality with 

universities with 

large bandwidth. 

common ambition 

of universities 

worldwide is to 

improve equity, 

that is, to offer 

scholarships and 

fellowships to 

the able students 

from impoverished 

families or 

disadvantaged 

regions. Many firstclass universities 

will have enough 

resources to offer 

scholarships to 

about one student 

Ranking of Asian Universities 

by Size of Bandwidth 

Rank Multi-Disciplinary Schools

Bandwidth 

per 

Student 

(kbps)

Overall 

Rank 

2000

1 Sun Yat-sen University (Taiwan) 33.53 20

2 Kyungpook National University (S. Korea) 29.76 35

3 Chungnam National University (S. Korea) 20.84 50

4 Australian National University 19.58 8

5 Taiwan Normal University 19.02 37

6 Seoul National University (S. Korea) 17.14 4

7 Tsing Hua University (Taiwan) 14.77 18

8 Kyoto University (Japan) 14.17 1

9 Chonnam National University (S. Korea) 13.52 34

10 Tohoku University (Japan) 11.84 2

11 Tianjin University (China) 11.54 46

12 Xi’an Jiaotong University (China) 10.81 54

13 National University of Singapore 7.1 5

14 University of Wollongong (Australia) 6.92 45

15 University of Adelaide (Australia) 6.88 26

16 Nagoya University (Japan) 6.58 11

17 Central University (Taiwan) 6.12 24

18 University of Melbourne (Australia) 6.06 9

19 Kasetsart University (Thailand) 5.56 63

20 Chao Toung University (Taiwan) 5.5 28

SOURCE: http://www.asiaweek.com
54 

in their management objectives and strategies. So far as I 

am aware, all universities have four categories of choices to 

which they can turn for funding: 

• They can raise revenue from traditional sources 

(such as by raising fees, charging rent for facilities, and 

increasing overheads); 

• They can diversify into new sources of revenue 

(such as by establishing copyrights on inventions or 

investing in equity markets);

• They can allocate current resources more efficiently 

(for instance, by shifting from line item to block funding, 

differentiating faculty salaries and so forth); or 

• They can eliminate programs or services that are 

outdated (e.g., domestic science). 

All the choices 

are controversial. 

High-quality 

universities are not 

only successful at 

raising resources, 

but are wise in the 

reallocation of the 

resources they raise 

to help preserve their 

public-good function. 

Different institutions 

differ, of course, in 

how successful they 

are in financing their 

own objectives. Some 

are slow because they 

may not yet recognize 

that to be of high 

quality, all universities 

now have to take finance and management into their own 

hands. 

Some might see this trend as a “commercialization” 

of higher education. Others may see it as the globalization 

of an “American model” of higher education. I see this 

necessity for maximizing resources differently. I would 

characterize this not as commercialization but as the 

professionalization of higher education in its legitimate 

pursuit of excellence, and not as an American model but 

as the successful model in which all higher education must 

participate in order to address what is now a universal 

dilemma of public resource scarcity.

SOCIAL COHESION

There is one other global influence on higher 

education that deserves to be mentioned, and that is the 

way in which higher education contributes to (or hinders) 

a nation’s social cohesion. Both private and public higher 

education have roles to play in helping to ensure that 

citizens live at peace with each other and with their 

neighbors, and that their graduates are technically able to 

perform in the labor market up to expectations. 

Whether the primary purpose is for teaching, 

research, or vocational preparation, all universities attempt 

to influence a community’s social cohesion through two 

mechanisms. One mechanism is through their curriculum 

and professionalism 

in teaching history, 

culture, biology, 

physics, engineering, 

and ecology. Highquality universities 

are defined by their 

openness to the 

world’s literature and 

evidence, provided 

freely to all students 

on as many topics 

as feasible. No great 

university restricts 

access to information. 

The second way 

is the manner by 

which a university 

models good 

behavior and exhibits 

professional standards. This includes the degree to which 

a university rewards academic performance honestly and 

fairly, the degree to which its faculty and administration 

openly advertise and adhere to codes of conduct, and the 

degree to which open discussion is cherished and differing 

opinions respected. The more a university exhibits these 

characteristics the more likely will its students exhibit 

human capital through their knowledge and skills and the 

more they will contribute to social capital, the kind that 

generates willingness to sacrifice for a common good, as 

well as tolerance and understanding of other views and 

opinions. 

