ABSTRACT
In recent years, numerous events and developments have challenged the globalization process, including the 9/11 terrorist attacks and America’s subsequent “War on Terror,” the collapse of the Doha trade negotiations,4 a proliferation of interstate trade and monetary disputes, the rejection of the European Union5 constitution by French and Dutch voters, Irish rejection of the Lisbon Treaty,6 America’s unilateralist foreign policies and the Iraq War, growing complaints about the outsourcing of jobs from the developed world,7 increased resistance in the developed world to the flow of migrants and asylum seekers fleeing poverty and/or violence, and the failure of the Copenhagen environmental summit. Among the greatest threats to globalization have been growing protectionism and protectionist sentiments in reaction to the world financial crisis and its accompanying insecurity.8 Another concern is increased US isolationism, revealed in a 2009 Pew poll in which a plurality (49 percent) of the American public for the first time in forty years said that the United States should
“mind its own business internationally” and “let other countries get along the best they can on their own.”9 Among the most potent of symbols has been the tightening of controls at the US-Canadian border.10 These developments might be read as suggesting that globalization is not overcoming national identities, that state frontiers are being strengthened, and that the world is again on a course of cultural fragmentation rather than uniting within a single, homogenized culture of modernity.
