Globalization

Globalization is a hot buzzword a lot of people like to throw around. Many seem to limit their view of globalization to economics and are primarily interested in free trade and its problems and benefits, like the WTO and the people who protest it. Thomas Friedman, a columnist for the New York Times who has written extensively on globalization, belongs in this category. However, the world is becoming global in a cultural sense as well, which is sometimes overlooked. Even when it has been studied academically (Arjun Appadurai at the University of Chicago is one of the pioneers of this field), that academic knowledge is not necessarily transmitted outside the ivory towers of academia. Globalization isn’t just free trade or getting a curry on the way home from the pub instead of fish and chips. It’s much more fundamental in changing our world in ways that are much more subtle than free trade and curry. In fact, the academy is still debating exactly what’s included and what the effects are. Here, three ways of thinking about globalization from several different authors are explained.

A great deal of thought has gone into understanding the consequences of the end of the Cold War. Analysts offer all kinds of distinctions between terms frequently used and philosophical arguments to justify their flavor of the definitions. While there may be no escaping such hair splitting to ensure clarity, it is nonetheless clear that after the end of the Cold War, the rules of nearly every game have changed. The Cold War assumptions about how the world worked economically, politically, socially, and militarily are now inappropriate. Thus it should not be surprising that anything essentially founded on the assumptions of the Cold War is not accurate.

This new system is most often called globalization. Here, the term globalization will be used to refer to this larger world order and structure. Globalization has multiple different aspects, some of which are economic, political, sociological, and cultural. There are a number of distinguishing features of globalization that clearly implicate certain success strategies. Economically, globalization is founded on laissez-faire neoliberalism. Open economic borders and transparency and consistency in business practices are very important in this economy. The European Economic Community (EEC), the precursor to the European Union, evolved in order to facilitate free trade and otherwise open intra-European economic boundaries. Politically, globalization is much more complex and multipolar than the Cold War system. There are many more actors in the political arena today. Instead of two opposed superpowers, there are many nation-states and other groups who are vying for political power internationally. These political and economic changes also result in changes in global sociology and culture. Understanding the world today requires understanding globalization.

Economic globalization has lead to political changes

During the Cold War, both superpowers gave money to their allies in order to keep loyalties on their side. It cost the United States and the Soviet Union considerable amount of money to compensate for various inefficiencies in the economies of both their own country and in those of their allies’ out of their state pockets. At the time, the expenses were considered justified because of political motives. After those motives ceased to exist, the amount of money needed to keep the support was staggering with no real purpose – so of course, it was dropped. As a result, the reality of capitalism started shaping the national economies and national politics of most countries.

When economic barriers were removed, the global economy started growing. When capitalism started moving across borders, borders started to mean less and less in economic terms. This meant that the market became much bigger than it had ever been before. Competition was occurring between firms on opposite sides of the Earth. Money markets were becoming very interlinked as investors could place money in markets that had previously been inaccessible. These economic facts can’t be escaped, and they impose a sort of ‘globalization of necessity.’ The price paid for retaining protectionism is lack of economic growth, which very few can afford, hence making economic globalization an inescapable reality.

The hallmarks of free-market capitalism are therefore those of globalization; laissez-faire, free trade (the WTO), competition, and creative destruction. The masses of investors who control money flows all have a small part of world power, and the invisible hand guides them across the world to maximize efficiency.

These economic changes require political changes. Political changes were expected after the Cold War, but in addition to the new political system evolving, nurturing the free markets that give growth became necessary. The centrality of capitalism in globalization should not be underestimated. In order to maintain growth, politicians can deviate little from a standardized set of choices. This spills over indirectly into other political matters. These more transnational economic practices create more points of contact as well as contention between people. The realism of the cold war era is applicable to fewer and fewer interactions. Instead of the ordered, balanced, walled-up world of the cold war we have a much more chaotic world. It should not come as a surprise, then, that a more complicated political model is needed to describe the world today. One improvement on realism is complex interdependence. (Keohane & Nye, 2000)

Comparison of Realism and Complex Interdependence

Realism uses four main assumptions:

International politics is struggle for power dominated by organized violence.
States are coherent units which are the dominant actors in world politics.
Force is a usable and effective instrument of policy.
Hierarchy of issues in world politics, headed by military security: view of “high politics” of military security and “low” politics of economic and social affairs.

