Ideologies of globalization

Taking issue with Michael Freeden's sceptical assessment that 'it is far too early to pronounce on globalism's status as an ideology', this article seeks to establish that globalism not only represents a set of political ideas and beliefs coherent enough to warrant the status of a new ideology, but also constitutes the dominant ideology of our time against which all of its challengers must define themselves. After drawing careful analytic distinctions between often-conflated terms involving the concept of 'globalization', the main section of this article relies on three criteria suggested by Freeden to assess the ideological maturity of globalism. It is proposed that its conceptual structure be disaggregated not merely into core, adjacent, and peripheral concepts, but¿perhaps more dynamically¿into a set of six core claims that play crucial semantic and political roles. With regard to semantics, this article argues that these claims absorb and rearrange bits and pieces of several established ideologies and integrate them with new concepts into a hybrid meaning structure of genuine novelty. Their political role consists chiefly in preserving and enhancing asymmetrical power structures that benefit particular social groups. The article ends with a short experimental 'thought exercise' designed to bring the insights gained from my critical analysis of globalism to bear on the necessary project of reclassifying conventional political belief systems