DAR AL HARB - U.S.A.:

I always knew that California was the "land of fruits & nuts" but this next story is just amazing:


The force behind globalisation's dark side

By Steven Weber and Ely Ratner, Los Angeles Times-Washington Post News Service
The world social forum -and the anti-globalisation movement that it represents - convened in Nairobi, Kenya, on Saturday, and if you hear or read anything about its proceedings, it will be surprising. What started as an annual event in Chile six years ago - building on the extraordinary visibility of the Seattle anti-globalisation protests in 1999 -has become a nonevent for most of the world's media. The forum has made itself nearly irrelevant to the future of the global economy because it, among other things, has aimed at the wrong targets - capitalists, corporate power and such international institutions as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund.

The anti-globalisation activists in Nairobi who want to slow down or even reverse the tides of globalisation have a point: The post-Cold War world is an increasingly dangerous place, in part because of the dark side of globalisation. New diseases roam across national borders; trade in drugs and women flourishes; pollutants spread to less-policed jurisdictions; deadly weapons find their way easily into the hands of anyone with hard currency. And yet the underlying flows that make up globalisation - the mobility of ideas, capital, technology and labour - are nothing new. Although container ships and the internet have speeded up commerce, goods and services have been moving across geographic borders for centuries. So what has lately increased the perils of globalisation?

Rather than capitalists and corporate power, national governments are to blame. The World Bank and the International Monetary Fund are creations of national governments and are ruled by them. Corporations are legal fictions, made responsible to their shareholders and are born of and depend on the laws that governments make to empower them. Globalisation's reputed villains respond to the incentives and constraints that national governments create for them.
The end of the Cold War was supposed to bring peace and prosperity to the globe. Many in the Clinton administration, for instance, shared Francis Fukuyama's "end of history'' vision - a future world of trade and commerce in which the biggest conflicts would be waged over things like interest rates and mobile phone standards. President Bill Clinton's first national security adviser, Anthony Lake, coined the term "enlargement'' to replace "containment'', arguing that the spread of democracy around the world inevitably would bring peace on top of that prosperity. Instead, the end of the Cold War and globalisation ushered in a period of US dominance that has not turned out to be the same thing as peace and prosperity for most of the world.

For the first time, rapid globalisation has been superimposed on a unipolar world. And the past 15 years have shown that this is a dangerous mixture.

...

If there is any good news about the relative decline of US power, it is that it opens the door for other powerful states to join in the game of global governance. The greatest beneficiary of anti-globalisation after the US has been China, a country with a burgeoning economy, growing political influence and distinct interests in parts of the world - most important, Africa - where the US is barely engaged.

If China and the US work together to develop rules for the next phase of anti-globalisation, the world 10 years from now could be not only a richer but also a safer, cleaner, more just and hopeful place to live. But if they work at cross-purposes, then corporate power will do what corporate power does best - generate profit at the expense of most other values. If members of the World Social Forum want to become relevant and curb the dark sides of anti-globalisation, they will have to face up to the reality of great-power politics.

This means turning their focus away from capitalists and corporations and towards Washington and Beijing.

The Los Angeles Times cannot go bankrupt fast enough for me...

Pertinent Links:

1) The force behind globalisation's dark side