Is a globalized world doomed to failure?
The international Forum 2000 Conference has drawn to a close this week in Prague. Focusing on 'Bridging Global Gaps', some of the liveliest and most controversial debate centered around arguments in favor of and against globalization. Maida Agovic has the following report.
'Economic globalization is a doomed concept that has taken us back in history, and, in 20 years, it will be looked upon as a strange aberration.'
At least Colin Hines from Great Britain, one of the prominent Forum 2000 participants, seems to think so. He is an associate of the International Forum on Globalization, and author of the bestselling book "Localization: A Global Manifesto", focusing on the need to solve adverse effects of international trade by replacing globalization with a focus on local economies.
His theory, however, flies in the face of the established economic doctrine:
"By localization I mean that the end goal of national and regional groupings of nations, like the European Union, should not be to reduce their domestic protective barriers, to fight each other for markets, and then go and grab the markets from the rest of the world. Economic warfare should not be the end goal of nation states.
Another Forum 2000 participant, Lord Desai from the London School of Economics, disagrees:
"I think that globalization has been the most transformative event of the last 25 years. Elimination of a lot of poverty nations would not have happened without globalization. While globalization creates problems, it also creates solutions. It's a dialectical thing; there is nothing all good and all bad. You have to take the good with the bad."
Despite numerous claims that the Czech Republic has greatly benefited from an intense process of globalization over the past couple of decades, Colin Hines disagrees, although he does recognize some successes:
"Things have gotten better for a section of the Czech society, under the rubric of freedom of speech, cheap imports, multiculturalism; yes, things have gotten better, but also as I understand it, a lot of Czech companies have closed down, a lot of Czech farmers aren't doing well, there is a growing increase of inequality, lack of security, but it's probably less in the Czech Republic and Slovenia than in most of Eastern Europe where it's a lot worse."
Colin Hines labels the single European currency as a 'disastrous policy', and has some direct advice to the Czech Republic concerning entry into the European Monetary Union:
"You're not in it yet, so I'd keep out if you possibly can. Don't be fooled by the idea of how wonderful it is to go between countries and not have to change money. They've sold this on the superficial joy of being able to go everywhere easily.
"That's a tiny inconvenience compared with not having enough money for hospitals and schools in your own country. Because that is the inevitability of the EURO, to try and constrain public expenditure, take away powers of nation states to set how they want to control themselves. That's why the British don't want it.
"You've had a lot of being dictated to by somebody else; don't replace the Soviet Union with Brussels. It's marginally kinder, but it's not really the way forward."
"The way to get an equal world is to get much more rapid growth in the system, rather than stop the growth. I have always been a believer that we ought to let globalization have much bigger force, much more speed, than all the other schemes which want to stop globalization."
The Forum 2000 Conference has not found any big answers to the basic question it posed: how to bridge global gaps, but, as we've just heard, it certainly provided an arena for an interesting and often provocative exchange of ideas.
