900329

research-article2020
GMC0010.1177/1742766519900329Global Media and CommunicationFlew

Article

Global Media and Communication

Globalization, neo- 2020, Vol. 16(1) 19­–39

© The Author(s) 2020
Article reuse guidelines:
globalization and post- sagepub.com/journals-permissions
DOI: 10.1177/1742766519900329
https://doi.org/10.1177/1742766519900329
globalization: The challenge journals.sagepub.com/home/gmc

of populism and the return of

the national

Terry Flew
Queensland University of Technology, Australia

Abstract
In the context of a perceived crisis of globalization, this article outlines key features
of the globalization paradigm that bore influence in media and communication studies,
observing two recurring and related weaknesses: underestimation of the continuing
significance of nation-states, and overestimation of the extent to which cultures and
identities had become ‘post-national’ and cosmopolitan. The rise of populism could
lead to a post-global era, but it is more likely that it marks a reassertion of national
policy and political priorities into the operations of global corporations and multilateral
institutions. This raises the question of whether global communication studies need to
be more concerned with national policy questions rather than with ‘the global’ as an
entity in its own right.

Keywords
Global civil society, global communication, globalization, media policy, nationalism,
nation-states, neo-globalization, populism, post-globalization

Introduction: Tough times for the ‘Davos Man’

The period since 2016 has been a hard one for advocates of globalization. That year was
marked by two events that most did not predict, and which have been highly disruptive
in their global effects. The first was the so-called Brexit referendum in the United

Corresponding author:
Terry Flew, Digital Media Research Centre, Queensland University of Technology, Building z6, Room 501,
Creative Industries Precinct, Kelvin Grove, QLD 4059, Australia.
Email: t.flew@qut.edu.au
20 Global Media and Communication 16(1)

Kingdom (UK), where a narrow majority chose to leave the European Union (EU), thus
reversing over 40 years of elite consensus about the benefits of EU membership. The
second was the election of Republican candidate Donald Trump as the 45th President of
the United States, over the far more experienced Democratic Party candidate Hillary
Clinton. These electoral trends have been seen as part of a wider populist upsurge occur-
ring in liberal democracies in Europe, Asia and Latin America, as part of a backlash
against the perceived economic, social and cultural consequences of accelerated globali-
zation (Eatwell and Goodwin, 2018; Goodhart, 2017; Mudde and Kaltwasser, 2017). In
particular, they have been linked to a crisis of global elites, or what has derisorily been
referred to as the ‘Davos Man’ (Tett, 2017), after the annual World Economic Forum
(WEF) event hosted in Davos, Switzerland, which brings together business and govern-
ment leaders as well as various academics, civil society leaders, celebrities, journalists
and others to address common global challenges.
The sense of a retreat from globalization has been picked upon among many of its
erstwhile advocates. The leading global business publication The Economist editorial-
ized in 2017 that the current era could see ‘globalization in retreat for the first time since
1945’, as the ‘new nationalists’ argued with increasing success that ‘globalization has
benefited the elites and penalized the ordinary workers and that governments should put
America/Britain/France first’ (The Economist, 2017). In the Harvard Business Review, it
was noted that ‘public sentiment about globalization has taken a sharp turn . . . [and]
even among business leaders, doubts about the benefits of global interconnectedness
surfaced during the 2008 financial meltdown and haven’t fully receded’ (Ignatius, 2017:
10). Even the WEF has been forced to acknowledge popular discontent with globaliza-
tion. In a background paper for the 2019 Davos Forum, WEF chair and founder Klaus
Schwab (2018) observed that

[o]wing to the slow and uneven recovery in the decade since the global financial crisis, a
substantial part of society has become disaffected and embittered, not only with politics and
politicians, but also with globalization and the entire economic system it underpins. In an era of
widespread insecurity and frustration, populism has become increasingly attractive as an
alternative to the status quo.

In this article, I will discuss the emergence of the globalization paradigm in the social
sciences, and its impact on media and communication scholarship, before exploring
some of its conceptual limitations. I will then discuss proposals for reform of global
institutions and agreements, which have been proposed under the banner of neo-globali-
zation, sometimes also referred to as progressive globalization or globalization from
below. I will observe a tension between those proposals for transformation of the global
order away from what is referred to as neoliberal globalization that focus upon global
civil society organizations as a countervailing force, and those that focus on reform
within the framework of a system of nation-states. The article will then conclude with a
discussion of the prospects of the current period being one of post-globalization, marked
by a decline in various indicators of global interconnectedness, whether as a result of the
reconfiguring of the world into relatively discrete and competing political–economic
Flew 21

blocs (a new age of empires), or the rise of competing populisms within nation-states,
and an increasingly protectionist global system.
I conclude that the extent of global interconnectedness is now advanced to a point
where a retreat to competing national populisms is highly unlikely. At the same time, the
current perceived crisis of globalization, and the rise of populist movements, marks a
return of the significance of domestic political forces to the shaping of globalization, as
well as a reminder of the continuing centrality of nation-states in the context of
globalization.

Requiem for the globalization paradigm?

The globalization paradigm has been highly influential in communication studies, and
the social sciences generally, over the past 30 years. It emerged with particular strength
in the 1990s at the intersection of diverse forces including: the dissolution of the Soviet
Union and the end of the Cold War; an accelerated period of growth of international
trade, investment and the global movement of people; the rise of the Internet and global
digital communication networks; and an increase in the number of international laws,
treaties and agreements. The growing number of transnational institutions, laws and
agreements gave legal and institutional form to what Manuel Castells (1996), termed as
the ‘global network society’, and were designed both to accelerate global commerce and
communication and to create collective action frameworks to tackle perceived global
problems including environmental degradation, climate change, terrorism and human
rights. To the extent that they gave rise to international civil society movements and
international governmental and non-governmental organizations (NGOs), they were a
key element in transforming the sovereignty of nation-states, so that effective political
power was increasingly ‘shared and bartered by diverse forces and agencies at national,
regional and international levels’ (Held et al., 1999: 80).
The globalization paradigm has been notoriously difficult to define. Sparks (2007)
noted that ‘there is no single theory of globalization that commands common assent’, (p.
126) while Ritzer (2007) observed that ‘everything in globalization studies seems to be
up-for-grabs’ (p. 4) and Held et al. (1999) pointed out that ‘no single coherent theory of
globalization exists’ (p. 436). Arguments around globalization have typically been tied
up with other conceptual claims, including the globalization of modernity (Giddens,
1990), the rise of a network society (Castells, 1996, 2009) and critiques of ‘methodologi-
cal nationalism’ (Beck, 2000, 2005) At its core, however, are propositions that globaliza-
tion ‘refers both to the compression of the world and the intensification of consciousness
of the world as a whole’ (Robertson, 1992: 8), involves ‘the intensification of worldwide
social relations which link distant localities’ (Giddens, 1990: 64) and ‘refers to the expan-
sion and intensification of social relations and consciousness across world-time and
world-space’ (Steger, 2009b: 15).
There has been considerable empirical evidence to support various claims made
around globalization, particularly in the economic sphere. The World Bank’s measure of
world trade as a percentage of global gross domestic product (GDP) shows a more or less
continuous increase from 30 per cent in 1973 to 41 per cent in 1992, to 60 per cent in
22 Global Media and Communication 16(1)

Figure 1. World trade as a percentage of global GDP, 1960–2018.

