Understanding International Relations, Third Edition

part of their respective self-understandings. In so far as global brands
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eliminate difference – tee-shirts, denims and hamburgers being universally
consumed by English and French alike – many people feel that something
important has been lost. This feeling potentially creates the social basis for
a reaction in favour of an exaggerated version of difference, and this is
where the new identity politics comes into its own, assuring us that we are
not simply the product of global branding, but can control our own
destinies by asserting ourselves as Christians, Scots, Sikhs or whatever.
Benjamin Barber captures this nicely in his amusingly (but misleadingly)
titled Jihad vs. McWorld (1996). McWorld is a convenient way of expressing
the rise of an unimaginative and somewhat bland sameness but ‘Jihad’ is less
well chosen since its Islamic connotations may seem to limit its applicability –
in fact, Barber intends this word to summarize all the reactions to McWorld
of whatever faith or region. His jihadists could as easily be American or
Indian as Saudi or Iranian, Christian or Hindu as Shia or Sunni. The central
point is that globalization creates its own antibodies. People do not want to
become cogs in a global machine so they look for ways of asserting them-
selves. Sometimes this involves taking part in global movements against
globalism (redefined for the purposes as ‘global capitalism’ by the anti-
globalization campaign) but, equally, faced by the challenge of homogenizing
external forces, some individuals and groups have responded by returning to
their roots – national or religious – or at least to a sanitized version of the
roots they imagine themselves to possess. Often, it should be said, these roots
are preserved or propagated by the very technology that allegedly threatens
them; satellite television and the Internet are now widely used by nationalist
and religious groups. Whereas once diaspora communities grew apart from
their original culture, often exaggerating some features, understating others –
so that, for example, the average Dubliner nowadays has very little in
common with a Boston Irish–American whose forefathers left at the time of
the Famine – nowadays communications between new and old homelands is
so easy that this sort of gap does not emerge so readily; although, probably
because they do not have to live with the consequences, diasporas are often
more oriented towards radical identity politics than their stay-at-home
cousins. In any event, the gap between a nationalist and an anti-capitalist
reaction to McWorld is sometimes very narrow. It is striking how many
prominent individuals seem to straddle this gap – the classic case being the
French farmer José Bové who has himself become almost a global brand on
the basis of his opposition to McDonald’s in France, but whose own politics
are dedicated to protecting the interests of French farmers, which often
directly contradict the interests of farmers in Africa or Asia. In the new poli-
tics of identity, old-style economic interests are downplayed – Bové opposes
‘McDo’s’ and that is good enough for the anti-globalization coalition.
It is plausible to suggest that part of the reason for the revival of identity
politics lies in this opposition between the global and the local, but there may
The International Politics of Identity
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be deeper causes involved, especially when it comes to the postindustrial
world. As noted above, what we think of as modern politics revolved
around the production process, taking the form of a contest over the distri-
bution of the gains from the increases in productivity that capitalist indus-
trialization created, a contest in which the rights of property-owners were
contrasted with the needs of the poor, and the power of the vote was,
eventually, set against the power of money and capital. Postmodern politics,
corresponding to postindustrialism, does not take this shape, largely
because the oppositions that shaped the old politics no longer exist in the
same, politically-relevant, form. Of course, in the advanced industrial world
the poor still exist in large numbers – especially if poverty is defined in
relative terms, as ultimately it has to be – but they are not employed in the
kind of jobs where unionization is relatively easy, and neither are they
unemployed and pushed towards the breadline and potential support for
extremist parties. Instead they work in call-centres and flipping burgers,
making enough to get by but not enough to build much of a stake in society;
very importantly, often they are not citizens but illegal immigrants or guest
workers, but even when they are entitled to vote they tend not to – the
percentage of the electorate that turns out on election day has been declining
in all the advanced industrial countries.
Political parties of the left who have not acknowledged this change, and
have tried to mobilize on the old basis, have tended to lose out, while
those who have reshaped themselves – Bill Clinton’s New Democrats, Tony
Blair’s New Labour and other ‘third way’ groups – have done well by 
de-emphasizing the old ideological divides and emphasizing managerial
competence. However, although such policies may be electorally effective
they do not heighten the emotions; ‘the worker’s flag is deepest red, stained
with the blood of comrades dead’ sang the old Labour Party – these are
extreme sentiments perhaps, and not many workers have been murdered by
the forces of reaction in Britain since the Trafalgar Square riot of 1886
which inspired the song, but they used to reach out to people in a way that
the anodyne pop songs (McMusic?) which have replaced the Red Flag do
not. And so people look elsewhere than to the regular political parties to
make sense of their lives and to give meaning to the rapidly changing social
context in which they are situated – hence the rise of political identities
based on ascribed characteristics such as ethnicity rather than ideology, or
on religious beliefs.
Approached from another angle, politics is always and essentially
oppositional; that is, about division, about who’s in and who’s out – or
about ‘friends’ and ‘enemies’ as Carl Schmitt (1932/1996) more formally
defined the process. If class position and the economy no longer shape these
oppositions, then something else will, and political entrepreneurs concerned
to increase their own influence will look for and promote that ‘something else’
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be it a religious, an ethnic or a national identity. This is not wholly new; the
mid-nineteenth century belief that conservative, pro-capitalist political par-
ties would not survive the impact of universal suffrage was proved wrong
precisely because many of these parties realized that working men would
not define themselves simply by their class interests and could be persuaded
to support patriotic, imperialist parties. Political entrepreneurs such as
Benjamin Disraeli and Otto von Bismarck were very successful employers of
this strategy. Today, though, things have gone much further. In the US,
where the process has gone further than in other industrial societies, elec-
tions seem to be very largely fought around ‘values’ and lifestyle issues.
Hollywood stars, who benefit massively from President Bush’s tax cuts for
the rich, campaign almost exclusively for the Democrats, while the rural
poor of the American mid-West who have been hit hard by his policies vote
Republican. These are positions that make little sense in terms of economic
interest, but perfect sense in terms of the new divisions in American society.
A leaked document from Bush’s leading strategist Karl Rove summarized
things nicely; the Democrats, he is said to have written, have the labour
unions, but we have the Christians – and he didn’t need to say that the
40 per cent of Americans who describe themselves as ‘born-again’ Christians
are a far more powerful voting bloc than the unions, if, that is, they can be
persuaded to vote as a bloc. In short, in any political order there will be some
basis for division; if it is not economic interest then it will be something else.
Think of this process happening on a world scale and not just in America,
and the shape of international politics in the twenty-first century starts to
look easier to explain – but not necessarily easier to manage.