Fighting Globalization--But Why?

They’re back. The same coalition of forces that wrecked the meeting of the World Trade Organization in Seattle last year has been gathering in Washington, ready to demonstrate against the World Bank and International Monetary Fund.

The usual Web sites have been humming with advice: Don’t wear body piercings, which can be grabbed by the police; keep your vinegar-soaked bandanna (“a gas mask semi-substitute”) in a heavy-duty zip-lock bag. Visitors have been able to choose from demos big and small, from the labor unions’ Capitol Hill rally against China’s membership in the WTO to a campaign in favor of “fair-trade” coffee at Starbucks. You could take your pick: March to save the rain forest or join the Lavender Leopards to protest the gentrifi cation of Dupont Circle.

Meanwhile, inside the buildings of the IMF and the bank, where well-meaning Indian and Scandinavian social democrats outnumber red-in-tooth-and-claw capitalists, officials wondered what they did to attract such ire. “I come in every day thinking I’m doing God’s work, as do my colleagues,” said World Bank President James D. Wolfensohn.

What’s going on here? The bank and the IMF may have done all sorts of things that activists dislike: imposed tough conditions on loans to developing countries and built dams where they shouldn’t have. But they’ve also done a lot of good.

They are not staffed by rapacious ogres. The World Bank, especially under Wolfensohn’s leadership, has been a model of openness to nongovernmental organizations. Neither body is “controlled by the bureaucrats from governments of rich countries,” as the demonstrators’ principal Web site has it; they are international organizations whose members are the elected governments of states around the world. They are more accountable to a wider sense of the public good than many of the self-important groupuscules now wandering around Washington.

As symbols, however, the bank and the IMF are wonderful targets. Those gathering for their meetings, says the umbrella group Mobilization for Global Justice, form “a veritable board of directors of the global economy.” It is that global economy--and the process known as globalization--that is the true target of the demonstrations.

For mainstream economists, globalization is easy to explain and defend. The case goes as follows: Driven by free trade and technological advances, the economies of the world are becoming ever more closely knitted together. Free trade can be proved to be an unqualified human good (I will spare you the math). Trade encourages each nation to concentrate on the production of the goods and services at which it is best; the free exchange of these different specializations maximizes economic output, and hence prosperity. Since prosperity is the handmaiden of happiness, a world in which trade is more free is a world that is more happy. Conclusion: Globalization is not a threat to anyone; it is, rather, something to celebrate.

As it happens, the mainstream case understates the virtues of globalization. But those of us on that side of the debate would do well to try to understand why so many apparently sensible people think we are nuts. There are at least three reasons why globalization has its enemies, and all are worth taking seriously.

First, globalization transforms, even destroys, much of what is familiar--and people like familiar things. Last week, I got an e-mail from a man on an island in the Baltic Sea. “After crisscrossing the world,” he wrote, “I came home, to teach my child and grandchildren all the things about fishing and sailing that my forefathers taught me. It was the best thing I have ever done.”

Disruption hurts. In Britain and Germany, for example, major banks, determined to be first-rank global financial institutions, are preparing to cut costs by closing many smaller branches. (They can because technology, globalization’s twin, allows them to. The ATM and the Internet are turning banks into unproductive piles of bricks.) But for small towns, a bank, just like a factory that discovers it can’t compete with wage rates in Mexico or Indonesia, may be an essential sort of community glue. When the bank or factory leaves, it’s easy to blame the global economy for the sense of loss.

Second, in rich countries, especially, globalization has become mixed up with a transformation in the nature of work. Our conception of work is a curiously 19th-century one: Something that stresses muscle power, like hauling bales of hay, or hacking lumps of coal from a seam deep underground. To make the obvious point, our idea of work is man’s work. But it is man’s work, in the rich world’s textile mills, mines, even farms, that is most at risk from globalization. In an integrated world, many developing countries will be able to provide those jobs far cheaper. That’s why Nebraska’s farmers are among the poorest of Americans, or why every bit of clothing you bought for the kids this weekend was made in Asia. The rich world’s jobs, increasingly, will be what used to be called “women’s work,” ones that depend on manipulating data rather than great hunks of metal. This amounts to a profound change in social arrangements.

Third, advocates of globalization have often oversold its benefits. That is particularly the case with environmental matters. It is an article of faith among globalizers that the richer we become, the more we are prepared to protect the environment. That is only partly true; a more complete statement would be that, at a certain level of prosperity, people want to clean up the mess made in getting to that level.

Yes, London and New York have cleaner air now than in 1950. But it was the rapid growth in the century before 1950 that made the air filthy. The same point can be made for today’s world. In a lecture last week, Chris Patten, the last governor of Hong Kong, remembered the fall of 1997, when devastating forest fires blackened Asia’s skies so “you might not see the sun for weeks except through a thick haze.” But those fires were set during a period of Southeast Asia’s most rapid economic growth ever; it is scant comfort to think that in 20 years’ time, when they are even richer, Asians will stand in their ruined forests, look back and promise not to burn them again.

How can those of us who believe in globalization meet the challenge of these objections? Mainly, by recognizing that the case for our new world cannot be made solely in economic terms. Prosperity is a wonderful thing: It means an Asian family who used to swelter in the tropical heat can afford a fan and, maybe, one day, the air-conditioning that Angelenos take for granted. But we do not measure ourselves solely by dollars and cents and what they can buy.

For the true promise of globalization is not that it makes us more wealthy, but that it enriches our humanity. It enables us to try new food, explore other people’s religions, visit places our parents could only dream about. In my case, literally: My mother died without ever having flown in an airplane.

In one of this week’s great paradoxes, it is globalization that enables demonstrators with nothing in common--the fair-trade-coffee freaks and the Ohio steelworkers--to gather in Washington and understand what it is each cares about most. I’d say that was something rather wonderful; it is a pity that some of those who most benefit from globalization can’t appreciate its charms. *