Mario Vargas Llosa:

“Cries of Western cultural hegemony are as common as they are misguided. In reality, globalization does not suffocate local cultures but rather liberates them from the ideological conformity of nationalism.” Foreign Policy

OTOH (from June, 2000): Assault of the Earth:

‘Sitting in the Phoenix offices one recent afternoon, the essayist Pico Iyer smiles and admits that his new book — The Global Soul: Jet Lag, Shopping Malls, and the Search for Home — might be a bit “discombobulating.”

No kidding. The literary equivalent of a red-eye flight, the book flits between Los Angeles and Atlanta, Hong Kong and Toronto, England and Japan in an attempt to fathom the human cost of globalism.

As Iyer sees it, our shrinking planet — with its drop-of-a-hat intercontinental travel — has led to a new breed: the Global Soul, a “full-time citizen of nowhere” who dashes around the planet in a sort of cultural limbo. “His memories might be set in airports that looked more and more like transnational cities,” Iyer writes, “in cities that looked more and more like transnational airports. Lacking a binding sense of `we,’ he might nonetheless remain fiercely loyal to a single airline.” ‘ Boston Phoenix