Associated Press
The U.S. faces the challenge of intergrating Iraq, where men still smoke traditional water pipes, into the global order.

Way back in the 1990s, when globalization was all the rage, markets, rather than states, were widely understood to constitute international politics. Such talk has been muted lately. After wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and after Sept. 11, it is difficult to argue that the world is coming together in a single global culture.
And in light of this administration's massive expansion of the federal government, to say nothing of its conduct of two foreign wars and the ubiquitous war on terror, who could argue that governments are unimportant?

Yet the idea of globalization has not been entirely discredited. Academics still write too much on the topic, trade meetings in Miami and Cancun still draw protesters, and most important, a sense that we live in a time of great transformation lingers. How are we to square this sense of transformation with our revitalized sense of the depth of cultural differences and of the importance of national politics? More concretely, what does globalization have to do with Iraq?

Quite a lot, actually, but in order to understand what globalization means, either for Iraq or more broadly, we have to have a better idea of globalization. Most popular ideas of globalization are too simple. Globalization has been widely understood, in terms inherited from neo-liberal and Cold War ideologies, as an international social ordering carried out by actors and through institutions largely distinct from, even opposed to, governments.

From this perspective, globalization is a historical contest between social models, markets vs. governments, and more deeply, economics vs. politics. At least until recently, markets were seen to be winning this contest, much as capitalism defeated communism in the Cold War.

But globalization is not some alternative to politics; globalization is a way of doing politics. Economic integration was the response to the nationalistic wars fought in Europe in the first half of the twentieth century. By their terms, the Bretton Woods institutions, the Marshall Plan and especially the treaties that have led to today's European Union were intended to break down the identity of national geography, culture, political enthusiasm, industrial base, government and military apparatus that made the World Wars possible.

While the success of this project was long obscured by the Cold War, once the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, it became obvious that our political structure had changed. Then-President George H.W. Bush spoke of "a new world order."

But what had become apparent was more than a mere reordering of old politics. As the protesters against globalization realize, the cumulative effect of economic, and more broadly, cultural, integration across national lines has established a fundamentally new way of doing politics. I call this new political form "the City of Gold."

Like any polital body, the City of Gold has vital interests, political objectives that it will secure militarily if need be. The recent wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, as well as President Clinton's decision to bomb Baghdad in 1998, were not wars in the old sense of a duel between states, but wars in the new sense of a violent effort to expand the (now global) political order.

Such wars are not uncommon. Not just the first Gulf War (which was explicitly fought in the service of the new world order), but military interventions in Bosnia, Congo, Cote d'Ivoire, East Timor, Haiti, Kosovo, Rwanda, Sierra Leone, Somalia and elsewhere exemplify the City's willingness to use military force to establish and expand order.

It is true that militaries remain largely national institutions, and the United States is capable of acting alone and is thus, in a very old-fashioned and now unique sense, sovereign. However, the U.S. is not only the exception that supports the rule, but also acts less unilaterally than is often claimed.

In all of the conflicts listed above in which it acted, the U.S. acted in concert with other nations, and usually, although not always, through the institutional machinery of the United Nations (Kosovo being the major exception). Even George W. Bush went back to the Security Council to get a resolution explicitly authorizing the action that would be called Operation Iraqi Freedom, and the State Department has stoutly if controversially maintained that such action was authorized under prior U.N. resolutions.

More deeply, however, the United States has no desire to rule a colonial empire or otherwise expand as a nation. Instead, for security, economic and more ethereal reasons - the political vision that we usually express in terms of "freedom" or "democracy" - the U.S. is interested in the expansion of the liberal order in which it has been so successful. In short, the U.S. has a national interest in the continuation of the process of globalization.

Which brings me to a third way in which the war in Iraq can be understood globally. As Roosevelt said, it is not enough to win the war; the peace also must be won. Since World War II, it has been recognized that defeating an enemy militarily does not, by itself, generate long-term security.

Real security is achieved through the integration of the defeated enemy, and especially its political and hence military apparatus, into the world order, a task that often goes under the name of nation building.

Whatever the mix of reasons that impelled the United States to go to war in Iraq, once the war was begun, the mission was clear: The United States needed to ensure the existence of a peaceable nation, that is, a nation economically, and hence culturally and militarily, integrated into the global order. From this perspective, the war in Iraq should be understood not as the refutation of globalization by American nationalism, but instead as globalization militant.

The fall and now capture of Hussein thus signals much more than regime change. It signals a transformation of politics. We may hope that Iraq can shift from the old-fashioned politics of the nation - carried to awful yet familiar extremes by Hussein's government - to the possibility of a modern liberal state, integrated into the global order.

DAVID A. WESTBROOK is associate professor of law at the University at Buffalo Law School and the author of "City of Gold: An Apology for Global Capitalism in a Time of Discontent" (Routledge 2003).