This research examines the impact of the war on terrorism on globalism. The research will set forth the context in which linkages between globalism and the war on terrorism have been brought to the fore and then discuss ways in which the war seems likely to affect the structures and state and corporate behavior associated with the economic forces that have been associated with globalism.
Since the end of the Cold War, relative economic benefit rather than military and political advantage has dominated the discourse between superpower rivals and major foreign-trade partners. An important aspect of that discourse has been an increasing trend toward rationalization of international political economy in general and foreign-trade protocols in particular, although over the entire course of the 20th century, despite two world wars and assorted regional conflicts there was a persistent drift toward international conventions. The General Agreement on Tariff and Trade (GATT), first constituted in 1947 among 23 western nations, was renegotiated and enlarged six more times, in a series of meetings organized as so-called rounds and by 1997 involving 125 nations (GATT, 2001). The effect of GATT rounds was to dramatically reverse the history and reduce the scale of tit-for-tat trade-by-tariff and international protectionism. The succession of negotiation rounds for GATT over nearly 50 years resulted in increasing the scope of treaty jurisdiction over member-nation economies beyond the initial elements of tariffs. The context for GATT as an international code of trade-related conduct with ever-increasing reach helps explain the increase of scope: the rise of the global economy, compounded by the relative ease of access to it made possible by the emergence of the Internet and e[lectronic] commerce (Sarkar, 2001). In the 1990s, GATT gave rise to the World Trade Organization (WTO), which formally constituted to further streamline international trade a...