Nationalism, internationalism, globalism

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The imagined community

One of the most challenging intellectual exercises is questioning what we take for granted. The difficulty lies in the fact that, of course, we do not know for certain just what it is we take for granted. For example, that the world is organized into nations that, in turn, generally form states. The trap here lies in two central issues. On the one hand, there is just how recent the modern concept of a nation is. In many ways, it is one of the many innovations that grew out of the French Revolution and, as such, in terms of the long sweep of history, it is an idea as novel as industrial modernity.¹²One can, of course, point out that the word “nation” had existed long before. For example, the patriarch Abraham appears in the Bible as the “Father of Nations.” This is undeniably true, but we must bear in mind that words change their meaning over time. For example, the current meaning of the word “tyrant” is far removed from its original definition in ancient Greece, where it was used merely to describe a king who had not inherited his throne. The other issue at play is even more curious: while we think of empires as artificial constructs that naturally go through cycles of rise and fall, we generally conceptualize nations as purely organic entities whose existence seems almost eternal. Yet the historical record shows that modern nations also have a considerable artificial element and, like empires, are still human constructs. A striking example is Italy. In 1814, Prince Metternich, the great diplomat of the Austrian Empire, declared quite unabashedly that “Italy is merely a geographical expression.” And, at the time he said it, the truth is that Metternich was right. Since the fall of the Western Roman Empire in the fifth century, the Italian peninsula had been divided into kingdoms, principalities, duchies, city-states, and was even split in two by the Papal States. But less than fifty years after Metternich's remark, a unified Kingdom of Italy had been founded, and today Italians make up one of the world's most influential nations: its economy has ranked among the ten largest for decades, it is one of the most visited tourist destinations, its diaspora has distinguished itself in every country that has welcomed it, its film industry has produced some of the greatest cinematic gems, and its cuisine is among the most popular on the planet.

How do we explain the construction of such a nation? Well, the key word in that question is “construction.” Like empires, nations are built, but in this case the bricks are the minds and hearts of their members. Unlike other human organizations based on ties of blood alone (such as tribes) or on merely political ties (such as fiefdoms), modern nations emerged as a pervasive political identity that not only encompasses an entire human group in a uniform way, but also requires its members to identify positively with it in order to sustain itself. Unlike empires, where different subjects are subjects in different ways and where membership in the state becomes more diffuse as one moves away from the imperial center and toward the frontier, in a nation all its members are fellow nationals to the same degree, regardless of where they are located, and their loyalty to this political construct is expected and frequently demanded.

One of the most famous and useful definitions of the modern nation comes from Benedict Anderson, who described it as an imagined political community. In this sense, imagined should not be understood as “false,” but rather as existing in people's minds. This is based on the fact that, even though the members of a single nation will never all know one another, they nonetheless subjectively consider themselves part of the same human group. In this way, a nation can exist even without a political reality to support it, as is the case with the 30 million members of the Kurdish nation, who have no state of their own.

In turn, Anderson adds, nations are imagined in three main ways. First, they are imagined as limited; that is, as having a finite number of members that sets them apart from other nations. Second, they are considered sovereign, since the modern concept of the nation was developed in contrast to—and as a reflection of—the absolute monarchies of the Ancien Régime. And finally, they are imagined as a community because they constitute a horizontal identity of comradeship that, in theory, transcends other inequalities or distinctions within society. Regardless of differences of class, region, or ideology, all members of a nation are members of that nation in equal measure.

This last point is where the concept's incredible political power lies. With the modern concept of the nation-state, the idea takes root for the first time in history that tens or hundreds of millions of people all have the same, equal stake in the fate of the political unit they inhabit. We find the first concrete demonstration of this in the midst of the French Revolutionary Wars: four years after the revolution, in mid-1793, France was fighting a war against a growing coalition of European powers, marked by numerous defeats, desertion, economic crisis, and internal rebellions. At the moment of greatest danger, the glorification of patriotism and the mobilization of the entire nation for the war effort saved the revolution in its most critical hour and enabled it to vie for European hegemony for the next twenty years. Thus, the leadership discovered one of the most powerful weapons of the last few centuries: the politics of mass mobilization.