Source: World Bank (2019).

2008 (Figure 1). While there has been considerable volatility in the period since 2008,
the share of world trade as a percentage of global GDP had risen to 71 per cent in 2018.
Similarly, in the period since 1990, the total assets of foreign affiliates (i.e. the assets
of overseas branches of multinational companies) grew by 1793 per cent between 1990
and 2015, and foreign direct investment (FDI) grew by 1278 per cent from 1990 to 2015,
while global GDP grew by 337.5 per cent over the same period (Figure 2).
This seemingly relentless march towards greater global economic integration was
both aligned with, and facilitated by, the global Internet. The estimated number of
Internet users around the world went from 360 million in 2000 (5.6% of the world’s
population) to 2.4 billion (36.3% of the world’s population) by 2012, and 4.1 billion
(53% of the world’s population) by 2018, with the fastest rates of growth being in the
developing world (Flew, 2014a; We Are Social, 2018). Taking a longer-term perspective
in terms of global civil society, it is estimated that there were over 38,000 active interna-
tional non-governmental organizations (INGOs) in 2018, compared to less than 200 in
1900 (Union of International Associations (UIA), 2019).
But the argument for globalization was never simply an empirical one. From a critical
perspective, Wolfgang Streeck (2017) argued that

globalization as a discourse gave birth to a new pensée unique, a TINA (There Is No Alternative)
logic of political economy for which adaptation to the ‘demands’ of ‘international markets’ is
both good for everybody and the only possible policy anyway. (p. 23)
Flew 23

Figure 2. Indicators of foreign investment, assets and sales growth, 1990–2015.

Source: Flew (2018b), p. 109.

Anthony Giddens (2002) observed in his 2002 BBC Reith Lectures that ‘Globalization
is . . . a shift in our very life circumstances. It is the way we now live’ (p 19), while
Ulrich Beck (2000) argued that ‘globality is an unavoidable condition of human
intercourse at the close of the twentieth century’ (p. 15). The former UK Prime
Minister Tony Blair told the 2005 Labour Party conference in Brighton that debating
globalization was as pointless as debating ‘whether autumn should follow summer
. . . the character of this changing world is indifferent to tradition’ (quoted in
Goodhart, 2017: 7).
Globalization theorists gave considerable attention to communication and culture,
and their focus upon communication and culture as drivers of globalization in their own
right, rather than as an epiphenomenon of economic globalization, differentiated their
work from both world-systems theory and theories of media and cultural imperialism.
Giddens (2002) observed that ‘globalization is . . . influenced above all by developments
in systems of communication’ (p. 37). Castells (1996) proposed that the Internet and
digital networks were at the forefront of informational capitalism, where ‘the core pro-
cesses of knowledge generation, economic productivity, political/military power and
media communication are already deeply transformed by the informational paradigm,
and are connected to the global networks of wealth, power, and symbols working under
such a logic’ (p. 21).
24 Global Media and Communication 16(1)

The globalization of communication was not seen as an extension of cultural imperi-

alism for reasons related to both production and consumption. On the production side, it
is argued that alternative production centres challenge the dominance of ‘Global
Hollywood’, as new media capitals and media cities are developed that orient production
towards international markets, but on the basis of connectivity to particular geo-
linguistic regions rather than to the world as a whole (Curtin, 2009; Straubhaar, 2007).
Insofar as global media giants gained a foothold in national media cultures, they often
did so through glocalization, or revising their global branding and content strategies to
better align with national cultures and expectations (Robertson and White, 2007), rather
than imposing a singular Western template onto diverse regions and cultures.
With regard to consumption and cultural identity, the risk of globalization being syn-
onymous with cultural imperialism and an increasingly homogeneous global culture was
seen as negated by the role played by global media and communication flows in promot-
ing ‘the growth of alternative frames of collective identity’ (Scholte, 2005: 232), particu-
larly cosmopolitan and non-territorial identities not tied to nation-states and national
cultures. John Tomlinson (2003) argued that ‘globalization, far from destroying it, has
been perhaps the most significant force in creating and proliferating cultural identity’
(p. 269). Large-scale movements of people, and the increasingly multicultural nature of
many nations, have promoted cultural hybridity, or the mixing of cultures, races, lan-
guages and identities, which in turn de-nationalizes cultural identity, as argued by Jan
Nederveen Pieterse (2015):

Globalization or the trend of growing worldwide interconnectedness has been accompanied by

several clashing notions of cultural difference. The awareness of the world ‘becoming smaller’
and cultural difference receding coincides with a growing sensitivity to cultural difference . . .
Yet it is interesting to note how the notion of cultural difference itself has changed form. It used
to take the form of national differences, as in familiar discussions of national character or
identity. Now different forms of difference have come to the foreground, such as gender and
identity politics, ethnic and religious movements, minority rights, and indigenous peoples.
(pp. 41–42)

For authors such as Ulrich Beck (2000, 2005), David Held (1997, 2016), Jurgen
Habermas (2002) and Manuel Castells (2008), such developments pointed in the direc-
tion of increasingly cosmopolitan and ‘post-national’ cultural and social identities as a
necessary precondition for the transformation of political culture towards forms of global
civil society, global governance and cosmopolitan democracy that could transcend
nationalism and the nation-state.
In retrospect, the most obvious weaknesses of the globalization paradigm lay in its
conception of the nation-state as a declining institution. The various arguments that the
nation-state had been ‘diminished’ (Cable, 1995), ‘hollowed out’ (Strange, 1995), was
experiencing ‘declining sovereignty’ (Hardt and Negri, 2000) and becoming ‘just a node
(however important) of a particular network’ (Castells, 2009: 19) misunderstood the rela-
tionship both between nation-states and international institutions, and between nation-
states and economic globalizations. With regard to international governance, Hirst et al.
(2009) made the point that the nation-state did not emerge in a historical vacuum: the
Flew 25

sovereignty of states emerged in the context of a system of states – sometimes referred

