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THE DYNAMICS OF LOCAL-GLOBAL RELATIONS 405

for creating more diversity and the dynamics or to which community or political system
of integrating it. they belong.
Thus, transnational regions have more Because local-global relations are
diversity than individual countries and hence enmeshed in a set of dynamics of change
the tensions between the policies in Brussels with the global impacting settled localities
in the European Union and its member states. more than the local impacts the global (or
The same pattern holds for the global and the sub-systems of the global), the process is
transnational regional, where the European perceived as favoring the global as winners
Union and North American Free Trade and the local as losers. Whether local actions
Association act to protect themselves against can offset the global of the last few decades
intrusions from the global in technology and is a major research challenge for the social
agriculture. sciences as well as for investors. During
This theory of developmental change, gener- recent decades rapid technological advances
ating changes in both the nature of the in transportation and communications,
components of the system and the relationships making controllable territorial boundaries for
among them, departs from classical theories defense of countries and localities nearly
of development as economic growth and impossible, has favored the global even more
its distribution in two ways. First, it includes strongly.
social and political relationships and values, What perhaps is different about contempo-
and not just goods and services of differential rary local-global relations is that variety
value. Second, it brings technology, produc- comes from everywhere, hence the pervasive
ing new objects, and ideas, and combining strangeness of all kinds of variety entering
and fusing them more efficiently and quickly, the local at an accelerating rate. More than
into the heart of the developmental processes that, nation-states have become yet another
of change rather than treating it as exogenous local, despite being mostly unfinished in the
(Teune, 1988a). formation of their capacities to control.
Eventually the developmental dynamics of Local-global relations are, then, funda-
integrating diversity occurs almost entirely at mental in that transnational and global organ-
the highest possible level of human aggrega- izations and institutions compete with lower
tion, the global system, providing access to levels, and the lower levels have ‘collective
all variety anywhere on earth to everyone, perceptions’that they are being exploited and
everywhere at decreasing costs. Hence, glob- destroyed by higher levels (or a response
alization as development weakens the con- reservoir from their histories that responds as
straints of space and time, diminishing the if they were). The conflicts are manifest in
key social ecological theoretical variables of anti-global political protests; populist, often
competition over limited resources and nationalistic, political reactions in political
space. Development, as integrating diversity, movements and political parties; and in
also eliminates the applicability of the logic terrorism against modernity, as represented
of equilibrium that is central to the classical by the West and its symbols of agents of
ecological processes of competition and change for a better life. Most of these overt
conflict in the spatially constrained dynamics acts of conflict are reactions to global forces.
of invasion, dominance and succession. The successes of the resistance to globaliza-
Nonetheless, scarcity and dominance remain tion often appear as a hodgepodge of status
implanted in the physical and social ecology quo arrangements or the restoration of past
of the past in organizations and roads and conditions.
buildings, standing in conflict with processes Whether and how global forces change or
of development that produce access for destroy the local is a political matter of what
nearly everybody to practically any object or is right, that is, of acceptable means for the
idea without regard to either where they are global to enter the local. But it is appropriate