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Friday, Jul 10, 2009
Canadian author John Ralston Saul argues that globalization is not the answer to economic success for all nations.
Jun 10, 2005 | John Ralston Saul is Prince Albert to Adrienne Clarkson's Queen Victoria. Clarkson, as you will know, is the governor-general of Canada, which makes her that country's ceremonial head of state. She bends the knee to no one but the queen. As a result, John is Adrienne's consort and, if you were to address him correctly, you should really call him your excellency. Oddly enough, he is staying in Kensington, just around the corner from the widow of Windsor's multiple homages (the Albert Hall, the Albert Memorial) to her dead German husband.
"I do hope this isn't the way the interview is going to go," says Saul, when I ask him about current etiquette issues in Ottawa. And with good cause. After all, he isn't just a leading Canadian's ankle bracelet. He is a formidable person in his own right -- philosopher, political and economic penseur, novelist, Chevalier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres de France, and holder of more honorary degrees than you can shake a stick at. The Canadian edition of Time magazine has called him a "prophet." He will be 58 later this month.
His latest book, "The Collapse of Globalism and the Reinvention of the World," is published in Britain at a moment that would seem to make him right on the geopolitical money. France and Holland have both just rejected the E.U. constitution, seemingly suggesting a retreat by these two hitherto Europhile countries from a transnational project, and next month's G8 meeting in Scotland is likely to be the object of an unprecedented anti-globalization campaign.
These events seem like the culmination of Saul's prophecies -- either that or his publishers are deft at anticipating the right time to publish a book. The book's thesis is that the era in which the nation-state was deemed obsolete, in which transnational corporations would secure global peace and prosperity, when the monetarism of Milton Friedman swept all before it and the technocratic language of Valerie Giscard d'Estang poisoned political discourse, is dead. It thrived for more than two decades, but its technocratic and technological determinism and market idolatry have expired. Saul's purpose in the book is like John Cleese's in the Monty Python parrot sketch -- to point out what should be obvious: that globalization is deceased.
"We have scarcely noticed this collapse," he says, "because globalization has been asserted to be an all-powerful god, a holy trinity of burgeoning markets, unsleeping technology and borderless managers. Opposition or criticism has been treated as little more than romantic paganism."
Of course, Saul's thesis may be nonsense, a possibility he is prepared for. "Even if what I'm saying is only 50 percent true, it does at least form the basis for a conversation." Indeed, at times one gets the sense of a recklessly imaginative novelist riffing recklessly on historical material that a more sober writer would have treated less cavalierly. "Facts," he says, "stop being facts after a while. They just fade away." What remains? If this book is anything to go by, jaunty hypothesis.
Giscard, intriguingly, emerges as what Saul calls the "comic nemesis" of the story. Not only did he write the much-satirized text of the E.U. constitution, a masterpiece of eye-rollingly technocratic unreadability, but he ushered in globalization in the first place. In November 1975, when president of France, he gathered the world's most powerful leaders for an epoch-defining powwow at his country home. Giscard was, in the early '70s, one of the first generation of technocrats to reach the top of the political ladder, and he insisted that economics, and technocratic management of international economics, were preeminently important.
Henry Kissinger, the then U.S. secretary of state, had wanted to establish an elite club of nations that could discuss matters of common political interest, similar to the concert of nations that had existed in the years after the Congress of Vienna. He also wanted to restore the United States' waning global influence. Giscard had other ideas, says Saul. He wanted this club, to be known as G7, to reflect the Common Market's concentration on economics and administration.
At that first G7 meeting at Rambouillet, Giscard ensured that Kissinger's agenda was not discussed. "He first verbalized the idea that economics was the prism through which we should see civilization," says Saul. "The idea was that the waning of the power of nation-states would be replaced by the power of global markets and transnational corporations. Economics, rather than politics or arms, was and should be the most important determinant of human events, and the best means by which human peace and prosperity could be pursued."
As a result, he contends, that meeting discussed exchange rates and ignored the pressing humanitarian, military and geopolitical nightmare that was unfolding in Cambodia, where the Khmer Rouge had seized power six months before and was busy murdering civilians.