to as the Westphalian system, after the 1648 Treaty of Westphalia, signed at the end of
the Thirty Years’ War in Europe – and territorial sovereignty has always been contingent
upon its recognition by other nation-states. The proliferation of international agreements
in the 20th and 21st centuries, and of multilateral institutions responsible for managing
such agreements, enables an architecture of international governance to emerge, but the
capacity of such institutions to act effectively and to have legitimacy in doing so remains
contingent upon the participation and support of the nation-states that are signatories to
such agreements. Hirst et al. (2009) referred to this as the process of ‘suturing’, or the
stitching together of diverse institutions and agreements into a common framework,
arguing that ‘the nation-state is central to this process of “suturing”: the policies and
practices of states in distributing power upwards to the international level and down-
wards to subnational agencies are the ties that will hold the system of governance
together’ (p. 316).
Implicit in the ‘declining state’ thesis is an underlying assumption about the nation-
state and the national economy being broadly coterminous, and that globalization weak-
ened the capacity of an activist state to regulate capital, on the basis of capital becoming
increasingly internationally mobile and corporations becoming increasingly transna-
tional. The sociologist Daniel Bell (1987) referred to this as ‘the nation-state . . . becom-
ing too small for the big problems of life, and too big for the small problems of life’
(p. 14). However, the nation-state has not been shrinking in size. Across 13 OECD
(Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development) nations in the period
between 1980 and 2009, the average share of government spending as a percentage of
GDP rose from 43.3 per cent in 1980 to 47.7 per cent in 2009, with only three of the
countries surveyed – Sweden, Belgium and Great Britain – seeing the share fall over that
period, and in all cases the share was about 50 per cent of GDP prior to 1980 (Flew,
2014b).
There is also an element of the ‘fallacy of linearity’ in the assumption that nation-
states are associated with predominantly national economies, meaning that economic
globalization inevitably means that capital now operates beyond the national scale. The
question of whether corporations retain or transcend their national base as they become
multinational has occurred since the debate between Robin Murray and Bill Warren in
New Left Review in the early 1970s (see Flew, 2018b: 156–157), and economic geogra-
phers have come down firmly on the side of arguing that most multinational corporations
are best thought of as national corporations with international operations rather than as
truly global corporations (Dicken, 2007). Weiss (1997, 2010) has critiqued the notion of
the ‘powerless state’ in the face of globalization, arguing that it ignores the question of
differential state capacities to respond proactively to such challenges and the manner in
which some nation-states have actively promoted globalization in order to strengthen the
capacities of ‘their’ national corporations and other institutions in international markets.
Following Mann’s (1997) observation that ‘though the capitalist economy is now signifi-
cantly global, its globalism is ‘impure’, a combination of both the transnational and the
inter-national’ (p. 489), Weiss makes the point that globalization has enabling as well as
constraining dimensions for nation-states. For example, China’s accession to the World
Trade Organization (WTO) in 2001 did not cede China’s sovereignty to the WTO, but
26 Global Media and Communication 16(1)

rather promoted internal restructuring of the Chinese economy to promote greater export
competitiveness, as well as locate China within the decision-making frameworks of mul-
tilateral governance.
Just as claims about the decline of the nation-state in an age of globalization are
overstated, so too have been claims about the decline of national cultures and identities.
Authors such as Appadurai (1990, 1996), Scholte (2005) and Tomlinson, (2003, 2007)
are right to point to a connection between the spread of global media and cultural forms
and the growth of non-territorial forms of cultural identity. This refers to attachments
and affiliations based on age, class, disability, gender, race, sexual orientation or other
aspects of ascribed behaviour or a common sense of belonging. The global Internet also
provides new ways in which awareness of such identities can be developed and shaped,
as well as new networks of affiliation, solidarity and struggle. The difficulty is that this
is presented as being paralleled by a decline of territorial identities, where a relationship
to culture is defined in terms of a relationship – current or prior – to a defined territory
or place. As with nation-states and globalization, the evidence is considerably more
complex.
Globalization theorists draw attention to the challenges that are presented by increas-
ingly multicultural societies for unitary notions of national culture and identity, and the
need to pluralize such conceptions in order to enable greater inclusion. Governments
have been required to respond to the growing pluralization of ‘ways of life’ within
nations by demonstrating active support for a plurality of cultures within cultural institu-
tions, including those of the media (Bennett, 1998). But there is a need to not overstate
the degree to which populations have left the boundaries of nation-states, or that mass
migration is historically unprecedented. Castles and Miller (2003) have pointed out that,
in proportional terms, mass voluntary migration in the period from 1815 to 1914 was
greater than that in the period from 1945 to 2000. United Nations (UN) data reveal that
213 million people were migrants in 2010, meaning that international migrants are about
3 per cent of the world’s population (Berg and Besharov, 2016). This is not a figure that
has varied greatly over recent years, staying within a 2–3 per cent band since the 1960s.
It is therefore clear that the vast majority of the world’s population remains in the coun-
tries in which they were born. Moreover, about one-third of total migration is South–
North migration, which has been the predominant focus of theories of cultural hybridity,
and over half of the world’s migrants are in 10 countries. These include OECD countries
such as the United States, Germany, UK, France, Canada and Spain, but also countries
such as the Russian Federation, India, Saudi Arabia and Ukraine (Berg and Besharov,
2016: 58). In the latter cases, and in many other countries where migrants constitute a
large percentage of the national population, such as Singapore or the Gulf States, there is
little preparedness on the part of governments to redefine national identity in order to
accommodate migrants as full cultural citizens, rather than as highly contingent guest
workers.
The conceptual problem with the cultural hybridity paradigm is that it presents the
question of cultural identity in the contemporary age – sometimes referred to as ‘post-
modern identities’ (Bauman, 1996) – as essentially an open one for all peoples. This is
what Mathews (2000) has referred to as the ‘cultural supermarket’ conception of identity,
where the global market offers us an infinite array of possibilities to shape and form
Flew 27

cultural identities. An obvious question here is how available are these multiple identities
of the ‘cultural supermarket’ to people around the globe. Mathews (2000) makes the
obvious point that ‘while some people in our globalizing world have the freedom to
choose, many more do not’ (p. 179). There is also, again, a curious absence of the state’s
role in the construction of identities, even though nation-states continue to invest heavily
in the institutions, ceremonies, rituals, and so on, through which cultural identities are
conferred. Indeed, with the growing investment in cultural diplomacy and the use of
media to project ‘soft power’ internationally, there is growing investment in projecting
national cultural identities internationally as well as within territories.
A proliferation of identities in the context of cultural globalization can therefore be
consistent with the institutionalization of forms of identity through the cultural practices
of nation-states, entailing fixity as well as openness, and nation-states can respond in a
variety of ways to such challenges to ‘traditional’ conceptions of national culture and
identity. Mann (1997) makes the point that while global communication networks
strengthen the capacity of social movement identities to be constructed on a transnational
basis, the forms of social regulation that are demanded by such movements are over-
whelmingly enacted on a national basis: the extension of such rights across nation-states
typically works on the basis of an emulation effect (e.g. legalization of same-sex mar-
riages in one country strengthens the case for change in another), rather than the imposi-
tion of international laws onto nation-states.

Neo-globalization
It is important to note at this point that globalization has always been accompanied by a
multilayered critique, and that the nature of globalization and preferred frameworks of
world order and international governance are highly contested. From the successful cam-
paign against the Multilateral Agreement on Investment in 1997 and the 1999 protests
against the first WTO Ministerial Conference in Seattle (the ‘Battle of Seattle’) through
to a range of subsequent protests at meetings of multilateral entities and forums such as
Group of Eight (G8) and Group of Twenty (G20) summits, meetings of the WEF, the
International Monetary Fund (IMF) and others, there have long been vigorous protests
and organized movements that have challenged the institutions, ideologies and dis-
courses associated with the dominant models of globalization (Brecher, 2012; Dawkins,
2003; Graeber, 2002; Hardt, 2002; Kahn and Kellner, 2007; Kingsnorth, 2003; Steger,
2009a, 2009b).
Such movements have been opposed to what they have variously termed ‘neoliberal
globalization’, ‘corporate globalization’ and ‘globalization from above’, as promoting
economic exploitation in the ‘Global South’, worsening economic and social inequali-
ties, being undemocratic and entrenching elite dominance on a global scale, undermining
local cultures and economies, and worsening environmental degradation (see, e.g.
Dawkins, 2003; Kiely, 2005: 166–176). Elements of their critique have been shared by
those who have been close to the leading multilateral institutions, such as the former
chief economist of the World Bank, Joseph Stiglitz, who wrote in 2002 about Globalization
and Its Discontents (Stiglitz, 2002). The alternative approaches proposed have variously
been referred to as ‘anti-corporate globalization’ (Kingsnorth, 2003; Starr, 2000), ‘justice
28 Global Media and Communication 16(1)

