Thoughts on globalism...

Interesting thoughts related to Globalsim and the founding of the UN in this interview with Mark Mazower who's newest book is "No Enchanted Palace: The End of Empire and the Ideological Origins of the United Nations.’’

Here he compares the ideology behind the UN with that of some of the founders of the League of Nations (Zimmern and Smuts): "We have humanitarian interventionists who are rather reminiscent of Zimmern and Smuts and who believe in the emancipation of the human spirit, if necessary through the agency of the United States this time, not the British Empire. I wanted to show that there’s a history to this way of thinking, a history that might give you pause. It’s a form of moralizing that conceals its connection to power. I specialize in modern Greece and when you see the world from the perspective of a small country where people are constantly intervening you develop a different attitude."

And here he draws an interesting parallel between the Nazis and the UN founders: "The more theoretically minded Nazis declared that they too had a vision of peace in Europe. What would bring peace was the eradication of minorities. Among their opponents, the debate became should the UN reproduce the league’s minority rights regime? The resounding answer was no. Why? Because it obliges you to protect dissenting groups who stir up trouble. Who were the biggest minority in pre-war Europe? The Germans. And look what happened. So the general view of the UN’s founders was that minority rights be shelved in favor of ethnically homogenous states. This might be a solution to Europe’s - and the world’s - problems. The Jews, for example, could have a state of their own, and Jewish groups were at the heart of this debate."

Ethnically homogenous states--weird connection but I just read something today about the effect of gerrymandering on US politics (creating politically homogenous districts) and the way that has increased the partisan divisions in the country.  But the effect of nationalism as a kind of peace-making tool?  I think that's been a pretty unqualified failure.

Imperialism and the birth of the UN

Thought this was a great idea--the Conservative Party in Britain has turned around it's diminishing returns in more recent elections by embracing a pro-local business and anti-global corporate box-store strategy.  As the author points out "localism offers a fresh take on a longtime challenge for conservatives: how to balance their probusiness stance with their innate reverence for tradition."  This strategy looks to result in the Conservatives winning the next election.  Republican party in US, take note.

Buy local, vote conservative

Review of two new books on globalism:

Network Power: the Social Dynamics of Globalization by David Singh Grewal

The Power of Place: Geography, Destiny, and Globalization's Rough Landscape by Harm De Blij

Well it's a provocative title :-)  

I wasn't sure where to post this as it relates to so many things on the site.  In the end, I decided here as it has most to do with gender oppression in the context of globalization.  I can't even begin to summarize--I just read the first chapter online and it is incredibly good.  Here are a couple excerpts:

" Consider, too, the role of globalization in the creation of new gender and family structures. R. W. Connell, whose work has influenced mine for more than twenty years, has argued that we should see "global markets and multinational corporations as key sites of the making and transformation of a global gender order."⁷⁴ Of course in assessing these changes we have to remember that in many parts of the world dominant sexual ideologies are themselves the products of earlier imperialist expansion, and of the missionaries who accompanied traders and soldiers. "Traditional" views of sexuality and gender in much of Africa, the Caribbean, and the Pacific owe as much to colonialism as to precolonial culture. Indeed the idea of a precolonial tradition is often a problematic concept for the millions of people who are descended from the mass migrations of nineteenth-century empires-African slaves to the Americas, Indian laborers to Fiji and South Africa, Chinese workers to Malaysia and California. Whose tradition are we talking about in countries which have undergone radical reshaping of their demography due to foreign domination? Is it African culture or imperialist Christianity which continues to criminalize homosexuality in Zimbabwe, and put President Banana on trial?

Gender and sexuality come together through the family, and family structures themselves, far from being fixed or "natural" as moral conservatives insist, are ultimately dependent on social and economic structures. Perhaps the most significant change for millions of people caused by greater affluence, urbanization, and foreign influences is the decline of marriage based on social and economic arrangements between families, versus the far more individualist assumptions about marriage as ways of achieving love and personal fulfillment."

" Such social controls create new victims, usually women and children who are punished because they have already been violated. Consider, for example, reports that in Jordan a quarter of all homicides are "honor killings," punishments of women for allegedly defiling their family's honor through sexual misbehavior.95 Currently there is a campaign to repeal that section of the country's penal code which provides that "[h] e who discovers his wife or a female relative committing adultery and kills, wounds or injures one or both of them is exempted from any penalty."96 Increasing numbers of children, often born to women who have been raped or coerced into sex, are abandoned, so that numbers swell in orphanages in Moscow and Casablanca.97 In many countries governments provide no services for single mothers or illegitimate children, and in a few, particularly in Latin America, it is not unknown for police to regard such children as fit only for extermination. Although it is hard to get reliable figures, women with dependent children constitute a major part of the world's poorest populations. As was true of industrialization in nineteenth-century North Atlantic countries, the rapid changes of the contemporary economy are producing demands which many governments are neither ready nor willing to accept."

