GLOBAL POLITICS, GOVERNANCE AND PUBLIC POLICY

José Fernández Santillán

1.- Three main impacts

For this essay’s exposé I start off with a basic statement: the international order created after the Second World War has been modified due to three contemporary and fundamental phenomena: the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, the fall of New York’s World Trade Center Towers in 2001 and Wall Street fall in 2008.
Of the first phenomenon, the fall of Berlin Wall, we must remember that it awoken hope and enthusiasm. Those scenes where thousands of people gathered around the Squares of East European cities in order to express their rejection towards bureaucratic authoritarianism and to ask for the ending of the Soviet domain over their countries, have been engraved in our memories. Marx, Lenin and Stalin’s statues went to the ground. Liberation’s expansive wave reached the Soviet Union itself, two years later, in 1991, when it split. The threat of an atomic outbreak between the so-called Free World and the Communist bloc also diluted. One of the opponents went down.
There were reasons for a luminous face to come out internationally. The first signs were encouraging: nations such as Poland, Hungary and Czechoslovakia willingly accepted Constitutionalism, power division, political parties, a competitive election system, freedom of the press, protection of civil rights and freedom of assembly. However, the hope and enthusiasm fell when aberrant happenings such as the interethnic fight that took place in former Yugoslavia.
Certainly, as Jürgen Habermas stated, a recovery Revolution (Nachholende Revolution) took off in the midst of the bicentennial commemoration of the French Revolution (18789-1989). Nevertheless, at the same time, some communities, based on the recognition of ancestral tribal identities, began to show their hate against their neighbours.
From one side, the liberation movement was conducted by the civil society, defined by the English term which was less worn out than the term “democracy”. Let’s not forget that Lenin said that proletarian democracy would be a thousand times more democratic than bourgeois democracy, and so it was the communists’ leaders rhetoric used throughout soviets’ domain stage. For many years civil groups developed a clandestine resistance task and an anti bureaucratic dictatorship propaganda. Michael Ignatieff, for example, states about this civil movilization: “The philosophical study groups in basements and boiler rooms, the prayer meetings in church crypts, and the unofficial trade union meetings in bars and backrooms were seen as a civil society in embryo. Within those covert institutions came the education in liberty and the liberating energies that led to 1989. In the revolutions of that year—in Hungary, Poland, Romania, East Germany, Czechoslovakia, and the Baltics—civil society triumphed over the State.” It was the way to push forward a democratic project, in the liberal sense of the term, distinct from the domination scheme imposed by the Stalinism.
Civil society’s revival was link, in fact, with the recovery of liberal-democratic culture. After harsh clandestine propagandist labors and pacific mobilizations –with the well-known repressive counterattacks-, civil society’s increasing pressure ended up breaking the barriers that had been raised to guaranty safety and system’s continuity. As John A. Hall says: “Civil society was seen as the opposite of despotism, a space in which social groups could exist and more—something which exemplified and would ensure softer, more tolerable conditions of existence.” Here we can also look at what René Gallissot stated: “In the field of motion, of agitation and emancipatory action, intended to break with oppresive situations in the name of democracy, the formula of 'civil society' is immediately useful to legitimate protest.”
With communism’s failure the period started in 1945, the Cold War, ended, also the 1917 period finished, the Bolchevique Revolution. Simultaneously, 1789’s ideals rose up again. The path towards political modernity was retaken. François Furet, during the bicentennial festivities of the fall of the Bastille (1989), accurately mentioned: “We keep drifting apart form the French revolution, however, each day we live more and more in the world that was created by it. A new closeness has borned from the distance.”
The recovery of political modernity through the vindication of liberal democracy and civil society contrasts with the assumed position that certain supposedly progressive circles adopted when they witnessed the fall of soviet communism and opted to abandon the claims embodied by a collective spirit of economical background, the proletarians, and to make theirs the demands made by an other spirit but this time of a cultural background, the ethnic group. This vindication has as a practical basis the autonomist fights of some communities throughout the world such as: the French-speaking area of Canada, especially the province of Quebec; the Basque provinces settled in Spain and France; the zapatistas from Chiapas in Mexico; the independence-movement from Northern-Ireland; the Chechens against Russian domination; Tibet facing up the Chinese occupation. No matter how much do these examples differ among them. Those who defend nationalistic or ethnicity vindications wrap them all in one basket. This explains the boost of multiculturalism in the last years.
In theoretical terms the anti-modern option, conservative, that holds the collective rights according to the identity based on tradition and on the yearning of a mythical past. Is what Charles Taylor has called “the fight for recognition”. Such concept has its basis on the notion of identity, the sense of blood belonging. In consequence, the lack of recognition or a distorted recognition can mean a way of oppression. Recognition is viewed as a human necessity. For him this necessity is located not in the individual field but in the collective one. In his opinion, the way that individual identity is interpreted has to be turned over, which means, not as isolated entity but as members of certain ethnic community. In consequence, like the individuals, the Volk (the people) must be true to themselves, in other words, to their culture. If the fight for Afro-Americans’ civil rights of the sixties, leaded by Martin Luther King, was a fight for equality, now the struggle for ethnical belonging rights, leaded by a variety of local leaders, is a fight for difference: “With the politics of equal dignity, what is establish is meant to be universality the same, an identical basket of rights and immunities; with the politics of difference, what we are asked to recognize is the unique identity of this individual or group, their distinctness from everyone else.”
Taylor distinguishes in public actions two types of orientations. From one side, the respect to the equalitarian principal encourages to treat people regardless of their differences, on another side, the respect to the diversity principle forces individuals to be treated taking into account their special features. In both cases one finds advantages and disadvantages: “The reproach the first makes to the second is just that it violates the principle of nondiscrimination. The reproach the second makes to the first is that it negates identity by forcing people into a homogeneous mold that is untrue to them.” Taylor attacks the so-called liberal aspect, identified with the first of those tendencies, for practicing a false neutrality which, in reality, represents the expression of an hegemonic culture. In consequence, he leans for the communitarian side to introduce differentiation criteria and a specific approach towards diversity.
One of the distinctive arguments of his dissertation, and that has been repeated by his followers, is that liberalism is in fact a particular culture which defends a false universalism: “Liberalism is not a possible meeting ground for all cultures, but is the political expression of one range of cultures, and quite incompatible with other ranges.” But then, here Taylor’s argument reverts when he asks that supposedly “particular” culture to admit diversity politics. Liberalism disqualification reaches the point of saying that in reality it is a fighting credo against other cultures: “liberalism can’t and shouldn’t claim complete cultural neutrality. Liberalism is also a fighting creed.”
By confronting equalities and differences, Taylor’s multiculturalism resorts to the sophism that liberal egalitarianism is insensible to differences. But that is not true because the liberalism structure is such that it raises equality in the political field and that it allows differences and a dynamic pluralism in the civil order. In another way civil society’s existence wouldn’t be understood. By making clear the liberal perspective and the relation between equalities and differences, we realize that, in fact, multiculturalism whishes to establish differences in the political order so to establish autonomous collective bodies separated form the national State, while finding awkward to speak of civil society as a real space in which from the very beginning group differences proliferated. Summing up, multiculturalism pleads for locating differences in the political sphere, which is to raise the creation of new self-sufficient identities that break the national State’s integrity; they’re not interested in enrolling or coexist with the differences that happen in civil society. The request, however, is not new; since modernity was launched there have been attempts of corporative restoration that reminds the medieval system.
The hinted solution is separatism and the unacknowledged national State to plead for the restoration of the pre-modern world, imagined as a pacific and harmonic world. However, it is well-known that in the past the coexistence of cultures has not been peaceful at all; it rather involved – and continues to imply – bloody conflicts. In this strategy, Taylor remains in an ambiguous position between the ideological and political confrontation and the attempt to reach an agreement with the 'dominant culture', which he loathes. There are sections where he shows his inclination towards conflict and others where he's willing to compromise. An uncertainty of this nature makes his approach extremely weak and explains why his followers also fall, politically and ideologically, in the same ambiguity between the threat of war and a shy invitation to dialogue.
On the Twin Towers fell I must say that as many times as the images of the planes diverted by Islamic extremists embedded in the World Trade Center were repeated, the same number of times was Benjamin's Barber book, Jihad vs. McWorld present in my memory. The fundamental thesis of this professor of the University of Rudgers is that, after the collapse of authoritarian socialism, we turn to the expansion of at least two phenomena that tested once again the model of civilization, namely, tribalism and mercantilism: “Jihad pursues a bloody politics of identity, McWorld a bloodless economics of profit” The strengthening of tribal identities is explained because before the collapse of some states, due to the uncertainty and fear of the unknown, people retreat to the more immediate references. Ralf Dahrendorf has referred to this problem as follows: “There is the re-emergence of the tribe, of primordial ties and emotions. Communism was among other things a homogenizing—some would say, a modernizing—force. Now that is gone, older national and religious ligatures come to the fore. Since people have little to hold on to, and even less to eat, they fall for prophets who fill their minds and hearts with the hatred of others in the name of self-determination.” Tribalism provides certainty in the midst of a world that is coming down. It's like retreating to the more immediate in view of the collapse of a social system that could not endure standing.
For its part, the economic activity’s overflow represents the limitless greed that manifests itself through aggression and the desire of accumulation. The consequence is that: “In being reduced to a choice between the market’s universal church and a retribalizing politics of particularist identities, peoples around the globe are threatened with an atavistic return to medieval politics.” After the attacks of September 11, 2001 the desire of fundamentalism is, in fact, to return to a dimension of obscurantist making.
Jihad and McWorld are not self-limiting democratic powers, on the contrary, are forces trying to swallow what they find in their path. They act as polar opposites, one pulls towards parochial hatreds, the other towards the global consolidation of markets, one tries to alter national boundaries to reclaim tribal area, another is trying to turn national borders porous from the outside. Despite their contradictory natures, “Jihad and McWorld have this in common: they both make war on the sovereign nation-state and thus undermine the nation-state’s democratic institutions.”
