Jul. 05, 2016
Globalization is behind the turmoil in Europe and the
United States
“It is the nature of men to create
monsters ... and it is the nature of monsters to destroy their makers,” said
Harlan Wade, the mad scientist, in the video game First Encounter Assault Recon
(F.E.A.R.). The West created and promoted globalization and now globalization
has turned on the West, shaking Europe to its roots and touching the heart and
soul of American democracy. I don’t just mean Brexit and Donald Trump. I mean
the wider crisis, reflected in the rise of nativism, racism and, I dare say,
fascism, in Europe and America, which was boosted recently by terrorism and the
flood of refugees into Europe.
Let me explain.
In his 2002 book, “Globalization and
its Discontents,” Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz explained “the devastating
effect that globalization can have on developing countries” by unleashing on
them global organizations, particularly the IMF with its harsh and outmoded
approach to restructuring. That book was, in a sense, a sequel to a 1987 book
by Giovanni Andrea Cornia, Richard Jolly and Frances Stewart entitled
“Adjustment with a Human Face: Protecting the Vulnerable and Promoting Growth.”
These and similar writings, which pleaded for mercy on behalf of the developing
countries, tell only one side of the story of globalization, the side that
created the discontent in Third World countries. That was the story of the
monster before it turned on its makers.
These were the days of economic
globalization, where the strong wrote the rules and the weak followed them.
Human globalization, that is, the integration of peoples of different cultures,
which was to create, eventually, the upheaval we are witnessing today, was late
in coming. Colonialists did not need to ask the natives for their opinion on
how to be governed nor needed to mix with them socially, or accept them as
immigrants. They were generally treated with disdain, or, at best, with benign
neglect. Winston Churchill used to boast that he created Jordan “with the
stroke of a pen, on a Sunday afternoon in Cairo.” Although he drew straight
lines in the sand, one exception was a triangle that jotted into Jordan at its
southern border, which survived to this day. It is referred to as Winston’s
Hiccup, or Churchill’s Sneeze, given Churchill’s reputation for guzzling liquor
(New York Times, March 26, 2012). The strong (read the West) could take
decisions affecting the weak without worrying about their consequences. The
Sykes-Picot agreement divided the Arab East among France and Britain after
these two countries had denied to the Arab leadership the mere existence of
such an agreement. A minor Arab revolt was quelled and that was that. The
creation of Israel caused a couple of million refugees. They were settled in
the neighboring countries and no one in Europe or the United States felt, for
some time, the earthquake that ensued in the region. Wars, including World War II,
Vietnam and others ended neatly by signing military surrenders, or by peace
treatise or armistice agreements. These situations formed the conventional
wisdom in the West until very recently. In October 2011, Hillary Clinton,
during a television interview, was told that Moammar Gadhafi was killed. She
broke out laughing loudly and said cheerfully: “We came, we saw, he died,”
adapting the words of Julius Caesar, “veni vidi vici,” (I came, I saw, I
conquered) that he wrote after a swift victory in B.C. 47.
But human globalization had to come
eventually, given the rapidly shrinking world and the revolution in
transportation and communication. Migration from the South to the North began
in earnest after World War II. The first reaction of people in the receiving
rich countries was anti-immigration, nativism and a growing feeling of
nationalism, but political parties representing these groups remained, until
recently, mostly on the fringe of national politics. Jean Marie Le Pen, who ran
the French anti-immigration party, the “National Front,” until 2011, never
received more than 17 percent of the vote in national elections. The
“Alternative for Germany” party (AfD), founded just prior to the elections of
2013 in Germany, didn’t make the 5 percent minimum vote in that election to
qualify for representation in the Bundestag, The German parliament. The British
“Independence Party” (UKIP) polled 3.2 percent in the 2010 national elections.
All this began to change, however,
soon after the invasion of Iraq in 2003, with the festering war in Syria
starting in 2011 and after the NATO attack on Libya the same year. Suddenly,
wars didn’t end neatly with an official surrender of one side. Hillary
Clinton’s diatribe “we came, we saw, he died,” turned out to be not only tasteless,
but utterly wrong.
