Bereza
Is the world really becoming a “global village?”
Does sharing a piece of McDonald’s Big Mac with a friends or having a sip of Coke in a local fast food mean that we are automatically becoming the hostages of the contemporary “McDonaldization” or “Coca-Cocalization” trends? Or, is benefiting from the use of information communication technologies (ICT) by the well-off countries does in fact help solving thorny problems of the Third World? Nowadays, these and numerous related questions apparently shadow the popular concept of transforming the modern world into a “global village”. The very phrase, coined by Marshall McLuhan, is widely used in a variety of contexts, though its genuine content is true just to a limited extent, to say the least. I would classify three misconceptions that overestimate the role of a “global village”, specifically: we are all living in a homogenous world, information revolution is making the world a better place, and globalization is not impacting national identity.
Since the world history has always been overwhelmed with various social divisions, nobody is ever able to ensure global cohesion. Bipolarity was well proven throughout the 20th century when the rest of the world fought against fascism, the U.S.A. clashed with the Soviet Union in a Cold War, democratic states opposed totalitarian regimes. What is more, the “clash of civilizations” theory by Samuel P Huntington clearly shows that the contemporary society is even multi-polarized due to religious, racial, linguistic and cultural diversifications etc. In particular, he argues, “Global conflict based on ideologies has been replaced by the clash of cultures. It will be where the "tectonic plates" of different cultures meet that conflicts will erupt. The chaos in the Balkans, where Catholic Croats, Orthodox Serbs and Moslem Bosnians are at each other’s throats, lends weight to the argument”. Therefore, historical agenda of the last century has much determined the present state of international affairs that are more ambiguous than ever before. On the one hand, most of the sovereign states tend to observe and promote the whole entirety of democratic values, whereas on the other hand, few of them are ready to lose a share in competitiveness under the conditions of globalization. Hence, the world is now threatened by the evil of terrorism, multinational conflicts, lack of natural resources and the emergence of environmental disasters, to name a few. These challenges mainly arise due to partial unity of the world leaders under the umbrella of multinational organizations, which are usually established to help the latter fulfill their own ambitions, not solve urgent problems of humanity. Therefore due to vivid disintegration, the problems placed on the global agenda get partial solutions, which significantly eliminate the priority of global values within the scope of a “global village” concept.
