ABSTRACT
Globalization is said to start when two cultures make contact (Robertson and While 2003). For many scholars, however, globalization is understood more as an outcome of encounters—a new phase of human social evolution in which the world is becoming a whole. The idea of ‘the world as a whole’ more often than not implies increased similarities and homogeneity among societies in intense connection with other countries or nations. Decreased border control and increased global embeddedness are considered to be correlated with the attenuation of national loyalty and identity. Indeed, there is a strong temptation to insist that an emerging single world can be described by one universal trajectory. Critics of globalization, however, conceive of it as Westernization or Americanization (Robertson 1990; Tomlinson 1999). In this structural transformation, individuals, societies, and states outside the centers of globalization are reduced to silence. Robertson (Robertson and Chirico 1985; Robertson and Khondker 1998) is one scholar who continues to object to this worldview. He asserts that as globalization advances, the relations between human societies become foregrounded as a central issue, involving a complex process of interpenetration of both sameness and differences. From this perspective, globalization is not universalism or a ‘world standard’ overwhelming local orders. Rather, it is a widespread process in which particularism in a certain territory adapts, reacts to, and even affects the conquering global order. The international global order is a presentation of contingency, cleavage, and discontinuity among various sovereignties, rather than a pre-ordained building of the global formation.
