The "global" as clash of grand narratives

Behind the consensus on the need for social science to become «global
» lies a theoretically, methodologically, and politically meaningful
opposition between different ways of understanding this nevertheless
deemed necessary shift. We distinguish between two different narratives
of the global, which are grounded in different «grand» narratives of
modernity/capitalism, and which can be related to alternative geopolitical
standpoints. A «Western narrative of the global as recent discontinuity
of modernity» emerged between the late 1980s and the early 1990s,
associated with the spreading of the idea of «globalization» as a qualitatively
new phenomenon, and aiming at supplanting or integrating
the nineteenth century-based grand narrative of modernity. A «Southern
narrative of the global as longue durée» had however already crystallized
between the late 1960s and early 1970s, as a theoretical expression
of the anticolonial sentiments and movements that had arisen in the
non-Western/peripheral world, and having its focus on the historical
connections which since the sixteenth century had united both core
and peripheral zones of the world(-)system in a single stream of history.
The differences between these two narratives of the global are
then investigated through three crucial theoretical knots: the critique
of «methodological nationalism»; the critique of «Eurocentrism»; and
the relation and tension between «universalism» and «particularism».