globalism’ (Steger, 2009a), ‘globalization from below’ (Brecher et al., 2000; Falk, 2004),
‘alter-globalization’ (Pleyers, 2010), global democracy (Dawkins, 2003; Smith, 2008)
and anti-capitalism (Sklair, 2002; Tormey, 2004). Among the many fora in which such
alternatives have been debated, perhaps the most significant has been the World Social
Forum (WSF), which first convened in 2001 in Porto Alegre, Brazil, as a ‘counter-sum-
mit’ (Kahn and Kellner, 2007: 664) to the WEF, adopting the slogan ‘Another World is
Possible’ (Hardt, 2002; Munck, 2007; Smith, 2008).
An important distinction needs to be made between critics of globalization who argue
from a populist, nationalist or protectionist standpoint, and those who adopt the stand-
point of what Held and McGrew (2007: 171) termed ‘critical globalism’. Graeber (2002)
argued that activists protesting globalization in its current forms were in fact more inter-
nationalist than the defenders of multilateral institutions, as

activists have been trying to draw attention to the fact that the neoliberal vision of ‘globalization’
is pretty much limited to the movement of capital and commodities, and actually increases
barriers against the free flow of people, information and ideas. (pp. 64–65)

Kiely (2005) observed that activist movements had differentiated themselves from
right-wing anti-globalization by ‘a more explicit commitment to global solidarity rather
than national protectionism . . . [and] the growth of campaigns in solidarity with
oppressed minorities and asylum seekers, and therefore against immigration controls’
(pp. 178–179). The group associated with what we term as neo-globalization is thus
associated with projects for ‘the reform and transformation of actually existing globali-
zation’, which ‘build upon the reform of existing infrastructures of global governance
and civil society [and] seek the democratic regulation of globalization in order to
address its more malignant structural and distributional consequences’ (Held and
McGrew, 2007: 170–171).
One important manifestation of neo-globalization has been around the rise of global
civil society. The term ‘civil society’ does not have a universally agreed meaning, but
generally refers to ‘that substratum of civil arrangements and institutions upon which
any stable democratic polity rests’, and to ‘a social sphere, differentiated from the state,
the private world of the family, and the operation of the market’ (Holton, 2005: 133).
Mary Kaldor (2003) has observed that global civil society can be defined in a relatively
limited sense, such as a commitment to the rule of law – most notably humanitarian and
human rights law – at a global level, backed up by international treaties and institutions,
or recognition of NGOs as a third sector alongside states and corporations. It can also
take a more expansive and activist form as promoting ‘globalization from below’ and a
global public sphere through which transnational advocacy networks and social move-
ments become more interconnected through participation in, and at times resistance to,
institutions and networks of global governance. Critical to this capacity is the formation
of what Manuel Castells (2008) termed a global public sphere, where these actors can
‘harness the power of the world’s public opinion through global media and Internet net-
works . . . [for] broadening political participation on a global scale, by inducing a fruit-
ful, synergistic connection between the government-based international institutions and
the global civil society’ (p. 90). Global civil society is therefore about ‘“civilizing” or
Flew 29

democratizing globalization, about the process through with groups, movements and
individuals can demand a global rule of law, global justice and global empowerment’
(Kaldor, 2003: 12).
Holton (2005) has observed that the duality between highly expansive and normative
conceptions of civil society, and its more specific association with NGOs, produces a
conceptual slippage in claims about its wider significance. At its most expansive, it is
associated with definitions of ‘globalization from below’ that incorporate ‘all those
aspects of global developments below and beyond the state and international political
institutions’ (Kaldor, 2003: 9), or what John Keane (2003) referred to as ‘a vast, dynamic
biosphere [that] comprises a bewildering variety of interacting habitats and species:
INGOs, voluntary groups, businesses, civic initiatives, social movements, protest organi-
zations, whole nations, ethnic and linguistic borders, pyramids and networks’ ( p. 18). At
the more pragmatic institutional level, it is typically taken to refer to NGOs, and particu-
larly INGOs. Held (2004) identifies the ‘leading actors of global civil society’ as ‘non-
governmental organizations and transnational advocacy networks . . . playing a role in
various domains of global governance’ (p. 88), and McGrew (2002) observes that ‘global
governance . . . constitutes the key arena within which the interests of both states and the
agencies of civil society are articulated and reconciled in the process of global policy
formation’ (p. 279).
The conceptual slippage matters at two levels. It is not apparent, for instance, that
global mobility equates with the adoption of cosmopolitan identities, or with the disap-
pearance of nationalism. Many migrant communities adopt transnational identities, iden-
tifying with both their homeland and their country of settlement, which is not a territorially
bound national identity in the traditional sense, but is also not a cosmopolitan form of
identity. Insofar as it refers to support for emancipatory values such as democratization
and the guarantee of human rights, as deduced from World Values Surveys conducted
since the late 1990s (Welzel, 2013), the case can be made that these emancipatory goals
are primarily projected upon the nation-states within which those surveyed are a part of.
Indeed, cosmopolitanism has in recent times been associated with elitism, and disregard
for one’s fellow citizens. The danger noted by Castells (1996) that ‘elites are cosmopoli-
tan; people are local. The space of power is projected throughout the world, while peo-
ple’s life and experience is rooted in places, in their culture’ (p. 415) has been echoed in
more recent times in anti-globalization rhetoric about unaccountable cosmopolitan elites.
One example, from a politician not necessarily regarded as a populist, is former UK
Prime Minister Theresa May’s statement to the 2016 Conservative Party Conference that
‘if you believe you’re a citizen of the world, you’re a citizen of nowhere. You don’t
understand what the very word “citizenship” means’ (May, 2016).
An important critique of the dichotomy between ‘globalization from above’ and ‘glo-
balization from below’ has been made by Peña and Davies (2014) in their revisionist
account of the evolution of the WSF. They question the extent to which it functioned
primarily as a forum for anti-capitalist social movements on a global scale, and noted the
extent to which its development was tied up with the shift of the Brazilian Workers’ Party
(PT) from an oppositional social movement-based grouping to becoming a party of gov-
ernment in 2003. Many of the tensions they identify in the WSF, such as the relationship
between an NGO-based grouping that reaches out to Western-based foundations and
30 Global Media and Communication 16(1)

