World Shift: Interests, Norms and Identities
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GLOBAL SOCIETY IN TRANSITION World Shift: Interests, Norms and Identities DANIEL N. NELSON University of New Haven, West Haven, CT, USA
This essay is adapted from the conclusion to Daniel N. Nelson and Laura Neack, eds., Global Society in Transition: An International Politics Reader (London: Kluwer Law International, 2002), pp. 528 Hardcover.
Introduction A wealthy Saudi-born Islamic fundamentalist, encamped in Afghanistan, creates and manages a global network of terrorist cells that strikes at American targets worldwide. Business pays for terrorism, instructions are communicated via the internet, and money is transferred to suicide hijackers through accounts they access from automatic teller machines (ATMs) that are always just around the corner. Global, simultaneous, rapid, and interwoven. The metamorphoses of this era are like no other. As artillery shells explode nearby, an Albanian fighter in a Macedonian village takes out his Palm Pilot to communicate instantaneously with a Swiss-based financier of his cause. He accesses monies contributed from an international diaspora and income from global trafficking in drugs, weapons, and people. The Group of Eight (G-8 or principal industrialized economies) meet in Genoa, Italy and confront vehement protests against globalized capitalism by tens of thousands who assemble like clockwork from dozens of countries mobilized and facilitated by internet advocacy communities. A coalition of small non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and individuals, interacting primarily through email list serves, generates momentum towards an international treaty to ban anti-personnel land mines – a treaty that, with the help of the Canadian government, is signed by almost all of the world’s states in Ottawa. Vignettes prove nothing. Yet, they evoke a sense that the twenty-first century world has become substantially, quickly, and permanently different. Many have noted and assessed this metamorphosis. Still, the sheer breadth is staggering. Less than a generation ago, world affairs were inter-national, not global. Relations between states, guided by national interests, using instruments of power, modified somewhat by cooperation that ensued as interests dictated, remained the “stuff ” of international relations and world politics. Today, however, global and local are undercutting and overwhelming the state.1 While we might quibble over the state’s future, it isn’t what it used to be.
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Daniel N. Nelson
As the tectonic plates of the international grind across each other, particularly since 1989 and the oft-cited end of the Cold War, we have heard it and felt it. Now we can see it. We knew that globalization meant that fundamental and irrevocable change was coming. Perhaps until September 11, 2001, we did not quite grasp how deeply such global transitions would affect people in most countries. From a world based on interests, and affected by norms, we are moving towards a world in which identity plays an additional and perhaps central role in the genesis of political action. At th
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