The issues of globalism and nationalism are essential for modern society. Multiple researchers of globalization focus on examining its products, phenomena, and the actual processes in which globalization is manifested. They barely touch upon and illuminate the essential question about its real sources and driving forces (Steger 21). This especially applies to radical currents of social science thought. One can note their extreme nihilism concerning the nation, national cultures, states, and the ease with which the “global” is opposed to the “local” as insignificant today. There are few authors with a more serious approach and a desire to find the sources and factors of the birth, growth, and spread of global processes and phenomena worldwide. The internationalization processes became the subject of research in the special scientific literature but were usually considered in isolation from globalization processes. They were also carried out in separate narrow areas – in the economy, politics, culture, or the social sphere.
There is an opinion that internationalization is a property of capitalism at the early stages of its development, which has been replaced by globalization in recent decades. These and some other methodological blunders can explain the lack of in-depth analysis of the process itself (Gopinath 112). This is also the reason for the fascination with the descriptions of products, external manifestations, and new phenomena born by them. It is this fascination that leads to the birth of concepts in which globalization appears in the images of “Westernization,” “Americanization,” or “McDonaldization.”
However, internationalization and globalization are not separate processes and phenomena that arise and develop on their own, separated from each other by time and space. It is a single process with its internal logic and results. In a sense, internationalization is the social process’s content, and globalization is its form, product, result. The most profound sources of globalization are contained in the processes of internationalization. The deeper and more comprehensive the internationalization is, the brighter and more tangible the processes of globalization, phenomena, and products are.
Only a specialized study of internationalization can comprehensively illuminate the problem of globalization and answer many complex questions. In addition, this will allow stopping many radical, “hot” authors, warn against temptations to bury nations, national cultures, and states, and draw hasty and reckless conclusions. When they say that globalization is a consequence of capital, modernization, transnationalization, while describing the power of modern TNCs or TNBs, there is nothing wrong or unexpected in this (Nakagawa 56). However, this is so abstract and general that it explains nothing. Moreover, from such thoughts, the most incredible conclusions and assumptions can be drawn. Such judgments contain hidden ideas about the expansionism of modern transnational forces. External expansion (political, economic, and spiritual) carried out by such forces and the “great powers” cannot integrate the world.
In essence, globalization is the formation and approval of the integrity, interconnectedness, integrality of the world, and public perception. Globalization is a new, previously unprecedented relationship between nations and peoples, a qualitatively new state of national life and national cultures (Davich). It is an original integral wholeness, and the global world is now becoming a source of development of subjects: states and communities of the sociocultural world. The issue becomes extremely clear if one realizes that globalization is intended not to destroy the world’s diversity, national, and state differences. It must create a new integral basis and factors for disclosing all the potentials and possibilities of such diversity. The problem of globalization is the problem of relations between nations (national cultures, states). Consequently, the crux of the matter is in internationalization and the processes taking place between countries.
Genetically, these processes are formed and prepared in intra-national life, in its depths. Each nation has substantial creative potential: it creates material and cultural values, scientific discoveries, works of culture, art, music, architecture. Achievements, especially great ones, significant in all spheres of life, become all humanity’s property. The most valuable creation that has arisen in one nation’s life tends to go beyond national borders to get involved in international life. Over time, this trend becomes an objective and necessary process. However, this is the first stage of internationalization, its starting point, for the process itself is continuous.
Consequently, one can abstractly talk about the second step. This is the stage when the exit of everything valuable, socially significant for society beyond the national borders, presupposes that other peoples accept these values, achievements, technology, or experience. After that, they must adapt to them and adapt them to their lives. However, internationalization does not end with this. It continues, and a decisive stage in realizing the powerful potentials and forces of internationalization begins. The latter merges with globalization, giving shape to new world transnational products and phenomena. This whole process boils down to that national values created in the depths and efforts of one nation do not just tend to go beyond the framework of its life. They are not only organically included in the corresponding sphere of the host nation but become a source of development and progress of its life. The social values and material products are tested in the process of internationalization.
In this understanding and explanation, internationalization itself ceases to be an elusive, mysterious process. It openly and reveals its connections with globalization, forming the phenomena of international life. It dramatically expands the range of possibilities, scopes, and limits of man (Steger 80). Now international experience emerged as a result of internationalization as its product is becoming the arena for forming its new prerequisites. The global system that has developed in the economic environment leads to the economic development of the planet. Its benefits could be reaped by countries that monopolistically owned the decisive means of production, new technologies, and powerful financial resources.
Whatever the peculiarities in the powerful currents of modern international life, in its most diverse forms and manifestations, the fundamental position’s essence does not change. Internationalization presupposes that something purely national and fundamentally new will go beyond the initial national framework. Before becoming international, global, it must be born from internal national sources of self-development (Haidt). Nevertheless, now these sources themselves originate from the previous internationalization products, from the accumulated values, knowledge, and experience.
Internationalization and external expansion, including cultural, are opposite, incompatible phenomena, just as the essentially democratic process is inconsistent with the dictate and imposition of other cultural values and models. Theories of “Westernization” express the ideology of sociocultural expansionism. The fruitful interaction of national cultures and cultural values makes their real rapprochement possible based on such common fundamental values inherent in all cultures. These are the value of human life, human rights, moral standards, equality, family, labor, collectivity, science, knowledge, and other vital foundations.
They can accumulate the values of democracy, civil society, universal human solidarity, and provide a new, in the spirit of sociocultural globality, which is the basis of human identity. In other words, they will shape human behavior by the principles of civil society. This identification does not take place based on Western values, but the fundamental ones that are in the deep origins of all national cultures. They are the primary internal sources of self-development. They do not rely on Westernization and unification of cultures, but on the pluralism of new forms and the preservation of Western individualism and Eastern collectivism.
A high degree of awareness of the global universal human identity while maintaining national cultural and civilizational identity depends on global contradictions and the world’s socio-cultural stratification. They, in turn, are based on deep inequalities between nations and states. The modern world is a place full of inequality and unequal opportunities. In it, a small group of highly developed countries monopolistically owns the decisive means of production, scientific and technological levers, and basic financial resources. This allows them to keep the rest of the world in a state of dependence. The clash of civilizations and national cultures in these conditions acts as a form of confrontation between countries and national communities for equality and equal opportunities. The nature, forms, and degree of convergence of nations and national cultures will depend on world relations’ democratic transformations. The possibilities of reducing the gap in the development levels of various groups of countries and peoples will also be decisive in this issue.
Works Cited
Davich, Jerry. Americans Asked to Pick Nationalism or Globalism. Chicago Tribune, 2017. Web.
Gopinath, C. Globalization: A Multi-Dimensional System, 3rd ed. Edward Elgar Publishing, 2018.
Haidt, Jonathan. When and Why Nationalism Beats Globalism. The American Interest. 2020. Web.
Nakagawa, Junji. Nationalization, Natural Resources and International Investment Law: Contractual Relationship as a Dynamic Bargaining Process. Routledge, 2017.
Steger, Manfred. Globalization: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford University Press, 2017.