For people like Rudolph and Timothy McVeigh, the main perpetrator of the Oklahoma City bombing that killed 169 people, the United States is the victim of a conspiracy that is being masterminded by sinister international organizations—the United Nations is a particular favorite—and assisted by internal traitors such as the federal government, Wall Street, the media elite, and, most loathed of all, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms. Groups such as the Patriots and Christian Identity generally consist of Americans who have been left behind: blue-collar workers whose wives now must work; unemployed people who imagine that immigrants are taking their jobs; and ranchers in Montana who have seen urban billionaires buying up huge chunks of the state. Every day, God-fearing Americans are being turned into slaves in a worldwide plantation economy, they argue, and the only way to avoid enslavement is to take up guns and fight.
Outside the United States, antiglobal groups tap into the same emotions of despair and incomprehension, but they reach exactly the opposite conclusion: The United States is not the slave but the enslaver. In an uncanny repetition of the way that Continental reactionaries regarded liberal, globalist, “Jewish” Great Britain a century ago, nearly all antiglobalists focus on “the Great Satan.” In some cases, these are merely childish repetitions of old fables. Mahathir’s thundering against America’s Jewish speculators could be based on the kaiser’s suspicions about England or on the tract by a ninep. 272teenth-century Frenchman entitled “Is the Englishman a Jew?” that cleverly decided that “Anglo-Saxon” is actually just a misheard version of “Isaac’s son.”[7] But there are also plenty of other people prepared to pick up their guns and bombs to fight this menace.
Two groups whose antiglobalist messages often go underappreciated are Japan’s Aum Shinrikyo and Mexico’s Zapatistas. The former is a paramilitary religious cult that draws its inspiration from a combination of Buddhism, yoga, and paranoia. Its members believe that Japan will respond to intensified competition from other Asian nations by subjecting its citizens to military rule; this in turn will provoke the United States to launch an all-out war on Japan before trying to establish a puppet world government. The organization’s decision to release sarin gas into the Tokyo subway in March 1995, killing twelve people and injuring five thousand, was part of a bizarre preparation for this conflict.
The Zapatista movement—a coalition of Indian peasants and urban intellectuals that has fought a long-running guerrilla war against Mexico—also fears globalization. It equates the current drive to open up the Mexican economy with the invasion of the country by the Spanish in the sixteenth century. The movement chose the first day that NAFTA was in force, January 1, 1994, to seize control of several cities in the southern Mexican state of Chiapas. Meanwhile, the Zapatistas’ local opponents in Chiapas also blame foreigners for the area’s misfortunes, with local mayors accusing outsiders of “twisting the minds of the Indian people,” local columnists snarling about the satanic intervention of foreigners, and one local union calling for them all to be rounded up and expelled.[8]
However, the most powerful antiglobalist group is militant Islam. This is partly a matter of size (it touches the lives of a billion people, from Indonesia to the former Soviet Union to inner cities across Europe) and partly a matter of stridency: Witness not just September 11, but also the way that the mullahs passed a death sentence on Salman Rushdie, a citizen of another country who wrote an allegedly heretical book. Militant Islam may be an exercise in globalization in its own right (it is indifferent to national and ethnic boundaries and determined to unite the entire world in the worship of Muhammad), but it appeals powerfully to people who have seen their lives disrupted by urbanization. In Iran, the Ayatollah Khomeini rose on a wave of popular opposition to the reigning shah’s wide-ranging attempt to modernize the country. An article in the subsequent Iranian constitution even prohibits “extravagance and wastefulness in all matters related to the economy, including consumption, investment, production, distribution, and services.”
p. 273 Naturally, there are hundreds of millions of Muslims who take the antiglobalist part of their creed as seriously as many Western Catholics take the ban on contraception. You can find weird signs of globalization even in the hotbeds of Islamic extremism: In 1995, in a particularly beleaguered corner of Beirut, an advertisement for a total-quality-management seminar sat surrounded by the familiar yellow flags of Hezbollah. Nevertheless, there is a wing of Islam that is dedicated to the overthrow of everything globalization stands for.
