The Dangers Of Globalisation

By Kaleem Omar

One of the more amusing banners carried by anti-globalisation protestors at the G-8 summit in the French lakeside town of Evian-les-Bains back in June 2003 read: "Sink the G-8!"

That might not have been such a bad idea given what two of the G-8's members, the United States and Britain, have been doing in Iraq in the five years since then. Several other G-8 members have joined the US and Britain in killing people in Afghanistan – all in the name of 'keeping the peace', of course.

To make matters worse, G-8 oil companies have been making hundreds of billions of dollars in profits since then as the price of oil has quadrupled, with oil-importing developing countries like Pakistan seeing their trade gap shooting up and up as a consequence, putting more and more pressure on their balance of payments and eroding their foreign exchange reserves.

One of the dangers of globalisation is the sudden flight of capital from one market to another. This has become an all too familiar phenomenon for developing countries around the world in recent years, as seen, for example, in the East Asia financial crisis of 1997-99, which was triggered by the collapse of the Thai baht in July 1997 and the flight of capital out of East Asian markets to Wall Street and other Western markets.

Malaysia was one of the few East Asian economies that weathered the storm relatively well. This was because then-Prime Minister Mahathir Mohammed's government moved swiftly to impose strict controls on the movement of capital. The action was criticised at the time by some Western free-marketeers, but subsequent events proved that the Malaysian government had acted wisely to protect the national economy.

Indian writer and activist Arundhati Roy is perhaps the most well-known critic of globalisation in the developing world. Even in the West, however, some commentators have been warning against the dangers of globalisation for years. One such commentator is Naomi Klein, the Canadian author of the best selling book No Logo -- which criticises the role of multinationals and their product-branding policies in the creation of the new economic dispensation.

Another prominent Western anti-globalisation commentator is Tony Benn, formerly the stormy petrel of the parliamentary radical left in Britain, a Labour Party MP for nearly 50 years, a two-time minister in Labour cabinets in the 1960s and the 1970s, a long time peace campaigner, and the celebrated author of such books as The Speaker, the Commons and Democracy, On the Falklands War and Why America Needs Democratic Socialism.

In a speech to the ICU Labour Club in London in January 1998, Benn warned that if the pleas of the poor countries were not heeded by the West, the world could see another rise of fascism as seen in the 1930s, born at that time out of the extreme poverty in Europe. Three years later, in an interview published in Britain's Red Pepper magazine in January 2001, Benn again spoke about the dangers of globalisation:

"Globalisation is the free movement of capital, but not the free movement of labour," he said. "It is imperialism under a new form, only the agents of imperialism are companies rather than countries. But, of course, these companies are supported by countries. Thus America backs up its oil companies by going to war where there's an oil interest (the 1991 Gulf war), as Britain did in the Falklands in the early 1980s, because the Falklands, too, was an oil war. There is more oil around the Falklands than there is around the United Kingdom, and that's what that war was about."

As Benn pointed out, some companies are now bigger than nation states. Ford is bigger than South Africa. Toyota is bigger than Norway. "Some of these big companies come and dominate the world, bring pressure to bear on governments, and to make sure they then buy both the main political parties in Britain and America, and then expect the payoff whichever one wins. And imperialism, of course, is coming back now. It really is a direct counterattack on democracy," Benn said.

The franchise was only extended to one person-one vote in 1948 in Britain, and at the age of 18 later even than that, Benn pointed out. He said: "At that moment, the guys at the top got really frightened that the poor could use the vote not just to gain political power but economic power. So they decided to prevent it. They couldn't prevent it during the period of the Soviet Union, because the existence of an anti-capitalist superpower frightened the life out of the establishment. And so they had to let the colonies go, in case they went communist, concede the welfare state in case western Europe went socialist. Only America is now the dominant power and not Britain, and we're riding on the back of American military power."

Asked if Britain was now doing America's dirty work for it, Benn said: "Exactly. And now we can be a superpower but not a super state… like saying I'll have a banana but not a banana split. Ludicrous! But it's an indication that the urge for domination is the urge that's put forward by governments… But then, they're all in the pay, or under the control, of corporate finance. In a sense it's a very alarming development."

Referring to the protests in Prague in 2000 against the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, Benn said that both institutions were initially presented to people as instruments of world development (just like the WTO is being presented today).

In the beginning these institutions at least put on a humanitarian front, Benn said. "Today, however, everything is humanitarian," he said. "The word is used to cover things. I don't say that it's always used in that sense, but they (America and Britain) do describe the bombing of Iraq as humanitarian."

Humanitarianism isn't the only euphemism, of course. There are lots of euphemisms being used by the West today. 'Free Trade' actually means protectionism in the United States. 'Globalisation' actually means the concentration of economic power in fewer and fewer hands. The 'international community' actually means America and the rest of the elites within the G-8 countries.

The notion of capitalism gives off the idea that there are free markets and various institutions struggling between themselves to lower prices. But this is not true, especially in the age of globalisation, if it ever was. As Noam Chomsky has pointed out: "The state is more often used to funnel public money into private hands."

Courtesy: The News Pakistan