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The Issues

An epic struggle between globalization and a resurgent nationalism is changing political identities and conflicts across the world. While the term ‘globalization’ refers primarily to the development of relatively unrestricted economic relationships across most of the world, that process has wider social and political implications. People from diverse cultures are drawn together, and national systems of economic governance are challenged. Various kinds of upheaval – economic, cultural and political – accompany globalization, producing a backlash among those who feel negatively affected. From being a process that seemed simply to be bringing us both cheaper products from abroad and new export opportunities, globalization has come for many to mean the loss, not just of individual jobs, but of entire long-established industries and the communities and ways of life associated with them, spiralling into further disorientation as foreign customs and large numbers of persons from other cultures invade and obscure life’s familiar landmarks. The consequent unease is felt alike by American and French former steel workers who have seen their industries and local communities disappear; by Germans talking about Heimat and feeling that it represents something they have lost; by Russians, British and Austrians nostalgic for lost empires and resenting the fact that, in a globalizing world, ‘sovereignty’ has to be shared; by people in Islamic societies feeling invaded by American and British warplanes as well as by western cultures and sexual mores; and by people across Europe and North America horrified by occasional acts of Islamic terrorism and disliking the presence in their streets of women wearing the hijab.

Globalization threatens some people’s desire to feel pride in the circumstances of their lives – in their work, their cultural identity, their communities, the towns and cities where they live, that broad bundle of ideas implied in the German idea of Heimat. Many people are still able to feel this pride, as the areas in which they live and the sectors in which they work have been favoured by globalization; they have relaxed, optimistic and even eager approaches to the opportunities presented by the kaleidoscope of an ever more varied cultural universe. But others have a different experience. Even if they are prosperous in their own lives, they see a wider world of bewildering change, and yearn for the certainties that they, perhaps mistakenly, believe characterized an earlier one.

During the prolonged discussion that took place in the United Kingdom (UK) after the 2016 referendum on leaving the European Union (EU) (the so-called ‘Brexit’), the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) interviewed some people in Middlesbrough, a very depressed, former industrial city in the north-east of England that had voted heavily to leave the EU. A recurrent theme of the interviews was: we have lost everything; our young people leave to go elsewhere; we see no prospects for our future; but at least we know that we are British, and we feel pride in that. Therefore, they voted to leave the EU. There is no logic in the strict sense in that chain of argument, but there is a powerful emotional logic. It helps explain why a resurgent nationalism is becoming a dominant popular force in the early twenty-first century.

But the lack of strict logic has to be contested. We can only gain a measure of control over a world of increasing interdependence by growing identities, as well as institutions of democracy and governance, that can themselves reach beyond the nation state. This task is hard enough in itself; it becomes virtually impossible when large numbers of politicians, newspapers and intellectuals are telling people to do exactly the opposite and seal themselves behind national barriers, treating immigrants as a disease that pollutes their culture, relating to the rest of the world only through arm’s-length trade – and therefore leaving transnational corporations and deregulated financial markets beyond control.

Although opposition to globalization comes from all recognizable parts of the political spectrum, its leadership has been firmly in the hands of the traditionalist, nationalistic right. This is interesting. Economic globalization is mainly a project of neoliberalism, which for several decades has been the dominant ideology of the modern right. Does this mean that politics has become a fight between different factions of the right, and that the left no longer has meaning? Or do differences between left and right have no relevance in the struggle over globalization? I shall argue here that left and right certainly retain meaning; that the social democratic left has a distinct contribution to make to this conflict; that it needs to stand on the side of globalization against the new nationalism; but that it must also insist on reforms to the shape that the process is taking. This in no way means – indeed, must not mean – abandoning national and more local identities. Rather, the multiple identities available to us in today’s world become a series of concentric circles, enriching each other and rooted in a cooperative subsidiarity – or a Russian matryoshka doll, with successive dolls of different sizes nested comfortably within each other. We need to be proud of our town or city, of the region within which it is located, of the country within which that is contained, of European institutions (for those fortunate enough to live in a country that is a member of the EU) and of wider global entities. This is only possible if constructive developments are occurring at each of these levels, and where their creative mutual interdependence is clear. We need political and social leaders who are willing to work at reinforcing the links across these levels, helping them to work positively together, leaders who cease insisting on absurd rivalries and an outdated search for sovereignty in a world where no individual person, region or country can stand alone without deep cooperation with others.

Behind all these issues stands a new stage in the great conflict, dating back to the eighteenth century, between the values of the ancien régime and those of the Enlightenment: between the security of conservative authority and familiar tradition on the one hand, and the freedom of rationality, innovation and change on the other. If globalization is examined in these, rather than economic, terms, it is easy to understand hostility to it on the traditionalist, nationalist, but not neoliberal, right. Perhaps it is because in recent decades we have become so accustomed to regarding neoliberalism as the principal force on the right that left-wing opponents of globalization have been rather unaware of the reactionary company they are keeping. The leftist argument against globalization is understandable enough in its own terms. Broadly, it runs as follows:

1. Globalization has involved the extension of capitalism over ever more parts of the world, achieved by breaking down those regulatory barriers that enabled national governments to ensure that firms and markets adhered to certain norms. In other words, globalization allows capitalism to destroy the governance mechanisms that contained those excesses that cause poverty, inequality and the neglect of collective needs.
2. The highest level of governance at which democracy has become established is the nation state. Therefore, as soon as a phenomenon escapes that level, it escapes the reach of democracy and falls under the sole control of the capitalist elites that dominate transnational space.
3. The nation state is not only a democratic level in a formal sense, but also an entity with which most ordinary working people identify; they are willing to commit themselves to it. That kind of commitment will be necessary if democratic political power is to contest the domination of deregulated capitalism.
4. The welfare state, in particular, has been a national construction, drawing on the solidarity with one another that members of a nation feel, members of a shared community, as captured in the Swedish concept of the welfare state as a folkshem (people’s home, ‘home’ here meaning, like the German Heimat, a place where one feels ‘at home’).
5. It is indeed notable that the strongest welfare states developed in the Nordic countries at a time when these were ethnically and culturally highly homogeneous, and that their fragmentation in recent years has been associated with the arrival of large numbers of immigrants and asylum seekers, mainly from Islamic cultures. It is also notable that the ethnically heterogeneous society of the United States of America (USA) has one of the weakest and least generous welfare states in the democratic world. There seems to be a trade-off between a strong welfare state and liberal multiculturalism; if so, the left had better abandon the latter as fast as it can. (This, it should be noted, is a far more respectable argument than one simply telling left-wing parties to run after the xenophobic right in the search for votes.)
6. Globalization and multiculturalism being inimical to a social democratic project, there needs to be a turn towards economic protection and controls over capital movements, and severe restrictions on immigration. For European countries, this means at least a severe limit to, if not total withdrawal from, the process of European integration – which especially in recent years has meant integration on neoliberal terms.

Each...