Religion, Identity and Human Security

Giorgio Shani

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN:
  9781138299108
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317698258
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: International Relations
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Religion, Identity and Human Security seeks to demonstrate that a major source of human insecurity comes from the failure of states around the world to recognize the increasing cultural diversity of their populations which has resulted from globalization. Shani begins by setting out the theoretical foundations, dealing with the transformative effects of globalization on identity, violence and security. The second part of the volume then draws on different cases of sites of human insecurity around the globe to develop these ideas, examining themes such as:

• securitization of religious symbols
• retreat from multiculturalism
• rise of exclusivist ethno-religious identities post- 9/11
• state religion, colonization and the 'racialization' of migration

Highlighting that religion can be a source of both human security and insecurity in a globalizing world, Shani offers a 'critical' human security paradigm that seeks to de-secularize the individual by recognizing the culturally contested and embedded nature of human identities. The work argues that religion serves an important role in re-embedding individuals deracinated from their communities by neo-liberal globalization and will be of interest to students of International Relations, Security Studies and Religion and Politics.

Part I
Reconceptualizing human security in a post-secular age

1
Globalization and Identity after the Financial Crisis¹

Our world, and our lives, are being shaped by the conflicting trends of globalization and identity.

(Castells 1997: 1)

Despite claims that, in the light of the twin events of September 11, 2001 (hereafter 9/11) and 2008 (the financial crisis), ‘the age of globalization is over’ (Rosenberg 2005), globalization – whether illusory or real – remains one of the key buzzwords of the contemporary world. September 11, 2001 may have witnessed ‘the return of religion’ to international relations² and a corresponding questioning of the ‘secular’ variant of (neo-liberal) globalization as a ‘universal’ project for the emancipation of humanity from the fetters of culture, poverty and religion but, as I shall discuss, the anticipated ‘clash of civilizations’ (Huntington 1993, 1996) has not materialized. Similarly, the global financial crisis, despite an initial departure from neo-liberal orthodoxy through ‘stimulus packages’ and government bailouts, has not led to a fundamental reconceptualization of the capitalist lines upon which the global economy is run. It has, instead, intensified the ‘savage sorting of winners and losers’ on a global scale (Sassen 2011).

Like most buzzwords, globalization may be considered an ‘empty signifier’ and evades attempts at definition. At its most basic, globalization refers to processes of increasing interconnectedness between peoples and societies such that events in one part of the world impact upon other peoples and societies far away. Expressing fundamental aspects of what Anthony Giddens (1981) terms ‘time-space distanciation’, it may be understood as

a process (or set of processes) which embodies a transformation in the spatial organization of social relations and transactions – assessed in terms of their extensity, intensity, velocity and impact – generating transcontinental or interregional flows and networks of activity, interaction, and the exercise of power.

(Held et al. 1999: 16)

Although no agreed definition exists, at the heart of the concept of globalization lies the idea of change. The world in which we live is said to be in the midst of a profound economic, political and social transformation affecting every aspect of our lives, including our understanding of who we are: our identity. Globalization assumes that the world is becoming more global. Here, global means connected with the natural habitat of humankind, our planet, Earth. It assumes that until very recently, the concept of the global, as opposed to the international, national or even universal, did not exist, or could not be imagined. In recent decades, however, as a result of advances in communications it is possible to view images of the world from outer space. This has enabled us to visualize our common planet as a globe. Viewed from space, our planet has no natural borders or frontiers, and human beings are merely one of the many different species of life living on it. The concept of globalization, therefore, assumes a progressive movement towards a global consciousness and ultimately a global identity. But is a global identity possible?

I shall argue in the course of this chapter that a global identity is, in fact, unlikely because identities are both relative and culturally constructed. Identities are relative because the ‘self’ – one’s understanding of who one is – is always dependent upon the existence of an ‘other’, who one is not. As psychoanalytical theory suggests, our understanding of who we are comes from outside, through a process of identification. Jacques Lacan (1977) argued that since identity comes from ‘outside’, it is inherently a ‘fictional’ construct: all identities are ‘imaginary’, based on the fundamental misrecognition (méconnaisance) of the child with its imago. The subject and the social order in which the subject finds a place are both in a continuous process of becoming. Both are always in a process of formation.