Complex interdependence has three assumptions:

Multiple channels connect societies: interstate (between coherent states), transgovernmental (between non-coherent states), and transnational (between non-state units) relations.
Agenda of interstate relationships consists of multiple issues that have no clear hierarchy.
Military force is not used by governments toward other governments within the region, or on the issues, when complex interdependence prevails. (Keohane & Nye, 2000) Another way of saying this is the Golden Arches Theory of Conflict Prevention, which says that no two countries that have McDonald’s have gone to war since they got McDonald’s. (Friedman, 2000)

Multiple channels

Some examples of the multiple channels that connect societies that are not interstate relations are migrants, diasporas, multinational corporations, transnational activist groups like Greenpeace, and even individuals like Osama bin Laden and Ted Turner. Mobile groups of people like migrants, expatriates, and diasporas create links between countries of origin and destination countries in an often tangible way – consider curry becoming the national dish of the United Kingdom, or the nearly bilingual status of Miami. Multinational corporations are often given government attention, and many multinational companies spend considerable effort in maintaining good relations with governments in the countries that they do business in in a manner strongly reminiscent of diplomacy. The actions of the United States toward Osama bin Laden after the attack on the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001 are very similar to declaring war – not on a country, but on an individual. None of these dynamics are accounted for or even considered in realism, but it should be clear that they do, in fact, influence both world events and grassroots understanding of the world.

No clear hierarchy of issues

The idea that military security is “high politics” and economic affairs are “low politics” may still be appealing to some, but has in practice been abandoned. The political debates in nation-states today almost without exception address economics. In most Western countries, the state of the economy both at home and elsewhere is under constant examination. Economics is de facto a very important concern in politics today. Any politician who spoke only of military security, but not economics, would stand little chance of getting elected. Any leader in a non-democratic country who only spoke of military security, but not economics, would encounter significant economic pressure internationally, if not domestically, to consider economics. While people generally seem to agree that economics is important, not everyone thinks it is the most important, and are willing to trade growth for other perceived benefits. Some think that caring for the environment is more important than economics at times, others think that economics is important but opposing free trade is also important, and still others have other ways of ranking importance. On any domestic arena, there is no equivalent of nation-wide political priority structure in the way there was during the Cold War. Therefore no clear hierarchy of issues arises.

Military force not pivotal

A consequence of the increased importance of economics and decreased importance of military might is that both the direct and indirect cost of going to war acts as a deterrent from going to war. Tom Friedman has formulated the somewhat informal but still enlightening Golden Arches Theory of Conflict Prevention. He argues that once a country has reached a state of economic development where McDonald’s expands into it, there will also be a sufficiently large middle class that wishes to protect its way of life to be very reluctant to go to war. He suggests that the citizens of that country will be the most unwilling to go to war with another country of roughly similar development level, i. e. a country that also has McDonald’s, because the direct and indirect cost of going to war with such a country is so high that extremely few situations would make the war worth the cost. Therefore, he posits that no two countries that have McDonald’s will go to war against each other. (Friedman, 2000) The unwillingness of an economically developed country to go to war, even with a less developed country, can be witnessed in the debates about the war the United States waged on Iraq in 2003. While many ethical and moral arguments for both sides were offered, the cost of the war was also debated. Some of those who opposed the war asked why the enormous cost of the war was justified – a question rarely asked during the Cold War.

The decreased importance of military security and the increased importance of economics and the generally more chaotic and dynamic characteristics of globalization compared to the Cold War suggest that we leave realism behind in favor of complex interdependence. The politics that serve best in complex interdependence are very different from what serves best in realism, and understanding complex realism also aids us in understanding both domestic and international events.

Political and economic changes have changed global sociology

These economic and political changes have resulted in new social and cultural organization worldwide. Opportunities have opened up to millions of people, but privileges have also been lost for millions of others. The foothold capitalism has acquired over world economics creates a situation in which job security and profits are not what they used to be. The well-educated are becoming the merely educated as everyone is trying to get ahead. Put all together, globalization is moving people to see the world in new ways. Some are reassured by what they see in their future, others feel threatened. Regardless, the increased contact and communications between people is resulting in social changes. One example of sociological changes could be someone who was raised partly in the United States, partly in Russia, and feels both American and Russian. Such an identity would have been extremely difficult to maintain during the Cold War, but is much more acceptable today.

