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Jamie Bartlett

photo of Jamie Bartlett

Researcher

Jamie joined Demos in February, 2007. His primary research interests lie in international development, public services, and Islam.

Posted by Jamie Bartlett at 2:21pm on Monday, 5th March 2007

Last week, John Ralston Saul, a renowned philosopher, novelist, political penseur came to Demos and provocatively pronounced the “end of globalism”, presenting a thesis he developed in his recent book The Collapse of Globalism and the Re-birth of Nationalism.  John believes that grand economic theories rarely last more than a few decades, and the current one, globalism, is dead.   Sounds crazy? Not quite.  He’s far too smart to suggest that things like the internet, global communication & media, or international travel are all on the verge of disappearing. Rather, he is talking about a growing rejection around the world of the dominant economic theory which globalism is pushing: free market capitalism (including of capital), privatisation, limited government intervention, and the expansion of international trade.    

 
John batters the sceptics with a litany of telling examples. Latin America’s – some of it anyway – conscious rejection of neo-liberalism. Rising protectionism (especially anti-Chinese) in the US and Europe.  A reassertion of the nation-state’s power (think for example of developing countries at Cancun in 1999). He could go on.  

 
Something is definitely happening. But John pushes his thesis too far. Firstly, extant indices of economic globalism do not bear his thesis out. The think tank KOF’s index of political, economic, social globalization shows that since 1970, the world is becoming more globalised every year.  Foreign Policy magazine’s index finds the same.  Foreign direct investment levels are increasing year on year.  International trade in goods is increasing, and international trade in services is growing even more quickly – which is doubly hard to control.  Alan Blinder, a prominent American economist, estimates that 30 million US jobs – in services as well as manufacturing – will be outsourced within a generation. I could go on.   

 
Secondly, it is difficult to disentangle economic globalism from its social, cultural, and political equivalents.  To take on example among many, India & China’s booming economies (the result in large part of better integration in the world economy) has stimulated another surge – India sends more students to America than any other country. China is second.  They are returning home in greater numbers, equipped with the educational skills, cultural knowledge, and know-how to take advantage of, and so continue the expansion of, economic globalism. And so it continues.

 

What is actually happening, and been happening for at least a decade, is a realisation that pure neo-liberal policy prescriptions do not work in the way the theory would suggest.  The WTO, the Bretton Woods institutions, and individual nation-states are becoming less dogmatic. The Doha round, however imperfect, is one example.  DFID’s new White Paper, which explicitly accepts that markets aren’t the answer to every country’s ills, is another.  The cautious Global Compact, California’s efforts to sue the Environmental Protection Agency, the Enhanced Analytics Initiatve, offer furtehr testimony. We are not seeing the collapse of globalism in the way John suggests, but a humanising of economics.  After all, the underlying principles of neo-liberalism remain: that markets are essential for economic growth, that private enterprise is positive, and that cross border trade can benefit everyone, if done in the right way.

 
Economic globalism is here to stay.  But John’s stirred up the debate.  And if it helps to make our current model of globalisation more democratic, and enables more people to capture the benefits, then so much the better.

Comments

1
I agree with Jamie that something is happening. The political and economic orthodoxies are being challenged as a result of increasing uncertainty about the capacity of those orthodoxies to respond to interconnected global challenges (in trade, in climate change, in resource depletion, in cultural conflict, in democracy, the list goes on). Our ability to respond to these challenges is limited by our capacity to adapt our thinking. If we continue to be trapped in an exclusively neo-liberal mindset then we will only look for solutions using that framework. We are already seeing the limits of such an approach and i think it is this is partly what Ralston Saul is observing. What we need is experimentation, alternative ways of doing things as we try and fumble our way forward. I would like to think that it is this system instinct for innovation that is leading to tensions between a global approach and a nation-state approach (but then i am an optimist). Such experimentation is rightly located at nation-state level, or lower (all the way down to neighbourhood level) providing that it is in service to tackling global problems (and not about petty nationalism and the associated politics of fear). Our challenge is to connect that local (national) experience to our global challenges. We continue to find that really tough to do however. The local and global dimensions to our lives will always exist in a state of dynamism. Connecting the two successfully to help us navigate our uncertain future is the political and social challenge of our age.
Posted by Grahame Broadbelt  at 2:31pm on Monday, 5th March 2007
2

Interesting blog guys, but Jamie I think you underestimate the strength of the rejection of globalization in many parts of the world; sure many aspects of deeper internationalisation and ‘globalism’ are here to stay, but the point is that globalization ideology, which theoretically, conceptually even moralistically underpins so much of economic policy, is beginning to seriously falter.  This is because it has categorically failed to deliver on its (unrealizable) promises; much like modernization theory before it (and many geographers write that globalization theory is little more than a rehashed modernization discourse) it has failed to address uneven development or provide a platform for poorer countries to catch up.  Neoliberlaism is still, as you say, the dominant economic agenda but everywhere it is being challenged.

