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Globalism and Nationalism
Globalization: The End of Giantism?
Tom Nairn and Paul James
The year 2004 was marked by continuing violence in Iraq as part of the neverending
War on Terror, the re-election of George W. Bush and John Howard as part
of steady-as-she-goes neo-liberalism, and climbing global inequalities, particularly
in relation to Africa and the Pacific. The year ended with a tsunami that killed over
150,000 people across Indonesia, Sri Lanka, Thailand and the Indian Ocean. Global
concern for the survivors took the form of an unprecedented global aid program in
Asia that began as heart-felt response to an act of nature, but very quickly became
consumed by politics and league-tables about who was the most generous national
donor. Overall, the intersection of globalism, nationalism and empire continued to
confront people with the immensity of social change.
In the context of this change, commentators, scholars and journalists
continued to argue over whether or not the dominance of one age (or
‘epoch’, ‘time’, or whatever) had ended in the fifteen years between
the dismantling of the Berlin Wall and the present. Historian John
Lukacs’ The End of an Age argues that a five hundred year
‘modern’ period is ending. After being originally voiced by the ‘confused
excrescences’ of postmodernism, it will be replaced by what some readers
must have found even more confusing: an odd mixture of theoretical
physics and rekindled Christianity. 1 William H.
McNeill and his son J.R. McNeill have followed with a general reinterpretation
of history, with change proceeding from the impact of the communications
revolution, the internet and a world in which ‘peasant patterns of
life and labour are in full retreat’. 2 In a metaphor
that now seems strangely prescient, they perceive us as being on ‘the
crest of a global breaking wave’ that will either make or demolish
the human species. The McNeills replace Lukacs’ preoccupation with
physics by an analogous focus upon biology and the biosphere, as if
post-1989 globalization may be responding to the pressures of a deeper
‘symbiosis’. A third reinterpretation of the historical process is
that of anthropologist Emmanuel Todd: his Après l’Empire
is a fiery polemic, founded on a primarily anthropological retrospect.
3 Todd denounces US leadership since 2001 as a futile,
self-destructive attempt to recover the lost hegemony of pre-1989—to
arrest the reality of globalization in its tracks, and avoid its spreading
into the wider delta of an uncontrollable, multi-polar diversity where
no single state or culture can hope to be in command. Here, physics
and biology give way to a speculative anthropology, grounded on Todd’s
previous demographic studies. The most important was La Diversité
du Monde: Structures Familiales et Modernite: an argument that
humankind’s socio-cultural variation is determined by an inherited
diversity of familial types and (hence) of intimate relationships
and emotive dispositions. These may be ‘memes’ rather than genes,
but the point is that such diversity is of the human-social essence,
not just a series of contingent accidents. The implication is that
the truly ‘global’ must be the affirmation of such diversity, not
its ‘overcoming’ or suppression.
Overstatement remains a condition of our time. Alternatively, moving
from the ridiculous to the sublimely stupid, some of the ideologues
of globalization have begun proclaiming its ‘true meaning’ as the
natural condition of the planet, pushing globalization back to the
beginning of time and naturalizing as if it has always been with us.
Alan Shipman, the author of The Globalization Myth, begins
his defence of globalization thus: ‘Life on planet earth was global
from the outset, as one fragile lonely planet huddled for comfort
against cold and empty space’. The parochializing move to set up local
boundaries ‘came later’, says our neo-liberal author in his Tower-of-Babel
story—’after manners started to fragment over space, and memories
over time. Many efforts have since been made to turn back the dispersing
tide and restore our cross-border connections’ he says in right-wing
cosmopolitan fashion. 4
Like many other neo-liberal tracts, The Globalization Myth
treats the role of the nation-state either as part of the problem,
as it slides back to a parochializing past, or as part of the solution
in which nations, like backward children, are called upon to work
extra hard to transcend their own history-notably in the realm of
the market. By contrast, we treat nationalism and globalism much more
ambiguously and ambivalently. As social phenomena, globalism and nationalism,
at least in their modern expressions, are bound up with each other.
As Steger points out in Globalism, our era of globalization
has resemblances to the period from 1870 through to the World War
I, though as yet (fortunately) without a prevailing philosophical
narrative like Social Darwinism. New narratives remain to be thought
out, in terms of a new dialectic of discontinuity and continuity.
In their ethical implications both nationalism and globalism are Janus-faced.
Whether they are good or bad, we argue, will depend on how they come
to be practiced in the emerging conditions.