Another, more encompassing, example of sociological changes can be seen in global cities. Large, internationally connected cities like Bombay, New York, Beijing, and London have certain characteristics in common due to the way the global economy works. Global cities have immense concentrations of economic power and are like command centers in the global economy. They often have great diversity in their residents compared to the surrounding regions due to immigrants, migrants, expatriates, and minorities. Their importance as economic powerhouses brings in many of these diverse people and brings forth certain support systems for the businessmen: the five-star hotels, the major international airport, the well-serviced apartment complexes with luxury gyms, European furniture, and American apartment layout. These business support systems are similar around the world for the simple reason that when businessmen travel, they most often do not have time to adjust to local conditions. The business conventions give rise to global city conventions. The diversity and flux of people and ideas through global cities result in a more open-minded and global orientation than in the surrounding area. These strategic sites tend to disconnect from their surrounding regions. Due to the disconnection from the surrounding area and the strong connection to the global economy, these large cities can become partially denationalized. These cities are also places where people increasingly adopt transnational identities. (Sassen, 2000)

Inside these cities we also see new geographies of centrality and marginality as well as formation of new identities. Central business districts receive large investments in real estate, infrastructure, and telecommunications, which low-income parts of the same city receive very little resources. Highly educated residents of the city have very high incomes, while low- and medium-educated residents see their incomes fall. Global cities are often deeply divided between these two groups. In addition, the highly educated residents, the new residents, and ‘users’ of the city claim large parts of the city that previously ‘belonged’ to low- and medium-educated people, changing the social morphology of the city. Often the locals lose out and their districts fall into disrepair, and violence may be the result. (Sassen, 2000)

These sociological changes are also reflected in the exchange of ideas and values as well as imagination. As the movement of people influences cities as well as countries, even people who are not mobile themselves come in contact with new ideas, practices, technology, information, and economic practices flows of thought go between people. A good way of modeling the complex interchange of thoughts between people is as a cultural economy. (Appadurai, 1996) The different dimensions of the cultural economy may be and often are disjoint. People in one place may feel one way about economics and another way, incompatible with the first, about immigration. These disjunctures may even be part of a single individual. The disjunctures in the global cultural economy can be explored by looking at the relationship among five dimensions of global flows:

Ethnoscapes: landscapes of people who constitute the shifting world in which we live
Mediascapes: distribution of electronic capabilities to produce and disseminate information and the image of the world created by those media
Technoscapes: global configuration of technology
Financescapes: global capital configuration
Ideoscapes: concatenation of images, often directly political, composed of Enlightenment elements

The suffix -scape indicates fluidity and irregularity, because it is a matter of fact that they are all in constant change. As people move, ethnoscapes change; as technology is moved around and invented, technoscapes change; as capital moves around the world as part of the global economy, financescapes change. Extension and changes in reach of media from different places make mediascapes change. Different television and radio channels are available in different places. When ideas are exchanged and spread, ideoscapes change. (Appadurai, 1996)

Ethnoscapes, technoscapes, and financescapes are deeply disjunctive and profoundly unpredictable. Global flows occur in and through the growing disjunctures among these landscapes. These landscapes are the building blocks of multiple imagined worlds of historically situated imaginations of persons and groups around the world. As people encounter the flows, they do so within their historical context. From their context and the flows, they construct a worldview. The scapes are deeply perspectival constructs. Therefore, the worldview that any one of us constructs depends on who we are, where we are, and what scapes we see and how we interpret them; therefore there will be multiple ways of imagining the world, and so there will be multiple imagined worlds. (Appadurai, 1996)

Appadurai sees modernity as the practice of imagining where you would like to be. Following Emile Durkheim, anthropologists view collective representations as objective social realities and facts. Appadurai proposes that due to relatively recent changes founded on technological changes, imagination has become such social fact, and that this leads to a “plurality of imagined worlds.” (Appadurai, 1996) He argues that imagination has become part of everyday, ordinary life for ordinary people, instead of being the sole domain of the privileged and powerful. Ordinary people can and do imagine themselves in different circumstances and different places, due to the increased rates of migration and the technologies that transmit images of other lifestyles and other places. He emphasizes that these lifestyles and places are not fantasy, but are more properly imagined than fantasized. The mediascapes that people are exposed to stimulate agency, and the imagination fuels action rather than dreams of escape. This imagination is taking place on an individual scale, but the collective imagination of a group of people that begin to feel and imagine things together is pivotal. As groups share collective imagination, they create new social realities. (Appadurai, 1996)

Another way of seeing the sociological dynamics at work is by studying the degree to which people feel emotionally connected to the rest of the world. Rosenau suggests the notion of distant proximity as a key concept in studying how various groups of people relate to the rest of the world. Rosenau defines a distant proximity as something that feels proximate and distant simultaneously, and suggests that distance can be both physical and across socially constructed spaces. (Rosenau, 2003 p. 6) Using the concept of distant proximities, we can envision people feeling very proximate in a socially constructed space to occurrences that are very distant physically, or people feeling very distant in an abstract social space to events that are spatially proximate. He outlines a new theoretical perspective on what he calls ‘dynamics beyond globalization,’ essentially mapping out twelve groups of people classified by their relation to distant proximities.

