Thursday 28 September 2023

So what's wrong with globalisation, anti-globalists? [update 2]


I keep hearing from many so-called libertarians that they're against something called "globalisation." Which seems odd. So I checked a working definition of globalisation, from an organisation that's so ill-disposed towards libertarianism they refer to something called neoliberalism (one of those "academic lies about free-market economists") ...

Neoliberalism [says something called the 'Dictionary of Global Bioethics'] is the dominant ideology of globalisation. It is a conglomerate of ideas focused on promoting the free market such as competition, privatisation, deregulation, reduction of public expenditure, tax reform, and protection of property rights. According to such an ideology globalisation is basically liberalisation and will foster individual liberty and human well-being when global markets are free.
So it looks like globalism means, in order: 
  • the free market, 
  • privatisation, 
  • deregulation, 
  • reduction of public expenditure, 
  • tax reform, 
  • protection of property rights, 
  • individual liberty, 
  • human well-being and 
  • global markets.
So what's not to like, anti-globalists?

UPDATE 1:

An example from the anti-globalist swamp, this one from the species Duplicitous Trumpus, speaking [sic] just this afternoon:
I want a future that protects American labor, not foreign labor. The future that puts American dreams over foreign profits. And a future that raises American wages, that strengthens American industry, that builds national rapport, and that defends his country's dignity, not squanders it all to build up foreign countries that hate us. And you know where they are. They're located all over the world. But they're mostly on the other side of the world. We [sic] don't want that.
    Under [the current administration] you have none of this. You have none of the things we want. Instead of economic nationalism, you have ultra left-wing globalism.
So now globalism is "ultra-left wing"?

Or do you really have to be an idiot to think that?

UPDATE 2:
In the comments below, Ross G draws a distinction between economic globalisation and political globalisation. (Thanks Ross.) They "are different beasts" he points out: "Being an owner of an exporting business, and the owner of IP in many markets, I am all for economic globalism. But not so keen on political globalisation though, i.e. the growing influence of the World Bank, IMF, WTO, WHO, etc."

This is true, except insofar as political globalisation is used to increase (or diminish) economic globalisation.

Let's think back a bit.

There was never a time when the world was more interlinked economically than at the very beginning of the twentieth century (right up until the world was rent asunder by war). 


One great story to tell is how that "liberal century" (the nineteenth century) created that economic interlinkage despite all the technological hurdles is one story. 

The other story, hardly told, is how it was re-created after the Second World War despite the widespread philosophical and academic opposition to it all (and how it's now being killed off today). That is: how we nonetheless ended up at the end of the twentieth century with at least as great a degree of economic globalisation as at the end of the nineteenth, despite the Gramscian capture of the bureaucratic and educational institutions (and the antediluvian nationalism -- both economic and political -- that's been destroying it since).

The main cause seems to be that the Gramscian "long march through the institutions" was opposed by a Hayekian one. They simply chose different institutions on which to focus.

And that's the crucial difference. While Gramsci's activists were capturing the teachers colleges, protest movements, and philosophy and sociology departments, Hayek's followers (many of them) were capturing the global institutions.

The key thing to grasp from that chart above is that the high in the Year 2000 was achieved when there was achieved almost a global consensus on free trade and global markets, on deregulation and self-regulating markets, on individual liberty and human rights,  tax reform and fiscal responsibility, etc. -- and also when anti-capitalist protests outside WTO meetings were at their height. The consensus was that these things were good. The strange thing is that it was mainly the protesters outside the meetings who understood how that consensus within had been achieved.

