Global politics

Abstract

This article is about the great changes that have happened in recent years in international politics as well as the challenges that these thorough transformations imply. Some examples of great significance are the fall of the Berlin Wall (1989), the attack on the New York World Trade Center's twin towers and the Pentagon (2001), and the crash of Wall Street (2008). These are historical events that have had practical and theoretical repercussions for different humanistic disciplines like political science, law and international studies. The author's purpose is to analyze both practically and theoretically the new paradigms of global politics. The impact of globalization on Latin America is given special attention. The author concludes by presenting some alternatives in order to resolve the dilemmas posed by globalization.

Resumen

Este artículo aborda los grandes cambios que se han registrado en los últimos años en la política internacional, así como los retos que han reportado esas magnas transformaciones. Ejemplos de las mutaciones de gran significado de las que habla esta investigación son: la caída del muro de Berlín (1989), los ataques terroristas contra las torres gemelas deNueva York y el pentágono en Washington (2001) y la debacle financiera de Wall Street (2008). Como se aprecia, son acontecimientos de carácter histórico que han tenido repercusiones tanto de orden práctico como de naturaleza teórica para distintas disciplinas humanísticas, como la ciencia política, el derecho y el estudio de las relaciones internacionales. Lo que el autor se propone es analizar tanto en términos prácticos como en términos teóricos los nuevos paradigmas de la política global. Cabe agregar que aquí también se toma en consideración el impacto de la globalización para América Latina. Por último, se presentan algunas alternativas de solución con vistas a resolver los dilemas planteados por la globalización.

I

Three Main Impacts

In this essay, I start off with a basic statement: the international order created after the World War II has changed due to three contemporary and central phenomena: the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, the attack on the New York World Trade Center's twin towers in 2001 and crash of Wall Street in 2008.

The fall of Berlin Wall roused feelings of hope and enthusiasm. Those scenes of thousands of people gathered around eastern European city squares to express their rejection of bureaucratic authoritarianism and to ask for the end of Soviet domain over their countries have been engraved in our memories. The statues of Marx, Lenin and Stalin were brought to the ground. The expansive wave of liberation soon reached the Soviet Union itself in 1991, when it split. The threat of an atomic outbreak between the so-called Free World and the Communist bloc was also attenuated since one of the principal rivals ceased to exist.

There were reasons for believing in a positive future. The first signs were encouraging: nations such as Poland, Hungary and Czechoslovakia, willingly accepted constitutionalism, the division of power, political parties, a competitive election system, freedom of the press, the protection of civil rights and freedom of assembly. However, hope and enthusiasm fell when aberrant happenings began taking place, such as inter-ethnic fighting in former Yugoslavia.

As Jürgen Habermas stated, a recovery revolution (Nachholende Revolution) took off in the midst of the bicentennial commemoration of the French Revolution (1789-1989).¹ However, around the same time, some communities began to vent their hatred against their neighbors based on ancestral tribal rivalries.

On one side, civil society led the liberation movement, as defined by the English term which was less worn out than “democracy”. Lenin said that proletarian democracy would be a thousand times more democratic than bourgeois democracy, and so it was used as communist leaders’ rhetoric throughout stage of Soviet domination. For many years, civil groups disseminated clandestine resistance and anti-bureaucratic dictatorship propaganda. On this civil mobilization, Michael Ignatieff, for example, states:

The philosophical study groups in basements and boiler rooms, the prayer meetings in church crypts, and the unofficial trade union meetings in bars and backrooms were seen as a civil society in embryo. Within those covert institutions came the education in liberty and the liberating energies that led to 1989. In the revolutions of that year —in Hungary, Poland, Romania, East Germany, Czechoslovakia, and the Baltics— civil society triumphed over the state.²

It was the way to push forward a democratic project, in the liberal sense of the term, distinct from the domination scheme imposed by Stalinism.

The revival of civil society was in fact linked to the recovery of liberal-democratic culture. After the unforgiving work of clandestine propaganda and pacific mobilizations —with the well-known repressive counterattacks— civil society put even more pressure and ended up breaking the barriers that had been raised to guarantee safety and the continuity of the system. As John A. Hall says: “Civil society was seen as the opposite of despotism, a space in which social groups could exist and more —something which exemplified and would ensure softer, more tolerable conditions of existence.”³ This coincides with what René Gallissot stated: “In the field of motion, of agitation and emancipatory action, intended to break with oppressive situations in the name of democracy, the formula of ’civil society’ is immediately useful to legitimate protest.”⁴

With the fall of communism, liberal and democratic ideals rose again and the path towards political modernity was retaken. During the bicentennial festivities of the fall of the Bastille (1989), François Furet accurately said: “We keep drifting apart from the French Revolution, however, each day we live more and more in the world that was created by it. A new closeness has risen from the distance.”⁵

The recovery of political modernity through the vindication of liberal democracy and civil society contrasts with the position certain supposedly progressive circles adopted on witnessing the fall of Soviet communism and abandoned the claims embodied by a collective proletarian spirit of an economic nature. This time, the main subject focused on ethnic groups with cultural backgrounds. This vindication serves as the principal basis for the fights for independence of certain communities throughout the world, such as: the French-speaking area of Canada, especially the Quebec province; the Basque provinces settled in Spain and France; the Zapatistas from Chiapas in Mexico; the independence-movement in Northern Ireland; the Chechens against Russian domination; and Tibet facing the Chinese occupation. No matter how different these examples may be, those who defend nationalistic or ethnicity vindications lump them all together. This explains the boost in multiculturalism over the last years.

In theoretical terms, for Charles Taylor, the fight for recognition is reflected in the anti-modern and conservative position, which upholds collective rights based on tradition and a yearning for a mythical past. This concept is based on the idea of identity, a sense of blood belonging. Thus, the lack of recognition or distorted recognition can become a form of oppression. Recognition is viewed as a human necessity. For Taylor, this necessity is located not in the individual field, but in the collective one. In his opinion, the way individual identity is interpreted should change to be seen not as isolated entity, but as members of certain ethnic community the same way the Volk (the people) must be true to themselves, in other words, to their culture. If the fight for Afro-American civil rights in the 1960s under Martin Luther King was a fight for equality, the struggle for ethnical belonging rights led by various local leaders, is now the fight to be different: “With the politics of equal dignity, what is established is meant to be universally the same, an identical basket of rights and immunities; with the politics of difference, what we are asked to recognize is the unique identity of this individual or group, their distinctness from everyone else.”⁶

Taylor distinguishes two types of orientations in public actions. On one side, the respect to the principle of equality encourages treating people the same regardless of their differences, while on the other, the respect to the principle of diversity forces individuals to be treated differently taking their special traits into account. In both cases, there are advantages and disadvantages: “The reproach the first makes to the second is just that it violates the principle of nondiscrimination. The reproach the second makes to the first is that it negates identity by forcing people into a homogeneous mold that is untrue to them.”⁷ Taylor attacks the so-called liberal stance, identified with principle of equality, for acting under false neutrality which, in reality, as it is an expression of a hegemonic culture, and leans toward the communitarian side to introduce differentiation criteria and a specific approach towards diversity.

One of the distinctive arguments of Taylor's thesis, which has been reiterated by his followers, is that liberalism is in fact a particular culture that defends a false universalism: “Liberalism is not a possible meeting ground for all cultures; it is the political expression of one range of cultures, and quite incompatible with other ranges.”⁸ But then, Taylor's argument changes directions when he asks supposedly “particular” culture to admit diversity politics. The disqualification of liberalism reaches the point of saying that it is in fact a fighting credo against other cultures: “All this is to say that liberalism can’t and shouldn’t claim complete cultural neutrality. Liberalism is also a fighting creed.”⁹

By confronting equalities and differences, Taylor's multiculturalism resorts to the sophism that liberal egalitarianism is insensible to differences. But that is not true because the structure of liberalism is such that it raises equality in the political field while allowing for differences and dynamic pluralism in the civil order. The existence of civil society could not be understood in any other way. By clarifying the liberal perspective and the relationship between equalities and differences, we realize that multiculturalism aims at establishing differences in the political order so as to set up autonomous collective bodies unconnected to the national State, while finding it awkward to speak of civil society as a real space in which group differences have proliferated from the very beginning. Summing up, multiculturalism asks that differences be respected in the political sphere, leading to the creation of new self-sufficient identities that break the integrity of the national State; they are not interested in enrolling or coexisting with the differences that are part of civil society. The entreaty, however, is not new; modern times have seen attempts of conservative restoration that are reminiscent of the medieval system.

The implied solution is separatism and for the unacknowledged national State to defend the restoration of a pre-modern world, imagined as a peaceful and harmonious world. However, it is a well-known historical fact that the co-existence of cultures has not been peaceful at all, but involved —and continues to involve— bloody conflicts. In this strategy, Taylor's position remains ambiguous between ideological-political confrontation and an attempt to come to an agreement with the “dominant culture”, which he loathes. There are sections in which Taylor shows his leanings towards conflict and others in which he is willing to compromise. An uncertainty of this nature makes his approach extremely weak and explains why his followers also fall, politically and ideologically, into the same ambiguity between the threat of war and a reticent invitation to dialogue.

