Globalism

Globalism has multiple meanings. In political science, it is used to describe "attempts to understand all of the interconnections of the modern world—and to highlight patterns that underlie (and explain) them". While primarily associated with world-systems, it can be used to describe other global trends. The concept of globalism is also classically used to focus on ideologies of globalization (the subjective meanings) instead of its processes (the objective practices); in this sense, "globalism" is to globalization what "nationalism" is to nationalization.

Globalism as a concept dates from the 1940s. In the 21st century, the term "the globalists" was popularized by the US conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, and used interchangeably with the concepts of a New World Order and the deep state. The term is now frequently used as a pejorative by far-right movements and conspiracy theorists. This term is now heavily associated with antisemitism, as antisemites frequently appropriate the term "globalist" to refer to Jews.

Paul James defines globalism

at least in its more specific use ... as the dominant ideology and subjectivity associated with different historically formations of global extension. The definition thus implies that there were pre-modern or traditional forms of globalism and globalization long before the driving force of capitalism sought to colonize every corner of the globe, for example, going back to the Roman Empire in the second century AD, and perhaps to the Greeks of the fifth-century BC.

Early ideas of globalism were also expressed by Adam Smith through his views on the role of commodities in distinguishing the civilized from the barbarous, which was deeply embedded in the ideology of empires.

German Enlightenment writer Christoph Martin Wieland explored concepts of cosmopolitanism in his 1788 work The Secret of the Order of Cosmopolitans, which presented ideas about transcending national boundaries through enlightened thinking.

Manfred Steger distinguishes among different globalisms, such as justice globalism, jihad globalism, and market globalism. Market globalism includes the ideology of neoliberalism. In some hands, the reduction of globalism to the single ideology of market globalism and neoliberalism has led to confusion. In his 2005 book The Collapse of Globalism and the Reinvention of the World, Canadian philosopher John Ralston Saul treated globalism as coterminous with neoliberalism and neoliberal globalization. He argued that, far from being an inevitable force, globalization is already breaking up into contradictory pieces and that citizens are reasserting their national interests in both positive and destructive ways.

Political scientists Joseph Nye and Robert Keohane, major thinkers of liberal institutionalism as a new international relations theory, generalized the term to argue that globalism refers to any description and explanation of a world which is characterized by networks of connections that span multi-continental distances, while globalization refers to the increase or decline in the degree of globalism. The term is used in a specific and narrow way to describe a position in the debate about the historical character of globalization, such as whether globalization is unprecedented or not. For example, this use of the term originated in, and continues to be used, in academic debates about the economic, social, and cultural developments that is described as globalization.