ABSTRACT
The forces of tribalism were arrayed against the forces of globalism, according to Barber, and they were locked in mortal conflict. The former looked to harden ethnic and religious differences, he argued, and to spurn the modern world’s emphasis on interdependence and cooperation. As the sociologist Manfred Steger has noted, the ideology of “market globalism,” so pervasive in the 1990s, had transformed itself into an ideology of “imperial globalism”— caustically defined by Steger as “a neoliberal structural adjustment program by military means”. The American nation-state has shown a particular interest in building a global political and economic order to maximize its own influence around the world, and to promote a particular vision of freedom and prosperity based on individual liberties and free-market policies. The war on terror was only the latest guise through which the United States attempted to impose an American-led political and economic vision upon the rest of the world.
