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Around the world, rumbles of complaint about globalization are growing loude

游客2025-01-11  54
问题     Around the world, rumbles of complaint about globalization are growing louder—and these rumbles are not confined to activist movements. In East Asia, the financial crisis of 1997 left a jaundiced sense of what globalization entails, though robust economic recovery has tempered that. Globalization’s standing has also been badly damaged in Latin America by the meltdown of the Argentine economy in 2000 and financial crises in Brazil in 1999 and 2001.
    New fears about globalization are surfacing in Europe, too. In Poland these have taken the form of concern about foreign capital taking over the Polish banking system; takeover fears also permeate France and Italy. In France and Germany, working people link globalization with pressures to dismantle the social democratic state.
    Among Americans, outsourcing of service-sector jobs has become a leading concern. Opposition to free trade has crept up the income and social-strata ladder to include educated white-collar workers. This new opposition comes on top of existing resentments among blue-collar workers at the loss of well-paying manufacturing jobs.
    These developments have raised concerns about the durability of globalization even among its supporters. In the final section of his new book Global Capitalism: Its Fall and Rise in the 20th Century, the Harvard professor Jeffiy Frieden—who is in favor of globalization—ruminates on the possibility that today’s globalization, like that of the 19th century, might falter.
    It can be highly instructive to look back at what some historians call the first globalization. When people do so, however, they often tend to identify its end as the beginning of World War I in 1914. This is wrong, and leads to misunderstandings about today’s globalization.
    The first globalization ended with the Wall Street crash of 1929 and the ensuing Great Depression. The world’s response to the crash, however, was profoundly affected by the political conditions that World War I had created. In the United States, Britain and France, the war created political and social conditions that fostered a turn to social democracy. In Germany, the onerous economic burdens of the 1919 Treaty of Versailles fostered a turn to Nazism.
    This history has enormous significance for understanding today’s predicament. The first lesson is that the economic crisis of 1929—not politics—brought down the first globalization, suggesting that an economic crisis, and not politics, will bring down today’s globalization.
The second lesson is that while political developments before 1929 did not cause the crash, they mattered enormously for the international response. After World War I, governments substantially recreated the prewar economic system, but the reconstructed system distributed prosperity extremely unevenly. In the United States, wealth and income inequality grew during the "Roaring Twenties". In Britain, the industrial midlands and the north suffered from persistent stagnation because of an overvalued exchange rate. And prosperity simply bypassed Germany.
    Additionally, there was a popular turn to isolationism in response to the carnage wrought by the war. The global economic system was therefore unpopular, and consequently it had few defenders when the crash came. That lesson holds for the current globalization, which is also unpopular and feared.
    After the first globalization crashed because of inherent financial fragility, the ensuing New Deal era created a system that remedied that fragility by restricting private ownership of bullion, and creating deposit insurance and lenders of last resort. The New Deal era also created a social democratic, mass-consumption economy in which income was more broadly shared because of unionization, minimum wages and social security provisions. But such an economy is expensive for individual capitalists, giving them an incentive to evade its costs. That has been a driving force behind globalization since 1980, and that is the contradiction in today’s system.
    Business has an incentive to move to countries with lower costs—yet it still needs mass consumption. Today’s global economic system needs a solid middle class, but is also driven to hollow out that middle class. This contradiction has been papered over by consumer-borrowing provided by deregulated financial markets and a 25-year asset price boom.
    The problem is that such borrowing risks prove unsustainable if incomes are hollowed out, and that could stop the economic merry-go-round. If that stoppage produces an economic crash, globalization may crash, too. Globalization will lack political support, after being a primary cause of a hollowed-out middle class.
    The pattern of retreat is difficult to predict. One possibility is a return to a world of tariffs and quotas. A second response may be the emergence of regional trade and investment blocs. A third response that would preserve globalization would be the establishment of new domestic and international rules that support a social democratic, mass-consumption economy. All three scenarios challenge the international economic system that is supported by today’s global elites. [br] The main thesis of the passage is______.
选项 A、the major concern that globalization may fail
B、three lessons in history that globalization didn’t succeed
C、supporters’ ideas about globalization
D、whether we should insist on the idea of globalization
答案 A
解析
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