[BRIEF NOTE] Globalization in action
Oct. 6th, 2005 06:11 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rfmcdonaldWhen I glanced at the Vietnamese-language periodicals left by others diners at Pho Xe Lua this afternoon and saw that they were all written in Quốc Ngữ script, an adapted version of Latin script introduced by Roman Catholic missionaries in the late 17th century that had replaced the indigenous Siniform Chữ-nôm script completely by the early 20th century, I realized that Vietnam is one of the most profoundly globalized countries in the world.
I'm not talking about globalization as measured by Foreign Policy's earnest annual indices, mind, the ones tracking broadband internet access per capita and the volumes of aid and trade and migrant flows. Still less am I talking about Thomas Friedman's debased and practically meaningless reduction of globalization to the adoption of investment-favourable policies by national governments. Rather, I'm talking about globalization in its full sense, in terms of the import of a country's overall engagement with an outside world dominated by the West and by Western techniques in every area of life. It's fitting that Vietnam's globalization began with the introduction of Quốc Ngữ , that the future self-representation of the Vietnamese would be made in Western form, at least outwardly. Everything in Vietnam's history from the mid-19th century on--the slow-motion French conquest and the subsequent transformation of Vietnam into a rigidly authoritarian colony that was a highly productive centrepiece of the French colonial empire, the changes wrought upon Vietnamese religion by the Roman Catholicism imported by the French or the syncretism of Caodaism that emerged in the early 20th century as an indigenous response to Western spiritualities, the messy decolonization that left Vietnam one of the main battlefields of the Cold War, the heavily politicized debate over what it meant to be Vietnamese and how Vietnam should be organized, the marginalization of the indigenous Montagnards by foreign colonial powers and then Vietnamese settlers, Vietnam's current tentative integration into the global economy--seems only to have wrought even more dramatic change, still more decisive integration into and dependency upon an aggressive global capitalist economy.
If it's to be a meaningful term, after all, globalization can't be used to refer only to the good things associated with it. Any critic with any integrity has to recognize the bad that inevitably comes with the good.
I'm not talking about globalization as measured by Foreign Policy's earnest annual indices, mind, the ones tracking broadband internet access per capita and the volumes of aid and trade and migrant flows. Still less am I talking about Thomas Friedman's debased and practically meaningless reduction of globalization to the adoption of investment-favourable policies by national governments. Rather, I'm talking about globalization in its full sense, in terms of the import of a country's overall engagement with an outside world dominated by the West and by Western techniques in every area of life. It's fitting that Vietnam's globalization began with the introduction of Quốc Ngữ , that the future self-representation of the Vietnamese would be made in Western form, at least outwardly. Everything in Vietnam's history from the mid-19th century on--the slow-motion French conquest and the subsequent transformation of Vietnam into a rigidly authoritarian colony that was a highly productive centrepiece of the French colonial empire, the changes wrought upon Vietnamese religion by the Roman Catholicism imported by the French or the syncretism of Caodaism that emerged in the early 20th century as an indigenous response to Western spiritualities, the messy decolonization that left Vietnam one of the main battlefields of the Cold War, the heavily politicized debate over what it meant to be Vietnamese and how Vietnam should be organized, the marginalization of the indigenous Montagnards by foreign colonial powers and then Vietnamese settlers, Vietnam's current tentative integration into the global economy--seems only to have wrought even more dramatic change, still more decisive integration into and dependency upon an aggressive global capitalist economy.
If it's to be a meaningful term, after all, globalization can't be used to refer only to the good things associated with it. Any critic with any integrity has to recognize the bad that inevitably comes with the good.