Jihad ideologists attack democratic politics arguing that the nation state is an "illusory community" and citizenship is an "abstraction"; for them what matters are the cores of collective affiliation. McWorld theorists criticize democratic politics arguing that the nation state is an awkward device and citizenship a trifle, to them what exists are consumers which must be caught by marketing networks. To this, Barber responds: “Neither the tribal circle nor the traffic circle, neither the clan nor the mal, offers adequate public space to the kind of democratic community that can provide citizens both identity and inclusion.”
For Barber is essential to put in its proper terms, the contemporary problem, remembering that in every society there are three powers, cultural, economic and political. The challenge is the absorption of economics and politics in the cultural-anthropological field (Jihad) or the confinement of culture and politics on an economic framework (McWorld). In contrast, the liberal art of separation is the way to recognize the presence of different spaces in which human action unfolds.
The factor that may work against these polarizing trends is civil society. Therefore, to promote democratization, civil society's activity should be extended to international affairs. In fact it is already the case with environmental groups, associations defending human rights, cultural exchange groups and an endless list of other activities that make globalization a phenomenon that goes beyond economic interdependence or racial links.
We must put in charge politics: globalization of democratic politics with a momentum that comes from the social base. The best formula to achieve this purpose is the confederated: “global democracy needs confederalism, a non compulsory from of association rooted in friendship and mutual interests; confederalism depends on members states that are well rooted in civil society, and on citizens for whom the other is not synonimous with the enemy.”
There is no justification for committing criminal acts. Much less when religious purity is invoked against civilization as a whole. Those who planned, sponsored and perpetrated the slaughter knew they were not against an economic symbol, McWorld; the purpose was to truncate the life of defenseless people of many different nationalities, close to eighty - to spread panic inside and outside the United States. So it would be more appropriate to speak of Jihad vs. Universitas Civium instead of tribalism against economic globalization.
It is worth remembering that between 1989 and 2001, there were several deep-water conflicts: the Persian Gulf War, the ethnic massacres in Rwanda, the previously mentioned war in the Balkans, the brutality in East Timor, etc. However, without downplaying these phenomena, it is certain that they had a regionally bounded connotation, while attacks in the northeast of the USA have an all-embracing profile. I appeal to the conceptual clarity of Susan Sontag: “terrorist activism, which scored such a success on September 11 is clearly a global movement. It should not be identified with a particular state, and certainly it is not identifiable only with the battered state of Afghanistan...As of today, like mass culture, such as pandemic diseases (think of AIDS), terrorism mocks borders.” This new tone is not due to the aggression suffered by the world's most powerful country, the matter lies in the evidence that there is a complex and widespread network of terrorist organizations-disseminated in at least sixty nations-which role is to act at the international level proclaiming a mystical reason.
As Giovanni Sartori has pointed out: “The, say, old school suicide bombers, were sacrificed for their country, are local. Their cause was specific and limited. Suicides in New York and the Pentagon, and those who will follow their steps, are global beings and their homeland is the Koran as well as their religious faith. They are not fighting for the place they were born, but for an islamized world that fights and punishes non-believers.” This limiting creed endangers enlightened reform that had been recorded in the immediately preceding years. About this risk Martin Kramer thinks: “What actually happened ... was the opposite: a descent into a medieval holy war. To stop the regression, the moderate majority will have to oppose the mobilization of the Islamic religion for military purposes...But it is impossible to deploy religion to justify murder and immolation without undermining the very foundations of religion. In the sorrowful faces of the respectable Muslims something more than sorrow for the United States mourning can be noticeable. The growing awareness that individuals who destroyed the Twin Towers have undermined Islam, is evident.” The Islamic spirituality is at the same time, used and sacrificed for the sake of a radical political cause.
Let's remember that fear of a violent death has always presented as a limit to avoid facing others and to establish an agreement based on which civil status was established according to the contractual tradition inaugurated by Hugo Grotius and Thomas Hobbes and from whose followers stand out John Locke, Baruch Spinoza, Jean Jacques Rousseau and Immanuel Kant. With variations in interpretation, but following the same methodological pattern, the iusnaturalism puts in the center of their concern the need to leave the state of nature in which there was not a constituted authority, a common power, through the provision of an agreement to leave this unpleasant situation and come precisely in the political status that would allow a better, more stable supported life by a public authority.
In the iusnaturalistic school of thought laid the foundations of modern political thought and, with it, the doctrine of man's rights and of the citizen. But after the terrorist attacks of September 11 death is no longer a constraint. This phonomenon is a factor that alters the direction of policy and it launches a new interpretation challenge for both domestic politics and foreign policy.
Regarding 2008 Wall Street’s collapse we can say that this financial phenomenon showed that we are located between two eras. The old order, the period denominated by neo-liberalism under the premise that the market cannot be wrong and the government cannot be right is dying. A new order, were Wall Street plays a lesser role and Washington plays a more relevant function, is emerging. In this framework, the political struggle is taking place at a national and international level because there are interests and groups who took great advantage of the neoliberal model, but now we have to see those other interests and groups much wider social level calling for the establishment of a development model more just national and international.
The fall of stock markets in 2008 is not a conjuncture problem but a structural one. It is the end of the formula that started the dumbbell Ronald Reagan-Margaret Thatcher in the late seventies and early eighties and that was imitated in almost all the world: the dismantling of the Welfare State based on a privatization program, the blind faith in the market, the reduction of taxes especially the more affluent groups and breaking the so-called social-democrat pact for, instead, impose the law of supply and demand as a supreme canon. These measures, thought the theorist of neoliberalism as Friedrich von Hayek and Robert Nozick, give full freedom to our societies, and would encourage economic growth. We already saw where it was to end: the acceptance of one of the gurus and enforcers of neoliberalism, Alan Greenspan, that they have been wrong.
The model of neo-liberalism development that was previously thought as insurmountable, that imposed conditions during the last three decades, has as breaking point; rightly, the financial crisis began on Wall Street and spread literally around the world. It is no accident that Joseph Stiglitz, Nobel Prize in Economics in 2001, has compared the collapse of Wall Street to the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989: “The globalization agenda has been closely linked with the market fundamentalists—the ideology of free markets and financial liberalization. In this crisis, we see the most market-oriented institutions in the most market-oriented economy failing and running to the government for help. Everyone in the world will say now that this is the end of market fundamentalism. In this sense, the fall of Wall Street is for the market fundamentalism what the fall of the Berlin Wall was for communism—it tells the world that this way of economic organization turns out not to be sustainable. In the end, everyone says, that model does not work. This moment is a marker that the claims of financial market liberalization were bogus.” Some may think that this statement is out of proportion. However, the parallelism has a precise meaning: the two events, as opposites as they are (right and left respectively), represent the failure of a not only economic model but also a way of thinking, a certain way of conceiving the world: both totalitarianism, one of State and another one of market, had left history in a very shameful manner.
Another greatest icon of neoliberalism, Francis Fukuyama, had to admit that indeed, this model could no longer stand. In an article published a few days after the financial crash in October 2008, wrote: “Under the mantra of ‘less government’, Washington failed to adequately regulate the financial sector and allowed it to do tremendous harm to the rest of the society.” The 700 billion dollars that the Congress allocated to stem the crisis are proof that the State comes back to repair the damaged caused by the market. But here we find a paradox because that amount was to save the banks rather than ordinary citizens. Therefore, among the banners that were in the protests against the current crisis was one that expressed the spirit of indignation “Bail out the People, not the Banks.” It would be unfair that after suffering the excesses of neoliberalism, the contributors would have to pay the debts of the banks.
Dean Baker has registered the fakeness behind the so-called “market fundamentalism”. Baker, who is co-director of the Economics and Public Policies Investigation Center, sustains that conservatives are so in favor to the State Intervention as the progressive are. The difference is that conservatives favor State intervention to redistribute the wealth up, it is, to the population with the higher wages: “The Right has every bit as much interest in government involvement in the economy as progressives. The difference is that conservatives want the government to intervene in ways that redistributive income upward.” Progressives, on the other hand, are in favor of the intervention of the State to redistribute the wealth way down. Another notable difference is that the right wing has been skillful at hiding the interventions making people believe that the mechanisms that redistribute wealth way up are those who naturally obey market laws. This is the game in which the left wing has fallen for because if it is accepted that interventionism in order to favor the higher levels of waging is not something else than the product of the way free market works, the progressive forces stay in political disadvantage.
So the strategy to be used consists in evidencing the hiding of up-way interventionism and show that the resource for the holy market laws is nothing but an alibi from conservatives to favor the privileged groups. The results of that conservative maneuver are on sight: a brutal concentration of power and wealth in just a few hands, low or zero economic growth, massive unemployment, a disarticulated economy with huge debts, massive migration, youths without a hope for the future, elder abandoned on their own, family heads without a fixed wage, broad gray zones occupied by crime.
This struggle between opposing political tendencies at a national level has been extended to the international arena. Those dividends generated by the large free-market model are not willing to cede an inch of ground: others, however, have raised the need to rethink the terms of the relationship so that there is a more equitable distribution of national wealth. Being that one of the areas in which power is being discussed is global economy. That is the refrain, as Stiglitz says of the free trade doctrine regarding globalization. However, it would be wrong to reduce the problem of globalization, as neo-liberals do, to the simple field of economic relations. On the contrary, globalization is presented in several interdependent and contradictory dimensions.

