Does Globalization = Glo________?

Not all of the empty slogans come from Left-wing academics: Establishment Republicans have cranked out quite a few over the years.

For sheer vacuity, for example, it would be hard to top the “New World Order” of George H. W. Bush unless it was with the “globalization” of his son, George W. Bush.

“Moral Globalization is essentially not occurring,” Michael Ignatieff, rector of Central European University, said in an interview with the Carnegie Reporter. “What’s occurring instead is ferocious national and local and regional defense of particularity—language, culture, religion, faith—against the forces of globalization.”

Indeed, Ignatieff assembled a book for the Carnegie Endowment, The Ordinary Virtues, published this year, “To investigate what globalization has done to moral behavior in our time.” He found that countries “are reasserting their sovereignty and trying to get the control that citizens want, enough control over the economy so you’ve got a job tomorrow, enough control over debts so you can pay your mortgage tomorrow. The basic stuff.”

“And crucially, control over terrorism. Globalization has brought international terror, and it’s frightening people. People are turning back to the sovereign because it does what Hobbes said it would do, which is provide basic protection.”

It should be noted that The Carnegie project’s conceptualization of globalization predates the Bush Dynasty. Yet and still, they latched onto the term, and if you are going to get emotionally attached to a phrase, why pick that one?