Reading Assignment 3: “What is the relation between politics and globalization?”——JIA MENGZHUO

 1)SUMMER

The concept of globalisation as used in this chapter refers to the multidimensional, accelerated and interconnected organisation of space and time across national boundaries. With specific reference to political globalisation, it involves an approach to the social world that emphasises post-national and transnational processes, as well as an awareness of the compressed nature of space and time. The focus is on the decline of the nation-state under the influence of global forces that create different types of politics stemming from the development of transnational networks and flows, on the one hand, and processes of national liberation and re-territorialisation, on the other. The approach to political globalisation adopted in this chapter emphasises the multifaceted nature of globalisation, which is best seen as a relational dynamic rather than a new type of reality. In our view, political globalisation can be understood as a tension between three processes that interact to produce a complex field of global politics: global geopolitics, global normative culture and polycentric networks.

Undoubtedly, one of the most pervasive forms of political globalisation is the worldwide spread of democracy based on parliamentary nation states. Democratic governments exist in some form or another in most parts of the world, which is a form of globalisation based on territory and largely confined to the political forms of nation states.

The second dimension of political globalisation refers to the rise of a global normative culture. Political communication is now also global and no longer confined to national borders due to global communication and popular culture, among other things. National politics are increasingly framed by global discourse. Together with the global spread of democracy, political communication has become the basis for a global normative culture that is both opposed to geopolitics and designed to support it.

While globalisation requires the presence of global players, such as powerful states, to spread and enforce global geopolitics, there is another dimension of globalisation that has less to do with states and cannot be reduced to a global normative culture.

This chapter examines three dynamics of political globalisation around four examples of social transformation: shifts in nationality and citizenship, the public sphere and political communication, civil society, and space and borders. In the context of the transformations outlined in this chapter, the shift from a state-centred world to a polycentric network of governance, and the development of a global political culture designed in part to stagnate the nation-state, the central question arising from the globalisation of politics is the extent to which the fragmentation of the social world has led to a loss of political autonomy. The three processes outlined here - the universalisation of state-contained models of democracy, the emergence of a global normative culture, and the 'civil societyisation' of governance structures - exist in complex and sometimes contradictory relationships. sometimes contradictory relationships. In conclusion, we can point to three dilemmas arising from these complex relationships and their implications for the tension between autonomy and fragmentation.

First, the globalisation of the nation-state and its political membership and institutionalised modes of governance have created a general desire for democracy. The nation-state is an important instrument of political autonomy through popular sovereignty, and democracy is an important badge of membership in the world's nation-states.

Second, the global normative culture, which has long been disseminated by international non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and which sees the development of the nation-state as a global form, has also become a vehicle for global norms of personhood that assume a personal world underpinned by human rights law.

Third, the development of polycentric networks, and global civil society in particular, creates new opportunities for autonomy and the recognition of a range of new actors and new modes of governance, but at the same time may create new instabilities and dangers. Global civil society actors do not necessarily work for peace, freedom and democratisation. The autonomy that civil society actors have and the way in which they lack accountability and democratic credentials tend to become self-appointed spokespersons for the causes they champion in any given context, creating new political spaces and transnational networks.

The globalisation of politics has led to a new set of tensions around which politics now revolves. While key political conflicts previously centred on class divisions, the split between the state and civil society, traditional and industrial economies, or resistance to imperial rule, complementary controversies have emerged around a range of shifting concerns: the right to difference, the rights of individuals and communities, liberal democracy and cosmopolitanism. Indeed, the globalisation of politics has worked to create the possibility of proliferating sites of political conflict around an expanded set of concerns: governance, identity, mobility, and the communities that figure prominently among them.