>>1083657As with many political terms, it has a lot of meanings to a lot of people and the meaning has changed over time.
As the Soviet Union fell, globalism was defined as integrating second-world (communist or soon to be ex-communist) or third world countries into an integrated global economy. There were two technologies which made this possible: computing telecommunications and the standardized shipping container. Computing telecommunications (think pre-WWW internet) allowed for the coordination of currency exchange and commerce in general. Standardized shipping containers reduced international ocean-bound cargo costs dramatically (on the order of 50x). There was also a liberalization of trade laws, reduction of tariffs, etc. which also contributed to an increase in trade.
This definition of globalism led to an enormous reduction in the cost of goods across the board because it allowed goods to be put in parity. In the olden days, it didn't matter if domestic production of sugar cost $1.00 per pound wholesale, because shipping costs (and tariffs, to an extent) made imported sugar cost $1.20 per pound. Now, shipping costs are close to 0, radically reducing the price of sugar (lets say $0.60 for argument's sake).
You can immediately see the results of this: inefficient domestic production gets priced out of the market, but domestic consumers get much cheaper prices. This is one reason people oppose globalism: it ships jobs to wherever something can be produced cheapest, particularly for goods where there isn't really a difference between them.
Of course, there is another side of globalism, because there are two sides to every trade. Money markets over-complicate things, so let's just pretend that nations barter rather than use money for transactions (it works out in an accounting sense, trust me). Lets call the country that produces sugar "WSR-topia". They trade their sugar to the United States, but they obviously want something in return....
