Political ideologies in the age of globalization

What then, precisely, is new about political ideologies? Have we really moved ‘post’ our conventional ideological landscape? Responding to these questions, this essay reflects on why and how the forces of globalization have altered the grand political ideologies codified by social power elites since the French Revolution. In order to explain these transformations, I discuss at some length the crucial relationship between two social imaginaries-the national and the global-and political ideologies. The essay ends with a brief survey of my own attempt to arrive at a new classification system for contemporary ‘globalisms’. This typology is based on the disaggregation of these new ideational clusters (formed around the global) not merely into core concepts, but-perhaps more dynamically-into various sets of central ideological claims that play crucial semantic and political roles. As I have argued elsewhere in some detail, these three major globalisms-market globalism, justice globalism, and religious globalisms-represent a set of political ideas and beliefs coherent and conceptually ‘thick’ enough to warrant the status of mature ideologies (Steger 2005).