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In recent years, and especially in the aftermath of 9/11, there has been a marked shift in the focus of both academic and public discourse about the global order from the theme of globalization to that of empire. This shift raises a number of fundamental issues about the nature of contemporary historical developments, around which our discussions are centered.
Viewed through a globalization lens, states appeared to be in decline, as governance of social life fell increasingly to markets, international institutions such as the UN, the WTO, the World Bank, and the IMF, and an ever-thickening network of transnational NGOs. In contrast, more recent accounts focusing on empire seem to presuppose that order will be imposed primarily by a dominant state's projection of economic and military power. From our perspective, then, a critical question to be addressed is how the global political and economic processes of the past three decades are related to the more recent emphasis on great power politics.
The contradictory relations between globalization and empire inform tensions in a number of key areas, notably:
- Territory and territoriality. The dynamics of global economic and political phenomena are changing how we think about territory. On the one hand, scholars have pointed to the declining sovereignty of nation-states over their economies. They emphasize the hyper-mobility of capital; the role of international institutions such as the World Bank and IMF; the ascendance of sub-national units, such as global cities or high-tech districts; the birth of new forms of transnational civil society; and the growing significance of electronic spatial networks. On the other hand, since the late 1970s the world has also witnessed the appearance of radical forms of territorially-based nationalist expression, as well as transnational movements whose appeal relies on explicit territorial claims. To what extent are these two apparently antithetical phenomena --processes of "de-territorialization" versus the passionate assertion of sovereignty over space --related? How and why do new forms of territorialization respond to the de-territorializing effects of global capital? And what does this dialectic between de- and re-territorialization portend for the shape of contemporary political projects and imaginations?
- Geography and the shifting dynamics of growth and inequality. The globalization of enterprise and finance has intensified world trade, fostering impressive economic growth in some regions. Yet the life chances of the rich and poor are diverging sharply in nearly every country in the world. Organized labor everywhere has lost much of its leverage and more real power is gravitating toward transnational corporations and off-shore financial operations that typically escape the legal control of any political system. Some former Third World countries (for example, China, Brazil, India, and Malaysia) have experienced significant expansion albeit at the cost of heightened economic stratification. Others, particularly in the non-oil producing countries of the Middle East and in Sub-Saharan Africa, have suffered outright impoverishment.
- Mass movements and democratic values. For much of the late twentieth century, the democratic nation-state seemed the inexorable political future of the world. Certain forms of global democratic values and institutions have thrived in recent years -- human rights agreements have become generalized and progressive NGOs and global social movements have proliferated. Since the 1970s, forms of democratic governance have spread, if unevenly and haltingly, through dozens of formerly authoritarian states, from Greece and Spain to Latin America, Eastern Europe, and parts of Africa and Southeast Asia. At the same time, some of the most powerful political and cultural movements of the past quarter century have not been democratic in character. It has become clear that this era of globalization entails a rise not only of the promise of new democratic movements, as most recently in Ukraine, but also of a wide variety of mass-based movements, religious as well as secular, some of which challenge the very concept of democracy and all of which may be said to call into question the current adequacy of democratic theory.
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