Regarding the fall of the Twin Towers, the numerous images of the planes diverted by Islamic extremists crashing into the World Trade Center have remained embedded in my memory. The fundamental thesis of Professor Benjamin Barber, of the University of Rutgers, is that, after the collapse of authoritarian socialism, at least two phenomena have come to once again test the model of civilization, namely, tribalism and mercantilism: “Jihad pursues a bloody politics of identity, McWorld a bloodless economics of profit.”¹⁰ An explanation of the strengthening of tribal identities is that when faced with the collapse of some States, people retreat to the more immediate references due to the uncertainty and fear of the unknown. Ralf Dahrendorf has referred to this problem as follows:

There is the re-emergence of the tribe, of primordial ties and emotions. Communism was among other things a homogenizing —some would say, a modernizing— force. Now that is gone, older national and religious ligatures come to the fore. Since people have little to hold on to, and even less to eat, they fall for prophets who fill their minds and hearts with the hatred of others in the name of self-determination.¹¹

Tribalism provides certainty in the midst of a world that is falling apart. It is like retreating to the more immediate in view of the collapse of a social system that could no longer stand.

Meanwhile, the overflowing economic activity represents the limitless greed manifested through aggression and the desire to accumulate. The consequence is that: “In being reduced to a choice between the market's universal church and a retribalizing politics of particularist identities, peoples around the globe are threatened with an atavistic return to medieval politics.” ¹² The attacks of September 11, 2001, reveal fundamentalists’ desire to return to a kind of obscurantism.

Jihad and McWorld are not self-limiting democratic powers. On the contrary, they are forces trying to eat up everything in their path. They act as polar opposites: one pulling at parochial hatreds and the other towards global market consolidation; one tries to alter national boundaries in an effort to reclaim tribal areas while the other is trying to make national borders porous from the outside. Despite their contradictory natures, “Yet Jihad and McWorld have this in common: they both make war on the sovereign nation-state and thus undermine the nation-state's democratic institutions.”¹³

Jihad ideologists attack democratic politics arguing that the nation-state is an “illusory community” and citizenship is an “abstraction.” What matters to them are the foundations of collective affiliation. McWorld theorists criticize democratic politics, arguing that the nation-state is an awkward device and citizenship a trifle. For them, there are only consumers to be caught up in marketing networks. To this, Barber responds: “Neither the tribal circle nor the traffic circle, neither the clan nor the mall, offers adequate public space to the kind of democratic community that can provide citizens both identity and inclusion.”¹⁴

For Barber, it is essential to put the current problem in its proper terms, keeping in mind that there are three powers in every society: cultural, economic and political. The challenge is the assimilation of economics and politics into the cultural-anthropological field (Jihad) or the confinement of culture and politics within an economic framework (McWorld). In contrast, the liberal art of separation is the way to identify the presence of different spaces in which human activity unfolds.

The factor that may work against these polarizing trends is civil society. Therefore, to promote democratization, civil society should extend its activities to encompass international affairs. It is already the case with environmental groups, associations defending human rights, cultural exchange groups and an endless list of other organizations that have made globalization a phenomenon that goes beyond economic interdependence or racial ties.

We must pay attention in the political sphere. Globalization must be improved through the democratization of the international power. The best formula is that: “global democracy needs confederalism, a noncompulsory from of association rooted in friendship and mutual interests; confederalism depends on members states that are well rooted in civil society, and on citizens for whom the other is not synonymous with the enemy.”¹⁵

There is no justification for committing criminal acts, and much less when religious purity is invoked against civilization as a whole. Those who planned, sponsored and perpetrated the slaughter knew they were not against an economic symbol, McWorld; the purpose was to truncate the life of defenseless people of close to eighty different nationalities —to spread panic inside and outside the United States. So it would be more appropriate to speak of Jihad vs. Universitas Civium instead of tribalism against economic globalization.

It should be recalled that there were several serious conflicts between 1989 and 2001: the Persian Gulf War, the ethnic massacres in Rwanda, the previously mentioned war in the Balkans, the brutality in East Timor, and so on. However, without downplaying these phenomena, it is certain that they had a regionally bound overtone, while attacks in northeastern United States have an all-embracing profile. I concur with the conceptual clarity of Susan Son-tag: “[...] the terrorism that realized such a signal success on September 11 is obviously a global movement. This terrorism can not be identified with a certain state or even with devastated Afghanistan [...] Like the modern economy, the mass culture and pandemic sicknesses (e.g. AIDS), terrorism knows no borders.”¹⁶ This new tone is not due to the aggression against the world's most powerful country; the matter lies in the proof of a complex and widespread network of terrorist organizations —spread throughout at least sixty nations— with the role of acting on mystical reasons at an international level.

As Giovanni Sartori has pointed out: “The, say, old school suicide bombers, were sacrificed for their country, are local. Their cause was specific and limited. Suicides in New York and the Pentagon, and those who will follow their steps, are global beings and their homeland is the Koran as well as their religious faith. They are not fighting for the place they were born, but for an Islamized world that fights and punishes non-believers.”¹⁷ This limiting creed endangers the enlightened reform that had been noted in the immediately preceding years. On this risk, Martin Kramer thinks:

What happened [.] was the opposite: a dangerous slide toward a medieval holy war. To stop the regression, the moderate majority will have to argue against the mobilization of the Islamic religion for war [...] But it is impossible to deploy religion to justify killing and self-immolation, without undermining the foundations of the religion itself. In the pained expressions of decent Muslims, there is more than regret at America's loss. There is a growing realization that the men who brought down the twin towers put Islam in peril.¹⁸

Islamic spirituality is at the same time, used and sacrificed for the sake of a radical political cause.

Fear of a violent death has always presented as a limit to avoid facing others and to establish an agreement on which civil status was established according to the contractual tradition founded by Hugo Grotius and Thomas Hobbes and supported by John Locke, Baruch Spinoza, Jean Jacques Rousseau and Immanuel Kant. It means that every man fears his own death. With variations in interpretation, but following the same methodological pattern, theorists of natural law have centered their concern on the need to leave the State of Nature in which there is no constituted authority or common power, by reaching an agreement to end this unpleasant situation and attain the political status that would allow the public authority to ensure a better, more stable supported life.

The Natural Law school of thought lay the foundations of modern political thought and, with it, the doctrine of the rights of man and of the citizen. But after the terrorist attacks of September 11^th, death is no longer a constraint. This phenomenon is a factor that alters the direction of policy and launches a new interpretation challenge for both domestic politics and foreign policy.

Regarding collapse of Wall Street in 2008, this financial phenomenon revealed our position as between two eras. The old order, the period denominated by neo-liberalism, the main premise of which is that the market cannot be wrong and the government cannot be right, is dying. A new order, in which Wall Street plays a less important role and Washington plays a stronger function, is emerging. Within this framework, a political struggle is taking place both nationally and internationally because there are interests and groups who took great advantage of the neoliberal model. However, we now need to see to the interests of a much broader sector of society that is calling for the establishment of a fairer development model nationally and internationally.

The fall of stock markets in 2008 is not a superficial problem but a structural one. It is the end of the formula that started in the late seventies and early eighties with Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, and was emulated in almost all the world: the dismantling of the Welfare State based on privatization, blind faith in the market, tax reduction especially for the more affluent groups, and replacing the so-called social-democrat pact with the law of supply and demand as its supreme canon. According to neoliberalism theorists like Friedrich von Hayek and Robert Nozick, these measures give full freedom to our societies and encourage economic growth. We already saw where it would end: in one of the gurus and enforcers of neoliberalism Alan Greenspan's admission that von Hayek and Nozick may have been wrong.

The model of neo-liberalism development that was previously considered insurmountable and imposed its conditions over the last three decades, came to its breaking point. The financial crisis began on Wall Street and literally spread around the world. It is no accident that Joseph Stiglitz, Nobel Prize in Economics in 2001, has compared the collapse of Wall Street to the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989:

The globalization agenda has been closely linked with the market fundamentalists —the ideology of free markets and financial liberalization. In this crisis, we see the most market-oriented institutions in the most market-oriented economy failing and running to the government for help. Everyone in the world will say now that this is the end of market fundamentalism. In this sense, the fall of Wall Street is for the market fundamentalism what the fall of the Berlin Wall was for communism —it tells the world that this way of economic organization turns out not to be sustainable. In the end, everyone says, that model does not work. This moment is a marker that the claims of financial market liberalization were bogus.¹⁹

Some may think this statement is out of proportion. However, the parallelism is precise in its meaning: the two events, as opposites as they are (right and left respectively), represent the failure of a not only an economic model, but also of a way of thinking, a certain way of perceiving the world: both types of totalitarianism, one by State and the other by the market, have left a reprehensible mark on history.

Another great icon of neoliberalism, Francis Fukuyama, had to admit that this model could no longer be upheld. In an article published a few days after the financial crash in October 2008, Fukuyama wrote: “[...] under the mantra of less government, Washington failed to adequately regulate the financial sector and allowed it to do tremendous harm to the rest of the society.”²⁰ The 700 billion dollars that the U.S. Congress allocated to stave off the crisis are proof that the State has to repair the damaged caused by the market. But here the paradox is that said amount was to save the banks rather than ordinary citizens. Therefore, many protest banners against the current crisis expressed indignation: “Bail out the People, not the Banks.” It would be unfair that after suffering the excesses of neoliberalism, the contributors would have to pay the debts of the banks.

