The new nationalist surge has startled establishment parties in part because they don’t see globalism as an ideology. How could it be, when it is shared across the traditional Left-Right spectrum by the likes of Hillary Clinton, Tony Blair, George W. Bush and David Cameron?
....thanks for sharing this excellent analysis [from the WSJ Saturday Essay]! It puts the whole "globalism" vs "nationalism" conflict in a helpful historical and international context.... comment from a listserve after I shared the article below.This insightful piece on the growing nationalism around the world in response to globalism sparked my earlier sci-fi piece, FEXIT Vote Roils United Federation of Planets, which was making a point about the dangers of extreme nationalism. This is tricky ground but Author, Greg Ip, does a lot of good splainin'.
The link is http://www.wsj.com/articles/we-arent-the-world-1483728161 if you can't read it there try this link
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We Are Not the World
- Greg Ip
- The Wall Street Journal
- 9:24PM January 7, 2017
Late on a Sunday evening a little more than a year ago, Marine Le Pen took the stage in a depressed working-class town in northern France. She had just lost an election for the region’s top office, but the leader of France’s anti-immigrant, anti-euro National Front did not deliver a concession speech.Instead, Le Pen proclaimed a new ideological struggle.“Now, the dividing line is not between Left and Right but globalists and patriots,” she declared, with a gigantic French flag draped behind her.Globalists, she charged, want France to be subsumed in a vast, world-encircling “magma”. She and other patriots, by contrast, were determined to retain the nation-state as the “protective space” for French citizens.Le Pen’s remarks foreshadowed the tectonic forces that would shake the world in 2016. The British vote to leave the European Union in June and the election of Donald Trump as US president in November were not about whether government should be smaller but whether the nation-state still mattered. Le Pen now has a shot at winning France’s presidential elections this spring, which could imperil the already reeling EU and its common currency.Supporters of these disparate movements are protesting not just globalisation — the process whereby goods, capital and people move ever more freely across borders — but globalism, the mindset that globalisation is natural and good, that global governance should expand as national sovereignty contracts.The new nationalist surge has startled establishment parties in part because they don’t see globalism as an ideology. How could it be, when it is shared across the traditional Left-Right spectrum by the likes of Hillary Clinton, Tony Blair, George W. Bush and David Cameron?But globalism is an ideology, and its struggle with nationalism will shape the coming era much as the struggle between conservatives and liberals has shaped the last.