Globalization: A Form of Colonialism to Developing Nations?

Most people in developing nations may regard globalization as a vehicle to modern day colonialism while others actually appreciate its existence for the many benefits it provides, like bringing the world together in terms of communication, the exchange of cultures, values and beliefs between nations, the openness of border and circulation between nations.

Globalization is the worldwide movement toward economic, financial, trade, and communications integration, it implies the opening of local and nationalistic perspectives to a broader outlook of an interconnected and interdependent world with free transfer of capital, goods, and services across national frontiers. According to Anthony Giddens “globalization refers to the fact that we all increasingly live in one world, so that individuals, groups and nations become ever more interdependent”.  

Globalization is not a form of colonization to the developing nations; rather it is a vehicle to massive development of these nations in terms of economy stronghold through trade and employment. With the introduction of globalization, there is now the availability of goods through state border trading. A massive expansion of technological material was and still is a huge benefit to the developing nations like in Africa.       

It is an economic phenomenon and it is connected with the rise of transnational corporations and the proliferation of markets that regularly cross state boundaries. Globalization has increased personal freedom, and has allowed communication between nations. For instance, before the globalization era, in most countries around the world, people did not have the means to communicate and travel. It is very much easy now to communicate with someone who is a thousand kilometers from where you are through the internet by use of communication levels like emails, Skype, Facebook, Whats app text messaging and twitter.

There are now better standards of living and a good quality of life simply because of the implementation of globalization. Globalization has benefited individuals because there is now better access to external financing in terms of purchasing a vehicle or a residential place through internet financial transactions, there are more opportunities for international travel and tourism, more opportunities to work abroad due to immigrant laws and foreign worker programs and there is a greater consumption of worldwide entertainment, music, sports, arts and culture. There is an unprecedented scope of world trade involving a much broader range of goods and services than ever before. There is also the rapid spread of consumer products like food, clothing brands to other countries within the developing nations themselves.

There has been an exchange of cultures amongst different nations worldwide. This only came up due to globalization as an individual can now communicate with other people from different cultural backgrounds and understand their way of living. People are exposed to other cultures when they travel and also experience them in person as compared to what they see on the television, all because of international travel and tourism due to the introduction of globalization.

However, to some extent we can advocate for the ideology that globalization is practically a hidden way of modern day colonialism by the western nations towards the developing nations in Asia and Africa. The western countries take our resources as form of debts and then sell them back to us as finished goods. This is a hidden way of colonialism whereby those people under this form of colonialism may not even notice it. It is practically happening and nothing much can be done by the developing nations as they basically rely on the western nations.

Each developing country owes to the western world nations, private international banks, World Bank, IMF and other financial institutions, billions of dollars which they have borrowed with high interest rates. The repayments are done in hard currency which these developing countries have to earn by selling their raw materials – like coffee, fish, cotton, minerals, metals, crude oil, timber, uranium and every other conceivable resource, these developing nations have. These western nations would buy these materials at very low prices and sell their own product at very high costs back to us in Africa where the products originate from.

Globalization is a modern form of colonization of the developing nations by the Western powers as it has changed our cultural values. We have vastly adopted the western culture through the means of media and education through globalization. However, globalization is a form of tremendous development in the developing nations. Transnational corporations now have massive operations which stretch across national borders; there is now an electronic integration of global financial markets and enormous volume of global capital flows and there is easy communication between nations.