Dean Baker has studied the fallaciousness of the so-called “market fundamentalism”. Baker, a co-director of the Economics and Public Policies Investigation Center, sustains that conservatives are as in favor of State intervention as the progressives are. The difference is that conservatives favor State intervention to redistribute the wealth upward, that is, to the population with higher wages: “The Right has every bit as much interest in government involvement in the economy as progressives. The difference is that conservatives want the government to intervene in ways that redistribute income upward.”²¹ The progressives, on the other hand, are in favor of State intervention to redistribute the wealth downward. Another notable difference is that the right wing has been skillful at hiding interventions, making people believe that the mechanisms that redistribute wealth upward up are those that naturally obey market laws. The left wing has played into this game because if it is accepted that interventionism favoring the higher wage levels is none other than the product of the way free market works, the progressive forces are at a political disadvantage.

Therefore, the strategy to be used consists of proving the existence of upward interventionism and showing that the resource for holy market laws is nothing but the conservatives’ defense in favor of privileged groups. The results of that conservative maneuver are: a brutal concentration of power and wealth in just a few hands, low or zero economic growth, massive unemployment, a disarticulated economy with huge debts, massive migration, youths without hopes for the future, abandoned elderly left on their own, heads of family without fixed wages, and broad crime-ridden gray zones.

This struggle between opposing political tendencies has extended from the national to the international arena. The dividends generated by the large free-market model are not willing to cede an inch of ground; others, however, have raised the need to rethink the terms of the relationship to obtain a more equitable distribution of national wealth. As Stiglitz says, this is the refrain of the free trade doctrine regarding globalization. However, it would be wrong to reduce the problem of globalization to the simple field of economic relations as neo-liberals do. On the contrary, globalization is presented in several interdependent and contradictory dimensions.

II

Globalization as a Process

In view of the new international phenomenon produced by recent changes, William H. Mott has said: “Globalization has become [...] the most important, economic, political and cultural phenomenon of our time.”²² It is a fact that, because of its complexity, requires systematic study. Otherwise, it is easy to fall into an analytical chaos. Trying to bring order to the enormous amount of analysis on globalization, in his essay “A Global Society?” Anthony McGrew presents a classification based on the different approaches to globalization.²³ For McGrew, the analysis of globalization can be divided into two main branches: the authors who emphasize a single determining cause for globalization and the authors who emphasize the multi-causal nature of the phenomenon.

Along the monocausal line, McGrew calls attention to three authors, Im-manuel Wallerstein, James N. Rosenau and Robert Gilpin. In his book, Historical Capitalism,²⁴ Wallerstein introduced the concept of world system as a social science and emphasized the importance of capitalism, or the economy in the globalization process. In his book The Study of Global Interdependence,²⁵Rosenau associates globalization with technological progress and especially with the expansion of transnational companies. In his text The Political Economy of International Relations,²⁶ Gilpin, in turn, highlights the political-military aspects of international integration and his approach focuses on the rise and fall of hegemonic powers in the inter-State system.

In the second classification, the multiple causes current, McGrew identifies two authors, Anthony Giddens and Ronald Robertson. According Giddens in The Consequences of Modernity,²⁷ there are at least four factors involved in globalization: the capitalist economic system, the inter-State system, the military complex and the process of industrialization. In his article “Mapping the Global Condition”, ²⁸ Robertson stresses that the most important task of social theory today is to take into account the history of globalization in terms of international policy and economy in a plural sense so as to go beyond the model.

In the same multidimensional classification is important to add the thesis of Joseph Nye. In his book The Paradox of American Power, Nye points out that perhaps since the time of the Roman Empire, no other power has looked down on others as the United States today. And yet, the conditions imposed by international politics today think it of utmost importance that the United States does not follow a militaristic, unilateral and one-dimensional line to remain standing as “[...] military power alone cannot produce the outcomes we want on many of the issues that matter to Americans.”²⁹ Globalization is such a special event that no matter how much power a State has, it cannot go forward if its pre-eminence is not backed by consensus from other countries.

One of Nye's theoretical contributions is the difference between what he calls a “hard power” and a “soft power”. This difference lies in separating the military and economic factors on one hand, and the many aspects a country as powerful as the United States can draw upon to develop its foreign policy, on the other: diplomacy, culture, education, science, technology, health and ecology. Nye also noted the difference between the imposition and negotiation.

Nye expresses his doubts regarding hard power exercised alone: “Any retreat to a traditional policy focus on unipolarity, hegemony, sovereignty, and unilateralism will fail to produce the right outcomes, and its accompanying arrogance will erode the soft power that is often part of the solution. We must not let the illusion of empire blind us to the increasing importance of our soft power.”³⁰ Nye acknowledges that the United States is forced to build the consensus to adhere to a set of principles and standards for the world to work toward achieving political stability, economic growth and global democracy.

On the multidimensional nature that now exists in international politics and globalization, Nye notes that the power among nations is currently distributed according to a pattern that resembles a complex three-dimensional chess game. At the top is military power. On that point, it can no longer be said that the United States can control the world and act unilaterally to resolve conflicts. In the middle board, there is the economic power which cannot be guided solely by the intervention of a single power. There, the United States ceases to have control. The bottom board is filled with transnational relations beyond the control of governments. A large number of non-State actors, such as banking and financial transactions, trade, NGOs, etc., are also listed. “When you are in a three-dimensional game, you will lose if you focus only on the interstate military broad and fail to notice the other broads and the vertical connections among them.”³¹

In my opinion, the most convincing point of view is the multi-causal one, which recognizes the various factors that affect globalization. It is very important to note that globalization is not, as the current neo-Marxist and neo-liberal believe, predominantly economic. On the contrary, there are converging factors. I find this important because globalization has been presented as a one-dimensional phenomenon. Globalization is, in reality, multidimensional. Moreover, globalization tends to reinforce the inequalities that existed before it occupied the center stage. In other words, globalization is not part of an egalitarian basis, but a long history of inequality and asymmetries. To correct this trend, it is necessary to act in the different fields mentioned as multi-causal determinants of globalization.

Contrary to the belief that globalization involves series of equal opportunities for all, McGrew and Giddens have shown that globalization is a process that does not produce shared benefits. It moves in a variety of contradictory trends reflected in some of the following pairs: universalism versus particularism, integration versus fragmentation, homogenization versus differentiation, juxtaposition versus syncretism, centralization versus decentralization and equality versus inequality.

Major changes are taking place in first world countries. Globalization is not causing economies to be reorganized in the interest of all in a coordinated and equitable manner. In reality, it is a phenomenon that has further divided the third world from the first world. For example, for the first-World knowledge is a vital competitive factor for the generation of wealth and the development of a new workforce. Some third world countries have understood the conditions of the new process and are adapting to it, but others have lagged behind and it is likely that they will not react until later when the conditions of the economy and science have produced an even bigger gap between the rich and the poor. And so far we have not been able to create a supranational body to balance and adjust this disparity. From our point of view, increasing inequality in the global process would be the greatest security threat of the future. Globalization has shown that without and effective governance, it tends to accentuate existing injustices. If we cannot shift this current tendency, it will lead us to more and more dangerous instability and violence.

Some social and economics writers, such as Adam Smith, August Comte and Herbert Spencer, foresaw this problem and suggested a solution: it is better to take the path of economic development instead of the military one if we want to follow the project of modernity and escape barbarism.

Without losing sight of the multi-causal perspective, I would like to turn to the political dimension. In this area, globalized politics refers to the increasing interaction between domestic and foreign policy. It is becoming a global/world politics. The perspective that international politics exclusively pay attention to the relationship between States has been replaced by a global policy that involves a wide variety of stakeholders, such as political parties, transnational corporations, civic organizations, and the media, while training a global public opinion.

Global politics is being strengthened to the extent that, as pointed out by Luigi Bonanate, the rigid barrier between domestic policy and foreign policy is fading:

[...] reality seems to have overtaken the theories, as it has been changed so drastically we may be faced with the need of a true and proper scientific revolution (in the manner in which Kuhn stated it). Revolution which becomes necessary by the fact that “normal science” cannot deal with “anomalies,” that is, events or circumstances that cannot be encased in the known and shared principles. But before addressing such a polemic theme, we must ask whose turn is it to try this maneuver. We are facing issues that pertain to political scientists or internationalists? Going from here it can be explicitly deduced, that, on one hand, we could say that the dividing line between two disciplines has ceased to exist (but it is a Salomonic solution, inconsistent if in its awaiting, both disciplines continue to do their routinely job) and, on the other hand, making problems global turns them into “international issues” mainly (or in other words, relative to humans).³²

There is a constant tug-of-war between internal and external politics. As Bonanate states, reality has moved faster than theory. Consequently, globalization presents itself as a challenge for both internationalists and experts in political science. Another internationalist who has analyzed this challenge is William Mott:

Political globalism appreciates global values and concerns, deflates commitments to narrow perspectives and local interests, and seeks to relieve social stresses in human progress and new knowledge. This multidimensional expansion involves not only the geographical expansion of political ideas into foreign polities but also the expansion of political activity from narrow perspectives to broader ones.³³

Political globalization has therefore drawn attention to the situation of nation states, overpassing the old political and institutional forms. According to this view, we are facing the process of the dissolution of sovereign States, as Nancy Fraser says. She argues that the old scheme based on the Treaty of Westphalia (1648), which placed national states and the concept of territorial sovereignty as key players in international relations, is being overcome: “Today, by contrast, this ’Westphalian’ framing of justice is in dispute [...] justice claims are increasingly mapped in geographical scales —as, for example, when claims on behalf of ’the global poor’ are pitted against the claims of citizens of bounded polities.”³⁴ For Fraser, the Westphalian framework is no longer sufficient to understand what is happening in the national and international arenas.

