GLOBALISATION AND ITS CRITICS

1. Globalisation is a great force for good. But neither governments nor businesses can be trusted to make the case. Publication of the survey had originally been intended to coincide with the annual meetings of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, scheduled for September 29^th-30^th in Washington, DC. Those meetings, and the big anti-globalisation protests that had been planned to accompany them, were among the least significant casualities of the terrorist atrocities of September 11^th.

2. You might have thought that the anticapitalist protesters, after contemplating those horrors would be regretting more the just the loss of a venue for their marches. Many are, no doubt. But judging by the response of some of the leaders and many of the activists grief is no always the prevailing mood. Some anti-globalists have found a kind of consolation, even a cause of satisfaction, in these terrible events – that of having been, as they see it, proved right.

3. To its fierce critics, globalisation, the march of international capitalism, is a force for oppression, exploitation and injustice. The rage that drove the terrorists to commit their obscene crime was in part a response to that. Terrorism thrives on poverty and international capitalism thrives on poverty too. These may be extreme positions, but the minority that holds them is not tiny, by any means.

4. Far more important, the anti-globalists have lately drawn tacit support – if nothing else, a reluctance to condemn – from a broad range of public opinion. As a result, they have been and are likely to remain politically influential.

5. But when many in the West are contemplating their future with new foreboding, it is important to understand why the sceptics are wrong; why economic integration is a force for good; and why globalisation, far from being the greatest cause of poverty, it is only feasible cure.

6. Undeniably, popular support for that view is lacking. In the developed economies, support for further trade liberalisation is uncertain; in some countries, voters are downright hostile to it. Starting a new round of global trade talks this year will be a struggle, and seeing it through to a useful conclusion will be harder. The institutions that in most people’s eyes represent the global economy – the IMF, the World Bank and the World Trade Organisation – are reviled far more widely than they are admitted; the best they can expect from opinion at large is grudging acceptance.

7. Governments, meanwhile, are accused of bowing down to business: globalisation leaves them no choice. Private capital moves across the planet unchecked. Wherever it goes, it bleeds democracy of content and puts “profits before people”. So, who will speak up for international capitalism? Governments and businesses. It’s a pity because these supposed defenders of globalisation may do more to undermine support for it then the critics.

8. Rich-country governments generally present economic integration to voters as unfortunate but inescapable fact of life: as a constraint, that is, on their freedom of action. For the last past ten years, this has been the favorite excuse of any government about the break an election promise.

9. Multinational businesses, for their part, implicitly say that they have a case to answer: capitalism with responsibility is bad. That sounds all right; the trouble is, when they start talking about how they will no longer put profits first, people think they are lying. If global capitalism is a cause of democratic paralysis and a cloak for old-fashioned corporate venality, even instinctive liberals ought to side with the sceptics.

10. With advocates like these on either side of the globalisation debate – dissembling governments and businesses in favour, angry and uncompromising protesters against – it is natural that the general public stands firmly in support of neither. It has no deep commitment to international capitalism, but it can see no plausible alternative. Certainly, the protesters do not appear to be offering one. So people are mostly puzzled, anxious and suspicious. This climate of opinion is bad for democracy and bad for economic development.

11. This survey offers a few suggestions for a more purposeful kind of discussion. It would be foolish to suppose that consensus will ever be possible. Some of the sceptics are opposed not just to globalisation or even to the market economy but to the very idea of economic growth. That view has virtue of coherance, at least, but it is unlikely in the foreseeable future to command a large following.

12. Nonetheless, in among all their weal arguments, dangerous good intentions and downright loony notions, the sceptics are hiding some important points. Clarifying what makes sense in the sceptics’ case, and exposing the mistaken or dishonest arguments that politicians and businessmen are putting up against them, may serve some purpose. And a clearer understanding of the arguments for globalisation, of the problems it solves as well as the problems it creates, may help as well.

Date: 2016-04-22; view: 757