Globalisation is when you don’t have to travel to Fiji Islands to get Fiji water …

As you may know, all the people contributing to our series of blogs about Globalisation come from our Global Youth Panel, a group of 1,000 young people from 100 different countries who got together to discuss issues arising from the COP15 conference and who are now moving on to debating all kinds of global issues. One of the stars of the GYP was Katerina Lygkoni from Greece and her views of globalisaiton are presented here:

In the beginning of the nineties the 'New World Order’ was the term that I was hearing and reading everywhere and had to learn. By the end of the nineties a new term came to replace it and that was ‘Globalisation’….everywhere.

Now ten years after, the term globalisation is no longer the focus of attention as a term but rather the explanation for everything that is happening around the planet. It’s like a hat placed on the new Millennium and goes with everything.

Originally explained by financial terms for the complex business issues of our times, for example the legendary remark “our stock exchange catches a cold when Far East has flu!”. Never thought the day will come when the opposite could also happen: that the state of our small economy could make the World go round crazy and talk about it non-stop.

Globalisation then moved towards the technological and cultural spheres. A Professor in his article smartly termed it as a “Pax techologica” époque. Through globalization alternative cultures were launched by minorities and disadvantaged groups. According to analysts, a cultural pluralism and the promotion of the cultural understanding paradoxically co-exist with the commercialized mass culture. Subsequently it seems that this paradox is responsible for a culturally neutral globalisation.

When the abnormal looks just normal, when we catch ourselves watching on various screens, more than ever before, there is no mystery. It’s the globalization that went local.

As for me, a plastic bottle of water made me realize what globalization is.

In 2001 through an amazing two-month international education program I had the luck to anchor by boat for 2 days in the capital of Fiji islands, Suva. The humidity and heat were high and like the rest I was buying local mineral water in a bottle from local shops. At the moment of the departure I decided to keep the last empty bottle because it was the most exotic souvenir to bring from Fiji. The bottle had a logo called “FIJI natural artesian water” and had a picture of the Fijian exotic flowers. The label at the back of the bottle had the inscription that this water is from a virgin ecosystem, separated by over 1,500 miles of the open Pacific from the nearest continent. Oh how proud I felt knowing that this unique water bottle I got by myself from the exotic island of Fiji!

What a shock to find one day, 8 years later in 2009, piles of this bottle on the shelves of my local Supermarket! What! How come this exotic water bottle that I had to travel to the other end of the world to get it was now standing on my local market! I bought the bottle to examine it better. Same colors, same logo, emphasis on one local flower than many in the design. On the label at the back of the bottle the inscription said “Bottled in Fiji. Shipped to you”. It continued: “Why travel to the South Pacific island of Fiji for a drink of water?”. Later by Google-ing the internet I found that this bottle is imported through companies to all over the world. For me globalization has managed to localize the exotic.

Katerina Lygkoni

Posted by: Dave, 22 Mar 10, 1:40pm

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