The sharp division between domestic and international politics is fading under the new political forms that Fraser calls “intermestic”, which means half international and half domestic, practiced by new transterritorial, non-State actors, which may include international social movements, transnational corporations, financial speculators, civic organizations, both public and private supranational and international organizations and international public opinion (and here Habermas's proposal on the public and the public spheres becomes more compelling) moving quietly through all areas of the Earth through the mass media and cyberspace. The weight of these actors is increasingly being felt in global politics. The apparent non-viability of the old regulatory scheme supported by the sovereign nation-state leads Fraser to speak of the imperative of forming a new paradigm which she has called “postwestphalian context” of globalization.

But the alleged dissolution of national institutions is not in any way what is happening on a widespread basis. What we are witnessing is a combined phenomenon of recomposition and decomposition of States. We speak of composition because in some cases some States, are concentrated into supranational political bodies like the European Union. Meanwhile, we refer to decomposition because in other cases some States have been dismembered or disaggregated like the former Yugoslavia.

Still, no one can say that the recomposition and decomposition are constant and widespread. Most nation-states still exist. Therefore, we can argue that the unit of measure of international politics is the nation-state. Reinforcing this assessment, McGrew says: “The nation-state and the inter-state system [...] are and will continue to remain the dominant ’reality’ of modern social life.”³⁵ Wolfram Hanreider argues: “Far from being secondary or obsolete, the nation-state, nationalism, and the idea of the national interest are central elements in contemporary world politics.”³⁶ George Soros, writes: “The basic unit for political and social life remains the nation-state.”³⁷

Greater interdependence in different dimensions and the concept of national sovereignty are not antagonistic. Taking advantage of global dynamics can be an asset to maintain political and national institutional frameworks. The problem is that the nation-state is affected when governments show a lack of adaptability, especially in the case of poor countries, to the new reality.

Between 1989 and 2008 (the fall of the Berlin Wall to Wall Street debacle), there are two major recognizable trends that have worked against the national States and democracy: 1) the ideas and practices of neoliberalism; and 2) the idea and practice of multiculturalism, which has taken up the banner of cultural claims of ethnic and regional demands.

Economic liberalism despised the national State, considering it a hindrance to the operation of market laws. Multiculturalism despised the nation-state by calling it an element of oppression against ethnic minorities. Benjamin Barber's argument regarding the post-Cold War is that two universalizing tendencies became strong: neoliberalism and multiculturalism. They want to get the various dimensions of globalization to a single expression, respectively, the economic and cultural-anthropological field.³⁸ Faced with such radicalism, it would seem that the world has no option, but to open itself up to other manifestations of social reality.

Against these simplifications, Barber explains the distinction of spheres (economic, political and social). He defends the legitimacy of politics, whether national or international, as the central point of coordination and planning. The international political and financial institutions created after Second World War, are inadequate for this new phase. Those institutions have not been able to maintain peace (United Nations) or counteract the excesses of financial markets (World Bank, International Monetary Fund). These institutions are acting casuistically —almost always under the pressure of contingencies— to a global situation that requires a different framework.

On the mentality of neoliberalism, Soros said sharply: “The promotion of self-interest to a moral principle has corrupted politics and the failure of politics has become the strongest argument in favor of giving markets an ever freer reign.”³⁹ From this point of view, we might add in reference to multiculturalism that the promotion of tribal interest to a moral principle has corrupted politics and the failure of politics has become the strongest argument in favor of giving tribalism an even freer reign.

We must defend politics as a form of mediation among the many forces on the global scene, and as a coordinating mechanism to solve the problems we face. Politics is the only instrument that can make a new national and international consensus possible. In the national context, it is obvious that we are ending a period of far-reaching time and we need to open another of equal proportions. Entering a new historical stage can only be achieved after searching for the coincidences that makes it possible to establish the foundations of a democratic agreement for development.

In the international context, political consensus is necessary to stabilize the rules of coexistence that govern the new era that is starting. Given that the inclination to build a universal empire has proven ineffective, it is then better to mold from the roots of their own nation-states, an agreement that will lead to democratic global governance. The situation which led to the collapse of the socialist bloc, the collapse of the twin towers in New York and the meltdown in financial markets cannot go without prolonging a period of far-reaching decline. The fall of the Soviet empire may have started an obscurantist state, as happened with the fall of the Roman Empire. Which took place in the middle ages.

Globalization refers to the human capacity to stay a step ahead of the immediate perspective to envisage a larger project that allows us to avoid the trends of decline. Pippa Norris has rightly observed:

The impact of global governance upon national identities has raised many hopes and many fears. On the one hand, theorist ranging from August Comte and John Stuart Mill to Karl Marx and Anthony Giddens have expressed optimism that humanity will eventually transcend national boundaries by moving towards a global culture and society. In this perspective, we can expect the globalization of markets, governance, and communications to strengthen a cosmopolitan orientation, broadening identities beyond national boundaries to a world community, and increasing awareness of the benefits of transnational collaboration within regional associations and international institutions.⁴⁰

A cosmopolitan outlook is emerging amid conflicting trends that move in a non-cosmopolitan way. In other words, these trends tend to stress the ethnic, inbred identities, an attachment to traditions and customs as denial of change and adaptation to a different reality. Drawing on the Greek roots of the concept cosmopolis (that tends to the universal), its opposite would be the ideopolis (that which tends to the particular). One is identified with the kingdom of light, the other with the kingdom of darkness.

Without effective political and cultural orientation, it is more likely that globalization will move toward an ideopolis and not to a cosmopolis, which will lead to greater injustice and exploitation. The change will not lead to better conditions, but rather to ones that will be more disastrous than those we already suffer. The roots of the globalization movement are in fact pessimism and distrust: “Rather than carrying people smoothly into a new and better, but comfortable and familiar, world, the most recent waves of globalization have deposited them on the far side of progress with only their wits and hearts to create any new world.”⁴¹

One thing is certain: globalization is an interaction among ideological, religious, economic and cultural paradigms from different geographical areas and social backgrounds that do not have to be consistent with each other. This interaction can be constructive in the sense that it leaves some benefits to our societies. But interaction can also manifest itself in irreconcilable positions which can only be resolved through violent confrontation. In my opinion, two events are already underway: first, a peaceful gathering of ideas and doctrines that fruitful and second, a clash of radicalism that proclaims the necessary annihilation of the opponent as a prelude to the proliferation of a single and exclusive true doctrine.

In one of his writings, Giovanni Sartori recalled that on the maps of ancient Rome when they did not know what was in one region, they wrote Ic Sunt Leones (here are the lions).⁴² Well, for globalization, we could use this metaphor to indicate that we do not know the land we are heading towards. We do not know what is in store for us while we penetrate a field that no one has explored before.

III

A Theoretical Challenge

To summarize the impact of the three phenomena mentioned above, we could say that the order created after World War II has modified since the fall of the Soviet world. The theoretical interpretations of international relations for that condition are no longer valid.

Globalization has cast doubt on the realist international relations theory. This approach, that has been the dominant one since the end of World War II, is emphatic in national States as fundamental subjects of its analysis. Today, that kind of assumption does not help understand what is happening in the world. It is no longer useful to understand the multidimensional interaction between nations and people, in view of the repercussions globalization is having within national States. This does not mean that national States are not important anymore. The problem is that power has acquired a complexity that it did not have in previous ages of national and international politics.

To understand the crisis of realist theory of international relations, we have to know its basis. Justin Rosenberg says:

What then does it mean to speak of a realist school of [International Relations] theory? In the postwar period the term realism has come to indicate a series of propositions underlying a distinctive approach to the study of international politics. These may be abbreviated as follows:

• 1)

  International politics is to be understood predominantly as the realm of interaction between sovereign authorities—a realm which is separate from that of domestic politics.

• 2)

  The distinctive character of this realm is given by the condition of ’anarchy’—meaning that the competitive pursuit of divergent ’national interests’ takes place in the absence of regulation by a superordinate authority.

• 3)

  The result is a set of compulsions generic to relations between states which works, though the complex operation of the balance of power, to determine how states behave internationally. To understand the balance of power is therefore also to explain international politics.⁴³

In a few words, the realist theory of international relations is a State-centered approach, a one-dimensional perspective.

According to certain interpretation of Thomas Hobbes's political philosophy, the State of Nature as a condition of anarchy and a lack of authority was resolved by establishing a social contract among men. This social contract produced the political State with which order and peaceful relations were possible internally. Nonetheless, in the international arena, it was not possible to build another social contract. Therefore, anarchy continues in this field. The subjects of politics inside the national boarders are men while the subjects of the politics outside national boarders are States. David Held recognized the importance of Hobbesian thought in the theory of international relations:

[...] in the arena of world politics, Hobbes's way of thinking about power and power relations has often been regarded as the most insightful account of the meaning of the state at the global level [...] It is said that Hobbes drew a comparison between international relations and the state of nature, describing the international system of states as being in a continuous “posture of war.”⁴⁴

In the Leviathan, we read:

[...] in all times, Kings, and Persons of Soveraigne authority, because of their Independency, are in continuall jealousies, and in the state and posture of Gladiators; having their weapons pointing, and their eyes fixed on one another; that is, their Forts, Garrisons, and Guns upon the Frontiers of their King-domes; and continual Spyes upon their neighbours.⁴⁵

The next step in the Hobbes's argument for getting away from anarchy in international relations would be stipulating a contract among States to create an association and subordinate agencies from each State to a central and monarchical authority. The universal empire is created by consent:

[...] the defenders of anarchy point out that the only conceivable alternative to this dispersed form of authority would be its centralization in a world state (or empire); and since this global Leviathan could exist only by overriding the sovereign independence of individual states (and with it the self-determination of nations) it would perforce constitute a kind of global despotism.⁴⁶

Hobbes's political thought has been associated with realistic theory in the sense that as the individuals in the State of Nature, States have to see to their own interests and security without any kind of moral or religious considerations. The first rule of the natural law according to Hobbes is to guarantee our own lives through the means each person has at hand against everyone else. This is the sign of the realpolitik that has had a significant influence on the study and practice of the international relations in the decades subsequent to World War II. Politics means defending and attacking when in the midst of an unstable environment in which States must survive at any cost. Neo-realism overly stresses conflict and competition for power while minimizing collaboration among the actors of international politics. It does not take internal politics into account. The sharp division between internal and external politics is the principal assumption of this school.