On the other hand, human
globalization melted borders. Old borders that shielded the Western countries
from the consequences of their actions elsewhere, proved fragile under the new
rules of human globalization. The creation of refugees in the East resulted in
a flood of refugees to the West. The rise of terrorism in the East found major
echoes in Europe and the United Sates. Topping all that was the revival of the
request of Turkey, a Muslim country with a population of 75 million, to join
the European Union.
As a result, the fringe
anti-immigration parties in Europe turned Islamophobic, nativist and
increasingly racist. They grew rapidly in popularity, thus beginning to
threaten the traditional majorities. The French “National Front” party is now
polling 28 percent, and its popularity is still rising. Its leader, Marine Le
Pen, will probably have a place in the second round of the French presidential
elections. In Germany, the “Alternative for Germany” party would take about 12
percent of the vote if federal elections were held today, according to a recent
poll. UKIP would receive 25 percent of the votes if a national election in
England is held now, compared with the 3.2 percent it received in 2010. It led
the movement to leave the European Union (Brexit) and succeeded. And in the
United States, traditional politicians are scrambling for ways to stop the
presumptive Republican nominee for president, Donald Trump, an extreme
Islamophobic nativist, who, many believe, would probably shake the foundations
of Western democracy and values if elected president.
So globalization that was created
and promoted by the West is now creating havoc in Europe and the United States.
The monster finally turned on its maker.
What Western leadership has to realize
now is that human globalization will intensify in the future irrespective of
present popular resistance, and that there is no turning back; that the new
wars may have no neat ending as in the past; and that injustices you do to
others will eventually come back to haunt you.
Accepting these three new rules is a
prerequisite for easing the inevitable transition to the new world order.
Riad Tabbarah is a former ambassador
of Lebanon to the United States.
A version of this article appeared
in the print edition of The Daily Star on July 05, 2016, on page 7.
http://www.dailystar.com.lb/Opinion/Commentary/2016/Jul-05/360557-globalization-is-behind-the-turmoil-in-europe-and-the-united-states.ashx
Just found this cartoon in the New York Times:
Just found this cartoon in the New York Times:
Note the
similarities between the points made by President Obama and those made in this
article. Sub-titles in bold are mine:
July 09, 2016 Warsaw, Poland
Remarks by President Obama at Press Conference After
NATO Summit
In answer to a question on Brexit:
PRESIDENT OBAMA:
Globalization
is here to stay
…What is accurate to say is that I believe the process of
globalization is here to stay… it's happening. It's here….
Economic
Globalization
And if we don't take steps to make
sure everybody can participate in that global integration -- making sure that
wages are high enough, making sure that we rebuild the social compact so that
pensions and health care are taken care of, making sure that communities are
not completely abandoned when a factory leaves and there’s an economic plan for
transition -- if we do not do that effectively, then there’s going to be a
backlash.
Human
Globalization: Normal integration
With respect to immigration, it is
America’s experience that immigration has been, by far, a net plus for our
economic growth, our culture, our way of life. Now, in America, that's by
necessity, because unless you're a Native American, you came from -- everybody
came from someplace else. Europe may not have as many of those
traditions.
But keep in mind, one of the huge
macroeconomic advantages that America has is we're still a relatively young
country, our birth rate is not dropping off like Europe’s is, or Russia’s is,
or China’s, or Japan’s. And that's as a consequence of immigration.
And it's economics 101, if you’ve got a younger population, your growth rate is
going to be higher….
The New Problem
of Human Globalization is its intensity
Now, huge influxes of the sort that
we've seen in Europe -- that's always going to be a shock to the system.
And I think it is entirely appropriate for Europe, even as generous as it has
been -- and I think that Chancellor Merkel deserves enormous credit, and other
European leaders who have taken in these migrant populations deserve enormous
credit, because that's hard. It's a strain on the budget. It's a strain
on politics. It's a strain on culture. It's legitimate for them to
say, look, we got to slow this thing down. We got to manage it
properly.
So it's one more reason why, given
the fact of global integration, we have to think globally, more broadly.
Because our security interests, our economies are all going to depend on the
institutional arrangements that we have across boundaries.
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