Globalization, Democracy, and Open Communication: Can We Have All Three?

This article asks the questions: are the desires for globalization, democracy, and open communication mutually supportive, or are they contradictory? Can we get all three at the same time or does one of the triad have to be sacrificed to the other? The author suggests that there is an inherent contradiction between globalization of movement, communication, and markets and the nation-state; essentially, the contradiction is one between nation-states, globalization, and democracy. The globe is not as yet and perhaps cannot be the site of democratic forms of governance. In the aftermath of September 11, the dream of nonspatial communities where we could live in friendly comity turned out to be an illusion, for the Internet gave rise to communities, old and new, that were lodged in a new dimension of space beyond control or communication. Applying an historical approach to an analysis of the relationship between nation states, communication, and globalization, the author concludes that we are in some ways back where we started, trying to figure out how to live freely, democratically and globally while avoiding the carnage and repression that made, for all the achievements, the 20th century such an ambiguous period in human affairs.