So one of the very strange things about this, is that the story of how that increasing post-war economic globalisation was achieved is mostly told by its enemies. And some of the least irrational accounts credit the ingenious advocacy by a group (including Hayek, Gottfried Habeler, Ludwig Von Mises and Wilhem Ropke) to use global political institutions like the WTO and the IMF to promote this cause. Their work began pre-war. From Quinn Slobodian' s book Globalists, for example, comes this tale:
Röpke himself pointed out in 1937 that macroeconomics encouraged the national frame of policy, including what he called “self-contained national income theory.”157 The nation-state was the assumed, if not the explicit, container for projects of planning and later the distribution of the welfare state’s social services and benefits. Geneva School neoliberals felt that this confidence was misplaced and drew a line around the nation when the frame of analysis should encompass the world....
    In a decade [the 1930s] when most solutions inspired by Keynes, Moscow, and Schacht were national, and [central] planning was in the air, Röpke and his collaborators in Paris, Geneva, and Eastern Europe thought at the scale of the globe.
    The neoliberals [sic] gave a name to the enemy in the 1930s and 1940s: “economic nationalism.” The term, which today is commonplace, refers to governments enacting policies that block or slow trade ...
    Against the enemy doctrine of economic nationalism, neoliberals posed what Michael Heilperin, in his contribution to the 1939 International Studies Conference, called “economic internationalism.” He defined this as “a policy intended to prevent political boundaries from exercising any disturbing effect on economic relations between areas on the two sides of the frontier.”7 Economic internationalism sought to make political borders mere lines on the map with no effect on the flow of goods and capital. By contrast, economic nationalism pursued the misguided goals of national self-sufficiency, autarky, “insulation,” and “autonomy”—the latter being categories that Heilperin put in quotation marks to express his skepticism. Neoliberals saw economic nationalism as a revolt against interdependence that could lead only to starvation or wars of expansion. Globalization could not be undone. To shield a national economy from the forces of world competition in any way was a sign of secession from the international community. Neoliberals saw the root of the problem in the tension between the twin Wilsonian principles of national self-determination and economic free trade.
That is, between the competing ideas of political nationalism and economic globalisation. The use of global political institutions was intended to counter that -- using their global framework to push economic liberalisation worldwide.
[T]he distinction between the political and economic realms was central. Nations could have formal sovereignty while still remaining deeply connected economically.... Atomistic national political equality, in other words, could coexist within what [Moritz] Bonn called the “invisible economic empire” of trade and exchange that was global. A political world of borders could coexist, and had coexisted ... within a borderless world economy....
    Accepting that political frontiers could not be eliminated, and that nationalism was a force that spoke to people in an ineradicable way, they sought what Bonn called the “sterilisation of frontiers.” “If frontiers were no longer obstacles to international economic intercourse,” he wrote, “they would lose part of their sinister significance.” The idea was to reconstitute the invisible economic empire of exchange and trade overlaid with a grid of externally bounded political units called nations.
Despite their many problems, global political institutions like the WTO, IMF World Bank were used to promote this cause. One method, imperfect as it was, was to promote the so-called Washington Consensus (ironic, since Washington DC itself could barely follow one of the ten-point "consensus"). Critics of the process [in their diatribe Neoliberalism: A Very Short Introduction] bewail the worldwide spread, half a century later, of the Hayekian "long march through the global institutions":
In some cases, domestic elites, educated in elite universities abroad, embraced neoliberalism enthusiastically. Others adopted it only grudgingly because they felt that they had no choice but to swallow the bitter pill of structural adjustment demands that inevitably accompanied much-needed IMF or World Bank loan offers. Although Chicago School economists like Friedman disliked the 1940s Keynesian regulatory framework under which the IMF and World Bank had originally been devised, their neoliberal ideological descendants in the 1990s managed to capture the upper echelons of power in these international economic institutions. With the support of the world’s sole remaining superpower, they eagerly exported the ‘Washington Consensus’ to the rest of the world.

Readers might remember that New Zealand itself was a beneficiary in the 1980s. And that a former New Zealand Prime Minister was to become head of the World Trade Organisation (WTO). And even that the consensus was so widespread, and so powerful, that even the former left-wing activist Phil Goff could be lauded at one time as one of the best advocates in global closed-door discussions for free trade!

