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Globalisation and the nation-state

By aneela shahzad Nov.22,2019

The dilemma of g lobalisation has been that as it g rew it allowed the crossover of ideas, art and cultures

The Treaty of Westphalia (1648) was signed by almost all European states to end the Eighty
Years’ War and the Thirty Years’ War. These wars collectively consumed over 10 million
European lives. The Eighty Years’ War was a result of the Dutch revolt against the political and
religious hegemony of Philip II of Spain over the Netherlands. The Thirty Years’ War broke out
when the Holy Roman Emperor, Ferdinand II, tried to force religious uniformity over his
domains, forcing Roman Catholicism upon the Protestant majority states which revolted.

Westphalia tried to induce peace in Europe by introducing the idea of national self-
determination, the concept of “co-existing sovereign nation-states” that would not interfere in
each other’s domestic matters. In the same years, Enlightenment philosophers like Rousseau and
Locke wrote about “the government’s lack of authority in the realm of individual conscience”,
which led to the idea of the separation of Church and State, hence a secular state. The principle
of democracy was another essential of Enlightenment. It was the “will of the people”, found
through the electoral process — and many revolutions in Europe were executed under this
slogan. An adage to all this was the 19th century Feminist Movement that brought the idea of
equality of both sexes, which in time not only led to the dilution of the family system in Western
Europe and America, but also brought out of the closet all sorts of sexual behaviour that were
previously grouped in “perversion”.

Westphalia had nothing to do with secularism. It only meant to secure for each state the right to
determine their own will over matters — religion being an essential one — so Protestant states
could live according to their own beliefs and Catholics theirs. Sovereignty of Westphalia
therefore clashes with the later idea of secularism, which takes away from a people their
freedom to exercise their religious belief collectively, if they want to.

Democracy, which first emerged as an Enlightenment idea, was equally espoused by the
communists and capitalists. According to Karl Marx, “the first step in the revolution by the
working class, is to raise the proletariat to the position of ruling class, to win the battle for
democracy” and “universal suffrage, being one of the first and most important tasks of the
militant proletariat” — ironically using exactly the same methods to do so as used by despots. On
the other hand, in the post-war period, the ensuing modern welfare states in Europe and
America, combined capitalism and democracy, even when in the words of Wolfgang Merkel,
“capitalism and democracy follow different logics: unequally distributed property rights on the
one hand, equal civic and political rights on the other; profit-oriented trade within capitalism in
contrast to the search for the common good within democracy; debate, compromise and
majority decision-making within democratic politics versus hierarchical decision-making by
managers and capital owners. Capitalism is not democratic, democracy not capitalist”.

Modern capitalism was the first-born of the Industrial Revolution and the banking system was its
father. Throughout the Cold War, the capitalist and communist camps were busy uprooting one
another. In its raw form, capitalism was a system based on individual rights and private
ownership — like basic human rights. But with banks giving huge loans to favourite individuals,
allowing them to own property and develop industry they would never have on their own,
created a capitalist elite that has to keep growing bigger, to the point it practically owns state
machinery and be able to manipulate all sources of livelihoods. Furthermore, the capitalist ideal
is based on a constant-growth model, because once you stop growing you will immediately be
engulfed by competitors. This “never enough” formula not only increased the rich-poor divide
worldwide, but also exhausted Earth’s resources, destroyed and polluted the environment,
accelerated global warming, and revamped cultures and societies in fashions suiting the
profiteers.

All these concepts needed mentioning because when the Cold War ended as a result of the
dissolution of the Soviet Union, the United States became the sole superpower in the global
arena and sought to rule over the world with a unified world-order that would benefit itself
above all others. It was the accumulative of all such conceptual ideals that would become the
slogan the US would present to the world as the solution to all human misery, and that only they
could bring that. This accumulative would be called globalisation. In fact, globalisation is the
evolved form of capitalism at the global scale.

JH Mittelman has described globalisation as “a historical transformation in the economy of

livelihoods and modes of existence; in politics, a loss in the degree of control exercised such that
the locus of power gradually shifts in varying proportions above and below the territorial state;
and in culture, a devaluation of a collectivity’s achievements or perceptions of them”.

Moreover, the dilemma of globalisation has been that as it grew on the swiftly growing means of
transport and communication it allowed the crossover of ideas, art and cultures. At the same
pace it has facilitated the cancerous spread of terrorism across state borders to the extent that it
became the new mask for proxy wars that had been so much in vogue since the Cold War.
With globalised terror came the international regime of the War against Terror, doubly severing
the nation-state. The first severing was by the non-state actors that tore the state from within
and the second by the super-national regimes that deemed themselves right to obliterate
national sovereign borders as they championed world peace. In this pursuit states have been
rampaged by the most powerful military tools, sometimes for harbouring these terrorists, or for
trying to fight off “good rebels” or even for being labeled as terrorist states. Presence of
terrorists in a state, whom the state itself deems as their enemy and is fighting against, has been
used as the legitimate reason to wage war upon that state.

The ‘”proxy” has in fact taken many new forms. In this new globalised world, a state population
is influenced by information through the electronic media from abroad. Foreign governments
establish channels that aim to communicate directly with the publics of the target nations, giving
them the power to mould the public against their national and ideological interests. Foreign
governments also influence the electoral process not only by donating money to favourites but
by spreading disinformation through fake social media accounts.

From the Westphalia effort to bound nations in spatial boundaries wherein they would be free
to exercise their will and ensure their prosperity, saving them from the endless wars of imperial
lust between kingdoms, that advocate slogans of liberty and humanitarianism to the untrained
masses. This is despite the freedoms of the free market and aid of supranational forces,
individuals and state corporations, who aim to maximise and secure the profits of these markets
and are shredding the nation-states into unbridled chaos.

Published in The Express Tribune, November 22nd, 2019.

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