When the French people (an entity that, in a sense, was taking shape in that very act) were told that the nation itself was in danger and that it was every young man's duty to take up arms in its defense, the concept of the levée en masse emerged: the mass military conscription of the civilian population. Through it, the French Revolution maintained a virtually inexhaustible source of new soldiers for decades, even as the very nature of war changed: the era of so-called “cabinet wars” (1648-1789), a limited, regulated, professionalized form of armed conflict, was left behind, and the concept of total war emerged, in which the country's entire population and its resources end up being considered part of the active war effort. This latter form would reach its fullest expression in the two world wars.

Despite the end of the French revolutionary adventure with Napoleon's defeat at Waterloo in 1814, the immense political power of the concept of nation had been demonstrated for the world to see, and within a couple of generations it would become increasingly popular. From then on, a series of institutions, practices, and traditions developed on which the construction of that nation and others was based, such as public education, compulsory military service, academic history, and folklore. The purpose of all these practices is rooted in the need to create a shared identity that can be mobilized politically. And they are terribly effective.

A Persian King of Kings or the emperor of China would never have wondered whether their governments held a special place in the hearts of peasants in some remote village. In many ways, and for millennia, politics was something that passed ordinary people by. But nationalism transformed the very meaning of what we understand by politics. Thanks to nationalism and other experiences that followed in the 20th century, passive acceptance of the established order is no longer enough to sustain a political project: citizens must participate in it actively and enthusiastically.

Argentine civic nationalism

Broadly speaking, however, it is possible to identify two major alternative models of nationalism: ethnic nationalisms, in which identity is based primarily on blood ties that bind a particular human group together, and civic nationalisms, in which national identity is based on a set of shared values. Unlike ethnic nationalism, which takes a more exclusionary and rigid view of belonging to a nation, civic nationalism is not only inclusive but potentially universal. As heirs, in a sense, to the ancient Roman model of integration, civic nationalisms present themselves as a cultural and moral space, potentially open to anyone who wishes to join.

This was the model Argentina adopted early on when, after gaining independence, it had to navigate the complex process of building a nation-state out of the territories and population inherited from the Viceroyalty of the Río de la Plata. The new civic nationalism that replaced the old imperial ties can be seen in the very preamble to the Constitution, which declares its purpose to be to “form a national union, establish justice, consolidate domestic peace, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty for ourselves [the people of the Argentine Nation], for our posterity, and for all men of the world who wish to dwell on Argentine soil.”

This founding framework gave the young republic a remarkable capacity to adapt, which was soon put to the test by the mass arrival of immigrants at the end of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Faced with the immense challenge of incorporating millions of people from different political, ethnic, linguistic, and religious worlds, Argentine nationalism demonstrated phenomenal resilience and managed to forge a strong, inclusive, multicultural national identity, with a remarkably low level of conflict. Despite the turbulent nature of Argentine history in the twentieth century, our main conflicts were political and economic rather than ethnic or religious. In this sense, episodes such as the actions of the Argentine Patriotic League during the Tragic Week of 1919 are regrettable but exceptional within our country's multicultural history.

Nationalism, socialism, internationalism

Although nationalism's mobilizing power opened up a new realm of political possibilities, it was also a destructive force for traditional multicultural societies such as Ottoman Turkey, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Romanov Russia, and Qing dynasty China. By the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century, the principle that each nation could aspire to form its own sovereign state was a centrifugal force that threatened to tear these continental empires apart, while the homogenization demanded by the national project made the transition from empire to republic an extremely complex challenge for their rulers.

