Globalisation’s Impact on Nationalism and Self-Determination

The world has never been more connected. Goods, capital, ideas, and people move across borders at a speed that would have stunned earlier generations. Yet this very interconnectedness has reopened one of the oldest questions in political theory: who has the right to decide a nation’s future? Globalisation promises prosperity through integration, but it simultaneously chips away at the economic and political sovereignty that the idea of nationhood rests upon. This tension between belonging to a global order and controlling one’s own destiny sits at the heart of what scholars call the national question.

The globalisation paradox: integration versus independence 🔗

At its core, globalisation creates a structural dilemma. The economist Dani Rodrik captured this sharply when he argued that we cannot fully pursue democracy, national self-determination, and deep economic globalisation all at the same time. Push one too far, and another must give way. A country that wants to attract global capital may have to accept rules set by international markets, even when its own citizens would have voted differently.

This pressure comes from two directions at once. Scholars studying state sovereignty point to forces that squeeze the nation-state from both outside and inside. From the outside, market integration and powerful institutions like the IMF, the World Bank, and the WTO constrain what governments can do. From the inside, self-determination movements demand new borders and new states. The nation-state, once treated as the natural unit of political life, suddenly looks fragile from every angle.

Why the Westphalian model is questioned 🔗

The traditional model of sovereignty traces back to the 1648 Peace of Westphalia, which established the principle that each state controls its own territory without outside interference. Globalisation has made some theorists argue that we have entered a post-Westphalian era, where the classic idea of the self-contained nation-state can no longer hold. Cross-border problems such as terrorism, climate change, financial contagion, and refugee movements simply cannot be solved by one country acting alone. States are forced to cooperate, and in cooperating, they surrender some control.

This does not mean the nation-state is disappearing. In fact, the relationship between globalisation and the state is uncertain rather than one-directional. As comparative scholars note, the same global pressures can be read as reasons for both stronger and weaker state involvement, depending on how a society responds. Some governments retreat; others build new capacities to manage the risks that openness brings.

Marxist perspectives on nationalism and imperialism 🔗

To understand why nationalism and global economics clash so deeply, it helps to look at how Marxist thinkers framed the question more than a century ago. For Marxists, the nation was never the ultimate political category. The working class was. Yet they could not ignore nationalism, because it shaped real struggles in the colonial world.

Lenin developed the most influential Marxist position. He argued that imperialism is the highest stage of capitalism, a stage in which capital had outgrown national boundaries and spread its domination across the globe. For Lenin, supporting the right of nations to self-determination was a tactical necessity. Oppressed nations fighting against imperial domination weakened the imperialist powers, which served the broader goal of socialist revolution. Self-determination here meant the freedom of a people to secede and govern themselves, free of colonial control.

The debate within Marxism 🔗

Not all Marxists agreed. Rosa Luxemburg famously challenged Lenin, arguing that under the conditions of imperialism, genuine self-determination for small nations was a practical impossibility. In her view, the slogan of national self-determination mostly served the interests of the rising national bourgeoisie, not the workers. She insisted that socialists should prioritise class unity across borders rather than national separation. Lenin replied that one could support self-determination strictly from the standpoint of the class struggle and working-class unity, not as an end in itself.

This historical debate matters today because it frames nationalism as a tool that can cut both ways. It can be a weapon against imperial and economic domination, or it can become a screen behind which narrow elites pursue their own gains. Lenin himself warned that not every struggle waged in the name of national freedom deserved support, since reactionary forces have often masked their ambitions with the language of self-determination.

The post-Soviet global order and economic exploitation 🔗

The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 was a turning point for the world economy. It removed the main counterweight to the United States and opened the door to a genuinely global capitalist market. The dissolution of the Soviet bloc and the fall of the Berlin Wall together helped create a single global market and a new world order built on neoliberal principles.

