Alien But Inevitable GEORGE BAGHDADI 'Globalization insights’ is a series of feature stories told by journalists from Africa, Asia and Latin America – sto­ries that give an insight into the perceptions and experi­ences of people as globalization unfolds in their environs. This project is jointly organized by the Friedrich-Ebert­Stiftung and IPS EUROPA. A young man, very thin, very tall, leans against a public Café in Damascus. Smoking water-pipe tobacco, Jamal Barakat peers into a half empty mid-afternoon tea and smiles."Globalization … I've heard a lot about this word but never understood it properly. It had something to do with open borders and free trade, I guess, but I cannot follow the whole subject," the 26 year-old employee at a private trade company replies. Barakat, wearing a faded T-shirt; what might have once been a blue background has since been obliterated, by repeating washing into a pale purple, paused for a while and said"I only know that the world has turned into a little village." Globalization- the growing integration of economies and societies around the world- has been one of the most hotly-debated topics in international economics over the past few years. But in Syria, globalization is to many still an alien concept. "Globalization is the domination of the computer over the world with no restrictions. There are no boundaries, no more secrets … there are scandals," says a 40-year-old art engineer Samia Bandar. With the collapse of the eastern bloc and the end of the Cold War, only one superpower remained on the world stage. It was a development that opened new vistas be­fore"capitalist producers", who saw the opportunity to conquer markets previously inaccessible to them. Many in Syria believe globalization impoverishes develo­ping countries while undercutting middle-class living standards. The reduction of trade barriers encourages the exploitati­on of child labour, fosters a race to the bottom in envi­ronmental standards, tears women in Third-World count­ries away from their families, homogenizes disparate indigenous cultures and strips the gears of democracy in favour of rapacious multinational corporations. It also causes cancer in puppies. To be fair, no one makes the last claim.