"Globalization" has come to be a shorthand term for the process by which the world's economy, and thus its economic power structure, has been knit together into an increasingly interlinked and integrated network. This process has given rise to a controversy that is itself global in scope. As meetings of the World Trade Organization (WTO) and similar bodies representative of global economic elite interests shift from one continent or another, anti-globalization protesters follow them. A few may do so literally, intercontinental jet travel being accessible even to activists of limited means. Most protesters, like the police who form phalanxes against them, are doubtless recruited locally, but are nevertheless members of a movement fully as globalized as the institutions they challenge.
This phenomenon raises (and gives a partial answer to) a fundamental question in contemporary political and social dynamics, namely the impact of globalization on collective political action and on the formation of social movements. Collective actions and social movements arise in general as responses by people to the forces they find to be influencing, imposing upon, or controlling their lives. They may take form on a local level, a regional level, or a global level, depending both on the scope of the pressures to which people are subjective, and their means of communicating and formulating a response. Has globalization helped or hindered this process?
Globalization itself is not new. Indeed, in some respects economic integration and globalization had proceeded farther a century ago than it has at the present day (Kahler 149). The movement then, as at present, was driven in part by ideology (e.g., "free trade"), but even more by technology. From 1850 to 1900, for example, the cost of transatlantic shipping fell by a factor of twenty as steamships replaced sailing vessels (Zoeller 2). Globalization in this era had some positive effects i...