Slaying the dragons

By SIMON COLLINS

"Globalisation is dead," John Ralston Saul told an Auckland audience this week, and they loved it.

The Canadian author of The Unconscious Civilisation and Voltaire's Bastards, in town to promote his new book On Equilibrium, drew 240 people to a Herald/Dymocks lunch at the Stamford Plaza on Thursday, at almost $60 a head.

His talk in Wellington yesterday had to be moved to the Town Hall to accommodate 600 people.

His fans applauded his attack on the way commercial values have seeped across the whole of Western societies. But they were surprised to hear him say that commercialism is already in retreat.

"Globalisation is completely dead," Mr Saul said.

"It doesn't seem to know it. It's a little confused about it. It has entered the living-dead phase, the zombie phase."

He said globalisation claimed to make people better off by dismantling trade barriers and promoting international competition.

Yet in the past 20 years a series of ever-bigger mergers had created cartels of a few huge firms which carved up the world market between them.

"When we look at the numbers, 70 to 75 per cent of them go within five to eight years into bankruptcy or close to it," he said. "So actually it doesn't work."

Globalisation and economic growth were said to be the only way we could afford better public services. Yet those services were declining.

Ironically, the aftermath of the terrorist attacks of September 11 showed that Governments could still act when it counted.

"The argument that the nation state is dead, that transnational corporations are bigger and richer and more sophisticated than any country - all of that has been proved to be nonsense," Mr Saul said.

"Immediately after that crisis we were diving into a depression.

"What happened? Was there a meeting at Davos at which the leaders of the transnationals announced they would maintain their investments?

"No. Actually they made it clear that they were going to look after their shareholder value by cutting back on their investments - which of course, when you look at it from the national or international point of view, is disastrous.

"So what prevented that? The heads of the national banks which went out and spent money; the ministers of finance who smoothed markets.

"The elected Governments of the 20-odd developed democracies used their power and force and kept us out of depression, thereby proving that actually there is no real power in the international companies - that the real power still lies with the nation state."

Mr Saul said he was not saying that international business, or even internationalism, were dead. But he questioned the idea that people were now powerless because of the "inevitable" march towards global integration.

"Does 'integration' mean that all your clothing says 'Buy Canadian' when it is actually made in Hong Kong? Is that integration?" he asked.

"Something like that can die in two seconds."

New Zealand might never go back to making as many products as it did before import controls were abolished. But the next generation might not accept the dogma that products could not be made here.

For example, 20 years ago people believed that local cheeses would be replaced by mass-produced international varieties. Yet speciality cheeses, which had to be sold locally because they were not stuffed with chemicals, were flourishing everywhere. The same was true of wine.

Until recently, national airlines appeared to be doomed. Now airline mergers were seen to have failed.

"So we are probably within five years of the rebirth of fairly severely regulated airlines. The private industry is going to get bored with losing money and Governments are going to get bored with bailing them out.

"There is only one way to deal with it and that is to re-regulate it, because most countries want to have effective communications within their countries above and beyond the two main cities."

The world, said Mr Saul, was at one of those turning points in history that only happened every 50 or 100 years.

The danger was that the vacuum left by "dead" globalisation would be filled by fascist anti-immigrants: Jean-Marie Le Pen in France, Joerg Haider in Austria.

The only way to avoid that was for ordinary people to stop keeping quiet for fear of upsetting their employers.

"There is an enormous need to promote the idea of active disloyalty," Mr Saul declared.

"Our primary obligation as citizens is to speak up and disagree. The more we are loyal in our lying, the more our societies will not work well.

"If we can accept that normality in a democracy is non-conformity, then I think we will be able to imagine how easily we can re-engage as responsible citizens."