«Գլոբալացումը և մենք»

The article by Karen Aghekyan and Rachya Arzumanyan, "Globalization and Us," is devoted to understanding the phenomenon of globalization and its projection onto Armenian society within the context of a broad discussion involving philosophers, historians, and public figures from various countries of the Armenian dispersion and diaspora.

Introduction and Methodology
The material is a transcript of an extensive collective conversation whose participants — K. Aghekyan, R. Arzumanyan, A. Melikyan, L. Mikaelyan, T. Savvidis (Hoffman), V. Abajyan, A. Skakov — examine globalization not as an abstract theoretical category but through concrete examples from everyday life, beginning with the phenomenon of outdoor advertising in Yerevan and Minsk.

Key Point: Advertising as an Indicator of Globalization
Starting from the particular observation of the predominance of non-Armenian faces in Yerevan advertising, the discussion participants formulate a more general thesis:

advertising in postindustrial society ceases to be a sales instrument and becomes a self-sufficient sign, a "brand";
in "third world" countries, excessive advertising performs a different function — it compensates for a sense of peripherality and "secondariness" in the globalized world;
the excess of visual symbols of global success paradoxically intensifies the sense of one's own marginality.

Historical Perspective on Globalization
The discussion then turns to the question of the uniqueness of contemporary globalization processes. Historical analogies are drawn — Hellenism, the Roman Empire, the Ottoman and Russian empires, the Islamic world as earlier forms of global unification. It is noted that:

earlier empires united different peoples within a single legal and cultural system, being "global" long before the era of nation-states;
the Soviet project of denationalization is interpreted as a radical variant of globalization that made the post-Soviet space particularly vulnerable to new globalizing challenges;
contemporary globalization differs not so much qualitatively as in the scale of its reach and the speed at which historical processes unfold.

Discussion of the Essence of the Process
Special attention is devoted to the question of the nature and direction of globalization: whether it is an objective spontaneous process or a managed project. Alternative positions are formulated — from the idea of "fragmegration" and "glocalization" as objective, ambivalent tendencies, to the thesis of globalization as the purposeful destruction of traditional bonds at the "molecular" level of the individual, the family, and the nation.

Conclusion
The key conclusion of the discussion is the position that a fundamentally new and unique parameter of contemporary globalization is its direct appeal to the individual person, who is torn from traditional social structures and drawn into new forms of communication that bypass historically established mechanisms of socialization. It is precisely this circumstance, in the participants' view, that requires the Armenian world to develop its own, historically grounded response to the challenge of globalization.