Setting the Glocal Scene

Recent decades have seen much talk about globalization. Yet, the term is often treated with little definitional care. What is more, there appears to have been a significant recent shift in the connotations intended by many of those who speak about “globalization.” Until not long ago commonly used as a neutral or in some cases celebratory shorthand for a growing degree of interdependency and interconnectedness spanning national and other boundaries, globalization has of late acquired more negative connotations to many. For instance, in his 2018 speech to the UN General Assembly then-US president Donald Trump set up a dichotomy between “patriots” and “globalists,” unambiguously siding with the former and finding deep fault with the latter. Almost instantly UK Brexiteer Nigel Farage tweeted his support for Donald Trump's speech and with it, one assumes, for the ideological binary it had contained (Euronews, September 25, 2018). In further illustration of how ideas today spread with a previously unknown speed and geographical reach, it did not take long for this juxtaposition of “patriots” to (negatively evaluated) “globalists” to also feature in statements made by Hungarian nationalists and Italian EU sceptics. Reflecting the circulation of figures of speech, the worldviews and political blueprints they contain and help articulate, this was merely one instance, albeit a particularly high-profile one, of some of the phenomena that define our era. These phenomena include our technological ability to share but also contest ideas instantaneously and across vast stretches of space. The issue at hand extends further to a paradox, namely the fact that some of the very illustrations of our global interconnectedness, ideational and technological, simultaneously contain a strong critique of such interconnectedness. The politicians just mentioned thus self-consciously also addressed transnational, if not even global audiences, and they did so by employing the very technological means that partly define our global era, only to advocate a return to something “smaller.” It is safe to conclude that to each of the politicians in question this “smaller” domain is that of the nationstate, which—in such statements—is shorn of all the historical guilt, or even of awareness or any memory of the many atrocities committed in the name of “nations” over the last 200 years.