KÜRESELLEŞME VE YERELLEŞME: BİR ÇELİŞKİ Mİ?

In describing the janus-faced development process of modernism it is quite difficult to find any other concept more suitable than globalization. 20th century has been not only an era of remarkable developments witnessed in science, technology and welfare policies but also an era of tragic contradictions disrupting the social life and world of values. Globalization as a process embodying suchlike tensions and conflicts marks a new paradigm in which the outcomes of modernizm have become radicalized. In fact globalization is a process which enables the contradictions of modernism to spread all over the world. With its economic, social and cultural aspects this process has also brought about a new fact called “localization”. In spite of its all contradictory and common meaning contents, globalization, in essence, is an economic fact characterized with the capital concentration and the velocity of circulation that capitalist world-system has reached so far. The main dynamic aspect making the globalization problematic today is the unexpected leading effect of economic globalization on disordering or destructing the socio-cultural fabric of life-worlds which is already transforming the world into one market. Ironically, globalization includes both homogenizing universalism of modernism and fragmental particularism of postmodernism. As the capitalist market economy becomes widespread, the world, on the one hand, is shrinking and getting more homogenized and on the other hand the stresses on what is called local and micro identities are becoming more apparent than ever before. In other words, in a world where it is being configured by gradually globalizing processes we are facing with the paradox of localization of policy. The question of whether localization signifies a resistance against global processes or a plain adaptation to those processes is a very important question to interpret the future of the global social life. Localization, in a sense, is related with the distance growing between economic domain and socio-political domain. In this respect, localization reflects rather a resistance of socio-political domain against economic domain. Some authors consider that the globalization is a process operating through particularities and so they conceive the relation between global and local as a dialectical relationship. To this view, the local has determining/formative role on globalization process as well as the global. But it is more accurate to say that there exists a limping dialectic here not an operating dialectic. Because the local does not have a global respect at all times while the dominance of global on economic relations always emerge in local guises. Localization today has turned out to be an identity obsession of people who have nothing to hold on to other than themselves against the global storm.This fact which marks “the rupture of social system and actors” or in other words “the breakaway of subject and structure” and so which results in impotence of policy is one of the most important developments menacing the future of global social life. Liberals the feverish advocates of globalization comprehend this fact as a transitory travail of a long-term global liberalization/integration process which represents itself as an ambiguous political challenge in the short run. In response to this, many other authors who feel suspicious about globalization stress on the falseness of the global-local contradiction through analyzing the process under a capitalism-focused argument. From these analyses, it is sensible to deduce that three different views are in conflict with each other to interpret the global-local contradiction. As it mentioned before, globalization is a process which enables the contradictions of modernism to spread all over the world. The experience of modernism all along has been a historical experience which covered a set of structural conflicts like universal-particular, individual-society, subject-structure, knowledge-value, reality-nature, freedom-reason and theory-practice. Looking at the global-local contradiction from this point of view; and so evaluating the modernism with its structural conflicts which has been local-maker so far as well as global-maker is of crucial importance. Whether held as a dialectical relationship or held as travails of a long-term integration process and yet whether perceived as a nonexistent conflict in reality, the global-local conflict is an inseparable component of modernism experience. It seems so that the subject’s/the local’s contingent policy is to determine the future world which is gradually becoming de-structuralized. But if the radicalization and the universalization of the outcomes of modernism shall come to mean concentration of modernism’s conflicts at the same time, it seems inevitable that “the local” shall be the new battlefield of clashing identities. This study which presents a literature research aims to discuss the relationship between globalization and localization under these arguments and along with the contradictions of modernism.