Editor’s note: The following article is one of 30 that we’ve selected from our archives to celebrate World Politics Review’s 15th anniversary. You can find the full collection here. "I think many of our problems as a country would be solved if people had thick passports." — Matt Damon, Condé Nast Traveler, 2009. Tourism is as much a political terrain as a cultural practice. It has been promoted as a route to economic development for poor nations and wielded as an instrument of political leverage between nations — as the U.S. embargo against travel to Cuba or the recent easing of [...]
Art and culture are two pillars on which all societies build both identity and a sense of community. But despite the common function of culture in general, the task of developing coherent cultural-heritage laws and policies is complicated by the complexities of particular nations’ and cultures’ interactions with one another as well as the difficulty of finding concepts that are meaningful to all in order to define the resulting legal relationships. Western notions of property, ownership and restitution, for example, may not translate to other cultures, some of which function according to systems of beliefs and values that run counter [...]
Editor’s note: The following article is one of 30 that we’ve selected from our archives to celebrate World Politics Review’s 15th anniversary. You can find the full collection here. Globalization holds out the prospect that the world might become a single place, but the resulting integration is often perceived as increased sameness through new information technologies and the spread of consumer culture. In this vision, whether defined as cultural imperialism, Americanization, or the triumph of market capitalism, global culture tends to be seen as an imposed uniformity and the demise of local cultures. Globalization becomes the arch destroyer of long-sedimented traditions [...]
