Openness and globalization have a long pedigree. Just count all the different cultural traditions mixing in this single paragraph, and keep in mind these guys didn’t have trains, cars, or planes:
In 668 Pope Vitellius sent Theodore of Tarsus, who had studied in Athens, to be Archbishop of Canterbury. His friend Adrian, who accompanied him, was an African, a Greek and Latin scholar. It was he who, with the Irish, propagated the culture of the ancients among the Anglo-Saxons.
-Henri Pirenne, Mohammed and Charlemagne, p. 127.
Aristotle was on to something when he described man as a social animal.
Inertia Wins! 