From: "Macdonald Stainsby" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
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Le Monde diplomatique
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January 2001
GLOBALISATION, TURNING BACK THE TIDE ?
Frightening the free marketeers
by BERNARD CASSEN
Globalisation is irreversible, inevitable and, according to
political commentator Alain Minc, necessarily "beneficial" (1). Or
so free-market pundits of all kinds have been telling us for over
10 years now. The message has been repeated ad nauseam by economic
journalists, leader-writers, essayists, international institutions
and governments of all shades. And the credo is still being
proclaimed in its most naive form. "For my part," European
commissioner Frederik Bolkestein wrote recently, "I shall remain
firm in my objections to the Tobin tax, in my advocacy of healthy
tax competition, and above all in my belief in the virtues of
globalisation" (2).
Yet Bolkestein would probably have been thought unnecessarily crude
by his usual mentors, the World Bank, the International Monetary
Fund (IMF) and the World Trade Organisation (WTO). Without of
course changing their practice, they have at least stopped shooting
a line that people are no longer prepared to swallow. In its latest
World Development Report the bank admits that, in terms of its
"attack" on poverty, its structural adjustment programmes are a
failure. At the annual economic symposium of the Federal Reserve
Bank of Kansas City last August, former IMF deputy managing
director Stanley Fischer acknowledged the validity of many
anti-globalisation attacks on governments, corporations and
international institutions (3). And Michael Kinsley, leader writer
for Time magazine, who is one of the WTO's most ardent defenders,
recently regretted that the organisation "is despised across the
entire political spectrum" (4). So much for Bolkestein's "virtues"
and Alain Minc's "benefits".
More serious for the credibility of these two "experts" is the
pessimistic assessment of the future of globalisation in the
British and American financial press which has made no bones about
criticising those self-proclaimed global leaders who have no time
for well-meaning amateurs (5). On 11 September the Financial Times
warned that "as long as the demands of the public and the capital
markets are in conflict, politicians will conclude that
anti-business populism promises electoral dividends. The message
for big business is hardly reassuring." On 6 November Business Week
observed that "unless multinational companies shoulder more of the
social costs themselves in countries where governments are weak,
street protesters will probably set the rules for them". But it was
The Economist that really sounded the alarm bells. On 23 September
it admitted that "the protesters are right that the most pressing
moral, political and economic issue of our time is third-world
poverty. And they are right that the tide of globalisation,
powerful as the engines driving it may be, can be turned back. The
fact that both these things are true is what makes the protesters -
and, crucially, the strand of popular opinion that sympathises with
them - so terribly dangerous."
What caused this sudden change of attitude? The success of the
street protests in Seattle, Washington, Prague and Melbourne,
confirmed by the demonstrations in Nice. It is no mean admission to
warn that globalisation is reversible and that political leaders,
responding to voters' "populism", can perfectly well undo what they
have done or allowed to be done in their name. Tactical
considerations certainly play a part in this. By raising the
spectre of a mass anti-globalisation movement, the critics aim to
provoke governments into taking the measures needed to banish it.
Unlike the prophecies of international financiers, these are not
intended to be self-fulfilling.
But although deliberate manipulation may play only a small part in
the current change of attitude, it is not free of risk. It
considerably strengthens the hand of the opponents of free-market
globalisation, who see that their struggle is paying dividends.
Apart from the growing impact of the opposition movements, there is
another, very straightforward explanation for the change of
attitude. It is the still unarticulated feeling that
anti-globalisation is gaining ground because it has adopted the
same top-down strategy as globalisation itself.
In the interests of American finance
Neo-liberal ideology was fabricated entirely in response to the
interests of American finance, concerned to remove all obstacles to
the worldwide free movement of capital. A systematic drive to raise
funds and infiltrate the universities and media was required in
order for it to win intellectual hegemony - first in the United
States and then in the rest of the world. By means of the
intellectual straitjacket known as the Washington consensus, it was
subsequently imposed on the large number of countries "benefiting"
from loans from the Bretton Woods institutions. In Europe - driven
in the early 1980s by a Thatcherite philosophy enthusiastically
espoused by a series of governments across the Channel - it gave
rise to the "strong franc" policy, the decision to liberalise
capital movements in 1988, the Maastricht treaty of 1992 and the
budgetary stability pact of 1997. It is responsible for the
structural adjustment plans imposed on EU applicants in the form of
acceptance of the Community "acquis" and, more generally, for all
the economic liberalisation measures proposed or implemented by the
European Commission.
