Anthropology -- Globalization

Chapter 4 The political dimension of globalization 

Political globalization refers to the intensification and expansion of political interrelations across the globe. These processes raise an important set of political issues pertaining to the principle of state sovereignty, the growing impact of intergovernmental organizations, and the future prospects for regional and global governance, global migration flows, and environmental policies affecting our planet. Obviously, these themes respond to the evolution of political arrangements beyond the framework of the nation-state, thus breaking new conceptual and institutional ground. After all, for the last two centuries, humans have organized their political differences along territorial lines that generated a sense of ‘belonging’ to a particular nation-state. 

This artificial division of planetary social space into ‘domestic’ and ‘foreign’ spheres corresponds to people’s collective identities based on the creation of a common ‘us’ and an unfamiliar ‘them’. Thus, the modern nation-state system has rested on psychological foundations and cultural assumptions that convey a sense of existential security and historical continuity, while at the same time demanding from its citizens that they put their national loyalties to the ultimate test. Nurtured by demonizing images of ‘outsiders’, people’s belief in the superiority of their own nation has supplied the mental energy required for large-scale warfare—just as the enormous productive capacities of the modern state have provided the material means necessary to fight the ‘total wars’ of the last century.

Contemporary manifestations of globalization have led to the greater permeation of these old territorial borders, in the process also softening hard conceptual boundaries and cultural lines of demarcation. Emphasizing these tendencies, commentators belonging to the camp of globalizers have suggested that the period since the late 1960s has been marked by a radical deterritorialization of politics, rule-making, and governance. Considering such pronouncements premature at best and erroneous at worst, sceptics have not only affirmed the continued relevance of the nation-state as the political container of modern social life but have also pointed to the emergence of regional blocs as evidence for new forms of territorialization. Some of these critics have gone so far as to suggest that globalization is actually accentuating people’s sense of nationality. As each group of global studies scholars presents different assessments of the fate of the modern nation-state, they also quarrel over the relative importance of political and economic factors.

Out of these disagreements there have emerged three fundamental questions that probe the extent of political globalization. First, is it really true that the power of the nation-state has been curtailed by massive flows of capital, people, and technology across territorial boundaries? Second, are the primary causes of these flows to be found in politics or in economics? Third, are we witnessing the emergence of new global governance structures? Before we respond to these questions in more detail, let us briefly consider the main features of the modern nation-state system.

The modern nation-state system 

The origins of the modern nation-state system can be traced back to 17th-century political developments in Europe. In 1648, the Peace of Westphalia concluded a lengthy period of religious wars among the main European powers following the Protestant Reformation. Based on the newly formulated principles of sovereignty and territoriality, the ensuing model of self-contained, impersonal states challenged the medieval mosaic of small polities in which political power tended to be local and personal in focus but still subordinated to a larger imperial authority. The centuries following the Peace of Westphalia saw the further centralization of political power, the expansion of state administration, the development of professional diplomacy, and the successful monopolization of the means of coercion in the hands of the state. Moreover, nation-states also provided the military means required for the expansion of commerce, which, in turn, contributed to the spread of this European form of political rule around the globe.

The modern nation-state system found its mature expression at the end of the First World War in US President Woodrow Wilson’s famous ‘Fourteen Points’ based on the principle of national self-determination. But Wilson’s assumption that all forms of national identity should be given their territorial expression in a sovereign ‘nation-state’ proved to be extremely difficult to enforce in practice. Moreover, by enshrining the nation-state as the ethical and legal pinnacle of his proposed interstate system, he unwittingly lent some legitimacy to those radical ethnonationalist forces that pushed the world’s main powers into the Second World War. Wilson’s other idea of a ‘League of Nations’ that would give international cooperation an institutional expression was eventually realized with the founding of the United Nations in 1945 (see Illustration 9). While deeply rooted in a political order based on the modern nation-state system, the UN and other fledgling intergovernmental organizations also served as catalysts for the gradual extension of political activities across national boundaries, thus simultaneously affirming and undermining the principle of national sovereignty.

9. The Security Council of the United Nations in session

As globalization tendencies grew stronger during the 1970s and 1980s, it became clear that the international society of separate states was rapidly turning into a global web of political interdependencies that challenged conventional forms of national sovereignty. 

In 1990, at the outset of the First Gulf War, US President George H. W. Bush announced the birth of a ‘new world order’ whose leaders no longer respected the idea that cross-border wrongful acts were a matter concerning only those states affected. Did this mean that the modern nation-state system based on national sovereignty and autonomy was no longer viable?

The demise of the nation-state?

