4 November 2020
Globalization is one of the hot-button political issues of recent times, but the word, if not the concept it represents, dates back almost a hundred years.
Globalisation appears in French in 1929, a coinage of Belgian psychologist Jean-Ovide Decroly in his La Fonction de Globalisation et l’Enseignement to refer to a stage in a child’s development. The word appears in English by the following year in William Boyd’s Towards a New Education:
The Decroly method of teaching reading has some resemblance to old methods, especially to that of Jacotot. But the psychological bases have been systematically elaborated. They are to be found in what Decroly calls the function of globalization, a function that has been psychologically investigated under different names in different countries, e.g. wholeness in American and Gestalt, in Germany.
The verb to globalize enters political jargon a few years later, as recorded by Samuel Bemis in his 1936 Diplomatic History of the United States. But here it refers to the expansion of diplomacy from bilateral to multilateral forums and agreements:
In the Peace Conference at Paris Woodrow Wilson wrote into the Covenant of the League of Nations the principles of his proposed Pan-American pact, notably Article X, to him the most vital article of the Covenant. He believed that by this article he was globalizing the Monroe Doctrine, whereas previously he would have merely pan-Americanized it.
By the 1940s, globalization was being used to refer to the spread of cultural ideas and perceptions. Here is an example from the 15 January 1944 Chicago Defender, a Black newspaper that despite its name had a nationwide circulation and readership, on how the U.S. military was globalizing Jim Crow:
But Jim Crow is G.I. equipment and goe[s] wherever the American solider goes—all over the world. You need no details. Just take it from any one of us: this time we are making the world safe for Democracy—American style.
Bad enough in itself, this fact has deeper meaning. The American Negro and his problems are taking on a global significance. The world has begun to measure America by what she does to us. But—and this is the point—we stand in danger (and we are only standing, if not supinely sitting!) of losing the otherwise beneficial aspects of globalization of our problems by allowing the “Bilbos in uniform” with and without brass hats to spread their version of us everywhere.
The term enters the world of economics with the formation of the European Economic Community in 1958. From the Winter 1959 issue of the journal International Organization:
On January 1, 1959, under the EEC treaty, the six community countries would take the following first practical steps toward their common market goal: 1) a 10 percent over-all mutual reduction in tariffs; 2) and over-all mutual increase of 20 percent in existing quotas; 3) the establishment of minimum quotas at 3 percent of national production for each product; and 4) the globalization of quotas.
And within two years worries about how globalization threatened domestic jobs appeared. From the Detroit Free Press of 27 February 1961:
The UAW has been worried about rumors of the foreign-made compact because it fears loss of more American jobs.
Carl Stellato, president of UAW Local 600, said in July, 1960, he had information that Ford was to build at least the transmission, rear-end and engine for the four-cylinder vehicle in Europe.
The union expressed displeasure that Ford was considering a European-built car while UAW members at the Ford Rouge plants were laid off.
Late in 1960, Ford negotiated the purchase of all outstanding stock in the Ford Motor Co. of England in a move toward “globalization.”
Sometimes the hot-button issues have been simmering for a long time.
Sources:
Bemis, Samuel Flagg. A Diplomatic History of the United States. New York: Henry Holt, 1936, 754. HathiTrust Digital Library.
Boyd, William, ed. Towards a New Education. New York: Knopf, 1930, 159. HathiTrust Digital Library.
“European Communities.” International Organization, 13.1, Winter 1959, 176. JSTOR.
Harper, Lucius C. “Dustin’ Off the News.” Chicago Defender, 15 January 1944, 4. ProQuest Historical Newspapers.
Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, September 2009, s.v. globalization, n., globalize, v.
“Tiny Ford Reported Near.” Detroit Free Press, 27 February 1961, 1–2. ProQuest Historical Newspapers.