Osama bin Laden, who declared a jihad against the United States in 1997, is part of that wing. As early as 1982, bin Laden was preaching in Saudi mosques on the necessity of boycotting American-made goods, even though the United States was supporting his own movement in Afghanistan. Bin Laden’s fury at the modern world, particularly its American component, was explicit in 1997. “In our religion it is our duty to make jihad,” he explained to CNN, “so that God’s word is the one exalted to the heights and so that we drive the Americans away from all Muslim countries.” The new world order, according to bin Laden, was simply an American ploy:
The collapse of the Soviet Union made the U.S. more haughty, and it has started to look at itself as a master of this world and established what it calls the new world order. . . . The U.S. today has set a double standard, calling whoever goes against its injustice a terrorist. It wants to occupy our countries, steal our resources, impose on us agents to rule us . . . and wants us to agree to all these.[9]
Sympathy for the Devil
Osama bin Laden neatly illustrates two ironic but disturbing things about the way in which globalization and its opponents interact. The first, which might be described as terrorist specific, is that the same forces that have helped speed globalization—the end of the cold war, the spread of technology, the lowering of borders—have made life easier for maverick bombers. Rather than being worried about missiles from Moscow raining down on New York, security people now fret about rogue states and individuals. Globalization has made it easier for a single person to acquire a nuclear device, take it across relatively undefended borders, and leave it in New York. Indeed, one horrifying way in which globalization might come sharply to a halt would be the terrorist detonation of a nuclear or biological bomb, something that, since September 11, no longer seems so remote.
p. 274 The second point is more general: Globalization’s opponents, both violent and peaceful, have been among the cleverest exploiters of its process. The sadly untrue rumor put around that bin Laden was a member of White’s, a smart London gentlemen’s club, did have an element of believability: In his youth, bin Laden had shown every sign of being a regular young Saudi cosmocrat. In his interviews, he talks articulately about things such as oil prices and the effects of supply and demand (before blaming any problems on “America’s agent,” Saudi Arabia). Even while bin Laden lived in a part of Afghanistan that could be described as medieval, he transferred money undetected around the world, keeping in touch with his followers by satellite phone—an appropriate form of communication for a man whose brother was on the board of Iridium. His various fatwas were faxed from Afghanistan to sympathizers in other countries, especially England; many of them were reprinted in Arabic newspapers based in London that were themselves transmitted to the Middle East. Even his 1997 interview with CNN was a masterful piece of global dissemination. The alleged mastermind of the bombing of the American embassy in Nairobi, Haroun Fazil, said that he found out about the jihad from CNN rather than from bin Laden’s organization.[10]
Similarly, the Zapatistas have cleverly used the Internet to organize a worldwide network of supporters—a public-relations coup that has proved to be a powerful restraint on the Mexican government. The anarchic coalition that is the American Patriot movement is held together, above all, by the Internet. Any Montana-dwelling gun nut with a computer and a modem can easily become a member of a worldwide network of fellow travelers. The Internet is chockablock with militia bulletin boards. (There are
several websites devoted to Rudolph.) Log on to the World Wide Web, and you can learn everything from who belongs to the Trilateral Commission to where to buy the most powerful semiautomatic weapons.
There is even a new group of activists, nicknamed “hacktivists,” who engage in “digital rebellion” against the information-industrial complex. Where their radical ancestors trespassed and poached, they unleash viruses or write graffiti on corporate websites. More legally, activists set up derogatory websites. A page established by the NikeWatch Campaign, which is devoted to the shoe firm’s labor practices, comes under the heading “Just stop it.” Following the success of websites such as walmartsucks.com, various big firms have registered domains with their own name followed by sucks or preceded by I hate.
