现代大学精读英语4 lesson eight课文(外语教学出版社).docVIP

Lesson 8 Globalization’s Dual Power At the edge of a new century, globalization is a double-edged sword: a powerful vehicle that raises economic growth, spreads new technology and increases living standards in rich and poor countries alike, but also an immensely controversial process that assaults national sovereignty, erodes local culture and tradition and threatens economic and social instability. A daunting question of the 21st century is whether nations will control this great upheaval or whether it will come to control them. In some respects globalization is merely a trendy word for an old process. What we call the market is simply the joining of buyers and sellers, producers and consumers and savers and investors. Economic history consists largely of the story of the markets expansion: from farm to town, from region to nation and from nation to nation. In the 20th century, the Depression and two world wars retarded the markets growth. But after World War II ended, it reaccelerated, driven by political pressures and better technology. The Cold War, from the late 1940s through the 1980s, caused the United States to champion trade liberalization and economic growth as a way of combating communism. A succession of major trade negotiations reduced average tariffs in industrialized countries to about 5 percent in 1990 from about 40 percent in 1946. After two world wars, Europeans saw economic unification as an antidote to deadly nationalism. Technology complemented politics. Even before the Internet, declining costs for communication and transportation ?from jet planes, better undersea telephone cables and satellites ?favored more global commerce. By the early 1990s, world exports (after adjusting for inflation) were nearly 10 times higher than they had been four decades earlier. Globalization continues this process but also departs from it in at least one critical respect. Until recently, countries were viewed as distinct economic entities, connected mainly