Because the rise of nationalism coincided with the other great revolution of the era, the Industrial Revolution, governments were able to apply their new technologies to the construction of more immersive collective identities. Inventions such as the telegraph, the railway, industrial printing, radio, cinema, and television served to unify nations in a standardized way, not only physically and geographically, but also mentally and intellectually. This expansion of state power, for better and for worse, resulted in a style of government with a much greater presence in people's everyday lives, and the regulation of private life reached an unprecedented scale.

In turn, throughout the nineteenth century and the early twentieth century, one frequently sees a symbiotic relationship between the national interest and the interests of newly emerging domestic capital. Thanks to the new wave of imperial expansion made possible by industrialization, dozens of cases can be found of national governments plunging into military adventures in defense of or on behalf of private interests, such as the Opium Wars, the colonization of India, and gunboat diplomacy.¹³A diplomatic practice used by European powers in the nineteenth century, in which displays of naval power were employed to obtain concessions from non-industrialized countries, commonly to collect sovereign debts.

But although nationalism was an important revolutionary driving force in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (whether we are talking about the French Revolution, Spanish America's independence, or the process of decolonization in Asia and Africa), its complex and adaptable nature can also make it a significant pillar of the status quo. Seeing how nationalism had been co-opted and instrumentalized to paper over social differences and injustices, various revolutionary currents, most notably Marxism, began to conceptualize it as a conservative force.

Putting forward a worldview that divided humanity into exploiters and exploited, Marxism advanced the principle that the world's working masses had more in common with one another than with the ruling classes of their respective countries. Thus, one of nationalism's main adversaries in the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century was internationalist socialism, which sought to replace national consciousness with class consciousness. From this perspective, the way to overcome the conflicts plaguing humanity would be for the workers of the world to unite, overthrowing their exploiters and dissolving borders, which they considered little more than artificial divisions.

The great trial by fire for these two antagonistic worldviews took place in the trenches of the First World War. Internationalist socialism's original hope that workers from different nations would see one another not as enemies but as brothers, and would refuse to kill one another in the name of exploiters from their own countries, was quickly crushed by the brutal appeal of total war. As never before in history, entire societies were mobilized physically and spiritually thanks to the new possibilities offered by industrial warfare.

However, the consequences of the First World War were complex and contradictory. On the one hand, the war enabled the emergence of numerous new nation-states, and its aftermath witnessed various ultranationalist movements such as Italian fascism, German Nazism, and Japanese imperialism. On the other hand, the conflict produced the world's first socialist country, the USSR, which presented itself as a new kind of civilization, with an alternative industrial modernity that would transcend national barriers in pursuit of a world revolution.

This landscape, in turn, was altered in the medium term by another world war that transformed the nature of the geopolitical chessboard. The socialist project emerged from the conflict strengthened in many respects, and by mid-century it had a contiguous bloc stretching from East Germany to North Vietnam. However, the history of Marxism-Leninism also took a nationalist turn in its individual national projects. Despite the high levels of cooperation observable at certain times, most Marxist-Leninist governments ended up jealously guarding their national power, maintaining high levels of mutual distrust and repeatedly coming into conflict with one another. Indeed, time and again, the party cadres with the closest ties to communist parties in other countries were purged en masse: cadres accused of being pro-Soviet were purged in China and Yugoslavia; those accused of being pro-Chinese, in North Korea and Vietnam; pro-Vietnamese cadres, in Cambodia; and in Enver Hoxha's Albania, pro-Yugoslav, pro-Soviet, and pro-Chinese cadres were purged in succession over three decades.

Moreover, ironically, several of the wars fought between communist countries arose from causes that could be described as nationalist, such as border disputes and territorial claims. In 1969, at one of the most tense moments of the Cold War, the Soviet Union and the People's Republic of China, the two socialist giants, armed with nuclear weapons, fought a border war for months over a dispute about national boundaries, while the Cambodian–Vietnamese War arose from a Cambodian claim to a region along the lower Mekong River.

