Globalization and Multiculturalism

To reiterate where we are, in Chapter 4 we argued that there is a historical debt to the colonial encounter within ICCM. Our field relies unwittingly on discourses of science, anthropology and earlier colonial commercial practices that were directly involved in the pursuit of formal European Empire. In Chapter 5, we looked at the changes to this complex of economic, political and military interests in the first half of the 20th century. We placed particular focus on the immediate post-World War Two period, when the US emerged as a world power enabled by a commercial-industrial complex. We demonstrated how selected foundational studies of ICCM were infused with the key contextual factors of the day, notably the Cold War and decolonization processes. This final chapter of Part II moves our temporal frame forward to the latter quarter of the 20th century. Whilst the two decades after World War Two were dominated by the institutional practices of modernization, industrialization and development, it might be said that a new paradigm for economic and cultural life emerged over the last three decades of last century: that of globalization. What is the nature of economic and cultural life under globalization? What, if anything, has changed or remained the same? And what implications might it have for our historicizing account of ICCM?