The problem of power in the context of globalization: the multi-discourse formation

Political theorists have been busy addressing the normative of globalization. Globalization is discussed in debates between cosmopolitans and communications. Cosmopolitanism has been developed on the universalistic values of modern and political thought. Communications deny the need to overcome international inequality, but often criticize the tendency of cosmopolitanism to defend global legal and political reforms. Attempts to achieve global are suspicious. Both cosmopolitans and communitarians discuss the prospects of democratic institutions at a global level. D. Held argues that globalization requires the extension of liberal democratic institutions. In contrast with D.Held, J.Habermas and other communitarians argue that democratic politics presupposes feelings of trust, commitment and belonging that remain uncommon at the transnational level. The main problem about the interpretation of the community in a global era is investigated by means of the analysis of the relations among individuals, state and systems of states according to the principle of domestic analogy i.e. analogy between international relations and domestic process of a state. Relevant here are also centered on the interpretation of an isolated individual passing through a national state so that to arrive to a global state. The problem of that is global, then, is formulated in different terms. Legal conceptualism sees legal regulation imperatives behind the problem of the global, because the community is developed from natural states towards a separate political community. Another point of view put into focus the idea of global responsibility generated by the global nature of the searched goals. Given all this considerations, political philosophy is expecting for the future a responsible community or "good" society. Some political philosophers complain for the weakness of the state which loses competency, legitimacy and power, the main features of the leading agent for international affairs. The state, in a globalized world, is replaced by a complex post-international universum with diversity and mixed policy. The problems of global power and global rensposibility characterize the post-international universum. From the point of view of some political theorists, the term super-power sounds archaic in the globalization era, so this should be actualized in the context of the concept of soft power. Theorists discuss the change in nature of contemporary power: power transforms itself into a net, tends to rhizome rather than to hierarchy, it is created and supported not by violence, military power, economy, but big people working and consuming in the global economy (C.Brown, G. Baudrillard, G. Lacan, G. Guattari). Final remakes about power in globalizing world is concerned with difference of contemporary Empire from Empires in Victorian Age. For example, many forms of contemporary power do not have any specific location. Many of the most powerful actors of the anti-global capitalism coalition - together with multiculturalists who promote "difference" - are in fact generation and supporting some sort of empire, which is based on networks. Many of contemporary political theorists are interested in better understanding the network dimension of a power in a global era.

Keywords

Authors

References