Globalization, Mobility and Community

Abstract

The will to survival and power motivated human beings to communicate with and migrate beyond the confines of their immediate local environment and communities well before intellectuals began to characterize contemporary society as ‘global’ and the processes involved in shaping it as ‘globalization’. Long before Marx and Engels described the internationalization of capital (1952) or Marshall McLuhan (1962) coined the phrase the ‘global village’, people travelled across continents and oceans to explore and sometimes settle in or colonise foreign lands.¹ So what is different about present times?

Simply put, globalization denotes the expanding scale, growing magnitude, speeding up and deepening impact of interregional flows and patterns of social interaction. It refers to a shift or transformation in the scale of human social organization that links distant communities and expands the reach of power relations across the world’s major regions and continents.

(David Held and Anthony McGrew, 2000, p. 4)

The tourists travel because they want to; the vagabonds because they have no other bearable choice.

(Zygmunt Bauman, 1998, p. 93, Bauman’s emphasis)