Global Ideology Research Articles

Planetary Overload, Limits to Growth and Health.

Since the use of atomic weapons in 1945 visionaries have warned that without major changes the survival of global civilization is in question. These concerns deepened in following decades, during the Cold War, with The Limits to Growth, the best-selling environmental book of the 1970s. Yet, since then, most concern has faded, fuelled by technological developments and a shift in dominant global ideology. Public health, with a few exceptions (one of which is the book Planetary Overload), has been slow to recognize this debate, even as evidence emerges that civilization may indeed be at risk, driven by an increasingly ominous complex of events. This article outlines the key relevant literature and concepts, attempting to bring emerging and future health consequences to the attention of health workers, including the idea of a "social vaccine," conveying sufficient anxiety to provoke action for environmental protection, but insufficient to induce paralysis.

Ideological justifications for restrictive immigration policies: An analysis of parliamentary discourses on immigration in France and Canada (2006–2013)

In this paper, I analyze the parliamentary discourses on immigration in France and Canada from January 2006 to December 2013 in order to answer the question: What arguments are put forward in parliamentary arenas in order to justify more restrictive immigration policies? Despite their different models of integration and citizenship, France and Canada are facing very similar discussions, involving the same arguments and the same theoretical reflections. Critical discourse analysis shows that immigration is an extremely divisive issue in the political landscape: in both countries, right-wing political parties try to restrict in the name of economic imperatives, while left-wing political parties seek to establish more liberal policies. This finding goes against some studies, which argue that right-wing political parties, influenced by the neoliberal ideology, call for more open borders to immigration. Within the debates, references to national histories, models of integration, and civic values are not especially prominent, especially when compared with the omnipresent discourses of economics. The justifications for more restrictive immigration policies often reveal the dominant position of a global ideology prioritizing values of competitiveness and cost-effectiveness in an era of post-Fordist capitalism. The treatment of refugees, asylum seekers, and illegal immigrants is a paradigmatic example of the trends I have identified. These kinds of immigrants are often at the heart of justifications for implementing restrictive measures. Our empirical material shows that Roma people are particularly targeted by these restrictions in both countries.

There and back again

This article examines and critiques Susan McWilliams’s recent book, Traveling Back: Toward a Global Political Theory. The book is a largely successful examination of the role of travel writing in western thought and its possible use in articulating a global politics. I offer some critiques, including a discussion of some places I found the analytic framework unclear, as well as noting some routes for extending the argument.

Проблема структуры и классификации глобальных политических идеологий

Проблема структуры и классификации глобальных политических идеологий

Global Incorporation, Ideology, and Public Policy in Zimbabwe

Six years after independence, Zimbabwe is viewed by its admirers as having adopted a pragmatic approach to a broad range of socialist oriented policies. A massive expansion and re-direction of services in the areas of education, health, and agricultural extension services, in addition to the creation of one of the world’s largest resettlement programs, are often cited as evidence of how the government of Prime Minister Robert Mugabe is working for socialist transformation in Zimbabwe. In addition, under Mugabe’s Zimbabwe African National Union (ZANU) government, the Zimbabwean economy has been able to maintain a real expansion in production averaging near 4.6% per annum-perhaps the highest rate in Africa--while the government has reversed a tremendous balance of payments deficit.

The Effect of Globalization on the Ideology of Pancasila

Pancasila is often seen as an ideology that deals with global ideologies, such as capitalism and liberalism. The Pancasila that was built was for the common welfare and social justice for all Indonesian people. On the other hand, we live in a globalization that is full of laws and rules of capitalism, free and open markets. We must remain firm and strong in our stance, that we will continue to dedicate all of these things to the common good, to social justice. An intelligent nation in the era of globalization, is not a nation that continues to complain, give up, and get angry, but a nation that is able to drain the sources of prosperity available in the global arena. We all use technology, capital or information properly to improve our welfare and interests. Don't want to be the loser. Let's be winners in this globalization. Globalization is an era of rapid changes that contain positive things, but also brings negative aspects for the Indonesian people. The Indonesian people must be good at seizing and taking advantage of opportunities from the positive aspects and still standing on the values that have been pledged, defended, and upheld. Facing globalization, the Indonesian nation must be able to stand up by having sovereignty in the political field, independence in the economy, personality in culture, and having strong resilience in national security. More than that, we must continue to strengthen our identity as Pancasilaists who uphold the 1945 Constitution of the Republic of Indonesia and strengthen the establishment of the Unitary State of the Republic of Indonesia. Every citizen is obliged to defend his country so that the survival of his nation is maintained. To defend the country is largely determined by the attitudes and behavior of every citizen. If citizens are active and care about the progress of their nation, the survival of the nation will be maintained. It is better if citizens do not care about the problems facing their nation, the survival of the nation will be threatened and sooner or later the state will dissolve.

Portrait of Pancasila Resistance in the Middle of Globalization and Global Ideology

Ideology can be formulated with complex knowledge and values which as a whole become the basis for humans themselves to understand the basic attitude to process the understanding they live in, capture what is seen as right and wrong, and what is considered good and bad. Thus he will be able to carry out activities as a manifestation of the overall knowledge and values he has. Ideology is not something that stands alone apart from the reality of people's lives, but ideology is a product of society's culture and therefore in a certain sense is a manifestation of social reality. In essence, ideology is the result of human reflection thanks to its ability to hold a stand against his life. Actually, the view of life also provides an orientation in human life, which grows with culture in a general form.

Book Review: Traveling Back: Toward a Global Political Theory, by Susan McWilliams

Book Review: <i>Traveling Back: Toward a Global Political Theory</i>, by Susan McWilliams

Normative behaviourism and global political principles

This article takes a new idea, ‘normative behaviourism’, and applies it to global political theory, in order to address at least one of the problems we might have in mind when accusing that subject of being too ‘unrealistic’. The core of this idea is that political principles can be justified, not just by patterns in our thinking, and in particular our intuitions and considered judgements, but also by patterns in our behaviour, and in particular acts of insurrection and crime. The problem addressed is ‘cultural relativism’, understood here not as a meta-ethical doctrine but as the apparent ‘fact’ that people around the world have culturally varying intuitions and judgements of a kind that lead them to affirm different political principles. This is a problem because it seems to follow (1) that global agreement on any substantial set of political principles is impossible and (2) that any political theory in denial of this ‘fact’ would be, for that reason, deeply unrealistic. The solution to this problem argued for here is that if domestic political principles (i.e. principles intended to regulate a single state) could be justified by normative behaviourism, and in reference to culturally invariant behaviour, then an international system supportive of such principles is justifiable by extension.

Should global political theory get real? An introduction

This special edition brings together (1) the recent methodological worries of the moralism/realism and ideal/non-ideal theory debates with (2) the soaring ambition of work in international or global political theory, as found in, say, theories of global justice. Contributors are as follows: Chris Bertram, Jonathan Floyd, Aaron James, Terry MacDonald, David Miller, Shmulik Nili, Mathias Risse and Matt Sleat.

Global justice and global realities

Should global political theory “get real,” focusing on real-world moral failures? I argue that, insofar as we think it important to reflect on global morality in a world of separate states, the answer is yes. In the article’s first stage, I set up the argument by suggesting that our only convincing reasons to reject the idea of a world state are non-ideal—these reasons concern failures to comply with moral duties, rather than ideal visions of a perfectly just world of full compliance. Therefore, any theory assuming a world of separate states must itself be a non-ideal theory focusing on compliance failures. In the article’s second stage, I contend that this necessary focus should lead global political theorists to make more use of social-scientific knowledge than they typically do, while recognizing the structural obstacles confronting global social science. In the article’s third stage, I indicate some under-studied normative implications of these obstacles, tying the debate on ideal and non-ideal global theory to other methodological questions in global political philosophy.

How ‘realistic’ should global political theory be? Some reflections on the debate so far

This article reviews the recent debate on realism in political theory (including the articles in this symposium) and examines its implications for global political theory. It distinguishes two versions of realism – contrasted, respectively, with political utopianism and political moralism – and argues that the second of these realisms fails to be sufficiently realistic by the standards of the first. In particular, it exaggerates the extent of political disagreement within domestic societies and underestimates the unifying force of national identities. In international relations, by contrast, disagreement over values runs deeper, and the pursuit of national interest remains a serious obstacle to co-operation, as classical international realists insisted. Current proposals for global democracy and global distributive justice therefore run into serious difficulties over agency and legitimacy: who might have reason and capacity to create the institutions needed to deliver these goals, and how could these institutions be rendered legitimate in the eyes of global publics?

Liberal Integrity and Foreign Entanglement

My aim in this article is to show that there is distinctive normative value to thinking about a liberal polity as an agent with integrity that can be threatened, paralleling the integrity of an individual person. I argue that the idea of liberal integrity organizes and clarifies important moral intuitions concerning the policies of liberal democracies, especially with regard to their global conduct. This idea provides a novel organizing framework for liberal values that currently seem disparate. It also captures important moral intuitions as to how the tainted histories of actual liberal societies should bear on their global conduct. Finally, this idea explains, in a way that a simple appeal to familiar liberal values arguably cannot, why liberal polities have identity-based moral reasons not to entangle themselves in manifestly illiberal practices beyond their borders—reasons whose significance becomes apparent in scenarios and real-world cases that global political theory overlooks.

Senghor, globalism and Africanity

A reflection on the challenges of African identity within the context of the persistence of European Modernity as the ideal of globalisation, offers an opportunity for a fresh perspective on the life and work of Leopold Sedar Senghor. We subject Senghor’s life and intellectual output to a critical triangular prism of: (1) Paul James’s critique of globalism as an ideology of globalisation; (2) Walter Mignolo’s enunciation of the epistemico-cultural implications of Western-led globalisation on the postcolony; and (3) Paulin Houtondji’s Afrocentric critical literary theory. The result is a claim we make that in the devotion of his literary talent and intellectual prowess to the nurturing of the ‘French way’, Senghor not only nurtured an imperialistic French globalism, but betrayed an opportunity to assert a political space for an enduring decolonial African epistemology during a critical period in the history of Africa’s relationship with Europe. Senghor’s life praxis is in this way presented as a typology of the psychopolitical pitfalls facing African thought leaders in their postcolonial engagement with Western modernity.

The Slow Drift

The Slow Drift Yün Peng (bio) Song Hwee Lim. Tsai Ming-liang and a Cinema of Slowness. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2014. 240 pp. Hardcover $45.00, isbn 978-0-8248-3684-9. Slow films had been around since at least the 1960s, but slow cinema had its moment in the early 2000s. In a Guardian review that begins with an anecdote about watching Belá Tarr’s seven-hour Satantango, Jonathan Romney notes that “[i]n any period of cinema history, a director like Tarr would be an out right [sic] exception, but today his work represents a prodigy of dissidence.”1 For Romney, the emergence of a cinema that “downplays events in favor of mood, evocativeness and an intensified sense of temporality” signaled cinema’s ability to reinvent itself; but not everyone was as enthusiastic.2 In an April 2010 Sight and Sound editorial, Nick James took aim at the phenomenon, calling slow films “passive aggressive,” because “they demand great swathes of our precious time to achieve quite fleeting and slender aesthetic and political effects.”3 The editorial set off heated debates among critics and film bloggers. Steven Shaviro similarly regretted that “the long-take, long-shot, slow-camera-movement, sparse-dialogue style has become . . . a sort of default international style,” a “profoundly nostalgic and regressive” cliché.4 On the other side, Harry Tuttle, who ran the blog Unspoken Cinema and preferred the term contemporary contemplative cinema (CCC) to slow cinema, wrote an outraged rebuttal accusing James of “anti-intellectual, pro-entertainment” banter. 5 In retrospect, the most significant outcome of the debates may be that they have revealed a set of assumptions about cinema that needs reexamination. As Dan Fox and Karl Schoonover observe, the debates revolved heavily around such oppositions as philistinism versus pretentiousness (Fox), and “time wasted versus time labored” (Schoonover, p. 67).6 Wherever one stands in the debates, then, slow [End Page 251] cinema is an excellent place to start rethinking these assumptions critically. Moreover, the debates also made clear that cinematic slowness remains inadequately theorized. The subjective nature of temporal experience is compounded by the fact that slowness is a value judgment. Even its defenders tend to define slow cinema negatively, in binary opposition to Hollywood, rather than in terms of its positive qualities.7 But elusive as it is, slowness is a defining feature in the cinematic pursuit of filmmakers as diverse as Belá Tarr, Chantal Akerman, Aleksandr Sokurov, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Jia Zhangke, and, of course, Tsai Ming-liang. Song Hwee Lim’s book Tsai Ming-liang and a Cinema of Slowness promises a welcome change. It is the first systematic treatment of cinematic slowness and a full-length study of Tsia Ming-liang, a key figure of the slow canon. Lim is the author of Celluloid Comrades: Representations of Male Homosexuality in Contemporary Chinese Cinemas (University of Hawai‘i Press, 2006), the first book-length study of queerness in Chinese cinemas. With Tsai Ming-liang and a Cinema of Slowness he accomplishes two intertwined tasks. The book offers an illuminating reading of Tsai Ming-liang’s films with slowness as the key, while simultaneously presenting a systematic examination of cinematic slowness incorporating theoretical and descriptive vocabularies fashioned from the reading of Tsai Ming-liang. The book is neatly organized, with an introductory chapter titled “Going Slow” and a concluding coda titled “Getting Lost” bookending four chapters titled “Slowness,” “Signature,” “Stillness,” and “Silence.” The introductory chapter situates cinematic slowness in the cultural context of late capitalism, where slowness is both deployed as a form of resistance to relentless speed and implicated in the capitalist ideology of consumption and globalization (think slow food movement, to which slow cinema is compared). The second chapter is a theoretical examination of cinematic slowness on a variety of registers: ontological (Gilles Deleuze’s time-image), material (continuity editing vs. the long take; art cinema as an institution and niche market; cinematic slowness and the repurposing of boredom and wasted time as labor), aesthetic (the production of a new temporal experience and new mode of subjectivity). The three chapters that follow offer an engaged look at Tsai Ming-liang’s works and their signature slowness...

Poisoning the Mother/Land: An Ecofeminist Dramaturgy in José Rivera’s Marisol and Cherríe Moraga’s Heroes and Saints

Poisoning the Mother/LandAn Ecofeminist Dramaturgy in José Rivera’s Marisol and Cherríe Moraga’s Heroes and Saints Arden Elizabeth Thomas (bio) In Marisol (1993) and Heroes and Saints (1992), the images that José Rivera and Cherríe Moraga contend with are of the poisoned earth and poisoned bodies, of deformed infants and bodiless heads, of a man giving birth and babies buried under concrete, of children crucified and the incarnation of la Virgen de Guadalupe, of Mother Earth as womb and tomb, of children and mothers and the earth screaming, burning, dying, yet refusing erasure and silence. When the title character in Marisol demands to know, “Why is there a war on children in this city? Why are apples extinct? Why are they planning to drop human insecticide on overpopulated areas of the Bronx? Why do cows give salty milk? Where did the moon go? How come nobody’s seen it in nearly nine months?” Rivera leads us through a series of questions that conflate images of ecological apocalypse with recurring images of maternity and childbirth. And when Moraga’s main character, Cerezita—a young woman born with only a head due to the toxic wastes infecting the land—takes on the ancestral images of the Virgin Mary and la Virgen de Guadalupe, she reclaims ancestral mothers and Mother Earth toward a conglomerate and powerful vision of a sustainable politics. This essay reads the plays Marisol and Heroes and Saints through the lens of ecofeminist philosophy to see how the theatre might intervene on behalf of issues of environmental justice and ecological sustainability. Paying particular attention to the material conditions of women, children, and the land and [End Page 143] interrelated issues of environmental destruction, race, and poverty, I examine how Rivera and Moraga incorporate metaphoric images of motherhood with concrete evidence of environmental toxins and policies experienced in the body. Ultimately, the playwrights articulate the material, physical consequences of political and ecological actions, calling for changed perceptions that empower individuals to work to transform communal, social, and even global ideologies of power that contribute to the destruction of the environment and the lives of women and children.1 With today’s increasing anxiety about climate change and ecological disasters, it is particularly instructive to look at these two plays from the early 1990s that bring together interrelated issues of motherhood, environmental destruction, race, and poverty. As testaments to their contemporaneity, both plays are today often taught in college theatre classes and regularly revived on college campuses and in theatre companies across the country. Nearly two decades after their premieres, Marisol and Heroes and Saints continue to hold powerful resonances for current conversations about the material relationship between bodies and the detritus of environmental waste; about the damaging effects of globalization on the land and the community, and in the lives of mothers and children; and about the symbolic and linguistic analogies between woman and nature that foster systems of domination. By using an ecofeminist dramaturgy—a relatively recent theoretical model that examines dramatic playtexts or stagings through the lens of ecological feminist criticism—this essay offers new readings of these important plays. I argue that Marisol and Heroes and Saints reveal in concrete detail how policies that continue to be promoted by government and corporations against urban families and rural farming communities impoverish the planet and its peoples, with women and children as their primary victims. Additionally, this essay examines how these plays interrogate what Sheila Rabillard and Karen Bamford discuss in their introduction to this special edition of Theatre History Studies as motherhood’s unstable cultural meaning in modern Western society. In particular, if Marisol and Heroes and Saints expose worlds of ecological destruction through metaphoric images of the maternal, this essay questions whether the plays go beyond Mother Earth as metaphor or essentializing myth, drawing on these archetypical precedents to foster an ecofeminist revision of such essentialism, or whether they are instead trapped by these culturally prevalent images. It may be useful to define ecofeminism at this point. The term ecofeminisme was coined by French feminist Françoise d’Eaubonne in 1974 as a tool to assess interconnections between women’s oppression and ecological...

INSTITUTIONAL GLOBALIZATION AS A SYSTEM OF INTEGRATION THE PHENOMENON OF THE POSTMODERN DEVELOPMENT

Purpose. Institutionalism is gaining strength as a dominant point of view on the world. Its philosophical basis is the postulate of the uncertainty of the development, which comes to replace the neoclassical certainty characteristic of industrial society. The postulate of uncertainty is closely connected with the idea of subjectivization and individualization of post-industrial society. All these were very important components of the new paradigm, although they do not exhaust the problem. In the heart of postmodernism is a mass identity as a spiritual substance, while the more recently mass of people to realize themselves as natural and social beings. Person has absolute freedom in the acceptance and rejection of culture and civilization; it is pluralistic in their actions and in their consciousness. It is the subject of history and it should be creative, fluent mastering all the achievements of culture. Methodology. The dialogue system of the Postmodern, which is the basis of human communication with another person, human with society is a model of convergent formation of the world community and world economy. The same model of rationalism and adequate industrial society is a monologue, which is easily builds a bridge to violence, even if it is carried out in the name of the man behind him and the pathos of the exaltation of man as the bearer of unlimited creation possibilities. However, it is very important not just to modify rationalism, and to understand the origins of civilization. Scientific novelty. The postmodern era begins is not easy. Modern defending, using all their reserves: public thirst for justice, the priority of rationality (at least in the economy), monologist public agencies and politicians in contrast to the dialogic postmodern imperative modality in the spiritual existence of man instead the freedom. Finally, the world of the story is set a trap – the anthropological paradigm of the globalization ideology formation. In this paradigm, people see materialistic rational measure of space and society building, i.e. the natural and social being, not a spiritual person. All this was evident in the course of transformation in Ukraine. Its main weakness is obvious. This narrows the field of mass participation in the market or by the adopted symbolism, the field of subjectivity. The population is invited to wait and endure, i.e. plays the role of the object of political and economic manipulation. Even more unacceptable monopolization of subjectivity government, for which everything is regarded as a subject of state regulation. Conclusions. For civilization of cardinal feature is the treatment of the person as the subject of history. The need for the development of civilization to increase the degree of subjectivity in an economy where people can express themselves freely and responsibly through a system of private property relations: economic entity is the subject of property. Policy enhancing the role of human rights and the development of the principle of subjectivity means deepening the democratic foundations of the state structure. In the social sphere the subjectivity is expressed in the individualization of the social existence of man and the personification of public relations and it is implemented through the mechanisms of liberal institutions. It seems that the civilizational unity of the economy, democratic state and liberal society has the value of a scientific paradigm. Whatever the great cultural peaks of the postmodern, the main processes of a new society formed at its foot: in the area of formation of public consciousness and public preferences with the mass participation of the individual in the economy (involving the mass of the individual in social production on the level of financial relations, which allow the maximum extent possible to include in the economy of free choice), in the field of state-building and the formation of social institutions on the principles of Amateur participation.

SUSTAINABLE PUBLIC HOUSING TRANSFORMATION IN THE CONVERGENCE OF EMIC AND ETIC PARADIGMS

Recent studies on the global ideology of public housing are significantly focused on the cultural values of inhabitants. Thus rapid transformation of originally design housing units that are based on modern standards by inhabitants is widespread. The emic and etic principles was used to evaluate existing situation where indigenous culture inclusive housing demand is on the rise. Retrospectively, established principles of emic and etic concept in directing public housing design was measured to test the synthesis- an interphase thought to provide sustainability amidst conflicting indigenous space demand and regulated homogenous designs. The study uncovered a chaotic but culture-specific genesis that comprise of formalized antecedents that can no longer be ignored, but lacks standardisation. Instead, the etic and emic interphase (convergences) remains a delusion proffering unintended solutions. Implacably, rigour in the concept of culture bonds sustainability process in public housing, hence its standardization is required to be undertaken in order to clarify and process the potentials of the alternative (the intersection) to the etic and emic approaches

‘Self-Help which Ennobles a Nation’: Development, citizenship, and the obligations of eating in India's austerity years

AbstractIn the years immediately following independence, India's political leadership, assisted by a network of civic organizations, sought to transform what, how, and how much Indians ate. These campaigns, this article argues, embodied a broader post-colonial project to reimagine the terms of citizenship and development in a new nation facing enduring scarcity. Drawing upon wartime antecedent, global ideologies of population and land management, and an ethos of austerity imbued with the power to actualize economic self-reliance, the new state urged its citizens to give up rice and wheat, whose imports sapped the nation of the foreign currency needed for industrial development. In place of these staples, India's new citizens were asked to adopt ‘substitute’ and ‘subsidiary’ foods—including bananas, groundnuts, tapioca, yams, beets, and carrots—and give up a meal or more each week to conserve India's scant grain reserves. And as Indian planners awaited the possibility of fundamental agricultural advance and agrarian reform, they looked to food technology and the promise of ‘artificial rice’ as a means of making up for India's perennial food deficit. India's women, as anchors of the household—and therefore, the nation—were tasked with facilitating these dietary transformations, and were saddled with the blame when these modernist projects failed. Unable to marshal the resources needed to undertake fundamental agricultural reform, India's planners placed greater faith in their ability to exercise authority over certain aspects of Indian citizenship itself, tying the remaking of practices and sentiments to the reconstruction of a self-reliant national economy.

Absolute Recoil: Towards a New Foundation of Dialectical Materialism

Slavoj Žižek continues his idiosyncratic critique of global capitalism, democratic culture, and neoliberal ideology in his latest 400+ page tome, Absolute Recoil: Towards a New Foundation of dialectical Materialism, which promises to provide, much like his Less than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism (Verso, 2012), a resolutely idealist “new foundation” for dialectical materialism. This is a promise that Žižek has made for some years now, since what we might call his “system” turn became manifest in the publication of a series of major books (In Defense of Lost Causes [Verso, 2008]; Living in the End Times, Less than Nothing [Verso, 2010]; and now Absolute Recoil) that at once synthesize, repeat, elaborate, and interconnect diverse reflections on a bewildering variety of philosophical themes, cultural events, and political debates. These reflections often first appear in online journal publications or op-ed pieces, and in shorter, more coherent, pamphlet-book form (First as Tragedy, Then as Farce [Verso, 2009], Violence: Six Sideways Reflections [Picador, 2008], and Event: A Philosophical Journey through a Concept [Penguin, 2014]). As readers of Žižek will know, there is a shameless recycling, reiterating, and recasting of ideas from these shorter pieces within the longer books, which have what we might describe as musical “theme and variation” structure, with recurring themes that return in different contexts, subtly altered or reintegrated into different lines of thought. This is rather different from the more traditional model of a sequentially organized, teleologically directed, logical argument. It is one of the reasons for the perplexity many critics feel when confronted by his books, as compared with the more conventional “essayistic” style of his shorter works.