Years of Poems and Spirits

Sat in COMM561 this evening. I knew I’d likely drop the class but had hoped to audit if it mattered. Boy, the class was a anti-globalization guerilla training camp: the students are partisans full of zeal but void of reason. All are eager to fight but none offers any idea how to run things once triumphed.

Not to say they must not be angry, or reason is the only means to achieve progress. But the problem is the debate develops in a closed sphere: a set of unchallengeable premises defines the boundry of the discussion–a feature that is more common among ideologies than science.

The premises are: globalization is a new form of imperialism; globalization is the source of alienation; globalization is a conspiracy. I tried to challenge those assumptions during discussion but didn’t go very far. Apparently, most of them have made the leap of faith and are beyond recall.

After the class, however, I thought of a new question–one that I like to pose to every globalization bashers: if you can do something to benefit one of your fellow country man who is wealthy, or you can do the same to benefit a poor foreigner (e.g. an indigenous Javanese), who would you choose?

If one is to answer the compatriot, then why anti-globalization? If it is the foreigner, doesn’t one take part in a form of globalization oneself?

The key is again, what one choose to identify with? The country one lives in? If not, how can one not call oneself a globalizationist?

The book: In Defense of Globalization by Jagdish Bhagwati

About the author:
Jagdish Bhagwati has a distinguished academic career. On the short list of Nobel Award. He is the teacher of my Econ471 professor, Kar-yiu Wong, in Columbia.

About the book:
Why would any one who profited from Globalization bother to defend it? If he gains legit, why bother? If he profits unorthodoxly, why go public? After all, globalization is not a ponzi scheme like Amway or stock promotion, where the promoter has a personal interest in seeing more people participating. On the contrary, if all your competitors are outsourcing to India, you can’t underbid them anymore.

So who would bother to defend globalization? That is where the discussion is getting interesting. Because Bhawati speaks as if he is paying tribute to globalization on behalf of the folks on the receiving end of it.

Bhagwati was born in a colonized India and spent at least the early part of his career fighting wide spread poverty. In the book, he expresses deep sympathy for the poor. Although he discusses the impact global trade has on culture, women, democracy, wage and environment, inevitably, he circulates back to the subject of poverty. For women, it is about finding a job if she has to “walk out on her husband” (p240). For democracy, it is about gradually building up a substantial middle class (p94). To understand Bhagwati, one has to imagine oneself looking out from an apartment in New Delhi.

But for at least some of the polemicists Bhagwati tries to convert, they are looking out from a library or a Starbucks. Their concern is more likely about the alienating nature of capitalism: the spirited pursuit of material progress that is so essential to any social development in Bhagwati’s world is exactly what is giving them grief. And I would argue that such grief is just as valid as Bhagwati’s conviction, not some surplus sympathy or sentiment.

Recently, a reporter for the Los Angeles Times wrote a book (Enrique’s Journey) about a Central American boy’s journey to search for his illegal immigrant mother in America. His mother left him when he was still a toddler so even in his late teens he had never met his mother. After seven attempts and having endured unspeakable sufferings, he finally located her in North Carolina and settled down nearby. This may likely be another success story in Bhagwati’s account. However, this “all is well that ends well” attitude is rather limited. If one thinks of the boy’s journey as a whole, and as a pixel in the snapshot of humanity today, the irony starts to assert itself: before globalization, a poor child looking for his mother had to travel on foot, but would suffer no harsher humiliation than having to beg for food. Today, a poor child can travel by bus or train. At the same time, however, he must face the possibility of being attacked, robbed, raped and killed. One has to ponder not only the worthiness of such “success” but the value coordinates by which it is measured. Is consumable materialistic gain the only yardstick of man’s welfare? To what degree can we accept the degradation of humanity in exchange for utility improvement?

Having failed to acknowledge this non-material aspect of the globalization debate, Bhagwati is going to have to work extra hard to change the critics’ minds.

A quick and nasty comment on his prose–pompous, pretentious: like a servant becomes a master, schools his servant on how to wait on him then tip gratuitously. Yuk!

Book Review: The Age of Empire, by Eric Hobsbawm

In starting the book with an account of how his parents first met, under the shadow of the Pyramids, in 1913, Eric Hobsbawm confessed his emotional tie to the period that he called The Age of Empire. To him, the years between 1875 and 1914 were an era of unparalleled marvels: mind not only the stunning material achievements, or the great historical figures who lived their formative years, but just feel the restlessness of human energy of the age—the energy of desire, innovation and hope—one cannot but nod in understanding of why Hobsbawm spared no effort trying to capture this segment of history before it finally faded into “twilight zone”.

