competence, as well as the ability to be compassionate and caring. Industrial coun-
tries like the United States, or the nations of Europe, are increasingly multicultural:
Gone are the days when to be American meant being able to trace your lineage to the
Mayflower or when to be Swedish meant uniformly blond hair and blue eyes. Today,
even the U.S. Census cannot keep up with how much we’re changing: The fastest-
growing racial category in the United States in the year 2005 was “biracial.” Just who
are “we” anyway?
At the same time that we’ve never been closer or more similar to each other, the
boundaries between us have never been more sharply drawn. The collapse of the for-
mer Soviet Union led to the establishment of dozens of new nations, based entirely
on ethnic identity. The terrifying explosion of a murderous strain of Islamic funda-
mentalism vows to purify the world of all nonbelievers. Virtually all the wars of the
last two decades have been interethnic conflicts, in which one ethnic group has
attempted to eradicate another from within the nation’s borders—not necessarily
because of some primitive bloodlust on the part of those neighboring cultures but
because the political entities in which they were forced to live, nation-states, were
themselves the artificial creations of powerful nations at the end of the last century.
The Serbian aggression against Bosnia, Croatia, and Kosovo, the Hutu and Tutsi in
Rwanda, the past or current tribal civil wars in Somalia or Congo, plus dozens of
smaller-scale interethnic wars have given the world a new term for the types of wars
we witness now—ethnic cleansing.
The drive for uniformity as the sole basis for unity, for sameness as the sole basis
for security, leads to internal efforts at perpetual self-purification—as if by completely30 CHAPTER 1WHAT IS SOCIOLOGY?
Defining Globalization
There are many definitions of globalization. The one here
is from the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace,
a major research and policy institution.What Is Globalization?
Globalization is a process of interaction and integration among
the people, companies, and governments of different nations.
The process is driven by international trade and investment and
is aided by information technology. Its effects extend from the
environment, to culture, to political systems, to economic devel-
opment and prosperity, to human physical well-being in soci-
eties around the world.
Globalization is not new. For thousands of years, people—and,
later, corporations—have been buying from and selling to each
other in lands at great distances, such as through the famed
Silk Road across Central Asia that connected China and Europe
during the Middle Ages. Likewise, for centuries, people and
corporations have invested in enterprises in other countries. In
fact, many of the features of the current wave of globalizationare similar to those prevailing before the outbreak of the First
World War in 1914.
But policy and technological developments of the past few
decades have spurred increases in cross-border trade, invest-
ment, and migration so large that many observers believe the
world has entered a qualitatively new phase in its economic
development. Since 1950, for example, the volume of world trade
has increased by twenty times, and from just 1997 to 1999 flows
of foreign investment nearly doubled, from $468 billion to $827
billion. Distinguishing this current wave of globalization from
earlier ones, author Thomas Friedman has said that today glob-
alization is “farther, faster, cheaper, and deeper.”
Globalization is deeply controversial. Proponents of globaliza-
tion claim that it allows poor countries and their citizens to
develop economically and raise their standards of living. Opponents
of globalization argue that the creation of an unfettered interna-
tional free market has benefited multinational corporations in the
Western world at the expense of local enterprises, local cultures,
and common people. Resistance to globalization has therefore
taken shape both at a popular and at a governmental level as peo-
ple and governments try to manage the flow of capital, labor,
goods, and ideas that constitute the current wave of globalization.Sociologyand ourWorld