This nationalist turn on the part of the socialist bloc was counterbalanced by a certain internationalist effort on the part of the capitalist bloc, made possible by the process of globalization in the second half of the twentieth century. Thanks to the global economic system built by the U.S. to contain Soviet power, economies around the world outside the socialist system became more integrated than ever, and even former rivals such as France and Germany achieved previously unthinkable levels of cooperation within just a few years.

This forging of economic ties was also accompanied by an intellectual framework that emerged from the revival of the old tradition of liberal internationalism. Broadly speaking, the origins of this school of thought can be found in the so-called Republic of Letters of the eighteenth century, a transnational space for intellectual exchange among thinkers and philosophers from different corners of the European continent, united by shared ideological values.¹⁴This phenomenon took place within the European intellectual and cultural movement commonly known as the Enlightenment, which developed during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Building on the qualitative leaps of the Renaissance and the Scientific Revolution of earlier centuries, the Enlightenment sought a substantial transformation of European society, using rational thought, empirical evidence, education, legislation, and secularism as driving forces of human progress.

Although this early cosmopolitanism among Enlightenment elites was overshadowed by the rise of nationalism in the nineteenth century, the catastrophic consequences of the world wars prompted a renewed appreciation of liberal internationalism: first through an early, tentative experiment with the principles advanced by U.S. president Woodrow Wilson and the League of Nations, and then through a more robust iteration in the form of the United Nations. In contrast to the ruthless geopolitical competition of the past, liberal internationalism holds that diplomatic cooperation among countries and the construction of an international system of shared rules, transnational organizations, and international arbitration bodies are the fundamental pillars for building lasting world peace. Indeed, this spirit is clearly evident in the United Nations Charter, which explicitly states the organization's goals as maintaining peace, fostering friendly relations among nations based on respect for the principle of equality before the law, and seeking solutions to economic, social, cultural, and humanitarian problems through international cooperation.

Globalism

Amid the struggle between the Cold War's two great ideological blocs, a new phenomenon soon emerged: the non-aligned popular nationalism of the Global South. This category encompasses a group of governments in countries across Asia, Africa, and Latin America characterized by a developmentalist view of the economy, a secular approach to politics, respect for the institutional framework of liberal internationalism, an almost socialist conception of the State's role in society's well-being, rejection of the Cold War's bipolar structure, and a political project built on mass mobilization. Prominent figures in this group include Indonesia's independence leader Sukarno, the Indian National Congress governments of Jawaharlal Nehru and Indira Gandhi, Gamal Abdel Nasser's Arab nationalism, and General Juan Domingo Perón's Third Position.

Although these policies sought to remain outside the competition between superpowers, the dynamics of the Cold War repeatedly ended up internationalizing their own internal conflicts. Moreover, while these movements met very different fates, in the last quarter of the 20th century they all had to confront a new global phenomenon: the rise of neoliberalism and its project to transcend the foundations of liberal internationalism—in other words, globalism.

Despite its growing popularity in recent years, this term remains nebulous and has a multiplicity of possible meanings that need to be clarified. The main point to emphasize is that globalism is not synonymous with globalization. The latter is, according to Joseph Stiglitz, “the closer integration of the countries and peoples of the world which has been brought about by the enormous reduction of costs of transportation and communication, and the breaking down of artificial barriers to the flows of goods, services, capital, knowledge, and (to a lesser extent) people across borders”. Globalism, by contrast, is an intellectual framework within which the phenomenon of globalization is analyzed in various ways. However, unlike schools of thought with a defined body of texts and concepts, such as Marxism, globalism actually refers to a range of different categories, depending on whether the term is used in an academic, ideological, or political sense.

In a purely academic sense, we find definitions such as Joseph Nye's, which holds that globalism is merely an attempt to “describe and explain a world characterized by networks of connections that span multicontinental distances” and to “understand all the interconnections of the modern world and highlight the underlying patterns that explain them”.