Indeed, as the swarm of NGOs that descended on Seattle demonstrated so emphatically, the best pressure groups are often better at playing the globalp. 275ization game than the multinational companies that they demonize. The world’s largest environmental pressure group, Greenpeace, is everything that today’s multinationals dream of being: networked, flexible, project driven, and value led. The organization is both tightly centralized and wonderfully decentralized; it can draw on a membership of two million people and annual revenues of one hundred million dollars, yet it usually reflects the immediate concerns of its local members. Greenpeace’s humiliation of Shell over the Brent Spar rig was a master class in global media management: The oil firm was universally condemned for trying to sink the rig, even though it was by no means clear that sinking it would be the environmentally damaging option.
As Seattle showed, again, radical activists are increasingly turning their attention from particular companies to free trade itself. A decade ago, none of the main American environmental groups had anybody permanently working on the subject.[11] Now they seem to focus on little else. The Sierra Club took out advertisements against “fast track”; the head of the National Wildlife Federation also testified against expanding NAFTA. Trade unions helped scuttle not just fast track but also the Multilateral Agreement on Investment. Articulate spokespeople have learned how to blend protectionism with more emotional calls for human rights. Listening to Thea Lee of the AFL-CIO explain gently how in the United States “lives were lost to limit the working day and for the right to bargain collectively,” it is hard to understand why the United States should allow its companies to seek out cheap workers abroad. And, as with the environment, some of the points raised are fair ones: Why, for instance, do multinationals insist that the developing world accept Western patent law but not its labor or environmental ones? Under NAFTA, claims Lee, a Mexican factory can be closed down if it is suspected of counterfeiting but not if it employs children.[12]
Fundamentally, globalization is quite a hard-hearted process. By increasing transparency, it unearths harsh facts that can be used against it. As Nadine Gordimer recently pointed out, the old saying “The poor are always with us” has now been joined by “We are always with them.” She then went on to explain: “We come face-to-face with the victims of pandemic ethnic conflicts and multinational manipulative greed on television and on the Internet.”[13] Here as elsewhere, globalization is never praised for bringing this evidence to the court, just immediately put in the dock. Multinational greed may be the force that has done the most to rid the world of poverty, but it will seldom get the credit.
All the antiglobal movement needs for success in most countries is some p. 276 clever person to give antiglobalism a respectable, intellectual face and political leadership. There is a long line of people trying to fill both roles.
Gray’s Elegy
The London School of Economics has globalization written all over it. The school was founded by Sidney and Beatrice Webb to provide professional administrators for Britain’s expanding empire. Today, more than half the school’s students are from outside the United Kingdom, and the faculty is stuffed full of sabbatical men, forever on the move from one international freebie to another.
Yet it is here, in a poky room in the school’s European Institute, that one of the most uncompromising critics of globalization has his lair. In the 1980s, John Gray was a leading member of a tiny and embattled band of academic Thatcherites. He wrote a fine book on F. A. von Hayek, hung around in Liberty Fund circles, and became a member of Margaret Thatcher’s informal brain trust. As the Conservative Party collapsed in the 1990s, however, so did Gray’s faith in free markets, and he embraced a succession of alternatives, ranging from communitarianism to environmentalism and culminating in antiglobalism.
Gray is no Luddite. He celebrates the fact that trade and technology have been bringing people together for centuries. His taste in ideas is as cosmopolitan and eclectic as anybody’s. (The only decorations in his austere office are two pictures of his mentor, Isaiah Berlin.) But Gray is convinced that the “Washington consensus,” which insists that global free markets will spread prosperity and democracy across the planet, is spreading misery and alienation instead. The globalists are guilty of cultural illiteracy, he argues, in that they fail to realize that different societies produce different sorts of capitalism and that the sort of free-market relationships that seem natural in the United States often seem perverse in other societies. Worse still, they are guilty of intellectual utopianism, justifying the misery with talk about the long run. For Gray, Marxism and globalization are peas from the same Enlightenment pod.
