Globalisation:Greater Interdependence OR Autarky.
"Just beyond the horizon of current events lie two possible political futures--both bleak, neither democratic. The first is a retribalization of large swaths of humankind by war and bloodshed: a threatened Lebanonization of national states in which culture is pitted against culture, people against people, tribe against tribe--a Jihad in the name of a hundred narrowly conceived faiths against every kind of interdependence, every kind of artificial social cooperation and civic mutuality. The second is being borne in on us by the onrush of economic and ecological forces that demand integration and uniformity and that mesmerisethe world with fast music, fast computers, and fast food--with MTV, Macintosh, and McDonald's, pressing nations into one commercially homogeneous global network: one McWorld tied together by technology, ecology, communications, and commerce. The planet is falling precipitantly apart AND coming reluctantly together at the very same moment." (Benjamin R. Barber Published originally in the March, 1992 issue of The Atlantic Monthly. Revised as the introduction to "Jihad Versus McWorld" Times Books, 1995)
The apocalyptic vision elucidated by Barber in 1992 has a great deal of resonance in the events of today. In South Asia the only resistance to the cultural homogeneity represented by US multi-national fast food encroachment appears from extreme Nationalism and fundamentalist Hinduism. In the US itself a rising fundamentalist right wing survivalist minority rants at the rise of global government. A wave of blindly furious xenophobia arose in the wake of 9/11. The political and religious right in North America have exploited public anger to restrict the rights and privacy of the individual in ways that would have been unthinkable five years previously. ( read "Trading on Fear" Sheldon Rampton and John Stauber Saturday July 12, 2003- The Guardian)
In Europe and Africa open conflict is attributed to the re-emergence of ancient hostilities between marginal ethnicities. The choices available to the peoples of the developing world appear to have been narrowed to an appalling degree.
The fiscal, cultural, electronic and productive interlinkages between the disparate nations of the Industrialised world have been so consolidated that difference has been dissipated to the point where one city is virtually indistinguishable from another. The excluded majority population of the world are faced with the prospect of either continued poverty and debt by allowing, and participating in, their own exploitation by transnational corporations bigger than their erstwhile imperial masters or the chaos and conflict borne by withdrawal from the global socioeconomic system.
Under the immediate surface the planet's biological support systems appear to be collapsing whilst we search for a barcoded "use by" date for the earth.
Postmodern ennui and new-millenial angst pervade the individual consciousness and the collective culture. Cynicism and open terror at the future are seen in the cultural production of popular entertainment, evident in cinemas in "Independence Day" or in the asteroid films of recent years, even with their happily resolved endings. These cultural responses have resurfaced today at least as powerfully as at the height of the cold war.
Yet despite the seemingly coherent pessimism of such a snapshot view of the world represents a gross oversimplification of the multi-layered complexity of an iniquitous set of global relationships and an ideological imposition of constraints on the actions of nations and individuals.
Economic interdependence is an illusion applicable only to a tiny elite of the world's population, the mass have been consigned to, or have given their consent to, dependency and subordination.
Autarky -economic and cultural self sufficiency- represented by a withdrawal from globalising forces is advocated only by the desperate or the insane.
However as we discussed much earlier in the module the development policy choices represented by Import Substitution or Export Orientation are equally illusory since they are based on essentially the same premises.
The fatal flaw in the edifice of conventional international socioeconimcs is deeply rooted- the quest for growth- the aim of every nation state in the world, is simply not sustainable. The fundamental ideological construct that defines development merely in terms of economic growth is detrimental to your health and to the health and well-being of 99% of the planet's peoples.
The prospects for global macro socioeconomic change are however not good. The possibility of even the most modest redistribution of resources for example by the writing off of the behemoth of debt crushing the developing world are continually resisted by the powerful coterie of the G7 nations. How long the nations states of the Industrialised world and their representative international intergovernmental fiscal organisation can continue to resist widespread public pressure to relent on the burden of debt so damaging to the Third World remains to be seen. For much of the Third world economic resources are so depleted that internal redistribution and withdrawal, as has been the case with Zimbabwe in the past three years, offers little as a solution to poverty and disease.
As Bhagwati states
"Marxist and Leninist theories of imperialism assumed that the quest for over-expanding markets would in time compel nation-based capitalist economies to push against national boundaries in search of an international economic imperium. Whatever else has happened to the scientistic predictions of Marxism, in this domain they have proved farsighted. All national economies are now vulnerable to the inroads of larger, transnational markets within which trade is free, currencies are convertible, access to banking is open, and contracts are enforceable under law."(Jagdish Bhagwati -Arthur Lehman Professor of Economics & Professor of Political Science Columbia University)
Cautious optimism is however still possible even if only for small scale incremental change. We can however not expect this change to originate in the actions of the Transnational corporations or the policies of the G7 lap dog "Bretton Woods" institutions. Funding for the development projects of the Non-governmental organisations may indeed be motivated largely by bourgeois guilt and provide a cover for the inaction and cynical manipulation of governments and corporations but the practical outcomes of such projects do make a fundamental improvement to the quality if life for many of the poorest, most marginalised people, in particular in the rural hinterlands of the South.
Public pressure, almost certainly motivated by fear as much as empathy for their fellow humans, has had and will continue to have an effect in pushing for change at the political level. The key is a generalised acceptance that continued inaction and the pursuit of growth is not sustainable at the economic, social or ecological level in -short that we can only resolve global poverty by curbing the excess consumption of the West.
Brian Mulrine 2000
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