In an ideological sense, globalism takes on qualitatively different connotations when globalization is no longer viewed as an economic phenomenon but as a goal and a good in itself. From this perspective, Manfred Steger has identified five general propositions that have underpinned much globalist discourse since the 1990s: globalization is about the liberalization and global integration of markets; globalization is inevitable and irreversible; globalization is controlled by no one; globalization benefits everyone; and globalization promotes democracy worldwide.

Finally, in a political sense, the terms globalism and globalist have been used increasingly pejoratively by their detractors, particularly the new libertarian right-wing movements that have grown in popularity over the past decade, but especially since the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020. According to an article published by the Cato Institute, one of the world's leading libertarian think-tanks, globalism is a programmatic position that purportedly seeks global governance through a top-down technocratic structure based on supranational organizations that undermine freedom, markets, sovereignty, and democracy. Globalism would thus seek to benefit a “global elite” at the expense of the ordinary citizen, by overregulating societies through institutions such as the OECD, the environmental agenda, the World Economic Forum, the European Union, and the UN.

To analyze the phenomenon of globalism, I will use the second definition mentioned here, that of ideological globalism, which avoids academic globalism's claims to objective neutrality without falling into the semi-conspiratorial view associated with the political use of globalism. As I mentioned in the previous chapter, the end of the Cold War ushered in the neoliberal ascendancy, whose initial optimism led it to envision a new utopia: an interconnected, prosperous, democratic, and multicultural world. These years of accelerating globalization gradually gave rise, in the world's major metropolises, to what could be described as a cosmopolitan bourgeoisie.

Broadly speaking, the people who make up this group tend to be urban, university-educated, multilingual professionals, middle-class or above, with one or more experiences abroad, who inhabit ethnically diverse and multicultural spaces united by a liberal ideological framework, generally center-left on social issues such as gender, sexual diversity, migration, or the environment, and center-right on economic or foreign policy issues. This cosmopolitan bourgeoisie has been the chief beneficiary of globalization and the main social group supporting it in academic, cultural, political, corporate, international, and nongovernmental circles.¹⁵A local example, fictional but archetypal, can be found in the 2016 film El ciudadano ilustre (The Distinguished Citizen). The plot follows the story of the acclaimed writer Daniel Mantovani, a cosmopolitan bourgeois played by Oscar Martínez, who confronts his plebeian origins when he returns, after decades away, to his hometown of Salas in Buenos Aires Province.

In aspirational terms, this is the group that has been the public face of the possibilities of a globalized world, forming communities of expats, or expatriates, around the world. In recent decades, this colloquial term has been used to distinguish people who move to other countries temporarily, by choice, and with certain professional qualifications and accumulated capital, setting them apart from migrant workers who move to other countries out of economic necessity and often permanently. The most extreme version of this is the phenomenon of the digital nomad, a term originally coined in a 1997 book of the same name. Drawing on a series of technological predictions that proved remarkably accurate, the book argues that after 10,000 years of sedentary life, the 21st century would finally allow human beings to free themselves from geographical constraints, work from anywhere, and lead a nomadic lifestyle, which, according to the authors, governments hate because nomads are “harder to tax and impossible to control”.

However, this cosmopolitan bourgeoisie, particularly in the United States and the European Union, progressively alienated the working classes of its own countries. The reason for this lies in the fact that globalization, while increasing humanity's overall prosperity, has also produced clear winners and losers.

A clear example of this is how globalization has negatively affected the working class in many of the most developed countries by triggering a wave of deindustrialization as transnational corporations relocated their operations to countries in the Global South.¹⁶An emblematic example can be found in the neoliberal policies of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, which were continued by progressive successors such as Bill Clinton and Tony Blair. In turn, these working classes, displaced from a rapidly declining manufacturing sector, had to reinvent themselves in a labor market that grew increasingly competitive owing to large waves of migration in the 1990s, 2000s, and 2010s. In many cases, this migration also substantially transformed the ethnocultural makeup, adding a layer of intercommunal tension to preexisting social problems.

Multicultural Europe (or the Procrustean bed)

In Europe's particular case, its increasingly multicultural reality presents a challenge in at least three dimensions.

