1 Does Globalization Breed Ethnic Violence?

The tragic events like the September 2001 attacks on the monumental embodiments of American superpower or the capture of hostages in a Moscow theater in October 2002 forced wide-ranging public debate on the darker aspects of globalization.1 A direct causal link between globalization and ethnic/religious violence is assumed on all sides, albeit in a highly polemical fashion, as the result of either Western cultural arrogance and capitalist domination or the maladjustment of Third World societies to market discipline and liberal cosmopolitan modernity. The focus on globalization and ethnic violence suggests that, after a hiatus of nearly a quarter century the problems of world underdevelopment and its discontents once again emerge centrally on the agenda. And once again we are confronted with essentially the old question: does modernization breed revolutions and the dangers of totalitarianism? Today, after the market optimism of the nineties has receded, it is phrased like this: does globalization breed violent anti-Enlightenment reactions? Can democracy take a root in non-Western societies? Nasty questions indeed.