-- this post authored by Reva Goujon
In times of global angst, we tend to organize ourselves into rival camps and casually hurl political epithets at each other as a matter of practice and principle. A couple of similarly angst-ridden generations ago, identifying yourself as a communist or capitalist could provide you with a medal or land you in jail, depending on where you were in the world and the company you kept. Now, it is self-proclaimed globalists and nationalists who are pitted against each other in a battle to passionately defend or radically reconstruct the global order.
Previous columns have examined the underlying forces - from aging populations in the advanced industrial world, to technological change compensating for lagging productivity, to major evolutions in global trade - that have put this most recent global rebalancing in motion. This rebalancing will take generations to play out but is growing more visible by the day. Just watch the battle lines being drawn by the "globalists" and "nationalists" from within the tense corridors of the White House to the flag-lined stage of the upcoming G20 summit in Hamburg, where host German Chancellor Angela Merkel will once again face off against U.S. President Donald Trump.
Divided Camps
At the risk of oversimplifying, the so-called globalists celebrate deeper connectivity around the world. In global trade, complex supply chains have stretched from continent to continent, moving parts, ideas and technologies multiple times across borders to produce a single good. All of this raises the wealth of the developing world in the process. Globalists see the rapid pace of urbanization as both a threat and an opportunity. If roughly half of the world is currently urbanized, and two-thirds of the world's population is expected to live in cities by 2050, cities - and the politicians who govern them - will be expected to provide water, power, food, transportation infrastructure, affordable housing and jobs to the arriving masses. Or else, political upheaval will ensue. That looming stress on local and planet-wide resources drives technological progress - from vertical farming to modular construction to battery innovation - to find solutions, enhancing along the way the clout of more innovative corporations that can agilely fill voids left by the state.
Nationalism is a dirty word for most globalists. The mention of it conjures disturbing images of parades filled with high-kneed marches and stiff salutes, a blinding embrace of propaganda and the threat of losing a generation to war. Globalists subscribe to the postwar liberal order that argues for collective security arrangements, such as NATO, and ambitious political unions, like the European Union, to tame nationalist fervor. Moreover, many globalists, particularly in the West, regard the United States as a superpower, or least a first among equals. Indeed, it is a nation equipped with the resources and foundational values to play a leading role in governing the globe among other like-minded nations. That responsibility traces back to the Bretton Woods system set up in the postwar order, where the United States guaranteed secure access to markets through its overwhelming control of the seas and used that as a basis to construct a globe-spanning network of allies.
The current iteration of this globalist message tends to resonate with a more youthful demographic that embraces technology and seeks international exposure as a way of life. Advocates bristle at talk of nostalgia for 'simpler' times, regarding such rhetoric as a gross distortion of history. The globalists are more willing to project their minds decades into the future in an attempt to tackle problems that will impact future generations. We associate leaders such as Former U.S. President Barack Obama, French President Emmanuel Macron, former Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau - and even powerful princelings further east like Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman - with a camp of contemporary globalist leaders. While there is a youthful face to this club, the globalist-nationalist divide is not simply a function of age or generational divide. Those who know and fear their history, like German Chancellor Angela Merkel, have risked their own political careers to defend a globalist agenda in an age of resurgent nationalism.
On the other hand, the older nationalists who lived through the chaos of the destruction of the Soviet Union in Russia regard the globalist-minded millennials protesting in the streets of Moscow as dangerously naive and blind to their own history.
Nationalists tend to see the globalists as spineless and misguided. A deep understanding of the past, and a vision toward the future, does little good if politicians are skipping over the problems festering before their eyes today. The nationalists preach a seductive message of taking back control of one's life, of one's nation. They minimize the consumer benefits of global trade and emphasize instead the tragedy that has befallen low-skilled workers who are ill prepared to keep pace with automation and free trade. Their mindset is entrenched in the present. Why spend time poring over demographic and climate charts when the solutions to those problems are wholly intangible to the common man and woman suffering today? An American farmer who has seen their livelihood go up in dust after years of drought does not want a lecture on climate change; they want a politician who will tell them that immediate relief has arrived and that the scientists other politicians are listening to are full of bunk. A prideful Frenchman would rather fixate on a message of preserving a modern French way of life imbedded in the country's revolutionary fabric than tolerate alien customs and job-seeking migrants coming across the Mediterranean from the war-torn Islamic world.
Even as nationalists make big - and often unrealistic - promises to their voters on short-term fixes to their long-term problems, setting the stage for further disappointment down the road, they are still able to feed off long-building disillusionment and distrust in political institutions to gain a voice and platform among the masses. Critically, certain powerful members of the elite are able to internalize that deep and confining sense of disillusionment. They are the ones who are ready to put their money and message behind those who they think can effect change. Take for example Robert Mercer and his daughter Rebekah Mercer - the wealthy backers behind White House chief strategist Stephen Bannon - who have collectively played a strong ideological role in shaping the Trump agenda. Writers Neil Howe and William Strauss, authors of the The Fourth Turning, have deeply influenced this group with their generational argument that prophesies the rebirth of an American identity.
They believe that the only way to save the republic from its current unraveling, and from its ossified public institutions, is to allow for the creative destruction of the state itself and rebuild from the ashes toward a more enlightened capitalist state based on Judeo-Christian values.
This mindset is naturally more risk-tolerant and less concerned with the very real consequences of injecting uncertainty into alliances and trade pacts around the world. For this class of nationalists, the system is so broken that the time for big risk and sacrifice has arrived. To carry their ambitious agenda forward, the nationalists weaponize populism to control the message to the masses. Thus, distrust toward public institutions is naturally channeled toward the mainstream media. "Fake news" becomes a mantra to drive people toward sources of information that conform to their worldview. And truth gets sacrificed along the way.
The nationalist mistrust toward political institutions plays out on a multinational levelas well. If the nation has reached such a level of crisis that it needs to be saved, why should a country like the United States needlessly tether itself to international bodies that require ever-greater sacrifices from the global superpower? The UN, NATO and newer arrangements such as the Paris Accord are seen as straitjackets to American power as opposed to the natural evolution of a postwar foundation to stabilize the world and guarantee U.S. supremacy through trade and security linkages across the globe.
This is why nationalists scoff at the fluffy notion of "global citizenship."
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