"Transnationalists" don't take immigration reform seriously

Transnationalism
Transnationalism
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The concept of transnationalism is focused on the heightened interconnectivity between people all around the world and the loosening of boundaries between countries. The nature of transnationalism has social, political and economic impacts that affect people all around the globe.

The concept of transnationalism has facilitated the flow of people, ideas and goods between regions. It has been greatly affected by the internet, telecommunications, immigration and most importantly globalization. Concepts like citizenship, nationalism and communitarianism are being changed and reexamined with this phenomenon of the modern age.

Transnationalism is often linked to internationalism but differs in the sense that internationalism proper refers to global co-operation between nation states, while transnationalism aims to global co-operation between peoples, and the obliteration of nation states.

Transnationalism is closely related to cosmopolitanism. If transnationalism describes the individual experience, cosmopolitanism is the philosophy behind it. Transnational life styles could be precursor to a cosmopolitan world government.

Diasporas are a historical precursor to modern transnationalism. However, unlike people with transnationalist lives, most diasporas have not been voluntary.

Transnationalism and Globalism; defining the term
Transnationalism & Globalism
Defining the term

In sweeping strokes, we can understand "globalism" as an alternate term for "postcolonialism" itself. The two terms share the idea of cosmopolitan centers in changing relations with rural areas and the emerging metropolises of the Third World. For the purposes at least of this page, however, we will use "Globalism" to refer to economic relations and shifts in modes of production that occur between financial centers like New York, Tokyo, London, and Los Angeles and emerging nations around the world. Usually narrated as in positive processes like "investement," "progress" and "development," activists and scholars around the world have begun to discuss globalism with ambivalence as they unpack profound assymmetries between center and periphery.

Although the most visible actors in these relations are abstract, imagined entities called "Trans-" or "Multi-National Corporations" (MNCs), the sites where such corporations set up shop, or do not, become the crucibles for radical change in material conditions and cultural production and potential sites of resistance from people whose lives have changed dramatically, as often asnot for the worse, despite the rhetoric of progress.

Flexible Accumulation

Although many theorists have offered engaging descriptions of Late Capital's strategies, geographer David Harvey has formulated a succinct and useful set of concepts that captures the way MNCs do business:

Flexible Accumulation ... Rests on flexibility with respect to labour processes, labour markets, products, and patterns of consumption. It is characterized by the emergence of entirely new sectors of production, new ways of providing financial services, new markets, and, above all, greatly intensified rates of commercial, technological, and organizational innovation. It has entrained rapid shifts in the patterning of uneven development, both between sectors and geographical regions.... It has also entrained a new round of what I shall call 'time-space compression" ... In the capitalist world -- the time horizons of both private and public decision-making have shrunk, while satellite communication and declining transport costs have made it increasingly possible to spread those decisions immediately over an ever wider and variegated space. (The Condition of Postmodernity , 147)

Flexible accumulation, then, belies the nature of corporations that are not so "multi-" as much they are "trans-". Transnational accumulation does not occur equally between geographical areas, but rather in specific locations-- Wall and Bond Streets, for example-- with transactions that transgress no end of boundaries with increasing speed.

For people living in locations affected, directly or indirectly, by the presence of MNCs, the ebb and flow of global capital becomes an destabilizing force, something to follow or find and that seems to value them as labor. In turn, however, new found cash incomes create new markets consisting of people not previously thought of as viable consumers. In the worst case scenario, peoples marginal to urban centers where MNCs are headquartered become doubly exploited, first as labor and later as consumers. Both processes increase accumulations of capital far from the sites where goods are produced.

Cultural Implications

Focusing on the cultural implications of transnational capital, anthropologist Arjun Appadurai has tendered a useful set of terms for a world that has undergone what he calls, after Deleuze and Guattari, "deterritorialization." In Appadurai's scheme a variety of "-scapes"-- ethnoscapes, mediascapes, technoscapes, finacescapes and ideoscapes-- are constantly at play. Most crucial and human among these post-territorial scapes are the ethnoscapes "... who make up the shifting world in which we live: tourists, immigrants, refugees, exiles, guest-workers and other groups and persons [that] constitute an essential feature of the world and appear to affect the politics of and between nations to an unprecedented degree."

Where cultural practice takes hold in the interstices of this transnational culture is in the production of the imagination, a term Appadurai uses not in an individual sense, but rather in terms of "a social practice." New or refined forms of media financed by ideologically thick apparati produce what is possible, what we can imagine in and between cultural and geographic boundaries.

In his considerations of mediascapes, Appadurai harkens back to Guy Debord, theorist of the spectacle, who examined a technologically accelerated process by which a new mode of spectacular production transforms social relations in a total frame: "The spectacle is not a collection of images; rather, it is a social relationship between people that is mediated by images.... The spectacle is capital accumulated to the point where it becomes image."

Extending this framework, Rey Chow follows spectacular logic to the point of inversion, as the visuality of the transnational society of the spectacle finds media supplanting imagination in creating what she calls "Postmodern Automatons." Her first step in locating an arena for a feminist intervention in global power relations comes in recognizing that "... a perception of the spectacular cannot be separated from technology, which turns the human body into the site of experimentation and mass production." Once spectacle dissolves human agency, it finds the human body a fertile site for production.

It's a small worldism.

I've long felt that these people have no homeland loyalty.

Edgar


Their only allegience is to themselves and the rest of us be damned!

BBB

I have next to zero homeland loyalty, I'm a humanist.

I guess I'm an elitist.

BBB
Their only allegience is to themselves and the rest of us be damned!

I think we are undergoing a major social disclocation world wide as a result of Transnationalism.

BBB

Dys


I take it you would do away with country borders everywhere more like the One World concept.

BBB

Re: Dys

yeah pretty much, I would like to see us move into the 20th century with an eye towards the 21st. We have some serious catching up to do.

My idealist self agrees with dys.
My regular self says we're not there yet..

FDR was porbably the most elitist president of the 20th century. Aside from bending the constituion to fit his desires, I think he was a pretty good president. Richard Nixon was a populist.

Well, tell that to the Jihadists, those who are still remembering the last battle in the Crusades and wanting revenge. Tell that to those traitor countries who were making nasty litttle agreements with Saddam Husseim, for oil just for themselves and nevermind anybody else.

Perhaps we need a new FDR. Those who have announced they may run for next president scare the people half to death. Each is all set for their various little revenge games.

Transnationalism, huh? Sounds good, actually, but it make take 20 years.

Dys
How would you deal with the social dislocation with the elimination of borders?

What would be the monetary basis of a borderless world? The Dollar? The Euro? The Yuan?

How would the Courts operate and on what legal basis?

BBB

More like one or two centuries if the Islamic nations are not included. I can't imagine combining the Islamic nations with non-Muslim countries unless Islamic goes through a religious Reformation as the Christians did.

The concept of Transnationalism wouldn't work unless everyone became Buddhists.

BBB

BBB you're really grasping at straws here.

Dys


You think Buddhists cannot be successful Transnationalists? I wonder what Asherman would say?

BBB

I would venture that Buddhists can only be transnationalists. Think Doctors without borders.

Dys


Good analogy---except that each doctor's home base are from different countries.

The reason that I don't think the Islamic countries can morph into a one world concept is their adherence to Shariah Law over all secular laws.

http://www.shariah.net/

BBB