<http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,443449,00.html> Goodbye to globalisation
America's new focus means greater realism and honesty for the rest of us
Special report: globalisation
John Gray Tuesday February 27, 2001 The Guardian
George Bush and Tony Blair sent out a reassuring message from Camp David. Their schmoozing and backslapping was designed to tell the world that nothing much has changed since Mr Bush entered the White House. In fact there has been a momentous shift in America's stance towards the world. As a political project globalisation is dead. The high-flying rhetoric of the Clinton administration has been replaced by a hard-headed focus on American national interest. The US is now more concerned with protecting itself in a dangerous and intractably disordered world than with spreading its values to the last corners of the globe. It is a development that carries large risks, not least for Britain, but it should also be seen as a triumph of reality over illusion. The era of globalisation was a time of cant, humbug and self-deception on an enormous scale. A chorus of pundits, politicians and business people told us that we were living through an unprecedented economic and technological revolution. At the same time they suggested that everything would go on much as before. On both counts they were wrong.
There is nothing unprecedented in the real changes the world economy is undergoing. The internet is only the latest in a series of technologies that began with the telegraph. There have been near-instantaneous link-ups between world markets ever since transatlantic underwater cables were laid in the last third of the 19th century. Looking further back, we can see that today's new technologies are another phase in a worldwide industrial revolution that began 200 or 300 years ago, if not earlier.
What we also see if we look back over the past couple of centuries is that it was a time of great social and political upheaval. Industrialisation did not go unopposed. Trade unions and social democratic parties were part of a powerful backlash that included less benign movements such as communism and fascism. Worldwide industrialisation went together with wars, revolutions and - in many countries - murderous dictatorships.
The missionaries of globalisation failed to notice its darker side. They confused a genuinely inexorable historical process - the worldwide diffusion of new technologies that abolish or curtail time and distance - with market deregulation, a trend that is clearly on the wane. They were able to pass over the turbulent history of globalisation because a historic boom in world markets had created the illusion that economic history had come to an end.
It is hardly accidental that the fad for globalisation coincided with a bubble on Wall Street. Equally, it is no coincidence that we are hearing a good deal less of it now that the bubble is deflating. The popular idea of globalisation expressed what might be called the Dow Jones interpretation of history - the theory that booming stock prices somehow demonstrated that free markets were spreading irresistibly across the world. With the pricking of the Wall Street bubble, that theory is now itself history.
The Bush administration's stance on foreign policy must be seen in the context of the end of America's long boom. It was easy for Americans to imagine that history was on their side when the stock market seemed to be making them effortlessly rich, but the world has begun to look a good deal more forbidding now that their some of their gains are starting to vanish before their eyes. When the pain spreads from the stock market to the real economy and rising unemployment returns to the US, protectionist pressures in Congress will grow. As the business cycle resumes, perhaps with exaggerated force, the US is likely to revert to something resembling the attitude to the world that it adopted towards the end of the 19th century. It will not drift into isolation, but it will intervene overseas only when it believes its vital interests are at stake.
Many in Europe have been horrified by the shift in attitude in Washington. Partly Europe's shock at Washington's new priorities reflects its failure to take seriously long-standing American intentions. US plans for National Missile Defence (NMD) are objectionable on several counts, notably their highly destabilising impact on arms control. But they are not new. Some version of NMD would very likely have gone ahead if Al Gore had become president. This is one area of clear continuity in American policy. The most worrying aspect of the new American administration may not be its defence plans but its attitude to the global environmental crisis. President Bush has publicly cast doubt on the reality of global warming - thereby breaking with a consensus not only of scientists but also of a growing number of business leaders. This stance bodes ill for relations with Europe, and for the world.
Mr Blair believes he can continue to bridge the divide between Europe and the US, and we must hope that he is right. But the international climate in which he finds himself has altered fundamentally. For more than a decade after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the US seemed committed to spreading "democratic capitalism" throughout the world. The Bush administration has not repudiated that American commitment, merely consigned it to history's memory hole.
On the whole, I cannot help feeling it a change for the better. The world into which we are moving is an increasingly dangerous place, but at least we can begin to think about its risks realistically and honestly, without the disabling illusions of the era of globalisation.
John Gray is Professor of European Thought at the LSE.