However, there are clear cultural limits to the malleability and/or what Zygmunt Bauman (2000) terms ‘liquidity’ of contemporary identities, and these militate against the emergence of a global identity. Identities are cultural and social constructs. For Manuel Castells, identity is a process of construction of meaning on the basis of a cultural attribute, or related set of cultural attributes, that is or are given priority over other sources of meaning, defined as ‘the symbolic identification by a social actor of the purpose of his/her action’ (1997: 6). Most human beings find meaning through identification with a particular cultural community, defined in terms of language, religion, ethnicity and territory. Each cultural community has its own particular values, myths and memories, which are, in turn, a product of that community’s unique history. There is no global culture: there are no global languages, common values, myths, memories or interests – apart, perhaps, from a common interest in preserving our natural environment. It follows that if globalization is about the creation of a global consciousness, then it must first erase the historical differences between particular communities. However, no such process has taken place. In fact, globalization, or rather the contemporary intensification of the globalizing processes, has resulted not in the erasure of localized, cultural identities, but rather in their transformation. I suggest that culture need not refer to a set of all-encompassing, biologically determined and territorially rooted ‘primordial attachments’ (Geertz 1963), as Castells appears to be close to suggesting; rather, it refers to that which permits the individual to have a bios: to enjoy a life endowed with meaning and dignity; in contrast to the ‘bare life’ (Agamben 1998) depicted by much of modernist social science.

This chapter will focus on the impact of globalization on cultural identities. The first section will examine the contemporary globalization debate (see Held et al. 1999; Held and McGrew 2000; Scholte 2005). I shall argue that both the globalist, or hyperglobalist, and the sceptical positions may be seen as problematic because they assume a contradictory relationship between the local and the global. Hyperglobalists assume that globalization will inevitably result in the displacement of local, particular identities by a new global political or cultural identity. Sceptics, by casting doubt on the reality of globalization, tend to assume that local, territorialized identities remain immune to so-called global transformations. The transformationalist ‘synthesis’, however, sees the processes of globalization and localization as mutually interrelated (Robertson 1994/2003). In the next section, I shall discuss the relationship between globalization, the nation-state and identity. I shall advance four main claims concerning the emergence of a global civil society, the persistence of the nation-state, the clash of civilizations and the hybridization of identities, and then critically examine these in the subsequent section on the grounds of homogeneity, ahistoricity, essentialism and malleability. Finally, in the section on contemporary developments I shall suggest that growth of the Internet in particular has facilitated, and often enabled, the formation of transnational networks among individuals and groups with a shared cultural background or interests. Reworking Benedict Anderson’s conception of the nation as an imagined community (1991), I will argue that globalization, through the Internet, has made the imagination of ‘deterritorialized’ diasporic identities possible on a global scale. This is not to claim that territorially based ‘local’ identities are no longer significant: the nation-state remains the basic unit of international political and socio-economic life and, as such, represents (and defines) ‘home’ for the overwhelming majority of the world’s population. Rather, I merely suggest that globalization has permitted the deterritorialization of localized identities and that these identities coexist, and frequently clash with, other identities which have been similarly transformed by globalization. These range from concepts of the ‘self’ to the concept of ‘humanity’ and include gender, class, regional, racial and hybrid identities, which have been discussed elsewhere (see Elliott 2007).

The globalization debate: historical and intellectual development

Three major approaches, or theses, have been established in the recent literature on the relationship between globalization and the nation-state: the hyperglobalist thesis, the sceptical thesis and the transformationalist thesis (Held et al. 1999; Held and McGrew 2000). I shall suggest that the transformationalist thesis, which developed in response to the sceptical criticisms of the hyperglobalist thesis, offers the most analytically useful account of contemporary globalization. I shall briefly introduce these three approaches to the globalization debate before examining their differing perspectives on the impact of globalization upon collective identities.

The hyperglobalist thesis

For globalists or ‘hyperglobalizers’, globalization is seen as primarily an economic phenomenon. Economic globalization refers to the increasing and deepening enmeshment of national economies in global systems of production and exchange. A ‘global’ economy organized on the basis of market principles and production for profit has emerged following the collapse of state socialism, and few states remain excluded from financial and economic markets. Manuel Castells has argued that a global economy is a historically new reality and is distinct from a world economy in that it has the capacity to work as a unit in real time and on a planetary scale. The dynamic driving globalization is capitalism; capital, to put it crudely, has been ‘liberated’ from national and territorial constraints, while markets have become globalized to the extent that the domestic economy has to adapt to global competitive conditions. The key beneficiaries of the globalization of the world economy have been multinational corporations (MNCs), which at the turn of the millennium accounted for 70 per cent of world trade (Held and McGrew 2000: 25); and, more perniciously, financial speculators, who have profited from the removal of currency regulations, first in the United Kingdom in 1992 (whose currency, sterling, was forced to leave the European Exchange Rate Mechanism), and subsequently, with more far-reaching consequences, during the East Asian financial crisis in 1997.

