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Amman - We live in a new world order: One where history according to Fukuyama, has supposedly come to an end with one dominant political, economic and cultural power superimposing itself on the rest of the world's political, economic and cultural entities, both large and small.
But the new world order, arriving soon after the fall of the Soviet Union in the late 1980s and making itself visible during the Gulf War, is really an extension of the old and familiar world disorder: one of social and economic disparities, of wide gulfs and yawning divides, of colonialism and neo-colonialism and of cultural imperialism and its complicated but ever-present derivatives and manifestations.
Three distinguishable foundations support the new world order today, which is unmistakably and unequivocally led by the United States and all that it represents. These foundations are globalization (through the triumph of capitalism and the free market system); the information revolution (satellite TV, the Internet, the mobile phone) and last but not least media imperialism. This trio of a single global economic system, an information outpour, and media monopoly is the driving force behind the new world order. Ironically, absent from all this are democratic values, human rights, rationalization of consumption, respect and care for the environment and equality among nations.
It is a world order that was defied in Seattle some years ago and in Genoa more recently; criticized by thinkers and intellectuals, students and labor unions, but equally defended by governments and leaders as a good thing. So which is it? Globalization as a world phenomenon began to gain credence as early as the 1960s. The great communicator Marshall McLuhan was among the first to popularize the term and point to its effect when he wrote in 1967 that "Time has ceased. Space has vanished. We now live in a global village.....a simultaneous happening." He talked about the arrival of a global culture; the homogenization of culture, of language, values and knowledge.
Critics from all over the world began to attack the concept referring to terms such as "cultural imperialism", "media imperialism", "electronic colonialism" "ideological imperialism" and "economic imperialism". The crux of all this is cultural imperialism in its widest definition; from economic and political principles to values and language, to...