 Globalizers respond to this question affirmatively. At the same time, these observers consider political globalization a mere secondary phenomenon driven by more fundamental economic and technological forces. They argue that politics has been rendered almost powerless by an unstoppable techno-economic juggernaut that will crush all governmental attempts to reintroduce restrictive policies and regulations. Endowing economics with an inner logic apart from, and superior to, politics, these commentators look forward to a new phase in world history in which the main role of government will be to serve as a superconductor for global capitalism.

Pronouncing the rise of a ‘borderless world’, globalizers seek to convince the public that globalization inevitably involves the decline of bounded territory as a meaningful concept for understanding political and social change. Consequently, they suggest that political power is located in global social formations and expressed through global networks rather than through territorially based states. In fact, they argue that nation-states have already lost their dominant role in the global economy. As territorial divisions are becoming increasingly irrelevant, states are even less capable of determining the direction of social life within their borders. For example, since the workings of genuinely global capital markets dwarf their ability to control exchange rates or protect their currency, nation-states have become vulnerable to the discipline imposed by economic choices made elsewhere, over which states have no practical control.

The group of globalization sceptics disagrees, highlighting instead the central role of politics in unleashing the forces of globalization, especially through the successful mobilization of political power. In their view, the rapid expansion of global economic activity can be reduced neither to a natural law of the market nor to the development of computer technology. Rather, it originated with political decisions made by neoliberal national governments in the 1980s and 1990s to lift international restrictions on capital. Once those decisions were implemented, global markets and new technologies came into their own. The clear implication of this perspective is that national territory still matters. Hence, globalization sceptics insist on the continued relevance of conventional political units, operating in the form of either modern nation-states or global cities linked to national units.

The arguments of both globalizers and sceptics remain entangled in a particularly vexing version of the chicken-and-the-egg problem. After all, economic forms of interdependence are set in motion by political decisions, but these decisions are nonetheless made in particular economic contexts. As we noted, the economic and political aspects of globalization are profoundly interconnected. For example, it has become much easier for capital to escape taxation and other national policy restrictions. In 2016, the ‘Panama Papers’—a leaked set of nearly 12 million confidential documents—revealed how wealthy individuals (including government officials) managed to evade national income taxes by hiding their assets in Panamanian offshore companies. Moreover, global markets frequently undermine the capacity of governments to set independent national policy objectives and impose their own domestic standards. Hence, it is difficult not to acknowledge the decline of the nation-state as a sovereign entity and the ensuing devolution of state power to regional and local governments as well as to various supranational institutions. 

Political globalization and migration

 On the other hand, the relative decline of the nation-state does not necessarily mean that governments have become impotent bystanders to the workings of global forces. States can still take measures to make their economies more or less attractive to global investors. In addition, they have continued to retain control over education, infrastructure, and foreign policy. But the intensifying population movements in the era of globalization have challenged some of the most crucial powers of nation-states: immigration control, population registration, and security protocols. Although in 2016 only 2 per cent of the world’s population lived outside their country of origin, immigration control has become a central issue in most advanced nations. Many governments seek to restrict population flows, particularly those originating in the poor countries of the global South. Even in the United States, annual inflows of about 1 million legal permanent immigrants during the 2010s are less than the levels recorded during the first two decades of the 20th century.

 In order to illustrate the growing problems of nation-states to cope with increasing trans-border migration flows, let us consider a recent example that has proven to be especially challenging: the Syrian refugee crisis. It started in March 2011 when, as part of the wider Arab Uprisings that swept across the Middle East region from Tunisia to the Gulf States, pro-democracy protests erupted in Syria that challenged the authoritarian rule of President Bashar al-Assad and his Baath Party. At first, Assad seemed to bow to mounting domestic foreign pressure to hold free elections and respect basic human rights. But once Russian President Vladimir Putin signalled his support, the Syrian dictator embarked on a confrontational course with pro-democracy demonstrators whom he vilified as ‘rebel forces’. The country quickly descended into an all-out civil war that would kill more than 250,000 people over the next five years.

The relentless fighting triggered a humanitarian crisis of truly epic proportions. By 2016, nearly 6 million Syrians—out of a total population of 23 million—had been internally displaced. Close to 5 million people had fled the country in search of both personal safety and economic opportunity (see Map 4). The majority of Syrian refugees ended up in camps in the neighbouring countries of Jordan, Lebanon, Iraq, and Turkey, where they received some humanitarian assistance from local governments, international NGOs such as Mercy Corps and World Vision, and global institutions like the UN. Still, in most cases, the massive refugee flows pouring out of Syria strained the available material resources of host communities and also created significant cultural tensions with domestic populations who saw these ‘outsiders’ as a drain on their country’s economic resources.