Reading Assignment 3: What is the relation between politics and globalization?LI XINWEI

 （1) Summary

  Political globalisation concerns an approach to the social world that emphasises post-national and transnational processes and an awareness of the compressed nature of space and time. For some people, political globalisation has opened up new possibilities for emancipation, while for others it has led to a loss of autonomy and the fragmentation of the social world. Political globalisation can be understood as a tension between three processes that interact to produce a complex field of global politics: global geopolitics, global normative culture and polycentric networks.

  Economic globalisation has also influenced the process of political globalisation. The state has been replaced by the global market. As the world economy, dominated by national economies, shifts to a global economy, new economic forces come into play that challenge the power of the nation-state. The state is only one source of political power. Much of this revolves around the question of whether the state becomes weaker or stronger as a result of global forces.

While most countries are nation-states, a distinction needs to be made between states and nation-states. This is particularly important in the context of political globalisation. The state is the monopoly centre of legitimate violence in a particular territory, while the nation-state is the overlap between the state and a particular political community. The state is more flexible than the nation in responding to globalisation, with the result that globalisation puts enormous pressure on the nation-state, i.e. on the relationship between political community and legitimate violence. The decoupling of nationality from citizenship can be attributed to the influence of a global normative culture, which has led to a blurring of the boundaries between domestic and international law. Particularly in the EU countries, it is now more difficult for countries to resist international law, which has been progressively incorporated into national law.

（2）Interesting point

  The global city is a product of the denationalisation of the nation-state and the rise of non-territorial politics. The nation-state is built on a centralised system of communication, including national education and science systems, national newspapers and media such as television, as well as national commemorations and popular culture, in which national narratives and collective identities are codified, reproduced and legitimised. Today's public is based on professional political communication and mass persuasion through systematic advertising and lobbying.

  Political communication in the public sphere is increasingly influenced by global issues. The global normative culture plays a dominant role in shaping political communication. This is largely due to the fact that global civil society has greatly amplified the global normative culture. Global normative culture is transmitted in many ways within the public sphere and is carried by many different social agents, including the state. The most obvious manifestation of political globalisation is the change in political communication and the broader transformation of the public sphere. From the changing centrality of civil society, we have seen how political globalisation is linked to the changing relationships between the state, society and the individual, as well as to the new transnational or global communities, networks and publics that already exist, which in turn drive new forms of politics. The 'civilization' of politics both reinforces the idea that politics is increasingly influenced by a normative global culture and points to the transformation of the nation-state as a site of political struggle. In other words, the 'civilisation' of politics implies a commonality of political forms linking the local to the global, the national to the transnational, and the mobilisation of a range of actors around common political norms: competitiveness, sustainability, human rights and social justice.

（3）Discussion point

  When considering the importance of global civil society to contemporary thinking about political globalisation, it is sometimes difficult to separate fact from rhetoric: the hopes and aspirations embedded in the concept of global civil society often lead to claims that exaggerate its importance. For many, the importance of civil society to political globalisation lies in its potential to organise resistance to capitalism and/or the global hegemony of the United States. The first contradiction is between the tendency of globalisation to homogenise and the increasing emphasis on and respect for difference. The second is the contradiction within the individualising forces of globalisation, which are committed to division but at the same time allow for the construction of new types of autonomy represented by new communities of interest, network politics and collective identities.

This implies a very interesting tension between state-constituted civil society and global civil society, the latter being the main driver of political globalisation.Global civil society is not defined on the basis of a single country. While there is no simple consensus on the nature and dynamics of global civil society, it usually refers to a complex of political movements led by non-governmental organisations.