Tensions between North and South

Globalization Old and New

It has been said that current globalization is but a new phase of an old process. According to some scholars, ‘if the sixteenth century Iberian expansion was better known, we could not speak of globalization as an unprecedented and recent situation’ (Gruzinski 2000). In this perspective, notions such as the ‘planetary melting pot’ in cultural or ethnic terms do not constitute novelties as such. Nevertheless, even if globalization today – both economic and cultural – is qualitatively different from prior stages or phases of global processes, this difference lies only in the technological and informational transformations experienced in the last two decades of the twentieth century. This is the reason why, we can argue, along with Braudel (1967), that there are longue durée trends which existed in the past and laid the ground for contemporary globalization. These long-term trends were in operation even before the Iberian expansion. We must not forget the earlier Arab expansion into Europe which began well before the tenth century.1 But even if we decide to concentrate on Western Europe as a site where contemporary globalization has its most ancient origins, many of the effects of globalization could reasonably be seen as mere technological adjustments to earlier, existing cultural phenomena. Some of these cultural phenomena have played a role since the dawn of imperial expansionism and have generated various forms of ‘cultural tensions’ – racism for instance. But there have also been other aspects, such as contempt for languages, arts, theories and thoughts considered not to be ‘rational’, ‘Western’ or ‘scientific’ that were then translated into forms of ‘Orientalism’, ‘New Worldism’ and other visions of ‘exotic’ cultural and ideological productions (Said, 1994; Gruzinski 2000). These ‘cultural tensions’ arose not necessarily from a ‘clash of civilizations’ or as a result of ‘religious differences’, but out of economic, territorial and power interests that were a fundamental feature of various imperial expansionisms.

...