Kenneth Waltz affirms: “Students of international politics will do well to concentrate on, separate theories of internal and external politics until someone figures out a way to unite them.”⁴⁷ This theory sets forth issues like the domestic conformation of power. Justin Rosenberg says: “In their eyes [of the realist writers], the discipline of [International Relations] is premissed on the recognition of a fundamental disjuncture between internal political life, which is carried on under the co-ordinating and pacifying sovereignty of the state, and external politics, which is governed by the irresistible logic of anarchy.”⁴⁸ Realist theorists have concluded that International Relations discipline should not lay down the possible connections between the international system of power and the political internal structure.

Bearing in mind that in the historical sense, the State-centered approach is best expressed in the Westphalian constitution of world (dis)order. In fact, the Westphalia and Osnabruck Peace Treaties (1648), as stated above, establish the legal and political basis of modern statehood. Over the course four centuries, it has formed the normative structure that has ruled power relations among nations. The mainstay of the Westphalia settlement was agreement among Europe's rulers to recognize each other's right to rule their own territories without outside interference. No one could violate the jurisdiction of the other. This translated over time into the concept of sovereign statehood and with it national self-determination, which acquired the status of universal ordering principle of international relations.⁴⁹ Each State recognizes the legal and political existence of the other. Meanwhile, each State admits the right of other States to control their own territories and govern their own populations according to like circumstances. This concept gave birth to the modern-State system.

But the historical and theoretical starting point of the international relations and more specifically of the Realist school is Thucydides's classical narrative of the Peloponnesian War (431-404 B.C.). The city-States of ancient Greece gave shape to a distinct system of interrelated and, at the same time, autonomous political entities, each with its own land and population. There was a complex structure of alliances among them, but in any case, this war was because they formed two main blocs forms of the democratic Athens on the one hand, and the oligarchic Sparta, on the other. Athens was dominant the Delian League while Sparta was the leader of the Peloponnesian League. Thucydides is quite clear in explaining the motive of the conflict: “What made war inevitable was the growth of Athenian power and the fear which this caused in Sparta.”⁵⁰ Therefore, at first glance, we can admit the Realist theory, which holds that there is a clear link between what happened in time of the Hellenic world and what is happening in our time. This means that political entities are, in fact, subjects of international relations and, consequently, we can ignore the internal facts of those entities.

However, Thucydides stresses that the Peloponnesian War was a constant and dynamic phenomenon of exchange between internal and external facts. Both parties tried to take advantage of the internal conflicts (stasis) backing the enemy's democratic (Athenian) or oligarchic (Spartan) factions. Moreover, from the beginning of his book, Thucydides points at the origin of the dispute: “The last act before the war was the expulsion of the nobles by the people. The exiled party joined the barbarians, and proceeded to plunder those in the city by sea and land.”⁵¹ The antagonism between democracy and oligarchy as internal political regimes was permanent and fundamental in the Peloponnesian War. It was this which made it difficult for the two power-blocs, representing different social systems, to come together.⁵²

With these elements of analysis, we can maintain that Thucydides does not belong to the Realist theory even if the most important authors (Edward Hallett Carr, Hans Morgenthau, Kenneth Waltz)⁵³ of this school have made of him an icon. To the contrary: if we analyze what Thucydides said about what really happened with the polis in Greece at that time and the Peloponnesian war, we will have a useful tool to better comprehend contemporary international relations. In view of all the historical differences between the ancient world and the contemporary world, this means that there were no rigid sketches between what we name internal and external politics. Thucydides's real is just that.

Religious expressions, political revolutions and social upheavals have had deep repercussions in different cultures, communities and countries throughout history. For instance, in antiquity, there is Judaism, Christianity; in the Middle Ages, Islam; in modern times, the Glorious English Revolution (1688), the American Independence (1776), the French Revolution (1789), the Russian Revolution (1917), and the Cuban Revolution (1959). All of them began in specific places (national politics) and then spread out in many directions. They changed not only domestic politics, but also the foreign balance of power. Moreover, they have left their mark in history.

In the contemporary age of globalization, Thucydides's lesson is more current than ever before. If in the postwar period it was possible to think about two different dimensions of politics (internal and external), we cannot deny that globalization has brought closeness, intertwining national and international politics. This requires and inside-out view.

IV

The Inside-out Approach: A Case in Point on the Transition to Democracy

Applying an inside-out approach on some specific cases, we can resort to, for instance, the “transition from authoritarian regimes to democracy” in some Latin American States, as well as in Portugal and Spain during the 1970s and 80s. Together, they are known as “the Ibero-American world.”

With the victory of the allies in World War II, the Western world opened up to democracy, but not so in Latin America where autocracies or, more precisely, military dictatorships, were maintained and even increased. The Ibero-American autocracies, with a few rare exceptions, experienced a wave of collapses in the 1960s and 70s due to both internal and external causes. The internal reasons included the weakness of the republics, increased social demands for better economic conditions and greater political participation, and conservatives’ demand to preserve order and the concentration of wealth in a few hands. The external factors included the hemispheric security policy imposed by the United States during the Cold War and the consequent counter-attack deployed to curb the example of the Cuban Revolution. Cuba was an inspiration to other countries on the need to fight against imperialism and adopt a socialist regime. The call was to respond to dictatorial and imperialist violence with revolutionary violence, but most of the attempted insurrections failed and brought even more repression. This outlook was confirmed with the rise and fall of the Nicaraguan Revolution (1979).

But a different pattern of political change was brewing in many Ibero-American nations. The old military autocracies under the leadership of Antonio de Oliveira Salazar and Francisco Franco began to disappear in Portugal in 1974 and in Spain between 1973 and 1975, respectively. This was the starting point for their political transformation towards democracy. In many Latin American countries, military dictatorships were then replaced by democratic governments: Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay, Chile, Peru, Bolivia, Ecuador, Paraguay and many Central American nations.

The phenomenon of democratization in Ibero-American countries began because of internal causes, but there were also external factors that favored this process, such as demilitarization, assistance given by the rising political class which came into power with the change of regime, the spread of democratic awareness beyond national borders, the media and its role as a liaison among different sectors of society.

In these cases, a different political framework is apparent because the transition from one regime to another was not through violence, as usually happened in countries. Since ancient times, political change usually presented itself in the form of a revolution if it was a mutation of a system or as a reform if it was a transformation in the system. The real novelty of the Ibero-American transition to democracy is that the change from autocracies to democracies did not take place through revolutionary means, but by reforms.

Once the political change took on a secondary role to give priority to social change (or mode of production to put it in Marxist terms), the political transformation became a central issue in Ibero-America. The political philosophy behind this is reflected in Guillermo O’Donnell's definition of the concept: “[...] we define transition as ’the interval between one political regime and another’ [...].”⁵⁴ The transition to democracy in Ibero-American countries meant the collapse of authoritarian regimes and the rise of democracies.

With the abundant literature on this topic and given the multitude of analytical perspectives, there are no coincidences on the peculiarities of dictatorships or democracies. However, it is necessary to highlight some basic features to show the change from one regime to another. We could say that politics has two facets: strength and consensus. Dictatorship stresses the first, while democracy emphasizes the second. Dictatorship highlights the mandate momentum and democracy lays emphasis on consensus. Under a dictatorship, power is highly concentrated and unlimited. In other words, there are no, or very few, institutional barriers to stop abuse; there is no effective control over rulers’ conduct; there is little or no tolerance for opposition; civil and political organizations have a low degree of autonomy from the State; representative bodies and electoral mechanisms, if any, are reduced to purely ceremonial functions; education and political participation are discouraged; and negotiation as a tool for political integration is relegated to inconsequential levels.

Conversely, in a democracy, power is more distributed and is subject to institutional oversight. Consequently, there is control over the actions of public servants; dissents are tolerated; civil organizations and political parties are independent of government power; representative bodies and electoral mechanisms work efficiently; education and political participation are encouraged; and agreement as a form of aggregation is central in political activity.

Defining the transition from an autocracy to a democracy also presents certain difficulties. Still, there are indications of a change when authorities began to offer concessions to individual and political rights which had previously been violated and start to remove obstacles to make a change of government possible, and when the existence of social and political actors that had previously been banned is accepted. So far only liberalization has been discussed. While it is necessary for democratization, it is not sufficient since the trend can still be reversed by the political dominance of armed forces, persistent inequalities that follow entrenched and powerful interests and an intolerant culture. However, certain signs of genuine transition include the establishment of a new and fair electoral law, successfully holding free and fair elections, and even completing the constituent assembly's work to produce a new institutional framework. Signs of transition from dictatorship to democracy denote a change from militarism to civilian rules.