Rosenau suggests that what is usually termed globalization is in fact better thought of as an emergent epoch defined by complex interactions between often casually linked integrative and fragmenting events. He further notes that we are not only living in an era where globalization is increasingly important, we also live in an era where local events and identities are becoming more pronounced. For example, in the United States a cable television package is likely to contain both channels that carry globally broadcasted news as well as channels that carry only local news and programming. People are building more transnational identities as well as rooting their identity more fiercely in localism. Since localizing and fragmenting trends are not necessarily the same (nor are globalizing and integrating trends), this gives rise to a series of complex events that describe the world. Rosenau calls this simultaneously fragmenting and integrating epoch fragmegration. (Rosenau, 2003)

Distant proximities are a central part of fragmegration. Rosenau considers the best way to understand the world today to be seeing world events as “an endless series of distant proximities in which the forces pressing for greater globalization and those inducing greater localization interactively play themselves out.” (Rosenau, 2003, p. 4) He points out that in analyzing distant proximities, one discovers many complex tensions and polarities, none of which are necessarily zero-sum. Because of this, distant proximities cannot be treated as plain relationships. “(…) the tensions that sustain other polarities are non-zerosum in character, with their globalizing dynamics serving to reinforce, or to be reinforced by, their localizing components. That is why distant proximities cannot be treated as simple relationships. They are rooted in complexity, in complementary as well as competitive processes.” (Rosenau, 2003, p. 5) Distant proximities are largely subjective appraisals of what people experience as remote or close-at-hand. There is no clear criterion for distinguishing the two. Rosenau sees nearness and farness as denoting both scale and space as well as being ranges across people move physically and with their thoughts. As people move, they can be active in geographic locations and socially constructed spaces. (Rosenau, 2003)

Using this view, global sociology can be seen in terms of how groups experience distant proximities. Rosenau outlines twelve ‘worlds’ in which people live, while being careful to point out that it is a simplification and spillovers and overlaps are to be expected. Rosenau’s concept of world denotes a worldview through which people arrange their priorities, decide on values, determine goals, and decide which horizons are salient to them. These worlds will be outlined briefly here.

Local worlds

People that live in the local worlds are “oriented toward local horizons.” (Rosenau, 2003, p. 87) They are aware of remote places and events that occur far away, but they interpret distant places and events through an essentially local worldview and treat them as something that can be incorporated into their existing local worldview. For locals, “place and rootedness are as important as ever. Their very identity is tied to place, and they cannot conceive of living anywhere else, for they are dependent on a piece of ground for their livelihood and on a particular culture and language for their sense of well-being.” (Richard J. Barnet and John Cavanagh, Global Dreams: Imperial Corporations and the New World Order. New York: Simon and Szhangster, 1994, p. 21; in Rosenau, 2003, p. 87.) The four local worlds are Insular Locals, Resistant Locals, Exclusionary Locals, and Affirmative Locals. Insular Locals are only concerned with spatial proximities and events that they can experience directly. They are essentially disconnected from the rest of the world and are the only locals not to experience distant proximities. They often live in close communities. Resistant Locals perceive some distant proximities to be threatening and thus worthy of being resisted. They often live in political arenas. Exclusionary Locals also view some distant proximities as threatening, but they seek to avoid them rather than resist them. They often live in enclaves. Affirmative Locals are not threatened by distant proximities. Instead, they can absorb them without substantially changing their local worldview. They often live in open communities.

Global worlds

People that live in the global worlds tend to live their lives on a scale that exceeds the local. The differences between the global worlds stem from differences in how that scale is conceived and in how nonterritorial dynamics are contextualized. The four global worlds are Affirmative Globals, Resistant Globals, Specialized Globals, and Territorial Globals. Affirmative Globals are people who “contextualize globalizing dynamics in both positive and nonterritorial terms.” (Rosenau, 2003, p. 121) Affirmative Globals believe that on the whole, globalizing dynamics will benefit everyone, even though there may be downsides or temporary problems. They are often so optimistic that they do not feel a need to publicly defend their ideas and interests. There are both elite and nonelite Affirmative Globals. Elite Affirmative Globals are mostly people whose career positions and career successes have cumulated into influence, wealth, and respect that gives them power. They are likely to be concerned about the world and its processes as a whole and become concerned with a wide range of problems in a global context that presumes deep interdependence among all areas of human activity. The nonelite Affirmative Globals are people who see globalizing dynamics in a positive light due to family background, global experiences, education, or economic circumstances.

