Globalization and the new world order

Contemporary Review, Winter, 2006 by Keith Suter

THE process of globalization is the biggest change to the world order for 350 years. This article describes both the old world order and the new world order. The process of change is called 'globalization'. This means the erosion of national boundaries and the reduced significance of national governments. We are moving from a world with borders to one without.

The nation-state is the basic unit of old world order politics. This is sometimes called the Westphalian System, after the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648. The treaty marked the effective end of the Catholic Church's legal and political domination of much of Western Europe. The Church had dominated European life for about 1300 years. By the sixteenth century, however, Rome was caught between two forces. On the one hand, there were renewed criticisms of the corruption within the Church, which caught the popular mood, after Martin Luther launched the Reformation in 1517 by putting his memorable protest on a church door. This led eventually to the Thirty Years War (1618-48) which devastated much of Central Europe. On the other hand, secular rulers (such as England's Henry VIII) were getting restless being subservient to Church influence, especially because the centre of that influence was so far away in Rome.

In medieval society the Christian commonwealth had been hierarchically organized and subject to the authority of the Pope and the Holy Roman Empire. The Roman Catholic Church and its appointed representatives exercised some centralized authority across the territorial boundaries of feudalism although Kings, Princes and other rulers throughout Europe exercised more power. This system gradually changed as authority, power, wealth and loyalties shifted to nation-state level. The Peace of Westphalia acknowledged the development of independent, secular and sovereign states, no longer subject to the centralized authority of the Pope or the Emperor.

As Europeans set out to colonize the rest of the world, so they took the Westphalian System with them. The Westphalian System is the basic system of governance across the entire world.

No one suddenly decided in 1648 to create the Westphalian System. Indeed the date is somewhat arbitrary. Some countries are older, such as England, Spain and Portugal. By contrast, 'Germany' seems to redraw its boundaries every generation or so (the last time being 1991).

Problems with 'Nation'

The Westphalian System had some internal problems right from the start. What is notable, perhaps, is not that the system is now in decline--but that it managed to last for so long. The 'nation' part of the Westphalian System refers to a group of people who see themselves to be a particular group. The application of the definition, however, is often difficult. On the one hand, there is certainly something that provides a common bond. For instance, a tune--which is not necessarily the official national anthem--can bond a group of people. For example, Rule Britannia which is for most of the world's population, who may hear it, a pleasant piece of music, is for a particular group of people a special tune and they need only to hear a few bars to feel misty-eyed (especially if they are overseas at the time).

On the other hand, the term 'nation' can be unclear. First, members of 'nations' move around the globe. The British 'nation' runs into hundreds of millions of people, with members in such countries as the US, Canada, South Africa, Australia and New Zealand. Much the same could be said about the Irish, French, Chinese and Indians. These people have, for hundreds of years, been moving overseas to take up such positions as traders, administrators, clerks, educators, soldiers, health practitioners, and missionaries. They have married and settled down, with their children thus having two sets of loyalty (and are often eligible to have two passports).

Second, there is no international agreement on how nationality is acquired. British, Australian and US citizenships are acquired by residence in the countries and according to government criteria (which nowadays are largely based on the applicant's skills or the number of relatives already present in the country). At the other end of the spectrum, to become a Japanese citizen a person has to be born of parents whose own parents were Japanese (which explains why Japanese-Koreans whose families have been resident in Japan for a century still do not have Japanese citizenship).

Finally, there is the much narrower definition of a 'nation' from the Boston-based human rights non-governmental organization Cultural Survival, which is concerned with the protection of indigenous peoples: 'A nation is a group of people with a strong cultural and political identity that is both self-defined and acknowledged by others. Nations are those groups that have exercised political control over their destinies at some point in the past and still see such control as a possible future strategy'. [1] Such people--numbering about 350 million worldwide--include the First Nations in the US and Canada.