Therefore, a transition takes place when the political principle that underpinned the regime, in this case the authoritarian one (deterrence through violence), is declining and is no longer able to contain social and political conflicts. In that sense, the coalition of forces that supported the autocrat and that may include important sectors of society becomes fracture and gradually begins to disintegrate.

While the old regime is diluted, the new one is strengthened by the rising political and civil freedoms and equality (another recurring factor). The old political class is replaced by one more capable of elaborating consensus and supported by organized and mobilized social sectors. The flow of power from top to bottom begins to change its route by moving in the opposite direction while horizontal, civil pluralism replaces vertical, State corporatism. This shows that democracy works better in dealing with conflict than dictatorship does. It is true that autocracies are always equal to themselves and immovable, while a feature of democracy is to undergo constant transformation, adapting to new circumstances by forming agreement among the participants.

V

Old and New Populism

The transition to democracy is the most important phenomenon that has been observed in Ibero-American countries in the last four decades. However, not everything has been easy. Some countries have fallen back into authoritarianism, though not in the way of the old military-style dictatorships of Antonio Salazar Oliveira (Portugal), Francisco Franco (Spain), Leonidas Trujillo (Dominican Republic), Anastacio Somoza (Nicaragua), Alfredo Stroessner (Paraguay), or Jorge Rafael Videla (Argentina). Authoritarianism has now taken the form of populism. It is worth wondering whether populism has any equivalent in classical political theory. Explicitly, the answer would be negative as there is no literal reference to this word. However, I believe a certain implicit reference to it can be found in some authors. This has to do with the question of which is the best government, the one of laws or of men? It is clear that the vast majority of political thinkers have preferred the government of laws and not the government of men for the same reason Aristotle noted in his Politics: it is better to be governed by laws and not by men for one simple reason, the laws have no passions, which is necessarily found in any human soul. “Therefore he who bids the law rule may be deemed to bid God and Reason alone rule, but he who bids man rule adds an element of the beast; for desire is a wild beast, and passion perverts the minds of rulers, even when they are the best of men. The law is reason unaffected by desire.”⁵⁵

The superiority of the law is tied to the idea of good government, which the Greeks identified with the term eunomia (a well-ordered State by law). The opposite is dysnomia (the ill-ordered State which contravenes the law). In his essay “Government of Laws or Government of Men? ”⁵⁶ Norberto Bobbio wrote that in Nomos Basileus, Pindar points out that the law is queen of all things, mortal and immortal. In The Republic, Cicero argued that by serving the law, men attain their freedom. This happened in the ancient world, but in medieval times the idea that the good ruler is one who exercises power within the law remained in force. For example, in the book De legibus et consuetudinibus angliae, Henri Bracton pronounced a rule that later served as the basis for a State based on the rule of law (lex facit regem): the law makes the king.⁵⁷

The rule of law is understood as a State subject to the law. This is the basis of constitutionalism (government sub leges). From this, Max Webber developed the idea of rational-legal authority in the sense that this kind of power bases its legitimacy on the exercise of power under the law. In this sense, Hans Kelsen speaks of the law as a series of rules that create powers whose reason for existence lies in the law of laws; that is, the Grundnorm.

There is an entire systematic process about the government of laws, but beside it, its opposite appears: the government of men. In his above-mentioned essay, Norberto Bobbio said he recognizes that in this other part of political history there is a wide and rich phenomenology to develop a typology of the government of men.

To this end, the first thing Bobbio does is to affirm that the government of men is not to be confused with monarchy, which was the preferred regime of political authorities like Bodin, Hobbes, Montesquieu and Hegel. The point of difference lies in the fact that monarchy is also a government under law since the King is not obligated to obey the laws he created himself, but is obliged to respect the natural and divine laws as pointed out by Saint Thomas Aquinas. Hence, Bobbio holds: “The negative mirror-image of the king is the tyrant, whose power is extra legem both in the sense of not having any valid authority to rule, and in the sense of ruling illegally. Even among those writers who regard monarchy as the best form of government, tyranny, the archetypal form of government of the rule of men, is always portrayed in negative terms.”⁵⁸

From Plato's famous description of the advent of tyranny due to an unbridled (or “wanton” as Machiavelli called it centuries later) democracy, the presence of this corrupt form of government has been closely linked with the deterioration of democracy rather than of the different variants of monarchy. It is no coincidence that with the personalist referral who ran the French Revolution after the government of the convention and terror emerged again into the concept of “Cesarist” in reference to Napoleon Bonaparte. This idea of personal rule was reinforced by the advent of Napoleon III, decades after the French Revolution, who inspired Karl Marx in his work The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. Marx spoke of “Bonapartism” in reference to Napoleon the Great, countering the caricature of his nephew Napoleon III. In that essay, Marx writes: “Hegel says somewhere that great historic facts and personages recur twice. He forgot to add: once as tragedy and again as farce.”⁵⁹

We must stress that several authors have described both Caesarism and Bonapartism as popular tyranny.

Alexis de Tocqueville also evidenced the risk of an unbridled democracy converting into despotism in his book Democracy in America:

I seek to trace the novel features under which despotism may appear in the world. The first thing that strikes the observation is an innumerable multitude of men, all equal and alike, incessantly endeavoring to procure the petty and paltry pleasures with which they glut their lives...

Above this race of men stands an immense and tutelary power, which takes upon itself alone to secure their gratifications and to watch over their fate. That power is absolute, minute, regular, provident and mild. It would be like the authority of a parent if, like that authority, its object was to prepare men for manhood; but it seeks, on the contrary, to keep them in perpetual childhood: it is well content that the people should rejoice, provided they think of nothing but rejoicing.⁶⁰

Immoderate democracy is prone to fall into a paternalism that conceals the cruelest of regimes, despotism. This form of domination takes advantage of citizens’ immaturity to establish an authoritarian regime. To prevent a demagogue from exploit the weaknesses of an unbridled democracy, according to Tocqueville, it is necessary to institutionalize the rule of law and separation of powers.

The study of the government of men, as embodied by Cesarism, holds a special place in two important treatises written in the late 19^th century. One was written by Treitschke and the other one by Roscher, both of which are coincidentally entitled Politics. Treitschke states that Napoleon the Great met the needs of the French, who wanted to be slaves and called the post-revolutionary regime a “democratic despotism.”

Roscher stressed the problem of anarchy and the need to impose order through an extraordinary one-person government. For Roscher, the degeneration of popular government leads to tyranny, which rules with the support of those same slaves. This link between licentious democracy and the authoritarian solution was examined by Alexander Hamilton in the first letter of The Federalist: “History will teach us [...] that of those men who have overturned the liberties of republics, the greatest number have begun their career by paying obsequious court to the people; commencing demagogues, and ending tyrants.”⁶¹

This semblance on the distinction between a government of laws and a government of men leads us to place populism within the realm of the government of men. Populism is a true and proper “popular tyranny” that opposes the government of laws in at least two of its classic forms. Recalling that Hubert Languet, which used the pseudonimus Stephanus Junius Brutus, wrote of two different types of tyranny: the tyrant who is the figure of the tyrant usurper without a legitimate title (ex defectu tituli), and the legitimate ruler who is in power but exercises said power outside the law (ex parte execiti).⁶²

Latin America has ample examples of populist governments. In some of them and at least during the initial stages, the government appeared to be more paternalistic (Lázaro Cárdenas in Mexico), while those more recently formed resemble a despotic regime (Hugo Chavez in Venezuela). Similarly, we can say that paternalistic populism has led to the institutionalization of the republic while despotic populism is more likely to destroy the institutionalism of the republic.

For the reasons set forth herein, I believe what Ernesto Laclau said on populism is wrong:

If populism consists in postulating a radical alternative within the communitarian space, a choice at the crossroads on which the future of a given society hinges, does not populism become synonymous with politics? The answer can only be affirmative. Populism means putting into question the institutional order by constructing an underdog as an historical agent —i.e. an agent which is an other in relation to the way things stand. But this is the same as politics. We only have politics through the gesture, which embraces the existing state of affairs as a system and presents an alternative to it (or, conversely, when we defend that system against existing potential alternatives). That is the reason why the end of populism coincides with the end of politics.⁶³

It is wrong to argue that populism is an alternative “at the crossroads of which depends the future of a given society.” This is tantamount to saying that the only alternative for our societies is tyranny. Similarly, it is nonsense to say that populism is synonymous with politics. Fortunately, politics has many more options than the government of the charismatic leader, among them, the government of laws. It is quite obvious that these laws and institutions can be renovated or modified by pre-established mechanisms stipulated in the constitution without having to fall into despotism.

Believing that populism constitutes the people, as a historical agent is to deny the people themselves the opportunity to choose courses of action that are not focused on personal domain. The alternative of transforming the state of current affairs has a range of possibilities that have nothing to do with populism. These possibilities may opt for the policy of negotiation rather than one of confrontation, which may seem like a populist policy. I would say that the end of populism coincides with the end of anti-politics, understood as confrontation, the destruction or marginalization of the opponent.