The work that we have been doing in the Globalism Institute has a
different emphasis again, perhaps closer to Todd than to Lukacs or
the McNeills, but also unconvinced by the anthropological determinism
of his underlying philosophy. It is true that the dominance of one
‘matrix’ of development is receding, and that the events of 2001 to
2004 have dealt it a shattering blow. It also seems apparent that
another matrix is in formation, overlaying older developments in contradictory
ways—the first comprehensive ‘global’ matrix. However, our own emphasis
is upon a cultural-political theme, meanwhile embracing a variety
of other factors— ecological, anthropological, and the condition of
being human-and seeking to link them together. This is an ‘ecumenical’
approach: in other words, closer to the overview given by Manfred
Steger in his Globalism: The New Market Ideology, and sharing
his insistence that there is nothing inevitable or ‘irreversible’
about market ascendancy and de-regulation. 5 This
counter-view is forced upon us, rather than being just a bland choice.
We have also been influenced by cautious distrust of all the single-issue
or portmanteau explanations that have crowded the shop-front of theory
since the 1990s. There is undoubtedly an emergent global matrix; but
it calls for detective work and some house-to-house inquiries, rather
than (as British tabloids love to say) a ‘swoop’ upon the presumed
guilty party. A case has to be patiently built up, beyond premature
rushes to judgement.
One feature of this deeper alteration in course is—and ought to be—a
profound and long-running reaction against those shadows from which
the globe began to free itself, when the Cold War finally ended. Masterful,
yet phoney, monotheism dominated that shadow-world. We faced a supposed
choice between commandeconomy socialism and liberal-capitalism. The
choice of worlds had narrowed down, from the competitive spectrum
of former would-be Empires to a basic ‘eitheror’. Only two of Goya’s
‘Giants’ were left, as it were, capable of devouring (and indeed destroying)
everything and everyone else. 6 These Giants, it
went without saying, were capable of explaining everything,
in one or other omnivorous, allencompassing fashion. The ‘-isms’ of
such a world were apologies for claimed omnipotence: fantasies extolling
a brute authority which (fortunately) no actual modern empire has
ever possessed.
Now, even that claim has foundered: this is part of what globalization
is about. However, ideological authoritarianism did not vanish in
1989–90, alongside the ex- Communist imperium. The inherited memes
of gigantism persist, and indeed still demand that humankind acknowledge
the dominance of the one ‘-ism’ that remains—as if, deprived of Colossi,
the species might indeed turn into the scared, fleeing rabble in Goya’s
picture. In fact (as Todd shows), this is a Giant with no clothes,
dependent upon a mixture of craven self-subjection by inherited satrapies,
grossly exaggerated military threats, and an almost equally exaggerated
economic credo—the secular religion of neo-liberalism. The truth,
or rather our political hope, is that ‘globalization’ must lead in
the overall direction of a Giant-less world. It will not
lead (naturally) to a globe without large states or nations, or without
uneven economic development or social conflicts, but at least it presumes
a world where it becomes increasingly difficult to naturalize such
inequities and sustain the constant deferral of legal/ideal senses
of recognition and human status. Though foreshadowed in the formal
structure of the United Nations Organization, whose General Assembly
ranks Andorra alongside China, this equality stood little real chance
in a world of Giant-contests. But in a post-Giant world, ought there
not to be some possibility of reality-growth?
We
have assumed that clearing the way towards such a big shift calls
for clearing the way for a different theoretical approach. The work
of the Globalism Institute does not offer yet another key to the universe.
Our assumption is that while ‘keys’ are not helpful, new lines of
understanding are crucial, and can only be composed collectively over
the coming period by those who will be ‘natives’ of the globalized
world—those who have been born into it and who will take its deeper
undertow and instincts for granted, as the present authors are unable
to. We have been formed by the world of nationalism, and our way of
contesting that age was (primarily) via theorizing about these older
structures. Of course, such theorizing bears its marks of origin:
in this case, the distant edge-lands of Scotland and Australia. Critics
will not be slow to point these out, usually ignoring (or simply not
perceiving) their own marks of descent as they do so. However, we
can take some comfort here from what is actually a minor formative
principle of globalism: in human discourse (unlike that of the Gods)
the stigmata of contingent origin are universal, and, at a certain
level, ineffaceable. Every theorist bears an axe to grind—social theory
would not be any use if this were not so.
Two-and-a-half centuries ago, David Hume made the same point in a
book that fell stillborn from the press: ‘we speak not strictly and
philosophically when we talk of the combat of passion and of reason.
