"Globalization" of what? And for whom?

Why is there still nationalism in an age of globalisation? Ben Hillier 23 February 2010

Globalisation has been a seemingly unstoppable force. The world is a smaller place than it used to be. We have constantly been told that the global nature of the system has undermined the power of nations. Yet nationalism remains. In some cases it has become stronger. How do we account for this? And why should we resist it? Globalisation The world is undoubtedly more integrated and the people in it much closer than at any time in history. Capitalism has broken down barriers like no other system has been able to. In the last several decades the process has sped up. It can be seen firstly in the way the basic act of producing goods and services for consumption has become a global task. Today, supply chains criss-cross the globe, bringing the labour and efforts of countless people together in the most staggering ways. The basic components of pretty much any household item have travelled from all corners of the globe to reach us in our kitchens and lounge rooms. The reality is, our own toothbrush has travelled more of the world than most of us ever will. Across the world, the share of imported inputs in manufacturing rose from less than 10 per cent in 1970 to around 30 per cent today. Trade as a share of GDP increased from 32 per cent to 47 per cent over the 15 years to 2005. Private capital flows tripled and foreign direct investment doubled as shares of world GDP. The ratio of trade to GDP increased most markedly in developing economies, where the ratio of trade to GDP has risen rapidly from 47 per cent in 1990 to 70 per cent in 2007. But simple economic data doesn’t capture the scale of world integration. Despite all the talk about different cultures and ways of life around the world, globalisation has seen a trend towards the formation of a global culture, where differences are eradicated. Almost everywhere mass education systems have resulted in uniform curricula (with key exceptions like history) and graduates who can all speak not just the same national language – but increasingly “global languages” like English. Most strikingly, the language of mathematics is generally understood (to greater or lesser degrees) by all who complete their education. The merging of culture is graphically illustrated by looking at the aspirations of young people. Across all parts of the world these are remarkably uniform. There would have to be pretty much no country on earth where teenagers aren’t singing into a makeshift microphone dreaming of “stardom” or of having a nice car. In particular, popular music today on every continent retains a vestige of “cultural authenticity” mostly by means of people singing or rapping in their own language and having the occasional traditional instrument overlayed across the rest of the sounds. In every country on the planet, the standard is rap, hip hop, rock’n’roll and punk. The same goes for the ways we organise our private lives. In Australia for example, we celebrate multiculturalism and talk about the great diversity of cultures. Yet here, a world of “different cultures” increasingly means simply “different food”. It might be a fun night out to indulge in some “traditional cuisine” from a restaurant, but the Iraqis, the Japanese and everyone else are now eating pasta like the rest of us. Of course there are still specific differences in ways of life from region to region. But more and more they are latched onto as proof of a general difference which, with few exceptions, simply no longer exists. The British Marxist Chris Harman wrote almost 20 years ago of how “patterns of consumption, styles of dress, forms of recreation, forms of sexual relations and the rest increasingly cut across the old cultural barriers. Languages remain different, but what they say is increasingly the same”. With the advent of the internet and the development of communication technologies like mobile phones, this process has accelerated. The World Bank has reported that “at the end of 2007 there were about 1.1 billion fixed telephone lines and 3.3 billion mobile phone subscribers worldwide. Developing economies increased their share of mobile phone subscribers from about 30 per cent of the world total in 2000 to more than 50 per cent in 2004 and to about 70 per cent in 2007.” It is now, by and large, easier and quicker to communicate with someone on the other side of the planet than it is to walk up the street to your neighbour’s house. The economic basis for this phenomenon of merging cultures is the spread of capitalism. The capitalist system has subsumed all aspects of human existence under market relationships – that is true for almost every person on the planet. Yet this isn’t the forging of “one planet, one people” as the saying goes. Increasingly there is the polarisation of the entire world into two peoples – two classes whose lived experiences are dramatically different. As Harman again noted: “As the forms of exploitation undertaken by ruling classes get more and more alike, so do their lifestyles and their culture. By the same token, as the humdrum everyday lives