Over the past decade, these four concepts have been heavily used in the political language around the globe. Many scholars do believe that three of these concepts are also the stages of history for the last century, from the rise of nationalism to that of trans-nationalism and toward a global society. This is why it is important to define each of these concepts in order to assess the connection between them. We have to start with power, as it is one of the essential concepts of politics. As defined in political textbooks, power is “a type of control held by a group in a society which allows administration of some or all of public resources, including labor, and wealth”.
Nationalism includes the identification of the ethnic identity society has with a state. This society has the firm belief that this state is its highest representative body on which it has to pledge loyalty. In certain cases, this nationalistic belief leads to the idea that your society, culture, group has a ‘higher’ status than other groups around you, and it can serve as a ‘fuel’ for conflicts. This was the case of Nazism and fascism, for example.
Trans-nationalism, on the other hand, is tentative to get beyond these boundaries and territories defined by nationalism. After the Second World War, especially in the West, people began to interact more with each other regardless of the nationality and society they belonged to. This social movement was the one labeled trans-nationalism.
And finally, we have globalization. In fact, it “is a widely-used term that can be defined in a number of different ways. When used in an economic context, it refers to the reduction and removal of barriers between national borders in order to facilitate the flow of goods, capital, services, and labor, although considerable barriers remain to the flow of labor”. As mentioned above, globalization is the process of integration of different cultures of the world, of societies breaking down barriers between them and interacting, interchanging, and communicating freely with each other. An important aspect of globalization is the fall of the barriers to trade among countries.
As mentioned above, many authors do see the link between nationalism, transnationalism, and globalization as the ‘final result’ of a process that started at the French Revolution more than two centuries ago and that now is crowning itself with the advent of a global society. Meanwhile, power, as a political concept, has been defined and redefined several times in accordance with one of the above-mentioned periods that human society passed the last century up to nowadays.