February 22, 2004

Globalization#2

I was loaned a copy of Don Watson's big tome Recollections of a Bleeding Heart when I was in Canberra last week.

I want to read it with a question in mind. Why did the Australian Labor Party embrace the neo-liberal doctrine of globalization in such a black and white way that it attacked the electorate for its parochialism and reform fatigue, adopted such a skewed vision of history, and saw austere microeconomic reform as the main political game. How come the Canberra policy makers become so blinkered that they did not even realize that they were blinkered or tunnel visioned?

John Ralston Saul says that it arose from a geopolitical vacuum:


"Globalisation materialised in the 1970s from the sort of geopolitical vacuum or fog that appears whenever a civilisation begins to change direction, to grope its way around a corner from one era to another.In geopolitics, a vacuum is not an option. It is the period between options; an opportunity, providing you can recognise it for what it is; a brief interregnum during which individuals can maximise their influence on the direction of their civilisation."

So what caused that vacuum or void? Saul gives an interesting answer:

"Perhaps a quarter century of social reform had left the liberal elites exhausted. The need to manage a multitude of enormous new social programs that had been put in place in a democratic manner - an ad hoc manner - made it difficult for political leaders to concentrate on the main line; that is, to concentrate on a broad sense of the public good. Instead, governments were caught up in the endless and directionless details of management. Or perhaps the cause of the vacuum was the resulting reliance of those political elites on technocrats, who understood little of the debate - in fact, distrusted it - and so drew the leaders into isolation. Most Western leaders seemed confused about what to do next. They had come to the end of a chapter of social progress."

That seem right. I distinctly remember many social democrat politicians at he time saying that they had no arguments to defend social democracy from the big Hayek roll back against socialism. Their cupboard was bare. They had nothing in their tool kit. Hence they could not resist neo-liberalism and the turn to the free market.

Watson was a bleeding heart historian working for a neo-liberal politician in the last few years of the ALP's decade long rule. So I want to see if he has an answer for why the neo-liberal conception of globalization swept all before it.

Maybe I won't find what I'm looking for. As a speech writer for the Paul Keating, then the Prime Minister, Don Watson may have become a courtier in Keating's court until it all came crashing down in 1996.

Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at February 22, 2004 10:29 PM | TrackBack
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