‘progressive’ elements of business, and a social movement-based grouping demanding

more radical alternatives to global capitalism, are rooted in the coalition-building politics
of the PT over this period and the complexities of the Brazilian state. Their analysis seeks
to challenge what they refer to as ‘a liberal stereotype that frames “the South” as the
home of plural grassroots movements, independent civil society and counter-hegemonic
political projects – a characterisation all too common in existing work on global civil
society’ (Peña and Davies, 2014: 275).
There is little doubt that many of the causes that have been associated with global civil
society movements, such as the rights of migrants and the undocumented, human rights,
the need for action on climate change, and addressing global poverty and inequality
remain very important. Global civil society movements, NGOs and transnational social
movements have played a critical role in forcing such issues onto the agenda of the
global polity. Moreover, they have maintained a critique of the prevailing liberal
approaches to globalization, and the international institutions and forms of global gov-
ernance that have either facilitated or failed to adequately address global problems, that
continue to have moral and ethical force. What is in dispute, however, is the claim that
this has seen a movement of the global system in the direction of what Robert Gilpin
(2001) termed as the new medievalism, where

[t]he concept of national sovereignty . . . is breaking down because of both internal and external
developments; states are fragmenting into sub-states as a result of ethnic and regional conflicts
and, at the same time, are being eclipsed by rising non-state and super-state actors such as
multinational firms, international organizations, and especially, nongovernmental organizations.
(pp. 390–391)

Reform of the global system along the lines envisaged by neo-globalization cannot
rest simply upon institutions of global governance or a vaguely defined global civil
society.1 Rather, as Dani Rodrik (2014) has concluded,

The nation state lives, and even if not entirely well, remains essentially the only game in town.
The quest for global governance is a fool’s errand, both because national governments are
unlikely to cede significant control to transnational institutions and because harmonizing rules
would not benefit societies with diverse needs and preferences. (p. 154)

Post-globalization?
It has become commonplace to observe the rise of populism in the 2010s as part of a
backlash against the policies of the past 30 years in Western liberal democracies, and the
perceived bipartisanship of the established political parties, and political and economic
elites generally (including media elites), around economic liberalism and globalization.
Populism is variously presented, both by its friends and its enemies, as the new wave of
electoral politics in liberal democracies (Bannon, 2018), the harbinger of a new ‘illiberal
international’ (Lloyd, 2018), nothing more than a convenient cloak for bigotry and ill-
informed resentment against economic and social progress (Kenny, 2018), and as provid-
ing the signposts for a revival of the left as the centrist politics of the ‘Third Way’ fall into
Flew 31

disrepute (Rubin, 2018). A notoriously difficult term to define, the general tenor of popu-
list politics that ‘the people’ are being neglected by unaccountable elites, and that dra-
matic action is required to turn around this iniquitous state of affairs, is reinforced by the
perception that globalization has been associated with rising economic inequalities,
social dislocation, and accelerated cultural and demographic change that has seen a sig-
nificant proportion of the population ‘left behind’ and, in Arlie Hochschild’s (2016)
words, ‘strangers in their own land’. While the global elites gathered at the WEF in
Davos warned about the dangers of populism, their very presence in Davos provided
populists with a powerful symbol of what is presented as a ‘globalist’ conspiracy against
the ‘common people’. Steve Bannon (2018), the former Trump campaign manager and
now a self-proclaimed thought leader of the new national populism, refers to ‘people on
both the “left” and the “right” feel[ing] that they have been the punchline of a long-run-
ning joke by the Party of Davos’.
Populist leaders have come to power in many countries in the world, although there
may be as many populisms as there are leaders. Leaders as diverse as Vladimir Putin in
Russia, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in Turkey, Rodrigo Duterte in the Philippines, Jair
Bolsonaro in Brazil and Viktor Orbán in Hungary have been variously identified as pop-
ulists, even when they differ on substantive policy questions. In Europe, new political
parties that have been identified as populist now attract about 25 per cent of votes in
elections in European states, compared to about 5–7 per cent in the 1990s (Lewis et al.,
2018), pointing to their capacity to draw support away from the long-established parties
of the centre-right and centre-left. In their 31-nation study of the rise of such parties,
Inglehart and Norris (2016) attributed this rise to a mix of economic factors, such as
stagnant real wages and the perceived economic insecurity of the ‘left behinds’, and
cultural factors, such as a backlash against multiculturalism, cosmopolitanism and cul-
tural pluralism. Eatwell and Goodwin (2018) observe that populism is characteristically
linked to nationalism, and they attribute the rise of national populism to what they term
as the ‘Four Ds’:

1. Distrust of political elites, anger at corruption and perceived exclusion from the
institutions of liberal democracy;
2. Deprivation in the face of rising economic inequalities, stagnant real wages, job
insecurity and declining social provisions;
3. Destruction – real or perceived – of national cultures and traditions, value sys-
tems and authority structures, and historically embedded ‘ways of life’;
4. Dealignment of citizens as voters from the major political parties, and from the
class and other societal cleavages associated with those parties.

Goodwin (2018) summarizes the appeal of national populism, and the leaders and
political parties within which it has become associated, in these terms:

Each national populist party has its own local particularities but there are common themes. In
the aggregate, national populists oppose or reject liberal globalisation, mass immigration and
the consensus politics of recent times. They promise instead to give voice to those who feel that
they have been neglected, if not held in contempt, by increasingly distant elites.
32 Global Media and Communication 16(1)

Following Mudde and Kaltwasser (2017), we can differentiate right-populism and

left-populism on the basis of the latter being largely based around a distinction between
‘the elites’ and ‘the people’, but with ‘the people’ understood in a pluralistic sense,
whereas right-populism typically triangulates between elites, the people and ‘others’
(such as ethnic, racial, religious or sexual minorities), who are counter-posed to a
‘national people’ with its own defining history, culture and identity.
Nationalism is a common thread of contemporary populism, and global elites are
frequently characterized as its other. But nationalist sentiments are by no means unique
to populists, and it remains the case that the number of nation-states in the world contin-
ues to grow, and many significant political struggles today are around national identity
and the rights to a territorially defined nation-state: the cases of Palestine, the Catalan
independence movement in Spain and the movement for an independent Scotland are
three such cases that come readily to mind. Stuart Hall’s (1993) observation that nation-
alism ‘is not only not a spent force; it isn’t necessarily a reactionary or progressive force,
politically’ (p. 355, author’s emphasis) comes to mind when thinking about contempo-
rary national populism. Advocates of left-populism, such as Chantal Mouffe (2018),
argue that the left needs to accept that democratic struggle is necessarily founded at the
level of the nation-state, at least in the first instance:

The hegemonic struggle to recover democracy needs to start at the level of the nation state that,
despite having lost many of its prerogatives, is still one of the crucial spaces for the exercise of
democracy and popular sovereignty. It is at the national level that the question of radicalising
democracy must first be posed. This is where a collective will to resist the post-democratic
effects of neoliberal globalization should be constructed. (p. 71)

