Part 3 Contemporary
ideologies
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 sharpdistinction 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 environ-
mentalists – 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).
The challenge to the distinction between national and international politics is
not the only significant divider between classical and new ideologies. In trying
to understand what is ‘new’ about the new ideologies three differences – or