The rules of this new order were summarised in what became known as the Washington Consensus, a set of policies championed primarily by the IMF, the World Bank, and the US Treasury. These prescriptions emphasised balanced budgets, low taxes, deregulation, privatisation, and the removal of trade and investment barriers. With the end of the Cold War, this neoliberal package took hold as the standard advice for how states should run their internal affairs.

Why developing countries felt exploited 🔗

For many countries in the Global South, this order felt less like a partnership and more like a system of extraction. The promise of a fairer arrangement had earlier been expressed in the 1970s through the demand for a New International Economic Order. But that movement faltered, and the eventual collapse of the Soviet Union meant the loss of a key counterweight to American dominance. Indebted nations were instead pushed toward IMF loans carrying tough “structural adjustment” conditions that often deepened hardship.

Critics argue that this global production system traps developing countries in the low-value segments of the supply chain, while international capital captures most of the profits along the industrial chain. A country may assemble smartphones or stitch garments, but the design, branding, and financing, where the real money lies, remain elsewhere. This is the modern echo of the older Marxist critique of imperialism: economic domination no longer needs colonies when markets and institutions can do the work.

National sovereignty and the call for self-reliance 🔗

Faced with these pressures, advocates of national sovereignty argue for a different path: greater self-reliance and resistance to global economic domination. The idea is that genuine self-determination requires a country to keep control over its economic policies, natural resources, and strategic industries rather than handing them to global markets.

In the Indian context, this sentiment has deep historical roots in the Swadeshi Movement that began in 1905 during the struggle against British rule. Swadeshi promoted indigenous industries, especially handloom and textiles, as a form of economic resistance to colonial exploitation. Thinkers such as Dadabhai Naoroji and Romesh Chunder Dutt had already argued that colonial rule caused an “economic drain”, reducing the country to a supplier of raw materials and a market for foreign goods. Swadeshi was both an economic strategy and a moral statement about dignity and ownership.

Swadeshi in the age of globalisation 🔗

This older idea has resurfaced in new clothing. The Atmanirbhar Bharat Abhiyan (Self-Reliant India campaign), launched in 2020 during the COVID-19 pandemic, explicitly revives the Swadeshi spirit. Announced alongside a substantial economic package, it rests on pillars including the economy, infrastructure, technology, demography, and demand. The pandemic exposed dangerous dependencies in global supply chains, from medicines to semiconductors, and reinforced the argument that excessive reliance on foreign sources turns national security into a hostage of geopolitical events.

Yet self-reliance is a contested concept. When the campaign was launched, the Finance Minister clarified that a self-reliant nation would “integrate not isolate”, signalling that the goal was strategic autonomy rather than full withdrawal from the world economy. Economic history complicates the picture too. The era of hyper-globalisation in the 1990s and 2000s saw exports and growth soar, even as economic nationalism never fully disappeared and resurfaced during crises and supply shocks. The newest frontier is “digital sovereignty”, the push to promote homegrown apps, localise data, and reduce dependence on foreign technology platforms.

The deeper meaning of self-determination 🔗

What ties these threads together is a redefinition of self-determination for the global age. It is no longer only about a people’s right to form their own state. It is increasingly about a nation’s capacity to make real economic choices when capital, technology, and information are controlled by powerful global actors. A modern economy that depends on globally integrated infrastructure faces real vulnerabilities, which is why analysts stress the need to maintain diverse inputs and markets and avoid dangerous dependencies. Pure self-sufficiency is unrealistic, but unguarded openness is its own form of risk.

The challenge, then, is not a simple choice between embracing or rejecting globalisation. It is about finding a balance where a nation can participate in the world economy while retaining enough control to act in its own people’s interest. That balance is precisely what the national question, old and new, keeps asking us to define.

What do you think? Is genuine self-determination still possible when a country’s economy depends on global markets and foreign technology it does not control? And where should the line fall between healthy openness and risky dependence in a nation’s pursuit of self-reliance?

References

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