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http://mondediplo.com/1997/05/globalsation3158
By Serge Halimi
What should we - journalists, intellectuals - do in a world where 358
billionaires have more assets than the combined incomes of nearly half
of the planet's population ? What should we do when Mozambique, where
25% of children die before the age of five from infectious diseases,
spends twice as much paying off its debt as it does on health and
education ? What should we do in a world where, according to the UNDP
administrator, "if present trends continue, economic disparities
between industrial and developing nations will move from inequitable
to inhuman" ? What should we do when, within democratic countries
themselves, money dominates the political system until it becomes the
system, those who write the checks write the laws and ask the
questions, and increasingly citizens seem to be replaced with investors ?
But can we still, as journalists and intellectuals, denounce this
situation and suggest remedies when so many of these billionaires -
the Bill Gates, Rupert Murdochs, Jean-Luc Lagardères, Ted Turners,
Conrad Blacks of the world - own the papers in which we write, the
radios on which we speak, the television networks in which we appear ?
When so much of the news and culture that is fed into developing
nations comes from industrial countries and so little of the news the
industrial countries ever hear about seeps in from developing
nations ? When those who write the checks and write the laws and ask
the questions and invest and divest and downsize, are also our
employers, our providers of advertising revenue, our trend-setters,
our decision-makers our news-makers ?
In other words, can we even think of doing what we must in this global
world, doing what we should, as journalists and as intellectuals,
comforting the afflicted and afflicting the comfortable, being a
counter-power, a voice for the voiceless, when so many of us are as
much a part of the ruling class as the business elite itself ? When so
many of us echo the speeches of the powerful and blame the attitudes
of the poor ?
Unfortunately, if the questions are necessary, the answers are
obvious. Most of us cannot, most of us will not do what they must. And
this too is the result of the type of globalisation we have let
happen. Although I do not believe this globalisation to be inevitable,
the media are trying to make it seem inevitable and to pretend it to
be desirable. And no one - least of all us journalists and
intellectuals - should deny the power of the ideas which we
disseminate and back to the drumbeat of around-the-clock propaganda in
a sleepless and borderless world.
Two and a half years ago, at Le Monde diplomatique, we called this
propaganda "pensée unique". The expression caught on so fast that,
within a month, candidate Jacques Chirac used it to re-ignite his
sputtering presidential campaign. And three months later, he had
become president of France. Needless to say, the sense of the
expression has lost a lot with its new popularity... So what is
"pensée unique", or more precisely what was it before its meaning
became so blurred ? And why should we oppose it ?
It is the ideological translation of the interests of global capital,
of the priorities of financial markets and of those who invest in
them. It is the dissemination through leading newspapers of the
policies advocated by the international economic institutions which
use and abuse the credit, data and expertise they are entrusted with :
such institutions as the World Bank, the IMF, the OECD, the World
Trade Organization.
Easy to spot in most countries, and in constant expansion because of
globalisation, this new orthodoxy results in submitting
democratically-elected governments to the one and only policy claimed
to be sustainable, that which has the consent of the rich. Speaking of
this, and trying to sound rational and Anglo-Saxon, a French essayist,
Alain Minc explained : "The totalitarianism of financial markets does
not please me. I find it alienating. But I know it is there. And I
want everyone in the elite to know it too. I am like a peasant who
does not appreciate hail and yet he knows he will have to live with
it. What I mean is simple : I don't know whether the markets think
right. But I know one cannot think against the markets. If you do not
respect a certain number of canons, as rigorous as those of the
Church, the 100,000 illiterates who make the markets will blow the
whole economy away. Experts have to be the propagandists of that
reality." When he said "experts", he also implied "journalists" of
course. And, in this respect, he is served well enough.
But should one accept this nice vignette of "pensée unique", this
suave legitimation of a new dictatorship, that of financial markets,
politics will amount - and it largely does - to little more than a
pseudo-debate between parties of government shouting out the minuscule
differences that separate them and silencing the significant
convergences that unite them. Electoral dissaffection will be, is
already, the result of this non-debate.
In the United States, where foreign companies heavily invested in the
White House "coffees" funding the President's reelection - thereby
blurring even further the line between national politics and global
commerce - only 48,8% of the eligible voters went to the polls last
November, the lowest number since 1924. This indifference almost
amounted to a quiet expression of civil disobedience.