2.- Globalization as a process

William H. Mott, in reward of the new international phenomenon produces by the recent changes, has said: "Globalization has become the most important, economic, political and cultural phenomenon of our time." It is a fact which requires, for its complexity, a systematic study. Otherwise it is easy to fall into an analytical chaos when standing before such a complex phenomenon. Trying to bring order to the enormous amount of studies that has been made about globalization, Anthony McGrew, in his essay "A Global Society?" He presents a classification based approaches in which globalization has been raised. He said that the analysis of globalization can be divided into two main branches. On the one hand, there are authors who emphasize a single cause as a determinant of this fact; on the other hand there are authors who emphasize the multi-causal nature of the phenomenon.
In the first range, that is, the monocausal line, McGrew emphasizes the presence of three authors, Immanuel Wallerstein, James N. Rosenau and Robert Gilpin. Wallerstein, in his book, Historical Capitalism introduced within the social sciences the concept of world system and emphasized the importance of capitalism, or the economy in the globalization process. Rosenau in his book The Study of Global Interdependence , he associates globalization with technological progress and especially with the expansion of transnational companies. Gilpin in his text The Political Economy of International Relations , in turn, highlights the political-military aspects of international integration. His approach focuses on the rise and fall of hegemonic powers in the interstate system.
In the second classification, the multiple causes current, McGrew placed two authors, Anthony Giddens and Ronald Robertson. According to what was written by Giddens in The Consequences of Modernity there are, at least, four factors involved in globalization. It means the capitalist economic system, the interstate system, the military complex and the process of industrialization. Robertson in his article "Mapping the Global Condition" , stresses that the major task of social theory today is to take into account the history of globalization in a plural sense in order to go beyond the model in terms of policy and international economy.
In the same multidimensional classification is important to add to Joseph Nye. In his book The Paradox of American Power, he highlights that perhaps since the time of the Roman Empire, no other power has look so down on others. And yet, the conditions imposed by international politics today think of the outmost importance that the U.S. does not follow a militaristic line, unilateral and unidimensional to remain standing, "military power alone can not produce the outcomes we want on many of the issues that matter to Americans." Globalization is such a special event that no matter how much power a state power has, it can not go forward if its pre-eminence is not held on a consensual basis with other countries.
Among the theoretical contribution of Nye is the difference between what he calls the “hard power” and “soft power”. The difference between these powers lies in separating the militarism and economism on the one hand and, on the other hand, the many aspects of which a country as powerful as the United States can draw to develop its foreign policy: diplomacy, culture, education, science, technology, health and ecology. Here are also recorded differences between the imposition and negotiation.
Nye doubts of hard power exercised in isolation: “Any retreat to a traditional policy focus on unipolarity, hegemony, sovereignty, and unilateralism will fail to produce the right outcomes, and its accompanying arrogance will erode the soft power that is often part of the solution. We must not let the illusion of empire blind us to the increasing importance of our soft power.” Nye acknowledges that the historical evidence for the United States, in terms of their foreign policy, will be whether they were able to build a consensus to adhere to a set of principles and standards for the world to work on achieving political stability, economic growth, and global democracy.
Regarding the multidimensional nature that now exists in international politics and globalization, Nye notes that at present the power among nations is distributed under a pattern that resembles a complex three-dimensional chess game. At the top is, indeed, military power. In that point it can no longer be said that the United States can control the world and act unilaterally to resolve conflicts. In the middle board lies the economic power wich can not be guided solely by the intervention of one power. There the United States ceases to have the hegemony. The bottom board is filled with transnational relations beyond the control of governments. There are listed a large number of non-state actors such as banking and financial transactions, trade, NGOs, etc.: “When you are in a three-dimensional game, you will lose if you focus only on the interstate military broad and fail to notice the other broads and the vertical connections among them.”
In my opinion the most convincing point of view is the latter. I mean the multi-causal, which recognizes the various determinations that affect globalization. It is very important to note that globalization is not, as the current neo-Marxist and neo-liberal believe a predominantly economical fact. On the contrary, there are converging factors. I find this remark important because globalization has been presented as a unidimensional phenomenon. The reality is that globalization is multidimensional. Moreover, as we have seen, globalization tends to reinforce the inequalities that existed before it occupied the center stage, that is, globalization is not part of an egalitarian basis, but a long history of inequality and asymmetries. To correct this trend is necessary to act in the different fields we have mentioned as multi-causal determinants of globalization.
Contrary to the belief that globalization involves series of equal opportunities for all, McGrew and Giddens have shown that globalization is a process that do not produces shared benefits. It moves in a multiplicity of contradictory trends reflected in some of the following pairs: universalism versus particularism, integration versus fragmentation, homogenization versus differentiation, juxtaposition versus syncretism, centralization versus decentralization and equality- versus inequality.
The major changes are occurring in the first world countries. Globalization is not causing a reorganization of the economies in the interest of all in a coordinated and equitable manner. In reality it is a phenomenon that further divided the third world from the first world. For example, for the first-Worldist, knowledge is a vital competitive factor for the generation of wealth and development of a new workforce. Indeed, some third world countries understood the conditions of the new process and are adapting to it, but others have lagged behind and is likely that they will not react until later when the conditions of the economy and science have produced an even bigger gap between rich and poor. And so far we haven't been able to create a supranational body to balance and adjust this imbalance. Increasing inequality in the global process, from our point of view would be the greatest security theart in the future. Globalization is showing that without and effective governance it tends to accentuate existing injustices. If we cannot shift this current tendency it will lead us to more and dangerous inestability and violence.
Some social and economics writers, as Adam Smith, August Comte and Herbert Spencer, foresighted this problem and suggested the solution: it is better to take the path of economic development instead of the militar one if we want to follow the project of modernity and run away from barbarism.
Without losing sight of the multi-causal perspective, I wish at this time to pay attention to the political dimension. In this area we have to say that globalized politics refers to the increasing interaction bettwen domestic and foreign policy. It is becoming a global/world politics. The perspective that international politics put attention exclusively at the relationship between states has been replaced by global policy that involves a wide variety of stakeholders such as political parties, transnational corporations, civic organizations, media and training a global public opinion.
We must also say that global politics is being strengthened to the extent that, as pointed out by Luigi Bonanate, the rigid barrier between domestic policy and foreign policy is fading: “reality seems to have overtaken the theories, as it has been changed so drastically we may be faced with the need of a true and proper scientific revolution (in the manner in which Kuhn stated it). Revolution which becomes necessary by the fact that 'normal science' can not deal with 'anomalies', that is, events or circumstances that can not be encased in the known and shared principles. But before addressing such a polemic theme, we must ask whose turn is it to try this maneuver. We are facing issues that pertain to political scientists or internationalists? Going from here it can be explicitly deduced, that, in one hand, we could say that the dividing line between two disciplines has ceased to exist (but it is a salomonic solution, inconsistant if in its awaiting, both disciplines continue to do their routinary job) and, on the other hand, making problems global turns them into “international issues” mainly (or in other words, relative to humans)”. There is a constant tug and pull between internal politics and external politics. In fact, as Bonanate states, reality has walked faster than theory. Consequently, globalization presents itself as a challenge for both internationalists and experts in political science. Another internationalist that has puntualized about this challenge is William Mott: “Political globalism appreciates global values and concerns, deflates commitments to narrow perspectives and local interests, and seeks to relieve social stresses in human progress and new knowledge. This multidimensional expansion involves not only the geopolitical expansion of political ideas into foreign policies but also the expansion of political activity from narrow perspectives to broader ones.”
Political globalization, consequently, has drawn focus on the situation of nation states. It is said that globalization has brought the overcoming of the old political and institutional forms. According to this view we are facing the process of dissolution of the sovereign states. This is what Nancy Fraser says. She argues that the old scheme based on the Treaty of Westphalia (1648) which placed national states and the concept of territorial sovereignty as key players in international relations is being overcomed: “Today, by contrast, this ‘Westphalian’ framing of justice is in dispute… justice claims are increasingly mapped in gegraphical scales—as, for example, when claims on behalf of ‘the global poor’ are pitted against the claims of citizens of bounded politics.” For her, indeed, the Westphalian framework is now a days insufficient in order to understand what is happening in the national and international arena.
The sharp division between domestic politics and international politics is fading under the new political forms that Nancy Fraser calls "intermestic", it means, half international, half domestic, practiced by new transterritorial, non-state actors in which may include international social movements, transnational corporations, financial speculators, civic organizations, supranational and international organizations both public and private, international public opinion (and here the proposal of Jürgen Habermas on the public and the public space becomes more valid) moving quietly through all areas of the earth through the mass media and cyberspace, are increasingly being felt its weight, precisely in global politics. The apparent non-viability of the old regulatory scheme supported by the sovereign nation-state makes Nancy Fraser speak of the imperative of forming a new paradigm which she called "post-Westphalian context" of globalization.
But the alleged dissolution of national institutions is not in any way, what is happening on a widespread basis. What we are witnessing is a combined phenomenon of recomposition and decomposition of the states. We speak about composition, because in some cases some states, are concentrating on supranational political bodies like the European Union, mean while we say decomposition because in other cases some states have been dismembered or disaggregated as the ex Yugoslavia.
Still, no one can say that the recomposition and decomposition are constant and general. Most nation states still exist. Therefore, we can argue that the unit of measure of international politics remains the nation state. I would quote some authors to reinforce this assessment. McGrew says: “The Nation-state and the inter-state system are and will continue to remain the dominant ‘reality’ of modern social life.” Wolfram Hanreider argues: “Far from being secondary or obsolete, the nation-state, nationalism, and the idea of the national interest are central elements in contemporary world politics.” George Soros, for his part, writes: The basic unit for political and social life remains the nation-state.”
Greater interdependence in different dimensions and the concept of national sovereignty are not antagonistic. Taking full advantage of global dynamics can be an asset to maintaining the political and national institutional frameworks. The problem is that the nation-state is affected when there is no adaptability of governments, especially in the case of poor countries to the new reality.
In the period running from 1989-2008, that is, the fall of the Berlin Wall to Wall Street debacle, there are two major recognizable trends that moved against the national states and democracy: 1) the ideas and practices of the neoliberalism that was mounted in the chorus of globalization to say that each State is a great market in which the "invisible hand" is the only criterion to consider; 2) the idea and practice of multiculturalism which has taken the banner of cultural claims of ethnic and regional demands.
Economic liberalism despised the national state by considering it a hindrance to the operation of market laws; multiculturalism despised the nation-state by calling it an element of oppression for ethnic minorities. It is worth mentioning, Benjamin Barber's argument regarding the post-Cold War: two universalizing tendencies became strong, neoliberalism and multiculturalism. They want to get the various dimensions of globalization to a single expression, respectively, the economic and cultural anthropological field. Faced with such radicalism would seem that the world had no options to open to other manifestations of social reality.
Against these simplifications Barber, explains the distinction of spheres (economic, political and social). He defends, in this sens the validity of politics, whether national or international, as a point of coordination and planning. There is work to be done: the international political and financial institutions created after the war, are inadequate for this new phase. They have not been able to maintain peace (United Nations) or counteract the excesses of financial markets (World Bank, International Monetary Fund). These institutions are acting casuistically - almost always under the pressure of contingencies - to a global situation that requires a different framework. In reference to both national and international levels,
Regarding the mentality of neoliberalism Soros said sharply: “The promotion of self-interest to a moral principle has corrupted politics and the failure of politics has become the strongest argument in favor of living markets an even freer reign.” From this point of view, reciprocately, we might add, in reference to multiculturalism that the promotion of tribal interest to a moral principle has corrupted politics and the failure of politics has become the strongest argument in favor of living tribalism an even freer reign.
We most defend politics as a forum for mediation between the many forces in the global scene, and as a coordinating mechanism to solve the problems we face. It, politics is the only instrument that can facilitate the formation of a new national and international consensus. In the national context it is obvious that we are closing an era of far-reaching and we need to open another of equal proportions. Open a new historical stage can only be achieved after the search of coincidences that makes it possible to establish the foundations of a democratic agreement for development.
In the international context the political consensus is necessary to stablish the rules of coexistence that govern the new millenium that is starting. Given that the inclination to build a universal empire has proven its ineffectiveness, it is conducive to mold from below, it means from the roots of their own nation states, an agreement that will lead to democratic global governance. The situation which led to the collapse of the socialist bloc, the collapse of the twin towers of New York and the meltdown in financial markets can not go without prolonging a period of long-reaching decline. The fall of the Soviet empire may, as happened with the fall of the Roman Empire, stage obscurantist.
Globalization refers to the human capacity to be a step beyond the immediate perspective to project a larger historical project that allows us to dodge the decadent trends. Pippa Norris has rightly observed: “The impact of global governance upon nacional identities has raised many hopes and many fears. On the one hand, theorist ranking from August Comte and John Stuart Mill to Karl Marx and Anthony Giddens have expressed optimism that humanity will eventually trascend national boundaries by moving forward a global culture and society. In this perspective we can expect the globalization of markets, governance, and communications to strengthen a cosmopolitan orientation, broadening identities beyond national boundaries to a world community, and increasing awareness of the benefits of transnacional collaboration within regional associations and international institution.” Indeed, the cosmopolitan outlook is emerging amid conflicting trends that move in a non-cosmopolitan way, that is, they tend to emphasize the ethnic, inbred identities, attachment to traditions and customs as denial of change and adaptation to a different reality. Drawing on the Greek roots of the concept cosmopolis (that tends to the universal) its opposite would be the ideopolis (that which tends to the particular). One is identified with the kingdom of light, the other with the kingdom of darkness.
Without effective political and cultural orientation it is more likely that globalization moves toward ideopolis and not to the cosmopolis: leading to greater injustice and exploitation. The change will not lead to a better condition but rather to a more disastrous one of which we already suffer. The roots of the globalization movement, are in fact, pessimism and distrust: “Rather than carrying people smoothly into a new and better, but confortable and familiar World, the most recent waves of globalization have deposited them on the far side of progress with only their wits and hearts to create any new World.”
One thing is certain: globalization is an interaction between ideological paradigms, religious, economic and cultural, coming from different geographical areas and social stories, they do not have to be consistent with each other. This interaction can be constructive in the sense that it leaves some beneficial amalgam to our societies. But it can also happen that the interaction manifests itself in irreconcilable positions which dispute can only be resolved through violent confrontation. In my opinion the two events are already under way: first, a peaceful gathering of ideas and doctrines that is being fruitful, on the other hand, a clash of radicalism that proclaims the necessary annihilation of the opponent as a prelude to proliferation of a sole and exclusive true doctrine.
Giovanni Sartori recalled in one of his writings that on the maps of ancient Rome when they didn't known what was in one region, they wrote Ic Sunt Leones (here are the lions). Well, on globalization we could use this metaphor to indicate that we do not know the land we are walking in. We do not know what is in store for us while we penetrate a field that no one has explored before.

