Let's give this some thought:

(CNN) - Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich is taking aim at President Obama's decision not to travel to Germany next week to commemorate the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, the latest in a string of conservatives to criticize Obama's decision to skip the ceremony on November 9.

"Some consider President Obama's refusal to attend the commemoration of the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall in Germany next week an outrage, I consider it a tragedy." Gingrich wrote in an op-ed published Friday in The Washington Examiner.

A little later in the article:

While the president had originally planned to be on hand for the event, White House spokesman Robert Gibbs confirmed earlier this week scheduling conflicts and preparation for his impending 10-day trip to Asia have instead caused Obama to stay in Washington.

With these two passages in mind, let's turn to a very readable passage in Etienne Balibar's essay "Ambiguous Identities," which was published in 1992:

I shall make a brief topical observation here, as we are currently, with the "end of the Cold War," coming out of a period of confrontation between the two great rival blocs and ideological systems...which have dominated political analysis for two or even three generations. Each of these presented itself as supra-national, as an internationalism, for there was a liberal internationalism just as there was a socialist internationalism. It is, however, doubtful whether the 'blocs,' inasmuch as they were mutually exclusive and organized around state construction, found any other cement for their internationalism than an an expanded, loosened-up form of nationalism. Liberal internationalism was in many respects a Western nationalism, just socialist internationalism was a Soviet nationalism....

To make things even clearer, we can say that liberal internationalism was simply Americanization, and socialist internationalism was Russification. What happened during the Cold War was the globalization of processes that shaped 19th century Europe at the national level. The establishment of the nation of Italy, for example, was in fact the expansion of Piedmont, or Piedmontization; or the establisment of the German state was in fact the Prussianization of that region. So, universalization, either in its state formation moment and global formation moment, was in actuality its opposite, imperialism—the imposition of one group's cultural system/standards on others. This is why there has been much confusion between where the line between Americanization and globalization exists, and also why certain resentful groups have responded to globalization by retreating into resurrections of their older cultures and beliefs. Globalization was not the universalization first imagined by Saint Paul, but the latest stage in the long history of imperialist domination.

The collapse of neoliberalism and neoconservatism in the same geographical area (Iraq), the collapse of Wall Street in 2008, and Obama's speech in Cairo (a concession speech of sorts), has meant nothing less than the detachment of the American national project from the processes of globalization (it will no longer direct these processes but be a major part of them).

At this moment, we do not know what will become of this still-expanding system. Sinofication? I do not think so (more about that in another post). We might very well be on then cusp of something truly new—a disconnected (if not disembodied), self-perpetuating universalization. No more Church, no more regionalization, no more nationalization—in reach is the absolute abstract. The absolute, however, not as a leveler (or flattening) but as a connector (from total dependence to total interdependence). If this is to happen, then it has to happen now.