The US, the most dependent country on the globe

We said that Trump's declaration, on behalf of the US at the UN General Assembly, that they have given up the doctrine of globalization will have no effect on the globalization process. By this we are of course not saying that the globe will experience no problems.

Today, one way or another, we live in a world that is more globalized with each passing day, and the most important feature of this world is that mutual dependence has increased.

On the course the world is on, this dependence is increasing even more, because we are in no way giving up our consumption habits. With each passing day we become even more attached to technology and production.

The production process required for the products we consume, and the raw materials this requires, are in no way resources that a country can supply on its own, with its own means, from within its own sphere of sovereignty.

At best, a kind of international division of labor is emerging, and in this division of labor everyone possesses surplus of what is scarce but necessary in others' hands. This means the spread, to the global and international level, of the organic division of labor that developed at the societal level together with industrial society.

Just as at the level of society no one can be so self-sufficient as to meet their needs alone, at the level of countries too everyone, needing more and more products, raw materials or energy sources produced in other countries, cannot be absolutely independent.

The demand for absolute independence can only be a resistance that can be carried out at the price of depriving one's own citizens of many things and remaining closed to the world. Indeed, the more complex and advanced the division of labor becomes, the stronger a society is. But the interdependence of the organs is to the same degree.

When one of the organs does not work properly, a pain felt in the whole organism is experienced at the international level as a crisis. At this point, mutual dependence creates an illusion of freedom that grows the more it eases the parties' affairs, but what underlies the greater volume of business, the greater activity, is in fact nothing other than dependence.

In this sense, that the one with the highest level of development has also the greater dependence is both the logical and the factual result of the process. For this reason, the most dependent countries produced by the globalization process today are the strongest countries, the US and China.

This dependence develops either because the products needed are in other countries, or because the markets needed to sell the goods produced are in other countries. In both cases the most dependent country on the globe today is still the US.

That being so, we can say that analyses that set globalization against the nation-state largely miss this very important dimension. Determining that the global dimension of the world we live in is developing of course does not mean giving up national-state identity, priorities or interests.

Truly, the fact that some globalization analyses went along on this equation in the early period has made it difficult to understand the dimensions of the matter correctly. Globalism was put forward as an identity that required the rejection of the national state or identity, which has been an equation that the developing reality did not confirm.

These analyses were followed by a process in which, as globalization increased, nation-state sensitivities, instead of decreasing, increased even more; on the contrary, as global non-state actors also came to the fore, the state activity behind them also became more visible. Today there is no multinational company without strong state support behind it. As globalization, and thus international interdependence, increases, national identities grow even stronger.

I am not saying this as a good or a bad thing. I am pointing it out as an important dimension for better understanding what globalization corresponds to.

So does a businessman like Trump, who governs a country that is the chief actor of the globalization process and who moreover has investments and multinational companies in many countries of the world, think he can stop the world without knowing all this?

Undoubtedly, the globalization Trump speaks of is not so much a process pointing to a sociological development as a globalization doctrine that has by now become ideologized and has moved far from expressing reality. In this ideological acceptance, the only thing that both its defenders and its opponents understand is US hegemony. Trump is desperately trying to preserve this hegemony that is slipping away from the US.

Of course, at the ideological level another language is in fact beginning to be spoken, and the real big mistake is that those involved in the debate continue speaking without distinguishing these levels.

Then we keep watching, this time, a blind flight of concepts in the air, as in a bar brawl in which it is unclear who is beating whom and chairs and tables fly through the air to hit blind targets.