Page - 53 - in Limina - Grazer theologische Perspektiven, Volume 2:1

53 | www.limina-graz.eu It posits one specific group as “the people” with the exclusion of others. Pushing back against the hybridity of globalized populations, it insists that only the “pure” (by culture, language, or race) have the right to supremacy. “Race” is a very controverted social construct, and the twenty-first cen- tury is still not free of the pseudo-scientific theories of racial hierarchy that were commonplace in the nineteenth and early twentieth century. Con- cerns about the loss of “white” domination in society and culture underlie many of the attitudes toward those who are “other” and entering wealthy societies. “Otherness” is seen as attenuating and even dissolving the pow- ers of a socially dominant group in a given national setting. The response to such a perceived threat requires exclusion of these “impure” features that “contaminate” our societies. Seen together, then, the negative sides of economic globalization—a grow- ing sense of insecurity and inequality of being left behind or even excluded from its advantages—meet a “threat” coming from “outside” (the im- migration of people deemed different or “other” from the host country), which creates the volatile social brew that is manifesting itself in Europe, the United States, and Australia. Issues of secure physical borders and con- cerns about cultural purity come to dominate political discussion, even in the face of empirical data that do not support the perceived level of threat. The thumos that keeps this brew at boiling point draws upon images of frag- mentation, loss, exclusion, and dilution so as to make the hope for a more commonly shared humanity now seem like a distant dream of the past. Globalization and a Shared Vision of Humanity What does all of this mean for a vision of shared humanity? The proponents of globalization in the first two decades of its current instantiation spoke of creating a “cosmopolitanism”—people being “citizens of the world.” (Beck 2004) This usage of the term goes back to Kant’s vision of a Perpet- ual Peace. This was not intended to obliterate the local and the immediate surroundings and identities; rather, the intent was to say that one could be both a citizen of a given place and a citizen of the globalized world at the same time. Postcolonial critics, however, soon argued that such a grand robert J. schreiter | Globalization and Plural theologies Populism grows out of the sense of loss of control and often carries racial overtones. It insists that only the “pure” have the right to supremacy.