Everybody talks about globalism. But what exactly hides behind that word? Where does it come from? And what is it supposed to mean? I keep asking myself these questions. Trying to make sense of the absurdities confronting us. The more I look into it, the more familiar it becomes.
Globalism is the colonialism of the 21st century.
The postwar promise of Never Again was soon hijacked by a cartel of multinational corporations and unelected technocrats. What began as a pursuit of peace and economic cooperation has evolved into Imperialism 2.0, sucking sovereign nation-states dry. Old-fashioned colonialism conquered countries, stole their resources and shipped the profits home. Same scenario. Different tools.
The economy has become the weapon. Debt through the IMF. Regulation through Brussels. Market monopolies through multinational corporations. Countries are no longer occupied by force. Legislative powers are simply transferred to supranational institutions. No armies required. Where missionaries once set out to erase local cultures, the global marketing machine now goes to work on national identities and traditions. The citizen is no longer supposed to be a person rooted in soil, tradition and history. Above all, he must be molded into a consumer.
Mass immigration and the demographic change that follows serve the interests of those who benefit from weaker national cohesion. A fragmented population generates less organised resistance, while the transfer of authority continues. A population fractured, atomized and preoccupied with internal friction is far easier to manipulate. While communities clash over integration and identity on the ground, the corporate oligarchs quietly continue their plunder.
And then there is morality. The multinationals have turned it into their mantra. Criticism of the Brussels bureaucracy, open-border dogmas or the stranglehold of megalomaniac investment funds is instantly dismissed as anti-European, hateful or nationalist. The language of peace and humanitarianism has become the ultimate marketing tool for economic exploitation and social engineering.
The architecture of power did not appear overnight. It took the better part of a century to turn classical hegemony into technocratic globalism. Military occupation gave way to bureaucratic control. Empires changed appearance. Political authority moved from national parliaments to international institutions. And somewhere along the way, the democratic nation-state found itself trapped in a machinery operating far above its head. No conquest. No occupation. Instead, a gradual transfer of power. Three distinct phases brought us here.
The entrance of the High Priests came between 1919 and 1921. The first great experiment came with the League of Nations, established after the First World War. The promise was peace. Collective security. Never again another European bloodbath. Behind the noble language stood a new political architecture: an international organisation with authority reaching beyond national borders. The American Senate refused to join. It saw membership as a threat to American sovereignty. The experiment failed. But the idea lived to die another day.
Between 1920 and 1921, influential policy institutions emerged, including Chatham House and the Council on Foreign Relations. The arrival of the modern High Priests: bankers, industrialists and academics. Men who didn't need to win elections to influence governments. Behind closed doors, they developed visions of an increasingly interconnected world economy. Through networks of political and institutional influence, their doctrines found their way into government policy, diplomacy and public debate. The new order would not be built by soldiers marching across borders. It would be built by committees.
The New Empire began to take shape in 1944 – 1945. The Second World War provided the next great opportunity. At Bretton Woods in 1944, the foundations were laid for a new international financial order: the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. A year later came the United Nations. The financial machinery was in place. The political framework followed. The old colonial powers had ruled their territories through governors, trading companies and military garrisons. The new international order came equipped with a different set of instruments: loans, conditions, agreements, institutions and rules. No governors. No garrisons. The machinery of power had simply been reinvented.
The age of the bureaucrats. National governments increasingly resemble local administrative offices of an international system. Politicians have become glorified middle managers. Elections change the personnel, but the machinery stays in place. The public votes for a new driver. The road has already been paved. Behind the democratic theatre stand investment funds, multinational corporations, international institutions and networks of unelected officials. Davos and Brussels have become symbols of a political order in which power increasingly operates beyond the reach of national electorates. The language remains reassuring. Cooperation. Stability. Sustainability. Progress. The wheels keep turning.
Hubris. The architects of this system overlooked one inconvenient detail: human nature. Their fundamental illusion was that human beings could be reshaped through mass media, marketing and engineered economic dependence. That national identity, history, culture and belonging could gradually be dissolved into a borderless consumer society. No roots. No flag. No past. Just purchasing power.
But the desire to belong to a recognisable place, a people and a history runs deeper than any hollow marketing phrase. A nation-state has biological, cultural and spiritual dimensions. Not something easily erased by a spreadsheet from Brussels or Davos. And here the machinery begins to contradict itself. The further power moves away from the people, the more elaborate the procedures needed to justify it. The more regulation is imposed, the more resistance it evokes. The more the system promises freedom, the more control it seems to impose.
Digital currencies. Digital identity. Expanding bureaucracies. Ever-tighter regulation. The machine desperately tightens its grip as it feels control slipping away. And the spell begins to break. The audience is growing tired of the performance. The actors keep delivering their lines, the committees keep meeting, the experts keep explaining.
A century after the first grand experiment, the machinery of global governance finds itself confronting the very thing it tried to administer out of existence: the human being. And the perfectly organised machine is threatening to disappear up its own bureaucratic backside.