The Battle of Belonging: On Nationalism, Patriotism, And What it Means to Be Indian

by Shashi Tharoor

The predictable backlash took two forms: economic and cultural. The economic backlash was straightforward. The poor and the unemployed in the developed world began to feel that they had no stake in the globalized system, and demanded to know why their governments’ policies benefited people in faraway lands like China and India with what used to be their jobs. They wanted to reduce the growing inequality in every ‘developed’ economy and go back to the security of older, more familiar economic ways, in which each generation assumed they would earn more and live better than their parents did. The cultural backlash derived from the same resentment but expressed itself in a different arena: the political denunciation of global trade led to hostility towards foreigners, as more and more people sought the comforts of traditional identity and ways of life. Rage was expressed against the ‘alchemical brew served up in the name of progress—liberal politics, theologies of social emancipation, technocrats, trade agreements, multiculturalism’.10