Interesting question: Why after many multiple decades of only localized migrant issues, most having to do with border wars or other disruptions, have so many nations at once dealt with floods of people exploiting broken migration systems? In other words, how did a local problem become a global problem so quickly? How did all border systems break at once?
And consider the problem before this one. We had a globalized response to the COVID crisis. In most nations of the world, the policy response was eerily similar. There was masking, distancing, closures, travel restrictions, and capacity limits, while big business was allowed to stay open. The same methods, which have no modern precedent, were attempted in all countries in the world except a few.
The states that did not go along—Sweden, Tanzania, Nicaragua among others—face unrelenting attacks from world media.
The problem of migration plus pandemic planning are only two data points but they both suggest an ominous reality.
The nation states that have dominated the political landscape since the Renaissance, and even back in some cases to the ancient world, are giving way to a new form of government, which we can call globalism. It doesn’t refer to trade across borders, which has been the norm for all human history. It is about political control, away from citizens in countries toward something else that citizens cannot control or influence.
From the time of the Treaty of Westphalia, signed in 1648, the idea of state sovereignty prevailed in politics. Not every nation needed the same policies. They would respect differences toward the goal of peace. This involved permitting religious diversity among nation states, a concession that led to an unfolding of freedom in other ways. The system worked but not everyone has been happy with it.
Some of the most brilliant intellectuals for centuries have dreamed of global government as a solution to the diversity of policies of nation states. It’s the go-to idea for scientists and ethicists who are so convinced of the correctness of their ideas that they dream up some worldwide imposition of their favored solution. Humanity has by-and-large been wise enough not to attempt such a thing beyond military alliances and mechanisms to improve trade flows.
The impression I had while there was that the experience of everyone in town that day, all swarming around the big United Nations meeting, was one of deep separation of their world from the world of the rest of us. They are “bubble people.”
Their friends, source of financing, social groupings, career aspirations, and major influence are detached not only from normal people but from the nation state itself. The fashionable attitude among them all is to regard the nation state and its history of meaning as passe, fictional, and rather embarrassing.
Entrenched globalism of the sort that operates in the 21st century represents a shift against and repudiation of half a millennium of the way governance has worked in practice. All governance came to be organized around geographically restricted zones of control. The juridical boundaries restrained power. The king of France could govern France but required a war to influence England, and so too for Russia, Spain, Sweden, and so on.
The world today is packed with wealthy institutions and individuals that stand in revolt against the ideas of freedom and democracy. They do not like the idea of geographically constrained states with zones of juridical power. They believe they have a global mission and want to empower global institutions against the sovereignty of people living in nation states.
They say that there are existential problems that require the overthrow of the nation-state model of governance. They have a list: infectious disease, pandemic threats, climate change, peacekeeping, cybercrime, and I’m sure there are others on the list that we’ve yet to see. The idea is that these are necessarily worldwide and evade the capacity of the nation state to deal with them.
1 comment:
The headline points are polar opposites. Not because they aren’t impossible to be one and the same. It is because those that are pushing globalization are evil and evil is opposite of good. Eliminate evil and globalization is possible and probably good for everyone.
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