An Address to Free Trade Youth
on Saturday 9 September, 2000
If there is one thing the anti-globalisation activists clearly believe above all else, it is that their moral concerns are worthy of great respect.
Indeed, they tell us that nothing but moral concern drives their protest and their anguish. That they are driven by horror at what is, and will, happen, and by a desperate desire for a better world.
With very few, if any, exceptions, none of this is true.
I do not mean to say that globalisation does not raise interesting moral issues, or that there are not matters that governments should be concerned about (though I think the concern on both counts is greatly exaggerated). What I do mean to say is that the campaign of the anti-globalisation activists is not worthy of moral respect.
Their campaign is not worthy of respect because they are clearly not concerned with either truth or with predictable consequences: the truth of what is happening or the predictable consequences of the policies they typically espouse.
We have to be clear about what globalisation is not doing. It is not abolishing national sovereignty. It is not creating mass poverty. It is not happening regardless of the wishes of ordinary folk. On the contrary, it is occurring because of deliberate acts by governments of sovereign nations, it is in the process of creating the greatest mass uplift from poverty in human history and it is happening precisely because of the preferences of ordinary people.
As commentators are saying more and more, we are not living in the first age of globalisation. On the contrary, the period prior to the First World War was at least as great an age of globalisation as the current one. Indeed, the Deakinite Settlement of White Australia, Trade Protection, Wage Arbitration, State Paternalism and Imperial Benevolence which was the basis of Australian public policy from the 1905-08 Deakin Government onwards until it was fatally undermined by the Whitlam Government (leading to the Settlement's evolving replacement by the Hawke, Keating and Howard Governments), was, in many ways, an attempt to opt out from globalisation.
What is globalisation and why has it become such a strong force?
Globalisation is the development and deepening of world markets in capital, in goods and in services by the increasing occurrence of commercial exchanges across international boundaries.
It is to be distinguished from internationalisation
Internationalisation is the increase in number, range and extent of international treaties and standards having, in countries with genuinely legalistic polities, import for domestic policies and politics.
They are very different, if related, phenomena which generate very different responses: many of those most favourable to globalisation are deeply dubious about internationalisation and vice versa. This is not surprising -- globalisation increases consumer sovereignty by widening choice and increasing competitive pressure on producers. Internationalisation (if governments permit it to) removes political decision-making to a far less accountable locus, thereby reducing the political sovereignty of the citizen-voter.
Globalisation is occurring because governments are letting, even encouraging it, to occur and because people want the things globalisation delivers. If ordinary consumers did not want to engage, directly or indirectly, in exchanges across national boundaries, they would not happen. If they did not want to participate in international popular culture, travel to other countries, buy foreign goods, have the widest choice of products, have cheaper products, have better products, sell the products of their labour to anyone who is willing to buy them, then globalisation would not occur.
Even more to the point, if governments did not believe that choosing globalisation did not enable them to more effectively deliver, directly or indirectly, what their citizens want, they would not choose it either.
Engaging in international trade is not compulsory. Even today there are sovereign nations which attempt to stay out of the international trading economy to a greater or less degree -- North Korea being perhaps the most extreme case.
The claim that globalisation is something imposed on people is nonsense. People sometimes do not want to face the consequences of their own preferences, but that is a different matter.
It is perfectly true that globalisation does increase Schumpeterian processes of creative destruction. This openness to other lands, other ideas, other products, changes us and the culture and society around us. But it remains a change driven by the myriad choices of individuals, households and firms.
Which is, of course, why the anti-globalisation activists hate the whole thing so much. Because it makes a complete mockery of the idea of social change as something they direct and they can control. It is not that they hate the idea of people being treated as consumers: it is they hate the idea of people not being subject to their ideological direction. People-as-consumers are people choosing on the basis of complete indifference to the visions of the activists: it is the activists being reduced to trivial nonentities.
After all, what is the core ideological vision of the central organisers of SII? It is of a society directed by a revolutionary elite who control all aspects of social life in order to create a transformed humanity and a transformed society.
These people claim they are so concerned about poverty, yet there is nothing more predictable than that the policies they espouse will create, extend and entrench mass poverty. Anyone who doubts that need only examine the record of command economies -- presently being exemplified by that weird Stalinist survival, the arch example of Socialism in One Family, North Korea.
They hate globalisation as the expression of the success of capitalism, and of the collapse of socialism.