There are two potential scenarios whereby the rise of national populism is associated
not only with what The Economist (2019) has termed ‘slowbalisation’, or the continua-
tion of global integration but at a slower rate than in the 1990s and 2000s, but to a rever-
sal of the globalization trajectory and the onset of a ‘post-global’ era. One is the
proposition that the major global powers may break up into a series or territorially or
linguistically based ‘empires’. Updating Samuel Huntington’s ‘Clash of Civilizations’
thesis (Huntington, 1993), this proposition is that the end of globalist ideologies is the
portent of a new era of competing civilization-states, pursuing realist foreign policies and
mercantilist economic policies. In the English-speaking world, it is influential among
those proposing an ‘Anglosphere’ of the English-speaking nations (CANZUK) in the
wake of the UK’s withdrawal from the EU or the revival of the British Commonwealth
under an ‘Empire 2.0’ agreement (Bell, 2017). Comparable observations can be found
with the likes of Steve Bannon, as well as the Russian philosopher and political advisor
Aleksandr Dugin, who has spoken of a ‘Eurasia Union’ centred around Russia, as a geo-
strategic counterpoint to perceived US-led liberalism.
In their broader ambitions, such scenarios are almost certainly implausible. The extent
of global economic interdependence, and the interconnectedness through digital media
technologies, make the prospect of economic autarky almost inconceivable. It is also
notable that some see such alliances being forged around free trade and others around
Flew 33

protectionism. But insofar as such ideas have influence – and there are pockets of influ-
ence in the Trump administration in the United States, among the pro-Brexit wing of the
UK Conservative Party, in Vladimir Putin’s inner circle in Russia – there are two areas
where they could have an impact on globalization trends. The first is in trade with China,
and the prospect of a trade war leading to a ‘New Cold War’ between the United States
and its allies with China. The second is within the EU, with the consolidation of a group-
ing of populist and nationalist parties, as has been flagged by leaders such as the Italian
Prime Minster Mario Salvini. Such a scenario would most likely impact upon the free-
dom of journalists, whose capacity to resist those leaders who refer to them as ‘enemies
of the people’ and purveyors of ‘fake news’ hinges in part upon the commitment to lib-
eral–democratic values such as freedom of speech and freedom of the press in Western
democracies.
A second scenario that is more plausible is that we are entering into an era of compet-
ing populisms in the political sphere. Authors such as Mouffe (2018) have observed that
a left-populist economic programme is potentially quite popular with voters, who have
come to see tax cuts to corporations and high-income earners, privatization of public
assets and international trade agreements that lead to relocation of jobs offshore as
inimical to their interests. The discussion of populism has tended to focus on the emer-
gence of new parties, but it can be readily associated with shifts within the established
political parties, as seen with the rise of Trump in the US Republican Party, the signifi-
cant support for Bernie Sanders in the 2016 and 2020 US Democratic Party primaries,
and the leadership of long-time left campaigner Jeremy Corbyn of the UK Labour Party
from 2015 to the party’s landslide electoral defeat in 2019. Underpinning the prospect
of centre-left parties shifting to the left is discontent with the status quo among their
membership base, the role that the Internet and social media can play as campaigning
and fundraising tools, and the fragmentation of news media, meaning that the ‘gate-
keeper’ function of mass media outlets is not as significant as it once was in endorsing
political consensus and the perceived views of the ‘median voter’ (Thompson, 2018).
Centre-left parties also need to be concerned about being electorally outflanked on their
left, as happened with the displacement by SYRIZA (Coalition of the Radical Left) of
the social-democratic Panhellenic Socialist Organization (PASOK) in Greece, and the
rise of the Greens and the commensurate decline in votes for the Social Democrats in
the Netherlands and Germany.
As with neo-globalization campaigners in civil society movements, left-populists are
not necessarily opposed to globalization. They support many of the developments asso-
ciated with global interconnectedness, such as the capacity of the Internet to enable com-
munication and interaction beyond national boundaries, and societies that are increasingly
diverse and multicultural. But they have long viewed international trade and investment
agreements as anti-democratic, and adversely affecting working people and those on
lower incomes.2 It is highly likely that future multilateral trade and investment agree-
ments will be subject to closer scrutiny by domestic political entities than has hitherto
been the case since the 1990s. Beyond the specifics of global trade and investment,
national governments could slow globalization trends in other ways. The growing pres-
sure to apply new forms of regulation to digital technology giants, in the wake of many
public hearings and inquiries pointing to their failure to exercise their power over digital
34 Global Media and Communication 16(1)

communication platforms in a socially responsible manner, is likely to act as a catalyst to

new forms of nation-state regulation (Flew, 2018a).

Conclusion
It has been argued in this article that the influence of the globalization paradigm in global
communication studies, and in the social sciences generally, is in decline. This is partly
because it has consistently underestimated the continuing significance of nation-states
and their institutions, particularly in managing and brokering the various forms of politi-
cal, economic and cultural interconnectedness associated with global interdependence. It
has also overestimated the degree to which national cultures and territorially derived
forms of identity have continued to have resonance, even as there is greater scope for
non-territorial forms of identity to be adopted and to enable political, social and cultural
change through the formation of transnational networks and movements. Some of the
weaknesses of the globalization paradigm become apparent in arguments for new forms
of globalization (neo-globalization), particularly around the notion that global civil soci-
ety has emerged as a third force alongside nation-states and transnational corporations,
which can transform global governance in a more cosmopolitan direction.
There has also been consideration of how significant the rise of various national pop-
ulisms has been, and may be in the future, in reversing the overall trajectory of globaliza-
tion: this has been referred to as post-globalization. The extent of economic interdependence
and global interconnectedness makes a large-scale return to protectionism and economic
autarky unlikely, and the prospect of new ‘civilization states’ or a ‘new age of empires’
emerging appears limited. A more likely scenario is that the reassertion of domestic politi-
cal demands into international arrangements will see greater scrutiny of the institutional
forms that have enabled globalization, such as international trade and investment agree-
ments, and that there will be a greater preparedness on the part of nation-states to regulate
global companies, particularly in the fields of digital media and communication.
A final point concerns the future of global media and communication studies. Prior to
the 1990s, this field was conceived as international communication and dominated by
modernization theorists who advocated for the role of communication technologies in eco-
nomic development, and critics who argued from a political economy perspective that such
initiatives constituted new forms of media and cultural imperialism. The proposition that it
was specifically concerned with studying ‘the global’ took root in the 1990s, with the rise
of the globalization paradigm. If it is the case that we remain within a global system of
states, and have not entered a post-Westphalian world – noting that the rise of populism is
in part a reaction to global elites and their perceived disconnectedness from nation-states
– then national policy concerns are going to become more prominent in the field. Whether
this in turn sees a shift away from analysing global phenomena, and a turn towards com-
parative international studies, will be a trend to watch for in the coming years.

Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this
article.
Flew 35

ORCID iD
Terry Flew https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4485-9338

Notes
1. If reform of multilateral institutions and global governance is likely to be mediated through
nation-states, then it is highly likely that China will be a major force behind such proposed
changes. The formation of the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) group-
ing was triggered by demands for reform of the existing global financial institutions, and
BRICS summits have consistently called for global governance frameworks that recognize
the changes in the global economic order that have occurred in the 21st century. Under the
leadership of Xi Jinping, China’s stance has been to strongly promote globalization as a core
economic principle (Xi, 2017), while calling for reform of the architecture of global gov-
ernance and establishing parallel institutions, such as the Asian Infrastructure Investment
Bank. For many non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and civil society advocates, China
remains a problematic partner to engage with on multiple fronts, particularly human rights,
and the political and military stance of Western governments towards China has become more
hostile since 2018. On the BRICS, see Thussu and Nordenstreng (2015).
2. The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD, 2011) has observed
that inequality rose in almost all OECD nations in the 2000s, although it rejects the proposi-
tion that globalization has been a primary causal factor. Similarly, Piketty (2014) has argued
that rising inequalities have become a structural feature of contemporary capitalism in the
absence of strong redistributive measures by nation-states, but rejects arguments that it is
primarily a consequence of globalization. By contrast, Rodrik (2018) has argued that inter-
national trade agreements have had distributional impacts that have fallen disproportionately
upon the less well-off, particularly as the focus has shifted from free trade in goods towards
enhancing the international mobility of capital and services, and as the relative weakening
of the power of trade unions has meant that compensatory measures for those affected by
changes to trade policy are less likely to be applied. For one economist’s view that Trump is
right to see globalization as disadvantaging the working classes in developed economies, see
Elliott (2018).

