Actually existing globalisation…means the opening of subordinate economies and their vulnerability to [advanced industrial] capital, while the [Northern] economy remains sheltered as much as possible from the obverse effects.  Globalization has nothing to do with free trade.  On the contrary, it is about the careful control of trading conditions, in the interests of [advanced industrial] capital…. Globalization has been as much about preventing as promoting integration.  The global movements of capital require not only free transborder access to labour, resources and markets but also protection from opposite movements, as well as a kind of economic and social fragmentation that enhances profitability by differentiating the costs and conditions of production.

                                                --Ellen Meiksins Wood, Empire of Capital (New York: Verso, 2003), pp.134-6.