On the one hand, the combination of mass immigration, the dismantling of the welfare state, and the globalization of industrial production led the working class in many countries, which had traditionally found a home in center-left parties (PSOE, Labour, PSdf), to begin turning toward more reactionary and xenophobic options; the most emblematic example of this was the Brexit referendum.

On the other hand, the multicultural model supported by neoliberal globalism had a clear ideological complement: the promotion of a package of shared liberal values, commonly understood as political correctness. To understand the attempt to synthesize these two contradictory values of neoliberalism (the celebration of diversity and the imposition of universal standards), it is worth recalling the ancient Greek myth of the bed of Procrustes. Procrustes was a demigod, the son of Poseidon, who, observing the traditional laws of hospitality, welcomed travelers who arrived at his rural home. As was customary, he offered them a bath, dinner, and a bed for the night. What set Procrustes apart, however, was that he would enter his guests' room while they slept to make sure the traveler's size matched that of the bed. If a guest's legs extended beyond the edge of the bed, Procrustes would cut them off to make them fit perfectly.

One of the many points that can be drawn from this legend concerns the exoticism of the foreign, particularly the way otherness is accepted insofar as it conforms to established preconceptions about it. In other words, the politically correct diversity that neoliberalism has developed is, at some level, deeply deceptive: different nationalities, ethnicities, and religions are accepted and even celebrated insofar as people of those backgrounds have also embraced neoliberalism’s political and social values. That is, difference is valued only so long as it is not disruptive and, at some level, is not really all that different. However, when communities within the European system retain their own identity-defining values, which are often non-liberal in nature, doubts arise about the viability of a globalist model being challenged on multiple fronts.

Finally, multiculturalism poses a major challenge to European nationalism. Although, as mentioned earlier, Europe was the cradle of the nation-state, the strand of nationalism that ultimately prevailed is ethnic nationalism. This concept of a nation united by blood is also particularist (in emphasizing the value of a group’s specific characteristics) and historicist (in legitimizing its existence through a shared historical continuity). However, all these characteristics that made ethnic nationalism a powerful force against the old imperial structures now appear increasingly fragile in the face of the reality of a multicultural, multiethnic, and globalized Europe.

The crisis of the European Union’s neoliberal model has seen a resurgence of reactionary nationalism in Europe, with examples such as France’s National Rally (formerly the National Front), Italy’s Northern League, and Alternative for Germany. Although each naturally has its own particular characteristics, they are generally united by their rejection both of immigration from outside Europe and of the European supranational system, which they hold responsible for it. These problems will only be exacerbated by the inevitable demographic collapse, which I will analyze in chapter 5.

At the same time, the first quarter of the 21st century witnessed the rise around the world of new nationalisms opposed to Western neoliberal globalism and championing their own civilizational traditions. This group includes phenomena such as Vladimir Putin’s idea of the Russian World, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s anti-secular Turkish nationalism, Narendra Modi’s Hindu nationalism, the beret revolution in the Sahel, Xi Jinping’s version of socialism with Chinese characteristics, which views the People’s Republic as yet another iteration of its millennia-old national culture, and the various national-popular movements of Latin America.

New Right-Wing Movements

Although these phenomena have posed a political and conceptual challenge to the post–Cold War neoliberal establishment, the greatest crises have emerged from within the system itself. Over the last decade, movements opposing globalism have emerged across the West, broadly understood. Although phenomena such as Brexit, Trump, and Javier Milei have apparent differences, they share a number of notable features.

