Protect Globalization?

By guest blogger Devin McIntire,
based on a conversation with Natasha Hanshaw about the article

"The political threats to globalisation" in the Financial Times

We are still far away from fair or even free global trade and yet protectionism, on a national level, is still a pretty bad idea.

This article was a bit peculiar in that it tried to analyze political threats to globalization objectively, yet gave an illusory definition of globalization and by discussing "threats" rather than "course corrections", "evolution of" or even just new globalization this guy made clear that he's endorsing his narrow thatcher/regan-did-it view.

You can't talk about globalization productively without giving a precise definition and there are hundreds of readily available definitions so it's basically plug and play, you just have to remember to respect whichever you choose.

I like my globalization big and holistic. Yes we've had periods of "globalization" before, yes today's trends are largely driven by economics, yes it's state-enabled, but as some of our complex system folks will remind us us, globalization is really just a convenient label for the state and trajectory of our increasingly complex 'people universe.' Globalization is an infinite number of Thomas Friedman's silly reductionist "ah-ha" platitudes.

Globalization has depth, layers and complexity. It's not some conception of elites in western countries despite how much havoc they cause. It's far bigger than that, like a strong ocean current, when it pulls you sometimes you have no choice but to follow, other times you know you better get up and start swimming.

There are no threats to globalization, because globalization doesn't represent them or anyone else, it simply is. Political gaffes, imbeciles taking us back to the 20th century so we can do nationalism again, and people who believe that I don't deserve bananas all year-round in the US; these are all simply bad things. Yes they're implicitly part of globalization, but so is cell-phone banking in Africa, so are pro-local consumer movements around the world and so are technological advances in health solutions driven by India's and China's hundreds of thousands of doctors and engineers.

In with the Good out with the Bad.