As for globalization, it is not as irresistible as portrayed in the film. The story of the last five years, as John Ralston Saul provocatively argues in the Collapse of Globalism is more its retreat than its advance. Countries are asserting control of their national destinies. Malaysia and Argentina, for example, have both refused to kowtow to the financial markets and prospered. China is industrializing in its very particular fashion.Even tiny New Zealand has reversed its flirtation with a Thatcherite agenda and prospered. When surveying the world, what is striking is not the uniformity of policy but the diversity. The real choice, declares Ralston Saul, is positive or negative nationalism.
What Ralston Saul argues, essentially, is that globalism is a process deriving from a variety of mainly western sources and serving a variety of western interests. During the past few decades, it has been pushed onto the non-western world, but is now meeting with increasing resistance even in the west, as the French referendum on the proposed European constitution demonstrated. A new nationalism appears to be emerging, with countries demonstrating that they can run their own show without falling into the globalization paradigm. I really should finish the book and will give it a try, even if I have to hold my nose at times.
An earlier (2002) book that I would recommend on what is being pushed and how is Joseph Stiglitz's "Globalization and its Discontents". It deals with how institutions such as the IMF and the World Bank, have been requiring the countries they help to clean up their act and use an essentially American (Washington Consensus) approach to putting their finances in order. With Paul Wolfowitz now running the IMF this is not likely to change very much in the near future.
Ed
> > I've read about half of J.R. Saul's book. I doubt that I'll finish
> > it, partly because I never finish books but also because I don't like
> > the tone of it. It's from too far above, too righteous, too scolding.
> > In what I've read, there were too many times when I stopped and
> > wondered who the hell does he think he is?
>
> Heh heh heh funny that, I often get the same feeling about Hutton! I'm a
> bit confused, though, as there seeme to be two books: The collapse of
> Globalism published a couple of months ago, and another one published in
> October coming called the collapse of globalism and the rise of
> nationalism or summat like that.
>
> Is this a sequel or a sort of quick second edition? Sorry can't remmeber
> the exact title and I forgot to bookmark that page...
>
> >
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