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Questo articolo è stato pubblicato il 02 febbraio 2011 alle ore 18:01.
FLORENCE – The term globalization first swept the world in the 1990’s and reached its highpoint of popularity in 2000 and 2001. In 2001, for instance, Le Monde contained more than 3,500 references to mondialisation. But then the figure steadily fell – more than 80% by 2006. Since the outbreak of the financial crisis in 2007, the word’s usage in major newspapers such as the New York Times and the Financial Times has fallen still further. Globalization is on its way out.
A brief history of the concept, and a comparison with another term that also became discredited by overuse, helps to explain what happened.
The twentieth century’s two most important conceptual innovations, totalitarianism and globalization, were originally Italian. The first term defined the tumultuous middle of the twentieth century, the latter its benign ending. Totalitarianism finally disintegrated in 1989, and globalization prevailed.
Both terms originated as criticisms that were supposed to undermine and subvert the political tendencies they described. But both ended up being just as frequently and enthusiastically used by the respective tendencies’ proponents.
Totalitarianism began its conceptual life in 1923 as a criticism or parody by the liberal writer Giovanni Amendola of the megalomaniacal pretensions of Benito Mussolini’s new regime. In the course of a few years, it had become the proud self-definition of Italian fascism, endorsed by Mussolini’s education minister, Giovanni Gentile, who became the official philosopher of fascism, and then incorporated in a ghost-written article by Mussolini himself in the Encyclopedia of Fascism.
In both the hostile and the celebratory use of the word, totalitarianism was intended to describe a movement that embraced all aspects of life in what purported to be a coherent philosophy of politics, economics, and society. Fascists liked to think of themselves as imbued with total knowledge and total power.
Today, few know where the term globalization originated. The Oxford English Dictionary gives as the earliest reference to its current usage an academic article from 1972. The word had been used earlier, but in a rather different sense. It was a diplomatic term conveying the linkage between disparate policy areas (for example, in negotiating simultaneously on financial and security matters).