Упрощенная HTML-версия
http://interaffairs.ru
Author : A. Skachkov
Head of the Lithuania Division, Second European Department Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the
Russian Federation, Candidate of Science (Political Science)
Historically, globalization trends were more rapidly
growing during the inter-civilization wars, ages of
great geographical discoveries, religious expansion-
ism, European cultural influence on the external
world throughout the Renaissance and the Enlight-
enment, industrial and scientific discoveries, as well
as the colonial division of the world.
The present stage of globalization has been typified
by a growing political, economic, financial, and cul-
tural expansion of the West. Indicatively, a cultural component of the global processes
has been growing against the backdrop of an accelerated diffusion of the state-of-the-art
information technologies, which have so far been owned by the industrialized Western na-
tions.
A rapid pace of political and socio-cultural shifts is based on a continuous update of sci-
entific conceptions, a lot of which become obsolete even before they are made public.
A genuine reason underlying the above contradictions and many other similar controversies
is the impact of geopolitical factors. And civilization prejudices are easily forgotten when
there emerge some unifying political and economic interests, e.g., Russia and China, the
United States and Saudi Arabia etc.
The past few decades have witnessed an increasing over-saturation with American and Eu-
ropean culture, accompanied by an unprecedented upsurge of traditional cultures.
The impact exercised by the cinematic art on people's minds, particularly on the young
people, bears a great political charge - the cinema becomes an advocate of the American
way of life, while misrepresenting the latter in an idealized way.
American pop culture has also been aggressively penetrating the youth milieu via modern
music. Even in such traditionalist societies as the Indian and Chinese, almost 50 percent
of popular musical disks have been made in the U.S.
It is no secret that the Internet allows getting around the political monitoring of informa-
tion flows. A global information space is being created which does not allow placing re-
strictions on the expansion of American mass culture.
One should, however, admit that the process of Western cultural expansion cannot only
be assessed in a negative way due to its rather ambiguous and controversial nature. We
Globalization and Specific Features in the Development of World
Cultures