Can Trump stop the world?

After US President Trump's statements at the UN General Assembly rejecting the doctrine of globalization in the clearest terms, the globalization debate has, so to speak, flared up once again. Our colleague Özlem Albayrak also outlined the framework of the sociological dimension of these debates with her piece "The end of the global world?" Albayrak underlined, as the most important contradiction in Trump's speech, that while he said he was rejecting the doctrine of globalization, he did not refrain from making interventionist assessments about developments in many countries or regions of the world.

When I first heard these words, I could not help asking myself, "I wonder how he will stop globalization in his capacity as US president?" Among us there was an outburst by arabesque singers in the late seventies (or was it the early eighties?):

"Stop the world, my head is spinning."

As much as they were able to stop the spinning world with that arabesque state of mind, that much is Trump's chance or possibility of stopping globalization.

True, Trump gives signs of what he himself understands by the doctrine of globalization he says he rejects in the later sentences of the very same speech: "Countries all over the world must protect their own countries… From now on we will help only the countries that respect us and, frankly, are our friends." Without anyone asking how recommending that countries protect themselves, or his deciding from now on to tell friend from foe differently, can be connected to globalization, everyone is in a flurry: Globalization is ending!

Yet as we have said before, globalization is not a process that began with the US, nor can it end through the US's obstruction. It is a concept that best describes the transformation and the sociological condition of the world we live in. The point is not whether to oppose it or not.

Let those who wish go on opposing it as much as they like; they find themselves unable even to escape from living in it. For such people this awareness can only be experienced as the dawning or the noticing of a tragedy.

Be that as it may, globalization is the state assumed by a world reshaped by the possibilities of technology. In the sixties the communication scholar Marshall McLuhan approached the matter through the dimension of world reality brought forth by the means of communication. According to him, media and the means of communication had turned the world into a global village. The worry that those who dominate the sources of news can govern the world through communication games followed this description; yet at the same time, as the means of communication and media multiplied and spread, the monopolies over this environment, and even the dominant determinants of these fields, began to become ordinary among a growing number of actors.

The communication environment has become more democratic with each passing day. Today, with the new media tools that are developing, it has become a field that everyone can easily enter and in which they can show activity. This communication environment has undoubtedly affected our culture of privacy, our individuality, our personality very negatively. It has transformed our lives and turned our traditions upside down. There is neither any point nor any need in arguing that everything is getting better.

Actually, this is not our subject. Our subject is first to understand what has befallen us. What we have understood and will understand is that the world we live in is not the same as the world we lived in yesterday. The world is turning, and while turning it makes our heads spin. Because we are not aware of the world, of the time, of the age, of history.

To claim the authenticity of everything, we cannot manage to stop making a moment in the past a reference. The world we live in has its own particular conditions and we are being tested with this world, not with yesterday's world. We have no responsibility of returning to yesterday's world; such a thing is in any case impossible. The Zionists are trying exactly this. We see together what state they have brought the world to. Is that not enough as a lesson?

Globalization did not begin, as is supposed, with somebody's decision. All the great religions have, for instance, a notion of a globe, an earth, a world. Our forebears said "nizam-i alem" (the order of the world). The Clear Book said "Until there is no fitna left on earth…"

Human beings possess an ambition that wants to reach out to the whole world, to spread their rule across the whole world, and they have sought and found the ways of money and goods that will be valid all over the world and able to enter circulation with ease. It was Muslims who first developed a global-scale economic market in which a cheque written in Baghdad or Khorasan was valid in Andalusia.

Today, with the technical level human beings have reached, globalization has become the structural form of our world, which no one can hold back. It is not something that can be attributed to the US. Especially while we live in a world in which the FED's raising or lowering of interest rates by a quarter point inevitably affects the economy of the entire world…

Interestingly, sociologists began to define and work on globalization intensively not because of the possibilities that emerged with globalization but because of disasters whose dimensions reached beyond nations. The radiation spread by the Chernobyl explosion and the AIDS disease, with their effects beyond nations, were the cases that triggered the globalization debates.

Today we can say that the US represents a similar case, not because it is a country that controls globalization but because the disasters it causes have a global effect. Its every move has a global-scale effect. Look, even its saying that it will give up globalization sets a global wave in motion. But even this shows that the US neither initiated globalization nor can it stop it whenever it wants.

Even so, the US's behaving as the owner and master of globalization is no different from a kind of claim to divinity. But on the other hand, those who enable it to make this claim to divinity can be its adversaries, who imagine that it has this power. By opposing globalization on the grounds that it represents US hegemony, they unknowingly grant it this rank. With the push given, even in enmity, sooner or later a US president emerges who can say that he will truly stop the world. And that fell to Trump's lot…

What is left, after all, for him to say that he can make the sun rise from the West?