Atlantic £16.99 pp309
Most readers will know the apocryphal Indian story about a group of blind sages being brought to feel the various parts of an elephant and then to describe what it is they are feeling. One savant strokes the elephant’s rough leg and declares it must be a tree, another feels the tail and insists it is a snake, and so on. None of them can comprehend the totality of the beast.
Most scholars examining today’s volatile political and economic circumstances resemble those India sages in that they — and I plead guilty here — focus upon one particular part of the story and tend to ignore (or at least downplay) the others. Some assemble facts to prove that China is an enormous investment opportunity; others contend that it is a vast and growing military threat. Certain scientists warn us that we are on the brink of ecological collapse, but their conservative critics declare the evidence to be too murky to tell. What is the poor layman to do?
Nowhere does our present intellectual Tower of Babel appear more in contention and confusion than in regard to the matter of globalisation. This is no mere academic dogfight, because entire political parties, indeed whole countries, have seized upon the question of whether the completely free exchange of goods, capital, ideas and people is a benefit — or a deadly threat.
There are few middle-of-the-road voices to be heard here. Egged on, one suspects, by their publishers, authors participating in this debate tend to advance a more extreme — or, shall we say, more dramatic — picture of events. Just recently, the foreign-affairs correspondent of The New York Times, Thomas Friedman, published his new book The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Globalised World in the 21st Century. Deeply impressed by the communications revolution and the free flow of capital, and reinforced by interviews with high-tech entrepreneurs from Boston to Bangladesh, Friedman argued that globalisation is intensifying, making societies ever more “flat” — that is, conforming more and more to free-market western practices.
This debate is now joined by the Canadian philosopher John Ralston Saul, with The Collapse of Globalism. Saul has written various books of fiction as well as non-fiction, and he brings a great breadth of literary and cultural knowledge to his task. But he has his own axe to grind in this debate over globalism, and his own arguments to advance.
The reader would be wise to ignore the dust-jacket blurb: “Globalisation, like many great geopolitical ideologies before it, is now dead.” The author is not that crude. He recognises some of the trends that Friedman celebrates, that is, that software engineers in Bangalore and female assembly-workers in a Motorola plant in Thailand are earning 10 times more than their parents could ever hope to bring home. Saul knows that there are significant winners in this tale.
But his story is about the losers or, better put, about the backlash against globalism and globalisation. And he is striving, yearning, faltering and then rising to find what Hans Kung, the great German theologian, described as a “global ethic” to help us pick our way through the debris of the 21st century. The Collapse of Globalism is an angry and, I think, an unbalanced book, for the same yet opposite reasons as Friedman’s. Each is groping a particular part of our elephant of globalism. For his part, Saul sees, not the “flattening” of our world, but the increasing storms and dislocations, and the increasingly powerful movements and protests against unbridled capitalism, especially in the developing world. And he means to frighten the reader, not only to his point of view, but to take action. This is a sort of manifesto, rather like Rachel Carson’s The Silent Spring, or Donella and Dennis Meadows’s Club of Rome report, The Limits to Growth.
There is much that I like about this indignant approach, and there is much evidence to support Saul’s contention that things are going badly wrong with our planet, its economic and social systems and its environment. Should the reader peruse a book such as Dominique Reperant’s wonderful photographic work, The Most Beautiful Villages of France, he or she would find breathtaking images, but one thing comes to mind: there are few people, except for the ancient women and bent-over veterans. The modern world has sucked the populations out of such rural, pre-industrial and pre-high-tech communes. The same is true in the broad plains of Nebraska, where only the two cities of Omaha and Lincoln survive, and where rural folk are resigned to driving 75 miles to a supermarket. If they can pay for the petrol. These are not pleasant sights and, so far, only a few regions have found a way to cope with this implosion. And the Wal-Mart revolution marches on.
Meanwhile, far from “old” Europe, the backlash against globalism has intensified. This is not just in depressed, poverty-stricken countries in the developing world. One of Saul’s more interesting discussions, in chapter 22, is how New Zealand flipped from being the “model” of Cobdenite free-market success to a nation riven by economic crisis — and how it has now begun to recover from that crisis with a return to a mixed economy, recognising where the state has a role to play in providing for the basic needs of its citizens. The Adam Smith societies of the world will go nuts at this. And it is unlikely that Klaus Schwab and the governors of the World Economic Forum at Davos will welcome Saul’s description of their orchestration of enthusiastic globalism each year.
But the author’s chief indignation is arrayed at what is happening in the poorer parts of the world today — malnutrition, Aids, abuse of human rights, gross distortions of income, dreadful examples of child labour, widespread ecocide, corrupt governments in cahoots with fantastically rich multi-national corporations whose fat-cat executives earn ever-higher bonuses even as they shift their production facilities to cheap-labour countries and fire their own workers. It is a sort of old Socialist Workers’ guide to the planet. Anecdote is piled upon anecdote, and statistic upon statistic. It is like being raked by a full broadside from HMS Victory.
Saul’s counterblast to globalisation’s cheerleaders is a healthy one. On the whole, I incline to his worries rather than to “the world is flat” optimism. There is a lot of evidence that societies old and new, north and south, are responding with anger to the acquisitiveness of Wall Street and the cheerful forecasts of the Chicago School of Economics. But the tone of this book is a little too breathless, it rushes from one fact to another, and awards itself (especially in the conclusion) too much importance. This is not the modern-day equivalent of Keynes’s Economic Consequences of the Peace; would that it were. And it will not sell well in Bangalore.
ANTI-FORUM
Saul is certainly no fan of the World Economic Forum at Davos, which this year featured Bono, discussing Africa with Tony Blair and Bill Gates. “Just as classic plays with kings, virgins, love and betrayal must have their fool,” he sniffs, “so globalisation has Davos.”
Paul Kennedy is professor of history at Yale University and the author of The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers and Preparing for the 21st Century. The Collapse of Globalism is available at the Sunday Times Books First price of £13.59 plus £2.25 p&p on 0870 165 8585
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websites:
www.gg.ca/john-ralston-saul/index_e.asp
Ralston Saul’s official page as Canada’s governor general
