WHAT IS GLOBALISATION AND DOES IT HELP OR HURT DEVELOPMENT? 20 CONSIDER NEW PERSPECTIVES
The changes brought by globalisation are cause for much debate across the world. Read the following perspectives on how we might react to those changes and then explore them in your Response Journal.
Kwame Anthony Appiah is a British-born Ghanaian- American philosopher and novelist. He writes in support of what he calls ‘cosmopolitanism’ (being a citizen of the world). He argues that coming into contact with people whose culture and values are different to our own need not be seen as a threat. In the big globalised cities around the world, he prefers to see chances for friendship and understanding rather than chances for conflict. If you are ‘cosmopolitan’, you can experience and learn from new cultures without losing what makes your own culture unique and special to you.
Cultures are made of continuities and changes, and the identity of a society can survive through these changes. Societies without change aren’t authentic; they’re just dead.
Thomas Hylland Eriksen is a Norwegian anthropologist (he studies human culture) who has written a lot about globalisation. Eriksen does not believe change itself is bad, but argues that globalisation is bringing change at a speed that is causing people to feel threatened and to come into conflict with others. He calls this ‘overheating’. Eriksen says overheating has contributed to situations such as Brexit, where people in Britain voted to leave the EU (and to clamp down on immigration) partly because the speed at which their country was changing felt out of control.
The steady acceleration of communication and transportation of the last two centuries has facilitated contact and made isolation difficult, and is weaving the growing global population ever closer together, without erasing cultural differences, local identities and power disparities.
