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February 27, 2004
More from John Ralston Saul. He says that there were three particularly obvious signs that corporate globalisation would not deliver on its promises.
"First, the leadership of a movement devoted to "real competition" was made up largely of tenured professors, consultants, and technocrats - private-sector bureaucrats - managing large joint-stock companies. Most of the changes they sought were aimed at reducing competition.
Second, the idea of transnationals as new virtual nation states missed the obvious. Natural resources are fixed in place, inside nation states. And consumers live on real land in real places. These are called countries. The managers and professors who waxed enthusiastic about the new virtual corporate nations were themselves resident citizens and consumers in old-fashioned nation states. It would be only a matter of time before elected leaders noticed that their governments were far stronger than the large corporations."
The Iraq war soon reinforced the idea that we citizens continue to live in nation states and nation states were not about to be consigned to the dustbin of history by the global market.
It is the third sign that interests me in the light of the Asian financial crisis in te late 1990s. Saul says:
"Finally, the new approach to debt - public versus private, First World versus Third World - revealed a fatal confusion. Those who preached Globalisation couldn't tell the difference between ethics and morality. Ethics is the measurement of the public good. Morality is the weapon of religious and social righteousness. Political and economic ideologies often decline into religious-style morality towards the end. But Globalisation had shoved ethics to the side from the beginning and insisted upon a curious sort of moral righteousness that included maximum trade, unrestrained self-interest and governments alone respecting their debts. These notions were curiously paired with something often called family values, as well as an Old Testament view of good and evil.
It somehow followed that if countries were in financial trouble, they were moral transgressors. They had to discipline themselves. Wear hair shirts. Embrace denial and fasting.This was the crucifixion theory of economics: you had to be killed economically and socially in order to be reborn clean and healthy."
I read that and I think of Indonesia. They were treated roughly by the IMF. It was standover tactics.
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