Globalization: Another False Universalism?

In: Third world quarterly, Band 21, Heft 6, S. 931-942

Abstract

Throughout human history, the idea of moral universalism has repeatedly appeared, but always in some less than universalistic, & hence morally compromised, form: in the religious imagination & culture, in the ideologies of liberalism & official socialism & in the liberal theory of the state, & in the informing worldview of the modern human & social sciences, especially anthropology. This discussion raises the question whether, & poses the possibility that, despite all the travails that globalization processes are unleashing worldwide (& perhaps even unknown to, & despite the political preferences of, many of globalization's more ardent champions), the present era of advancing globalization may be ushering in a truly historical moment & change in the history of the human moral imagination. By producing for the first time, no matter how unevenly, a single, interdependent humankind &, in prospect if not yet in actuality, a single worldwide human community, globalization processes may be producing an objective, experiential basis for the emergence of a genuine & uncompromised moral universalism: as a successor to, & to transcend, the sequence of selective intimations & incomplete intuitions of human universality that has hitherto constituted the history of humankind's moral imagination. Adapted from the source document.