3.- A theoretical challenge

Making a recap of the impact the three phenomena we have mentioned we could say that, the order created by the end of the Second World War has been modified ever since the fall of the communist bolc. The theoretical interpretations of International Relations for that condition are not more valid.
In fact, globalization has put in doubt the realist international relations theory. This approach, that has been hegemonic ever since the end of the Second World War, is emphatic in national States as fundamental subjects of its analysis. Today that kind of assumptions result out of operation to understand what is happening in the world. It is no longer useful to understand the multidimensional interaction between nations and people, as the repercussions that globalization is having inside national states. It does not mean that national states are not important anymore. Of course they are important as we have already recognized. The problem is that power has acquired a complexity that in previous ages of national and international politics it did not have.
To understand the crisis of realist theory of international relations we have to know what has been its basis. Justin Rosenberg affirms ar this regard: “What then does it mean to speak of a Realist school of International Relations theory? In the postwar period the term realist has come to indicate a series of propositions underlying a distinctive approach to the study of international politics. These may be abbreviated as follows:
1) International politics is to be understood predominantly as the realm of interaction between sovereign authorities—a realm which is separate from that of domestic politics.
2) The distinctive character of this realm is given by the condition of ‘anarchy’—meaning that the competitive pursuit of divergent ‘national interests’ takes place in the absence of regulation by a super ordinate authority.
3) The result is a set of compulsions generic to relations between states which works, though the complex operation of the balance of power, to determine how states behave internationally. To understand the balance of power is therefore also to explain international politics.”
In few words, realist theory of international relations is a state center approach. In means a one-dimensional perspective.
According to certain interpretation of Thomas Hobbes political philosophy the state of nature as a condition of anarchy and lack of authority was resolved by the stipulation of a social contract among men. This social contract produced, internally, the political State in which order and peaceful relations were possible. Nonetheless, externally, in the international arena it was not possible to build up another social contract. Therefore anarchy continues in this field. The subjects of the politics inside the national boarders are men; meanwhile the subjects of the politics outside national boarders are the states. David Held recognize the importance of hobbesian thought in the theory of international relations: “in the arena of world politics, Hobbes’s way of thinking about power and power relations has often been regarded as the most insightful account of the meaning of the state at the global level. It is said that Hobbes drew a comparison between international relations and the state of nature, describing the international system of states as being in a continuous ‘posture of war’.” We can read in the Leviathan at this reward:
In all times, Kings, and Persons of Soveraigne authority, because of their Independency, are in continuall jealousies, and in the state and posture of Gladiators; having their weapons pointing, and their eyes fixed on one another; that is, their Forts, Garrisons, and Gungs upon the Frontiers of their Kingdomes; and continuall Spyes upon their neighbours.
The subsequent step of the Hobbes’s argument in order to get away from the anarchy in international relations would be the stipulations of a contract among states to create at the same time an association and subordinations of each state to a central and monarchical authority. The universal empire created by consent: “the defenders of anarchy point out that the only conceivable alternative to this dispersed form of authority would be its centralization in a world state (or empire); and since this global Leviathan could exist only by overriding the sovereign independence of individual states (and with it the self-determination of nations) it would perforce constitute a kind of global despotism.”
The political thought of Hobbes has been associated with the realistic theory in the sense that, as the individuals in the state of nature, the states in the international field have to see for their own interest and security without any kind of moral or religious considerations. The first rule of the natural law according to Hobbes is to guarantee our own life trough the means that each one has in his hands against everyone other. This is the sign of the realpolitik that has had a significant influence in the study and practice of the international relations in the decades subsequent to the Second World War. Politics means defends and attack according with an unstable environment in which states must survive at any cost. Neorealism stresses in an exaggerate maner conflict and competition for power meanwhile minimize collaboration among actors of international politics. It does not take into account internal politics. The sharp division between internal and external politics is the principal assumption of this school.
Kennet Waltz affirms: “Students of international politics will do well to concentrate on separate theories of internal and external politics until someone figures out a way to unite them.” This theory let out issues like the domestic conformation of power. Justin Rosenberg says: “In their eyes [of the realist writers], the discipline of International Relations is premised on the recognition of a fundamental disjuncture between internal political life, which is carried on under the coordinating and pacifying sovereignty of the state, and the external politics, which is governed by the irresistible logic of anarchy.” Realist theorists concluded that it is not of the International Relations discipline to stipulate the possible connections between the international system of power and the political internal structure.
We have to bear in mind that in the historical sense the State center approach has its mayor expression in the Westphalian constitution of world (dis)order. In fact, the Peace Treaties of Westphalia and Osnabruck (1648), as we have sustained above, establish the legal and political basis of modern statehood. In the course of the subsequent four centuries it has formed the normative structure that ruled the power relations among nations. The core of the Westphalia settlement was agreement among Europe’s rulers to recognize each other’s right to rule their own territories free from outside interference. No one could violate the jurisdiction of the other. This was translated over time in the concept of sovereign statehood and with it national self-determination which acquired the status of universal organizing principle of international relations. Each State recognizes the legal and political existence of each other. Meanwhile, each State admits the right of every other to control its own territory and govern its own population in a parity of circumstances. This conception gave birth to the modern-state system.
But the historical and theoretical starting point of the international relations and more specifically of the realist school is the classical narrative of Thucydides of the Peloponnesian War (431-404 B.C.). As it is well known, the State-cities of the ancient Greece gave shape to a distinctive system of interrelated and, at the same time, autonomous political entities, each one with its own land and population. There was a complex structure of alliances among them but, in any case, this war was due to the fact that they formed two main blocs integrated by the democratic Athens, on the one hand, and the oligarchic Esparta, on the other. Athens was hegemonic in the Delian League meanwhile Sparta was the leader of the Peloponnesian League. Thucydides is quiet clear when he explains the motive of the conflict: “What made war inevitable was the growth of Athenian power and the fear which this caused in Sparta.” Therefore, at first glance, we would admit the realistic theory, which sustain that there is a clear linkage between what happened in time of the Hellenic world and what is going on in our time. It means that the political entities are, in fact, the subjects of the international relations and, consequently, we can ignore the internal facts in those entities.
However, Thucydides stresses that the Peloponnesian war was a constant and dynamic phenomenon of interchange between internal and external facts. Both parts tried to take advantage of the internal conflicts (stasis) backing the democratic (Athens) or the oligarchic (Sparta) factions of the enemy. Even more, from the beginning of his book Thucydides points out the origin of the dispute: “just before the war between Athens and Sparta, the democratic party [of Epidamnus] drove out the aristocratic party, who then went over to the foreign enemies of the city and joined them in making piratical attacks on it both by sea and by land.” The antagonism between democracy and oligarchy as political internal regimes was permanent and fundamental in the Peloponnesian war. It was this, which made difficult for the two power-blocs, representing different social systems, to lie down together.
With these elements of analysis we can maintain that Thucydides does not belongs to the realist theory even if the most important authors (Edward Hallett Carr, Hans Morgenthau, Kenneth Waltz) of this school have made of him an icon. To the contrary: if we bear our analysis in what Thucydides showed about what really happened in Greece at that time with the polis and the Peloponnesian war we will have a useful tool to comprehend in better terms the contemporary international relations. It means, with all the historical differences that exist between the ancient world and the contemporary world, the important thing is that there were not rigid sketches between what we name internal politics and external politics. The genuine lesson of Thucydides is just that.
As a mater of fact, religious expressions, political revolutions o social upheavals have had long the history deep repercussions in different cultures, communities and countries. For instance, in the antiquity, Judaism, Christianity; in the Middle Ages, Islam; in the Modern times, the English Glorious Revolutions (1688), the American Independence (1776), the French Revolution (1789), the Russian Revolution (1917), the Cuban Revolution (1959). All of them began in specific places (national politics) and then widespread in many directions. They changed not only the domestic politics but also the foreign balance of power. Even more, they have landmarked the universal history.
In the contemporary age of globalization the lesson of Thucydides is more present than ever before. If in the postwar period it was possible thinking about two different dimensions of politics, internal and external, we can not deny that globalization has brought the closeness and interweave of national and international politics. This requires and inside-out view.

