the world, it is relatively easy to incorporate the hopes, aspirations and economic muscle of the emerging nations into an already established world economic order. This is the kind of message that found favour in books such as Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History and which still finds sympathy today in international gatherings such as the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland (where the great and the good of the global community can solve mass poverty for the benefit of the international media before heading off to the nearest champagne reception or ski slope).
Admittedly it’s a seductive view. If globalization is inevitable, the only things that can hold it back are evil men, stupid ideas and wars. For extreme optimists, the events of the last hundred years can thus be regarded as no more than an awkward interruption, a pause for breath before the forces of globalization are allowed to scale even greater heights. On this interpretation, we have finally returned to an economic roadmap that had apparently reached a dead end as the nineteenth century drew to a close. With the free market restored, with world trade rising rapidly, with cross-border capital flows surging and with command economies increasingly no more than historical relics, the battle over political and economic ideas that led to the violence of the twentieth century is now over. We are back to ‘business as usual’, only with more nations able to take advantage of the ideas that first began to develop in Europe during the Enlightenment. Seen this way, we can all be rich.
It’s a pleasing idea, but it’s also largely wrong. We may be living in a world of relative peace and prosperity, with capital flowing more easily across borders, but there’s no guarantee that this land of economic milk and honey will remain bountiful for ever. There is, in fact, no ‘business as usual’. The world economy is constantly evolving and, as it does so, it offers new challenges. We cannot just travel back in a time machine to conditions that last prevailed at the end of the nineteenth century. As we shall see, the world today looks very different from how it appeared then. In any case, those who look back at the late nineteenth century with rose-tinted spectacles forget the obvious weakness in their approach: the relative peace of the nineteenth century was shattered by the destructive violence of the twentieth century. Globalization depends on co-operation but can all too easily be knocked off course by conflict.
DON’T MENTION THE WAR
Before the outbreak of the First World War, the idea that globalization was inevitable was widely shared in part because the costs of any reversal were, rightly, seen to be huge. Globalization was not, however, an immutable process. Its pre-First World War protagonists were nicely lampooned by John Maynard Keynes in his Economic Consequences of the Peace 8 in a much quoted, yet highly relevant, passage caricaturing a typical English gentleman in the summer of 1914. The complacency it reveals is commonplace today:
The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, in such quantity as he might see fit, and reasonably expect their early delivery upon his doorstep; he could at the same moment and by the same means adventure his wealth in the natural resources and new enterprises of any quarter of the world, and share, withoutexertion or even trouble, in their prospective fruits and advantages … The projects and politics of militarism and imperialism, of racial and cultural rivalries, of monopolies, restrictions, and exclusion … were little more than the amusements of his daily newspaper, and appeared to exercise almost no influence at all on the ordinary course of social and economic life, the internationalisation of which was nearly complete in practice.
From an Englishman’s perspective, at least, the early years of the twentieth century were halcyon
Admittedly it’s a seductive view. If globalization is inevitable, the only things that can hold it back are evil men, stupid ideas and wars. For extreme optimists, the events of the last hundred years can thus be regarded as no more than an awkward interruption, a pause for breath before the forces of globalization are allowed to scale even greater heights. On this interpretation, we have finally returned to an economic roadmap that had apparently reached a dead end as the nineteenth century drew to a close. With the free market restored, with world trade rising rapidly, with cross-border capital flows surging and with command economies increasingly no more than historical relics, the battle over political and economic ideas that led to the violence of the twentieth century is now over. We are back to ‘business as usual’, only with more nations able to take advantage of the ideas that first began to develop in Europe during the Enlightenment. Seen this way, we can all be rich.
It’s a pleasing idea, but it’s also largely wrong. We may be living in a world of relative peace and prosperity, with capital flowing more easily across borders, but there’s no guarantee that this land of economic milk and honey will remain bountiful for ever. There is, in fact, no ‘business as usual’. The world economy is constantly evolving and, as it does so, it offers new challenges. We cannot just travel back in a time machine to conditions that last prevailed at the end of the nineteenth century. As we shall see, the world today looks very different from how it appeared then. In any case, those who look back at the late nineteenth century with rose-tinted spectacles forget the obvious weakness in their approach: the relative peace of the nineteenth century was shattered by the destructive violence of the twentieth century. Globalization depends on co-operation but can all too easily be knocked off course by conflict.
DON’T MENTION THE WAR
Before the outbreak of the First World War, the idea that globalization was inevitable was widely shared in part because the costs of any reversal were, rightly, seen to be huge. Globalization was not, however, an immutable process. Its pre-First World War protagonists were nicely lampooned by John Maynard Keynes in his Economic Consequences of the Peace 8 in a much quoted, yet highly relevant, passage caricaturing a typical English gentleman in the summer of 1914. The complacency it reveals is commonplace today:
The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, in such quantity as he might see fit, and reasonably expect their early delivery upon his doorstep; he could at the same moment and by the same means adventure his wealth in the natural resources and new enterprises of any quarter of the world, and share, withoutexertion or even trouble, in their prospective fruits and advantages … The projects and politics of militarism and imperialism, of racial and cultural rivalries, of monopolies, restrictions, and exclusion … were little more than the amusements of his daily newspaper, and appeared to exercise almost no influence at all on the ordinary course of social and economic life, the internationalisation of which was nearly complete in practice.
From an Englishman’s perspective, at least, the early years of the twentieth century were halcyon
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