Towards global diversity.

• Jurisdiction: Australia
• Author: Hinkson, John
• Date: 22 December 1999

The upheaval within social life which we associate with the term globalization has now been building up for at least two decades. Tied structurally to cultural and technological developments which have issued in the information and communications revolution, this upheaval has produced effects in every sphere of social experience. Arguably, amongst many other things, it dealt the final blow to those Soviet-influenced state structures which had, for better or worse, represented a blockage to full-scale capitalist hegemony. A new social and economic order, combining modern capitalist markets and productive settings with postmodern high technologies emerging from the high sciences, offered utterly novel ways of living, consuming and producing. These have captured the social and political imagination of a generation.

Yet this shift in ways of life has seen the rise of a hyper-individualism and the emergence of processes which shatter established community structures, workplaces and the natural environment. Individuals and communities--even generations--have been affected as these forces displace our conceptions of social and economic development, as well as our sense of selfhood. While at first helpless before processes which could barely be named, slowly but surely signs of social resistance to globalization have gathered pace. In stark contrast to the bemused and ineffectual responses of left social democrats and socialists in the 80s seeking to blunt strategies like those of Margaret Thatcher, diffuse movements--hardly of the Right or Left--are now actively removing from office hard-nosed proponents of globalization. Lacking a social policy, and also largely lacking a social perspective, these movements nevertheless know what they are against. They have organized sufficiently to make such a political impact that they are now feared by mainstream politicians. The recent congress of the World Trade Organisation (WTO) in Seattle (or its follow up in Davos) marks a further stage in the emergence of such movements of resistance in search of a viable perspective and policy in the face of the global juggernaut.

It remains to be seen whether the 1999 Seattle congress will come to symbolize the first step in the re-evaluation of globalization. Yet even if it does, it could hardly set the cultural and political tone of the next decade, for any critical debate at or around the congress was both elusive and highly generalized. While one could conclude safely enough that the protestors were against WTO global free trade strategies, claims that the labour unions and the environmental movement had finally come together against the WTO were never convincing. And in general there was a most striking lack of alternative policy formulation associated with the protests. As was often remarked about protests in the 1960s, these were expressive demonstrations.

Responses of a negative or expressive kind occur for good reasons. But those who commented with derision upon the protests were quick to make their only point--both telling and disturbing--that 'there is no alternative to globalization'. 'Economic Luddites' declares Paul Krugman, the well-known US economist. 'There is no alternative', declare Anthony Giddens and Tony Blair. In this view the only prospect for economic growth and well-being lies with globalization. The alternative is ground zero: a return to cultures and economies which have no market, and we should all know where that leads!

Krugman could hardly be accused of utopianism in his defence of globalization. Even arguments about the diversity offered by global culture are now accepted by him to be fanciful. But homogenous settings, he says, are a small price to pay for the only prosperity on offer. If city apartments are ugly and dreary, the alternative is the village hut...