Affirmative Globals share characteristics due to their tendency to move around in Appadurai’s five scapes. They live in a world of distant proximities, where events can resonate and have consequences far beyond where they originated and far away from where an Affirmative Global is physically located. While not all Affirmative Globals have the same concerns or the same view of their identity and social obligations and what they have obligations to, what they share is that in order to follow events interesting to them, they have to contextualize the distant events, and do so for a variety of issues and events. Rosenau specifically points out that Affirmative Globals are unlike earlier global-minded people in that they “lack clarity with respect to their own identity.” (Rosenau, 2003, p. 130) Some Affirmative Globals resolve their identity ambiguity by adopting a world-wide orientation. Rosenau suggests that Affirmative Globals show several contradictory tendencies in how open they are. Some he considers involved in a “jet-set searching for roots” (Hannerz, Transnational Connections, p. 75; in Rosenau, 2003, p. 128); others he sees as open to interacting and learning about the Other and tolerant of differences; yet others he perceives as self-centered and selfish.

Resistant Globals also live in a world of distant proximities, but perceive globalizing dynamics as needing deep reform in various ways. What those changes should be and how to achieve them is not agreed upon. Resistant Globals and Affirmative Globals often clash politically. Specialized Globals are similar to Resistant Globals, but instead of being concerned with globalization as a whole, Specialized Globals are concerned with single issues. Elite Specialized Globals are often intellectuals, spokespeople for transnational social movements, or foundation officials, while the nonelite Specialized Globals are teachers and those who see themselves as involved in a global social movement. The elite Specialized Globals are more or less an international intelligentsia. Territorial Globals are public officials who are aware of distant proximities, but are primarily concerned with their territorial jurisdiction.

Private worlds

In addition to the local and the global worlds, there are also four private worlds, consisting of people who feel disconnected from the rest of the world. These people have experienced distant proximities, but have either tuned out from them or become deeply alienated by them. Passives are people who have never been caught up in either local or global affairs, while the Alienated have moved around among the local and global worlds and rejected all of the local and global worlds they have lived in. Both are further split into two subgroups, for a total of four private worlds. Tuned-Out Passives eschew participating in either local or global worlds. They are apolitical, but may participate in non-political social activism. Circumstantial Passives are simply too preoccupied with surviving and taking care of daily living to care about either local or global worlds. Rosenau suspects that their numbers may be very small and that they may be a theoretical possibility rather than a reality due to the likelihood that very poor people would seek help from a local community. Alienated Cynics have a deep mistrust of larger forces and organizations around them and are very conscious of their disdain for public arenas. Their cynicism can become a way of life. Alienated Illegals feel disconnected from the world and are ready to engage in illegal activities to reach some goal for changing the state of the world. They are often willing to use violence. The goals vary, but some infamous Alienated Illegals are Theodore Kaczynski, the Unabomber, and Osama bin Laden.

Movement among these twelve worlds is possible, and it is also possible to live in one world with respect to some issues and in another with respect to some other issue. Movement among worlds can be in response to attitude changes due to intensification of issues without changes to roles or identity or in response to changes in roles and identity. Moving among worlds is rarely easy or painless, but is becoming increasingly common because of the complexity of the fragmegrative epoch. Fragmegration is rooted in uncertainties and nuance and compels individuals to balance multiple identities and issues as the world around them becomes more complex and dynamic. Rosenau sees a correspondence between movement of people in the ethnoscapes and movement through the twelve worlds.

Rosenau also specifically addresses the impact of fragmegration on identities. He posits that individuals are compelled or enabled to negotiate their identity when they encounter new ideas, cultures, and transformed situations. Because “one of the consequences of fragmegrative dynamics (…) is that the coherence and boundaries of cultures, like those of states, have become porous and frayed” (Rosenau, 2003, p. 188) he points out that even immobile people are confronted with wide-reaching changes. In terms of Appadurai’s model, the changes in ideoscapes, mediascapes, ethnoscapes, and financescapes are prompting changes in cultures.

