1 Introduction
"No two countries that both had McDonald's had fought a war against each other since each got its McDonald's.” This quote of Thomas L. Friedman, a well-known US-American foreign affairs and globalization expert, shows two of the main results of globalization: Companies that are becoming more international and a world in which the countries start cooperating more and more instead of fighting wars. People start in-teracting borderlessly and politicians and newspapers mention the “world community.”
There are mainly three forces that are contributing to the process of globalization: the liberalization of capital movements, the opening of global markets to trade and invest-ment, and the increasing use of information and communication technologies.
If you want to define globalization you have to emphasize that Globalization is a multi-dimensional phenomenon that not only touches political, economic, social and cultural spheres of any society but also reshapes the traditional way of studying the “social world and human nature” first. At political and economic level, globalization is the process of denationalization of markets, politics and legal systems, it is the rise of global economy. Good examples for this development are e.g. the European Union or the negotiations of the European Union with the United States to create the biggest trade zone of the world. At the business level, globalization is when companies decide to take part in the emerging global economy and establish themselves in other countries’ mar-kets. They adapt their products or services to the linguistic and cultural requirements of foreign nations. One of the best adapting companies is McDonald’s. It adapts its menu to different cultures by for example offering rice in Asia or the Big Maharaja in India. Besides the wealth of a country can be measured with the “Big Mac Index”, that