Contemporary globalization is essentially a massive civilizational shift in the making — a worldwide civil society that is more complex and integrated than we have yet imagined. It promises a potential improvement on what we now have.
"For centuries, people have thought about the world in terms of the organization of nation states. But, thanks to globalization, nation states are now becoming units within broader clusters that are sometimes called civilizations. As Max Stackhouse explains in the second installment in his five-part series, this shift does not homogenize everything, but creates new patterns of diversity that foster innovative global patterns of life and more complex identities.
lobalization has gained many meanings since being introduced into the language as a term of analysis in the 1950s by Roland Robertson. In general, it refers, as he points out, to a worldwide set of dynamic social and cultural developments that are influencing every local context, all peoples, each nation and the ecology of the earth itself.
It has thus become the framework that relativizes and modulates every regional, national and local context — and is simultaneously adapted into each local, national or regional context in distinctive ways. It creates new cultural varieties that are 'glocal,' new combinations of the global and local."...more
