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The term "globalization" was coined at the beginning of the 1980s in the management schools of Harvard, Columbia and Stanford. It soon spread quickly, initially popularized in a series of articles on marketing strategies designed to rescue the world's advanced economies from the stagnation still lingering from the oil crisis of the mid-seventies-a crisis that had interrupted the pattern of postwar growth in the North American economy, the longest in history up to that time. Initially an economic concept, the word "globalism" would soon come into a dazzling critical fortune outside the marketing sphere upon being appropriated by neoliberal political discourse in the definition of a "new" capitalism. The term very soon penetrated the languages of sociology and anthropology as well, particularly in their application to the cultural field, where the concept of globalism threatened structures and mechanisms of social insertion and the very ideas of the world itself.
Since the beginning of the twentieth century, Latin languages had had their own term for globalization-in French, mondialisation; in Spanish, mundializacion. As globalization came into linguistic currency in the 1980s, the Anglo Saxon word was at first paired with its Latin counterpart, which seemed to translate it perfectly. However, mundializacion, as it had been understood up to that point, had never implied a diminishing of direct planning and control over national economies-a concept introduced by the new theorists of globalization-nor the disappearance of borders, customs bureaucracies, and import taxes which, as Japanese scholar Kenichi Ohmae of Harvard University argued in his 1990 study of globalism, The Borderless World: Power and Strategy in the Interlinked Economy, was necessary for the fluidification of the world economy. As the Marxist economist Francois Chesnais explains,
.. the term mondialisation has the "unfortunate" effect of distilling the conceptual imprecision of the terms "global" and "globalization." More effectively than the word "global," the word mondial allows the introduction of the idea that, if the economy is mondiahsi, it will soon be necessary to construct world-wide political institutions capable of intervening in its movements. That is precisely what the forces currently ruling the world's commerce react against so violently. (15, translated from the French)
By their own analysis, the theorists of globalism of the early 1980s sought only to reactivate economies by increasing...