The process of globalization is far from new to mankind. It has been preceded by attempts of economic and cultural integration on an international scale. It can be said even that the harbinger of globalization was what communist leaders called imperialism, which they fought at the dawn of the past century and in which they saw the gravest evil to mankind. But this process has proven to be inevitable, because it is nothing but the formation of an integrated humanity bound by common problems and common responsibilities. When anti-globalists, the successors to those who fought imperialism, say that globalization brings people a mass of problems, making the rich richer and the poor still poorer, they overlook one simple thing. As long as mankind was separated and there were no so-called global ties uniting people, the poorer nations lived through their problems in a much more tragic way than when the global international community began to emerge, many members of which extended assistance. This concerns the struggles against famine, economic backwardness, infectious diseases, and epidemics. It is precisely within this community that aid by the rich to the poor has become possible, because everything is so interconnected in the global world that should an epidemic break out in one remote corner of the planet, it immediately becomes a problem for other nations. In the same way, the problems of rich countries become the problems of the whole world. This is an inevitable process.
The September 11 tragedy that hit the United States naturally affected the entire world community. It was no accident that the overwhelming majority of nations supported the United States out of the awareness that this tragedy would not only affect the American nation, but would shake the whole world, its economy and moral spirit.
Ukraine is already partially entering global civilization. This is shown by a great number of factors, at least the fact that politically, Ukraine has a vote in a number of international organizations. The vote is weak but adequate to its economic influence in the world. Ukraine is very rapidly entering the global information space, developing computer technologies and Internet services. Unfortunately, Ukraine is still outside the global space in one crucial aspect. What is called globalism today was called earlier by sociologists and economists the new international division of labor when the leading economies began to relocate many industries to developing countries, those of the Third World. In this way, they rectified their own infrastructures in the most complex, resource and energy consuming branches which were much cheaper in the less developed countries. Even before the anti-globalist protests, some countries were accused of thus trying to solve their own environmental problems by shifting them to the less developed economies. Then the facetious thought arose that the international division of labor means increments to the most developed countries and excrement to the least developed. Of course, that is not quite an adequate way to assess a process so necessary to poor economies. Many public organizations contend now that Asian and African industries use child labor and that people are exploited for meager wages there. On the other hand, without such industries those countries would find themselves in far worse conditions. Ukraine, incidentally, is only dreaming of attracting investors. This is exactly what can be appraised as movement toward a new international division of labor. Although we are in a better position here than many African or Asian nations. Ukraine is prepared in the educational and cultural aspects, but it is completely unprepared in other ways. Ukraine is a country that has erected a host of barriers to economic cooperation. These are connected with bureaucratic arbitrariness, mass corruption, and utterly inadequate legislation which primarily encourages predatory investment. One invests seven dollars and enjoys hundreds of millions in privileges, the money then being shared among government officials and our own thievish businessmen. This is what hampers normal and effective economic cooperation. If Ukraine really means to move into the global streamline, it should ponder on all this.
