How Global Are We?
BY Keren Rattenbach

 

Keren Rattenbach is a graduate student in the Master's in Media Studies program at the New School.

 

In answering the question posed in the title of my essay, I would like to consider the issue of global versus national identity as it is reflected in daily newspapers from around the world. Rather than approaching this topic objectively and discursively, I have tried to make it a creative think piece by actually putting together a prototype of a 'global' newspaper. The following remarks accompany the process of this creation.

As I was thinking of an interesting way to approach this, I was wondering about the definition of globalization as the notion of the world as a whole. The question that came to my mind was whether today’s world can really be defined as a global village?

Media are our main source of information. Daily newspapers are the traditional form in which we consume information about events happening in our country and around the world. However, we are limited to the information that is offered to us by the media. That brought up the idea of a global newspaper. A daily newspaper which offers content from the front pages of daily newspapers all over the world. The global newspaper can actually make one feel as if s/he is a citizen of a world and not be limited to the information offered by the local daily newspaper of their country.

The idea brought up the question; are we really as global as we think we are? Is there room for such a media form in today’s world or is the nation state still our dominant identity? The word "nation" comes from the Latin "nasci," meaning "to be born.” There are hardly any colonies left, therefore, most of the world’s population live in independent sovereign states. With rare exceptions, even exiles and refugees live in states, though not their own. It is easy to define what constitutes a state, the unit which has become the template for all new independent political entities since the late eighteenth century. It is a territory, preferably coherent and demarcated by frontier lines from its neighbors, within which all citizens come under the exclusive rule of the territorial government and the laws under which it operates.

Since the end of the nineteenth century, the residents of states have been identified with an "imagined community" bonded together by such things as language, culture, ethnicity etc. "A nation," said Abbe Sieyes "is the totality of individuals united by living under a common law and represented by the same legislative assembly."

Globalization puts in doubt the nation-state identity. It is the apparent integration of the world into a single economic space through the redistribution of labor and capital across the political boundaries of nation-states. It is often represented as an inevitable and irreversible phase of capitalism. Advocates of globalization base their arguments on the tenets of free-market neoclassical economic theory. The tendency to focus on technical and abstract economic processes denies the power relations at play at the same time as it renders invisible the forms and practices that disrupt the presumed order of globalization. The denial of power relations and globalization's differential effects on diverse social categories of people, differentiated by nation, class, gender, race, ethnicity, is not new.

During the twenty years since Edward Said framed debates about cultural identity and the construction of the other, there have been extraordinary worldwide political, economic, and social realignments, massive migrations, displacements of people and development of a seemingly borderless electronic communications network. At the same time, there have been intense reassertions of the particularities of cultural, ethnic, and religious identification.

To raise the issue of culture today is to position oneself at the crossroads of two forces, globalization and the persistence of national identity, that are both contradictory and intertwined. Culture can no longer be developed without a basic, existential, vital tension between the universal, the regional, the national and the local.

Although national contexts remain the base, it is increasingly hard to believe that the traditional concepts of identity, people and nation are permanent. Our societies have never experienced such a widespread break with traditions that have grown over centuries. But we must ask ourselves whether modern trends usually presented as possible threats to these traditions, including that of the nation-state, might not turn out to be favorable to the coexistence of diversity.

Fears that globalization is imposing a deadening cultural uniformity are as ubiquitous as Coca-Cola, McDonald's, and Mickey Mouse. Many people are afraid that local cultures and national identities are dissolving into an all-American consumerism. That cultural imperialism is said to impose American values as well as products which promote the commercial at the expense of the authentic. Market-driven globalization doesn't want diversity but the opposite of diversity. Its enemies are national habits, local brands, and distinctive regional tastes.

On the other hand, globalization is setting people free from the tyranny of geography. It not only increases individual freedom, but also revitalizes cultures and cultural artifacts through foreign influences, technologies and markets.
So is national identity dead? In my opinion it is not. People who speak the same language, were born and live near each other, face similar problems, have a common experience, and vote in the same elections still have plenty in common. For all our awareness of the world as a single place, we are not citizens of the world but citizens of a state. However, globalization will not be stopped, much less reversed .

Appadurai (1996) claims that nation-states are not likely to be the long term arbiters of the relationship between globality and modernity. He discusses the nation-states system as one in danger. He raises the question of what will be the substitute for this system which will assure the continuity of the civil democratic society.