Universities that exhibit a very high degree of 

human and social capital are of higher quality, and it is 

GLOBAL ISSUES / FEBRUARY 2006 eJOURNAL USA BERND KAMMERER ©AP/WWP

Students from Louisiana State University were met at the airport in Frankfurt, Germany, 

by U.S. Consul General Peter W. Bodde (left) and Hesse state minister for science and arts 

Udo Corts (right) when they arrived in October 2005 to take up an offer to continue their 

studies, which had been interrupted by Hurricane Katrina.
eJOURNAL USA 55 GLOBAL ISSUES / FEBRUARY 2006

high-quality universities that will have the most positive 

impact on a nation’s social cohesion. What this implies is 

that universities where corruption occurs, where grades 

and admission decisions and accreditation itself can be 

changed through bribes, will threaten a nation’s social 

cohesion. Instead of modeling good behavior, a corrupt 

university would model the opposite, behavior that is 

dysfunctional to the nation’s future. 

Fighting higher education corruption is a global 

problem today, and the stakes are high. The Bologna 

process, through which members of the European Union 

are working to harmonize their higher education systems 

to allow for increased mobility of students and staff, and 

the new UNESCO accreditation guidelines hold out 

an opportunity for universities in different parts of the 

world to be compared in terms of program quality. The 

willingness of a high-quality university to be compared to 

others often seems to depend on whether a university can 

demonstrate that it is not corrupt. 

The burden of proof is on the university undergoing 

scrutiny. If it cannot prove its own honesty, its students 

will be at a permanent disadvantage in the labor market, 

and the public may well ask to what extent public 

investment has been well spent.

In sum, there is increasingly a successful “model” 

of higher education that applies in all regions of the 

world, and that is the model in which higher education 

institutions themselves are able to finance their own 

objectives. It is increasingly clear that higher education has 

a unique role to play in a nation’s social cohesion, but it 

can play either a negative role by modeling unprofessional 

behavior, or a positive role by living up to international 

standards of conduct. 

The opinions expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect the views 

or policies of the U.S. government.

©AP/WWP

These Qatari students are working in their typography class at the Virginia Commonwealth University 

School of Arts in Doha, Qatar. 
56 

Friedman, Thomas L. The World Is Flat: A Brief History 

of the Twenty-First Century. New York: Farrar, Straus, and 

Giroux, 2005.

Gugler, Josef, ed. World Cities Beyond the West: 

Globalization, Development, and Inequality. Cambridge; 

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“Measuring Globalization: The Global Top 20,” Foreign 

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Annual A.T. Kearney/Foreign Policy Globalization Index] 

Naím, Moisés. “Globalization: Passing Fad or Permanent 

Revolution?” Harvard International Review, v. 26, no. 1 

(Spring 2004): pp. 84-85.

Perrons, Diane. Globalization and Social Change: People 

and Places in a Divided World. London; New York: 

Routledge, 2004.

Veltmeyer, Henry, ed. Globalization and Antiglobalization: 

Dynamics of Change in the New World Order. Aldershot, 

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CULTURE

Appiah, Kwame Anthony. Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a 

World of Strangers. New York: W.W. Norton, 2006.

Cowen, Tyler. Good and Plenty: The Creative Successes 

of American Arts Funding. Princeton, NJ: Princeton 

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Cowen, Tyler. “The Fate of Culture,” Wilson Quarterly 

(Autumn 2002): pp. 78-84.

http://www.gmu.edu/jbc/Tyler/fate-of-culture.PDF

Hackett, Robert A., and Yuezhi Zhao, eds. Democratizing 

Global Media: One World, Many Struggles. Lanham, MD: 

Rowman and Littlefield, 2005.

O’Sullivan, John. “The Role of the Media at a Time of 

Global Crisis,” International Journal on World Peace, v. 21, 

no. 4 (December 2004): pp. 69-79.

Pells, Richard. “American Culture Goes Global: Or Does 

It?” Chronicle of Higher Education, v. 48, no. 31 (April 12, 

2002): p. B7. 

Pells, Richard. From Modernism to the Movies: The 

Globalization of American Culture in the Twentieth Century. 

New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, forthcoming.

Rantanen, Terhi. The Media and Globalization. Thousand 

Oaks, CA: Sage, 2005.

Robertson, Robbie. The Three Waves of Globalization: A 

History of a Developing Global Consciousness. Nova Scotia, 

[Canada]; Fernwood; New York: Zed Books, 2003.

Veseth, Michael. Globaloney: Unraveling the Myths of 

Globalization. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 

2005.

