View of the Grand Market in Lier (early 17th century) by Philips de Momper, Netherlands. Courtesy the Stadsmuseum Lier, Netherlands View of the Grand

All of our religions, stories, languages and norms were muddled and mixed through mobility and exchange throughout history

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2025-01-10 13:30:03

View of the Grand Market in Lier (early 17th century) by Philips de Momper, Netherlands. Courtesy the Stadsmuseum Lier, Netherlands

is professor and chair of global international relations at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands. She is the founding director of the Centre for Global Knowledge Studies (gloknos) and co-founder of the Cambridge Sustainability Initiative social enterprise, both hosted at CRASSH, University of Cambridge. She is the founding editor of the Global Epistemics book series (2019-).

In the 1990s, an entire generation was robbed of its historical consciousness by a powerful and seemingly unprecedented tale. This story, crafted as the Cold War came to an end, declared that real or imagined boundaries had stopped working as they once had. Humans were no longer contained within their old geographies or identities. They now inhabited a new world that appeared to be unhinged from the normal evolution of human society.

The concept chosen to capture this transformational moment in human history was ‘globalisation’. It described how new technologies and networks of connectivity had suddenly brought human communities closer together and made them permeable to an uncontrollable flow of people, ideas, goods and cultural practices, which all moved freely across the integrated markets of the world economy. In the wake of this transformation, new jargon emerged, expressing new anxieties: the world had truly become the ‘global village’ that Marshall McLuhan anticipated in the 1960s, but it was a world shaped by multinational corporations and ‘elite globalisers’, who spoke a common, hegemonic ‘global English’, and were spearheading a destructive ‘homogenisation’ (or ‘McDonaldisation’) of human cultures that national borders were too fragile to withstand.