Rachman vs. Toynbee on Globalisation, "Today"
Toynbee: "Gloablisation is good in that it has raised the poor out of poverty, for example in China. But the benefits in the advanced economies have been concentrated on the rich. To have the cake of globalisation and to eat it, we must make sure that its benefits are distributed much more equally. Then you will avoid the nationalist, protectionist sentiments that we see arising everywhere now."
Rachman: Sure ... but ... political pressures are killing the global fundamentals of free trade ... there is no political message that can counter these pressures ... we just can't make sense of the world anymore ...
That is because the economic crisis is revealing the basic and immense conflict between the nation and the the inter-nation. The inter-nation is the collection of all those interests that globalisation creates that are not contained, captured or represented by national institutions. Capital is one source of such interests, for sure. But so are the environment, security, many hybridised identities etc.
Here is what a Davos internationalist might have said to Toynbee a couple of years back:
"Redistributive policies are all very fine, but they do mean high taxation. And one way or another, nation states are in competition with each other over the cost of doing business. If a nation falls behind in that competition, it will have less and less to redistribute. If the UK taxes capital and the rich to make globalisation more acceptable to its losers, capital and wealth will find ways not to fall under the UK regimes."
The paradox proposed was this: if you make globalisation redistributively acceptable, you miss out on it; if you embrace it, it becomes socially unacceptable in the bad times. And a corollary is that the more rich nations protect themselves, the less export-led goodness there is for the poor nations.
The nation and inter-nation are in conflict here. Since 1945, we built social democracy in one country in the rich West, but it was not "real" social democracy---not accepted and internalised into our social beings in such a way that it survives the pressures and temptations of the inter-nation. Infant social democracy must now grow up, and this means rebuilding both the nation and the inter-nation.
