What is the relation between politics and globalization? - NGUYEN KIM CH(응웬김찌)

 

The Intricate Weave of Politics and Globalization

The connection between politics and globalization is not a simple cause-and-effect relationship, but rather a profoundly complex and tension-ridden dynamic that is fundamentally reshaping the organization of power, community, and identity across the globe. Political globalization refers to an approach that stresses postnational and transnational processes alongside a consciousness of the compressed nature of space and time.


The Three Tensions of Global Politics

Gerard Delanty and Chris Rumford argue that political globalization can be understood as a tension between three interacting processes that create the complex field of global politics:


  1. Global Geopolitics : This dimension is rooted in traditional forms, yet it constitutes a new kind of global power structure. A pervasive form of political globalization is the worldwide spread and universal acceptability of the democratic nation-state. However, this new order is not simply a Pax Americana or a single Western world order; global supremacy will be challenged by multiple power centers, mostly states. While globalization gives the nation-state worldwide acceptability, it simultaneously generates a geopolitics of global power. States remain powerful actors, but they exist in a more globally connected world that they do not fully control.

  2. Global Normative Culture : Independent of geopolitics, this dimension is largely legal and diffused through global political communication. Its main expression is human rights, which lies at the center of a global cosmopolitanism, but it also includes concerns like sustainable development and environmentalism. This culture provides a frame of reference for all societies and acts as a normative reference point and orientation for states and political actors. Crucially, the rise of a global normative culture has led to the sovereignty of the state being challenged by the rights of the individual, creating tensions between peoplehood and personhood.

  3. Polycentric Networks : This refers to forms of nonterritorial politics that emanate from a multiplicity of sites and cannot be reduced to a single center. These networks are associated with emerging forms of global governance and are embodied by global civil society. Global civil society is a political domain between the state and the market , encompassing organizations, social movements, and activists that are polycentric, globally organized, and challenge the state or global capitalism. The rise of global civil society is often seen to symbolize the political potential of globalization from below.

The Transformation, Not Demise, of the State

The relationship between politics and globalization centers on the transformation of the nation-state rather than its demise. The pressures of global economic forces, the rise of global civil society, and the transnationalization of the state (as seen in Europeanization) mean states must now share sovereignty with other global players and non-governmental actors.

  • Decoupling: Political globalization exerts tremendous pressure on the relationship between a political community and the exercise of legitimate violence. This leads to two decoupling processes: the decoupling of nationality and citizenship (as international law becomes incorporated into national law) and the decoupling of nationhood and statehood. The state becomes transnationalized and functional to a global apparatus, while the nation may take on new, sometimes recalcitrant, forms.

  • New Political Spaces: Globalization generates new non-territorial politics, like that seen in global cities and subnational politics. The spatial dynamics of politics move beyond the single, unified territory of the nation-state toward spaces of flows (social practices without geographical contiguity) that exist in tension with the traditional space of places. Paradoxically, this shift has brought borders back. Borders are now multiple, relational, and deterritorialized, existing both within and between polities.


Autonomy Versus Fragmentation

Ultimately, the core tension in the relation between politics and globalization is the inner conflict within the political frame of autonomy versus fragmentation.

Globalization can enhance democracy and open up new possibilities for autonomy through cosmopolitan collectivities and new forms of governance. However, it can also lead to a loss of autonomy and the fragmentation of the social world , often by shifting political autonomy towards global capitalism. The rise of polycentric networks, while creating new political opportunities, also introduces instabilities and dangers—the so-called 'dark-side' of civil society—where groups lacking accountability can be appropriated by terrorists, traffickers, and organized crime.

Political globalization is thus a dense, shifting set of conflicts and transformations, moving the centers of contestation beyond simple class or state-versus-civil-society divides towards new struggles over governance, identity, mobilities, and community.

What aspects of this new, fluid global political structure do you find most challenging to traditional political understanding?

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