THE COLLAPSE OF GLOBALISM: And the Reinvention of the Worldby John Ralston Saul
Reviewed by Paul Kennedy:
Most readers will know the apocryphal Indian story about a group of blind sages being brought to feel the various parts of an elephant and then to describe what it is they are feeling. One savant strokes the elephant’s rough leg and declares it must be a tree, another feels the tail and insists it is a snake, and so on. None of them can comprehend the totality of the beast.
Most scholars examining today’s volatile political and economic circumstances resemble those India sages in that they — and I plead guilty here — focus upon one particular part of the story and tend to ignore (or at least downplay) the others. Some assemble facts to prove that China is an enormous investment opportunity; others contend that it is a vast and growing military threat. Certain scientists warn us that we are on the brink of ecological collapse, but their conservative critics declare the evidence to be too murky to tell. What is the poor layman to do?
Nowhere does our present intellectual Tower of Babel appear more in contention and confusion than in regard to the matter of globalisation. This is no mere academic dogfight, because entire political parties, indeed whole countries, have seized upon the question of whether the completely free exchange of goods, capital, ideas and people is a benefit — or a deadly threat.
There are few middle-of-the-road voices to be heard here. Egged on, one suspects, by their publishers, authors participating in this debate tend to advance a more extreme — or, shall we say, more dramatic — picture of events. Just recently, the foreign-affairs correspondent of The New York Times, Thomas Friedman, published his new book The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Globalised World in the 21st Century. Deeply impressed by the communications revolution and the free flow of capital, and reinforced by interviews with high-tech entrepreneurs from Boston to Bangladesh, Friedman argued that globalisation is intensifying, making societies ever more “flat” — that is, conforming more and more to free-market western practices.
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2102-1616368_1,00.htm---------------------------------
The Collapse of Globalism Mother Jones Magazine....
The current wave of globalization has its origins in the economic crises of 1970s, when the industrialized economies, after three decades of steady growth, began to flounder, beset by persistently high unemployment and inflation, and governments began casting around for an alternative to the Keynesian orthodoxy that had dominated economic thinking since the end of the Second World War. They found that alternative in a (hitherto fringe) school of thought associated with Friedrich von Hayek and, later, Milton Friedman, one premised on the notion that in matters of economic management government was the problem, not part of the solution, as Keynesianism had it.
Central to the new thinking—taken up famously and with particular fervor in the 1980s by Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan—was the the idea that market forces work best and to everyone's benefit when government stands aside. Left alone, such forces would inevitably unleash waves of trade, which would in turn generate a tide of growth, raising all ships in both the developed and developing world. Deregulation and privatization were the watchwords of the day.
Developing countries were effectively forced to open up to foreign trade and capital—for their own good. On a global scale, the embrace of what fast became a new orthodoxy promised an impressive array of social and political benefits as trade barriers fell and international markets were freed from the dead hand of government: the power of the nation-state would wane; nationalism and racism would fade; economics, not politics—and certainly not religion—would shape human events. Free markets and free democracies would become the norm in an interdependent, peaceful world held together by the magic of enlightened self-interest.
However, as John Ralston Saul argues in his new book, The Collapse of Globalism, things didn't work out quite as planned. The past three decades have been marked by unimpressive economic growth and sharply increasing economic inequality, and recent years have seen a marked rise in economic populism, nationalism, and conflict, much of it within states. The Asian financial crisis of 1997-98 pointed up the instability of the global economic system, and, in 1998, the talks on the Multilateral Agreement on Investment (MAI) collapsed. In 1999, the WTO conference at Seattle drew huge protests that derailed the talks. As the failure of last week's free trade meeting in Argentina showed, developing countries, having gradually and painfully discovered that globalization, at least as currently conceived by the industrialized countries, has been something less than a boon, are no longer willing to open their markets with no questions asked, on terms dictated by the United States and other industrialized countries.
Saul, a Canadian, writes that the collapse of free trade orthodoxy has left us in a vacuum, unmoored from the (spurious) certainties of yesterday's economic fundamentalism but lacking a better framework for thinking about economic arrangements within and among states. The task of figuring out what that framework might be requires, first of all, that the proponents of globalization admit that there's a problem with their model, which many have been unwilling to do.
Saul is the author of many books, including Voltaire
http://72.14.207.104/search?q=cache:qgHEkTmJFvUJ:www.motherjones.com/news/qa/2005/11/saul.html+The+collapse+of+Globalization,+John+Saul+Ralston&hl=en
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