Peter F. Bang,
The globalization of modernity 1945-2002. The world pictures of de-colonisation, between the ‘clash of civilizations’ and the ‘global world-system’

This article seeks to examine the changes which have occurred in the increasingly popular field of world history within the last 50 years. The Second World War and de-colonisation called into question the established view of the relationship between the West and the Third World and the shape of historical development. It was no longer possible essentially to identify world history with the course of European history since Graeco-Roman antiquity. During the greater part of history, other civilisations had been equal in social power and technological capacity. They needed to be included in world history. Hence, the comparative approach of Weber experienced a renaissance. Western superiority could not be taken for granted. It had developed at a specific point in time and would not continue forever. Global history developed as an attempt to explain through comparisons what specific features had set the West apart during the early modern period. Recently, however, a new generation of world historical studies have begun to reject this approach. Cross-cultural comparison is dismissed as ethnocentric. Instead, the old world is portrayed as one system, which developed in unison at least since the Middle ages and possibly earlier. This is too crude and does not really manage to get by the need for identifying significant historical differences. But the one-world approach does point to the need for including the third world as co-agent in the gradual development of the modern world economy.