Cool thread, thanks all. Bit of sniping probably inevitable, but better-natured than it has been in other threads. And thanks kool maudit for the OP.
kool maudit wrote:A lot of my own positioning is derived from a deep democratic stubbornness. In order for a position to be valid, for me, it needs to be advanced by a person or insitution with a popular mandate. This doesn't mean that all such positions or mandates are good, only that they are legitimate. As such, I often find myself using the term "globalist", but this position itself has a lot of baggage.
What is a globalist? For me, while there is a lot of "you know it when you see it" (you see it at Davos, at the Bilderberg meetings, etc.), that is obviously unsatisfying. Ultimately, a globalist is somebody who is involved in the medium- to long-term planning of transnational affairs without a mandate. After the 20th century's parade of big ideas, new worlds, and grand structural solutions, I have a deep suspicion of ultra-macro-scaled plans; their scope means that they are necessarily untethered from consensus and thus must be forced, to whatever degree, into being. And we have all seen what that looks like.[/b]
That's a good definition, and by that definition, you're absolutely right, democrats should oppose globalism. But it's worth dwelling on where globalism - or maybe internationalism - comes from. Nation-states, that are now so in vogue around here, caused a thousand years of basically uninterrupted war in Europe, culminating in the biggest war in history in 1914-18. That war was fully a consequence of the great nation-states - France, Germany, England (for which 'Great Britain' was then just a disguise, and to some degree still is) and Russia - competing for their interests... but, for the first time, with industrial arms. That's where the League of Nations came from. But that failed, and the 1919 peace failed to a large degree because of the nation-state logic: Clemenceau insisted on punitive reparations imposed on the Germans, and on Alsace-Lorraine, and that peace was accepted against the advice of what we'd probably now call globalists - especially Smuts and Keynes, who wanted better terms for Germany. So then, a bit later, we had an even worse war, again fought on the logic of the nation-state.
'Nation-state' probably wants defining, too, it gets used much too loosely. Not all states are nation-states, and the US definitely isn't. Nation-states - states in which the state is defined as the institutional expression of a certain nation, living in a certain place - were themselves the creations of central powers that everywhere erased local identities and imposed flags and languages, and centralised taxation systems, to increase the power of the capital at the expense of the provinces. It wasn't that long ago that little kids in France were beaten for speaking Provençal or Basque in school. I'll get back to this point in a minute.
Anyway, so during the 1939-45 war the conflict in Europe was essentially Europeans defending themselves against the explosive expansion of German control, while the Germans were inspired by the idea of their right, as a nation, to the farmland of the east and to safety from the French by occupying France. The Holocaust also followed from the German nationalism of the time, as suddenly German Jews were not-Germans, and persecuted accordingly. People under occupation in the Slavic countries were treated almost as badly, and China and Indochina under Japanese occupation looked pretty much the same. This is another thing about nation-states: they require the sacrifice of others. That is the logic of the nation-state, and the only logic that supersedes it is one of a sort of democracy of nations, in which it is acknowledged that nations have the same rights. On the ideological level that is how the Allies portrayed their war, although inevitably the interests of the participating states played the most important role.
It was after the war that the UN and the EU could be established as credible institutions for providing a kind of international democracy, and it's important to recognise that, at that point, they had a strong popular mandate. Now they don't - the UN doesn't have all that much effect (although people in weak nations tend to put more store in it than people in strong ones, which might say something positive about it), while the EU works very hard to go around any kind of democratic control. When did this change? For the UN I reckon it was pretty immediate, at the time of the Korean war; I think the EU became self-aware when it pushed through the Lisbon Treaty. So, yeah, the EU is a globalist organisation by your definition, and the way it goes about things, especially the TAFTA thing at the moment, should be opposed by democrats.
But it's interesting how the EU has created space for real nations to flourish now that there is a system overarching the competing mess of nation-states. The Basque country has never been more prosperous, Scotland's going to be independent in a few years, Corsicans aren't blowing shit up anymore, and Catalonia is becoming more of a real unit. I think this is A Good Thing.
This is getting long-winded now, but I put it to you that the move towards global institutions was A Good Thing in the same way. For starters, war between France, Germany and England is now unthinkable, and that hasn't been true for a very long time. The way the EU, IMF and World Bank have become tools of Western capital is A Bad Thing, but that's a matter of the how, not the what, and can be changed. Nation-states were artificial anyway, and the progress to some higher political unit is generally positive, and even, I'd say, inevitable - that's the direction of human evolution. The nation-states themselves were the outcome of duchies and earldoms and other lower-level units that arrived at an agreement at some point. It's what we do.
