The American
Globalisation, ‘G 2009 Style By Alison Holmes
lobalisation’ has come roaring back onto the popular agenda. The financial avalanche that began at the end of last year has reminded us of the perils of interconnectedness, the ugly realities of state regulatory impotence and the terrifying power of single individuals in a global world. As it continues to hurtle downwards into 2009 with government bail-out cum buy-outs, retailer freefall and homeowner paralysis, it may be instructive to remind ourselves how the debate on globalisation began in the hope that it may provide guidance or at least help us to reorient ourselves in the throes of the current debate. When the term ‘globalisation’ came into our vernacular it seemed to harbour progressive portents. Bill Clinton in the United States and Tony Blair in the United Kingdom joined forces and began to assemble a ‘coalition of the willing’ – though
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very different from that which we have come to know. Their respective campaigns were designed to promote the benefits of the borderless world and a weightless economy. Once in power, they developed domestic policies to deal with the increased competition of the global market and sought allies abroad for what they termed the Third Way. It was, they argued, a new kind of politics for a new political paradigm. The world had moved beyond the constraints of state sovereignty with its propensity for violence and could now be organised to face the state-less issues of poverty, environmental degradation and conflict. Some heralded it as a new Camelot but their city on the hill would not be limited to one country because the global age would bring the light of a liberal and cosmopolitan democracy to the whole world. We tend to forget it now, but their worldview also included a healthy dose of humanitarian intervention and even the possibility of pre-emptive action should the need arise. Yet somehow globalisation’s ‘unstoppable wave’ and ‘inevitable consequences’ were stopped cold. From the moment the towers of the World Trade Center tumbled to the ground globalisation was no longer the delivery system for enlightenment but a harbinger of danger. Leadership changed hands in almost all of the Third Way partner countries. International division and
conflict emerged along the old paradigm cleavages of politics, religion and economics. Nationalism returned with a vengeance to both domestic and international debate. Is Camelot so fragile? Are the links of progressive politics so weak? Or did we misinterpret the signs of global change? For some time the pundits and commentators of globalisation dazzled us with explanations of these mysterious tides. It has now become clear that they confused explanations of globalisation with policy prescriptions. The drivers of globalisation are not the same as outcomes. And more importantly the actors and the levels at which they operate have been muddled in ways that makes the next phase of globalisation even more difficult to manage. Our most basic problem is the failure to recognise that we have, in fact, been this way before and we do not need to go back to the development of the state system or the Treaty of Westphalia to find the most relevant comparator to our current difficulties. The alignment of technological, political and economic change at the end of the 19th century as the United Kingdom led the western world through the industrial revolution and the systemic change present at the end of the 20th century as the United States leads the world into a post-industrial world bear more than passing examination. The current eco-