Globalisation and Democracy Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 2000 words

Globalisation and Democracy - Essay Example There is no doubt that since the nineties of XX century, the term "globalization† has become the most prevalent in the global politics and political science. There is no need to dwell on those objective preconditions, which caused the appearance of the given term. Suffice it to list only the most significant ones. They are the growing internationalization of markets of goods and services, as well as the growth of financial interdependence between countries and regions, and uniformization of political regimes on the basis of the almost universal acceptance of democratic governance and the associated incidence of common culture (mass culture) models and patterns of consumption, and hitherto unprecedented development of informatization and communication, allowing to reduce the spatial and temporal boundaries between people, nations and states. With all the objective fullness of the given concept, which does not allow to doubt the existence and development of this process in the mo dern world, its rationale, interpretation and prediction in global political science, there is quite strong subjective beginning in it. It is connected on the one hand, with everyone’s inherent striving to simplify and speed up all the positive phenomena of reality in order to have time to enjoy their outcomes during lifetime. On the other hand, such subjectivity in the interpretation of globalization is associated with the exploitation of people’s natural psychological needs by worldwide mass media in order to ensure the individual interests of certain groups of countries, united by such concept as "developed". As a rule, political observers tend to perceive a certain inferiority of post-totalitarian countries’ democratic systems, their non-conformity to Western standards, due to their communist past. Certainly, the development of democracy in post-communist countries, where historical continuity and even cultural tradition were distorted by more than 70-year p eriod of revolution and state violence, has its own characteristic shortcomings. Liberalization of the economy in post-communist countries failed to provide a deep structure of property relations (as in Poland or Hungary), as well as led to a huge social stratification of society on the poor and the rich (when the income gap reaches a ratio of 1:50). This situation is fraught with social and political instability, and, most importantly, it absolutely falls out of the context of European democracy. Those phenomena that are considered to be an unfortunate results of economic liberalization in developed Western countries and its unavoidable costs, serve as the norm for the post-communist countries, almost as a brand name of democracy. In reality, such increased economic inequality (with a concentration of wealth and power in the hands of a small group of oligarchs) constitutes a menace to democratic development and is an attributive sign of third world countries. In accordance with a m ajority of sociological researches, globalization and informatization lead not only to the internationalization and intensify interaction between different countries and civilizations, but at the same time cause various kinds of crises in less developed countries and regions. (Jagdish Bhagwati 2004). These trends, previously outlined by Samuel Huntington in his article "The Clash of