In each case, peoples have been summoned to comply with measures
legitimised by international institutions that are supposedly above
partisan politics and, by reason of their technical "expertise",
alone able to decide on the "only possible policies". Governments
actively involved in formulating those measures have subsequently
been able to apply them by invoking, as required, the "conditions"
imposed by the IMF and the World Bank or the "constraints" of EU
membership. This top-down strategy has served both to absolve
governments from responsibility and to legitimise their actions.
Now the anti-globalisation opposition has taken the top-down route
from the international to the national, and it is applying the
strategy to great effect.
In France, for example, the scathing critics of "inward-looking
nationalism", "the French ideology" and "national republicanism" -
from Bernard-Henri Lévy to Philippe Sollers, via Daniel Cohn-Bendit
and a few of their journalist friends - have failed to squeeze the
anti-globalisation movement into the straitjacket of preconceived
ideas they employ to defend and demonstrate their free-market
orthodoxy (6). The fact that José Bové's bail was paid by American
farmers, for example, or that a movement like Attac (7) has spread
spontaneously to a score of countries, makes nonsense of
allegations of nationalism. The mass protests in Seattle and Nice
brought together demonstrators from many different countries. All
came with demands specific to their own countries or professions,
but all those demands were set in a global context.
It is becoming clear to everybody that since national policies are
over-determined by strategies decided at international level,
protest and the formulation of alternatives must also take place at
that level. In sharp contrast to free-market globalisation, which
is purely a product of the North, the new alternatives must
incorporate the aspirations of both North and South. The main task
of the World Social Forum to be held from 25 to 30 January in Porto
Alegre (see Ignacio Ramonet's leading article) will be to formulate
the first global alternatives. It will then be up to the movements,
unions and elected representatives attending the forum to translate
them into actions suited to each country, bearing in mind local
power relations. A new internationalism is emerging - very slowly,
of course, because issues such as social and environmental
standards can divide as well as unite. It will gradually bring
together isolated struggles and legitimise them by reference to a
common set of proposals associated with symbolic venues.
For citizens' movements, Seattle or Porto Alegre may soon acquire
the status which the Washington consensus or the budgetary
stability pact have for their national governments. The piercing
anxiety of the free-marketeers can now be more easily understood.
They see looming before them a structure built on a model of their
own making. They are only too aware of its efficiency and know that
the outcome of their policies can only be to strengthen it. And
they are unlikely to be reassured by an excellent recent report by
the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) entitled
"Anti-globalisation - a spreading phenomenon" (8).
______________________________________________________________
(1) The reference is to the unforgettable French title of Minc's
book, La mondialisation heureuse (Editions Plon, Paris, 1997),
which may be rendered in English as "The Benefits of
Globalisation".
(2) "To the Enemies of Globalization", The Wall Street Journal
Europe, 25 September 2000.
(3) Financial Times, 28 August 2000.
(4) Michael Kinsley, "The Mystical Power of Free Trade", Time,
December 13, 1999.
(5) French pro-globalisation journalists, however, appear to lag
behind in this respect. Jean-François Revel's article in Le Point
on 15 December is itself suggestive of the famous "retard français"
which the magazine is always lambasting. His delusions include
references to "the Seattle, Davos and Biarritz hordes", "a few
thousand terrorists", "assault troops" who "call, like Hitler, for
the closure of frontiers" and, at the same time, "look back fondly
to the Soviet model".
(6) Some use devious methods to attempt to discredit the
anti-globalisation movement. An example is the use of the French
adjective "anti-mondialiste", deliberately borrowed from the
vocabulary of the Front National, to suggest kinship with that
party. This trick was used by Alexandre Adler, for example, in an
article entitled "La mondialisation malheureuse" (Le Monde, 23
November 2000), in which he attacked, for good measure, the
"agitational violence of communitarian cranks in Seattle and
Prague". Under the headline "Le vrai fiasco de la présidence
française" (Le Monde, 13 December 2000), Alain Lipiez, a Green
Party member of the European parliament, went so far as to claim
that the term was used by the anti-globalists themselves.
(7) Association for the Taxation of financial Transactions for the
Aid of Citizens, currently chaired by the author of this article.
(8) http://www.csis-scrs.gc.ca/eng/miscdocs/200008_e.html
Translated by Barry Smerin
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ALL RIGHTS RESERVED © 1997-2001 Le Monde diplomatique
<http://www.monde-diplomatique.fr/en/2001/01/09globalisation>
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