Introduction. Intercultural communication is based on intercultural understanding

Intercultural communication is based on intercultural understanding. Intercultural understanding cannot be realized without an objective and up-to-date understanding of the notion of culture. Globalization, however, has changed the notion of culture. Culture can no longer be described as the property of a single nation.

Globalization has changed the concept of culture. Globalization stands for the overlapping of global and local factors (Robertson, 1997). Human beings are living at the same time within particular settings on the one hand, and between different cultural environments on the other one. This is nothing new.

One lives between one’s home in a family, on the one side, and also is situated in the daily life world – going to school, working in one’s professional life, on the other.

This has been happening for thousands of years. In a culturally globalized world, between-situations are becoming essential for any understanding of culture. There were three stages in globalization.

The first one was political, the founding of the United Nations in 1945.

The second one was the economic globalization, the spread of free-market capitalism in virtually every country of the world since 1980.

The third one is … cultural globalization, which has an essential function for the efficient working of the political and economic globalizations of the world. In fact, the economic and political globalizations have given rise to the problematic triangle “identity–culture–communication” in international relations (Wolton, 2005). As the technology for worldwide transmission of information continues to progress, attempts by some countries to restrict this transmission are becoming more and more ineffective (McPhail, 1989).

The debates on globalization have focused on economic and political issues, but the powerful impact of globalization on culture has not been sufficiently analyzed and researched.

Globalization provides a good opportunity to reflect on the efficiency of the tools which the intercultural enterprise so far has developed to promote intercultural understanding (Kalscheuer, 2002). Thomas’s (1996) definition of culture as a system that is valid for all members of a society or nation, as well as Hall’s (1984) and Hofstede’s (1980, 1991, 1997) “cultural dimensions”, fixed sets of polar attributes (collectivism vs. individualism, monochronic vs. polychronic, high power distance vs. low power distance, high context culture vs. low context culture, etc …) obtained with questionnaires to very small groups of participants of a given society, are not any more adapted to research in intercultural understanding.

Cultures are not homogeneous and stable entities. Recent cultural theory takes into account the increasing mixture of cultures and people within each culture, and emphasizes the hybrid nature of culture (Bhabba, 1994, Pieterse, 1994, Shweder & Sullivan, 1990). Welsh (1999) stresses the reciprocal influences of cultures.