Political Globalization 

1.

  The concept of globalization as used in this chapter refers to the multidimensional, accelerated and interconnected . There can be little doubt that one of the most pervasive forms of political globalization is the worldwide spread of democracy based on the parliamentary nationstate. acceptability. The famous thesis of the ‘end of history’ misinterpreted this to be the end of ideology, since the spread of liberal democracy did not lead to the end of ideology but to the proliferation of more and different kinds of ideology. The concept of civil society is much contested and for present purposes it simply refers to the political domain between the state and the market where informal politics takes place. The three dynamics of political globalization will be examined in this chapter around four examples of social transformation: the transformation of nationality and citizenship, the public sphere and political communication, civil society, and space and borders.

   A distinction needs to be made between states and nation-states. While most states are nation-states there is an important distinction which is particularly important in the context of political globalization. The decoupling of nationality and citizenship can be attributed to the impact of global normative culture, which has led to a blurring of the boundary between national and international law. Especially in the countries of the European Union, it is now more difficult for states to resist international law, which has become progressively incorporated into national law.

 Communication is central to politics. Nation-states have been based on centralized systems of communication ranging from national systems of education and science, national newspapers and media such as TV as well as national commemorations and popular culture in which national narratives and collective identities were codified, reproduced and legitimated.

Until now this has been mostly conceived of as a national public sphere. Most of the examples taken by Habermas relate to national public spheres. While debates continue on the question of the global public sphere as a transnational space, what is more important is the emergence of a global public discourse, which is less a spatially defi ned entity than a manifestation of discourse.

    The image of a ‘borderless world’ has long been associated with thinking about globalization. The power of global processes to transcend national borders, annihilate distance and unite through global catastrophe has provided the globalization literature with a range of powerful metaphors: the ‘global village’; ‘world polity’; ‘fragile earth’. It has also led to an interesting paradox.

    Against the background of the shifts outlined in this chapter, away from a statecentric world towards polycentric networks of governance and the development of a global political culture which works, in part, to hold the nation-state in stasis, the central question generated by political globalization is the degree to which the fragmentation of the social world leads to a loss of political autonomy. First, the globalization of the nation-state, and its model of political membership and institutionalized governance, has given form to the universal aspiration for democracy. Second, global normative culture, which has been disseminated by INGOs over a long period of time and has scripted the development of the nation-state as a global form, has also acted as a vector for global norms of personhood positing a world of individuals sustained by human rights law.

2..

  Polycentric networks, and in particular the development of global civil society, create new opportunities for autonomy and the recognition of a range of new actors and new modes of governance, but, at the same time, can create new instabilities and dangers. Global civil society actors do not necessarily work for peace, freedom and democratization; the so-called ‘dark-side’ of civil society.

   The autonomy possessed by civil society actors and the ways in which they lack accountability and democratic credentials, and tend in any case to be self-appointed spokespersons for the causes they espouse, creates new political spaces and transnational networks which can easily be appropriated by terrorists, traffickers in drugs and people, and organized crime in such a way as to undermine a nascent world polity.

3.

  What is the examples of ‘dark-side’ of civil society? 

-Yirang Kim  (yirangbu@naver.com)