Asia and Japan in the Process of Globalization

Globalization of the capitalist economy has recently attracted much attention. Increasing numbers of firms, their products, more and more money, and workers, seem drawn into the whirlpool of a global competitive market. The new trends in the Japanese economy are deeply related to this process of globalization. But is the globalization of economic activities truly a new phenomenon? Has it not been a fundamental aspect of the capitalist market economy from the very beginning of its development? According to Wallerstein (1974, 1983), for example, we have seen two kinds of world system in human history: world empires and the capitalist world economy. Modern capitalism appeared through ‘the long sixteenth century’ as a new type of European world system, replacing the preceding world empires. While world empires were integrated by political and military power, the capitalist world system formed a global system of division of labour mainly by means of the self-regulating market order. Indeed, capitalism has anarchically promoted the marketoriented system of the division of labour, beginning with the expansion of the world market after the discovery of the American continent and the circumnavigation of the globe. Clearly, capitalism has been grounded upon the global market economy from the very beginning.