March 9, 2018

Letting the right define a word

Sam Smith - Thanks to Trump using the word globalist to describe Gary Cohn, the mass media is declaring the term anti-semetic, a reaction that is at best cowardly and at worst stupid.

In fact, the term has been around for decades and often used to describe corporate expansion across the globe, something of not great concern to large media corporations. To take its use by the alt-right as the prime definition is like letting the right-wing evangelicals define Christ. Here's a little background from Wikipedia:
Paul James defines globalism, "at least in its more specific use, ... as the dominant ideology and subjectivity associated with different historically-dominant formations of global extension. The definition thus implies that there were pre-modern or traditional forms of globalism and globalization long before the driving force of capitalism sought to colonize every corner of the globe, for example, going back to the Roman Empire in the second century CE, and perhaps to the Greeks of the fifth-century BCE."

Manfred Steger distinguishes between different globalisms such as justice globalism, jihad globalism, and market globalism  Market globalism includes the ideology of neoliberalism. In some hands, the reduction of globalism to the single ideology of market globalism and neoliberalism has led to confusion. For example, in his 2005 book The Collapse of Globalism and the Reinvention of the World, Canadian philosopher John Ralston Saul treated globalism as coterminous with neoliberalism and neoliberal globalization. He argued that, far from being an inevitable force, globalization is already breaking up into contradictory pieces and that citizens are reasserting their national interests in both positive and destructive ways.

Alternatively, American political scientist Joseph Nye, co-founder of the international relations theory of neoliberalism, generalized the term to argue that globalism refers to any description and explanation of a world which is characterized by networks of connections that span multi-continental distances; while globalization refers to the increase or decline in the degree of globalism. This use of the term originated in, and continues to be used, in academic debates about the economic, social, and cultural developments that is described as globalization. The term is used in a specific and narrow way to describe a position in the debate about the historical character of globalization (i.e. whether globalization is unprecedented or not).

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