Understanding International Relations, Third Edition

Globalization and postindustrial society
Nationalists and the fervently religious explain their commitments in simple
terms. In the first case, the nation (or ethnie) is taken to be a pre-existent
phenomenon – it is simply a fact about the world that it is composed of
nations which shape the political identities of their members and once this
The International Politics of Identity
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is recognized it follows (for the nationalist) that it is natural for each of us
to orient our political actions towards ‘our’ nation or ethnic group. The
so-called revival of nationalist politics, on this account, is simply the re-assertion
of a truth that ideologies such as communism and liberalism suppressed.
Religiously-minded people take a similar view; the truth about the world is
to be found revealed in the Koran or the Bible (or in the Hindu scriptures
and so on); these books tell us how to behave towards our fellow believers
and towards others, and what needs to be explained is why most people do
not follow the word of God, not why some people do. Again, the increased
salience of religion is not to be explained in terms of social factors but in its
own terms, terms that have been de-legitimated by the Enlightenment and
post-Enlightenment secular politics of the last two hundred years but whose
relevance is constantly being re-asserted by witnesses to the faith. As social
scientists, students of International Relations may wish to contest these self-
understandings; after all, contrary to the claims of nationalists it is quite
impossible to identify any objective characteristics of a nation, and,
contrary to the claims of religious fundamentalists, it is clear that the holy
scriptures on which they rely do not interpret themselves – the word of God
never comes through en clair. It is, however, important to recognize that the
interpretations that social scientists offer for the revival of identity politics
are not those that the individuals concerned would usually accept. We are
not obliged to accept the explanations of the true believers, but we are
obliged to try not to patronize them by ‘explaining away’ their beliefs. Still,
and bearing this proviso in mind, it is possible to identify one clear expla-
nation for the revival of identity politics, or, better, a family of explanations –
namely that the kind of political identities described above are a reaction to
the new social/economic/political forces conveniently summarized by the
portmanteau word ‘globalization’.
The central argument here is simple; globalization potentially creates a
uniform world with global production and consumption patterns gradually
ironing out the differences between peoples and societies – gradually we are
all coming to do the same kind of jobs, wear the same kind of clothes, eat
the same kind of food, watch the same kind of television programmes and
so on. But, so the argument goes, people need meaning in their lives as well
as material goods; generally we have interpreted our social world precisely
through the kind of differences that are now being removed or undermined.
National stereotypes were (sometimes still are) a crude illustration of the
point – very few Englishmen have ever worn bowler hats and roast beef was
always expensive, the beret was equally unusual across the Channel and the
French diet does not consist of frogs’ legs and snails – but the sense that
Englishmen were genuinely different from Frenchmen, crudely expressed by
these caricatures, was engrained in both societies and has been an important