of the mass of people become ever more dependent on their ability to sell their labour power and fit into the tempo of work in the factory, mine or office, so their forms of recreation, culture and dress converge.” So bosses all around the world have lavish lifestyles, wear the same diamond necklaces, the same expensive suits and Rolex watches, eat the same fine cuisine in expensive restaurants, attend the same conferences and sit in the same sections of airplanes and sporting stadiums. Workers all around the world increasingly buy the same sorts of canned goods, wear the cheaper clothes made in the same cheaper locations, catch the same sorts of buses and work at the same sorts of jobs. The basis of nationalism This process was supposed to undermine nationalism. A world where businesses are multi-national, where international institutions have proliferated, where people are multilingual and where our ways of life converge was supposed to make nations somewhat irrelevant. Yet nationalism remains a potent force. In fact in Australia it seems to have grown stronger, with more flags, more Southern Cross tattoos and more public displays of “national pride” every year. There are a number of reasons for the continued existence of nationalism. Firstly, there is the role of the state in capitalism. In order to forge an integrated national market in both labour and goods to facilitate business, there has to be the unification of diverse geographical areas under common laws and regulations, ruled by a singular authority. To facilitate the exploitation of workers by bosses within a territory, there has to be the creation of national allegiances. The imposition of a national language, the creation of national institutions and a national identity which can generate some level of loyalty on the part of workers toward their exploiters is crucial. To maintain this unity, governments never cease in their attempts to strengthen the national identity and to shame those who get in the way of the ruling class’s project of making money. Hence WA Premier Colin Barnett’s labelling of striking Pilbara workers as “un-Australian”, and the constant invocation of the “Australian values” of mateship and a fair go. Who could possibly argue against mateship and a fair go? By implication, only people who are not Australians, who don’t really belong here. So the capitalist state is by its very nature a nation state. Yet the strengthening of nationalism has, paradoxically, been facilitated by the very processes of globalisation which have been said to undermine the nation. Globalisation and nationalism Globalisation is not simply a natural process of economic and cultural integration. There are powerful and conscious national forces at work pushing globalisation. The major imperial powers have, through brute military force or through institutions like the International Monetary Fund (IMF), consciously reshaped countries, prying open borders to the flow of foreign capital and goods. Iraq is a prime example – the “war for freedom and democracy” delivered freedom only to capitalists. Restrictions were removed from foreign companies and state-owned industry was gutted. Author Michael Schwartz quoted one US official bragging that “one well-stocked 7-Eleven could knock out 30 Iraqi stores; a Wal-Mart could take over the country”. Haiti is another example. IMF structural adjustment programs allowed the US to dump its own food exports and destroy traditional agriculture. As American socialist Ashley Smith notes, this process “undermined the ability of Haitian peasants to compete on the market. Dislocated peasants flooded into Port-au-Prince, swelling the population from 760,000 in the early 1980s to close to 3 million before the earthquake… As a result, hundreds of thousands were reduced to desperate poverty in the sprawling shantytowns.” The specific examples are but instances of a general trend of major nations using “globalisation” as a front for their own interests. The World Bank itself has reported that high-income economies erect the greatest barriers to world trade and punish smaller nations that attempt to increase their share of manufacturing. Reflecting this is the fact that high-income economies account for around 76 per cent of global manufacturing exports and receive 75 per cent of foreign direct investment inflows. Globalisation then has a national bent. A free global market is often promoted as a way of generating wealth for the “world community”. But in practice, there can be very little freedom in a market dominated by capitalist interests. Globalisation has often been a very old fashioned process involving the subjugation of weak economies to the interests of imperial powers. So while nationalism is a general feature associated with the way the capitalist system is organised on the basis of states, the processes associated with globalisation generate resentment among less powerful countries, which can heighten nationalist sentiment. Just think of the movements in Latin America over the last decade, where Venezuelans and Bolivians have rallied behind their national flags against imperial economic domination. Ideology, class