THROUGHOUT THE 1990s, both within Japan and abroad, the doctrine of economic globalization has been advocated with such intensity as to seem the very spirit of the age. “Globalism,” as the discourse advocating globalization may be called, has grown conspicuously extreme in its claims, asserting in various ways that a unitary, undifferentiated world has or will in the near future become reality. At the same time, arguments opposing or wary of that prospect have also been put forward on various fronts.

In the final decade of the twentieth century, indeed, the process of economic globalization has advanced remarkably, supporting these claims for globalism's ascendency. The advance is most striking in the instantaneous transfer of large sums of money in the international financial market.

The tide of globalization did not swell all of a sudden in the 1990s, however. The groundwork for swift, international transfer of enormous quantities of funds was laid in the 1970s when trade and capital liberalization also gained momentum in developed capitalist countries, in parallel with the transition of the international monetary system to a floating rate system. By the 1980s, this wave of trade and capital liberalization had extended to semi-developed capitalist countries that had experienced sustained economic growth, and with this came the establishment of a global, open-economy system. This, too, spurred the international transfer of funds. This period was also characterized by dramatic growth on a global scale of not only American- but also European- and Japanese based large corporations, and by an increasing trend toward corporate multinalionalization. Multinationalization became another factor accelerating the international movement of funds. The 1980s also saw this rise of “neo-liberalism,” represented by “Reaganomics” and “Thatcherism,” which may be regarded as the precursor of today's globalism.

Looking further back in history we find the establishment of the Bretton Woods System at the end of World War II, followed by its maturation in the 1950s and 1960s. This system was the cornerstone of post-war globalization growing out of the disintegration of the inter-war period world economy. Traced back even further to before World War I, we can see that Britain's advocacy of free trade and free-trade imperialism in the nineteenth century was also a kind of globalism, and that that age was one of globalization as well.