Exposing the rocks in the rhetoric: What is the Coalition’s policy on globalisation?

By Chris Shiel

Dick Smith has a point. There has been no serious official public discussion on how Australia should manage globalisation. It is extraordinary, as Smith complains, that we can spend millions on a republican convention, "but no-one says let's have a convention on how Australia handles globalisation". Instead of embracing a 21st century debate, we've been fumbling about with one that has come down to us from the 19th century.

Yet Smith's timing is out, way out. Given Seattle, Melbourne, Prague, Gothenburg and Genoa, a globalisation convention today would invite mass protest, civil disorder and political embarrassment. Perhaps a little like the millionaire adventurer himself, the idea of an official gabfest on globalisation's effects on Australia is as sensible as it is crazy.

The time for open policy debate on globalisation has passed over to a more dangerous moment. Somewhere on the way to Seattle, the establishment lost its grip on the debate, and the worldwide protest movement is now deaf to official reasoning. The protesters may be untidy. They may also be part of a movement so new that it scarcely knows itself, or how to articulate its demands. But they do know whom they do not believe.

This is a particularly dangerous moment because we cannot yet see the end to the impasse between the world's political leadership and the led. It is preposterous to imagine that the world's leaders will never meet again, for all time, except in secret. We know the present blockade will break. But as of now we know not how.

The biggest barrier, it will be suggested here, lies not on the side of the protesters, but with the prevailing orthodoxy. This is because the authorities - those who constitute the G7, the IMF-Wall Street Complex, the Washington Consensus, Davos Man, the People Who Rule the World, call them what you will - are not only walled off from each other literally. For all their admonitions whenever the protest movement gathers - "a rag-tag coalition" (snub), "deluded young fools" (snort), "anti-globalist thugs" (snarl) - the leading globalisation authorities, and their retinue of intellectual retainers, are a study in ideological petrification.

This is producing some alarming results, which will only compound the polarisation. As the great romantic poet William Blake once quipped: "Expect poison from the standing water." Having become trapped within the enclosed circularity of their own self-validating logic, the most pronounced impulse of late from global HQ is towards cynical unscrupulousness.

It would be superfluous to make this argument with reference to the new US president, or even Tony Blair, since their critics abound. Instead, we will stay at home, where the Prime Minister, John Howard, and the federal Treasurer, Peter Costello, regularly speak about globalisation.

The Coalition's Globalisation Messages
The Coalition's speeches reward careful analysis. Not because they tell us much about globalisation. They don't. Rather, they supply a measure of the cynical rhetorical lengths to which upholders of the orthodoxy will go to avoid confronting the issues that have mobilised the young people of the world. They therefore also spell a dispiriting message, since there will be no anchoring the present movement without an authentic engagement with those on the move.

The central globalisation message that has been standard issue from the Howard-Costello camp for several years is briefly stated. In a nutshell, the official perspective is that globalisation means facilitating more trade between nations, which is inevitable and nothing new. Other and more varied interpretations of globalisation can be found within the multitude of official documents and utterances. But anyone who studies the major speeches of the two leaders will find that these three croaks - it's trade, it's inevitable, it's nothing new - are the constants.

This is pure political spin. Perhaps you disagree. It would be tedious to traverse the literature. For the sake of the argument, let's just assume that all we are dealing with is spin, the purpose of which is to shepherd globalisation past the public mind with as little fuss as possible. The important point is that, once we make this assumption, the object of analysis changes.

If we are dealing only with spin, the question of whether the rhetoric has any substantive basis largely falls away. Instead, we must examine the government's message in terms of strategic value. We must ask not what is true, but why does the government talk this way? The answers can provoke despair. Follow the logic as we turn over the government's three rhetorical rocks to see what's hiding beneath. It may be enough to make you think about agreeing with Dick Smith, even.

Myth No. 1 - Trade is Inevitable
Firstly, trade. Once we assume a public relations motivation, it seems obvious that this emphasis aims to frame globalisation within the traditional free trade-versus-protection debate, which offers strategic benefits in several directions. Australia has always been a trading nation, and the idea of nations specialising in what they do best, based on their comparative or competitive advantages, is one of the most venerable theories in modern economics. The rhetoric can be relied upon to enlist the support of the country's domestic trading interests, along with much of the public commentariat, which can draw reinforcement from conventional economic theory. Opponents, in turn, can be cast as dangerous (snarl), unpatriotic (snort) and ignorant (snub).

