Аннотация:Under the influence of the processes of globalization by the beginning of the 20th century humanity had finally became globalized. Thus, all the opportunities for extensive development of the world community had expired. Since then, our social life finally became a planetary phenomenon. Evidently, sooner or later, we should have achieved understanding of this newly acquired quality using appropriate categories. In the 20th century, cultural and (later) civilizational approaches looked the most useful for describing this new reality. But at the moment each of them, isolated, is unable to depict the contemporary global world adequately.
Now, when the global processes embrace all spheres of social life, we need a new vision of history, culture, and civilization - a cultural-cum-civilizational vision, where there is one civilization, but many cultures. This is not the only possible approach, but its advantage is that it focuses our attention on the unity of cultural and civilizational development of any society. It is also important to emphasize that cultural diversity, together with common norms of civilizational development, make every social body a unique and unrepeatable cultural-cum-civilizational system.