Globalizing Values
Other observers have suggested that globalization leads to effects beyond simply raising awareness and sympathy for people and events in other nations. There is also a diffusion of values on issues such as human rights, democracy, and even on very specific concerns such as health matters.
Sociology Professor Peter Berger has noted that a global network of foundations, academic networks, non-governmental organizations and some governmental, and multinational agencies (such as the UN system and development agencies), have become transmission agents for what they perceive to be positive cultural values
This group spreads its ideas through mass communication, think tanks, educational systems, development projects, the legal system, and other mechanisms of international organizations.
For example, three non-governmental organizations, Amnesty International, the International Campaign to Ban Landmines (ICBL), and the French organization Medicines Sans Frontiers, all won the Nobel Peace Prize at different times for their efforts to extend values about human well-being onto a global level.
Having paid the travel expenses of health ministry officials from developing countries around the world, the assembled ministers all made sympathetic remarks about the lofty goals of the campaign. Nonetheless, Berger notes, many of the developing country officials—whose nations are being ravaged by incurable diseases such as HIV/AIDS and very curable or preventable ones such as cholera, tuberculosis, or malaria—have felt that anti-smoking efforts must rank very low on their list of priorities.
Professor Samuel Huntington has similarly criticized Western groups for taking on such initiatives, however well-intentioned they may be. He argues that values are particular to the nations in which they originate, and he denounces the Western belief in the universality of culture as false, immoral, and dangerous. The West, he says, must abandon both these pretensions and all attempts to impose Western values on the rest of the world.