Reason is, and ought only to be, the slave of the passions, and can
never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them’. 7
As he goes on to explain, ‘passions’ are original existence, the drivers
of society’s discourse and of the reason this requires. One crucial
task for the latter is the recognition and delineation of its own
limits. Rational-ism is a systematic evasion of this—the promotion
of reason into a religion, or substitute religion, a secular magic
capable of making humanity’s crooked timbers all straight— preferably
by this time next week. Globalization, by contrast, should encourage
greater diffidence and uncertainty. This is why the Globalism Institute
is also a founding member of the ‘crooked timbers’ club. Giants are
not admitted, naturally; all ‘-isms’ must be consigned to the cloakroom
upon entry; and the only members’ oath commits them to an anti-crusade
against ‘fundamentalist’ delusions—religious and secular alike.
As
we write, identity politics is back on the international stage, if
it ever went away. Suicide-bombers are making their way both into
Iraq and Israel, the Israeli army is poised for further atrocities
in the West Bank or Gaza; Pakistan and India are mobilizing over the
broken nation of Kashmir in what may become the world’s first nuclear
war; North Korea is attempting to join the club of war-machines with
nuclear capability; China is rejoining the world economy on a tide
of rejuvenated chauvinism; and the British Prime Minister has become
a latter-day Lord Acton, ceaselessly air-freighting the spent fuel-rods
of UK wisdom from one ‘trouble-spot’ to the next.
The work of the
Globalism Institute is part of what Manfred Steger calls ‘the reformist
project’ to revise the neo-liberal scenario of early globalization,
and to engender ‘an ethical vision for a global society’. New meanings
are needed to formulate such a vision, and give it institutional voice—that
is, new constitutions for democracy, which in turn demand altered
identities (including national identities) to make them live. Humanity
can’t jump out of its old, accumulated skin overnight. Not by armed
‘shock and awe’ tactics, certainly; but neither by committee decisions,
religious pontification, or a recycled rhetoric of internationalism.
Few would contest the Dalai Lama’s urging of ‘a sense of universal
responsibility’ upon twenty-first-century youth; but the universal
is no longer a prerogative of faith (including his own), it depends
upon particular transformations on earth (including Tibet’s independence),
and the formation of a global climate unintimidated by the legacy
of Giantism.
1. J. Lukacs, The End of an Age, Yale University
Press, New Haven, 2002.
2. W. H. McNeill and J.R. McNeill, The Human
Web, Norton, New York, 2003.
3. E. Todd, Après l’Empire, Gallimard, Paris
2002, English translation 2004.
4. A. Shipman, The Globalization Myth, Icon
Books, Cambridge, 2002, p. 5.
5. M. Steger, Globalism: The New Market Ideology,
Rowman and Littlefield, Lanham, 2002.
6. The Spanish painter Goya produced a famous series
of dark premonitory images, after experiencing the horrors of the
French occupation of Spain-in many ways a forerunner of nineteenth
and twentieth-century imperial and colonial conflicts. The best-known
is ‘El Coloso’, The Colossus (1808-12) in the Prado Museum in Madrid,
shows a gigantic figure turning his back upon a terrified, fleeing
humanity the size of ants. It has always been noted as one of the
greatest yet most enigmatic images of modern times. Robert Hughes’
recent biography of the artist describes the background of this and
other dark masterpieces, as an illness that forced Goya to brood upon
what he (and many others) had seen, during a foreign military invasion
intended to impose ‘regime change’ upon a notoriously backward, superstition-ridden
land bent on holding back progress. Interestingly, the idea may have
been associated with the work of a Basque poet of the period, Juan
Bautista Arriaza, whose La profecia de los Pirineos (1808) imagined
a giant spirit of resistance, arising against the invaders. See Robert
Hughes, Goya, Harvill Press, London, 2003, pp. 286–7.
7. A Treatise of Human Nature, Edinburgh,
1739-40. The most valuable recent edition is the Oxford Philosophical
Text, edited by David and Mary J. Norton: see Book 2, Part 3, Section
3, ‘Of the influencing motives of the will’, p. 266. The ‘crooked
timbers’ started with Immanuel Kant: ‘Out of the crooked timber of
humanity no straight thing was ever made’ (Kant’s Gesammelte Schriften,
Berlin 1900- ) Vol. 8, p.23. It was Isaiah Berlin’s favourite quote,
recurring throughout his collected essays, The Proper Study of
Mankind, New York, 1997.
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