AS GLOBALIZATION PENETRATES the remotest villages in Mexico, China sends its low-wage produced merchandise to congested urban centers around the globe. In Latin America Internet-Cafés sprout like genetically modified tomatoes, while much of Africa stands on the side lines. As whole sub-continents are compelled to seek modes of integration, a shower of mixed blessings pours down upon nations that until recently were detached from the information, resources and policy requirements upon which managing global integration depends. Africa does not feature prominently on most globalization agendas and it seems to be confronted with the downsides of world market integration, experiencing almost perpetual economic, social and ecological stress. Ignoring the trends or seeking refuge in purely national development does not allow for sufficient progress to even remotely master the pressures associated with feeding growing populations, ensuring basic needs are met and safeguarding fragile natural resource bases. Are there any development options for Africa that allow for at least a minimal measure of success in the context of capital-driven and non-democratic globalization patterns as they present themselves today?
The need to adapt policy frameworks to the ever-shifting economic and political priorities of globalization is usually seen as necessary in order to effectively integrate and successfully compete in the world market. Most current economic and social debate, both in the North and the South, is concerned with questions related to form, pace, and depth of socio-economic adaptation to the general trends of globalization.
Only rarely does the debate shift its attention to more fundamental questions of sustainability and feasibility of globalization within the confines of free market ideology. Civil societies and state institutions that accept unconditional and unchecked globalization as the terms of reference for development quickly run into severe implementation obstacles. They face substantial internal legitimisation problems and encounter serious resource and management constraints in their efforts to manage global integration. At the same time, efforts to reconcile the integration process with policies oriented towards sustainable and equitable development are deeply frustrated.
Seen as a historical process, globalization can be understood as "a shifting and transitory series of hierarchical relationships." In its current-day forms, it involves "a process of transformation in the capitalist world-system, one that intensifies an array of structural and ideological tendencies as all aspects of the world-system come increasingly into the orbit of what we can see as a single and continuous circulation of ideas, commodities, social relations and, most important, sites of conflict." (P.Wilkin, 1996: 228f.)
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