First, they arise from the crises of neoliberalism and the inability of the political forces that spawned it to offer creative solutions. In the case of Brexit, the Conservative Party, which gave birth to British neoliberalism under Margaret Thatcher’s government (1979-1990), gave in to pressure to hold a referendum and was then unable to persuade its electorate to vote to remain in Europe. It then drifted for a decade without a clear direction before suffering one of the worst electoral defeats in its entire history in 2024 and witnessing the rise of the far-right Reform UK party (formerly known as the Brexit Party) as the country’s third-largest party by vote share, with around 15 % of the vote. In the United States, by the mid-2010s the Republican Party itself, which had ushered in the neoliberal era with Ronald Reagan’s presidency (1981-1989), had run out of answers to China’s rise, Russia’s challenge in Crimea, and the failure of its military adventures in the Middle East. Consequently, it was hollowed out from within by an outsider to both the party and politics in general, who remade it in his own image and likeness in record time. As for Argentina, although the experience of Alberto Fernández’s government (2019-2023) is often cited to explain Milei’s rise, in many ways Fernández does more to explain Peronism’s defeat than the libertarian victory. After the collapse of 2001 and the failed revival under Mauricio Macri’s government (2015-2019), Argentine neoliberalism went into the 2023 elections without a clear proposal and, following La Libertad Avanza’s victory, has seen its political identity diluted amid an increasingly nebulous political landscape.

Second, these new right-wing movements display an ontological rejection of every form of technocratic power, whether the professional state bureaucracy, the multilateral system, or academia. And it is through this rejection that they seek to cultivate popular legitimacy by opposing expertise presented as elitism; a particularly effective strategy in a post-pandemic political landscape, where traditional institutions of government, research, and planning face increasingly fierce attacks, regardless of their successes in managing the crisis.

Third, these new right-wing movements have developed complex and often contradictory relationships with nationalism. On the one hand, their anti-globalist stance has appealed to certain nationalist segments of the population, while their mobilizing rhetoric is compatible with a political sentiment grounded in mass participation. However, these governments’ outlandish, bombastic, and provocative style has often offended nationalist sensibilities, while the libertarian platform itself stands in structural contradiction to an essentially collective project such as the development of a nation.

Lastly, being anti-globalist does not make them anti-globalization. On the contrary, these governments have developed close ties with major representatives of transnational capital. Moreover, these new right-wing movements by no means dismiss the potential of international cooperation. Examples such as Trumpist ideologue Steve Bannon and his repeated attempts to strengthen a far-right movement on a global scale highlight the importance they attach to the tools of globalization.

The Collapse

However, this attempt to build an international far-right movement that is anti-globalist yet globalized will face, like the rest of humanity, the challenge of the current system’s collapse. As I mentioned in the previous chapter (and will explore in greater depth in the next), geopolitical dynamics appear to be rapidly driving the collapse of the current model of a globalized world economy underpinned by U.S. naval supremacy. In its place will come a reconfiguration of the balance of political, military, and productive power, with a plurality of great powers and their respective spheres of influence.

This “re-regionalization” of the global chessboard will present numerous challenges and opportunities for countries around the world. In the particular case of the Argentine Republic, this South American nation has numerous assets that could allow it to benefit from a new geopolitical landscape. On the one hand, the absence of a hegemonic superpower and the contraction of extraregional power would give Argentina greater room for diplomatic maneuver and thus allow it to avoid falling prey to spheres of influence. On the other hand, its location within South America, surrounded by countries with which it has much in common culturally, linguistically, and in terms of development, allows it to deepen a project of regional integration within a more favorable global context.

Finally, the end of this era of globalization and a global reordering will not spell an end to either intercontinental connections or migration. In this regard, the civic and inclusive nationalism on which an Argentine identity has been built represents one of the most geopolitically valuable tools the country possesses, as it would allow it to continue attracting and integrating people from different corners of the planet in a context in which the value of human capital will steadily rise amid population collapse.

This point is crucial, and will therefore be examined in the next two chapters. On the one hand, the unique synthesis of Argentine identity gives the country a distinctive flexibility in finding its place on a geopolitical chessboard that will be reconfigured through an interlocking system of alliances and rivalries far more complex than the current one. On the other, its ability to receive and successfully integrate large numbers of migrants is a key resource that will allow Argentina to survive the great demographic collapse of the mid-21st century.