This article examines three critical issues relating to the role of culture in teaching English as an international language (EIL): Firstly, the way in which top-down processes of globalisation, accompanied by the widespread desire for English in many former colonial countries, have in general fostered the negative effects of dominance, divisiveness and difference in world social relations, resulting in the suppression and devaluation of local forms of knowledge and practice. Secondly, the way in which shifts of ownership and authority to non-native speakers and their varieties of English in combination more recently with global cultural flows, have created the need for reconceiving English as a pluralised global language, informed by local norms, functions and practices, reflecting a fluid and multiple cultural base. Lastly, it explores the way in which an ecological approach to English language teaching, which is oriented to "globalisation from below" (Appadurai, 2000; Canagarajah, 2005), and which opens up a dialogical relationship between the global and the local, might help speakers in ex-colonial settings to reclaim their local identity and voice and thus realise the potential of globalisation to construct more inclusive, democratic relationships. (Contains 6 notes and 1 figure.)