Perhaps the most damning indictment came from UN-Habitat in their 2003 report Challenge of the Slums, in which they squarely laid the blame on SAPs and neoliberal reform for the exponential growth of slums and unplanned conurbations across the global south.  In fact globalization ideology has been disastrous for most poorer countries, precipitating in capital flight, de-industrialization, entrenchment of comparative disadvantage and so on.  Part of the nationalist backlash is a logical response to this increased instability.

The fact that circuits and flows of trade and finance continue to grow internationally is not a repudiation of the failure of this ideology, nor is it quite frankly a sign of greater global integration.  In fact most financial flows and most FDI is concentrated among the triad – EU, Japan and the US; when it does extend beyond this familiar network it usually goes to the big three – Brazil, India and China (and they are succesful not becasue they have opened their markets but precisely because they exercise a mixture of protection and integration).  Actually under deregulated conditions, many geographical areas have been spatially red-lined as capital no-go areas (think sub-Saharan Africa for example).  The alleged ‘globalism’ of these networks and circuits is hardly global! Moreover, the integration of enclaves and pockets of affluence and dynamism does not translate into national economic success, but even deeper differentiation.   

 However, I don’t feel that this should mean a rejection of everything ‘global’; poorer countries are much better of producing for a local, protected market (that is after all how the advanced industrial core developed) but many aspects of globalization can be instrumentalized in their favour.  What some call ‘globalization form below’ is a possibility; it has little to do with the decidedly neoliberal tenets of economic globalization theory, but it uses the technological tools and space-time compression to create social, political and economic international networks with a different agenda and set of values (look for example at the work done by organizations like Slum Dwellers International).  Grahame, I feel is right in saying that the orthodoxies are being challenged, but this not only because they cannot respond to the pressing problems but also because they are constitutive of the latter.  The challenge, I agree, is in connecting the local and global scalars in a coherent and consistent way; but part of the effects of deeper internationalization has been the blurring of the global/local distinction (‘glocalization’), and the current ‘cracks in the consensus’ present an opportunity for the remodelling and reconceptualization of these processes, of what we mean by globalization.  

Posted by Nasser Abourahme  at 11:30am on Tuesday, 6th March 2007
3
One of Saul's more telling points , is not just that neo liberalism as an economic  fad is exhausted, but that the way of seeing the world, through an entirely economic prism that has accompanied what has appeared to be the triumph of global capitalism, is in itself highly problematic. I was therefore hugely disappointed to read the invitation (bizarrely enough from 'the Englsh Language') to the launch of the Demos pamphlet 'As You Like it...' in which English speakers are refrred to as 'shareholders' in the 'asset' that it represents, and moreover as shareholders who should be getting concerned about the 'returns,' we get from it. This seems to me to be an example of the extension of business/economics jargon where it doesn't belong, that even the CBI might blush to acknowledge. Not to mention a depressingly reductionist view of what a language is.
Posted by Kate Oakley  at 1:22pm on Tuesday, 6th March 2007
4

Thanks Kate.  We absolutely agree that language is about far more than economics.  Not wanting to give too much away prior to the launch, As You Like It makes the point that the 'triumph of global capitalism' and the relationship that it had to the English Language and its use is now giving way to far less restricted and controlled use of the language by many more people in a range of contexts that is to a vast degree wider.

The problem is that, in many areas, we have retained not just the viewpoint and assumptions of a more capitalist age, but also some hang-ups from 1707, Empire and beyond.  This is simply untenable - the metaphor of 'assets' and economics is used to make the point that, actually, these are being viewed (quite often in terms very much moulded by perceptions of economic and commercial opportunity) as such but in ways far removed from many of the now outmoded assumptions of native language users.

The pamphlet is also making the point that, in responding to these changes, we should not be driven by either market considerations or a sense of economic protectionism.  The English language is vital to our future, position and, yes, much of our export and import, but we really need to wake up to the individually driven ways in which it is now used around the world and accord them due respect, responding to and accommodating the attitudes that underlie them.  The simple, undeniable and irrefutable fact is that we do not 'own' the English language and, Kate you're right, the economic way of thinking simply isn't enough ... it's just that sometimes it needs putting in such terms to get the message across.

P.S.  Apologies for the English Language typo - it had to happen at some point in a year's worth of typing it ...

Posted by Sam Jones  at 2:56pm on Tuesday, 6th March 2007

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