What is cultural and political globalization?

Question

What is cultural and political globalization?

Answer 1

There's two streams of though on this, formed from two different interpretation of what "globalization" means.  

The slightly more popular because it's simpler, stream is globalization as convergence.  The idea is that the whole world is approaching some ultimate similarity, so the many cultures of the world will eventually become one homogeneous group of peoples holding similar values and preferences, and therefore politics.  A lot of this also comes from people feeling that one set of beliefs, perspectives and political ideology is self evidently right, so will ultimately be accepted by one and all.

  Another view of globalization, held by many macro economists, is globalization as interdependence.  This is the idea that differences will persevere and each group will leverage its differences in competencies and preferences like Adam Smith's ideal of specialization. This interdependence means that each culture and group relies on the others contributions to value production.  In terms of political and cultural globalization, this would imply that one culture and political system needs others by which it can define itself.  This would make sense too in that a significant amount of US policy centers on the idea of spreading democracy and free market ideology since it feels the rest of the world lags in this respect.  

  European countries seem to often define themselves by pitting their "values" as contrary to the US.

Answer 2

In a nutshell, turning the world into the United States. Their values their form of democracy, economic system etc. Where we in the West get off talking about freedom and then impose our doctrines upon other nations is quite hypocritical.