Globalization is an anomaly?

I can’t let the article in The Guardian by James Howard Kunstler (Aug. 4) entitled “Globalization is an anomaly and time is running out” go unchallenged. I have concluded that Mr. Kunstler does not know very much about globalization. He thinks that it is something that it is removable from world events. That is ridiculous. Globalization has woven a web so strong that it can’t be separated from the rest of the human enterprise. It can’t be abandoned or allowed to collapse because the consequences would be horrendous. The world has become too dependent on it for it to end.

Globalization is about much more than economics, though economics is its foundation. From the tone of Mr. Kunstler’s article his dislike for globalization is really his dislike for America and the spreading of its ways around the world. (In globalization the center is now moving away from America as it did from Britain.) Resentment is not a good basis for an argument. Moreover, Mr. Kunstler should know that Britain and Europe were just as much or more responsible for globalization with their colonization, trade and insatiable appetite for exploration. On the other hand, globalization has been Britain and Europe’s savior. Without it there would have been no America or colonies to come to their rescue in two world wars.

Globalization ending on the scrap heap of history is as ridiculous an idea as the internet ending on the scrap heap of history. Speaking of the internet, it wouldn’t exist without globalization. Conversely, the internet reinforces and expands globalization. If globalization is an anomaly so is the internet and so is international travel and so is international trade and financing.

Thomas Friedman of The New York Times does sound a bit like a broken record when he goes on about the inevitabilities and virtues of globalization. But Kunstler and sores of other, such a John Ralston Saul, sound more broken when they go on with their whiny prognoses about globalization and how it is something unnatural and in its last throes. Globalization has made the world more secure. It debunked communism. One of the silliest comments I ever heard was from a British professor who said that 9/11 meant the end of globalization. From what I have seen the reverse has happened. Globalization has been strengthened by it. If anything, 9/11 showed a global solidarity, a determination for a more secure and ordered world, a proof that globalization is here to stay. World travel has increased since. So has world trade and finance. The quick responses to the recent global events like the tsunami and contagious diseases would not be possible without globalization because of the global cooperation it musters. Globalization is a form of containment that has a cauterizing effect, like the circling of wagons, in treating world disasters.

Kunstler talks about another era of globalization which ended in the early 20th century. He uses that collapse of globalization as a verification of its impending collapse today. Globalization, according to historians, thrived in the latter part of the 19th century. This is how I see it. The reason why that first round of globalization collapse, just before the WW l, is because the world wasn't ready for it. (Funny, nobody accused this instance of globalization of being an anomaly.) It collapsed because it was too sophisticated an enterprise for the world to fully adopt and implement at that time. The world didn't yet have all the pieces in place for its continued success. Sociopolitical attitudes and situations like colonialism and imperialism had to change before it could continue. Globalization didn’t end before WW l. It just lay dormant until a better time arrived. It really took off again with the advent of world bodies like the UN and the World Bank which made it more feasible. (I consider the first instance something like a dry run.) His saying that globalization is not a permanent fixture of the human condition is bunk. It has be a permanent fixture since the beginning of Civilization when it first started weaving its web. Globalization is the result of the unavoidable and inevitable interaction/interdependence of human activity.

For decades the West has been telling the rest of the world - China, India, Korea, Eastern Europe - to be more like it. Globalization has afforded that opportunity. It has expanded democracy and capitalism to many areas of the world that never had it, in some instances with great success, like with Germany and Japan. It shredded communism and other totalitarian regimes as it pushed and advance democracy and capitalism. Now Kunstler is suggesting that we abandon globalization. Perhaps one reason some people want to scrap globalization is because the ‘other side’ is getting to good at our game and ‘taking our resources’. Some people are isolationists, xenophobic and protectionist and that is also why they hate globalization.

What makes Kunstler think that the depletion of oil will bring an end to globalization? I think that since the world has become so interwoven with itself, the opposite will happen, just like with 9/11. The interdependence of the world and globalization has happened so as to tackle and overcome, as one, the many pitfalls of the modern world. Financially and economically we are too tangled up with each other to let it go any other way. It is as though the ‘invisible hand’ of Adam Smith created it deliberately . We are bound by it. One thing we can do is improve on it. But we can’t extricate ourselves from it.