To put it bluntly, maybe we need to think less about Europe and the Philippines separately, and rather more about
whether Europe is rich precisely because the Philippines are poor. That is a very simplistic assertion but it has its virtues. It sensitizes us to the idea that there is a set of global relations between local places. In emphasizing how global relations actively produce differences between places it reorients our efforts away from just documenting diversity (Europe and
the USA are like this, the Philippines are like that) and towards understanding the processes of that differentiation.