What is a new social movement?

What is a new social movement? We have argued that an ideology is a belief system focused around the state. The classical ideologies discussed in Part 2 took the legitimacy of the state to be a central concern, and this is true even of anarchist theories: although most anarchists reject the claim to legitimacy made on behalf of the state one of their main objectives is to challenge the state, and in this sense anarchists are ‘state-focused’. Despite talk of ‘globalisation’ and the ‘hollowing out of the state’, the state remains important in political theory, and the new ideologies discussed in this part of the book do not dismiss it. They do, however, challenge the sharp distinction between domestic and international politics. For example, multiculturalists argue that cultures do not equate to nations, and therefore allegiance to the state does not, as the British politician Norman Tebbit claimed, require that British Asians support the English cricket team against Pakistan. Similarly, an important feature of feminism is the linking together of women’s experience across the world. While a traditional ideology, such as socialism (or Marxism, as one variant of socialism), stressed that the workers ‘know no nation’, and therefore class solidarity should transcend the state, the focus of socialist (communist) political action was capture of the state. Feminists, on the other hand, while prepared to work through state structures to achieve legal change, identify power relations at both substate and suprastate levels: women can be oppressed through family structures as well as by global forces. Ecologism represents an even more radical challenge to the significance of the state as the central focus of political thought. Ecologists – as distinct from environmentalists – see ‘nature’ as an interconnected whole, protection of which requires both small-scale organisation and global action. Small-scale, quasi-anarchistic communities are required as a means of avoiding environmentally damaging transportation of goods, while global agreements are necessary to tackle problems that by their nature do not respect state boundaries. Fundamentalism may also represent a challenge to the state: Islamic fundamentalism regards the state as a corruption of Islam (US fundamentalism and Zionism do, however, appear highly nationalistic, although some variants of Zionism conceive of the Jewish State as a religious, rather than a secular, entity, and thus as quite different to the traditional state).