"Global Sex"

Reviews of two recent books on globablization. Warning GC, Zakaria's poll numbers are up for Campaign 2008, at least in this district.

"Globalization, its discontents and its upside"

Open Source Democracy is an ebook by Douglas Rushkoff. I'm linking to the introduction which also gives you a link to the Project Gutenberg site for the entire book. And here's an excerpt from the introduction:

" As the world confronts the impact of globalism, newly revitalised
threats of fundamentalism, and the emergence of seemingly
irreconcilable value systems, generate a new reason to believe that
living interdependently is not only possible, but preferable to the
competitive individualism, ethnocentrism, nationalism and particularism
that have characterised so much of late twentieth-century
thinking and culture....

Those who choose to compose and disseminate alternative
value systems may be working against the current and increasingly
concretised mythologies of market, church and state, but they
ultimately hold the keys to the rebirth of all three institutions in an
entirely new context.

The communications revolution may not have brought with it
either salvation for the world’s stock exchanges or the technological
infrastructure for a new global resource distribution system. Though
one possible direction for the implementation of new media
technology may be exhausted, its other myriad potentials b eckon us
once again. While it may not provide us with a template for sure-fire
business and marketing solutions, the rise of interactive media does
provide us with the beginnings of new metaphors for cooperation,
new faith in the power of networked activity and new evidence of our
ability to participate actively in the authorship of our collective
destiny."

I discovered an interesting writer/thinker today and one of his articles related to bringing about social change--wasn't sure where to put it exactly but I think it relates to globalism/tribalism in that it's thinking about the relation of community to change. I like his use of the term renaissance to describe a model for change vs. revolution. And I thought it related to Shelley's post under the Science forum about cooperation.

Douglas Rushkoff Article

I believe I have a solution: The Crimson Permanent Assurance

Thinking about this some more, I was thinking about how globalism can be seen as an extension of the trend toward societies ruled by regulation and disciplines like education, and connected to the capitalist need for predictable consumer behavior, as well as larger and larger markets. If you go back to the Middle Ages, you have as a governing force, a single person with incredible priveleges and rights over the populace--but very little reach. Today, those rights of the governing body are much curtailed but much more far reaching, and the reach extends in people governing or disciplining themselves--learning through the school system for example what proper behavior is supposed to be. I'm reminded of what the GC said in a different thread about the way in which politeness and manners develops alongside of capitalism. And one thing that happens with this self-governance--everyone learning to march to the beat of the same drummer--is that capitalism has available a more predictable market. So the more cultural variation is taken out, the more marketing companies can predict trends in what we will buy--the more we buy the same products, the less cultural variation there is.

I'm reminded of a thought I had looking at pictures a friend of mine showed me of time he spent studying martial arts at a shaolin temple in a small village in China. The thing I really noticed about the pictures of the marketplaces was how colorful and varied they were. And I realized the contrast to the marketplaces I'm used to because the marketplaces I'm used to are all filled with the same Starbucks-Walmart-HomeDepot logos.

BTW--an excellent point about sci-fi novels. 

I agree with what you are saying--and I do think the direction of globalism is toward that kind of capitalist hegemony, not really a uniting of diverse groups. The definition of both globalism and tribalism have an interesting similarity--actually the corollary of what you were saying about "isms," that they are definied in opposition to something else. The corollary is the idea that everyone in the group is "united" or is "loyal" to one view. This kind of reminds me of the complaint I was making about feminism in an other thread (and why some now prefer the term feminisms). I'm not sure where this belief originates but I would describe it as a belief that there is no action (in this case political influence) possible without a complete suppression of conflict within the group taking action. It's an idea that also dominates our view of ourselves--the self has to have a unity--if you're conflicted you need to work out the conflicts before you can do anything.

Maybe there's an alternative in the idea of world communities. As a model, I'm still thinking of the internet--the way one can be a member of several different and overlapping communities. I guess one example I can think of is the way in which musical styles from different countries are being used by some bands--maintaining the root style but still combining them in creative ways. Some of the music like that that I'm familiar with interestingly has an explicitly anti-globalist message ("Fortress Europe" by Asian Dub Foundation for instance).

Interesting...

Do you think that people in general are hardwired to identify as groups? And that this is where tribalism comes in? That sort of group identity tends to fall into the lap of being bias. Tribalism as a commodity though makes it easier for people to identify and then unidentify themselves as a group identity, making it seem like we have an intellectual freedom. Making the idea of tribalism less harmful. Or not I guess. I'm kind of in the process of learning such things.

On a side not, globalism and globalization is often confused as the same thing. What are your thoughts on this based upon what you wrote above?