Ishizu

Bonjour à tous ! J'ai à rédiger un commentaire sur un article de presse issu de The Economist, et j'aurais aimé qu'une âme charitable corrige mes éventuelles fautes de grammaire, de lexique... et rende le tout plus idiomatique si possible. Merci d'avance !

This article, taken from the weekly London based magazine The Economist of July, 28th 2007, is a comment upon a book by Nayan Chanda, an expert from Yale University, which is entitled Bound Together : how traders, preachers, adventurers and warriors shaped globalisation.
Indeed, this essay tackles the consequences of current global economy and particularly deals with its advance indications in the former centuries, that’s to say with those people who, from the XVI th century, contributed to creating and shaping what we nowadays identify as « globalisation ». This article is intended to expound Mr. Chanda’s theories about this issue
and to value them in order to show that, in fact, we nearly all misunderstand a concept we very often use, since we even don’t know its origins. Therefore, our reflection will be based on the oldness of globalisation and on the role of those Nayan Chanda calls the forerunners of global economy, on
its contemporary aftermath and on the journalist’s tone all through the article.



First and foremost, Mr. Nayan Chanda, the director of publications at the Yale Centre for the
Study of Globalisation, in New Haven, Connecticut, points out the fact that a great number of both educated and uneducated people misapprehend global economy. The author of the article consequently tries to follow his argumentation and immediately accounts for this unfortunate phenomenon ; he charges public personas like José Bové, a French farmer, politician and syndicalist, or social movements such as alter-globalisation with making us believe that globalisation is only linked with junk food and supermajors. As a matter of fact, the word « globalisation », whose creation dates back to the late 1970s, designates a very old reality and even could be applied to the first massive emigration we know in history, sixty thousand years ago, when first human beings spread from Africa all around the world. As a consequence, the journalist endeavours to define what’s exactly global economy ; he centres on a specific phrase which encapsulates the whole phenomenon, « interconnectedness », and on the forerunners of global economy in the XV th and XVI th centuries : European adventurers, warriors, traders and preachers. Indeed, the first explorers contributed to discovering new worlds or new maritime routes, such as Vasco da Gama – a Portuguese navigator of the Renaissance that is quoted by the journalist and who managed to bypass Africa and reach India in 1498 –, Muhammad Ibn Battuta – whose journeys covered almost the entirety of the Islamic world – or Marco Polo – a Venetian trader who explored Cipango (the old name of Japan) and Cathay (the old name of China) and who’s shown on the illustration arriving in Persia. The explorers enabled the merchants to establish trading posts in the Far East (like Goa for the Portuguese or Chandannagar for the French) and to exchange hand-made products for expensive, valued spices (pepper, cloves, saffron,…) or luxury objects (china, silk). Thus, they widened the European network of trade and improved our geographical knowledge. As for the warriors, they were the first ones, along with the missionaries, to export a culture from a continent to another ; for instance, Hernán Cortes, by conquering the Aztec empire, brought his language (Spanish), his religion (Catholicism), his knowledge in medicine, geography,… and the first « new technologies » (gunpowder, armours, guns,…). As explains the journalist, all this proved to establish strong links between different areas of the world and the consequences of the Great Discoveries are still vivid nowadays.
That’s why being aware of the history of globalisation is so useful and almost essential, since the old groups have correlatives in current global economy : Nayan Chanda thus compares, but with some objections, great explorers with tourists (nevertheless, the first ones used unsafe caravels and travelled for the sake of adventure, whereas the second ones travel by plane or liner for their own entertainment) and preachers with « missionaries » of NGOs, as both of them have moral ideals. Nonetheless, beyond the obvious differences between yesterday and today, the author of the essay and the journalist emphasize continuity and likenesses ; the author of the article prefers putting the stress on the slow evolution of global economy. For example, the excerpt taken from Daniel Livingstone’s book hints that, already in the XIX th , a European explorer could feel the nearness between Scotland and central Africa, for the United Kingdom had brought new techniques and its language to other continents.


Nevertheless, Nayan Chanda must acknowledge that the momentum of globalisation has increased quite rapidly for the fifty last years, and our current technologies and mass media have changed our viewpoint about the universe, which has become more and more reduced as we were mastering technique and science. The essayist quotes a much revealing example, which is based on our capacity to communicate more or less rapidly. Nowadays, mankind can attend a live catastrophe, such as the attacks of September, 11th, whereas forty days were necessary in 1453 for the European to know that Constantinople was from then on a Turkish city. Interconnectedness is a major fact of today societies, and, on the one hand, offers many assets (Western countries are able to react against terrorism more quickly), but, on the other hand, also presents serious drawbacks (we are more vincible, and burdens like computer bugs or any other threat can affect the whole world more heavily than the Black Death during the Middle Ages). Above all, the journalist highlits the fact that they are thousands of people who suffer globalisation and don’t take advantage of its benefits, such as the countries were water supply is scarce, AIDS a real scourge,… Mr. Chanda indeed experiment commiseration for « globalisation’s losers », and his final chapter is couched in pathetic, merciful language, even though he regards global economy as a boon for humanity. As for the journalist, he thoroughly supports the expert’s analyses, drawing our attention to his sound argumentation. And not only does he prove Mr. Chanda’s right, but he also criticizes with him some kinds of protests he considers anecdotal, shameless and out of proportion. Many phrases at the beginning and the end of the article bespeak his ironic eloquence : in the last paragraph, he sees José Bové as an « oversubsidised continental gourmet » (he thus refers to the subsidies granted to the European farmers by the Common Agricultural Policy) ; in the first paragraph, he was a quite ridiculous « cheesemaker » (it’s true that he became a sheep farmer and produced Roquefort cheese on the Larzac, but he’s above all a syndicalist and a politican), who was driving his tractor in order to demolish a Mc Donald’s restaurant. His fierce satire is envidenced by his diction, when he wants to characterize alter-globalisation : « cranky » (first paragraph), « high jinks », « lazy thinking », « anecdote and deering-do » (second paragraph).

Both Mr. Chanda and the journalist may as a matter of fact believe that, in comparison with many people’s suffering and grinding poverty, these demands are infamous. Nonetheless, mass media and ignorance about globalisation, according to Mr. Chanda, make people follow their example. The journalist’s argumentation proves to be very solid to, since it looks like a loop : his own criticism against José Bové can be found at the beginning and at the end of the article, introduction and conclusion thus refering to each other.