2 Globalization

Globalization is the intensification of worldwide interconnectedness — flows of goods, capital, people, technology, ideas and risks across borders compressing distance. Facets: economic (trade and investment integration, global value chains — the WTO regime; Nepal member since 23 April 2004), political (governance shifting upward to international bodies and sideways to networks), cultural (global media, consumer convergence, and the local/global dialectic), environmental (shared atmospheres and pandemics — globalization of risk). Drivers: technology (containerization, the internet, cheap communication), liberalization (post-1980s policy choice — hyperglobalist view), and firms' strategies (Sutherland/Google-era capitalism). The debate: hyperglobalists (a new era, the state obsolete), sceptics (a myth — the world was more integrated in 1914; regionalization not globalization), transformationalists (states reconfigured, not eclipsed — Held). Critiques and counter-currents: inequality within and between states, democratic deficit, cultural homogenization anxieties, financial contagion — and the current partial reversal: trade wars, supply-chain "de-risking," and the pandemic's border closures ("slowbalization"). Nepal: globalization arrives as remittance migration, tourism, foreign aid, FDI in hydropower and telecoms, and international education; its double edge — forex lifeline vs. hollowed villages and a labour-export economy — is a standing Nepali essay topic.