But I would like to take another example, this one from Greece, and
see how the mainstream press, in this instance The Washington Post,
reacted to it by drilling into our brains the major postulates of what
we, at Le Monde diplomatique, also like to call "market journalism".
Last December, as Greek peasants were barring the roads in protest of
austerity measures threatening their survival, one of them
complained : "The only right we have is the right to vote and it leads
us nowhere." An election had been held, leading to the victory of a
pro-business socialist party. And when it happened, The Washington
Post had concluded : "This was the first truly modern election in the
history of the birthplace of democracy ... The two parties essentially
agree on most of the major issues."
Can we, as journalists, as intellectuals, accept the idea that a
"modern democracy" is one in which the major parties agree on most
issues ? And if we do, as is too often the case, how dare we bemoan
the rise of so-called "extremism" and "populism" when it is but the
mere consequence of the legitimate anger that comes from a truncated
political debate in a socially polarised society ? We all make fun of
the tendency, especially in America, to be "politically correct". But
don't we fall in the trap of being economically correct - cheerleaders
for the stock market, asleep at the switch when Robert Maxwell was
robbing his companies, or maybe just too busy then writing fawning
profiles of Carlos Salinas's "economic miracle"... ?
"In three years, the new millenium", "a bridge to the 21st century" :
the definition of modernity and of its opposite is, I believe, one of
the most telling instances of the weight of this "pensée unique". When
one listens to the mass media, "modernity" is almost invariably
equated with free trade, strong currencies, deregulation,
privatisations, communication (of those who have the means to
communicate with each other in the virtual "communities" they create),
Europe (insofar as it is that of free trade, strong currencies,
privatizations, and communication).
"Outdated notions", on the other hand, are almost invariably
associated with the welfare state, government in general (unless it
shrivels into a lean and mean law-and-order machine), unions (which
are said to defend "special interests", unlike those of, say, big
business), the nation-state (guilty of fostering "nationalism"), the
people (always likely to be entranced by "populism").
Then let me say this : their modernity is archaic. It is as old as the
steam machine. And their outdated notions have never been more
necessary. Too often, we journalists pretend the opposite. So, yes
indeed we must oppose globalisation and its logical consequences. And,
most of all, we must fight the belief that it is inevitable. In this
respect, Le Monde diplomatique and the Financial Times cannot but be
allies. Because, what, at Le Monde diplomatique, could we add to the
excellent analysis of Martin Wolf in an article he wrote two years
ago. The article was entitled : "The Global Economy Myth". and it
said : "Global economic integration is far from irresistible.
Governments have chosen to lower trade barriers and eliminate foreign
exchange controls. They could, if they wished, halt both processes."
They must. Let us help them.
But, clearly, this is not the sense of the comments we have just
heard. Because, what strikes me in the discourse of the apostles of
the market and of globalisation is its extremism, its oblivion of the
notion of healthy doubt. It's the analogy one easily can draw with the
cant of communists thirty or forty years ago. According to you,
markets have to be a great model for human kind, and so does
globalisation. And when these don't quite work out, we hear : "Give us
more time", "Let's go one more step", "Change is always painful",
"What we've seen wasn't quite pure enough", "If only the people were
better, more pliable, things would have worked beautifully".
Social inequalities ? Let's deny their existence or claim they exist
because ... we don't have enough markets. Not enough school or
hospital vouchers. Not enough enterprise zones. Not enough tax breaks.
Not enough pension funds. Not enough competition within the civil
service. Like with Stalinism before, every stumble in the march toward
a pure, radiant, bountiful market society is explained by the timidity
of the march, not by its direction. And, like with Stalinism before,
the critics of your model have to be irrational, in need of a
reeducation program or of a mental treatment ?
Well, it might be - just might be - that the market is a model that
doesn't work well for most people ; that markets can be a great
wealth-creating machine, but not so great when it comes to building a
human, just, and decent society for most of us. And what will it take
us to learn that ? How many people living in poverty ? How many people
sealed out of what Mr Alan Greenspan, the Chairman of the Federal
Reserve, called the "irrational exhuberance of the market" ? How many
people sealed out of the gated communities of the rich ? How many
people behind bars ? How many riots ? And which proportion of us
convinced that democracy is not for them ?
If the fall of communism and of its related certainties about the
nature of mankind have taught us anything, it should not be the need
for another totalitarianism, for another tyranny - that of financial
markets. But the value of doubt and the need for dissidents. Let us
all relearn the value of doubt.
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