Each year in January, Calvin College, with the support of civic-minded individuals and institutions, hosts an extraordinarily rich series of lectures and musical events. This year's January Series brings to Grand Rapids a typically wide-ranging array of speakers, beginning on the 3rd with Robert Hughes, the iconoclastic art critic and cultural commentator, and concluding on the 23rd with Hanan Ashwari, commissioner of information and public policy for the Arab League and a member of the Palestine Legislative Council. In between, audiences at Calvin will hear from figures as varied as the Wilberforce Forum's Chuck Colson, New Testament scholar N.T. Wright, and Harvard University's Henry Louis Gates, Jr., the preeminent African American scholar. Books & Culture is pleased to offer reports on selected lectures in the series.

"The world we live in," Newsweek columnist Fareed Zakaria told an audience at Calvin College, "is not the one we thought we lived in." On January 8, in a lecture entitled "Terrorism in an Age of Globalization," Zakaria argued that the September 11 attacks must be seen in the context of globalization and the upheavals it has caused.

Editor of Newsweek's overseas editions and formerly managing editor of the journal Foreign Affairs, Zakaria is a widely respected commentator on international affairs, a thoughtful and balanced writer who since September 11 has criticized both Arab nations and the American empire.

The impact of globalization, Zakaria said, is more unpredictable than its cheerleaders imagined in the blithe days of the 1990s. Back then, the sales pitch was that globalization would stitch the world together through communications technology and trade, and progress would inevitably follow.

But rapid advances in communications technology have had unforeseen side effects. Linking the world also linked the terrorists. "One of the crucial factors that makes the Osama bin Laden network possible is the democratization of technology," Zakaria said. "Technology by itself does not bring political harmony. Technology cannot be divorced from the political context in which it operates."

And communication technologies have been developed in a way that idealizes efficiency at the expense of human habit. For example, those who declared the death of newspapers upon the arrival of the Internet failed to account for what Zakaria called "the three B's: the beach, the bedroom, and the bathroom"–locations where people prefer the printed page.

The economic picture of globalization has also been cloudy. Many Americans, Zakaria said, see globalization as a "linear process" following a simple formula: implement free markets and wait for the payoff. But nations like Sweden maintained old-fashioned, big- government economies and thrived, while others did everything the gurus of globalization prescribed yet saw their economies stagnate or —like Argentina's—spiral downward.

The most complex aspect of globalization may be its cultural dynamics. For the vast majority of people who experience it, Zakaria said, "globalization is a deeply disorienting process." Developing nations "fear that globalization means Americanization." And they are right, he added—but not in the sense they assume. What Americanization actually means in practice is the local adoption of American methods of satisfying a mass audience, rather than the spread of a centralized American culture.

Zakaria cited France as a nation that has preserved its ethnic culture, most notably its fine cuisine, even with the advent of McDonald's. On the global scene, fast food is a vindication of the new middle class, Zakaria said, rather than a Trojan horse of American culture. "The new middle class wants to go out to eat," and McDonald's is a cheap and convenient option.

What's crucial is the degree of responsiveness to new demands created by globalization. Zakaria noted that France produces its films according to the preferences and prescriptions of an elite board, but the Hollywood approach of playing vendor to a mass audience's desire for simple heroes and dazzling special effects has caught on with the broad French public. As a result, the French film industry is reeling. By contrast, India's film industry already caters to local tastes, and so Hollywood has not made inroads there. (The same is true of Asian rock, the success of which makes Asia resistant to Western rock.) So rather than Tom Cruise being a secret agent for American values in a global film market, "the reality is that American films are producing copycats in local areas."

In several pieces he's written in recent months, Zakaria has connected this theme to the Arab world and the supposed cultural showdown pitting Western civilization against the Islamic world. Many commentators have asserted that Arab anger is fueled in part by America's ubiquitous cultural exports. Not so, Zakaria wrote in the December 24 issue of Newsweek:

"Tip O'Neill once said that all politics is local. So is the politics of rage. The frustrations of ordinary Arabs are not about the clash of civilizations or the imperial foreign policy of the United States. They are a response to living under wretched, repressive regimes with few economic opportunities and no political voice. And they blame America for supporting these regimes."

If the Arab world achieves stability and openness sufficient to join the world in worrying about McDonald's, Zakaria wrote, "that kind of anti-Americanism will be a sign of a healthy political culture."

Still, America must re-evaluate its role in what Zakaria called in his lecture a unipolar globalized world. "We have to take the view of the person lying on the floor looking up at the 800-pound gorilla," as Zakaria put it. America cannot continue to "swoop in and then retreat," but must stay engaged in the world as an advocate of democratic political expression. "It must achieve its goals without being seen as an evangelist or a target," Zakaria said. "This will not be an act of charity, but an act of survival."

Nathan Bierma is a communication arts and sciences major at Calvin College. He has interned at Time, Inc. and at the Chicago Journal, a weekly newspaper.