ABSTRACT
The last surviving great narrative of the West may be the idea of inescapable, ubiquitous globalization, which is largely based upon technological modernization. It survives even though each day a number of minorities gain public attention, for instance, by claiming geographical terrain from the deforestation industry in many parts of the world; it survives, even though neo-imperial acts of the main western superpower continually get bogged down because of a stunning lack of intercultural imagination and competence, and it survives even though the agents of technologically and economically wielded power are being replaced and the crossroads of monetary and economic networks are moving from the Atlantic to the Pacific. Western hubris may partly explain the longevity the idea of unidirectional globalization has enjoyed, but its persistence is surely equally due to the effects of economic supremacy and international commodification. Yet, when the economic and technological supremacy of the world’s superpowers comes into question, the idea of inescapable globalization within a homogeneous world market may finally be on its way out. Surely globalization loses some of its momentum when western economies need to be supported by tariffs and taxes that undermine the very ideology of a liberal capitalist market; and it loses even more when the West cannot prevent many so-called ‘developing’ countries from becoming increasingly impoverished, in spite of (some believe because of) all the counsel offered by the World Trade Organization and the International Monetary Fund. If we are, indeed, today witnessing a crisis of the idea of globalization, it is in more than one sense overdue, since the very basis for the story of globalization – a faith in technological progress and continual enlightenment – has effectively been deconstructed within the postcolonial domain, along with simplified ideas of the technical impotence of the periphery. The fact that the remaining western superpower is economically overreaching itself in order to afford an intimidating display of military power, that it is neglecting inner stability and the happiness and welfare of its own citizens for the
phantasm of world hegemony, that, finally, it is losing world markets to emerging Asian powers, all indicates a deep crisis of unidirectional western ideas of progress and globalization.
