The wind's a-blowin'

This June, professor Frank Hoole, my boss, is retiring after 33 years of service to IU. For a year and a half, we've taught a course on globalization, a process affecting most everyone on the planet, especially the types who read college newspapers. Thus, in tribute to the "Doc" and in service to you, I'm condensing a semester of globalization into 500 words or less. It's scary, it's confusing, but it's here. We should at least get to know it.\nGlobalization has more definitions than hell has politicians. Just know this: it's the interconnection of your economy, politics and society with the economies, politics and societies all over the world. Sound vague? Sure. That's because, like wind, we only see globalization by its effects. Kiddies playing Pokémon, university budget cuts from falling endowment values, the war on terror and so on -- all leaves blown into your yard from around the globe.\nArguments on globalization's age and scale vary. Some world systems theorists claim it is an evolutionary process that started 5,500 years ago between Mesopotamian city-states. Some neo-Marxists claim it is a big business plot hatched in the 1970s, like bell-bottoms, AMC Gremlins or ABBA. I tend to back The New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman's argument that today's round was uncorked by the fall of the Berlin Wall. \nStarting in 1989, a means, motive and opportunity brought globalization to a boil, determining its flavor. The means: advances in communication, information and transportation technologies allowing individuals to "reach farther, faster, cheaper and deeper around the world than ever before," as Thomas Friedman said in his column "The Lexus and the Olive Tree." The motive: with communism defeated, most everyone could make money and buy things. The opportunity: an international system shaped by a superpower advocating free trade and democracy (the United States.) \nAs a result, the nature of international politics has changed. For centuries, governments called all the shots; any other groups were ants facing elephants. But like radiation in a '50s "B" movie, globalization inflated those ants to the size of Volkswagens. Today, governments not only deal with one another, but with foreign investors, multinational corporations, international advocacy groups (such as Greenpeace), terrorist organizations, criminal networks and more. Also, international organizations have proliferated since World War II. Now the United Nations, the European Union, the World Trade Organization, the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and others sometimes demand changes in member-countries' domestic or foreign policies, or compete with governments to provide services. The result: international politics is increasingly beyond individual governments' control.\nHowever, the real issue is globalization's implications for poor mugs like you and me. \nAdvocates assert that interaction, interdependence and competition will bring more democracy, more cooperation, better government, greater diversity, greater prosperity and prevent large-scale wars. \nSkeptics range from workers and business owners fearing competition in developing countries, to conservationists worried about environmental damage and to adherents of anti-democratic, anti-capitalist ideologies (communists, fascists, radical Islamists and other charmers).\nMany critics fall into what I call the Dickens-Orwell pool. Like Charles Dickens, they are concerned about the impact of industrialization on the working class and the poor (child labor, the growing income gap, living wages and labor rights). Like George Orwell, they worry about the control of undemocratic, unaccountable authorities (intergovernmental organizations and multinational corporations). Who's right? Who knows? But you and I have front-row seats. With IU's international connections, Bloomington is a prime and growing node of globalization.\nKeep this in mind: when my old dad was at the business school 27 years ago, there was only one "international" restaurant: Taco Bell.