4.- The inside-out approach. A case in point: transition to democracy

Applying the inside-out view in some specific cases we can resort, for instance, to the “transition from authoritarian regimes to democracy” in some Latin American states and in Portugal and Spain during the 70’s and 80’s.
Let's see: with the victory of the allies in the Second World War the Western world opened to democracy, but not so in the Latin American area where autocracies or, more concisely expressed, military dictatorships, were maintained and even increased. A very real wave of autocracies fell, indeed, with rare exceptions, under the Ibero-american countries betweeen the 60's and 70's. This phenomenon had both internal and external causes. The internal reasons include the weakness of the republics, increased social demands for improving economic conditions and greater political participation, the claim on the behalf of conservatives to preserve the order and the concentration of wealth in a few hands. The external factors include the hemispheric security policy imposed by the United States during the Cold War and the consequent counter-line deployed to curb the example of the Cuban Revolution. Correspondingly, from Cuba, it was spoken of the need to expand the struggle against imperialism to other countries in the area and the advisability of implementing on them socialism. Replying to dictatorial and imperialist violence with revolutionary violence, but most of the insurrection attempts failed and brought more repression. This perspective came to its fulfillment and decline with the Nicaraguan Revolution (1979).
But a different pattern of political change was brewing in many Ibero-american nations. The case began in 1974 in Portugal and between 1973 and 1975 in Spain with the fading of the old military autocracies led respectively by Antonio de Oliveira Salazar and Francisco Franco. This resulted in a process of political transformation towards democracy. Then in many Latin American countries military dictatorships were replaced by democratic governments: Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay, Chile, Peru, Bolivia, Ecuador, Paraguay and Central American nations.
Certainly, the phenomenon of democratization in Ibero-american countries began due to internal causes in each of them: but undoubtedly there were also external factors that favored it, such as demilitarization, the assistance given by the rising political class which came to power thanks to change of the regime, the expansion of a democratic culture beyond national borders, the media and its liaison work between societies.
In these cases we are dealing with a different political framework because the transition from one regime to another was not through violence, as was the custom in our countries. It means political change since antiquity usually presented as a revolution if it was a mutation of a system and as a reform if it was a transformation in the system. The real novelty of the Ibero-american transition to democracy is that the change from autocracies to democracies was made not by revolutionary means, but by reforms.
After a time political change was given a secondary role in order to give priority to social change (or mode of production to put it in Marxist terms), the political transformation was proposed as a central issue in Ibero-america. The relationship with the political philosophy is reflected in the definition that Guillermo O'Donnell has proposed of the concept: "We define 'transition' as the extending interval between one political regime to another." The main point is no longer, as it was in the period between the First and the Second World War, the fall of democracies and the rise of autocracies. Instead the central point in the transition to democracy in the Ibero-american countries is the collapse of authoritarian regimes and the resurgence of democracies.
Logically, in such an abundant literature as the one that has been produced to study this topic and given the multitude of analytical perspectives mismatches there are no coincidences on the peculiarities of dictatorships or democracies. But it is necessary to highlight some basic features to show the changes from one to the other. We could say that the two facets that make up politics, the strength and consensus, dictatorship puts the accent on the first, democracy on the second. Dictatorship highlights the mandate momentum, democracy emphasizes the moment of consensus. Under the dictatorship the power is highly concentrated and is unlimited, in other words, there are not, or very few, institutional barriers to stop abuses, there is no effective control over the conduct of the rulers, there is little or no tolerance for opposition; civil and political organizations have a low degree of autonomy from the state, the representative bodies and electoral mechanisms, if any, are reduced to purely ceremonial functions, education and political participation are discouraged, negotiation as a tool for political integration is relegated to inconsequential levels.
In a democracy, on the contrary, power is more distributed and it is subject to institutional oversight, there is, consequently, control over the acts of public servants, there is tolerance for dissents, civil organizations and political parties are free against government power, the representative bodies and electoral mechanisms work equally, education and political participation are encouraged, the agreement as a way of aggregation is central in political activity.
The transition from autocracy to democracy also presents difficulties in its definition. Still, it is known that traffic signs appear when the authorities began to offer concessions to individual and political rights which were violated before, when they start to remove these obstacles to make possible the change of government, when one accepts the existence of social and political actors that had previously been banned. So far it has only been talked about liberalization which is in itself necessary for democratization but it is not sufficient, since it can still be reversed by the political dominance of the armed forces, persistent inequalities in line with the entrenched and powerful interests and an intolerant culture. However, a sign that shows that the transition has been achieved is the establishment of a new and fair electoral law, the successful holding of free and fair elections, and even the completion of the work of the constituent assembly that produces a new institutional framework. Signs of transition from dictatorship to democracy are the change from militarism to civilism.
What must be collected from all this is that the transition takes place when the political principle which underpinned the regime, in this case authoritarian, that is, deterrence through violence, is going downhill and is no longer able to contain conflicts. In that sense the coalition of forces that supported him and in which, indeed, may have important social segments, suffers fractures and gradually disintegrates.
While the old principle is diluted the other strengthens by rising political and civil freedoms and equality (other recurring item). The old political class is replaced by another one more capable of aggregation and supported by social sectors organized and mobilized, the flow of power coming from the top to the bottom begins to change its rout by moving from the bottom up, horizontal and civil pluralism replaces vertical and state corporatism. This is to show that democracy works best to channel conflict compared with the dictatorship. It is well said that autocracies are always equal to themselves, immovable, while a feature of democracy is to be in constant transformation, adapting to new circumstances by agreement among the participants.

