Global Culture and Society in the Twenty-First Century

While warfare, booms, and crises continued, increased migration and growing global communications were changing culture and society, prompting many to ask what would become of national cultures and Western civilization itself. Would the world become a homogeneous mass with everyone wearing the same kind of clothing, eating the same kind of food, watching the same films, and communicating with the same smartphones? Or would there be a global holocaust brought on by a clash of civilizations or a new war of religions? The information revolution and the global sharing of culture argued against the cultural purity of any group, Western or otherwise. “Civilizations,” Indian economist and Nobel Prize winner Amartya Sen wrote after the terrorist attacks of September 11, “are hard to partition . . . given the diversities within each society as well as the linkages among different countries and cultures.”

Through global communication and migration, some believed that Western society had changed even more rapidly from the 1980s into the twenty-first century than it had hundreds of years earlier when it came into intense contact with the rest of the globe. Culture knew no national boundaries, as East, West, North, and South became saturated with one another’s cultural products via satellite television, films, telecommunications, and computer technology. Consequently, some observers labeled the new century an era of denationalization—meaning that national cultures as well as national boundaries were becoming less distinct. There is no denying that even while the West absorbed peoples and cultures, it continued to exercise not only economic but also cultural influence worldwide. Yet the identity of the West was becoming unclear as Westerners themselves absorbed the cultures of other regions.