The denationalization of economies through networks of production, trade and finance has in turn helped revolutionize telecommunications. The Thatcher– Reagan economic reforms at the start of the 1980s in particular laid the groundwork for the ‘technological revolution’ by encouraging domestic and international competition in the telecommunications industry. The British Telecommunications Act of 1981 denationalized the telecommunications industry in the United Kingdom by privatizing British Telecom. This action was mirrored in the United States by the breaking up of AT&T’s monopoly in 1984, with significant results. In return, AT&T was permitted to compete to provide value added and enhanced information. The 1990s saw three ‘revolutions’ in information technology (IT) that have helped transform our lives: the World Wide Web, e-commerce and wireless communication. Ironically, the Internet itself is an early product of this collaboration. The Internet began in the 1960s as a US Defense Department project to build a data network to connect its researchers (Advanced Research Projects Agency Network, ARPANET) and has been transformed into a potentially universal, all-encompassing space as a result of technological innovation and corporate sponsorship. The invention of HyperText Markup Language (HTML) by a group of researchers at CERN in Geneva led by Tim Berners-Lee in 1991 paved the way for an image-driven, user-friendly World Wide Web easily accessible through corporate browsers such as Microsoft’s Internet Explorer and Netscape Navigator. The World Wide Web deterritorialized the Internet by organizing website content by information rather than by location. Each day, the number of web pages increases nine times faster than the human population, and the estimated online population at the turn of 2010 was 1.8 billion (Internet World Stats 2010).

Hyperglobalizers argue that the technological revolution has eroded the economic sovereignty of the nation-state, generating a ‘borderless economy’ and ushering in a ‘global age’. The nation-state, in the words of Kenichi Ohmae, ‘has become an unnatural, even dysfunctional, unit for organizing human activity and managing economic endeavour in a borderless world’ (1993: 79). Hyperglobalists point to the constructed nature of national or particular communities. The nation is seen as ‘invented’ (Gellner 1983) to legitimize state power. Now that, under the impact of economic globalization, the nation is losing an important part of its old functions, that of constituting a territorially bounded ‘national economy’, nationalism is, particularly for many Marxist-inspired scholars, no longer an important dynamic of historical development.

The sceptical anti-thesis

In contrast, sceptics would agree with Krasner that ‘sovereignty is not being transformed fundamentally by globalization’ (1999: 34). The claim that globalization is undermining state sovereignty is at best ‘exaggerated and historically myopic’ (ibid.: 34). At worst, globalization is a self-serving myth (Hirst and Thompson 1996) propagated by neo-liberal state elites to both ‘naturalize’ and ‘internationalize’ market orthodoxy. Furthermore, as the resurgence of ethno-national movements following the collapse of the Soviet Union and the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia suggests, nationalism retains its emotive appeal and the nation-state provides the only realistic framework for the contemporary world order (Smith 2000).

For Hirst and Thompson, the hyperglobalist view is ‘pernicious’ for two reasons: first, because it is empirically weak; and second, because ‘it demands policies that result in established entitlements being sacrificed in favour of market-based increases in growth that will prove illusory’ (1996: xii). Drawing upon statistical evidence, Hirst and Thompson have concluded that contemporary levels of economic integration and interdependence are by no means unprecedented. Japan and the United Kingdom, for example, were less ‘open’ to foreign trade and investment in 1995 than they were in 1913. Indeed, the level of state autonomy under the Gold Standard or Pax Britannica in the period leading up to the First World War was much lower than it is today. The claim that we are entering a radically new phase in the internationalization of economic activity needs to be qualified by a comparison with other historical periods. Even that symbol of cont...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• CONTENTS
• Preface and acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• PART I Reconceptualizing human security in a post-secular age
• PART II Sites of human insecurity
• Conclusion: to be human is not to be resilient
• Index