References
Appadurai A (1990) Disjuncture and difference in the global cultural economy. In: Featherstone M
(ed.) Global Culture: Nationalism, Globalization and Modernity. London: Sage, pp.295–310.
Appadurai A (1996) Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization. Minneapolis, MI:
University of Minnesota Press.
Bannon S (2018) Orban and Salvini are redefining democracy in Europe, 9 June. Available at:
https://www.spectator.co.uk/2018/06/orban-and-salvini-are-redefining-democracy-in-
europe/ (accessed 29 January 2019).
Bauman Z (1996) From pilgrim to tourist: Or a short history of identity. In: Hall S and du Gay P
(eds) Questions of Cultural Identity. London: Sage, pp.18–36.
Beck U (2000) What Is Globalization? Cambridge: Polity Press.
Beck U (2005) Power in the Global Age: A New Global Political Economy. Malden, MA: Polity
Press.
Bell D (1987) The world and the United States in 2013. Daedalus 116(3): 1–31.
Bell D (2017) The Anglosphere: New enthusiasm for an old dream. Prospect, 16 January.
Available at: https://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/magazine/anglosphere-old-dream-brexit-
role-in-the-world (accessed 29 January 2019).
36 Global Media and Communication 16(1)

Bennett T (1998) Culture: A Reformer’s Science. Sydney, NSW, Australia: Allen & Unwin.
Berg E and Besharov D (2016) Patterns of global migration. In: Besharov D and Lopez M (eds)
Adjusting to a World in Motion: Trends in Global Migration and Migration Policy. Oxford:
Oxford University Press, pp.57–76.
Brecher J (2012) De-centering globalization from below. Social Policy 42(2): 30–34.
Brecher J, Costello T and Smith B (2000) Globalization from Below. Boston, MA: South End
Press.
Cable V (1995) The diminished nation-state: A study in the loss of economic power. Daedalus
124: 23–53.
Castells M (1996) The Rise of the Network Society – The Information Age: Economy, Society and
Culture. Malden, MA: Blackwell.
Castells M (2008) The new public sphere: Global civil society, communication networks, and
global governance. The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science
616(1): 78–93.
Castells M (2009) Communication Power. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Castles S and Miller M (2003) The Age of Migration, 3rd edn. London: Macmillan.
Curtin M (2009) Thinking globally: From media imperialism to media capital. In: Holt J and
Perren A (eds) Media Industries: History, Theory, Method. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell,
pp.108–119.
Dawkins K (2003) Global Governance: The Battle Over Planetary Power. New York: Seven
Stories Press.
Dicken P (2007) Global Shift, 5th edn. London: Sage.
Eatwell R and Goodwin M (2018) National Populism: The Revolt Against Liberal Democracy.
London: Penguin.
Elliott L (2018) The truth is that Trump has a point about globalisation, 26 September. Available
at: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/sep/26/donald-trump-globalisation-
nation-state (accessed 29 January 2019).
Falk R (2004) The Declining World Order: America’s Imperial Geopolitics. New York: Routledge.
Flew T (2014a) New Media: An Introduction, 4th edn. Melbourne, VIC, Australia: Oxford
University Press.
Flew T (2014b) Six theories of neoliberalism. Thesis Eleven 124(1): 49–71.
Flew T (2018a) Platforms on trial. Intermedia 46(2): 18–23.
Flew T (2018b) Understanding Global Media. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Giddens A (1990) The Consequences of Modernity. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Giddens A (2002) Runaway World: How Globalization is Reshaping Our Lives. London: Profile.
Gilpin R (2001) The Political Economy of International Relations. Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press.
Goodhart D (2017) The Road to Somewhere: The Populist Revolt and the Future of Politics.
London: Hurst Publishers.
Goodwin M (2018) Why national populism is here to stay. New Statesman, 3 October. Available
at: https://www.newstatesman.com/2018/10/why-national-populism-here-stay (accessed 6
January 2020).
Graeber D (2002) The new anarchists. New Left Review 11: 61–73.
Habermas J (2002) The Postnational Constellation: Political Essays. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Hall S (1993) Culture, community, nation. Cultural Studies 7(3): 349–363.
Hardt M (2002) Porto Alegre: Today’s Bandung? New Left Review 12: 112–118.
Hardt M and Negri A (2000) Empire. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Held D (1997) Globalization and cosmopolitan democracy. Peace Review 9(3): 309–314.
Flew 37

Held D (2004) Global Covenant: The Social Democratic Alternative to the Washington Consensus.
Cambridge: Polity Press.
Held D (2016) Elements of a theory of global governance. Philosophy & Social Criticism 42(9):
837–846.
Held D and McGrew A (2007) Globalization/Anti-Globalization, 2nd edn. Cambridge: Polity
Press.
Held D, McGrew A, Goldblatt D, et al. (1999) Global Transformations: Politics, Economics and
Culture. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Hirst P, Thompson G and Bromley S (2009) Globalization in Question, 3rd edn. Cambridge: Polity
Press.
Hochschild A (2016) Strangers in Their Own Land. New York: New Press.
Holton RJ (2005) Making Globalisation. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Huntington S (1993) The clash of civilizations? Foreign Affairs 72(3): 22–49.
Ignatius A (2017) The truth about globalization. Harvard Business Review 95(4). Available at:
https://hbr.org/2017/07/the-truth-about-globalization (accessed 29 January 2019).
Inglehart R and Norris P (2016) Trump, Brexit, and the Rise of Populism: Economic Have-Nots
and Cultural Backlash. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Kennedy School, John FR. Kennedy
School of Government.
Kahn R and Kellner D (2007) Resisting globalization. In: Ritzer G (ed.) The Blackwell Companion
to Globalization. Malden, MA: Blackwell, pp.662–674.
Kaldor M (2003) Global Civil Society: An Answer to War. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Keane J (2003) Global Civil Society? Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Kenny C (2018) The bogus backlash to globalization, 9 November. Available at: https://www.
foreignaffairs.com/articles/united-states/2018-11-09/bogus-backlash-globalization?cid=int-
lea&pgtype=hpg (accessed 6 Janaury 2020).
Kiely R (2005) The Clash of Globalisations: Neo-Liberalism, The Third Way and Anti-
Globalisation. Leiden: Brill.
Kingsnorth P (2003) One No, Many Yeses: A Journey to the Heart of the Global Resistance
Movement. London: Free Press.
Lewis P, Clarke S, Barr C, et al. (2018) Revealed: One in four Europeans vote populist. The
Guardian, 20 November. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/world/ng-interac-
tive/2018/nov/20/revealed-one-in-four-europeans-vote-populist (accessed 4 February 2019).
Lloyd J (2018) The new illiberal international, 18 July. Available at: https://www.newstatesman.
com/world/2018/07/new-illiberal-international (accessed 29 January 2019).
McGrew A (2002) Liberal internationalism. In: Held D and McGrew A (eds) Governing
Globalisation. Cambridge: Polity Press, pp.267–289.
Mann M (1997) Has globalization ended the rise and rise of the nation-state? Review of International
Political Economy 4(3): 472–496.
Mathews G (2000) Global Culture/Individual Identity: Searching for Home in the Cultural
Supermarket. London: Routledge.
May T (2016) Theresa May’s conference speech in full, 5 October. Available at: https://www.tel-
egraph.co.uk/news/2016/10/05/theresa-mays-conference-speech-in-full/ (accessed 18 March
2018).
Mouffe C (2018) For a Left Populism. London: Verso.
Mudde C and Kaltwasser C (2017) Populism: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
Munck R (2007) Globalization and Contestation: The Great New Counter-Movement. London:
Routledge.
OECD (2011) Divided We Stand: Why Inequality Keeps Rising. Paris: OECD.
38 Global Media and Communication 16(1)