It is somewhat a strange experience to follow a historian’s guide to a past that he’s professed of such personal attachment. One couldn’t help but wonder when Hobsbawm being critical of the age of empire, was he trying to find the causes or the excuses of its ultimate degeneration into a World War?

Hobsbawm answered this question with dialectic sensitivity. The age of empire, he seemed to argue, was at the same time of an age of progress and an age of crisis.

The momentum of progress was overwhelming. If anyone harbors any exceptionalism sentiment toward the contemporary age, reading Hobsbawm will certainly help to diminish that. To those today who marvel at the exponential rate of growth in China, or at the material excesses an average American have access to, Hobsbawm seems to remind them: history is a great circus show in which the spectacle remains the same. It is only the audiences that are different each time.

Yet signs of crisis were equally abundant. In almost every chapter, Hobsbawm coupled glories with worries: in economy and commerce, net production increase couldn’t eclipse precipitous decline of profits. In political development, the liberation of the mass and the triumph of reason over religiosity were so profound, that they left a vacuum soon filled by anarchism and nationalism. Industrialists hailed the arrival of “scientific management” as a savior, all the while oblivious of its alienation of humanity. The advance of theoretical science, such as math and physics, was such that it lost secular traction and morphed from observable to believable. So were the fine arts, despite a booming vernacular entertainment industry.

In the end, all the crisis culminated in the self-destruction of the ego of this belle époque, the ideology of imperialism itself. The genesis of such an ideology was the product of economic necessity as much as political convenience. The seminal form of imperialism, Hobsbawm told us, was a British creation, in that the conquering was to serve the expansion of commerce: either as new markets for exports, or as outposts to secure trade routes. Soon, however, the innocent urge of capitalist growth took on a life of its own, albeit a political one: it became the symbol of national pride, a convenient instrument for nascent states to consolidate its powers and to coerce its dissidents.

Coupled with such a transformation was its own undoing. Not only the spread of idea of Modernity to the periphery lit the fires of revolution everywhere, but the groundswell of nationalistic sentiments steered the European powers irreversibly towards a catastrophic collision, or shall we say, collisions, that in another 30 years would bury the imperialism de jure for good. The synthesis born after such epic human calamity is today’s particular form of globalization, in which nationalism is considered as obstacle.

Obviously, there is this destructive aspect of nationalism. Hobsbawm described in the chapter “Towards Revolution” the ambiguous feeling Europeans had towards an all-out conflict on the eve of World War I. Some didn’t believe it was coming. Others didn’t think it was necessarily a bad thing. Anyway the consensus was it would be short bloodletting. There is no such illusion today.

Not only nationalism in its most naked form, in agents like Jorg Haider or Jean-Marie Le Pen, is closely monitored and quickly discredited, there is also this newfound vigor against economic nationalism, or mercantilism. It appears the ever sophisticate fight against nationalism reflects a deeper appreciation of peace and harmony.

Or is it? After closing the history not long ago passed but before moving on praising the Free Trade utopia, shall we pause and reflect for a moment: a century ago, who benefited most from a nationalistic world order? Today, who will benefit most from an “anationalist” one?

In fact, one may argue that it is precisely the same dynamic that germinated nationalism during the age of empire that is turning against it today. The global economy, already burgeoning a century ago, has now entered a very different geopolitical reality. Former colonial territories are sovereign nations now. When Peru (or Columbia?) defaulted on its debt in the 19th century, French and German gunboats sealed off its ports until the government agreed to pay back every penny. Today, international creditors cannot do such a thing against Russia or Argentina. Instead, the task is now delegated to regional or global institutions such as WTO or IMF, as exemplified by the intrusive role the latter played during Asian Financial Crisis (AFC).

Even without such a crisis, developing countries today are often presented with a Faustian bargain: eternal subjugation in a thoroughly borderless global economy for a flow of temporal capital. I once thought it was Puncho Villa who lamented “Poor Mexico, so far from God and so close to the United States!” because General Pershing crossed Rio Grande. I was mistaken. It was actually a quote by Porfirio Díaz, the Mexico president under whose watch American businessmen flooded into his country taking over one industry after another. I suppose this is just another proof of Wallerstein’s observation that the downtrodden are often the most acute observers.