(Pix © Larry Catá Backer 2016)
Globalization continues to transform the state, law, economics and culture. What had started as an efficient means of ordering global production, with a side benefit of economic integration potentially reducing conflict to advance national interests (only recently viewed as antique, tribal and unnecessary) has now morphed to create profound global orderings of economic, social, cultural, civil and political norms. "Indeed, one can understand the move toward control of civil society as
an expression--a rear guard action--that recognizes that, like economic
activity in the decades immediately proceeding this one, political
activity is no longer a matter for a polity encased within a territorial
state. Rather, internationalization of politics is an organic process
inherent in the processes of globalization itself."(Here).
This post considers the way that discomfort about the emergence of globalization as a economic, social, cultural, political and civil phenomenon has begun to produce resistance among elites--and the cultivation of a renewed nationalism that mimics, perhaps in its most unfortunate forms, the nationalism that became the illness of the inter-war period of the last century. That nationalism, stoked by national elites unable to effectively embrace their own national ideologies and to protect them unaided by assertions of power and control, may well threaten to divert globalization from its present course. And worse--globalization appears to have been weaponized in some of its forms (e.g., here). But to what ends?
