In his novel The Elementary Particles (Atomised), Michel Houellebecq writes of the “metaphysical mutations” which have changed the way the world’s people think. “Once a metaphysical mutation has arisen, it moves inexorably towards its logical conclusion. Heedlessly, it sweeps away economic and political systems, ethical considerations and social structures. No human agency can halt its progress- nothing, but another metaphysical mutation.”

These events are, as Houellebecq points out, rare in history. The emergence and diffusion of Christianity and Islam was one; the Enlightenment and the ascendancy of science another. I believe we may be on the verge of a new one.

Throughout history, human beings have been the loyalists of an exclusive community. They have always known, as if by instinct, who lies within and who lies without. Remorselessly, the unit of identity grew, from the family to the pack, to the clan, the tribe, the nation. In every case the struggle between the smaller groups has been resolved only to begin a common struggle against another new federation.

Our loyalties have made us easy to manipulate. In the First World War, a few dozen aristocrats sent eight million men to die in the name of nationhood. The new mutation will force us to abandon nationhood just as, in earlier epochs, we abandoned the barony and the clan. It will compel us to recognize the irrationality of the loyalties which set us apart. For the first time in history, we will see ourselves as a species.

Globalization is establishing a single, planetary class interest, as the same forces and the same institutions threaten the welfare of the people of all nations. It is ripping down the cultural and linguistic barriers which have divided us. By breaking the social bonds which sustained local communities, it destroys our geographical loyalties. Already, it has forced states to begin to relinquish nationhood, by building economic units – trading blocs – at the level of the continent or hemisphere.

Simultaneously, it has placed within our hands the weapons we require to overthrow the people who have engineered it and assert our common interest. By crushing the grand ideologies which divided the world, it has evacuated the political space in which a new, global politics can grow. By forcing governments to operate in the interests of capital, it has manufactured the disenchantment upon which all new politics must feed. Through the issue of endless debt, it has handed to the poor, if they but knew it, effective control of the world’s financial systems. By expanding its own empire through new communication and transport networks, it has granted the world’s people the means by which they can gather and coordinate their attack.

The global dictatorship of vested interests has created the means of its own destruction. But it has done more than that. It has begun to force a transformation of the scale on which we think, obliging us to recognize the planetary issues which bear on our parochial concerns. It impels us, moreover, to act upon that recognition. It has granted us the power to change the course of history.

The movement’s defining debate is just beginning. Led by activists in the poor nations, most of its members have come to see both that opposition to the existing world order is insufficient, and that its proposed alternatives will be effective only if they are global in scale. It has correctly perceived that the world will not change until we seize control of global politics.

The quest for global solutions is difficult and divisive. Some members of this movement are deeply suspicious of all institutional power at the global level, fearing that it could never be held to account by the world’s people. Others are concerned that a single set of universal prescriptions would threaten the diversity of dissent. A smaller faction has argued that all political programmes are oppressive and our task should be to replace all power with a magical essence called "anti-power." But issues such as climate change, international debt, nuclear proliferation, war, peace and the balance of trade between nations can be addressed only globally or internationally.

That the international institutions have been designed or captured by the dictatorship of vested interests is not an argument against the existence of international institutions, but an argument for overthrowing them and replacing them with our own. It is an argument for a global political system which holds power to account.

In the absence of an effective global politics, moreover, local solutions will always be undermined by communities of interest which do not share our vision. We might, for example, manage to persuade the people of the street in which we live to give up their cars in the hope of preventing climate change, but unless everyone, in all communities, either shares our politics or is bound by the same rules, we simply open new road space into which the neighboring communities can expand. We might declare our neighborhood nuclear-free, but unless we are simultaneously working, at the international level, for the disarmament of nuclear weapons, we can do nothing to prevent ourselves and everyone else from being threatened by people who are not as nice as we are. We would deprive ourselves, in other words, of the power of restraint.

By rebuilding the global politics first, we establish the political space in which our local alternatives can flourish. If, by contrast, we were to leave the governance of the necessary global institutions to others, then those institutions will pick off our local, even our national, solutions one by one. There is little point in devising an alternative economic policy for your nation, as Luis Inácio Lula da Silva, now president of Brazil, once advocated, if the International Monetary Fund and the financial speculators have not first been overthrown. There is little point in fighting to protect a coral reef from local pollution if nothing has been done to prevent climate change from destroying the conditions it requires for its survival.

While it is easy to unite a movement in opposition, it is just as easy to divide one in proposition. This movement, in which Marxists, anarchists, statists, liberals, libertarians, greens, conservatives, revolutionaries, reactionaries, animists, Buddhists, Hindus, Christians and Muslims have found a home, has buried its differences to fight its common enemies. Those differences will re-emerge as it seeks to coalesce around a common set of solutions. We have, so far, avoided this conflict, by permitting ourselves to believe that we can pursue, simultaneously, hundreds of global proposals without dispersing our power. We have allowed ourselves to imagine that we can confront the consolidated power of our opponents with a jumble of contradictory ideas. While there is plainly a conflict between the coherence of the movement and the coherence of its proposals, and while the pursuit of a cogent political program will alienate some of its participants, it is surely also true that once we have begun to present a mortal threat to the existing world order, we will attract supporters in far greater numbers even than those we have drawn so far.

We must harness the power of globalization, and, pursuing its inexorable development, overthrow its institutions and replace them with our own. In doing so, we will, whether or not this is the intended outcome, bring forward the era in which humankind ceases to be bound by the irrational loyalties of nationhood.

Our task is not to overthrow globalization, but to capture it, and to use it as a vehicle for humanity’s first global democratic revolution.

George Monbiot is an academic, journalist and broadcaster who writes a weekly column for The Guardian. This essay is adapted from his book The Age of Consent: a manifesto for a new world order.