Globalism
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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Globalism refers to various systems with scope beyond the merely international. It is used by political scientists, such as Joseph Nye, to describe "attempts to understand all the inter-connections of the modern world — and to highlight patterns that underlie (and explain) them." While primarily associated with world-systems, it can be used to describe other global trends. The term is also used by detractors of globalization such as populist movements.
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Political science definitions
Paul James defines globalism, "at least in its more specific use, ... as the dominant ideology and subjectivity associated with different historically-dominant formations of global extension. The definition thus implies that there were pre-modern or traditional forms of globalism and globalization long before the driving force of capitalism sought to colonize every corner of the globe, for example, going back to the Roman Empire in the second century AD, and perhaps to the Greeks of the fifth-century BC."
Manfred Steger distinguishes between different globalisms such as justice globalism, jihad globalism, and market globalism. Market globalism includes the ideology of neoliberalism. In some hands, the reduction of globalism to the single ideology of market globalism and neoliberalism has led to confusion. For example, in his 2005 book The Collapse of Globalism and the Reinvention of the World, Canadian philosopher John Ralston Saul treated globalism as coterminous with neoliberalism and neoliberal globalization. He argued that, far from being an inevitable force, globalization is already breaking up into contradictory pieces and that citizens are reasserting their national interests in both positive and destructive ways.
Alternatively, American political scientist Joseph Nye, co-founder of the international relations theory of neoliberalism, generalized the term to argue that globalism refers to any description and explanation of a world which is characterized by networks of connections that span multi-continental distances; while globalization refers to the increase or decline in the degree of globalism. This use of the term originated in, and continues to be used, in academic debates about the economic, social, and cultural developments that is described as globalization. The term is used in a specific and narrow way to describe a position in the debate about the historical character of globalization (i.e. whether globalization is unprecedented or not).
It has been used to describe international endeavours begun after World War II, such as the United Nations and the European Union, and also sometimes the later neo-liberal and neoconservative policies of "nation building" and military interventionism between the end of the Cold War in 1992 and the beginning of the War on Terror in 2001.
Other uses
The term "globalist" has been used a pejorative for political enemies who are perceived as too "cosmopolitan" or favoring international projects over national ones. For example, during the election and presidency of United States president Donald Trump and members of his administration used the term globalist on multiple occasions, associating the term specifically with Jewish critics of the Trump Administration. The administration was accused of using the term as an anti-Semitic "dog whistle", to associate their critics with a Jewish conspiracy.
History of the concept
The word itself came into widespread usage, first and foremost in the United States, from the early 1940s. Many of these early uses of the term "globalist" in American English were pejorative uses by marginal political groups like the KKK and neo-nazis and anti-Semites like Henry Ford and are not connected to later academic uses of the term in political science.
Or Rosenboim find that the modern concepts, although not the terms themselves, of "globalism" and "globalisation" arose in the post-war debates debates of the 1940s in the United States. In their position of unprecedented power, US planners formulated policies to shape the kind of postwar world they wanted, which, in economic terms, meant a globe-spanning capitalist order centered exclusively upon the United States. This was the period when US global power was at its peak: the country was the greatest economic power the world had ever known, with the greatest military machine in human history. As George Kennan's Policy Planning Staff put it in February 1948, without using the terms "globalism" or "globalisation": "[W]e have about 50% of the world's wealth but only 6.3% of its population. […] Our real task in the coming period is to devise a pattern of relationships which will permit us to maintain this position of disparity". America's allies and foes in Eurasia were suffering the dreadful effects of World War II at this time.
One later American historian has gone as far as to describe this particular American version of globalism as visionary, in order to highlight its potently ideological nature—indeed, "Washington's most impressive Cold War ideological achievement". Visionary globalism was a far-reaching conception of "American-centric state globalism using capitalism as a key to its global reach, integrating everything that it can into such an undertaking". And "integrating everything" crucially meant global economic integration, which had collapsed under the blows of World War I and the Great Depression. Modern"globalism" has been linked to the ideas of economic and political "integration" of countries and economies. The first person in the United States to use the term economic integration in its modern sense (i.e. combining separate economies into larger economic regions) did so at this time: one John S. de Beers, an economist in the US Treasury Department, towards the end of 1941. By 1948, economic integration was appearing in an increasing number of American documents and speeches. Paul Hoffman, then head of the Economic Cooperation Administration, made the most marked use of the term in a 1949 speech to the Organisation for European Economic Co-operation. As The New York Times put it,
- Mr Hoffmann used the word 'integration' fifteen times or almost once to every hundred words of his speech. It is a word that rarely if ever has been used by European statesmen having to do with the Marshall Plan to describe what should happen to Europe's economies. It was remarked that no such term or goal was included in the commitments the European nations gave in agreeing to the Marshall Plan. Consequently it appeared to the Europeans that "integration" was an American doctrine that had been superimposed upon the mutual engagements made when the Marshall Plan began …
See also
- Anti-globalization movement
- Anti-nationalism
- Cosmopolitanism
- Cultural globalization
- Dimensions of globalization
- Global capitalism
- Global warming
- Information Age
- Internationalism
- Isolationism
- Neoconservatism
- New World Order (conspiracy theory)
- New world order (politics)
- Post-industrial society
- Power elite
- Ruling class
- Rootless cosmopolitan
- Techno-globalism
- United Nations
- Global village
- Global brain
