Les enjeux de la mondialisation culturelle

Most people know that globalization has dramatically lowered economic borders, relocated production, forced major policy changes, promoted Far Eastern growth, created new inequalities, challenged security arrangements and begun shifting power balances. In all this, however, we don't bother much with culture even though globalization is promoting cultural changes that could be hugely significant. Cultures are simultaneously constitutive of individual social behaviors and essential to human social existence. Globalization brings a new symbolic ecosystem, a "globalizing hyper-culture" spreading symbols in new ways at fantastic speeds, that creates a virtual "sixth continent" separate from tangible geography. This new culture tends to be a-historical, a-moral, and resocializing, constituting a new, virtual geo-cultural area. There should be concern about the potential for disorientation and loss faced by existing cultures and their members plus more general threats to cultural diversity, whether disaster is implied or not. Such threats no longer come primarily from proselytizing, colonization, conquest by powerful states, and hostile legal impositions, but rather from a free, painless, often seductive, circulation of symbols that can shift and undermine cultures, disrupt identities, and marginalize languages without anyone's consent and sometimes without anyone really noticing. With reference to cultural globalization and probably well beyond it, traditional state actors and international organizations are ineffective agents of global governance and unlikely to supply the controlled cultural globalization that is needed. Cultural globalization completely overwhelms existing national boundaries, state legal authorities, and the scope of international organizations. It calls for experiments with new forms of global governance involving new instances of concertation, beginning with existing geo-cultural entities such as Francophonie, Europe of Cultures, and IbéroAmerica).