Largely, I still find myself in agreement with "billiard ball" analyses of the international realm after this week's discussion. While globalization has brought societies together through the advent of Internet communication and ease of travel (for those that can afford it, at least), recent trends in political belief in the US and Europe have led me to strongly question whether or not a global public sphere is actually emerging.
The recent swing in nationalist tendencies in the US and Western Europe has given me cause for concern as I've watched our collective responses to the Syrian (and Middle-Eastern) refugee crisis of the past couple of years. Foregoing the fact that global governments neglected to take action on this issue for 4 years of bloody civil war for a moment, the reactions of citizens to the influx of refugees has seriously made me question the levels of tolerance I'd assumed of Western society - can we truly have a global public sphere if citizens are increasingly demand that they be walled off from other cultures? I don't mean to paint with a broad brush here, but the loudest resistance to accepting refugees seldom finds itself rooted in economic arguments so far as I've seen.
But what of the collective inaction regarding the rest of the world's governments' failure to respond more quickly to the refugee crisis? Nations bordering Syria had been taking in refugees since the beginning of the conflict - Turkey itself having received most of the brunt of the early refugee flows, and were mostly left high and dry to figure out how to deal with the problem by the rest of the world.
In light of these issues, it's difficult for me to view the global public sphere as anything that currently exists - perhaps it was emergent in recent years, but with recent trends in political ideology, I'm now operating under the assumption that there's either no global public sphere, or what little of one had been established is quickly being eroded.
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