J.B. Shurk
Some politically charged words become part of our common vocabulary almost overnight. “Globalism” is a timely example. Ten or fifteen years ago, calling someone a “globalist” didn’t have much effect. Today, it is well understood as a pejorative that highlights someone’s allegiance to international institutions over those created within a nation state.
Although the term has been used in various academic circles for more than a century, it didn’t become part of our common political parlance until anti-Establishment conservatives in the United States and Europe found it a useful taxonomic description of their ideological opponents. In hindsight, it is surprising how long the word “globalism” remained dormant and hidden away in the context of political speech and debate.
During the Cold War, however, the world was divided between the Soviet Union and the United States, between communism and freedom, between closed economies and open markets. To the extent that nationalism and globalism were distinguished from each other, academics and political leaders did so under the umbrella of the Cold War contest between East and West to gobble up as many nation states as possible. Both sides embraced a “domino theory” of geopolitics in which partisans fought for global domination, one nation at a time.
There was, however, an intentional, albeit rarely described, linguistic shift from the 1950s forward. In newspapers and scholarly essays of the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, “nationalism” and “patriotism” were largely used interchangeably. Following WWII, “nationalism” increasingly acquired a negative connotation until eventually becoming a proxy word for “fascism” or “Nazism.” In our current age, prominent political and academic leaders speak of “nationalism” as if it were a virulent form of racism, imperialism, and authoritarianism rolled into one malevolent philosophy. In contrast, until rather recently, “patriotism” retained a positive meaning, even though its Greek roots describe a person’s connection to “fellow countrymen” and the “fatherland.”
After WWII, there was a concerted effort among political and intellectual leaders in the West to use the destruction from two catastrophic global wars as a profound moral argument for charting a new course for humanity. Framing the carnage of those wars as the natural result of unbridled “nationalism,” architects of the post-war world put their faith in international institutions.
The United Nations, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, and the European Union all emerged immediately after WWII but so did a thousand new international bodies constructed to do everything from standardizing industrial production in factories around the world to regulating the movement of people and goods across borders. “Internationalism” was sold as an antidote to war and therefore became almost synonymous with “peace.” The dichotomy between “nationalism” and “internationalism” was much easier to advance publicly than a contrast between patriotic love of country and an unpatriotic hatred for one’s countrymen. The United Nations decided that patriots could be internationalists. Nobody asked out loud whether internationalists could be patriots.
This paradigm has remained attractive for its simplicity but never made much sense.
or starters, German Nazism, Italian fascism, and Japanese imperialism (in which an absolute monarch was worshipped as a deity) were not inherently dangerous because their proponents organized power through national governments. They were dangerous because they were totalitarian in nature and compelled citizens to sacrifice themselves completely in the interest of the State. Had the Germans, Italians, and Japanese strongly believed in limiting government power and maximizing personal freedom, respect for individual rights would have kept expansive authoritarianism in check.
It is illogical to assume that international forms of government are somehow more humanitarian or philanthropic than national forms, just as it is illogical to assume that national forms of government are more just and capable of representing citizens than local municipal governments.
One might ask what the difference is between the Green Party in Germany demanding total civilian obedience to “global warming” mandates and a group of international ambassadors demanding the same thing through the Paris Climate Accords. Are the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change somehow less
totalitarian because international bureaucrats are regulating the behavior of both Germans and non-Germans alike?
