August 20, 2002
Globalisation is being strongly resisted by Governments because of the acute effect of negative aspects on the national identity or sovereignty of people.
University of Kitakyushu professor of Asian Studies Yoshihara Kunio said globalisation was not strictly restricted to trade and investment with effects felt in relation to money, labour markets and laws. In his paper at the International Conference on Globalisation, Culture and Inequalities in honour of the work of the late Professor Dr Ishak Shari, he said it did not benefit all as some countries were better able to cope with its effects.
This was because they had a stronger national language and culture base to deal with globalisation. "In East Asia, in general, North-east Asian countries have done better than Southeast Asian countries for this reason.
"Malaysia, for example, has not benefited from globalisation because the national language cannot be used to create a large manpower to take advantage of globalisation and the national culture is not strong enough to bind people together," he said.
He said many people did not see anything wrong with promoting English as the language of globalisation but the spread of English promoted an English-speaking mass media which was dominated by American companies and carried elements of American culture. "It might be thought that the country will benefit from globalisation without doing anything about national language and culture, but if the present trend continues, the net benefits of globalisation will be marginal at best; an anti-globalisation will emerge at worst. "This is because the present globalisation is making the majority of people, especially Malays, an economically as well as culturally oppressed group in their own country," he said.
Lee Poh Ping, a professor in political science and senior fellow at the Institute of Malaysian and International Studies, Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia, said a country could play a regional role either as a result of the globalisation process or as a step towards a global role. In his paper titled Globalisation and Regionalism: Japan Now and in the Seventies, he cited Japan as an example which had expressed itself in the various financial schemes it was introducing to address the Asian financial crisis.
"The crisis has shown that no individual Asian country affected had enough financial resources to deal with it. At the same time, many are not enamoured with the global approach of institutions like the IMF as it involves too high a social and political price," he said.
Meanwhile, American University school of international service professor J.H. Mittelman said resistance was not only response to but also an integral component of neoliberal globalisation.
"The analytical challenge is to come to grips with the interplay of micro and macroresistance. Fundamentally, a priority in research is to uncover the whole series of mediations among resistances, which are central to the historical transformation known as globalisation," he said.
Mittelman said public debates and most scholarly discourse had focused on macroresistance, which signalled new dynamics in globalisation. The conference will see speakers from the region giving different perspectives on globalisation in 22 papers being presented.
FAIR USE NOTICE: This page contains copyrighted material the use of which has not been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. Global Policy Forum distributes this material without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. We believe this constitutes a fair use of any such copyrighted material as provided for in 17 U.S.C íŸ 107. If you wish to use copyrighted material from this site for purposes of your own that go beyond fair use, you must obtain permission from the copyright owner.