Globalisation is simply the application of liberal capitalism on a global stage. And liberal capitalism is the only form of society which has sustainably delivered mass prosperity, mass longevity, mass freedom and mass democracy. It delivers these things because it allows a myriad of economic agents to make their own choices, through property rights, the rule of law and free and open political processes. Globalisation is just the logical extension of this.
Liberal capitalism is the most dynamic social system humanity has ever created. That dynamism creates its own costs and difficulties: it is not a costless boon. But it remains a boon. One has only to contemplate the fact that human life expectancy has gone up more in the last 100 years than in the previous 200,000 or contemplate the opportunities and prosperity that the average Australian child has today compared to that of a child of, say, 1750, 1850 or even 1950 to see its virtues.
The increase in mass prosperity and longevity, the creation of mass freedom and mass democracy, is such a stunning achievement that no-one who does not seek to understand the nature of that achievement, who does not acknowledge that achievement, can be said to be seriously concerned with human welfare.
We are so used to seeing people accept uncritically that opposition to capitalism and all its works is the only possible sign of moral virtue that we do not stop often enough and consider the bankruptcy of such a position. It is contemptible than people who proclaim themselves deeply concerned with human welfare to pay no heed to such unparalleled achievement. Even the claim that political action is necessary to civilise capitalism is subject to the elementary response that political action without capitalism -- under Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot -- has been responsible for some of the greatest barbarisms of human history. For all its, at times apparently relentless, banality, capitalism, at its core, is based on the mass application of individual choice, of institutions which protect and foster mutually beneficial exchanges which have proved to be a profound force for human liberation.
After all, poverty is the normal human condition. Most people in history have lived and died in poverty, often grinding poverty. Most human societies produce mass poverty. It is the development of societies which achieve mass prosperity which is startling.
But now we know how the trick is done. More to the point, people in societies where mass poverty remains know that the trick can be done. The success of the Asian tigers in moving from mass poverty to developed world status in a generation has set the benchmark for governments around the world. They want in because their people demand in.
They also know how the trick is not done. China is now the largest source of foreign students in the United States -- over 100,000 of them. They are the children of the elite. Chinese President Jiang Zemin's own son is studying in the US. The Chinese elite is becoming American-educated. They have seen Maoism fail, they have seen the Soviet Empire collapse, they have seen Japan stagnate and they have seen the Americans go from strength to strength. It is not merely a matter of the current economic boom (which has more than a little of the bubble economy about it) -- in the last 80 years, the US has seen off Imperial Germany, Imperial Japan, Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union and the Japanese economic challenge. The Chinese know a working model when they see one and they want in. The effort they have put in to join the WTO is evidence of that.
What the Chinese are seeking to do is not an easy process: a system which creates "government-owned non-government organisations" or GONGOs has some adjustment problems yet. In fact, they have huge adjustment problems which may yet see the whole thing go bust. But they know what they want, they want mass prosperity. And they know what the working model is. They have even acquired a striking version of it in Hong Kong.
What this represents is not only the triumph of capitalism as the superior model, as the path of mass prosperity, it is also the abandonment of politics as a source of transcendental belief and aspiration. It is workday, practical politics. In its own way, it is deeply inspiring, but it is not a substitute for religious belief and does not pretend to be. It does not promise a transformation of human nature or a society without tensions and problems. Instead, it takes human nature as a given and works with that. It is the triumph of the ideas of the sceptical Enlightenment, the Enlightenment of Hume, Smith, Montesquieu, Burke and Madison.
The radical Enlightenment, the tradition which sees human nature as plastic to the ambitions of the visionaries, the tradition of Rousseau, is left homeless and bereft and utterly defeated. Their rage is great, because their aspirations as the history-bestriding visionaries of a transformed humanity are empty ashes in their mouth. Trashing Starbucks café's in Seattle and McDonalds in London are apposite expressions of this rage. Both chains represent the power and popularity of ordinary consumer choice. (That McDonalds had to take over the whole food production process in order to supply its first Moscow store with food of sufficient quality to meet McDonalds' standards was a nice display of the failure of socialism). As anyone who has tried to launch a new product knows, it is nonsense to portray consumers as helpless pawns of marketing: but such a myth expresses well the ambition of Rousseau"s heirs to be moulders of others. Accepting the power and reality of consumer choice naturally buttresses the validity of what they choose.
At Seattle and London we saw rage, but it was not the rage of the downtrodden, it was not even rage for the downtrodden, it was a rage of frustration, the frustration of the true believers in their own enormous moral importance being left with no place to go, no stage on which to strut with any seriousness except that of vacuous street theatre.
And that is a rage worth not a scintilla of anyone's moral respect.
No comments:
Post a Comment