NEWSPAPER COLUMNS
 ¶ Most Recent
¶ Miscellany
|
SUNDAY SPECTATOR
February 10, 2002
Globalization blues
It is because I prefer businessmen to politicians (and politicians to bureaucrats whether they serve in the private or public sector) -- that I have such an intense distaste for gatherings like the World Economic Forum. I do not like it when businessmen cross-dress when they set themselves up to be politicians. By the time it had wrapped up this last week I had absorbed more cheap posturing and self-congratulation from the inside of New York's grander commercial ballrooms than from the weird demonstrators in the streets outside. Moreover whether inside or out the bows were all taken in the same direction. How apt that the assembly concluded with rapt attention to one William Jefferson Clinton crying for Argentina and a few other debt-ridden countries (plus North Korea) in town-hall format at the Waldorf. The ex-president is the stereotypical Davos superstar a man whose self-regard is swollen to sociopathic dimensions from a career laden with collateral damage to everyone who ever trusted him so that he is now the highest-paid adviser to the world's hypersmug. The transfer of this annual forum from the health spa of Davos in the Swiss mountains to the heart of Manhattan meant abandoning its last pretension of seriousness. For the whole point initially had been to provide a retreat for European business leaders to discuss management strategies away from the distractions of everyday work. Now it is moved to the ultimate fishbowl. Yet the original idea was far from good. The function of businessmen is to make money not to indulge grand strategic visions -- for Europe or for the earth or for any other planet. There is nothing wrong with making money it is an extremely useful commodity with a wide range of possible applications. But sometimes money goes to people's heads and they begin to believe themselves more than mortal. And sometimes it is used to buy luxuries that no man nor woman can afford -- to assuage vanities by comparison to which gr eed is venial. By increments this World Economic Forum grew from the already outsized head of Klaus Schwab Swiss professor of business administration into the carnival of erotic power we see today -- with its chic agenda of political economic and social issues. It did so within a single generation. I think the point of no return was passed when this slick set slid into bed with the Rio Earth Summit in 1992. Everything done since has been for the cameras. Which is not to give comfort to the wackos -- the protesters against "globalization" parading their own vanity in the streets outside. Except to say that the "vanity of the powerless" has this to recommend it that it looks as ridiculous as it is. (I think one of their inspirations to occasional violence is the desire to elevate farce to tragedy.) Had these protesters sincerely wished to impale the slick insiders they would have behaved satirically instead of prophetically. They should have dressed themselves in power costumes with dark suits and pale silk ties and trimmed hair and scrubbed their faces down with eau de cologne to create the maximum confusion of identity; then walked about the perimeter of the conference with giant dildoes affixed to them as in Attic comedy. (Some could be dressed to precisely resemble the more eccentric forum guests for instance Swamiji Chidanand Saraswati Mustafa Ceric H.H. Patriarch Abuna Paulos and His Grace George L. Carey each of them crying out to be dildoed.) For that is what requires to be satirized -- the ludicrous pretensions of men and a few women who feel themselves called to solve the problems of the world on the strength of irrelevant credentials. And summoning to their aid even religious leaders who removed from their context in church temple synagogue and mosque appear resplendent only in their pomposity. For if they are truly qualified to discuss the intricacies of economic globalization then they are not qualified to be priests. It is time anyway to suppress this word "globalization". Except with very careful qualification it has come to mean nothing at all -- like the words "democracy" and "fascism" and even "community". You can stick them up on any wall of your choosing then wait for the elements to peel them down. By any solid statistical measure the trend to trade "globalization" was arrested on the morning of Sept. 11. It was already in recessional decline. For the first in many years the amount of trade across national borders dropped in 2001. The amount of direct investment and especially of investment in the poorest countries went down precipitately. And the sooner the consequences sink in of the war we are compelled to fight against international terror the happier for everyone. The hard fact is that "globalization" -- in this restricted sense of international trade and cross-border investment -- had advanced farther by the beginning of the last century than it did in its recovery to the year 2000. But then the "Great War" intervened the Bolshevik Revolution and a series of further international disasters welling from the vanities of persons long dead. The very idea of inevitable progress was stomped by the experience of the 20th century. Its impracticability was reaffirmed in the collapse of the Twin Towers. Trade which has been generally enriching is for that reason at least a good thing. That people trading with each other are much less likely to go to war is more or less borne out by history. That one kind of political regime can be more encouraging to trade than another goes almost without saying. But businessmen have nothing to do with this. Their role is only to do the trading when circumstances allow. They cannot strictly speaking create opportunities only exploit the opportunities that appear. The plain truth is that the creation of those circumstances depends exclusively on the political will -- on the provision of force by national statesmanship and international diplomacy. "Power speaks through the barrel of a gun as Mao Tse-Tung correctly observed, and the question is whether that gun is in our hands, or the hands of our enemies. Decency unarmed is decency defeated. To dress up, to pretend the truth is otherwise, is a vanity we can seldom afford. It is a vanity that crumbled when the planes hit the glass. Businessmen, go back to your desks; the discussion of globalization" no longer concerns you. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
|
Top