If we understand democracy as a peaceful exercise of power, rather than a repressive one, we understand politics better than the crass error in which Laclau has fallen. Contrary to what this author says, I believe populism is the refusal of democracy, a tyrannical government that replaces democracy and denies it. This denial is manifest in both government subversion of institutions and laws, and the removal of power from the base to be deposited at the apex, or in the figure of the charismatic leader who acts in the name of those treated as children or as slaves. The mission of tyranny is not to encourage individuals’ improvement, but to turn them into obedient servants.⁶⁴

To this we must add that the term “populism” was put back into circulation by neoliberal technocracy as a way of discrediting their political enemies. However, sociologists and political scientists, who embraced the concept of “populism” in the 1960s, did so for scientific purposes: to define certain patterns of behavior in regimes like those of Getulio Vargas in Brazil, Juan Domingo Perón in Argentina, Raúl Haya de la Torre in Peru, José María Velasco Ibarra in Ecuador, Jacobo Arbenz in Guatemala and Lázaro Cardenas in Mexico.

In analytical terms, the concept of populism was useful to better understand the Latin American social mobilization of masses in partnership with the State. The principal argument for this was that social groups under a populist leader fail to defer to an independent political alternative and therefore yielded to the designs of the rulers. Thus, authoritarian command was formed with broad popular support. Among the scholars who studied this phenomenon are René Zavaleta, Mario Salazar Valiente, Rui Mauro Marini, Octavio Ianni and Andre Gunder Frank. For them, the term populism, referred especially to social forms that replaced oligarchic systems of government. Some of these populist forms managed to extend themselves despite the departure or fall of their leaders.

The paternalistic populism was not born by chance. Studies on this topic suggests that populism began when, in the late 19^th century and the first third of the 20^th century, the landed oligarchies in Latin America blocked the lower social strata's access to the political sphere and those oligarchies took possession of power to exercise it as a form of patronage, that is, blurring the line between public resources and private wealth. Positivism and the “laissez faire, laissez passé” was the banner of the elites

Apart from neoliberalism and populism in which the first acquires a positive value and the second a negative one under the perspective of modernization, a new form of populism has emerged to draw the attention of politics in Latin America: despotic populism.

In Latin America, the neoliberal model has persisted as in the cases of Mexico (Vicente Fox and Felipe Calderon) and Colombia (Alvaro Uribe and Juan Manuel Santos). However, that which I call “neo-populist” has come into existence as the one headed by Hugo Chávez in Venezuela and his respective followers: Evo Morales in Bolivia, Rafael Correa in Ecuador, Daniel Ortega in Nicaragua and Ollanta Humala in Peru.

According to that which was said by Ludolfo Paramio,⁶⁵ populism today presents new foundations for a system that goes against that which already exists in terms of institutional and legal matters. According to the new populism, all republican institutions and laws should be eliminated and replaced by the rule of a single man. This is accompanied by increased polarization, as well as social and political conflict. This in turn establishes an atmosphere of constant tension.

Faced with these characteristics, it should be noted that the new populism differs from classic populism: the new one fights against oligarchic governments while the second one plain and simply goes against democracy.

While populism has been reborn in Latin America, it does not mean that “popular tyranny” is limited to that region of the world. The phenomenon is already a challenge to democracy worldwide. One example is what is happening in Italy with Silvio Berlusconi, a regime that Giovanni Sartori has described as a true and proper “sultanato.” In this same range, we can include Jean-Marie Le Pen in France and Pim Fortuyn in Holland. Another case in point is the example of Jörg Haider in Austria. It is interesting and not without significance that unlike what happens in Latin America, a region where left-wing populism has sprung up, in Europe, right-wing populisms are also appearing. Among the issues that have been at the heart of the demands of European populism is that of the immigration of people from all over the world to the European continent and especially to Western Europe.

VI

The Collapse of the Free Market Model

There are many scholars studying national and international politics who assure that populism has been a response to the difficult conditions international financial institutions impose on developing countries. The neoliberal onslaught has not only affected Latin American countries, but also a large number of nations around the world. The neoliberal cycle that took place in the late 1970s gave way to the meltdown on Wall Street in 2008.

Assuming that the concept of globalization became part of the common language of national and international politics when the Berlin Wall fell, if one of the opponents, the Soviet Union, fell apart along with its empire based on authoritarianism and a centrally planned economy left the door open to democracy, a market economy could spread everywhere. A form of government, democracy, and an economic system, capitalism, without restrictions, would unite the world. There are some who believe in the peaceful coexistence of democracy and market economy. This is the case of Giovanni Sartori who in his book “ What is Democracy?” also establishes that this relationship is evident. However, democracy embracing market economy can be both vital and lethal. It is vital because both are fueled by dynamism, creativity, and constant transformation; it is lethal because while democracy requires equality, market economy is a natural producer of inequalities.

Both democracy and capitalism continue to face serious problems. On the one hand, democracy has seen brutality with events like those that took place in the former Yugoslavia, the massacres in Rwanda and Sudan, separatist tendencies and particularly, the terrorist attacks in Washington D.C. and New York on September 11, 2001. Even then, although democracy managed to defeat enemies as bad as Nazism and Communism in the 20^th century, another equally insidious rival has now emerged: populism.

Regarding capitalism, or more specifically the neoliberal model, it seems to me that its fate has been sealed with the financial meltdown in September 2008. Those who thought that globalization was just the universalization of markets through the free market system (McWorld) were completely mistaken. Today, the challenge is finding an economic model to go beyond statism (Welfare State),and mercantilism (liberalism). Neither John Maynard Keynes nor Milton Friedman can be theoretical references any more.

VII

The Old Third Way

We will now proceed to review the recent history of neoliberal economic politics and the alternative option to this strategy, the Third Way, to better understand the possibilities open to us in the future from an economic standpoint, which is less undemocratic, or more inclusive.

For starters, the 1980s will admittedly be remembered for the control exercised by conservative parties that even spoke of a true and particular “Restoration”, which had an echo and followers in practically the whole western world.

One of the biggest mistakes of conservatism was to practice abstentionism, not only in the economic realm, but also in the political one. The result of this was what Massimo D’Alema has called “weak politics”, meaning it allows the “laissez faire, laissez passé” principle to be applied in the circulation of goods and in following up on problems.⁶⁶ In the neoliberal era, the State certainly did follow the interventions of conservatives, but now it was to favor the concentration of wealth. The neoliberal right wing had a technocratic formation, but lacked a political culture and a precise notion about the State and what it stands for. The conservative strategy left national cohesion hanging.⁶⁷

The social vision of the Third Way was not, as the conservatives thought, a collection of people competing among themselves, but a conglomerate that looked to support and gather individual efforts.⁶⁸ The project that the left wing supported tried to forge a different relationship between individuals and society. Tony Blair said: “The question today is whether we can achieve a new relationship between individuals and society, in which the individual acknowledges, in certain key matters, that it is only by working together in a community of people that the individual's interest can progress.”⁶⁹ Under this premise, a mutual correspondence between individual rights and social responsibilities was tried to put into practice.

As to distributive justice, one of the most frequent topics of neoliberals theoreticians has been the refusal to join together individual freedom and social equality.⁷⁰ In contrast, writers identified with the Third Way, like Bruce Ackerman, refuted that supposition: “We emphatically reject the idea that there is an inexorable distance between freedom and equality. The comprehensive partnership (Stakeholder Society) promises more of the two.”⁷¹

Neoliberal rejection of social justice was mixed with abhorrence for populism and statism. Nevertheless, social justice and populism are not the same. Neoliberals kill social justice to get rid of statism and populism. Now substance will have to be saved while the complements are taken out.

Labor parties were in power for many years and their example was followed in several countries of the world, including some Latin Americans countries.

VIII

The New Third Way

But with Labor Party's removal from power in the United Kingdom and the defeat of the German Social Democrats, it can be said that the experiment of the Old Third Way came to an end. Nevertheless, there is a new economic and social model worth taking as a viable alternative to populism and neoliberalism: the Scandinavian model. This model, which has survived the assault of neoliberalism, could trigger an alternative economic and political line to old markets, old Statist and the politic defeat of the U.K.’s Third Way.

On this, Eric S. Einhorn and John Logue affirm: “the Scandinavian Welfare State, which were written off as road kill on the global economy highway in 1990 or 1995, have now again become a social laboratory for adapting solidaristic and universalistic Welfare State programs to the change International economic dispersement.”⁷² The OECD ranks Scandinavian per capita incomes at the top level. Income inequality is one-third lower than that in the larger European Union countries and fully 40 percent less than in the United States.⁷³ Scandinavia encompasses five States: three of which are full European Union members (Denmark, Finland and Sweden) while two belong to the European Economic Area (Iceland and Norway). As Einhorn and Logue suggest, the experience of these states shows that success is a matter of policy choices. This is an important consideration when faced with the need to find a new model of development both nationally and internationally.

Nordic countries have been able to find a rapid solution to recover from severe economic problems. They identified the failures Welfare State and corrected them. They implemented a new line of public politics without sacrificing social protection and social cohesion by creating jobs and promoting economic growth. This model, which has drawn attention from around the world, is called “flexicurity,” which has been recognized by the International Monetary Fund (especially in its 2003 report on Sweden) and by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). Over the past two years, a spate of news articles appearing in The New York Times, Newsweek, The Economist, and amazingly, Forbes, have described the new Scandinavian model as “flexicurity” in action. “Flexicurity” is the combination of economic flexibility, security and particularly, as Forbes expressed it:

[...] a “Third Way’ trade off [that] gives employers the right to hire and fire easily, while the state guarantees a good wage [that is protection against unemployment] and retraining for the fired.” The World Economic Forum places Denmark and Sweden as the fourth and fifth most-competitive national economies (just behind Switzerland, the United States and Singapore), and Finland and Norway are only slightly lower (sixth and fourteenth, respectively).⁷⁴

The Scandinavian Third Way has captured the attention of international public opinion because it has been able to face the challenges of globalization, while maintaining social policies and shifting its approach about competitiveness, things that apparently cannot combine among them.

