Globalization cannot simply aim at a borderless world, and in fact the rhetoric of borderlessness is deceptive. Transnational corporations are not really transnational, for almost all are based in the West. The utopia of limitless and borderless consumption is offered to those who can pay, primarily Westerners of the middle class and above. The globalized economy, like tourism, depends on the maintenance of a center and a periphery….The progress of modernity depends on the instability of modern identity and the conviction that reality and authenticity are elsewhere. The conquering spirit of globalism—the attempt to turn every other place and thing on the globe into a potentially consumable experience—depends ironically on the maintenance of bordered identities, the preservation of premodern authenticity. The primary boundary, then, that globalization must constantly reinforce is the boundary between the modern and the premodern, the developed and the undeveloped. […]
Globalism has tended to reinforce divisive borders, especially those between the developed and the undeveloped. The cosmopolitan gaze of the tourist seeks to connect with others, but ends up vacating their otherness, and thus destroying the connection. The pilgrim, on the other hand, sees all as potential brothers and sisters on a common journey to God. The pilgrim preserves otherness precisely by not seeking otherness for its own sake, but moving toward a common center to which an infinite variety of itineraries is possible. If God, the Wholly Other, is at the center, and not the great Western Ego, then there can be room for genuine otherness among human beings. The pilgrim church is therefore able simultaneously to announce and dramatize the full universality of communion with God, a truly global vision of reconciliation of all people, without thereby evacuating difference.