By Alan Oxley
It has become fashionable to criticise globalisation. In the populist climate today in Australia, few seem willing to make the case for globalisation. This is serious cause for concern. Globalisation creates great opportunity for Australia.
Globalisation is rarely defined. But it is blamed for all the ills supposedly visited by multi-nationals, foreign governments, world money markets and even high-profile financiers. Groups at opposite ends of the spectrum - the Greens and Democrats and One Nation - are united in attacking it. What unites them is a form of xenophobia, expressed as opposition to foreign products and foreigners.
It is also fashionable for people who would not see themselves as extremists to criticise globalisation. Few people these days are prepared to openly criticise free trade. Criticising globalisation is a backdoor way of doing so.
The critics of globalisation say we have lost sovereignty, that our economy and the world economy is controlled by big international corporations and foreign exchange traders. This is not what is happening. But like all effective propaganda, it has a germ of truth.
The world has changed. Globalisation is the result of the development of global markets and the instant access to those markets which information technology affords. So what happens in one economy affects others. That is also not new, but the extent to which the effect is felt is new. It is not true that multinationals like IBM and General Motors control the world economy, or even whole nations. But we are much more exposed to foreign influences.
There is nothing new about foreign influence. The foreign influence of globalisation is benign compared to earlier forms. Previous generations had to endure wars and the threat of invasion. Globalisation is making the world safer. It creates economic interdependence. France and Germany now have deep stakes in the European common market. Another war between them is inconceivable today. But they went to war three times between 1870 and 1940.
A fall in the Australian dollar because of recession in Japan is positively benign. It protects our exports in a declining Japanese market. Compare it to the threat posed by the Japanese Navy steaming into the Coral Sea in 1943.
Globalisation only threatens those who want to keep societies closed. Australia tradition-ally has been an open society. Open to migrants, foreign capital and trade. We could not have grown if we were not open. Globlalisation creates opportunities for open societies to accelerate their growth.
Australia is better set up than most other nations to thrive in this more globalised world, recession in Asia notwithstanding. Our economy is competitive in all major sectors and we are one of the most computer-literate societies in the world. And with information technology we no longer suffer the tyranny of distance. Globalisation is very good for Australia.
Alan Oxley is chairman of the national APEC Study Centre, located at the Melbourne city offices of Monash (www.apec.org.au).
Mr Alan Oxley believes globalisation creates opportunities
for open societies like Australia to accelerate their growth.
By Peter Marden
Indeed, like the other well-used word at the moment, 'reform', it has a multitude of meanings largely dependent on one's own life experiences. The ambiguity of the concept, however, seems to escape fashionable political discourse, which is constantly fostering a certitude about the apparent inevitability of globalisation and our response to it at both the national and individual level.
The economic dimensions of globalisation are readily seen in the ongoing push for free trade and the relentless appetite of finance speculative capital. We are in an era of 'flows', be it information, trade in goods and services or ideas and money. But these flows are not producing similar outcomes, as a simple perusal of United Nations poverty figures indicates. It would seem that despite the promise of global economic growth, we still have a world of nations characterised by a wealthy few surrounded by the many poor.
Globalisation is one of the great paradoxes of our time. New technologies are being celebrated as icons of invention and human ingenuity, while masses of people are being deprived of their claims to self-sufficiency and basic human rights. The ghost of Marx still hovers amidst this wondrous world of power and creativity, for while the juggernaut of commerce and corporatism rolls on, we are still faced with staggering contradictions evidenced by the unyielding exploitation of the weak by the strong. It is, therefore, misleading to suggest that we are all winners with the onset of globalisation, just as it is equally misleading to argue the contrary.
Wages and salaries are a good example. Consider the wealthiest and most productive country in the world. In 1995, four-fifths of all male employees and workers in the US earned 11 per cent less an hour in real terms than they did in 1973. So for the great majority, living standards have been falling for the past two decades. On the other hand, for the top managers of large corporations, globalisation has meant a windfall. On average, their net income has risen by 66 per cent since 1979. By 1980, they were receiving 40 times more than their employees, and by the mid-1990s the ratio was 120:1. Meanwhile, many thousands of workers in poor nations are still facing abject poverty and deplorable conditions as they also become unwitting participants in globalisation.
An uncritical acceptance of globalisation as an irrevocable force is attributable to a politics of despair. What we need to keep in mind, however, is that there are several global-
isations. Next to the dominant form bound up with economic rationalism, privatisation, deregulation and the ongoing need to be aggressively competitive, there are those forms expressing alternatives and hopes steeped within the linkages and networks of civil society. Different voices, different agendas, requiring perhaps a different set of social and economic standards.
Dr Peter Marden is a lecturer in the Geography and Environmental Science department at Monash University.
New technologies are being celebrated
while masses of people are deprived of their claims
to basic human rights, argues Peter Marden.