Recreating Democracy in A Globalized State
* Book: edited by Cliff DuRand and Steve Martinot: Recreating Democracy in A Globalized State (Clarity Press, 2012).
Review
Excerpt from Kostis Papadantonakis:
"National states, in the words of Fernandez Ríos, “…continue to have a cardinal importance which, in many instances, is reinforced by the fact that they are territorial and cultural places where important searches for alternatives to capitalism and struggles for a more just and equitable world are taking place.” Within each nation, such “searches for alternatives” bring about a confrontation between the popular forces and the state. Absent vigilant mobilization in defense of the national sovereignty, the “national” state is bound to end up as a “globalized” state. As such, the state becomes the enemy of its citizenry, acting as agent of imperialism and endangering the very survival of the nation. What especially imperils national survival is the deliberate fragmentation of national identities (polyarchy) due to globalization’s divide-and-conquer strategies in the interest of securing the globalized “national” state and, through it, imperialist governance. These matters are at the heart of the book, taken up by each of the authors in turn: “Global Imperialism and Nation-States” (Ríos), “State Against Nation” (DuRand), “The Sustainability of the Nation-State Model in A Globalizing World” (Pérez), “On the Autonomy, Sovereignty and Integration of Peoples and Nations” (Capote), “Sovereignty and the Failure of Corporate Governance” (Martinot), “National Self-Determination in An Age of Globalization” (Lara).
The final chapter (DuRand) counter-poses “democratic politics” (with a lower-case “d”) to the globalized state. Building on the rich contributions in the earlier chapters, DuRand manages an insightful translation of the largely Third-World perspective of this volume to the challenges of resisting globalization at the heart of the core, the U.S.A. itself. He notes the historic achievements of the U.S. popular forces whenever they succeeded in mobilizing in order to exercise true “national sovereignty”—and the perils “due to the absence of the countervailing power of social movements.” After reading this book, one should feel energized to rejoin the ranks of Occupy Wall Street and of all solidarity mobilizations against continued repression in the periphery of the pyramid at whose top our own globalized state now totters." (http://afgj.org/resisting-the-global-state-a-perfectly-timed-perspective)