First and foremost, let us talk about the positive consequences of globalization on the world economy. For those who defend free trade, it is clear that this freedom of exchange increases economic prosperity as well as opportunity, especially for developping nations. They also argue that “globalized trade” creates a more competitive and efficient world economic order “which allows a more efficient allocation of ressources between all countries involved in the trade.” Globalization allows for lower prices and reduced costs (transport, communication, production, tariffs...), more employment and higher output, improves technologies and human skills, and always for the supporters of free trade a higher standard of living for everyone. Thus globalization would be a good tool for fighting poverty and allowing developing nations to enter in the world business economy, in theory because as we will see later it is not totally true. (...)

From a cultural and “human friendly” point of view, “Mondialisation” has strongly favoured the growth of cross cultural contacts, the development of a “world-universal-pop culture” shared and understood by so many people in the world, mainly youngsters. It favours better communication - thanks to the progress in computer and information technology – and offers better formation and education opportunities. "Electronic mass media (TV and radio by satellite, Cellphone, Internet) erase space and time boundaries in human communication, enabling people to interact and live on a global scale. In this sense, the globe has been turned into a village by the electronic mass media" (wikipedia), a "Global village" as Herbert Marshall McLuhan called it. The successful of social networks like Facebook and My Space or the famous VOIP software, Skype, shows clearly how the current and global spread of new technologies can make connection easier between human beings accross the world. The world migrations tends to be easier and faster than before mainly for students and skilled workers. There is a wonderful thing with globalization : it creates a multicuralism around the world. And finally, the information is broadcasted and diffused better and faster than before, so world citizens are now more and better informed.

Finally, politically speaking, globalization and liberal capitalism seems strongly linked to democracy. Indeed globalization arouses a higher degree of political and economic freedom in the form of democracy while capitalism in the developped world produces higher levels of material wealth. Globalization also enhances civil liberties, promotes human rights and spreads universal values such as freedom of speech. It is true that this phenomenon fosters the building of global political institutions based on multilateral relationships. So globalization creates a new global political order, a kind of world government which organizes and regulates the relationships between nations.

But when you take a look over the planet, obviously things doesn't go so good. Globalization also has many prejudicial effects and some of its aspects are really controversial. The first and principal issue is that globalization has increased poverty and inequalities, not only in the developing countries but also in the rich countries (we can think for example about the poor workers in USA), and has widened the gap between the have and the have nots. With globalization the rich become richer and many poor people become poorer. It tends to create injustices and arouses much frustration. Indeed discrimination and inequalities are still growing and it is clearly disturbing to learn that only 20% of the world population have and benefit from 80% of the world's resources. There is obviously a big problem with the allocation of resources, and instead of contributing to a better sharing, globalization seems to worsen disparities between human beings.

The frustration linked to globalization, increases indirectly social, religious and ethnic tensions ; terrorism and delinquancy are one of the worst effects of this fact. Globalization has also cultural effects and one of this most known aspect is the “Americanisation”of the world. In fact globalization promotes a world culture really similar to the american way of life. The spread of american values favour the erosion of traditional cultures and the USA truly profit from globalization. Indeed American imperialism is also cultural and the US entertainement industry (Hollywood, and the recording music industry) is one of the best ways of exporting the model of American society.

Globalization also causes a lot of damages to nature and seriously threatens the biosphere. It is worrying to witness how some multinational firms and some politicians do not care about ecological issues. The negative effects of an uncontrolled globalization are known ; pollution, spread of new diseases (Chicken Flue, Asia-Europa), chemical contamination (Bhopal tragedy, India), fast and extensive detoriation of the environnement (Amazonian forest, Brasil), etc... The human and ecological consequences of globalization could soon become an irreversible problem. (...)

Globalization seems to be a process which mainly benefits corporate interests. Indeed one of the effects of globalization is the emerging of a new economic power run by the multinational lobby. In many cases, firms have now more power and more income than states. For example, the turn over of General Motors is more important than the Denmark’s GDP. Politicians have no real power, they are under the pressure from multinational companies and depend on them for financing their electoral campaign. For more and more citizens to vote means nothing, because they feel that politicians follow corporatist interests most of the time. Moreover, these last years, liberals have encouraged the privatisation of public services for more efficiency, but finally once done the brand new privatised companies are not so efficient, cheaper and fairer than expected (See the disaster of the privatisation of britain's railway system). Futehrmore “uncontrolled free trade benefits create a big financial leverage but at the expense of the poor who do not reaaly benefit of this speculation economy. Worse, Globalization tends to favour economical and financial insecurity. Nowadays, credit-based economies are currently threatened by a world financial crash and debt crises. Due to globalization, this kind of financial crises can quickly spread from a given region or a a country to the other economies, because there is a dependent link between them. The Financial crisis in South-East Asia (1997) demonstrated this new risks and the extrem volatility of financial markets.

Globalization cannot be stopped but needs to be regulated by some more democratic multilateral institutions which really care about human rights, and are more concerned by social and cultural issues than money. This fairer regulation can be made by the current global institutions but not if they keep the same organisation and the same process. So it seems clear that we need to reform these old fashioned instituions to make them more efficient and less liberal than they are today. If not they will definitively lose the little credibility they still have, and it will be difficult to create quickly some new world institutions that are able to fix the serious and numerous issues which threaten the world equilibrium.

Another issue that needs to be changed is the way that politicians depend on or are influenced by the multinational lobbies. Politicians are elected by the citizens but they seem to work for the interests of private firms. And too often they implement measures which lure citizens or disrespect their will or their rights.The ungovernmental associations and institutions (trade unions, humanitary foundations) have also a big part to play, because if they manage to earn suffiecient respectability and credibility worldwide, they can put strong pressure on national governements, the world conservative institutions, and the multinational firms. Clearly we need some kind of power check which better promotes the interests of the citizens, and the latter have to be more engaged, more interested about the globlal issues which finally concern everyone.

To conclude, the global firms need to be more respectful towards elementary ethic rules of well governed business. They must pay more attention to social, environnemental and political issues (mainly when they are installed in countries which do not respect human rights), because they have a great responsability to do so. If each of these “shareholders” make more efforts in order to make globalization fairer, we can still improve this process and reduce its negative consequences. It is not too late.