Peña A and Davies T (2014) Globalisation from above? Corporate social responsibility, the work-
ers’ party and the origins of the world social forum. New Political Economy 19(2): 258–281.
Pieterse JN (2015) Globalization and Culture: Cultural Melange, 3rd edn. Lanham, MD: Rowman
& Littlefield.
Piketty T (2014) Capital in the Twenty-First Century. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Pleyers G (2010) Alter-Globalization: Becoming Actors in the Global Age. Cambridge: Polity
Press.
Ritzer G (2007) Introduction. In: Ritzer G (ed.) The Blackwell Companion to Globalization.
Malden, MA: Blackwell, pp.1–12.
Robertson R (1992) Globalization: Social Theory and Global Culture. London: Sage.
Robertson R and White K (2007) What is globalization? In: Ritzer G (ed.) The Blackwell
Companion to Globalization. Malden, MA: Blackwell, pp.54–66.
Rodrik D (2014) The Globalization Paradox. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Rodrik D (2018) Populism and the economics of globalization. Journal of International Business
Policy 1(1–2): 12–33.
Rubin C (2018) The new socialists, 24 August. Available at: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/24/
opinion/sunday/what-socialism-looks-like-in-2018.html (accessed 29 January 2019).
Scholte J (2005) Globalization: A Critical Introduction, 2nd edn. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Schwab K (2018) Globalization 4.0 – What does it mean? 5 November Available at: https://www.
weforum.org/agenda/2018/11/globalization-4-what-does-it-mean-how-it-will-benefit-every-
one/ (accessed 29 January 2019).
Sklair L (2002) Globalization: Capitalism and Its Alternatives, 3rd edn. New York: Oxford
University Press.
Smith J (2008) Social Movements for Global Democracy. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins
University Press.
Sparks C (2007) Globalization, Development, and the Mass Media. London: Sage.
Starr A (2000) Naming the Enemy: Anti-Corporate Movements Confront Globalization. London:
Zed Books.
Steger M (2009a) Globalisms: The Great Ideological Struggle of the Twenty-First Century, 2nd
edn. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield.
Steger M (2009b) Globalization: A Very Short Introduction, 2nd edn. New York: Oxford
University Press.
Stiglitz J (2002) Globalization and Its Discontents. New York: W. W. Norton & Co.
Strange S (1995) The defective state. Daedalus 124: 55–74.
Straubhaar J (2007) World Television: From Global to Local. Los Angeles, CA: Sage.
Streeck W (2017) How Will Capitalism End? Essays on a Failing System. London: Verso.
Tett G (2017) Davos man has no clothes. Foreign Policy, 16 January. Available at: http://foreign-
policy.com/2017/01/16/davos-man-has-no-clothes-globalization/ (accessed 18 March 2018).
The Economist (2017) Who will lose when globalisation retreats? 2 March. Available at: https://
www.economist.com/blogs/buttonwood/2017/03/post-2016-world-order-0 (accessed 18 March
2018).
The Economist (2019) Snowbalisation, 26 January. Available at: https://www.economist.com/
briefing/2019/01/24/globalisation-has-faltered (accessed 29 January 2019).
Thompson D (2018) The media’s post-advertising future is also its past, 31 January. Available
at: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2018/12/post-advertising-future-media/5789
17/?fbclid=IwAR2gSKu6jijYc8DqSxdSY5u7pEI_GyrsFV3Q8iBvdJ5MUir2-k8ldPE9kIA
(accessed 29 January 2019).
Thussu D and Nordenstreng K (2015) Contextualizing the BRICS media. In: Nordenstreng K and
Thussu D (eds) Mapping BRICS Media. London: Routledge, pp.1–22.
Flew 39

Tomlinson J (2003) Globalization and cultural identity. In: Held D and McGrew A (eds) The
Global Transformations Reader. Cambridge: Polity Press, pp.269–277.
Tomlinson J (2007) Cultural globalization. In: Ritzer G (ed.) The Blackwell Companion to
Globalization. Malden, MA: Blackwell, pp.352–366.
Tormey S (2004) Anti-Capitalism: A Beginner’s Guide. Oxford: One World.
Union of International Associations (UIA) (2019) The Yearbook of International Organizations.
Available at: https://uia.org/yearbook (accessed 29 January 2019).
We Are Social (2018) Digital in 2018: World’s Internet users pass the 4 billion mark, 30 January.
Available at: https://wearesocial.com/blog/2018/01/global-digital-report-2018 (accessed 29
January 2019).
Weiss L (1997) Globalization and the myth of the powerless state. New Left Review 225: 3–27.
Weiss L (2010) The state in the economy: Neoliberal or neoactivist? In: Morgan G, Campbell J,
Crouch C, et al. (eds) The Oxford Handbook of Comparative Institutional Analysis. Oxford:
Oxford University Press.
Welzel C (2013) Freedom Rising: Human Empowerment and the Quest for Emancipation.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
World Bank (2019) Trade (% of GDP) – Data. Available at: https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/
NE.TRD.GNFS.ZS (accessed 29 January 2019).
Xi J (2017) Opening plenary address to the World Economic Forum 2017, 17 January. Available
at: https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2017/01/full-text-of-xi-jinping-keynote-at-the-world-
economic-forum/. (accessed 29 January 2019).

Author biography
Terry Flew is a professor of Communication and Creative Industries in the Creative Industries
Faculty at the Queensland University of Technology (QUT), Brisbane, Australia, and a Researcher
with the Digital Media Research Centre in the QUT School of Communication. He is the author of
12 books (three edited), including Understanding Global Media, Politics, Media and Democracy
in Australia, Media Economics and Global Creative Industries. He was the President of the
International Communications Association (ICA) from 2019-20, and a Fellow of the Australian
Academy of the Humanities. He currently leads an Australian Research Council Discovery Project
on Digital Platform Governance and the Future of Media Policy.