The March/April 2007 issue of Foreign Policy has an article by Harvard Business School professor Pankaj Ghemawat entitled Why the World Isn’t Flat (subscribers only).
Professor Ghemawat main argument is that most proponents of globalization or anti-globalization are wrong: The world is not as globalized as they all want us to think.
the world is not nearly as connected as [they] would have us believe. Despite talk of a new, wired world where information, ideas, money, and people can move around the planet faster than ever before, just a fraction of what we consider globalization actually exists.
And he has the hard data to support his argument:
the total amount of the world’s capital formation that is generated from foreign direct investment (FDI) has been less than 10 percent for the last three years for which data is available (2003-05).
Other indicators of how exagerated globalization is are the levels of migration, telephone calls, private charitable giving, stock investment and trade. They are all around 10%. One particular case where geography and borders should have no effect at all is the web, therefore one could assume that globalization has spread faster in cyberspace.
Yet Web traffic within countries and regions has increased far faster than traffic between them. [...] People across the world may be getting more connected, but they aren’t connecting with each other. [...] We’re more wired, but no more “global”.
Whithout negating the possibility that globalization will continue its advance as policies evolve around the world, there are many indicators that point to the fact that it was far easier for entities to become global in the 90’s than it is today. Anyone involved in the process of becoming global should be careful to consider the implications and not assume too much.
I guess that includes Global Culture, but so far the reception of the ideas continues to grow in numbers and diversity. By the end of the week I will provide an update on readership at the end of the first quarter of 2007.
4 responses so far ↓
1 Globalistgirl // Mar 29, 2007 at 11:10 pm
Well, it makes sense that people first connect to people they aready feel belong ‘in their group’. Language barriers alone probably contribute a lot to this, since school English, school German or school French is inevitably a little rusty and not as fluent as one would like for real-time talk to someone else in that language. Those people whose foreign language skills are good enough to use like that are likely to either be young and connected since childhood (I just logged off an MMORPG, where basically everyone but the Japanese exercise their English every day, but virtually everyone is also young) or businesspeople, who get frequent practice through work. Neither group is such that those who are not currently in either are likely to become so.
Then there’s the comfort factor. It’s not just language, it’s trying to understand what’s going on in someone else’s brain, which for someone who hasn’t already gotten a lot of experience with cross-cultural interactions is going to have a hard time with. Both of these things make it easier for most people to interact with others from the same country.
But isn’t the more relevant viewpoint how much *more* connected we are cross-culturally than in the past? There are hard numbers supporting that as well. Friedman’s book “The Lexus and the Olive Tree” has a bunch of them in the beginning chapters, for example. For a common-sense view, what percentage of the world population had lived abroad 100 years ago? What percentage has now? I’m sure both are small, but I’m sure the percentage is larger now.
I know I have opportunities to travel and live outside the country of my birth that I wouldn’t have had even 50 or 30 years ago. I have student loans for studying outside the country whose government is granting them, which is now institutionalized. My parents’ generation could only get them if they stayed in that country. Many of my high school friends as well as college friends have studied abroad for a year, whereas virtually no one did in my parents’ generation. The extent of cross-cultural learning may not be as great as one might have hoped, but it’s still an important break with the past.
There may also be a big generational difference stemming from the aggregate effect of the points previously mentioned. I think younger people think more global than middle-aged and especially older people, simply because of the differences in the world during the formative years. My cousins had to learn English to play - computer games. My aunt and uncle didn’t. My cousins have been aware from the age of 5 or 6 that what they want is tied up with the rest of the world, whereas my aunt and uncle had a choice of ignoring the rest of the world. My grandmother refers to channels from her home country as “our TV”, as opposed to German or Italian TV. Some aspects of globalization are not so easily quantified, which also should be kept in mind.
2 juan // Mar 29, 2007 at 11:33 pm
Great observation about language as a barrier for being global. It also points towards precise facts that would allow us to identify those people that would have a strong preference for the global.
Regarding your question about how much more connected we are today, the very same article says that “the number of long-term international migrants amounted to 3 percent of the world’s population in 1900-the high-water mark of an earlier era of migration- versus 2.9 percent in 2005.” The trend is to reach higher percentages over the coming years, but as of today we not *more* global that our grandparents. This alone is a very strong argument in favor of Prof. Ghemawat.
Your insight about the generational difference reminds me of McLuhan’s gap-generation, but with a twist: the openness to a global world comes as a result of enabling technologies that mostly young generations are exploiting. It would follow that a real Global Culture will only be possible once this generation reaches full productive age, since they are the ones culturally programmed to accept it and could not settle for the traditional ways.
3 Manuel // Apr 3, 2007 at 12:01 pm
In 180 A.C. the Denarius was used from the Sahara’s melting sands to the Northern England’s frozen peaks. Latin was spoken by 88 million of people (out of about 120 million in all Europe) and roads could take you from Bagdad to Lusitania (Portugal). Two roman emperors were born outside Italy.
Global Culture may be felt more now due to technology, but it is hardly a new phenomena.
4 Chintan // Apr 22, 2007 at 2:06 am
To know Indian Culture in details and their honesty.
http://indiankulture.blogspot.com/
Regards
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