Arts & International Affairs: Volume 2, Issue 1 | Page 96

Evaluation of National Cultural Policies which started in ���� and is still going
on. Quite diversified, these policies have been formulated by state ministries.
They have helped a (re)structuration of national cultural spaces, preserved
financing and functioning of cultural institutions and raised the awareness
of culture as social value. However, their impacts on cultural creativity
and cultural exchange remain limited. It has become evident by now that
the cultural NGO sector, its supporters and new cultural markets visibly
influence the present day development of Southeast European cultures as
these become ever more open to exchange and communication within the
global context.
Globalization and Globalism
Globalization has been generally understood as an all-inclusive process
that has embraced all types of human activity across the world. Among
countless definitions that have emerged from the descriptions and
analyses of globalization, the following one seems to express the nature of
globalization most adequately for the purposes of the following analysis:
“… globalization is best seen as a multidimensional and multidirectional
process involving accelerated and increased flows of virtually everything—
capital, commodities, information, ideas, beliefs, people—along constantly
evolving axes” (UNESCO ����:�).
Globalization, described and understood as a multidimensional and
multidirectional process, has created a state of globalism. Globalism is often
interpreted as a new historical paradigm that sees a networked interactive
cultural environment emerging from global economic, technological, and
social processes. Such an environment strongly supports the creation
of new globalized cultural contexts characterized by intensive cultural
communication, and this currently is true of most living cultures. The
possibility to experience different cultures deepens the knowledge of the
values they have developed over time. Through intercultural communication
cultural borders have become elusive, flexible, and open (Švob-Đokić ����:�;
����:���). The original cultural varieties are now relatively easily transferred,
used and practiced in very different cultural contexts, which may subject
them to different interpretations and different usages. As cultures are
increasingly linked by networked communication (Benkler ����; Castells
����), they are exposed to the fast and effective exchange of content, values,
symbols, meanings, and cultural products, which have all become relatively
easily accessible due to new technological developments and, in particular,
the Internet.
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