Introduction: Troubling Globalisation

In a context in which the idea of globalisation is now routinely condemned in the name of a nationhood that should once again assert its sovereign preeminence, to question the purpose or place of this idea is both politically and intellectually risky. If the era of globalisation is coming to an end, it is often posited, then it is because the idea of the nation – as a territory and a population with a defined social and cultural character – is again in the ascendant. Any critical or intellectual challenge to globalisation today risks being perceived either as enabling neo-nationalist anti-globalism or as seeking to preserve neoliberalism’s crumbling narrative of open movement and free exchange. If we are to avoid these risks then one option is to look to Peter Sloterdijk’s observation that a structural shift is under way not because of the nation-state’s resurgence but because ‘we are today living through a dramatic crisis of reformatting’. In this drama, the disavowal of the foreign is aligned to a micropolitics in which groups and individuals are fixated on self-preservation and self-care, but the nation too is rejected as a principle and as a mechanism that permits shared association.