The soul musician Sam Cooke's life-affirming celebration of a "wonderful world" joyfully admits that the author doesn't "know much about history". A cascade of daily reportage of world events seems only to confirm that it is possible to champion or condemn current trends without much reference to their precedents in earlier eras.
The amnesiac approach is particularly marked in relation to globalisation, where breathless noting of the latest awesome statistic can replace a search for the historical context and meaning that can alone make sense of it.
If this is true of news journalism, it is less so of the background analysis of experts like Thomas Friedman (The World is Flat) and John Ralston Saul (The Collapse of Globalism). The publication of these two books at the moment I was finalising my own book on the subject (A Brief History of Globalization) may be healthy evidence that the balance of understanding is shifting.
These two voices offer bold views as well as (to the author who comes in their wake) daunting competition: Friedman is the New York Times correspondent with an eye for catchy analogies and a mantlepiece full of Pulitzer Prizes, a "one-man think-tank" according to his paper; Saul is from the philosophical wing of the anti-globalisation movement, whose Canadian-ness (as Tom Nairn argues in openDemocracy) is central to his work and outlook (see "Ending the big 'ism", January 2006). Indeed, Saul ("a prophet" in the eyes of Time magazine) has been carrying the anti-globalist torch pretty much single-handed since Pierre Bourdieu died in 2002.
Both writers do indeed approach globalisation with a memory that goes back beyond last week's headlines. But neither addresses what, in my own explorations of the topic, I have found to be its most compelling aspect: the reality that globalisation is less a decades-long sprint than a centuries-long marathon with many detours, reversals and rest-stops along the way.
Alex MacGillivray is head of the responsible competitiveness programme at AccountAbility. His A Brief History of Globalization is published by Robinson (February 2006)
Also by Alex MacGillivray in openDemocracy:
"The trade gangs of Hong Kong"
(December 2005)
"The Brazilian hat-trick" (March 2006)
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We have been here before
Friedman, a roving ambassador for hi-tech globalisation, believes that the current round of globalisation got started in the year 2000, when the impacts of ten world "flatteners" among them the fall of the Berlin wall, the world wide web, offshoring, global supply chains finally converged.
Saul, in contrast, dates the decline of globalism to 1995, when the Mexican debt crisis, the arrival of James Wolfensohn at the World Bank, the hanging of Ken Saro-Wiwa and the Oklahoma City bombing combined in a "cusp year" after which the globalism project rapidly unravelled in the face of growing protest and nationalism.
"History", accused Henry Ford, "is just one damn thing after another". Not according to Friedman and Saul. Their views about the merits of globalisation may be at loggerheads, but both agree that the history of globalisation is a bunch of damn things all at the same time.
In fairness, the world has shrunk enormously in the last decade, and both writers make occasional forays beyond the past decade into the prehistory of globalisation. Saul consults the 20th and even 19th century more effectively than Friedman, whose subtitle is the revealing "a brief history of the 21st century".
A more receptive approach to the history would have shown that globalisation has emphatically not collapsed, but also that the world is still far from flat. I'm not suggesting we adopt the "synchronoptic" approach to world history giving every decade and every people exactly equal coverage devised in 1952 by maverick German historian and cartographer Arno Peters. (His comparative neglect may be owed to the fact that his key work has never been translated into English.)
But both free-trade enthusiasts and anti-globalisation protestors would benefit from a slightly longer perspective. The highly-selective "1996 and all that" approach has thoroughly polarised the debate. That's a shame, because people have confronted the mixed blessings of globalisation before.
Three particularly intense planet-shrinking decades deserve closer consideration:
- the Iberian carve-up (1490-1500): the decade when the only superpower, Spain, and its diminutive but innovative neighbour Portugal literally agreed to split the globe in two at the Treaty of Tordesillas. Sluggish superpowers like Wal-Mart, the United States of America, or Sheffield United should beware: it's the innovative minnow that gets the better bargain. But today's little guys iPod, Bangalore or Reading could soon look as quaint as Portugal does to the Brazilians
- the Britannic meridian (1880-90): Greenwich was officially decreed to be the centre of the earth in 1884. This a symbolic moment encapsulated the "golden age" of globalisation, much to the chagrin of the French, who appear to have invented the word "global". But this period also saw the early NGOs and muckraking books like Red Rubber and the Putumayo Report exposed the brutal rubber trade in the Congo and Amazon, perpetrated by companies listed on the London stock-exchange. These growing protests seemed set to coalesce into a powerful movement for ethical trade, before being swept away by the great war of 1914-18. Will the anti-sweatshop movements of the late 1990s prove as fragile?
- Sputnik world (1955-65): far from being a cold war, the space race actually heated up many global exchanges, from the financial flows of the Marshall Plan to the far-flung conflicts of "domino" theory, not forgetting Sam Cooke's Wonderful World (1958), cultural hybrids like spaghetti westerns and technologies like the pocket transistor radio, which created the teenager. But despite rapid growth in trade and migration, a massive gap began to emerge between rich and poor nations, setting the scene for the petrodollar debt crisis and anti-immigration.
A process, not a destination
Contemporaries spoke of these previous pulses of globalisation in the same feverish tones as we do about today's shrinking planet. They were sometimes more sophisticated about the implications of globalising technologies, like the 1890s civil servants who resisted the telegraph because they could see it would increase hierarchical reporting but reduce local accountability.
One of the strangest periods was the 1930s, a period of "phoney deglobalisation" when the contraction of trade, mass unemployment and fascism masked vibrant global developments like jazz, the movies and soccer's world cup. Dramatic increases in productivity in corporations led to widespread demands to curb the power of giant supermarkets like A&P;, accused of driving small mom and pop stores off Main Street in the 1930s. For better or worse, governments were not afraid to regulate in this period.
Like its predecessors, the planetary contraction we are in right now is creating winners and losers aplenty, and failing to reach many bystanders. Achieving a fair and responsible version of globalisation is not a new mission. Like Henry Ford, we should be sceptical about Winston Churchill's claim that "the further backward you look, the further forward you can see". But we can learn from history that globalisation is more a process than a destination and a jerky process too. Slavery was not abolished overnight, far from it, but decades of concerted action could make a difference. Yet there are powerful and recurrent environmental, social and cultural limits to how flat the earth can become, no matter how breathtaking the technological potential.
Historians are belatedly mobilising to reclaim globalisation from the pundits. That has to be wonderful news. Sam Cooke's world was unhistorical. But then, he never claimed to be an A-student, let alone a prophet or one-man think-tank.
