Gray: Globalization - the world is shrinking

Globalization refers to all those widening and deepening linkages between events in the world, market events, cultural events, political events, even military events, which are now more continuously and deeply linked than they ever were before. So globalization means a kind of shrinkage of the world, resulting from new technologies. And the technologies which are now central in that process of globalization are technologies of the internet, of all kinds of new communications technologies. Globalization has always been driven by new communications technologies. The last big era of globalization in the last third of the nineteenth century, from the 1860s onwards, was driven by underwater cables, which transmitted telegraph signals across the Atlantic and to India, so that for the first time in history in the 1860s and ‘70s financial events in Europe had a direct impact on financial events in New York, an almost instantaneous impact. So the driver of globalization is technology, but the impact is very diverse and it's a mistake to think that when the world becomes smaller because of globalization, when the world shrinks because of globalization, it therefore becomes more peaceful. It doesn't. Or more free. It doesn't. Or has fewer conflicts. It doesn't. All that globalization really does is make the world a smaller and more interdependent place.