Gray argues that “imperial laissez-faire” is responsible for a storm that is destroying social bonds across the planet and preparing the way for a bloody fundamentalist backlash. In the United States, where the storm has blown most ferociously, it has already broken the family, proletarianized the middle classes, and swollen the prison population to gulag proportions. In the rest of the world, its consequences will be even more devastating.
p. 277 Free-trade fundamentalism confronts the world with a choice between two equally unappealing futures. The first would see the application of a “new Gresham’s law,” in which bad capitalists would drive good ones out of business, and decent wages and career ladders would become things that you read about in history books. The second prospect would feature the rise of prosperity-destroying protectionism, as more and more mixed-economy moderates are forced to choose between bowing down to pure capitalism or protecting their traditional ways of life. “Americans don’t realize how peculiar they are,” Gray sighs, casting a wistful glance at his twin portraits of Isaiah Berlin.
All along the Watchtower
This is not the place to go into why Gray is wrong but simply to consider how many other intelligent people think generally the same as he does. Gray is no longer a lone wolf in the groves of academia in the way that he was as a Thatcherite. The reigning orthodoxy in most of the world’s humanities departments is antiglobalism. In many parts of Europe it is hard to think of any intellectual who might be described as “proglobalization.” An antiglobalist screed called L’Horreur Économique by a French novelist, Viviane Forrester, is set to be the continent’s biggest economics best-seller since Karl Marx’s Das Kapital, having sold six hundred thousand copies in France and Germany alone. Anointed gurus such as Michel Foucault taught that Western history is a history of repression. Ethnic study courses teach that what used to be called the triumph of the West involved the oppression and impoverishment of the third world. The bookstores of most university towns are groaning with books like The Silent Takeover; No Logo; One World, Ready or Not; and When Corporations Rule the World. One of the better academic summaries of the sociological effects of the process is titled simply Globalization and Its Discontents.
Already some respected leftish critics of globalization have started to warn that the current system might lead to fascism. “If a new political economy cannot emerge to tame the new force of turbo-capitalism, the wave of the future could be populism,” warns Edward Luttwak, “a revolt of the less educated against elite rule, elite opinions, elite values and the elite’s consensus on how the economy should
be run.”[14] In one rather frightening article, Richard Rorty, a leading philosopher, forecast that globalization will produce a world economy owned by a cosmopolitan upper class “in which an attempt by any one country to prevent the immiseration of its workers may p. 278 result in depriving them of employment.” As workers gradually realize that they are getting a raw deal, the ordinary people will decide the system has failed and start looking around for a strongman, “someone willing to assure them that, once he is elected, the smug bureaucrats, tricky lawyers, overpaid bond salesmen, and post-modernist professors will no longer call the shots.”[15]
There are also plenty of businesspeople committed to taming globalization. The list of people who have written books warning about the evils of unregulated markets includes both George Soros, the greatest speculator of the age, and Jimmy Goldsmith, perhaps its greatest corporate raider. Interestingly, both men are cosmopolitans par excellence and have made a virtue of their rootlessness. Goldsmith spent most of the last years of his life, not to mention a considerable sum of his own money, warning against “the trap” of free trade. His brother Teddy continues the fight to this day.
In mainstream politics, antiglobalism has managed to unite people from both ends of the political spectrum. Patrick Buchanan sounds like an old-school socialist when he rails against American companies that export American jobs. Wages rise while profits soar, he laments; wealth becomes more concentrated while the middle class is decimated; and society begins to fall apart at the seams. “Broken homes, uprooted families, vanished dreams, delinquency, vandalism, crime,” he writes in The Great Betrayal, “these are the hidden costs of free trade.” Protectionism, claims Buchanan, is not “some alien dogma” but an all-American policy supported by Lincoln, Washington, and Teddy Roosevelt.[16] Appropriately enough, the support for his “pitchfork rebellion” comes from the sort of blue-collar patriots who used to provide the hard core of the Democratic Party.
A Future Perfect: The Challenge and Promise of Globalization Page 39
