Writing in The Irish Times of April 5th, 1997, Lorna Siggins conjures up a striking symbol of "globalisation": schoolchildren in Zimbabwe singing songs in praise of the supermarket chain Tesco, for whom their families were busily producing mangetout peas.

Siggins notes sadly "how easy it is for a whole community to prostrate itself" in this way, but she also points out that the Tescos of this world sometimes create valuable new money-earning opportunities - for women in particular. This story represents the essence of globalisation - long-distance economic networks, cultures clashing and combining in curious ways, dependence and opportunity, winners and losers.

Economic globalisation can be defined simply as the growth of economic activity that spans the boundaries between countries - such as when an American company, Dell, decides to build lots more computers in Ireland. Some aspects of globalisation can be measured. The Economist magazine, recently listed a few. Over the past decade, it said:

trade in goods and services between countries has grown twice as fast as total economic output; in other words, countries are exporting more and more of what they produce;

foreign direct investment (FDI), such as when a multinational company (MNC) sets up a factory in a new location outside its "home" country, has grown three times as fast as output;

international trade in company shares, which involves a foreign person or company simply buying up part of an existing company, has grown 10 times as fast as output.

Of course, this is not the first time in history that Africans have been producing food for Europeans to eat. The world really started to become a more inter-related place economically about 100 years ago, when the European colonial empires set up close trading links with their overseas colonies. Still, the globalisation that's happening now does have its own specific features; one of the most obvious is the technology involved. New computers and communications technologies have allowed us to organise international activity more easily than ever before. The cost of a three-minute telephone call between New York and London is $1 today, compared to $300 in 1930; the cost of computer processing power has been falling by an average of 30 per cent a year in real terms over the last 20 years. These new technologies have, amongst other things, allowed for extraordinarily fast movement of money around the world.

However, some media coverage of globalisation would make you think it's all about computers. It's not.

the role of governments

Governments are now often portrayed as helpless to do anything about what happens on international markets; a good example is the way "speculators" have constantly been blamed for problems in the value of the Irish pound. In fact, governments lessened their own power by measures such as the abolition of capital controls, which previously limited the amounts of money people could import to, and export from, a country. Between 1983 and 1993, the value of cross-border assets held by banks tripled (the notorious Ansbascher deposits are far from unusual). Foreign-exchange transactions also tripled between 1986 and 1992 - they now average more than $1,200 billion per day, 70 times the value of the total world-wide trade in goods and service. In other words, vast amounts of money are sloshing around the world economy, most of it for pure speculation - a sort of gambling on the future value of assets, shares and currencies - rather than to finance trade in a traditional sense. And governments helped make this possible.

So much media discussion focuses on the role of national governments - and their alleged impotence in the face of overwhelming, slightly mysterious global forces. At the moment, for example, Asian governments are seen as helpless to protect their currencies in the face of speculation and panic-selling on the financial markets.

The anonymous Irish Times political columnist, Drapier, complains that when Digital closed its plant in Galway in 1993, Irish government ministers behaved "more like Third World supplicants than a sovereign European power", a view which was heard again after the more recent closure of Seagate's plant in Clonmel, Co Tipperary.

There is no doubt that governments are less influential than before. It is now more difficult, for example, than before for governments to tax business and highly mobile workers - if they try, money or people could just leave their countries. Ericsson and other large companies threatened to leave Sweden in May 1997 because personal taxes were seen as too high to attract or retain skilled workers. That has not, as yet, been used as an argument to lower personal taxes in Ireland, but it is commonplace for an Irish industrialist to write in a newspaper opinion piece that "any increase in corporation tax rates will further diminish Ireland's attractiveness to mobile investment" (The Irish Times, May 9th, 1997). In fact, in the EU as a whole, the average rate of tax on capital and self-employed labour fell from 50 per cent in 1981 to 35 per cent in 1994.

In other words, globalisation means lower taxes for the rich. Indeed, in general it tends to promote inequality, both at a global level (see "What about Africa?") and also within countries. An international labour economist recently told The Irish Times (January 16th) that globalisation is "putting downward pressure on the wages of low-skilled workers", while in Ireland and elsewhere those with the most marketable skills (like computer engineers) are doing better and better.

Do these sort of pressures have anything to do with the recent rise of racist anti-immigration groups in Ireland? This deserves further investigation, perhaps of the sort that Irish Times journalist Lara Marlowe brilliantly brought to bear on the 1997 French elections, when she described how extreme right-wing politicians portrayed globalisation as a plot against France.

Europeanisation

Most of the media, in their enthusiasm about globalisation, don't tell us how the EU is seen by some of its leaders as protection for Europe from the worldwide free-for-all. European Monetary Union (EMU), for example, is a way to reduce the influence of unaccountable currency traders.

German Chancellor Helmut Kohl says "the answer to globalisation is Europeanisation" (as quoted in The Irish Times of December 30th, 1997). Watch out for this theme to emerge in the media and public debate on the upcoming Amsterdam Treaty referendum.

Globalisation thus increasingly shapes the media agenda - not only in the finance pages, but also in coverage of European issues, of racism, of wages and of industrial relations. The challenge is to strike a balance between, on the one hand, glib attribution of all problems to the mysterious force of globalisation and, on the other, an insular view which risks ignoring how fundamentally the world is being reshaped and how that affects all our lives.

Andy Storey is a lecturer at the Development Studies Centre, Kimmage Manor, Dublin, and the author of the forthcoming Globalisation: economic characteristics and political implications (Development Studies Centre Occasional Paper).