5.- Populism, old and new

The transition to democracy is the most important change that has been observed by Ibero-american countries in the last four decades. However, not everything has been easy. Some countries have fallen back into authoritarianism and not in the way of the old military-style dictatorships of Antomio Salazar Oliveira (Portugal), Francisco Franco (Spain), Leonidas Trujillo (Dominicanian Republic), Anastacio Somoza (Nicaragua), Alfredo Stroessner (Paraguay), Jorge Rafael Videla (Argentina). Now authoritarianism has taken the form of populism. It is worth wondering whether populism has any equivalent in classical political theory. Explicitly, the answer would be negative. It means there is no literal reference to this word. However, in my consideration, there is, in some authors a certain implicit reference. And this has to do with the canonical question: what is the best government, the one of laws or of men? It is clear that the vast majority of political thinkers have preferred the government of laws and not the government of men for the reason that Aristotle noted in his book Politics: it is better to be governed by laws and not by men for one simple reason, the laws have no passions, which is necessarily found in any human soul: "When the law rules is as if God and reason alone command, when given the superiority to men is giving it to both man and beast. In desire there is something bestial; passion perverts the judges and the best men, intelligence without passion that is the law."
The superiority of the law is tied to the idea of good government that the Greeks identified with the term eunomia (well-ordered state by law). The opposite is Dysnomia (the ill-ordered state and which contravenes the law). Norberto Bobbio, in his essay "Government of laws or government of men?" , wrote that Pindar, in his book Nomos Basileus, points out that the law is queen of all things, mortal and inmortal. Cicero, in The Republic, argued that by serving the law, men reaches their freedom. This happened in the ancient world, but in medieval times continued the idea that the good ruler is one who exercises power within the law. For example, in the book De legibus et consuetudinibus angliae, Henri Bracton enunciated a rule that later served as the basis of a state based on the rule of law (lex facit regem), the law makes the king.
By the rule of law is understood that such state is subject to the law. This is the basis of constitutionalism (government sub leges). Max Webber, pulled out of here, precisely the idea of rational-legal authority in the sense that this kind of power bases its legitimacy on the exercise of power under the law. In this sense Hans Kelsen speaks of the law as a chain of rules that create powers whose reason for existence lies in the law of laws, that is, the Grundnorm.
This is a familiar story: there is a whole systematic process about the goverment of laws. But at next to it, it appears like its opposite, that is, the government of men. Norberto Bobbio, in the mentioned essay said he tried to do a few words about this other part of political history. He recognizes that there is a wide and rich phenomenology to develop a typology of the government of men.
To this end, the first thing he does is to clear the ground: to affirm that the government of men is not to be confused with monarchy which was preferred by political authorities as relevant as Bodin, Hobbes, Montesquieu and Hegel. The point of difference lies in the fact that monarchy is also a government under law as, indeed, the King is not obliged to obey the laws he created himself, but he is obliged to respect the natural laws and divine laws as it was indicated by Saint Thomas Aquinas. Hence Bobbio hold: "The counterpart of the king is a tyrant whose power is outside the law (extra legem) wether he has no valid title to rule or in the sense of ruling illegally. Even in the field of writers who see the monarchy as the best form of government, the typical form of government of men is tyrannical; this type of system is always classified as a negative way."
From Plato's famous description of the advent of tyranny due to an unbridled democracy or "wanton" as Machiavelli called it centuries later, the presence of this corrupt form has been strongly linked with the degeneration of democracy rather than with monarchy in its different variants. It is no coincidence that with the personalist referral who ran the French Revolution after the government of the convention and terror has emerged again into the concept of "Cesarist” in reference to Napoleon Bonaparte. This idea of personal rule was reinforced with the advent, decades after the French Revolution, of Napoleon III from who Karl Marx took inspiration for his work The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. He spoke of the "Bonapartism" recalling Napoleon the Great to counter the cartoon figure precisely of his nephew Napoleon III. In that essay Marx writes: "Hegel states somewhere that all great events and personalities in world history occur, as it were, twice. He forgot to add: once as tragedy and once as farce."
We must emphasize that both Caesarism and Bonapartism were qualified by several authors, as popular tyranny.
The risk of unbridled democracy becoming its opposite, despotism, was also evidenced by Alexis de Tocqueville in his book Democracy in America. There we read:
I imagine under what new features despotism may be known in the world, I see an innumerable multitude of men equal and alike, incessantly revolving upon themselves to obtain mean and vulgar pleasures on which they fill their soul ... Above them rises an immense and tutelary power that is responsible only for ensuring their enjoyment and to monitor their fate. Absolute, minute, regular, announced and benign, it would resemble paternal power, as if it had intended to prepare men for manhood, but on the contrary, it has no ohter intention to fix them irrevocably in childhood and wants citizens to enjoy, provided they do think of nothing but enjoying .
Immoderate democracy is prone to fall into paternalism that covers, in fact, the cruelest of regimes, despotism. This form of domain takes advantage of the immaturity of citizens. They are civil minors, to establish an authoritarian regime. To prevent a demagogue from enjoying the weaknesses of unbridled democracy is necessary, according to Tocqueville, to institutionalize the rule of law and separation of powers.
The study of the government of men, personified by Cesarism holds a special place in the two major treatises written in the late nineteenth century. One was written by Treitschke, the other one by Roscher. Both titled, coincidentally, Politics. The first said that Napoleon the Great met the need of the French of wanting to be slaves and called the regime following the 1789 revolution "democratic despotism."
The second highlighted the problem of anarchy and the need to impose order through an out of the ordinary one person government. The degeneration of popular government, says Roscher, leads to the tyranny that rules with the support of those same slaves. This link between licentious democracy and the authoritarian solution was approached by James Hamilton in the first letter of The Federalist: "The history teaches us that men who subverted the freedom of republics, began their careers by proclaiming their devotion to the people. They climbed positions by inflaming prejudices and ended up as tyrants."
Another range of government of men is composed of the classical distinction between three powers: the father upon the children, the master over the slaves and the ruler over the ruled. These forms of authority correspond respectively to the paternal power, despotic power and political power. This is a distinction to which most of the treaties of political philosophy recurre to make clear the distinction that must exist between paternal power, power management and political power.
From there the classical authors took off to later deal with more diligence, the case of well-established political power. However, they knew that very often the ruler's power has been confused with the paternal power giving rise to the degenerate form of domination called paternalism. Also, the ruler's power has been mixed improperly with the tyrant's power leading to the degenerate form of domination called despotism.
It was no coincidence that Kant left on record the following statement: "A government based on the principle of benevolence towards the people suchs as the government of a father over his children or a paternalistic regime (imperium paternal) is the worst despotism that could be imagined.”
Max Weber was the one who best summed up the government of men in the range of charismatic power. There lies the great demagogue, the hero, the messiah and the military leader. On the opposite side is, in the Weberian typology, precisely the legal-rational power. In this way we understand better the difference between the men’s government and the government of laws. The third classification of Weber, the traditional power is in the middle of two extremes. The traditional power "is a personal power but not extraordinary it is a personal power whose basis of legitimacy derives not from under the boss, but on the strength of tradition and, therefore, as in the case of the legitimate power of an impersonal force."
This semblance about distinction between the government of laws and government of men puts us in a position to locate the populism, no doubt, in the range of men’s government. Populism is a true and proper "popular tyranny" that opposes the government of laws in at least two of their classic forms. Recall that Stephanus Junius Brutus spoke of two different types of tyranny, the tyrant's of default title (ex defectu tituli), which is the figure of the tyrant usurper or default of exercise (ex parte execiti) the legitimate ruler who has reached the power is exercised outside the law.
Latin America has been rich in examples of populist governments. We should say, however, that some of them, especially in the first stage, the government appeared to be more paternalistic (Lázaro Cárdenas in Mexico) while the most recently formed resemble the despotic regime (Hugo Chavez in Venezuela). Similarly, we can say that paternalistic populism led to the institutionalization of the republic in contrast, despotic populism is likely to destroy the institutionalism of the republic.
For the reasons set forth herein, I believe it is wrong what Ernesto Laclau said on populism:
If populism consist in postulating a radical alternative within the communitarian space, a choice at the crossroads on which the future of a given society hinges, does not populism become synonymous with politics? The answer can only be affirmative. Populism means putting into question the institutional order by constructing and underdog as an historical agent—i.e. an agent which is an other in relation to the way things stand. But this is the same as politics. We only have politics through the gesture, which embraces the existing state of affairs as a system and presents an alternative to it (or, conversely, when we defend that system against existing potential alternatives). That is the reason why the end of populism coincides with the end of politics.
It is wrong to argue that populism is an alternative "at the crossroads of which depends the future of a given society." This is tantamount to say that the only alternative in our societies is tyranny. Similarly, it is nonsense to say that populism is synonymous with politics. Fortunately, politics has many more options than the government of the charismatic leader, among them, precisely, the government of laws. Quite obviously these laws and institutions can be renewed or modified by pre-established mechanisms for the constitution without having to fall into despotism.
Believing that populism constitutes the people, as a historical agent is to deny the very people the opportunity to choose courses of action that are not focus on personal domain. The alternative of transforming the state of current affairs has a range of possibilities that have nothing to do with populism. These possibilities may opt for the policy of negotiation rather than confrontation, which seems like a populist policy. I would rather say that the end of populism coincides with the end of anti-politics, understood as confrontation, as the destruction or marginalization of the opponent.
If we understand democracy as the exercise of politics as a peaceful slope, rather than a repressive one, about politics we will understand better the crass error that Laclau has fallen into. On the opposite of what this author says, in my opinion populism is the refusal of democracy, is a tyrannical government that replaces democracy, denies it. This denial is manifest in both the government subversion of the institutions and laws, and in the removal of power from the base to be deposited at the apex, or the figure of the charismatic leader who acts, as stated above, in the name and account of those treated as children or as slaves. The mission of tyranny is not encouraging the improvement of individuals, but turning them into obedient servants.
To this we must add, on the one hand, that the term populism was put back into circulation by the neoliberal technocracy to discredit political enemies. On the other hand, however, sociologists and political scientists who, in the sixties laid hands on the concept of "populism", did so for scientific purposes, it means, to define certain patterns of behavior of regimes like those of Getulio Vargas in Brazil, Juan Domingo Perón in Argentina, Raúl Haya de la Torre in Peru, José María Velasco Ibarra in Ecuador, Jacobo Arbenz in Guatemala and Lázaro Cardenas in Mexico.
The concept of populism, in analytical terms, was useful to understand the social mobilization of masses in partnership with the State in Latin America. The main point was that social groups convened by the populist fail to submit an independent political alternative and therefore yielded to the designs of the rulers. Thus was formed the authoritarian command with broad popular support. Among the scholars who studied this phenomenon are René Zavaleta, Mario Salazar Valiente, Rui Mauro Marini, Octavio Ianni, and Andre Gunder Frank. To them, the term populism, reffered especially, to social forms that replaced the oligarchic systems of government. Some of these populistic forms managed to protract despite the departure or fall of their leaders.
The paternalistic populism was not born by spontaneous generation. That is, almost nobody has paid attention to what is before him. What was the cause for breaking into the story? The studies on this topic suggests that populism began when, at the end of the nineteenth century and the first third of the twentieth century, the landed oligarchies in Latin America held off access to the political sphere to the lower social strata and, in contrast, those oligarchies took possession of power to enjoy it in a patronage fashion, that is, confusing the public resources with private wealth. The flag of the elites was positivism and the "laissez faire, laissez passé."
Leaving aside the binomial neoliberalism-populism in which, from the vision of modernization, the first acquires a positive and the second a negative value, which draws the attention of politics in the new continent, is the emergence of a new edition of populism. That is precisely despotic populism.
In Latin America we have, first, the persistence of the neoliberal model as in the case of Mexico (Felipe Calderon) and Colombia (Alvaro Uribe), but on the other hand, is the emergence of what I call "neo-populist" as the headed by Hugo Chávez in Venezuela with their respective followers: Evo Morales in Bolivia, Rafael Correa in Ecuador and Daniel Ortega in Nicaragua. To this list must be added the presidential candidacies of Andrés Manuel López Obrador in Mexico and Ollanta Humala in Peru.
Populism in accordance with what was said by Ludolfo Paramio today presents new foundations for a system, which states in opposition to what already exists in institutional and legal matters. According to the new populism all republican institutions and laws should be eliminated, being replaced by the rule of one man. This is accompanied by increasing polarization, social and political conflict. This will establish an atmosphere of constant tension.
Faced with these attributes of the new populism should be noted that there is a difference with the classic populism: one fought the oligarchic governments, and the second one moves, plain and simple, against democracy.
It is worth noting that while populism has been reborn in Latin America that does not mean that the "popular tyranny" is limited to that region of the world. In reality the phenomenon is already a challenge to democracy worldwide. One example is what is happening in Italy with Silvio Berlusconi, which regimen Giovanni Sartori has described as a true and proper "sultanato." In this same range we must include Jean-Marie Le Pen in France and Pim Fortuyn in Holland. Another case in point is the example left by Jörg Haider in Austria. It is curious and not without significance that, in contrast to what happens in Latin America, a region where left-wing populism have sprung up, in Europe, right-wing populisms are appearing. Among the issues that have been banner of the demands of European populism is dealing with the immigration of people from all over the world to European continent and especially its western part.

