Attempts to define globalization often seem little better than so many ideological appropriations—discussions not of the process itself, but of its effects, good or bad: judgements, in other words, totalizing in nature; while functional descriptions tend to isolate particular elements without relating them to each other.footnote¹ It may be more productive, then, to combine all the descriptions and to take an inventory of their ambiguities—something that means talking as much about fantasies and anxieties as about the thing itself. In what follows we will explore these five distinct levels of globalization, with a view to demonstrating their ultimate cohesion and to articulating a politics of resistance: the technological, the political, the cultural, the economic, the social, very much in that order.

One can talk about globalization, for instance, in purely technological terms: the new communications technology and the information revolution—innovations which, of course, do not simply remain at the level of communication in the narrow sense, but also have their impact on industrial production and organization, and on the marketing of goods. Most commentators seem to feel that this dimension of globalization, at least, is irreversible: a Luddite politics does not seem to be an option here. But the theme reminds us of an urgent consideration in any discussion of globalization: is it really inevitable? Can its processes be stopped, diverted or reversed? Might regions, even whole continents, exclude the forces of globalization, secede, or ‘delink’ from it?footnote² Our answers to these questions will have an important bearing on our strategic conclusions.

In discussions of globalization at the political level, one question has predominated: that of the nation-state. Is it over and done with, or does it still have a vital role to play? If reports of its demise are naïve, what then to make of globalization itself? Should it, perhaps, be understood as merely one pressure among many on national governments—and so on. But lurking behind these debates, I believe, is a deeper fear, a more fundamental narrative thought or fantasy. For when we talk about the spreading power and influence of globalization, aren’t we really referring to the spreading economic and military might of the US? And in speaking of the weakening of the nation-state, are we not actually describing the subordination of the other nation-states to American power, either through consent and collaboration, or by the use of brute force and economic threat? Looming behind the anxieties expressed here is a new version of what used to be called imperialism, which we can now trace through a whole dynasty of forms. An earlier version was that of the pre-First World War colonialist order, practised by a number of European countries, the US and Japan; this was replaced after the Second World War and the subsequent wave of decolonization by a Cold War form, less obvious but no less insidious in its use of economic pressure and blackmail (‘advisers’; covert putsches such as those in Guatemala and Iran), now led predominantly by the US but still involving a few Western European powers.

Now perhaps we have a third stage, in which the United States pursues what Samuel Huntington has defined as a three-pronged strategy: nuclear weapons for the US alone; human rights and American-style electoral democracy; and (less obviously) limits to immigration and the free flow of labour.footnote³ One might add a fourth crucial policy here: the propagation of the free market across the globe. This latest form of imperialism will involve only the US (and such utterly subordinated satellites as the UK), who will adopt the role of the world’s policemen, and enforce their rule through selected interventions (mostly bombings, from a great height) in various alleged danger zones.

What kind of national autonomy do the other nations lose under this new world order? Is this really the same kind of domination as colonization, or forcible enlistment in the Cold War? There are some powerful answers to this question, which mostly seem to fall under our next two headings, the cultural and the economic. Yet the most frequent themes of collective dignity and self-respect lead in fact less often to social than to political considerations. So it is that, after the nation-state and imperialism, we arrive at a third ticklish subject—nationalism.

But is not nationalism rather a cultural question? Imperialism has certainly been discussed in such terms. And nationalism, as a whole internal political programme, usually appeals not to financial self-interest, or the lust for power, or even scientific pride—although these may be side-benefits—but rather to something which is not technological, nor really political or economic; and which we therefore, for want of a better word, tend to call ‘cultural’. So is it always nationalist to resist US globalization? The US thinks it is, and wants you to agree; and, moreover, to consider US interests as being universal ones. Or is this simply a struggle between various nationalisms, with US global interests merely representing the American kind? We’ll come back to this in more detail later on.

The standardization of world culture, with local popular or traditional forms driven out or dumbed down to make way for American television, American music, food, clothes and films, has been seen by many as the very heart of globalization. And this fear that US models are replacing everything else now spills over from the sphere of culture into our two remaining categories: for this process is clearly, at one level, the result of economic domination—of local cultural industries closed down by American rivals. At a deeper level, the anxiety becomes a social one, of which the cultural is merely a symptom: the fear, in other words, that specifically ethno-national ways of life will themselves be destroyed.