I know we have another thread on Globalization. But this is to discuss points made by John Ralston Saul. Here is the article and link. I would like to interconnect Terrorism, Globalism and Ideology at some point. Comments are welcome. The end of Globalism Grand economic theories rarely last more than a few decades. Some, if they are particularly in tune with technological or political events, may make it to half a century. Beyond that, little short of military force can keep them in place. The wild open-market theory that died in 1929 had a run of just over 30 years. Communism, a complete melding of religious, economic and global theories, stretched to 70 years in Russia and 45 in central Europe, thanks precisely to the intensive use of military and police force. Keynesianism, if you add its flexible, muscular form during the Depression to its more rigid postwar version, lasted 45 years. Our own Globalisation, with its technocratic and technological determinism and market idolatry, had 30 years. And now it, too, is dead. Of course, grand ideologies rarely disappear overnight. Fashions, whether in clothes or food or economics, tend to peter out. Thousands of people have done well out of their belief in Globalisation, and their professional survival is dependent on our continued shared devotion to the cause. So is their personal sense of self-worth. They will be in positions of power for a few more years, and so they will make their case for a little longer. But the signs of decline are clear, and since 1995 those signs have multiplied, building on one another, turning a confused situation into a collapse. We have scarcely noticed this collapse, however, because Globalisation has been asserted by its believers to be inevitable - an all-powerful god; a holy trinity of burgeoning markets, unsleeping technology and borderless managers. Opposition or criticism has been treated as little more than romantic paganism. It was powerless before this surprisingly angry god, who would simply strike down with thunderbolts those who faltered and reward his heroes and champions with golden wreaths. If Globalisation has seemed so seductive to societies built upon Greek and Judeo-Christian mythologies, perhaps the reason is this bizarre confusing of salvation, fatalism and punishment. Transferred to economics, in however jumbled a manner, these belief systems are almost irresistible to us. The British and French empires had vaunted and defended their power in similar ways from the late 19th century on; that is, just as they began to collapse. And as the various 19th-century nationalisms declined into ugliness, their supporters increasingly transformed them into a matter of race. Inevitability is the traditional final justification for failing ideologies. Less traditional - and a sign of inherent weakness - is the extent to which Globalisation was conceived as old-fashioned religiosity. Perhaps the economists and other believers who launched Globalisation were instinctively concerned that people would notice their new theories were oddly similar to the trade theories of the mid-19th century or the unregulated market models that had been discredited in 1929. And so treating the intervening 40 years as an accidental interval, they began where their predecessors left off: with religious certainty. Despite that initial certainty, a growing vagueness now surrounds the original promise of Globalisation; we seem to have lost track of what was repeatedly declared 30 years ago, even 10 years ago, to be inevitable: That the power of the nation state was on its way out, to be replaced by that of global markets. That in the future, economics, not politics or arms, would determine the course of human events. That freed markets would quickly establish natural international balances, impervious to the old boom-and-bust cycles. That the growth in international trade, as a result of lowering barriers, would unleash an economic-social tide that would raise all ships, whether of our Western poor or of the developing world in general. That prosperous markets would turn dictatorships into democracies. That all of this would discourage irresponsible nationalism, racism and political violence. That global economics would produce stability through the creation of ever larger corporations impervious to bankruptcy. That these transnational corporations would provide a new kind of international leadership, free of local political prejudices. That the rise of global marketplace leadership and the decline of national politics, with its tendency to deform healthy economic processes, would force the emergence of debt-free governments. By then wedding our governments to a permanent state of deficit-free public accounting, our societies would be stabilised. In summary, global economic forces, if left unfettered by wilful man, would protect us against the errors of local self-pride, while allowing individual self-interest to lead each individual to a better life. Together these forces and self-interest would produce prosperity and general happiness. In a society where Christian dogma had been so dominant until so recently, how could people of goodwill not be attracted by this good news - by these promises of personal redemption? And if you add to all of this a multitude of new, technocratic market methods - well, then, the cycles of history would be broken, setting us on a permanent, inevitable course. In the words of a particularly naive believer, history would die. History was already dead. Globalisation materialised in the 1970s from the sort of geopolitical vacuum or fog that appears whenever a civilisation begins to change direction, to grope its way around a corner from one era to another. In geopolitics, a vacuum is not an option. It is the period between options; an opportunity, providing you can recognise it for what it is; a brief interregnum during which individuals can maximise their influence on the direction of their civilisation. What caused that particular void? Perhaps a quarter century of social reform had left the liberal elites exhausted. The need to manage a multitude of enormous new social programs that had been put in place in a democratic manner - an ad hoc manner - made it difficult for political leaders to concentrate on the main line; that is, to concentrate on a broad sense of the public good. Instead, governments were caught up in the endless and directionless details of management. Or perhaps the cause of the vacuum was the resulting reliance of those political elites on technocrats, who understood little of the debate - in fact, distrusted it - and so drew the leaders into isolation. In either case, most Western leaders seemed confused about what to do next. They had come to the end of a chapter of social progress. And they could not have been less prepared for a religious counterattack upon their ethical motivations, particularly not one in which the classic Judeo-Christian ideas of the sacred had been converted into economic inevitabilities. These theoretically new economic ideas were now scarcely recognisable as the simplistic economic arguments of pre-1929. The religious fervour had been blended with sparkling waves of new technology and with masses of microeconomic data, all presented as fact. Relaunched in this way, as three in one, one in three, the old ideas seemed new. Caught up as the liberal elites were in the instrumental rationality of program management, they responded to this attack with superior, stolid and unimaginative rejection. Instead of speaking out for the public good, they defended administrative structures. The effect was to make tired and discredited market arguments seem young, agile and modern. One comic sign of the coming era was the creation, in 1971, in a Swiss mountain village called Davos, of a club for European corporate leaders. There they could examine civilisation through the prism of business. Soon businessmen were coming from around the world. Then government leaders and academics flooded in, looking for investors. Business leaders, politicians and academics alike seemed to accept without question the core tenet of Davos: that the public good should be treated as a secondary outcome of trade and competition and self-interest. Davos was just a weather vane, a superficial and self-important version of a royal court, but when the G6 - now the G8 - was created in 1975, its aim mimicked that of Davos: to bring the leaders of the biggest national economies together to examine the world through the prism of economics. Never before had the great nations so explicitly and single-mindedly organised their core relationship around naked, commercial self-interest, without the positive and negative counterweights of social standards, human rights, political systems, dynasties, formal religions and, at the negative extreme, supposed racial destinies. Valery Giscard d'Estaing, the French president who organised the first G6 meeting at his official country residence, Rambouillet, was the very model of the European technocratic economist. And his approach dominated. But what actually opened the door to Globalisation was the economic collapse of 1973 - the depression that never was. The reigning technocratic obsession with management and control meant that we all had to be reassured. So we were told that this was just another recession. Then there was another recession, then another, and on and on, always minimised, always about to be resolved. The social reformers, who dominated within almost all political parties and governments, denied themselves the right to stand back and deal with the situation as a whole. They had lost the intellectual breadth and the emotional balance to do this. And so they gradually lost the right to lead. As for the new force or ideology that came forward to fill the vacuum, it involved an all-inclusive strategy called Globalisation - an approach that contained the answer to every one of our problems. It was delightfully seductive. It contained simple, sweeping solutions and, as with all successful religions, lodged ultimate responsibility in invisible untouchable hands. Thus Globalisation required no one to take responsibility for anything. Full article at: http://afr.com/articles/2004/02/19/1077072774981.html