These changes in cultures mean that adoption of an originally foreign norm or practice does not necessarily mean that the culture that the norm or practice originated in is being transplanted; it could also be what Appadurai calls indigenization, the incorporation and reinterpretation of something foreign into a culture. (Rosenau, 2003) Saussure suggested that language is a symbolic system of signs. A sign is composed of a signifier and a signified together. The signifier stands for the signified. (Agar, 1994) In terms of Saussure’s signifiers and signifieds, the originally foreign signifier acquires a new signified in the ‘new’ culture. This is not cultural transmission, because when the signified changes, the new signifier-signified pair becomes a new sign. Cultural transmission would require transmission of the complete original sign, with signifier and signified intact.

Indigenization adds a layer of complexity to cross-cultural identity analysis – how does one determine what culture a particular idea, norm, or practice originated in or is part of? In theory, all that would be required to determine which culture a practice is part of is to determine which sign is in question, and then differentiate that sign from other signs with the same signifiers. However, this may be easier said than done, and tracing ideas, which are not signs, is much more complicated as ideas change with time even within a culture. The answer is highly context-dependent, and finding the answer or deciding whether the answer even matters is a key part of negotiating global identities.

Rosenau also specifically highlights that people “whose lives are marked by prolonged residence in two or more countries are especially subject to the opportunities and vulnerabilities inherent in the contradictory pressures of fragmegration.” (Rosenau, 2003, p. 192) However, while acknowledging that expatriates and other mobile people are included in this category, Rosenau thinks that immigrants confront the challenges of acculturation most fully and uses the case of immigrants to explore how a simultaneity of consciousness might operate. He proposes that migrants across cultural borders are the most likely to maintain a simultaneity of consciousness, and that they may not be willing to change identities completely as they move and instead choose to maintain multiple identities. The speed and variety of immigration could then give rise to “the creation of a new layer of citizenship above that of the nation – the citizen who does not belong.” (Stephen Castles and Alastair Davidson, Citizenship and Migration: Globalization and the Politics of Belonging New York: Routledge, 2000, p. 157; in Rosenau, 2003, p. 194) However, Rosenau’s speed and variety seems to apply to expatriates and their families to an even higher degree than immigrants.

Expatriation causes sociological changes

Transnational corporations are operating increasingly across borders instead of as groups of smaller companies as free-market capitalism has taken hold, and as a result transnational corporations are using expatriates more and more. The changes in global sociology are intimately linked to the increased frequency of expatriation. Expatriates experience distant proximities, are more likely to be globals than locals, are part of the flux in the five scapes, and contribute to the deterritorialization of global cities. This increase in expatriation has also been proposed to create a new sociological class. The exact properties and standing of this class have not been completely agreed upon. It has been suggested to be that of a transnational, non-Marxist capitalist class (Sklair, 2000), but others have rejected the validity of the Marxist analysis (Rosenau, 2003). Although not all expatriates are business expatriates, the rates of expatriation for other groups, such as missionaries, military personnel, and diplomats, have not increased as much as business expatriates. The expatriates also fill an important role in complex interdependence as some of the multiple channels that connect countries.

Although expatriation is not a new phenomenon, it was rather uncommon in the past. Sojourners were unusual and there was little consensus over routines of international life. In contrast, transnational corporations have developed routines, although somewhat lacking at times, for sending expatriates abroad. Having lived abroad is simply much more common today than it has been in the past. Already in the 1950s – before the onset of globalization – there were many more expatriates than during the 19th century. During this time, however, most expatriates lived in a clearly defined expatriate community. Useem & Useem invented terms to describe the expatriate community they lived in while in India. They termed the culture from which adult expatriates came the first culture, the host culture the second culture, and the interstitial culture of the expatriate community the third culture. (Useem, R.H. (1993). Third Culture Kids: Focus of Major Study. Newslinks, Newspaper of the International School Services. 12(3), 1; in Pollock & van Reken, 2001, p. 21) The term has since been redefined as a term to for the lifestyle “created, shared, and learned” by those who are in the process of relating to a new culture. (Useem, R. H. Third Culture Kids. Year of publication and publisher unknown, p. 1; in Pollock & van Reken, 2001) The third culture is not merely a sum of partial cultures. Living in the third culture requires thinking about heritage, belonging and identity in ways not common elsewhere, and as a result the third culture is a way to approach the world. As the number of expatriates worldwide increases, increasing numbers of people are part of the third culture as well.