WILLIAM GRIMES “The Rise of Globalization, a Story of Human Desires” http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/30/books/30grimes.html?ei=5070&en=8745a2ccea6196f6&ex=1181620800&pagewanted=print
NYTに載ったNayan Chanda BOUND TOGETHER: How Traders, Preachers, Adventurers, and Warriors Shaped Globalization(Yale University Press)という本の書評。著者のNayan Chandaという人は多分名前からいって印度系の人だろうけれど、そもそもジャーナリストで、Far Eastern Economic Reviewの編集者などを務めた人。書評の初めの数パラグラフを引用しておこう；
また、
Globalization has a bad image problem. It is a conceptual tar baby to which every perceived ill in the world attaches: depressed commodity prices, Asian sweat shops, child labor, fast-food imperialism, American cultural hegemony, outsourcing and global warming. A low point for the world’s most unstoppable trend came on Sept. 10, 2003, when Lee Kyung-hae, a distraught Korean farmer protesting at the World Trade Organization summit in Cancún, Mexico, plunged a knife into his own heart after shouting “Death to W.T.O.”In “Bound Together” Nayan Chanda, the director of publications for the Yale Center for the Study of Globalization, offers an alternative description of the term. Rather than a synonym for late capitalism, he argues, globalization is an expression of human desires that date back to the dawn of time, when the first humans left their African homeland and set out in search of a better life.
Globalization, as Mr. Chanda describes it, is not a scheme dreamed up by a few Western finance ministers, corrupt industrialists and the International Monetary Fund. It is an age-old drive as natural as breathing: “Essentially, the basic motivations that propelled humans to connect with others — the urge to profit by trading, the drive to spread religious belief, the desire to exploit new lands and the ambition to dominate others by armed might — all had been assembled by 6000 B.C.E. to start the process we now call globalization.”
勿論、本そのものを読んでいないので何ともいえないのだが、Nayan Chanda氏が「グローバル化」というもの一般について肯定的であることはたしかであり、上に引用した部分によれば、その起源を人類史的に追跡しているらしい。
Globalization, perceived by its critics as a radical break with the past, looks to Mr. Chanda like a very familiar phenomenon. The traders, preachers, adventurers and warriors who acted as agents of globalization in ages past now wear different clothes and have access to new technologies. The Spanish missionaries of the 16th century find their modern counterparts in idealists spreading a secular gospel of social justice, like Amnesty International, or aid workers bringing relief to third-world countries.
私自身としては、グローバル化に関しては、如何に世界はグローバル化されるのか（how world is globalized）ということが重要であると考えている。ただ、
というのを読むと、少し見通しが楽観的すぎないかとも思うのだが、何れにしても一読してみる価値はありそうな本だ。
There have been losers and winners along the way. Mr. Chanda carefully weighs the costs as well as the gains of globalization, coming down with a certain optimism, as well as fatalism, on globalism’s side. (He is scathing about the enormous subsidies doled out by developed countries to their farmers.) The plight of Lee Kyung-hae, a rice farmer impoverished when protectionist barriers dropped, is balanced by the new opportunities for poor rice growers in Thailand and Vietnam. Traveling through the Mekong Delta in 2005, Mr. Chanda saw new homes, television antennas and bustling markets.“Farmers now can afford to send their children to school and enjoy a living that would have been unimaginable a few years ago,” he writes.
さて、http://d.hatena.ne.jp/sumita-m/20070606/1181098380に対して、Skelita_vergberさんからコメントとTBを頂いた*1。NHKで放映されたという北京の水問題に関する番組について書いている。さらに、「グローバル化」についても言及されているので、参照されたい。ただ、中国北部、特に黄土高原の水問題を構成するのは決して単一の因子ではなく、人口問題、気候変動、産業化、さらには伝統的な漢族のライフ・スタイル等々と複合的に因子が絡み合っており、それが或る種の悪循環を来しているということは補足しておきたい。また、Skelita_vergberさんが指摘されている問題で、日本で対応する問題を照射するとしたら、水を消費する都市／水を供給する非都市ということだと、かつては水源地の水没−移住というのが大きな問題になったし、今でもその問題は完全に終わったわけではないだろう。また、原発の現地問題も。
