The Global Economy
& For A Turn Towards Localization
edited by
Edward Goldsmith & Jerry Mander
Earthscan, London, 2001. £14.95. 328 pages. ISBN 1-85383-741-5
Reviewed for Fourth World Review by Peter Etherden
Teddy Goldsmith has been worried about globalisation for a long time. As far back as 1988, we find his name in the acknowledgements to Susan George's 'A Fate Worse Than Debt'. His concern culminated at the end of 1998 in the landmark issue of 'The Ecologist' that delivered a damning indictment of 'Monsanto' and all its works.
On the other side of the North Atlantic Ocean, Jerry Mander at the 'International Forum on Globalization' has long been campaigning against the power accumulated by transnational corporations at the expense of national governments and the democratic process itself.
In 1996, Goldsmith & Mander published a collection of essays by North American writers. This collaboration has now been extended to include articles by other English-speaking writers. So for the first time we have the great and good of the true opposition to the 'Onward & Upward Brigadiers' gathered together between one set of covers. In this book, familiar anti-globalisation names like Colin Hines, David Korten, Tim Lang, Helena Norberg-Hodge, Vandana Shiva and Lori Wallach rub literary shoulders with such old stalwarts of the alternative movement as Wendell Berry, Jerry Mander and the grand old man of radical politics, Edward Goldsmith himself.
Much of this book is an implicit assault against the 'World Trade Organisation (WTO)' and in particular it's 'Multinational Agreement on Investments (MAI)', which is not dead but merely sleeping. Lori Wallich points out that the 'WTO' is engaged upon 'a slow motion coup d'états over democratic governance worldwide' and that, unlike past trade pacts, the 'WTO' has moved far beyond traditional commercial matters such as tariffs, import quotas or the equal treatment of foreign and domestic goods. The 'WTO's' provisions
Set limits on the strength of countries' food safety laws and the comprehensiveness of product labelling policies. Forbid countries from banning products made with child labour. Can regulate expenditure of local taxes prohibiting environmental or human rights considerations in purchasing decisions. Indeed since its establishment in 1995 this closed shop with 142 member governments has rapidly accumulated a sordid record of undermining consumer and environmental protections around the world while permitting transnational corporations to use the threat of 'WTO' action to roll back and block countless rules designed to benefit workers, consumers and the environment, and to promote human rights and development in the world's poor countries.
Jerry Mander summed up the globalisation issue in his October 1999 'US Schumacher Lecture' in Salisbury Connecticut like this:'In the end it comes down to who should make the rules we live by? Should it be democratic governments, influenced by local communities concerned about what is good for people and the environment? Or should it be the global community of transnational bankers, corporations and speculators?'
In passing he remarked that the rising tide...so beloved by the Eurofantasists when not worrying about the train leaving the station...far from lifting all boats, seemed instead to be sinking most of them and lifting only the biggest and poshest yachts.
This is the bad news and it is a pity there is no essay in the book pointing out that it is also the good news.
Power only flows one way at a time, so by shifting the nexus of power in the 'MAI' from the 'World Trade Organisation' to a myriad of 'Village Common Sense Trusts'...and this can be done by inserting a few 'not's and 'no's here and there and reversing the flow of power in most of its clauses…we will have a manifesto for localization with self-sufficiency that might actually deliver power to the parish and wealth to all our counties.
Business schools have long taught that globalisation is a good thing. But they are now discovering that the issues are much more complicated than they realised. They need to change tack fast. A good start would be for 'Harvard Business School', the 'Kennedy School of Government' and the 'London School of Economics' to include books such as this as 'required reading' in their courses on international affairs, because many of the arguments for allowing corporations to run amok and ride roughshod over governments are demolished, or at least seriously dented, by the essays in this book.
The best and the brightest have a right to be told both sides of any issue…particularly when they are drafted in to spend their working lives believing in them. So it is rather strange to find their less privileged brothers and sisters being beaten up around the world for no other crime than seeing clearly the light that is being hidden from their gaze.
It was the great romantic William Wordsmith who remarked that it is better to be uneducated than miseducated. Perhaps. But it need not be so.
Rye 30th July 2001Copies Of This Document May Be Obtained From
Tel: 01793 77 22 14 Fax: 01793 77 25 21
e-mail: john.papworth@btinternet.com
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