THE GLOBALISATION TIMELINE OPEN PROJECT

As part of Gold Mercury’s mission to advance the understanding of Global Governance, this Open Project aims to map globalisation in the form of an interactive poster that can be used as an educational tool to explain and visualise globalisation.

The Globalisation Timeline Poster shows us that globalisation is not a new phenomenon. It is, in fact, an ongoing process that began some 10 000 years ago. Globalisation is a complex phenomenon, involving the interaction of millions of technological, cultural, economic, social and environmental trends. What is new is the speed of this phenomenon, and the fact that it now occurs on an unprecedented scale, penetrating every institution, policy, industry and culture worldwide. Nowhere and nothing is safe from the effects of globalisation. How then, do we even begin to unpick the events and trends that shape our current world?

WHY A GLOBALISATION TIMELINE POSTER?

Various theories for understanding globalisation already exist in the world, each of which tells a different story. They are espoused by educational institutions, the commercial sector, the arts, public institutions… in fact, the list is endless.

There are three distinguishing factors that differentiate the Globalisation Timeline Poster Open Project from other globalisation projects.

Firstly, the timeline takes a “Big History” view of globalisation. A long-view of history is indispensable to understand globalisation as a series of complex patterns and events built up over time. If business and political leaders across the world found themselves unprepared and surprised by the current crises taking place today, it might perhaps be because they were not adopting a long enough view of history. At the same time, they are taking a dangerously short-term view with regard to sustainability. And the competing long and short-term views of the past are not only a feature of today’s society– this has long been the case.

Secondly, the events recorded on our poster fall into three categories: popular, cultural and scientific reference; economic reference; and political and social reference. This allows clearer identification of trends across sectors. An event in the economic column, such as the 1917 U.S. Immigration Act, will lead to knock-on events in political, social and cultural spheres. The division into three areas highlights the synergy between the categories and shows how trends are in fact are interplay of momentous events.

Thirdly, since this is an open-source project, we can say that it is a live poster. It is a dynamic model that we will seek to periodically update. We therefore encourage individuals and organisations to contribute to this live project by sending us suggestions of what they feel needs to be added to the poster. Contributors are also invited to suggest comments on the Globalisation Timeline Project website via posts on our blog.

In this way, we aim to keep the globalisation debate up-to-date with the most significant events that have characterised the globalisation process, and keep it receptive to different perspectives. The project is thus the beginning of a continuum and not an end in itself.

LEARNING HOW TO IDENTIFY NEW TRENDS

Having already suggested that globalisation is an overworked subject, why should the listing of important globalisation events on a chronological chart be of any significance to conceptualising our modern world? Quite simply because globalisation continues to be poorly understood. Most of the time it is discussed purely in economic terms and debated outside of its historical context. Our poster, however, looks at globalisation in a different way, helping us to further our knowledge.

The other key difference that our project highlights is the difference between data and information. We live in a world inundated by data, but the world is on the cusp of transitioning into a new phase of the information age. Whereas data accumulates and swamps us, information is organised and useful. In every sector, new intelligent systems are being designed to accommodate proliferating data and turn it into manageable units of information. In this vein, the Globalisation Timeline Poster picks out select events that are important and organises them in such a way that trends can be better identified.

To illustrate this point, let us examine the trends associated with trade. Firstly, by looking at earlier periods of history we can see that trade is nothing new. The chart shows us that, in the Pre-modern period “Several interlocking trade routes are developed towards the end of the Pre-modern period connecting the most populous regions of Eurasia and North Eastern Africa.” Then, as now, capital flows moved around the world. Migration, too, took place in the Prehistoric period.

When we now fast forward to the twentieth century, we can see how trade-related events, which might have been categorised in the “economic” column, now begin to interact with the “popular, cultural and scientific column”. Unbalanced trade in the twentieth century created a schism between the dominant and weaker global powers. The North was often rich, the South was poor. On the chart, we see the first “Earth Day” in 1970, followed by the ‘Live Aid’ concert in 1985 which ultimately leads us back into “political and social” references with the anti-globalisation protests in Seattle at the WTO meetings in 1999.

Elsewhere, the poster shows how the global population missed various opportunities to steer global governance towards reducing power friction, i.e. Post-World War II, where although positive steps were taken to improve global governance, the winning parties failed to start a new global framework of cooperation following a catastrophic conflict. Once again the world was divided, resulting in the Cold War period, which in turn focused global efforts on armament and the power struggle. We still suffer the cultural, scientific, economic, political consequences of this failure today. That is to say, it has been a multi-dimensional failure.

An overview of this nature may help us to predict the way civil society and institutional engagement in, say, the climate change debate, might unfold over the coming decades. At the very least, it will provide a historic view of past successes and failures with globalisation as its framework. The poster will continue to evolve as we identify more and more globalisation events and trends. The open-source nature of this poster will mean that we can collectively fill the gaps of the past and trace the future together.

CHARTING THE FUTURE

The Globalisation Timeline Open Project shows the development of globalisation through time in a clear and comprehensive way. The poster states major events in our world history through to the current day relating to Globalisation, in order to provide an understanding of how it came about and how it might evolve in the future.

The poster’s emphasis on organisation allows identification of trends and meta-trends, which should provide food for thought when analysing them in conjunction with today’s governance and leadership decisions. If world leaders could only cast their eyes back some 10000 years, they would see that today’s change comes from well-defined patterns that can also unlock the solutions to our future’s puzzles.