Introduction : ideologies of globalism

Ideologies of globalization are neither consistent within a particular political perspective nor across the ideological spectrum. However, we have argued that they make up an ideological family which, despite continuing points of contestation, has become naturalized within an emergent global imaginary, which, in turn, is anchored in deeply embedded ontologies. We content that there is an emerging and increasingly dominant sense that different social categories in the world including ‘the person’ and ‘the nation’ exist most obviously in a social whole called ‘planet earth’, ‘the world’ or ‘the globe’. This global imaginary remains in continuing intersection with prior dominant imaginaries such as ‘the national’ and ‘the sacred order of things’, but it is coming slowly to reframe them. This is not to suggest, as Amitai Etzioni argues, that we are seeing an ‘emerging global normative synthesis’. Our point is much simpler and less utopian. Normative contestations continue, but they tend to have a common implicit point of reference – the global. Beyond that, we suggest that different globalisms gain part of their power to the extent that they draw on deeper taken-for-granted and dominant modern notions of time, space, embodiment and so. Again, this is not to suggest a homogenizing modernism. Oder traditional and tribal ontological formations continue to ground the lives of many people and a postmodern layer of temporality-spatiality has recently emerged. Thus, while it is accurate to say that ‘the modern’ – read and reinterpreted through the lenses of globalization as both an objective and a subjective set of social processes – provides the dominant social frame through which across the globe people make sense of their complex lives, this is hardly a satisfactory description of the world today. A fuller understanding requires, among other things, a sense of the intersection of ideologies and imaginaries as they play across the complexities of intersecting formations from the tribal to the postmodern.