Metáforas de la globalización: una mirada europea

Metaphors of globalization: a European perspective

Abstract

The article first takes a brief look at the idea of globalization, long before the current term was used, as an awareness of an organically articulated reality that has reached the farthest corners of the known world. Despite the remote antecedents of the phenomenon and the existence of an "early globalization" at the end of the 19th century, the onset in the use of the term occurred at the end of the 20th century, due to the confluence of a series of factors mentioned in the article. It was also then that a whole repertoire of metaphors emerged to explain a phenomenon that is difficult to conceptualize. The article emphasizes a set of images – the globe, the ship, the human anatomy, the hamburger... – that have been used to represent globalization from Europe and often to combat it as an expression of American power in a dehumanized world.