ECONOMICS

Barfield, Claude E., Günter Heiduk, and Paul 

J.J. Welfens, eds. Internet, Economic Growth, and 

Globalization: Perspectives on the New Economy in Europe, 

Japan, and the USA. New York: Springer, 2003.

Barker, Drucilla K., and Susan F. Feiner. Liberating 

Economics: Feminist Perspectives on Families, Work, 

and Globalization. Ann Arbor, MI: The University of 

Michigan Press, 2004.

Bhagwati, Jagdish N. In Defense of Globalization. New 

York: Oxford University Press, 2004. 

Buch, Claudia M. Globalization of Financial Markets: 

Causes of Incomplete Integration and Consequences for 

Economic Policy. Berlin; New York: Springer, 2004.

Cavanagh, John, and Jerry Mander, eds. Alternatives to 

Economic Globalization: A Better World Is Possible. 2nd ed. 

San Francisco, CA: Berrett-Koehler, 2004. 

Chandler, Alfred D., and Bruce Mazlish, eds. Leviathans: 

Multinational Corporations and the New Global History. 

Cambridge, UK; New York: Cambridge, 2005. 

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Additional Readings on Globalization

GLOBAL ISSUES / FEBRUARY 2006 eJOURNAL USA
57

Das, Dilip K. The Economic Dimensions of Globalization.

Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire; New York: Palgrave 

Macmillan, 2004.

Drainville, André C. Contesting Globalization: Space 

and Place in the World Economy. London; New York: 

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Hanson, James, et al., eds. Globalization and National 

Financial Systems. Washington, DC: World Bank, 2003. 

International Monetary Fund. U.S. Fiscal Policies and 

Priorities for Long-Run Sustainability. Washington, DC: 

IMF, 2004.

Isaak, Robert A. The Globalization Gap: How the Rich Get 

Richer and the Poor Get Left Further Behind. Upper Saddle 

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Laudicina, Paul A. World Out of Balance: Navigating 

Global Risks to Seize Competitive Advantage. New York: 

McGraw-Hill, 2004.

Legrain, Philippe. Open World: The Truth About 

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Lele, Uma J., and Chris Gerrard. Addressing the Challenges 

of Globalization: An Independent Evaluation of the World 

Bank’s Approach to Global Programs. Washington, DC: 

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Mander, Jerry, and Victoria Tauli-Corpuz, eds.

Paradigm Wars: Indigenous Peoples’ Resistance to Economic 

Globalization: A Special Report of the International Forum 

on Globalization, Committee on Indigenous Peoples. San 

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2005. 

Michie, Jonathan, ed. The Handbook of Globalisation. 

Cheltenham, UK: Northampton, MA: Edward Elgar, 

2003.

Naím, Moisés. Illicit: How Smugglers, Traffickers, and 

Copycats Are Hijacking the Global Economy. New York: 

Doubleday, 2005.

Ocampo, José Antonio, and Juan Martin, eds. 

Globalization and Development: A Latin American and 

Caribbean Perspective. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford Social 

Sciences, Stanford University Press; Washington, DC: 

World Bank, 2003.

Pink, Daniel. Free Agent Nation: The Future of Working for 

Yourself. New York: Warner Business Books, 2002.

Rivoli, Piera. The Travels of a T-Shirt in the Global 

Economy: An Economist Examines the Markets, Power, and 

Politics of World Trade. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, 

Inc., 2005.

Runge, C. Ford, et al. Ending Hunger in Our Lifetime: 

Food Security and Globalization. Baltimore, MD: Johns 

Hopkins University Press, for the International Food 

Policy Research Institute, 2003. 

Rupert, Mark, and M. Scott Solomon. Globalization and 

International Political Economy: The Politics of Alternative 

Futures. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2006. 

Smith, Neil. The Endgame of Globalization. New York: 

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Stark, Jurgen. “The State of Globalization,” The 

International Economy, v. 19, no. 2 (Spring 2005): pp. 

52-55.

Stiglitz, Joseph. Globalization and Its Discontents. New 

York: Norton, 2002.

Weinstein, Michael M., ed. Globalization: What’s New? 

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Wolf, Martin. Why Globalization Works. New Haven, CT: 

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EDUCATION

Heyneman, S.P. “Defining the Influence of Education 

on Social Cohesion,” International Journal of Educational 

Policy, Research and Practice (Winter 2002/3): pp. 73-97. 

