The word itself is unappealing: globalisation. It is, frankly, soulless - a 1960's made-up word with too many syllables and no fixed definition. Yet, however jarring it sounds, the word is frequently charged with intense emotive force and used indiscriminately as a blanket term for concepts that can be political, cultural or financial.
Mostly, though, globalisation is just another word for international trade. Specifically, it has become synonymous with the extraordinary late-20th century phenomenon of global outsourcing: the migration of huge volumes of jobs across continents and of large numbers of rural workers to wherever those jobs land.
Globalisation has been hugely successful, by all economic criteria at least, yet it is often unpopular. It is cited for cultural imperialism, has provoked mass demonstrations and is decried by its opponents as a greed-driven capitalist leviathan which enforces uniformity and the elimination of all that is exceptional in the unrelenting pursuit of capital profit.
Nonetheless, globalisation can claim to have liberated millions from poverty, accelerated the creation of entire new consumer nations and fulfilled one of the prime goals of any business: to make and do things cheaper, faster, better and in greater volumes.
And was it not also globalisation, swiftly blamed when the 2008 United States credit crunch toppled the world's economies into recession, which just as swiftly, and surprisingly, helped with our collective financial salvation through the political will to adopt a global position?
As for the imposition of global monoculture, legions of zealous globalists have learned to their considerable cost that locals will always act local. Even McDonald's and Coca-Cola aren't quite the same the world over.
