GLOBALISATION AND ITS IMPACTS ON INTERNATIONAL DEVELOPMENT: A LONG-TERM HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE

Abstract

  The nexus between globalization and international development is one of the most debatable issues in today’s development literature. Broadly, there are two camps: the diffusionist accounts of neoliberal school of thought or what we might call optimists and the so-called radical school of thought or pessimists. Rather than taking sides with either of these two camps, this study embraces a middle ground approach to the matter of globalization and development. Overall, it argues that globalization causes complex patterns of convergence and divergence across regions and between countries that its impacts cannot be observed at the same degree and effect in all ages and economies of the world. In the light of this argument, this study aims to explore the impact of globalization on the unevenness of international development through two main stages. In the first stage, the study critically discusses the nexus between globalization and development by putting special emphasis on the complex patterns of development in the global economy, To that end, the conceptualization of contemporary globalization either as a win-win situation or as a zero-sum game is questioned based on the uneven and asymmetric nature of economic globalization. Later in the second stage, the relationship between globalization and development is situated in a wider historical context of the international capitalist system which has been in a phase of far-reaching structural transformation for a long time. In doing so, the implications of globalization for development are explored in retrospect, focusing on the question of uneven development throughout the history.