Heyneman, S.P. “Education and Corruption,” 

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Moiseyenko, Olena. “Education and Social Cohesion: 

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“A New World View: Education in a Global Era,” Phi

Delta Kappan, v. 87, no. 3 (November 2005): pp. 184-

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eJOURNAL USA GLOBAL ISSUES / FEBRUARY 2006
58 

Rumyantseva, Nataliya L. “The Taxonomy of Corruption 

in Higher Education,” Peabody Journal of Education, v. 80, 

no. 1 (2005): pp. 81-92.

HUMAN RIGHTS

Brysk, Alison, and Gershon Shafir, eds. People Out of 

Place: Globalization, Human Rights, and the Citizenship 

Gap. New York: Routledge, 2004.

Moghadam, Valentine M. Globalizing Women. Baltimore, 

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SECURITY

Barkawi, Tarak. Globalization and War. Lanham, MD: 

Rowman and Littlefield, 2006.

Carmody, Padraig. “Transforming Globalization and 

Security: Africa and America Post-9/11,” Africa Today, 

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Copley, Gregory R. “Preparing for the Post-Terrorism 

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Echevarria, Antulio J. and Bert B. Tussing. From 

“Defending Forward” to a “Global Defense-in-Depth”: 

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Florida, Richard. “The World Is Spiky,” The Atlantic 

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Haas, Richard N. “The Politics of Power: New Forces and 

New Challenges,” Harvard International Review, v. 27, 

no. 2 (Summer 2005): pp. 60-65.

Miskel, James F. “Grand Strategies for Dealing With 

Other States in the New, New World Order,” Naval War 

College Review, v. 58, no. 1 (Winter 2005): pp. 63-75.

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Morgan, Matthew J. “The Origins of the New Terrorism,” 

Parameters, v. 34, no. 1 (Spring 2004): pp. 29-43.

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Nassar, Jamal R. Globalization and Terrorism: The 

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Nye, Joseph. Soft Power: The Means to Success in World 

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Rapley, John. Globalization and Inequality: Neoliberalism’s 

Downward Spiral. Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 2004. 

Rosenau, James N. Distant Proximities: Dynamics Beyond 

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Sicherman, Harvey. “Cheap Hawks, Cheap Doves, and 

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Van Rooy, Alison. The Global Legitimacy Game: 

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The U.S. Department of State assumes no responsibility for the content and 

availability of the resources from other agencies and organizations listed 

above. All Internet links were active as of February 2006.

GLOBAL ISSUES / FEBRUARY 2006 eJOURNAL USA
59

INTERNET RESOURCES

Selected Web Sites on Globalization 

UNITED STATES GOVERNMENT

U.S. Agency for International Development

http://www.usaid.gov

U.S. Department of Health and Human Services

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention

http://www.cdc.gov

U.S. Department of State

http://www.state.gov

U.S. Treasury Department

Office of Foreign Assets Control

http://www.ustreas.gov/offices/enforcement/ofac/

index.shtml

INTERNATIONAL

International Labor Organization

http://www.ilo.org

International Monetary Fund

http://www.imf.org/external/np/exr/ib/2000/

041200.htm#ll

Japan Center for International Exchange

http://www.jcie.or.jp

Organization for Economic Cooperation and 

Development 

Principles of Corporate Governance

http://www.oecd.org/dataoecd/32/18/31557724.pdf

Statistics Canada

http://www.statcan.ca/english/freepub/11-623-XIE/

2003001/multi.htm

World Bank Group

http://www.worldbank.org/html/extdr/pb/globalization

World Health Organization

http://www.who.org

World Trade Organization

http://www.wto.org

UNIVERSITIES, COLLEGES, AND RESEARCH 

ORGANIZATIONS 

Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation

http://www.gatesfoundation.org

Carnegie Endowment for International Peace

Global Policy Program

http://www.carnegieendowment.org/programs/global/

Center for Strategic and International Studies 

Globalization101.org

http://www.globalization101.org/about/

George Washington University

Center for the Study of Globalization

http://gstudynet.com/gwcsg/

The Globalization Website (Emory University)

http://www.sociology.emory.edu/globalization/about.html

International Forum on Globalization

http://www.ifg.org

World Economic Forum

http://www.weforum.org

OTHER

A. T. Kearney: Globalization Index 2005

http://www.atkearney.com/main.taf?p=5,4,1,116

Global Scenario Group

http://www.gsg.org

International Women’s Tribune Centre

http://www.irc.nl/page/7049

A World Connected

http://www.aworldconnected.org/

The U.S. Department of State assumes no responsibility for 

the content and availability of the resources from other agencies and organizations listed above. All Internet links were 

active as of February 2006.

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