The ‘Washington Consensus’ is often viewed as synonymous with ‘neoliberalism.’ Coined in the 1980s by the free-market economist John Williamson [whose work was mainly on the institutions necessary for economic progress and stability], the term refers to the ‘lowest common denominator of policy advice’ directed at mostly Latin American countries by the IMF, the World Bank, and other Washington-based international economic institutions and think tanks. In the 1990s, it became the global framework for ‘proper’ economic development. In exchange for much-needed loans and debt-restructuring schemes, governments in the global South were required to adhere to the Washington Consensus by following its ten-point programme: 
  1. A guarantee of fiscal discipline, and a curb to budget deficit 
  2. A reduction of public expenditure, particularly in the military and public administration 
  3. Tax reform, aiming at the creation of a system with a broad base and with effective enforcement 
  4. Financial liberalisation, with interest rates determined by the market 
  5. Competitive exchange rates, to assist export-led growth 
  6. Trade liberalisation, coupled with the abolition of import licensing and a reduction of tariffs 
  7. Promotion of foreign direct investment 
  8. Privatisation of state enterprises, leading to efficient management and improved performance 
  9. Deregulation of the economy
  10. Protection of property rights
Which rather brings us back to the point at the top of this (now over-long) post: that if this is globalism (global political institutions used to push back economic nationalism and primitivism), then what's not to like?

7 comments:

Libertyscott said...

As far as I can tell, "globalism" is a pejorative for whatever policies get advanced by any international organisation that the person using the term doesn't like. The UN isn't keen on a lot of those things, but the WTO is. NATO couldn't care less about most of those things, the WEF cares about some but not others.

The opposite "localism" is seen as benign, but who really wants everything you do determined by your neighbours?

Ross G said...

Being an owner of an exporting business, and the owner of IP in many markets, I am all for economic globalism. But not so keen on political globalization though, i.e. the growing influence of the World Bank, IMF, WTO, WHO, etc.
Economic globalization and political globalization are different beasts.

MarkT said...

Libertyscott is right, it all comes down to the detail of what the global organisation is trying to advance.

If it's advancing free trade, of course we should be in favour of it.

It it's advancing say uniform targets for carbon reduction, we should be agin it.

Peter Cresswell said...

@Mark T: Exactly. So, because the referents for the word are so disparate, it makes it something of an anti-concept -- and makes me automatically suspicious of anyone using it.

I'll post an update later today which puts a further spin on it ...

MarkT said...

@Peter: We agree, but on the other hand the concept perhaps has some limited validity. It distinguishes policies that are ‘top down’ and more likely to be distant from the reality of the people it affects; versus those that are more attuned and influenced by local sentiment.

When something good is being pushed from overseas (eg: commercial realities requiring free trade) that distance can be a good thing, when something bad is being pushed it’s a bad thing. When it comes to local government at least, I’d say that localism (smaller rather than amalgamated council districts) is generally a good thing.

So we can’t say something is either good or bad if it’s globalist, but the concept can still be useful in distinguishing how accountable it is to local sentiment.

MarkT said...

Great post. I particularly like the idea that there was a Hayekian march through the institutions. I think that's largely correct, but not as conspiracist as the authors you quoted probably assume. It was simply the result of socialist applications producing such bad results that governments were forced to look at alternatives to avoid going bankrupt, and the Hayekians had good explanations for why things had gone so bad and a credible prescription for improving it.

Here's my go at trying to tidy up the concept and distinguish good globalism from bad:

Globalism describes the spread of ideas and practices that are considered universally applicable, via institutions that have a global perspective and influence.

To the extent these ideas and practices are pushed voluntarily, and encourage more individual freedom they are to be applauded.

To the extent these ideas and practices are pushed by force, and encourage less individual freedom they are to be condemned.

Often globalist political institutions will be a mixture of both, and it comes down to whether on balance they increase or decrease freedom at the individual level - the individual being the most 'local' level you can get to.

I'd suggest that conceptualising it this way allows you to both recognise where 'globalism' is good (eg: the WTO's free trade push), and also contexts in which 'localism' is better (eg: smaller local government areas rather than amalgamated ones like Auckland super city applying universal rules). That's because on balance the WTO is improving individual freedom, whereas Auckland Council with all their rules are on balance degrading it compared to what existed previously.

Peter Cresswell said...

An example from today's news, of how less-visible globalisation from above works to advance real trade and genuine contact, even when the more-visible contacts have broken down: "Whole we (NZ) do not maintain diplomatic relations with Taiwan, we do have a vibrant trading, economic and cultural relationship. We're both members of APEC, the World Trade Organisation (WTO), and number of fisheries conventions, and the Asian Development Bank. [Thus] Taiwan is an important source of imports, tourism, and an important export market for New Zealand."