6.- The exhaution of the free market model

There are many scholars studying national and international politics who assure that populism has been a response to the difficult conditions imposed by international financial institutions to developing countries. Of course the neoliberal onslaught not only affected the Latin American countries, but also a large number of nations around the world. The neoliberal cycle took place since the late seventies to the meltdown on Wall Street in 2008. The rise of neoliberalism both domestically and internationally was surrounded by a number of factors which deserve to be mention because they are part of what today is at stake in global politics. For that we must deepen in their theoretical and historical analysis.
Take into consideration that in the history of twentieth century liberalism was oriented on the one hand, towards criticism of "real socialism" as a "totalitarian" state coercively limits individual space. Similarly, in developed Western countries while the strategy of socialdemocracy was developed, the estrategy of the members of the Labour party around the Welfare State also was developed, which in Europe is considered a logical consequence of the advent of democratic systems after the Second World War.
If during its origins in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries liberalism managed to defeat the monarchical nanny state and once it obtained the victory builded up the minimal state. Nonetheless with the pressure of democracy the old liberal minimal State became the Welfare state. After serving only security and surveillance tasks, the State became intrusive. In fact, the rise of institutions and state public service is closely tied to the process of democratization and socialization. "If the core of liberal theory is the minimal State, the practice of democracy, which is a historical consequence of liberalism or at least a historical continuation has led to a form of State that is not minimal, but it is not the maximum State of totalitarian regimens." Therefore it can be argued that the Welfare State is a larger state than the minimal State that prevailed for a big part of the Twenty century.
The modern state has experienced three significant changes. At the political level democracy and socialization (universal suffrage, the organization of mass political parties, increased trade unions, interest groups and pressure, etc.) have increased. On the economic level, there has been an increasing influence of state activities in industry, commerce and finance. Administratively, the remarkable thing is an appreciable increase in the ministries, the parastatal sector and the regional administration.
The criticism against the Welfare State, also known as Keynesian State, came to a national and international level, both the left and right. The argument of the radical left was that it relied on a partnership between workers, the ruling groups and the bourgeoisie to legitimize and stabilize capitalism. The right, instead, considered that the Welfare State is the entry of totalitarianism. At the stage of decline of interventionism, the harshest criticisms came from the right and, more specifically, to the right that used as flag economic liberalism (Friedrich von Hayeck, Robert Nozick, Milton Friedman). The neo-liberals criticized the Welfare State referring to the failure of his economic plan. They feel that it was an extremely expensive experiment, in which much of its implementation rested on the expansion of public economy which went further than the desirable limits. The remedy, therefore, was to reduce the economic role of the State and let the private sector to retake the sections that the public authority could not manage.
It arises, then, a curious trunking between economic liberalism and political liberalism that is worth analyzing. Remember that in Europe, the liberal State traditionally opposed the nanny State, in other words, the State that left the entire responsibility in hands of one man, the King.
It’s here where the fundamental difference between classical liberalism and neoliberalism appears, because, "The nanny State today is not the creation of enlightened prince, but of democratic governments. Here is all the difference and a difference that counts." Indeed, neo-liberals one do not fight anymore the paternalistic monarchic State, but to democracy, because they consider it a form of government that has become ungovernable; the social demands are stronger that the capacity of responsive of the governments. It is the well-known argument of the “overload of the demands”. From this point of view it would be possible to judge the Welfare State as an expanded State in terms of functions, public institutions and economic activities, but weak as far as the power. For that reason the neo-liberals at the same time propose a minimal State in terms of features and fort, even authoritarian, in terms of power.
The implementation of the neoliberal model began with the ascent of Margareth Thatcher as Prime Minister of Great Britain, in 1979. The following year Ronald Reagan was elected President of the United States thing that gave a huge boost to model centered in the freedom of the market. Thereafter the so-called friedmanian model scattered in many parts of the world, accompanied by the electoral defeat of the left parties that had led to the Welfare State and the victory of the right-wing parties that imposed the dogma of more market and less government. In this way, the privatization program of public enterprises started, deregulation, flexibility of labor contracts, free trade with the outside, massive dismissals in the public sector as in the private, the promotion of foreign investment and strengthening of technocracy in making public politics’ decisions.
Let us assume that globalization, as a concept, became part of the common language of national and international politics when the Berlin Wall fell. If one of the opponents, the Soviet Union, fell apart along with his empire based on authoritarianism and the centrally planned economy left the door open to democracy and market economy could spread everywhere. The world would be united by a form of government, democracy and an economic system, capitalism without restrictions. There are some who believe in a peaceful coexistence, without problems, between democracy and market economy. This is the case of Giovanni Sartori, who in his book “What is Democracy?” also establishes that this relationship is certain. However, the embrace of democracy with market economy can be both vital and lethal. It is vital, because both of them are fueled by dynamism, creativity, and constant transformation; it is mortal, because while democracy requires equality, market economy is a natural producer of inequalities.
Both democracy and capitalism have continued to face serious problems. On the one hand, democracy faced brutality, indeed with events such as the ones that occurred in former Yugoslavia, the massacres in Rwanda and Sudan, the separatist tendencies and, particularly, the terrorist attacks in Washington and New York of September 11, 2001. Even so, you could add, that although democracy managed to defeat in the XX century enemies as bad as Nazism and communism, today another equally insidious rival emerged. It means, as we have shown, populism.
Regarding the fate of capitalism, or more specifically the neoliberal model, it seems to me that its luck was sealed, as we have emphasized here, with the financial meltdown in September 2008. Those who thought that globalization was just the universalization of markets through the free market system (McWorld), were fully mistaken. Today the challenge is finding an economic model to exceed the statism (Welfare State), and the mercantilism (liberalism). The theoretical references no longer can be John Maynard Keynes, nor Milton Friedman.

7. The Old Third Way

Let’s do a recount of what has been of the recent history of neoliberal economic politics and the alternative option to this estrategy, that is to say, the Third Way to understand better the possibilities that are open in the future from an economic line less undemocratic, that is more inclusive.
For starters we must recognize that the 80’s will be remembered, no doubt, by the hegemony of the conservative parties. It was talked about, even, of a true and own “Restoration” that had echo and followers practically in the whole western world.
However, in those same years, the most lucid left-center currents began, in a discrete work from the opposition, to reframe its conscious positions that someday things could change. Indeed, at the beginning of the 90’s the balance began to tilt: in 1992 Bill Clinton unseated George Bush senior of the United States’ presidency; later in 1997 Tony Blair replaced John Major like Prime minister of Great Britain. To this scene Gerhard Schoder in the united Germany, Lionel Jospin in France, Massimo D’Alema in Italy, and Wim Kok in Holland, were included, to only mention some of the notorious exponents of the awaking of the left-center at an international level.
One of the biggest mistakes of conservatism was to practice abstentionism, not only in the economic realm, but also in the political one, having as an outcome what Massimo D’Alema has called “weak politics”, it means, allowing the "laissez faire, laissez passé" to be applied in the circulation of goods and also in problem continuation. As we have said, the State, in the neoliberal era, has certainly followed their interventions, but now to favor the concentration of wealth. The neoliberal right wing has a technocratic formation, but it lacks a political culture and even more a precise notion about the State and what it stands for. The conservative strategy left national cohesion suspended.
The social vision of the Third Way was not, as the conservatives did, a collection of people competing between themselves, but a conglomerate that looks forward to supporting and gathering the effort of individuals. The project that the left wing supported, tried to forge a different relation between individuals and society. Tony Blair said about it: “The question today is wether we can achieve a new relation between individuals and society, in which the indiviudual acknowledges, in certain key matters, that it is only by working together in a community of people that the individual’s interest can progress.” Under this premise, a mutual correspondence between individual rights and social responsibilities was tried to pull out.
Egoism, the lack of social belonging and detachment were promoted, consciously, by economic liberalism. The individualist apathy broke the citizen apart from his society and power. The sense of social integration was lost as unbalanced wealth distribution reached abysmal limits.
Considered as the ideologist of the Third Way, Anthony Giddens, mentioned two forms of apathy and exclusion generated by neoliberalism. The first, that of the ones who are at the bottom of the social scale, isolated from overcoming opportunities. The second, that of those who are at the peak of the pyramid by isolating themselves voluntarily to guarantee their safety and privileges. This strategy is aimed to correct this apathy and exclusion to recover the social sense of politics through equality of opportunities: “We need a country in which we acknowledge an obligation collectively to ensure each citizen to get a stake in it.” It is the moral responsibility of creating a fair society.
By the way, speaking about distributive justice, we must say that one of the most frequent topics by theoreticians of neo-liberalism was the rejection to gather individual freedom with social equality. In contrast, writers identified with the Third Way, like Bruce Ackerman, refuted that supposition: "We emphatically reject the idea that there is an inexorable distance between freedom and equality. The comprehensive partnership (Stakeholder Society) promises more of the two."
Neoliberal rejection to social justice was mixed with despise for populism and Statism. Nevertheless, we would have to say that this and those are not from the same kind. Neoliberals wanted to toss the girl (social justice) to the dirty water (statism and populism). Now substance would have to be saved complements are to be taken out.
Laborists stood in the power for lots of years and their example was seen in several countries of the world, including some Latin Americans such as Brazil, Chile, Costa Rica, the Dominican Republic and Uruguay. The problem is that in England the conservatives allied with the liberal Democratic Party took them out. Many say that the option for social democracy as an alternative to neoliberalism has failed or is wearing down by the electoral defeat of the English left wing.

