Globalization Isn’t a One-Size-Fits-All Answer
Alot of the people demonstrating in the streets of Seattle this week in an effort to embarrass the World Trade Organization ministerial meeting are scared witless of this new thing called globalization.
They fear its steamroller march: blasting over environmental standards, penetrating the borders of little nations to puree indigenous cultures into one homogenized global soup, blowing gigantic gales of foreign capital in and out of small economies and dissing human rights values in favor of shareholder values. This is not globalization’s kinder, gentler wealth-producing, raising-all-boats image, of course, but the icy cold face of a relentless modernity that the environmentalists, union activists, human rights lobbyists, anti-multinationalists and crank opportunists causing chaos outside Seattle’s five-star hotels want in plain view.
What these fearful demonstrators do not know is that many of the big-shot foreign ministers at the WTO conference hovering in the halls and conferring in the closed conference rooms are fearful, too. For globalization is now the huge new force stalking the Earth, creating great uncertainty as well as vast new opportunity.
East Asia itself is as plagued by doubt as it is resigned to the inevitable.
Globalization tells the Japanese--who in a mere five decades raised their nation from a nearly bankrupt Third-World country to the second-largest economy--to abandon their system of promising workers a job for life simply because it makes their economy uncompetitive with ones that treat workers little better than tissue paper. The Japanese aren’t sure about this.
The imperatives of globalization instruct the Chinese, determined to enter the world economy but cautious about each step, to open up their currency market to the rest of the world. Yet the Chinese say: “We weren’t ready for that two years ago, which helps explain how we managed to escape the worst ravages of the Asian currency crisis.” Who’s sorry now?
And two years ago globalization was whispering in the ears of the South Koreans to borrow and borrow--so as to invest and invest. Yet when Western creditors all started calling in all these loans, the South Korean economy imploded. No wonder people are scared by globalization.
For Asians, at least, the key to succeeding with globalization, observed Prime Minister Goh Chok Tong last week in his native Singapore, is learning how to ride the tiger without being devoured by it. In a long interview in the tiny nation’s Istana governmental compound, the successor to modern Singapore’s founder, Lee Kuan Yew, said: “We need to move with the times, that’s basic.” To this end, his nation, a mere 249 square miles in size and 3.1 million in population, has probably embraced global technology like the Internet more extensively than any government on Earth. Before long, all schools and homes will be wired. This will be good for the national economy, the government believes. Yet will it be good for the national soul?
Goh knows that with the latest market information comes a lot of garbage, whether pornography or Web hate pages. Even now, the Singaporean way is to keep the streets so clean you can almost eat off of them and keep people so glued to work, study and the family that no one would have time to read Playboy magazine even if it were available to buy--which it isn’t.
Goh shakes his head and says you just have to accept that the old days are over: “We have even removed censorship of plays. With the Internet, you have got to change the way you manage society. You can’t stop information or materials coming in.”
Don’t believe for a second that Goh and others in Asia who agree with him are entirely happy about that. Still, there’s an up side, says the Williams College-educated politician: “People now can at least begin to experiment and test other ideas. That’s what I have in mind, to be more innovative.” Blame that on globalization, too.
How the United States handles itself as globalization proceeds apace will help determine whether nations adapt to its requirements wisely or resist it irrationally. Like China or Japan or Korea or Thailand, Singapore is very much its own place with its own mind about things. Changing your ways to survive globally is unavoidable, but cultures and polities won’t abdicate to foreign influences unless economic survival absolutely depends on it.
The soft-spoken Goh surely reflects widespread concerns when he pleads for more tolerance of political diversity from the West as other nations sort out their new role in the world: “The U.S. model of democracy may not apply to everyone. Don’t go for ‘one size fits all.’ Try custom-made democracy for individual countries, taking into account their cultural differences, their lack of a middle class and their readiness for democracy. Apply your norms in a general way, but don’t insist that everybody should follow the way you do things.” What chance of this is there? Goh laughs loudly: “I think the average American will not know, or the average congressman will not understand, that.”
In a different life or with a different fate, at least a few of the ministerial leaders inside Seattle’s hotels might have wound up on the other side of the barricades.
