For Dr. Patrick Mendis, author of "Glocalization: the Human Side of Globalization as If the Washington Consensus Mattered," the evidence of the ever-shrinking world appears in his own community of Reston.
"Reston is a glocal city," said Mendis, who has a doctorate in geography and applied economics. He points to the Dulles Corridor, with its ethnically diverse workforce as example. "You call them foreigners; I call them glocal citizens."
In his new book, Mendis argues that globalization is expanding not only by the policies of politicians, economics and businessmen alone, but also by local citizens, protesters and unskilled workers.
To support his argument, Mendis uses case studies. The religious freedom gained in Cuba by the visit from Pope John Paul II, the apartheid struggle in South Africa and the efforts by socially conscious U.S. consumers to improve conditions in Nike manufacturing plants in Vietnam are all examples of "glocalization."
"It is no longer dictated to the top ... when you come to the local level there is a reaction to those policies," Mendis said.
His 400-page tome is part travelogue, academic essay and foreign policy. Mendis gathered much of the material for the book when he taught on an ocean liner as part of the Semester at Sea Program through the University at Pittsburgh during the spring of 2004.
During the trip, Mendis, with students and faculty members, traveled aboard the Universe Explorer for three months. The voyage started at Washington, D.C. and stopped at such countries as Cuba, South Africa, India and, ending, at Seattle, Washington.
Mendis, originally from Sri Lanka, moved to Reston in 2000 to work for Secretary of State Madeleine Albright and Colin Powell. He has worked as an editor for Asian American Press, he has held several professorships including teaching at military installations all over the world for NATO and Pacific Commands.
"[ON] THE TRIP, every place I went, I wrote what I observed at the local level," said Mendis. His background in journalism gave him the necessary skills to record the things he saw. But he confessed that coming from Sri Lanka — an island slightly bigger than the state of West Virginia but with a population of 20 million people — the level of squalor he witnessed touring the world wasn’t new.
Instead, his students’ reaction is what surprised him. "The poverty, the life style is kind of similar to where I grew up," Mendis said. "It is not a big shock to me." Every day, after taking several trips off the ship, he and his students would return to their "floating campus" and discuss what they saw. "Oh my gosh, these guys have no clue about the world," Mendis said referring to his students.
Kenneth Scott, however, believes that the trip had great influence on Mendis personally and academically. Scott, a retired political officer for the U.S. Embassy in Colombo, Sri Lanka during the early ‘80s, first met Mendis at a reception in the young students honor.
"He was so challenged and impressed by these experiences, that’s why he wrote the book," said Scott who read early versions of the book. "He epitomizes globalization."
Mendis’s wife Cheryl said the poverty is just one component of Mendis’s past, violence has also played a role.
"When he came to the United States, it was because of war in Sri Lanka," She adds. "He’s had to deal with the ramifications of war for many, many years."
All these factors, poverty, war, his Catholic background and the time he spent in a Buddhist school, seems to have shaped a man who is charitable yet a "frugal person himself," according to his wife.
So when he lost five friends to the Tsunami that his home country, Sri Lanka, one way he could help was to turn his electronic book into ink and paper and donate the proceeds form its sales to a 50-year long social movement called Sarvodaya.
THE THIRD INCARNATION for the material, which was originally a column, came after a visit with Arthur C. Clarke. Mendis went to Sri Lanka in April 2004 to see for himself the damaged caused by the Tsunami. While there, he saw his fellow member of the World Academy of Art and Science, Clarke.
"He said, ‘if you turn this into a regular book, I will write the forward’," Mendis remembers Clarke telling him. "Oh my gosh, if he writes the forward — his name is world famous; everybody knows his name, nobody cares about me." Therefore, Mendis spent another year researching and rewriting his book.
The process of writing the book was a learning experience. "Being in Reston you are in a different world when you write about something far away.
"What are we interested over here? Traffic jams, or the drug problems in the high schools, or some kind of environmental problems," Mendis answers himself. "When you write about other cultures you are exposed to the world around us."
Mendis is also someone who likes to include people, and it was no different when it came to his book. His 14-year old daughter, Samantha, helped choose some of the pictures. "The ones that where really unusual are the ones I chose," Samantha said, such as the picture of a building’s image caught in the reflection of a pair of sunglasses.
Gamini, Mendis’s 17-year old son, got the task of editing his father’s manuscript.
"My English ends up being more fluent than his," Gamini said. "He adds ‘the’ where it shouldn’t be and neglects it in other places."
Now Mendis teaches diplomacy through Norwich University’s online graduate program and military officers at Troy University. Teaching online gives him the flexibility to work on his next book, provisionally titled, "Trade for Peace: Economic Tools and Trade Rules as If Strategies Mattered."