8.- The New Third Way

With the exit of laborists from the power in England and the defeat of german social democrats, it could be said that, in fact, the experiment of the Third Way was concluded. Nevertheless, it is not like that because there is a model worthy of being taken as a valid alternative to neoliberalism. It is the Scandinavian model. This model that has survived the assault of neoliberalism can be the detonator of an alternative economic and political line to the old markets, the old Statism, and the politic defeat of the English Third Way.
Eric S. Einhorn and John Logue affirm at this regard: “the Scandinavian Welfare State, which were written off as road kill on the global economy highway in 1990 or 1995, have now again become a social laboratory for adapting solidaristic and universalistic Welfare State programs to the change International economic dispersement.” Scandinavian per capita incomes are at the top of OECD. Income inequality is one third lower than in the larger European Union countries and fully 40 per cent less than in the United States. The Scandinavian states are five: three of which are fully European Union members (Denmark, Finland and Sweden) while two belong to the European Economic Area (Iceland and Norway). The experience of these states shows, as Einhorn and Logue suggest, that success is a matter of policy choices. This is an important statement for our purposes rewarding the necessity to find a new model of development both at the national and international level.
Nordic countries had the virtue of finding a rapid recovery of severe economic problems. They recognized the failures Welfare State had corrected them. They implemented a new line of public politics without the sacrifice of social protection and social cohesion via the creation of jobs and economic growth. This model, that calls world attention, is called “flexicurity”: “Monetary Fund (especially its 2003 survey of Sweden), and by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), over the past two years, a spate of news articles in The New York Times, Newsweek, The Economist, and amazingly, Forbes, have described the renewed Scandinavian model as ‘flexicurity’ in action. ‘Flexicurity’ is the combination of economic flexibility and security, and, particularly, as the latter source defines it, is a ‘Third Way’ trade off [that] gives employers the right to hire and fire easily, while the state guarantees a good wage [that is protection against unemployment] and retraining for the fired.’ The World Economic Forum places Denmark and Sweden as the fourth and fifth most-competitive national economies (just behind Switzerland, the United States and Singapore), and Finland and Norway are only slightly lower (sixth and fourteenth, respectively).” “The Scandinavian Third Way” has captured the attention of international public opinion because it has been able to face the challenges of globalization, while maintaining social policies and shifting its approach about competitiveness, things that apparently cannot combine among them.
Scandinavian model have proved that policymaking has not to have a restrict circle of operation inside the technocratic entourage. Public policy, by contrast, can be consensual policy making and get the legitimacy that other kind of governmental activities do not acquire easily. Certainly, consensual decisions take time but it is a choice in democratic societies: “government commissions have recruited experts from academia, business organizations and labor movement to study problems and propose solutions. Universities and autonomous think tanks have added volumes of data and research on intricate issues such as economic structural change, technology, healthcare performance, and not least, old-age pension alternatives. This does not replace either the periodic national collective bargaining rounds or the political debate, but it does provide a generally accepted database of ‘facts’ in which policymakers and their constituents can frame the debate.” It is enough clear that democracy and economic efficiency are not foes as the neoliberal dogma proclaims: by contrast, democracy and efficiency can be complementary.
One of the main features of the “New Third Way” is the relevance that it gives to research and development: “Nordic countries spend lavishly on research and development. Jeffrey D. Sachs. ‘All of them but especially Sweden and Finland, have taken to the sleeping revolution in information and communications technology and leveraged it to gain global competitiveness. Sweden now spends nearly 4 percent of GDP on R and D, the highest ratio in the World today. On the average, the Nordic nations spend 3 percent of GDP on R and D, compared with around 2 percent in the English-speaking nations’. Social policy was part of the restructuring that has produced the currently strong performance.” The experience of Scandinavian nations in the recent years shows that social democracy remains vigorous. Even more, social democracy in Scandinavian has regain energy “without sacrificing a strong commitment to economic equality.” Nobody in Europe has assimilated better the challenge of globalization than Scandinavia. “A comparison between the relative success of Scandinavian policies and those of Britain, France, Germany, or the United States would be as favorable to the Scandinavian model today as it was in 1970. That would not have been true in 1985 or 1995.”
Some components of Scandinavian model are: democratic rule, a strong civil society, technological innovation, adaptability in reward with globalization, partnership among entrepreneurs, workers, government, academia and civil society. In addition, Scandinavian model is characterized by a constellation of social values like solidarity, reciprocal responsibility. It is truth that these values can be related to the idea of “social capital” as Robert D. Putnam conceptualizes it in several and famous works. At this level of social confidence and high levels of organization we can say that Scandinavian countries have a striking density of organizational membership. For instance, Union Density, that is union membership as a percent of employed workers, stood at 70 percent in Denmark, 74 percent in Finland, 53 percent in Norway, and 78 percent in Sweden in 2003 above all European countries. In comparison United States has only 12 percent of union density. As a consequence, “the labor movement’s strength has been key to modernizing the Scandinavian Welfare State in the labor market and pension policy areas.” The organizational strength of Scandinavian unions has made possible that workers’ movement is able to think about commonwealth and not narrow interests.
We must not deny that certain elements of neoliberalism have been adapted to Scandinavian model, nonetheless it has been done in the context of a general strategy in order to upgrade socialdemocratic model: “While Danish and Swedish pensions tomorrow will rely less on the state and more on the market, they will do so through collectively bargained, universal DC systems that cover all participants in the labor market. Neoliberal elements have been integrated in Scandinavian Welfare State reform, but not at the cost of cutting health care, increasing poverty, or reducing future pensions.”
In a nutshell, “The revised Nordic model is now widely known and attractive to a broad political spectrum. It seems to have success fully dealt with issues of pension reform, employment flexibility, labor force growth, and medical cost containment in ways that are compatible with economic security, high employment at high wages, good health outcomes, and broadly shared prosperity. Relatively high levels of taxation do not seem to be a problem in and of themselves, at least when they are perceived as fair and do not lead to serious economic dislocations.” The new Third Way can be a new wave of political and economic strategies at the global level. Taking into account the lack of strong proposals because of the exhaustion of the neoliberal model and the old Third Way languish, it is convenient to keep in mind the experience of the Scandinavian model.

9.- Cosmopolitanism

Throughout this essay we have seen that globalization represents a theoretical and practical challenge of great proportions. It is something new that took everyone by surprise in crescendo. We have seen that realistic theory of international relations is no longer feasible to address this phenomenon. It is no longer possible to address the field of international relationships as a collection of entities that are mired in anarchy. This gives us, as a result, a scenary in which every member has to act according to a calculation of conveniance in order to survive. In a strange mixture between hobbesian and utilitarian political theories, those thinkers that identify themselves with the appointed realism to survive in the state of nature, they have to proceed in the anarchic situation according to the calculation of maximizing benefit and minimizing losses. The result is assessed according to "the national interest".
Neither is the doctrine of multiculturalism well suited to understand the phenomenon of globalization. It is not feasible to characterize the world as a set of autonomous entities defined by their ethnic features driven by the desire to constitute themselves, as small states emerged from the wreckage of the national States. Another doctrine that has been present in the process of globalization is neoliberalism that understands this phenomenon, as we have emphasized here, in a one-dimensional way as the universalization of the markets. Economic liberalism has encouraged the view that the financial and commercial integration of the world should not encounter obstacles in their path neither some form of regulation both nationally and internationally.
Instead of these failure doctrines we have a real theoretical proposal, cosmopolitanism. This is based on rationality, not according to the results, such as utilitarianism, but in accordance with rules derived from the practical reason that they become moral duties to individuals regardless of racial identity, income level, gender, religion and party affiliation. This is a set of rules that must be respected by the justice of the intention. In cosmopolitanism is present, as could be deduced easily, the Kantian theory that the existence of rules must be universal for all human beings.
The Kantian ethics is known as a normative doctrine, which is located on the opposite side of utilitarianism as a consequentialist theory. The latter one feeds realism. Multiculturalism highlights the particularism, not universalism. For multiculturalism national borders are important limits for the performance of its project. Borders are even more barriers set by each cultural community within the states themselves. Each ethnic-cultural entity establishes its own patterns of behavior that have nothing to do with other cultures: “Different cultures have their own ethics and it is impossible to claim, as cosmopolitans do, access to one single account of morality. Therefore they reject the idea of a single universal morality as a cultural product with no global legitimacy.” According to the multiculturalists is impossible to have an agreement between cultures as different as those that exist worldwide. There is not an ethic that can work for all of them universally. This position also tends to be wary of these hypothetically universal values because generally they are proclaimed by the Western nations, such as human rights to justify "humanitarian" military intervention in those countries, which are not respected. From this point of view, each national State or even each ethnical community could freely specify, and not to the international community, the place of these rights in their legal system.
While globalization is increasingly linking to mankind, there are however, schools of thought, which oppose to the unification on behalf of the particular collective belonging. In doing so it leaves room for, not always, well-intentioned forces to take over of this linkage and impose their own interests to all societies. The retreat to the mere defense of particular identities are waived to participate in global politics in which issues are at stake as important as, hunger, racial discrimination, inequality within and outside national borders, distributive justice, cosmopolitan citizenship, technological advances, women rights, building a global civil society, protection of the environment: “Cosmopolitans, however, argue that despite this division into separate historically constituted communities, it remains possible to identify with, and have a moral concern for, humanity. Cosmopolitanism refers to the idea that humanity is to be treated as a single moral community that has moral priority over our national (or subnacional) communities.” The fact that we are only concerned with regard to national or sub-national community necessarily makes incomplete the belief in social and political equality. This perspective that claims the existence and strengthening of a moral community for all of humanity requires us to assume a universal thought. It should be noted that the cosmopolitan universalism is strongly linked to the philosophy of enlightenment. There, in that philosophy, is the program for building a peaceful global order oriented to comply with moral values proclaimed by cosmopolitanism.
From there you could start building global norms and institutions to support the ethical point of departure. This normative view is an equal dignity for all men and women, therefore, on the basis of this idea is an equal approach. This equality, in turn, requires a fair consideration. Almost always this criterion of fairness leads to the requirement of global justice, indeed, has lately been claimed as the case of Amartya Sen who in several of his works has emphasized this demand. In this same liberal idea, although in different philosophical matrix, lines of thought related to the legacy of John Rawls have emphasized also the issue of global justice. To this requirement is added, precisely, issues like those above, respect for human rights, the formation of a global civil society, and setting limits on the uncontrolled powers that have taken advantage of globalization and Luigi Ferrajoli has called "savage powers" such as transnational corporations and the corporations that dominate the information and news in the world.
Globalization has brought enormous challenges like the need to establish citizenship and democracy at a global level and not as a romantic idea, but as the imperative need to stop those wild powers and get them under well-defined legal and institutional control. Apart from that, global citizenship and democracy are presented, at the same time, as the necessity to lead a dynamic that seem to go in many directions without a conscious path and consensually determined. There is a generalized perception that no one is in the leading post of globalization. Some authorities have a great influence en some activity fields—this means, in certain “boards” to use the effective formula of Joseph Nye. But there is no harmony or concert. The main challenge of globalization is to find some form of governance. There comes the necessity to establish a cosmopolite citizenship and democracy that allows participation in the process of decision-making and the need to get cosmopolite politics on the control post. Although long it seems convenient to mention Andrew Linklater’s quote on this topic:
The idea of world citizenship is a concept which international non-governmental organizations have used to promote a stronger sense of responsibility for the global environment and for the human species. Proponents of cosmopolitan democracy have argued that national democracies have little control over global markets, and limited ability to influence decisions taken by transnational corporations, which influence currency values, employment prospects, and so forth. They maintain that democracy may not survive if it remains tied to the nation-sate. They argue for democratizing international organizations such as the World Trade Organization, and for ensuring that transnational corporations are held accountable for decisions that may harm vulnerable persons in different parts of the World.
I would add up to this necessity of making world-governing institutions democratic not just the World Trading Organization, but also the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank and the United Nations. This institutions were created by the end of Second World War and are still operating according to the structure given back then, it means, with the predominance of countries that were victorious in that war. However, World’s physiognomy has changed deeply. We cannot keep on going on with schemes that come from the mid XX century to solve affairs that involve the whole humanity and its future in many dimensions.
The question made by Immanuel Kant has got updated due to globalization: “Do the oceans make a community of nations impossible?