There are substantive issues concerning trade and globalisation, but the traditional framework only hides them. This follows from the ready observation that the extremities in either of the framework's directions are apocalyptic. No-one can sensibly oppose trade in principle, because that would ruin living standards. Equally, (surely) no-one could support, say, shutting down Tasmania and South Australia and relocating their populations to Melbourne - even if economists could show that Australia would realise efficiency gains by importing everything produced in these two states from, say, New Zealand and Singapore. As insane as this scenario (hopefully) sounds, if the efficiency gains from large-scale provincial closures ("structural adjustments") could be calculated, there would be no objection from liberal economic theory.

In short, the debate here is not, cannot be and never has been about free trade-versus-protection. Even if we accept a degree of relevance in the trade strand of government rhetoric (and we should not), in the real world the free trade-versus-protection debate will always be about where the best balance between the two directions lies. Under the first rock, all we have found is the rot of foreclosing dogma.

Myth No. 2 - Globalisation is Inevitable
Secondly, we have the notion that globalisation is inevitable. All practising politicians know that the strategic objective of this line is to confect a general feeling that any attempt to influence the march of globalisation is a waste. Yet the inevitability slogan also goes to another polemical sleight-of-hand, and in this instance the jiggery-pokery is not only part of the government's patter. The insistence on inevitability draws its rhetorical strength from the persistent and generally popular identification of globalisation with new technology, particularly the internet.

Technology-driven explanations for globalisation beg perspective. Technology is certainly making the world a smaller place in many respects, and this is re-configuring aspects of our social relations, as it has for hundreds of years. Certainly globalisation is occurring through the medium of technologies, new and old, and these are conditioning the reach and intensity with which we are experiencing the phenomenon. But the effects of technology are not unlimited, as the NASDAQ has recently discovered.

More importantly, globalisation cannot simply be reduced to a function of technology in some vacuum of power relations. Technology can be used in many different ways for good or ill, and new technology increases humanity's options, it does not determine them; since these depend on which way we chose, or are compelled, to use it.

In lifting the second rock of government rhetoric, it eventuates that what crawls out is really only a second bid to embed the globalisation debate within a much older and more politically neutral history; in this instance, the history that explains the material progress of technology through the ages. The strategic attractiveness of this rhetoric stems from there being a genuine sense of inevitability attached to this older story, since humans have convincingly shown themselves to be an inventive species. But, again, this only avoids authentic debate about globalisation, which must be concerned with what determines the specific ways in which today's technology is used and to what effects, amid much else. The inevitability rhetoric simply refuses debate by positioning critics as the enemies of technical progress, no less. Costello is fond of this tactic, claiming on one recent well-publicised occasion that

"railing against globalisation is like railing against the telephone".

No. 3 - Globalisation is Nothing New
This leaves the third rock, the insistence that globalisation is nothing new. In a sense, this rock both rests upon and supports the other two. As trade and technological development both date from antiquity, by insisting on them as defining characteristics of globalisation, it is possible to conclude that nothing new is happening at all. What we are experiencing is simply more incremental progress of a long established kind, so everyone should just get over it.

Again, Costello has hyped this line, going so far as to suggest that (non-Aboriginal) Australia was created as a "consequence of globalisation". Alert readers will recall this is not exactly what they were taught at school, and they may be disturbed by the fact that the word "globalisation" didn't exist until nearly 200 years after British colonisation. Never mind. Scruples over detail have never bothered spin-doctors, and reading history backwards to favour a preferred version of the present has been a tool of ruling propagandists for millennia.

In sum, the government's rhetoric aims not to engage citizens on the distinguishing and disturbing developments of our era, which are harboured within the debate over globalisation - perhaps most notably, the size and volatility of global financial markets relative to the real world of trade and investment, the concentration of productive capital within transnational corporations, and the exploding concern about inequality. With accompanying snorts, snubs and snarls, these disturbances have been consigned to a netherworld, while the government's rhetoric diverts the turbulent waters of protest into a stagnant lake of meaningless spin.

It would be wrong, of course, to suggest that Howard and Costello are exceptional in their windy perfidy. Rulers worldwide are experiencing ideological petrification, and under these conditions any diverting rhetoric goes. Indeed, the president of the World Bank, James Wolfensohn, recently blew into town and promptly outbid all the local propagandists with the revelation that globalisation began with "Adam and Eve".

Wolfensohn was wrong, of course. Globalisation really began when "the spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters", as Genesis instructs. Creationism rules. This will be a long stand-off. Where did I put Dick Smith's internet address?

Christopher Sheil is a Visiting Fellow in the School of History at the University of New South Wales and the editor of the Evatt Foundation's recent book Globalisation: Australian Impacts, published by UNSW Press.

© The Australian Financial Review, 31 August 2001. Reprinted with the permission of the author.

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