We should greet them as we did their predecessors - with the full force of our intellect, our ingenuity and our inventiveness. Neither of them is an evil in itself. We in the Caribbean have been the objects of globalization and liberalization from time immemorial. Apart from a brief period in two Commonwealth Caribbean countries, our economies have been wide open to all forms of trade and to all kinds of goods and services. What is wrong with globalization and liberalization is the manner in which the powerful and rich nations are manipulating and applying them to serve their sole interests.
Globalization has several aspects - cultural, social, environmental and economic.
All of them have to do with conditions that cross borders, recognising no national boundaries. For example, in 1999 when a new virus plagued New York and helicopters were used to fumigate the City, the press suggested that the pathogen had arrived through the bloodstream of a traveller, a bird smuggled through customs or a mosquito that boarded an aircraft. The truth is that globalization and liberalization are not new developments. The world has been globalized since the 19th Century in the sense that conditions gave crossed borders creating change wherever they were introduced. The Globalization of the 19th Century had a political directorate in European imperialism and an economic framework in colonialism.