Against Globalism, towards Internationalism
FALC is internationalist, grasping the integrated nature of the world economy and flows of goods, people, capital and climate systems. It builds on universal values struggled over from Haiti to China for more than two centuries. It accepts that the nation-state, as a tool for the powerful, has concentrated wealth in certain places to the disadvantage of others. To say one country is less developed than another is not to diminish it, but to recognise the global system has intentionally sought to bring such a situation about. The point is not to change the words we use, but the reality they describe.
One of the greatest barriers to such change is the cult of globalism, whose default rhetoric is that the challenges we face are so profound that they can only be resolved through international coordination. On climate change, migration and resource scarcity we repeatedly hear the same refrain: no single nation can solve these problems in isolation. That may well be true but, so far, such talk has served political inertia more than decisive action. Perhaps that was the intention.
The starkest example of this is with climate change: the 1992 Rio Earth Summit was the moment the world began to grasp the devastating consequences of global warming. The resulting conclusion was immediate and would shape globalist presumptions for decades to come: because this challenge was truly planetary in scale only cooperation between states was adequate. Anything less was destined to fall short.
And yet, since then, carbon emissions have significantly increased, with the years immediately following the global financial crisis the worst for emissions in recorded history. The current approach to climate change isn’t about ‘working together’, it’s about passivity presented as partnership. The reflex of pointing to the necessity of global solutions – always conjoined to a form of economic globalisation interchangeable with market capitalism – has allowed elites to evade responsibility. Here ‘global coordination’ is merely the international adjunct to capitalist realism, allowing the biggest polluters – who are also the most powerful nations – to avoid changing their path.
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