and globalisation The mass restructuring of the global economy has been part of a process in which the exploitation of workers has increased in the industrial heartlands of the world. Globalisation has class content. In the US, for example, globalisation mostly hasn’t driven firms down to Mexico. It has meant firms moving from the unionised areas of the north to the southern states, where trade unions have much less of a presence and where wages can be pushed much lower. The threat of globalisation, of jobs being lost overseas, is constantly used as a bargaining chip by employers in all countries to push down wages and increase profits. So it is not just globalisation, but the idea of globalisation that is a powerful force in the hands of the national ruling class. They have the capacity to cry poor and claim that “we are all in it together”. They are just as buffeted by international forces as anyone, they say. Sacrifice is more important than ever if the country is to survive in rapidly changing globe. In Australia the rallying calls to save “Aussie jobs” and “Aussie industry” from global economic competition – particularly competition from emerging Asia – is a constant. Workers are told it is up to us to make industry competitive by working harder and increasing productivity. Yet there is a contradiction in this. If the national state has retreated or had its power undermined by the global system, then there is little to hope for in making demands on the government to ease the burdens of working life. The mass privatisations and the deregulation of markets allows governments to say that basic things like public transport ticket prices, energy prices, wages and the like have nothing to do with them – the whole world is out of their control too. Even some on the left agree with this assessment. Nigel Harris wrote more than a decade ago of: “a structure which is now impelling integration on a scale which governments can only temporarily impede. It is this major material change which has destroyed the agenda of the left: using the state to fashion whatever domestic social reforms were proposed.” Such a state of affairs really might spell the end of nationalism. The reality, however, is not so clear cut. Globalisation – insofar as it means the triumph of capitalism on a world scale and the creation of a global working class with similar conditions of life – is an unstoppable force. Yet insofar as globalisation means absolute subjection of the world working class to the vagaries of the market, it has been a conscious choice of the ruling class to overstate their own powerlessness. So they try to have it two ways. On one hand, they promote nationalism to create a sense of unity between themselves and those they exploit. On the other, they try to convince us all that the nation has been fundamentally undermined. At the same time they tell us that globalisation is a force for good, but that we have to sacrifice for it. The game is given away, though, every time the ruling class uses the state for their own benefit. The mass intervention of governments to save the global financial markets quickly showed just how much power nation states have when they actually want to use it. Workers of the world unite! Nationalism is a dead end for workers because it ties us to the very class that has an interest in promoting the market above the needs of humanity. Yet nationalism is an outgrowth of the way capitalism is organised. The forces of globalisation don’t necessarily undermine it, but often see that it is promoted. The conditions of life for workers make us susceptible to it. Our experience of the world, despite globalisation, is still mediated through the prism of the nation. And the marketisation of everyday life creates more of a sense that we have no control over the world around us. Blind economic forces buffet us around as we try to eke out a living. As the world comes to grips with the utter failure of globalised finance, nationalism continues to strengthen the hold of bosses over workers. In Australia, class struggle has declined as unions have acquiesced to the ruling class. The decrease in struggle has meant an increase in the sense of powerlessness. Nationalism has become more obvious, more flagrant partly because of this – we are more likely to listen to ruling-class propaganda when we don’t have a sense of our own power. For the working class, squeezed by global capitalism on one side and by our own national ruling class on the other, there is only one way out: Seeing that the fundamental conflict is not between nation and global economy, but between the classes that make up every nation on the globe. When we fight against the economic forces that are lined up against us, we can regain some control, a sense of power over our lives and a sense of power over the world. So to truly unite the population of the globe, to overcome both the narrow divisions of nation and the cultural limiting that occurs through turning the mass of humanity into wage slaves, requires class struggle within nations. It requires seeing that, despite the immense forces of global capitalism, the real enemy is still at home.