HOW DOES GLOBALIZATION TRANSCEND INDIVIDUAL NATIONAL IDENTITY AND CITIZENSHIP
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Answer:During the early part of this decade two competing and influential conceptions of the ‘new imperialism’ emerged to focus on questions of international security, world order, and the evolving world system of states. Robert Cooper (2000), one-time Deputy Secretary of the Defence and Overseas Secretariat in the British Cabinet Office, posits the development of a postmodern European state system based on transparency, interdependence, and mutual surveillance. He calls for a ‘new imperialism’ – one compatible with human rights and cosmopolitan values – in order to sort out the problems of rogue states and the chaos of pre-modern states. By contrast, Michael Hardt and Anthony Negri (2001) use the combined resources of Marx and Deleuze to chart the emergence of a new form of sovereignty they call Empire. They narrate a history of the passage from imperialism to Empire, that is, from a modernity dominated by the sovereignty of nation-states under Westphalia, and the imperialisms of European powers, to a postmodernity characterized by a single though decentred, new logic of global rule. They suggest that the passage to Empire, with its processes of globalization, “offer new possibilities to the forces of liberation,” arguing that our political future will be determined by our capacity “not simply to resist these processes but to reorganize them and redirect them toward new ends.”(p. xv)
In a strong sense, Hardt and Negri’s Empire and Cooper’s ‘new imperialism’ are both geopolitical and juridical forms of globalization that are dependent on emergent forms of global sovereignty though not necessarily forms of global citizenship. Questions of national identity and citizenship are transformed when raised in this new geopolitical context. The difference between the two views is that whereas the former focuses on American Empire as the dominant form the latter concentrates on an emergent European postmodern state system. They both entertain extranational forms of sovereignty based on these supranational systems and yet only the latter problematizes the concept of citizenship based on the bounded system of the sovereign state to describe a complex of rights that varies with scale and location. The U.S., exhibiting a kind of ‘defensive modernity’, recoils from liberal multiculturalism to fiercely defend its borders especially against the southern influx of Mexican migrants who want to equalize global opportunity and world resources. This defensive posturing also focuses negatively on American values and identity in contradistinction to the Other, and often blatantly engages the politics of racism and stereotypes to instil fear, create division, and manipulate the voters.
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