Ten years into the new decade, it's a question worth asking: What does globalisation mean to us and to the West? As recent visits by the heads of state of some of the world's most powerful countries show, globalisation, to the west, primarily means the opening up of new markets.
India's emerging middle class forms a hungry consumer base and Western economies want a share of this pie. Seen this way, globalisation is primarily about business and trade, the exchange of services, labour and capital.
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But what about globalisation as a cultural force? As the world becomes a flatter place, could it be true that globalisation has done more for us in thick cultural terms than it has for them? The West tends to treat globalisation primarily as an economic process to which it has an ambivalent attitude. It's often seen as a threat, an unsettling force that robs locals of their jobs. Of course, there is a flip side: that American and European countries can sell their products to other markets.
There, the popular perception of globalisation is linked with outsourcing and little els
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