The fact that territorial sovereignty is still the major goal of many large ethnic groups proves that the nation-state identity is still the main identity. However, “The wave of debates about multiculturalism that has spread through the US and Europe is surely testimony to the incapacity of states to prevent their minority populations from linking themselves to wider constituencies of religious or ethnic affiliation. These examples, and others, suggest that the era in which we could assume that viable public spheres were typically, exclusively or necessarily national could be at an end.” (Appadurai). Appadurai suggests that the postnational order may be a system of relations between heterogeneous units without the need for constraints of the nation form.

Hobsbawm, in his latest book on the subject, assures us that nationalism "is no longer a major vector of historical development," that it is of "declining historical significance.” Nationalism invities this kind of cognitive dissonance, not only among Marxists like Hobsbawm, who have a stake in the theory of the "withering away of the state" and of the nation – the "workers of the world" have no nation, but also among liberals and some conservatives. Liberals find it difficult to credit the fact, and the force, of nationalism because it violates some of their most cherished assumptions: that people are rational individuals with universal interests and aspirations; that nations are nothing more than an aggregate of individuals and that nationalism is irrational, parochial, and retrograde. A neo-liberal version of this doctrine has the nation-state being superseded by a "civil society" dominated by individuals, groups, and communities responsive to local and particular, rather than national, concerns.

Benedict Anderson identified the forms of print media as playing a key role in the creation of a diasporic public sphere. Technical communication allows more people to participate in the mediated world. In a world where media transform the information, they also represent identities. Daily newspapers are a form which produces local, national and global identities.
I tried to explore the global and national identities issue by examination of content on the front pages of 5 different daily newspapers from different nations: Israel, Spain, Greece, Japan and USA. I did a very brief quantitative survey in order to examine how much content of the front page is global news and how much of it is national. Here are the results:

 

Israel - Ma’ariv
Content on the front page:
Top 1/2 page: A woman who commited suicide jumped from the top floor of her building and killed a 7 month old baby.
Middle _: The Israeli-Palestinian conflict
Bottom _ divided to 3:
Gangs of teenagers in a south city acting violent
An integration against a Rabbi
Economic news
Summary: About _ of the front page of the daily newspaper are local news. The other _ deals with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict which is also local news but has a global meaning as well.

 

Spain – El Pais
Content on the front page:
55% of the front page is an article about March 11 attack used as a weapon by politicians.
10% - Prime Minister of Spain calls for a terrorism conference
10% - A case of violence against gays
10% - A case of a Neo-Nazi getting arrested
5% - The ties between Spain and the US
5% - National economy issues
5% - National economy issues related to the global market
Summary: Most of the front page is the article about March 11 attack in Madrid. Although Terrorism is a global problem, the article deals with a national aspect of it as the victims' family members blame politicians for using the case as a weapon.
The shorter articles deal with national matters, 2 of them are related to global issues but the point of view is local.

 

Greece – Kathimerini
Main article: Turkey and the occupation of Cyprus. The article talks about the EU’s approach to Turkey’s actions and the relation of this case to Greece.
Second main article: Economy matter: the Drachmas still flow around Greece.
Other articles:
Greece’s arm deals
A commentary article about the internet
Sport: Athletes who may have cheated in the Olympics
Briefs:
Stores shopping hours for Christmas
A local trial against building contractors
Transportation announcements
Weather
Local crimes

Summary: The main article does deal with an international matter however, it is about Turkey and Cyprus, both are countries which Greece has strong connections with and the case has an effect on Greece.
All the other articles deal with local matters. The article about Google is also in relation to Greece and its appearance on this search engine.

Japan – Japan Times
Japan’s front page is all local news. There is an article about the Princess’s marriage, an article about a disease that is spreading, the Christmas shopping and a scandal in transportation. The articles which have any relation to the world outside Japan are only related to the Asian world.

 

US – USA Today
The main article tells about a car bomb in Iraq's two holiest Shiite cities killing more than 60 people.
The second main article talks about Time Magazine and its choice of Bush as the person of 2004. One can actually find the ironic connection between the two articles.
Other articles:
Israel releasing 170 Palestinian prisoners as a gesture of goodwill
A baby kidnapping case
A decision regarding the national baseball league
More updates about Iraq

To conclude, as we see from the results, the nation-state identity is still dominant. All the newspapers deal mostly with local news or global news in relation to the local. In my opinion, it is too soon to “bury” the nation-state identity. One can have business all over the world, however, most likely there will only be one place where a person feels at home. I find our personal background to have a strong effect on who we are, and I think the nation is an integral part of it.

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