Читать книгу Sociology - Anthony Giddens - Страница 203

The 2008 global financial crisis brought home some of the risks inherent in an emerging ‘borderless economy’. In the European Union, huge economic bailouts of the Republic of Ireland, Cyprus, Greece and Portugal led to renewed questioning of the single currency and the logic of ‘ever closer union’. Is this an early sign that a gradual centrifugal tendency towards looser integration has begun to take hold in the EU? Have two major global crises of the twenty-first century – the 2008 financial crash and the 2019–20 pandemic – shown that citizens still turn to their own nation-states for solutions rather than relying on supranational bodies?

In many European countries there has been a backlash against increasing migration into Europe and the principle of freedom of movement within the EU. Recent years have seen the rise and electoral success of populist, nationalist parties in Hungary, Slovakia, Poland and the Czech Republic (Gosling 2019). In 2016, concern about large-scale immigration from EU countries was also a factor in the UK’s vote to leave the EU, as many voters favoured additional controls over the level and type of inward migration. The kind of borderless world forecast by hyberglobalizers is at odds with a continuing identification with ‘the nation’ and rising nationalist sentiment in politics.

Right-wing political movements and parties prioritize national identity over any benefits globalization may bring, but other political and social movements do not oppose globalization per se. During the 1990s, movements developed across the world that were highly critical of the capitalist free-market version of globalization but did not reject closer global connectedness. Rather, these movements promoted an alternative vision of what globalization could look like if ecological sustainability, human rights and community governance were at its heart. As a result, the varied groups and organizations – including the World Economic Forum – are known collectively as alter-globalization movements rather than being simply against globalization.

Populism and anti-/alter-globalization movements are discussed in chapter 20, ‘Politics, Government and Social Movements’.

Historically, globalization is the product of conflict, wars and invasions just as much as cooperation and mutual help, which means that reversals of global trends such as national economic protectionism are always possible. Conflicts have made a major contribution to globalization, but they also have the potential to send it into reverse. In the globalization debate, all three positions focus primarily on the contemporary process of rapid globalization and its consequences for the future. However, as we have noted, it is possible to set globalization processes into a much longer historical time frame. On this view, the extended development of human societies is leading towards more global patterns of interdependent relations, but this was not and still is not inevitable (Hopper 2007).

Chapter 21, ‘Nations, War and Terrorism’, contains an extended discussion of war and conflict.