National Identities and the Future
of Democracy, Part II:
Globalization and the Decline of
Civic Commitments in New and Established Democracies
Wendy M. Rahn
Globalization--the
worldwide movement of goods and services, people, and information--has created
an increasingly interdependent world, the implications of which are sharply
contested in the political science literature.
There are many who argue that the myriad facets of globalization pose
clear challenges to the nature of state autonomy and sovereignty and that the
nation-state system as we know it is being transformed in fundamental
ways. Despite all the academic chatter about
globalization, however, litte research has directly examined empirically how
globalization effects the orientations of individuals who reside in this “new
world order.” Instead, almost all of the
large-N comparative work on globalization looks at macro-economic indicators
and their role in shaping nation-state outcomes, such as economic growth, or policies,
such as exchange rates or government taxation and spending, especially as these
bear welfare state policies.
The debate within
political science has largely overlooked that the future of democratic
nation-states ultimately rests on how these forces impinge on the individuals
who reside within their borders. In
particular, it is through the eyes of the youngest
members of these polities that the future of the democratic nation-state can be
glimpsed. Using a new international data
set, I show that globalization has indeed resulted in substantial
“denationalization” in many of the world’s democracies. The reduced importance of the nation-state
as an object of attachment has problematic consequences, not just for
commitments to conventional democratic virtues, such as being informed or
voting in national elections, but also for orientations that are deemed central
to so-called “post-national” or global citizenship. The exhaustion of the political project of
the democratic nation state, therefore, has not made the world safer for
democracy, contrary to the hopes of many global cosmopolitans.