After the 9/11 terrorist attacks against the US, the very discourse of international relations and global politics has been transformed. Prior to 9/11, the dominant issues were geoeconomic in nature. Globalization and humanitarian issues occupied the agendas of international summits and international organizations.
To encourage the democratization of Arab and other mainly Muslim nations is to ride in the slipstream of technological evolution, which at the moment has anti-autocrat tendencies.
And steering nations toward economic modernization is largely a matter of tearing down trade barriers and letting capitalism do what it naturally does.
The ongoing globalization of technology and commerce, it would seem, amounts to an autopilot anti-terrorism machine.
This clash of cultures, by itself, needn’t be a huge problem. Sure, the encroachment of modern values on traditional culture will create friction, including resentment and even disgust.
In short: If people everywhere had the economic opportunity and political freedom, the clash of cultures that globalization brings would more often be endured without an explosion.
So, maybe globalization, to the extent that its part of the problem, is self-solving. By moving the world toward market economies and democracy. In developing countries, globalization can, in the short run, create economic frustrations.
Today parts of the developing world are taking an even wilder ride, going straight from pre-industrial agrarian lifestyles into the modern, globalized world, covering in decades a jump that the West took centuries to make. With traditional routes to status and community being rapidly redefined, there is bound to be some virulent discontent generated somewhere.
It is ironic that global terrorism, the phenomenon of terrorists operating in and against several nations simultaneously, was facilitated by globalization and now it has become the biggest challenge to globalization. Global terrorism depends on the success of globalization. In fact, one may very conceive of global terrorism as a facet of the global culture resulting from globalization.
Rajnish
Impacts of globalization on terrorism: