Globalisation

There is a strange chain that links the Zapatista uprising in the Mexican jungle in 1994 to the election of Donald Trump in Washington in 2016. The same chain links landless farmers in Brazil with unemployed ex-miners in the north of England. I traced this development, and wrote about it, for over twenty years.

The project of corporate ‘globalisation’ which, post-1945, has been working to refashion the globe in the image of the West’s notion of ‘progress’, has been creating blowback since it started (arguably, it started centuries ago; ‘globalisation’ is in many ways a continuation of empire). I tracked much of that blowback across the ‘developing’ world in One No, Many Yeses in 2003, and across pre-Brexit Britain in Real England in 2008, and in many related essays, articles and reports between 2000 and 2015 or so.

In 2016, the blowback hit the West with force. The Brexit vote in Britain, the election of Donald Trump in the US and rising national populist movements across the EU and elsewhere represent, in their different ways, a rebellion against the one-world ambitions of the globalisation project. This rebellion comes in many forms, and by no means all of them are savoury. But good or bad, they are deeply significant. This is an era change.

I voted for Brexit myself, because localisation and sovereignty and self-determination have always been at the heart of my politics. Back in the day, this is what we old-school greens believed in. Post-2016, in the new, febrile atmosphere of partisan tension, this view, along with my critiques of our globalised elites and my attempts to explain the appeal of national populism, has occasionally conjured accusations that I have morphed from a young left-wing anti-capitalist (hurray) into an old right-wing nationalist (boo). I don’t accept either label. My politics haven’t changed much over the years. I’ve always been on the side of the deplorables, whether those being deplored are Zapatistas in San Cristobal de las Casas or Brexit voters in Doncaster. I’ve always tried to champion local culture against centralised control; the overlooked against the arrogant; particularity against power.

This section collates the best of my writing about globalisation, from the indigenous and leftist uprisings against it in the nineties to the anti-globalist nationalisms of the 2010s. They may be useful companion pieces to my two books on the subject.