Scandinavian model has proved that policymaking does not need to have a restricted scope to operate within the technocratic entourage. Public policy can be the result of consensual policy-making and obtain the legitimacy that other governmental activities do not easily acquire. Consensual decisions take time, but it is a matter of choice in democratic societies:

[...] government commissions have recruited experts from academia, business organizations and labor movement to study problems and propose solutions. Universities and autonomous think tanks have added volumes of data and research on intricate issues such as economic structural change, technology, healthcare performance, and not least, old-age pension alternatives. This does not replace either the periodic national collective bargaining rounds or the political debate, but it does provide a generally accepted database of “facts” in which policymakers and their constituents can frame the debate.⁷⁵

It is clear that democracy and economic efficiency are not enemies as neo-liberal dogma proclaims: democracy and efficiency can complement each other.

One of the main features of the “New Third Way” is the importance it gives to research and development:

Nordic countries [...] spend lavishly on research and development. All of them, but especially Sweden and Finland, have taken to the sweeping revolution in information and communications technology and leveraged it to gain global competitiveness. Sweden now spends nearly 4 percent of GDP on R&D, the highest ratio in the world today. On the average, the Nordic nations spend 3 percent of GDP on R&D, compared with around 2 percent in the English-speaking nations. Social policy was part of the restructuring that has produced the currently strong performance.⁷⁶

The experience of Scandinavian nations in recent years has shown that social democracy is still strong. Moreover, social democracy in Scandinavian has regain energy “without sacrificing a strong commitment to economic equality.”⁷⁷ Nobody in Europe has better assimilated the challenge of globalization than Scandinavia. “A comparison between the relative success of Scandinavian policies and those of Britain, France, Germany, or the United States would be as favorable to the Scandinavian model today as it was in 1970. That would not have been true in 1985 or 1995.”⁷⁸

Some components of Scandinavian model are: democratic rule, a strong civil society, technological innovation, and adaptability to globalization, as well as collaboration among entrepreneurs, workers, the government, academia and civil society. Furthermore, the Scandinavian model is characterized by a constellation of social values like solidarity and reciprocal responsibility. These values truly relate to Robert D. Putnam's idea of “social capital.” At this level of social confidence and high levels of organization, Scandinavian countries have a striking degree of organizational membership. For instance, in 2003, Union Density (union membership as a percent of employed workers) stood at 70 percent in Denmark, 74 percent in Finland, 53 percent in Norway, and 78 percent in Sweden, higher that of any other European country. In comparison, the United States has a union density of only 12 percent. As a consequence, “the labor movement's strength has been key to modernizing the Scandinavian Welfare State in the labor market and pension policy areas.”⁷⁹ The organizational strength of Scandinavian unions has made it possible for the workers’ movement to think of the common good and not their own narrow interests.

It cannot be denied that certain elements of neoliberalism have been adapted to Scandinavian model as part of a general strategy to upgrade the social-democratic model: “While Danish and Swedish pensions tomorrow will rely less on the state and more on the market, they will do so through collectively bargained, universal DC systems that cover all participants in the labor market. Neoliberal elements have been integrated in Scandinavian Welfare State reform, but not at the cost of cutting health care, increasing poverty, or reducing future pensions.”⁸⁰

In a nutshell,

The revised Nordic model is now widely known and attractive to a broad political spectrum. It seems to have success fully dealt with issues of pension reform, employment flexibility, labor force growth, and medical cost containment in ways that are compatible with economic security, high employment at high wages, good health outcomes, and broadly shared prosperity. Relatively high levels of taxation do not seem to be a problem in and of themselves, at least when they are perceived as fair and do not lead to serious economic dislocations.⁸¹

The new Third Way can be a fresh wave of political and economic strategies globally. Taking into account the lack of strong proposals due to the collapse of the neoliberal model and the languishing old Third Way, the experience of the Scandinavian model should be kept in mind.

IX

Cosmopolitanism

Throughout this essay, we have seen that globalization presents a theoretical and practical challenge of great proportions. The Realistic theory of international relations is no longer able to address this phenomenon adequately, nor can the field of international relationships be addressed as a collection of entities mired in anarchy. As a result, we are at a stage in which every member must act according to a calculation of convenience in order to survive. In a strange mixture of Hobbesian and utilitarian political theories, those thinkers who identify themselves with the appointed realism needed to survive in the State of Nature have to carry on in the anarchic situation according to the calculation of maximizing benefits and minimizing losses. The outcome is assessed according to “the national interest.”

Neither is the doctrine of multiculturalism well-suited to understand the phenomenon of globalization. The world cannot be characterized as a set of autonomous entities defined by their ethnic features and driven by the desire to establish themselves as small states emerging from the wreckage of national States. Another doctrine present throughout the process of globalization has been neoliberalism, which understands this phenomenon one-dimensionally as the universalization of the markets. Economic liberalism has encouraged the view that the world's financial and commercial integration should not encounter obstacles in its path or any form of regulation either nationally or internationally.

Instead of these failed doctrines, we have a real theoretical proposal: cosmopolitanism. This is based on rationality, and not results like utilitarianism, but is based on the rules derived from practical reasoning, so much so that these rules become moral duties for individuals, regardless of racial identity, income level, gender, religion or party affiliation. This set of rules must be respected by the fairness of the intent. Cosmopolitanism coincides with the Kantian theory that the existence of rules must be universal for all human beings.

The Kantian ethics is known as a normative doctrine, which opposite to the consequentialist theory of utilitarianism as the latter feeds realism. Multiculturalism highlights particularism, and not universalism. For multiculturalism, national borders are important limits for the implementation of its project. Borders within the States themselves are even more barriers set by each cultural community. Each ethnic-cultural entity establishes its own patterns of behavior that have nothing to do with other cultures: “[...] different cultures have their own ethics and it is impossible to claim, as cosmopolitans do, access to one single account of morality [.] Therefore, we must reject the idea of a single universal morality as a cultural product with no global legitimacy.”⁸² According to multiculturalists, it is impossible to reach an agreement among cultures as different as those that exist worldwide. There is no code of ethics that can work for all of them universally. This position also tends to be wary of these hypothetically universal values because they are generally proclaimed by Western nations, such as using human rights to justify “humanitarian” military intervention in those countries in which these rights are not respected. From this point of view, each national State or even each ethnical community can freely determine the place of these rights within their legal system, without having to render explanations to the international community.

While globalization is increasingly linked to cosmopolitism there are however, schools of thought that oppose unification from the perspective of particular collective belonging. In doing so, it often leaves room for well-intentioned forces to take over this link and impose their own interests on all societies.

This normative view is that of equal dignity for all men and women. This equality, in turn, requires a fair consideration. This criterion of fairness almost always leads to the demand for global justice, as has lately been claimed in the case of Amartya Sen, who in several works has stressed this need.⁸³ In this same liberal idea although on a different philosophical matrix, lines of thought related to the legacy of John Rawls have also emphasized the issue of global justice.⁸⁴ Issues like those mentioned above, the respect for human rights, the formation of a global civil society and setting limits on the uncontrolled powers that have taken advantage of globalization and that Luigi Ferrajoli has called “savage powers”⁸⁵ (such as transnational corporations and the corporations that dominate the information and news in the world) have been added to the need for global justice.

Globalization has brought enormous challenges, like the need to establish global citizenship and democracy, not as a romantic idea, but as an imperative need to stop wild powers and place them under well-defined legal and institutional control. At the same time, global citizenship and democracy are presented as the need to lead the momentum that seems to go in many directions without a premeditated path and is determined consensually. There is a generalized perception that no one is in the leading position of globalization even though some authorities may have significant influence on some fields of activities, which means having certain abilities to effectively apply Joseph Nye's formula. But there is no harmony. The main challenge of globalization is to find some form of supranational governance and hence the need to establish a cosmopolite citizenship and democracy that allows participation in the process of decision-making and place cosmopolite politics in a position of control. Although long, it is fitting to mention Andrew Linklater's view on this topic:

The idea of world citizenship is a concept which international non-governmental organizations have used to promote a stronger sense of responsibility for the global environment and for the human species. Proponents of cosmopolitan democracy have argued that national democracies have little control over global markets, and limited ability to influence decisions taken by transnational corporations, which influence currency values, employment prospects, and so forth. They maintain that democracy may not survive if it remains tied to the nation-sate. They argue for democratizing international organizations such as the World Trade Organization, and for ensuring that transnational corporations are held accountable for decisions that may harm vulnerable persons in different parts of the World.⁸⁶

To this, I would add the need to make world-governing institutions democratic, and not just in terms of the World Trade Organization, but also the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank and the United Nations. These institutions were created after World War II and are still operating according to the structure established back then; that is, with the predominance of the countries victors of that war. However, the physiognomy of the world has greatly changed. We cannot continue to use schemes from the mid-20^th century to solve affairs that involve all of humanity and the many dimensions of its future.

Due to globalization, the question Immanuel Kant made has been updated: “Do the oceans make a community of nations impossible?”