*Originally published in 2023. Get E-International Relations delivered to your inbox, free of charge. As you sign up, consider becoming a paid subscriber, or make a donation, to support our work.

This article is part of the Indian IR Meets Global IR series, edited by Deepshikha Shahi and Raghav Dua.

Globalisation is hopelessly parochial for being a by-product of European Liberalism. Dealing with a plethora of concerns including the dichotomy between individual and societal rights, Liberalism balances them via interests and contracts (see Chapters 2 and 3 in Mill 2004). Used to create equivalences, states deploy them to calculate how to barter, maximise, or reduce, some interests to secure others. This makes for a commercial form of globalisation. Ironically, this globalisation is also antithetical to every state’s primary interest: sovereignty. Commercialisation fragments sovereignty because interests make states dependent on each other. Dependency fosters equality as all states politick in terms of interest, but the price is high for states must hand over control to their contracting parties. Yet states willingly give up sovereignty because commercialisation is said to foster stability.

It is odd then that post-Cold War the votaries of globalisation as commercialisation, the Liberal West, NATO, kill more than any other country including China, Russia – or any other alliance (Datta-Ray 2018). This is because globalisation rides on offense (Locke 2003, 2.2.6) since interests and equivalences enable the calculation of the degree of violence required to secure interests. An instance of commercial politics is Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD), which uses threats to safeguard interests to deliver stability. Paradoxically, the interested parties’ very threatening to secure their interests is precisely what makes for instability: militarism and war. During the Cold War, Liberals waged proxy wars, but today they themselves kill and are killed, across the world (Dillon and Reid 2009).

Naturally, Liberals account for the paradox of globalisation as commercialisation triggering global chaos as originating outside commercial life. Rather than recognising globalisation is synonymous with instability, the logic of the market seeks to commercialise all life in a delusive hunt for stability. Commerce is therefore now not only the object, but its defence demands making it also the subject. The former is to create interconnected markets, but these are now being inserted into the ideas and concepts that organise us – to recreate us as globalised subjects.

A site for recreation is love which was once sublime, particularly unrequited love’s interactions beyond interests and contracts and so exceeding reciprocity. Patently a threat to globalisation as commercialisation, love is denigrated early-on with the colonial phrase “going native”. Post-colonial Europe continues commercialising love (Giddens 1992) to ensure it is limited to serving material interests, primarily, the sexual impulse. Interesting is not prostitution since it is largely ad hoc and illegal, but the West’s fabrication at great cost a socio-legal web of tax-breaks and holidays to cage love in marriage and cohabitation contracts.

The intention, to contractually manufacture the transactional people who are globalisation’s subjects. Ideally manufactured within the marriage contract, it is being rendered obsolete by religion's decline and LGBTQ’s rise – hence cohabitation contracts to bring everyone in line with commercialised heterosexuality (In the US there are a multiplicity of such initiatives, most notably the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families [TANF], see The Administration for Children and Families 2022, see also LII, n.d.; Seven EU countries offer marriage bonuses, while four offer cohabitation bonuses, see Christl, De Poli, Ivaškaitė-Tamošiūnė 2021). Its success is writ large in Europe’s globalisation and attendant costs being mimicked. The newest agents, the Global South’s poor fleeing poverty for the planet’s most commercialised societies to become everything from academics to CEOs, but remaining parvenue.

Beyond globalisation as commercialisation

There have always been alternative imaginings of the ‘Global’, ‘globality’, and ‘globalisation’ uninterested in converting technicolour life into commercial monotone. Compelling is Mahatma Gandhi’s globalisation for its theoretical rigor, and because it is everyday practice. Gandhi takes his globalisation from the ancient epic Mahabharata and uses it to craft an entirely new politics, satyagraha (political practice based on truth-force). That this is the practice of Indian diplomats, the Ministry of External Affairs (MEA), and the Indian nation-state, denotes an abiding relevancy. Its full significance is reiterated time and again during my unique fieldwork within the MEA. It remains the only foreign ministry, if only under orders from the Executive, in this case Prime Minister Dr. Manmohan Singh, to permit an outsider such as myself, to live, and work to some extent, with diplomats, as well as publish a book, unfettered.

Moreover, the current Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) administration’s attempt to overturn the teachings of Gandhi, only reiterates him while exposing commercialisation’s logical vacuity. What this, along with the success of the triptych of individual, organisation, and state, makes for is a robustness and replicability, lacking elsewhere. In other words, Gandhi’s rigorous theorisation in practice is what certifies his globalisation for wider consumption.

Gandhi is rigorous because he challenges with love, hatred’s instabilities, that is, commercialisation’s precursor, colonialism. His writings draw on the familiar, the Mahabharata, which he reads as a treatise on violence. He takes from the epic wholesale, the dharma-complex. It recognises every context regardless of its location in time or space possesses its own truth and therefore rationale for action and that all contexts are permeated by violence – for even life affirming processes rely on destruction, at the very least at the cellular level. Furthermore, the dharma-complex also states the rational actor manages violence, non-violently. In other words, Gandhi cannot hate, but only love.

In stark contrast to Europe’s colonising of those it hates, and then emaciating love to contracting, Gandhi seeks out like a lover those violent towards him, to love them by freeing them from their hatred. It is this that makes for Gandhi’s taste for violence, which he internalizes and converts, with love. In combination then, the Mahabharata makes for Gandhi’s globalisation as a tapestry of contexts unique in every sense except that they all generate violence which rationally ought to be managed morally, that is non-violently. In short, with love.

Gandhi adopts the Mahabharata’s globalisation but finds the epic cannot manage every violent context non-violently. That is why he builds on his epic learnings, to split violence into its forms, offensive and defensive. The difference between the two is not a matter of degree, but ontology. ‘Offence’ in its mildest form are the threats commercial politics such as MAD ride on because they begin with interests.

In contrast, globalisation is........

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