Has globalization done more harm or good for the promotion of human rights?
I had a seminar in my humanities class. We discussed about whether globalization have done more harm or good for the promotion of human rights. What is globalization? There are many different terms to define globalization because of the different perspectives. Still I would define globalization as respectful interaction between countries, respecting various cultures, perspectives and differences. Also, not bringing in nationalism. In this process, globalization have brought many positive influences. Global market and trading has developed, therefore, production process became more efficient. Also, globalization have created more human unity/human rights concepts and made opportunities to learn about human rights.
"Action. Reaction." But as positive effects occurred there are negative effects. If one economy gets corrupt, then the whole global community is corrupted. Also, people these days started to lose patriotic sentiments and admired other country's cultures, where lack of nationalism and population density started to happen. Since the people moved to the countries that they admire, population density happened. As the globalization have more developed, stronger countries and weaker countries were evidently shown. And mostly the powerful countries/industrials began to "abuse" their power. The global market have made the big companies use labor from weaker countries. The laborer's rights started not to be guaranteed and were manipulated. Nike factory in Indonesia is an example of the human rights violations. Although Indonesia is an independent country, why cannot the government stop the Nike factory from violating their citizen's human rights? And this led me to question, does dependency guarantee self sustenance? I found a recent study that states low income countries trade associates with higher energy consumption per capita. And this explains that not only being dependent means they are guaranteed with self sustenance. Would the people like the factory workers in Indonesia have lived in a better condition if Nike factory did not enter? A better life without globalization? The answer for me was no. The whole idea of globalization is to promote human rights and make all of the people around the world come together to live a better life. In the other hand, the workers of the Nike factory might have lived with a happier mind in regardless of their finance. As I have mentioned above if there are goods problems always exist.
We came up with interesting ideas during the seminar. Our class started off with talking about the African Union day coming up on next Monday. We had an idea about creating an African Union such as European Union. I thought that was a great idea, however, the creation would be hard at this point. African countries have evident cultures and perspectives due to different colonization. Also, most of the African countries are still "developing" and not independent. If these weaknesses are improved, I truly think that African Union will benefit all the African countries and develop further on. At this point, I came up with a question. Who decides to be part of globalization? The individuals? The government? And were the countries forced or volunteered to be globalized? It is hard to find whether the countries were forced or volunteered because too much globalization took place at this period. However, I thought that rights for the people that did not want globalization might have been ignored. I have learned that respect of different perspectives and view points are essential for the globalization to develop even more.
Further research
Globalization and environment. These two does not seem to relate to each other, however, they do. Since a global mass of poverty seems like coming slowly, the countries keep up with the demands without cross border trade and this would harm the environment. In fact, the international shipping causes 2-3% of CO2 emissions. In the other hand, there are some solutions happening in the world for this problem. In England, supermarket Tesco banned rose imports from Kenya to save on emissions since 2007. The world should mind more with the environment for a more globalized place.
