The June 2003 Pew Global Attitude Survey is being promoted as evidence that poorer countries are keener on globalisation than rich ones. Of the 38,000 people in 44 nations surveyed, those in the developing world generally blamed their local governments, not globalisation, for their countrys ills. According to the survey, 75% of households in Sub-Saharan Africa thought that multinational corporations had a positive influence on their country, compared to only 54% in rich countries.
What credence to give the survey? Many campaigners will be likely to dismiss it out of hand. Would they be wrong to do so? Like any survey, much depends on how the questions are constructed, who is asked in what circumstances, and which results receive most attention.
Globolog wonders whether, for all the intelligent, evidence-based work around, globalisation continues to be a Rorschach test for people across a spectrum of divergent views.
So, for example, writing for the Yale Global site, David Dollar, Director of Developmental Policy at the World Bank, cites findings from the survey to support his case that globalisation helps reduce poverty and inequality that there has been a significant decrease in the number of the worlds extreme poor since 1980.
Is Dollar on the money? Him being Director of Development Policy at the World Bank n all, surely he must have a case?
Responses in YaleGlobals discussion forum show, variously, more wisdom and comparable zeal for a range of views. Most pragmatic, Sarah Bachman of www.childlaborphotoproject.org asks some very pertinent questions: was globalisation clearly defined in the survey? Were the people surveyed already in the modern sector? Were they subsistence farmers? Here is someone who wants to really understand what is going on. Bachman concludes:
Globalisations opponents and proponents both should recognize that the big theories often run aground on the small details of how theories are implemented in specific countries, regions, and locations.
Hadra in France writes, with passion:
We want a globalisation where people are not only buying stuffs... we want a solidarity globalisation, we want social globalization, health globalisation. Trade globalisation has his use, but must not be the only one.
And who will disagree with that?
Bye, bye nation state?
And on the same page of responses, someone named Karmapa writing from Nepal has to be one of the most ardent advocates of people flow you could find:
Free the global labor markets first...then well talk globalisation. Let the unskilled/poor and skilled/rich of the world compete everywhere. Down with visas, passports, work permits. Dissolve the country borders. All are world citizens. Let Americans rich or poor settle/work in Iraq if they wish for as long as they wish; let Afghans live/work in Norway without any restrictions, if they wish. Lets shake the world all up. Lets stir it up... in the words of Bob Marley.
Kinetize the latent global workforce held in place by iron curtains of nation states by giving it unrestricted freedom to live/work/go anywhere and see the world change before your eyes. Will solve the problem of global unemployment, reduce global labor market distortions, weaken the power of unions, will better integrate the world and make it more secure, will bridge the us vs. them divide...will deal a final blow to the nation states...that have only given us wars, persecution, nuclear bombs, genocide this century. Let us lay the nation state to rest.
Phew! No doubting the man's enthusiasm. These views may seem a long way from those of George Monbiot, author of The Age of Consent : A Manifesto for a New World Order. For example, Monbiot would probably differ just a teeny bit on that point about unions, among other things, and wants us to think hard about instruments for global government, not a global free-for-all. But they are united on one thing: the belief that the days of the nation state are numbered. He and Todd Gitlin will be discussing the possibilities of a new global politics in a cracking dialogue on openDemocracy in the near future.
Back on the ranch
Meanwhile, Globolog was left with a lot of doubt about both the Pew Survey and David Dollars response to it. For something more than Rorschach blots, the best option was to turn to James Galbraith who told Globolog:
The survey is impossible to interpret. In China, for example, the desire among educated people for greater openness to the West goes back nearly a century at least to the 1919 May 4 Movement, which unfurled the banner of Science and Democracy.
It would be easy to confuse that long-standing sentiment with support for globalisation, a word whose policy content is much more precisely specified on H Street [home of the World Bank in Washington D.C.] than it would be, say, in Chengdu.
There is also a question of party line. To make this point a bit more concrete, one might notice that the photograph accompanying the YaleGlobal Online essay contains a pro-globalisation banner. Where did it come from? No doubt, from the local Communist authorities. A pro-globalisation response to a poll in China is politically correct nowadays in a very strict sense. I would refrain from using this observation to accuse World Bank officials of toadying to the Chinese Communist Party line, if they would only apply a little common sense to the situation in front of their eyes.
James Galbraith made these comments to Globolog the day before the 1 July demonstrations in Hong Kong when around 400,000 people came out on the streets against proposed anti-subversion laws (the equivalent proportion of the population in the UK would be more than 4 million; in the US 19 million).
Galbraith continues with two substantive criticism of Dollars analysis:
First, it is silly to attribute the successes of Chinese economic policy over twenty-five years to the latter-day globalisation policies of the World Bank. When I was serving as chief technical adviser to the State Planning Commission on a UNDP project on macroeconomic reform in the middle 1990s, even the World Banks own Beijing representative strenuously opposed those policies. What we supported, and the line the Chinese actually pursued, was much better captured by their own phrase, the socialist market economy which provided for gradual institutional change toward more flexible and autonomous units of production, but with important protective barriers still in place, including capital control.
Second, the claim that there is no worldwide trend toward rising inequality is contradicted by important evidence that Mr. Dollar declines to confront, including the work of Branko Milanovic at the World Bank itself and, using quite different sources of information, that of my own group at the University of Texas at Austin (http://utip.gov.utexas.edu). We find a systematic trend toward rising pay inequality within countries, beginning largely with the high interest rates, debt crises and coerced liberalizations of the early 1980s. It would be very strange if pay inequality were rising but income inequality were not.
Thank you, James. Here is a model approach for Globologers and Globologistas everywhere: evidence-based (and therefore falsifiable or verifiable) and tempered by real knowledge of both history and current politics.
Send your views on globalisation to globolog@opendemocracy.net