"Globalism long off the mainland's trade agenda"

Philosopher John Ralston Saul says China's five-year plan favours Confucian side

South China Morning Post, 19 March 2007

China has rejected globalism, while the west is in denial about it, according to Canadian philosopher and essayist John Ralston Saul.

"China made that very clear in the last five-year plan - in the five equilibriums. The instructions are to favour the humanist internal Confucian side over the globalist side," Saul told business leaders attending a breakfast session of the 2007 Man Hong Kong International Literary Festival at the Foreign Correspondents' Club.

"They've said the direction they don't want to go in. They haven't figured out how to do it but the west has no idea that globalism has already been put aside by China.

"(The Chinese are) doing something else. They may be signing international treaties but those are fixed bilateral international treaties - not globalism. They're 19th century-style treaties.

"When you look at what the Chinese are saying, there is a fascinating debate going on. It's one of the most interesting debates in the world: 'How are we going to deal with the fact we've done extremely well in a certain sense creating wealth for quite a few people but it's created this imbalance, as in India, a lot of instability'."

Saul, author in 2005 of The Collapse of Globalism: And the Reinvention of the World, said globalisation as conceived in the 1950s and '60s and put in place in the '70s and '80s and early '90s began to cease to exist around 1995.

"We've been in an interim period since 1995...a vacuum filled with confusion with all sorts of forces at work and we don't actually know what the next period is going to look like. If we're lucky it will be a regionalist period. If we are unlucky it could be much more unpleasant than that."

When economists begin to say the economic theory of the day was inevitable, you knew it was "on the way out," said Saul. It was usually in the latter quarter of an economic ideology that "inevitability" became an important theme. "Usually economic theories last between 25 and 50 years," he said. "The Soviet Union lasted for 60 but it had the secret police and the army to back up the economists."

If you looked back to the beginnings of globalism, he said, everybody who wrote about it was perfectly clear about what they meant - that for the first time in history economics would be promoted from its secondary or tertiary position to the primary position and civilisation would be seen through the economic prism. This would cause a weakening of nation states, a decline in warfare, a decline in nationalism and a decline in government policies.

As globalism had slipped since 1995 so its adherents had begun to use the word to mean "just about anything under the sun," he said.

At the next United States presidential election there would not be a single pro-globalist candidate. They would all be nationalist, Saul said. "The Democrats just took control of Congress, 42 new elected members - 39 of them have declared they will not vote in favour of any globalist policies, they're elected on anti-globalist policies.

"Military budgets are back above cold war levels, US$1.2 billion. But as long as elites go on pretending it is the globalist era, we are very badly prepared to find our way out of this interim phase."

Saul said that with countries adopting a more nationalist stance and with scarcity of resources leading to competition that might lead to conflict, the hopeful thing was: "China could be moving towards something new, which is the obvious realisation that the biggest and best market they have got is their own market and it is the one place where things are not in surplus."

The problem with the globalist model was that it was a 19th-century model of economics based on scarcity, and the whole world is now in surplus. "It's the wrong theory for today," he said. "But to the extent that China and India look at their domestic markets you're looking at what you might call regional scarcity and that could be quite interesting."

Saul sounded a positive note saying that this was "a more hopeful moment for the world" than five or 10 years ago when "we just seemed to be sliding along."

The west was in denial but there was a real hope that something interesting could come out of the debate going on in Beijing and Delhi, he said. They had realised they could not pursue industrialisation in the same way western countries had because of their population densities and all the attendant implications for the environment, human living conditions and disquiet in the population, Saul said.

- Chris Wood

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