Yaroslav Shimov. Globalization

Globalization - save yourself who can!
The meeting of the IMF and the World Bank in Prague is another battle between myths and common sense

Yaroslav Shimov

Date of publication: September 5, 2000

Prague has probably not seen such militarization since the arrival of the “Soviet brothers” in tanks in August 1968. According to the Ministry of Internal Affairs of the Czech Republic, in the capital of the country and its environs at the end of September, in addition to 10 thousand police officers, about 2 thousand regular army troops, 20 armored personnel carriers, 4 helicopters, several armored vehicles equipped with water cannons, and other military equipment will be concentrated. The fact is that in three weeks the next meeting of the IMF and the World Bank opens in Prague and several tens of thousands of so-called “opponents of the globalization of the world economy” are promised to descend on the Czech capital - a very violent people, judging by the destruction they caused during last year’s World Trade Organization conference in Seattle, USA.

However, the problems of maintaining public order are far from the most important thing in the upcoming gathering of the “kites of world capitalism.” The meeting of the IMF and the World Bank is a good opportunity to reflect on the features and consequences of globalization, the specter of which is taking walks around the world that its predecessor, the specter of communism, never dreamed of.

Advantages and disadvantages

The list of the most frequently mentioned pros and cons of globalization is still relatively small.

Its advantages , as a rule, include the following.

1. Growth in the quantity and quality of consumer products on the world market.

2. Rapid technological progress, as a result of which the cost of manufactured products is reduced and prices for a significant part of consumer goods are reduced. (Let’s just remember the transformation of a computer and a mobile phone in just 5-7 years from a luxury item into a ubiquitous inexpensive attribute of a modern person).

3. The emergence of new jobs, mainly in the non-production sector, as a result of the development of information technology.

4. Significantly wider and freer access to information than 10-15 years ago and a corresponding expansion of opportunities and methods of communication on a global scale.

5. Increase in living standards, relative improvement in basic social indicators in most regions of the world. So, according to the UN, by the mid-90s. Compared to 1970, average life expectancy in the most developed countries increased from 69 to 75 years, in developing countries (except for the poorest) - from 46 to 63 years. Literacy rates in developing countries rose from 46 to 69 percent over the same period, and in the poorest countries from 29 to 46.

6. Improving mutual understanding between different cultures and civilizations as a result, on the one hand, of intensifying global information exchange, and on the other, leveling out differences due to the spread of mass culture products throughout the planet.

Here is a list of the disadvantages of globalization.

1. The global economy is becoming more unstable and vulnerable. Negative trends in one country or region immediately affect the economic health of others. The most obvious examples here are the Asian and Russian crises of 1997 - 99.

2. The gap in economic and social development between the rich North and the poor South has reached unprecedented proportions and continues to grow.

3. The scale of population migration, primarily from poor to wealthy countries, is increasing significantly. This process is beyond the control of national governments and international organizations. Its negative consequences are manifold - from an increase in crime and the spread of dangerous diseases to the rise of racist sentiments and xenophobia in both developed and developing countries.

4. Even in the most prosperous countries, the difference between the standard of living and well-being of the rich and poor segments of the population is increasing. For example, in the USA, the average salary of an industrial worker is approximately 300 (!) times lower than the income of top managers of the largest companies. In 1980, this gap was almost half as much.

5. The influence of transnational corporations, including political influence, is growing. Not only the governments of individual countries, but also powerful supranational associations, such as the European Union, are forced to increasingly focus on TNCs and take their interests into account. National states find themselves tied hand and foot, their influence on economic and political processes is steadily declining.

6. The state of the environment is deteriorating, which is being sacrificed to the interests of business.

7. The intoxicating and stultifying influence of mass culture is growing, threatening cultural diversity.

Those who dislike the listed new trends in global development continually accuse international financial institutions of evil intentions or at least incompetence. However, the indignation of the IMF's opponents in most cases is not economic, but purely political.

Conversations for the poor

This background is simple: the IMF, the World Bank, the WTO and other international economic organizations are considered by their opponents primarily as instruments with the help of which the world hegemony of Western civilization is strengthened, a unipolar world is being built, and a “world government” is being created, ruling in the interests of the rich and powerful. However, opponents of globalization are a rather heterogeneous public, and the reasons why they do not like modern Western capitalism are also different.

The most significant and vocal group of these opponents consists of a diverse group of leftists - from anarchists and radical greens to the so-called bleeding-heart liberals. As has long been the custom among representatives of the left side of the political spectrum, they are decidedly dissatisfied with the existing world order due to its injustice. The left considers the main injustice, first of all, to be that only 30-35% of humanity has the opportunity to fully enjoy the fruits of globalization, while the resources of the whole world are used to create these fruits. “The distribution of wealth in the world is extremely uneven, and this situation cannot persist for long,” said Noam Chomsky, an American philosopher and political scientist, one of the prominent representatives of the left-wing intellectual elite, in a recent interview with the Czech newspaper Lidove Novyny. It is difficult to disagree with this statement, even if you are an opponent of the ideology of equality. But not with the methods of solving the described problem that the left offers.

One of the main demands made by the “left opposition” to developed countries is to write off or sharply reduce the external debts of the poorest countries. The G7 has already decided to “forgive” $100 billion of such debts, but this amount seems to many (including, by the way, UN Secretary General Kofi Annan) to be far from sufficient. Write it all down, the intercessors of the poor demand. But will this change much?

Take, for example, Nigeria, which - along with Colombia, Indonesia and, interestingly, Ukraine - has been declared by the American State Department to be one of the priority countries for the United States with “developing democracies.” Nigeria owes the West about $30 billion. But this country ranks 6th in the world in terms of oil exports, from which, according to the British magazine The Economist, Nigerians have earned almost $300 billion over the 40 years of independence. But what are Nigerians like? Judging by the state of the country's economy and the standard of living of the majority of its population, the lion's share of petrodollars, and a considerable part of Western loans, ended up in the pockets of the military and civilian bureaucracy (leaders in uniform and without shoulder straps in Nigeria regularly replace each other; now it is again the turn of civilians, but It’s not a fact that they will last long). Writing off the debts of such a country, as well as dozens of others like it, will most likely lead to a repetition of the cycle: export revenues - theft - widespread poverty - Western loans - new theft - even greater poverty.

The only alternative seems to be strict control on the part of creditors over the spending of the funds they provide - and not only in Africa. But what then about the sovereignty of debtor countries? It is not difficult to imagine what a fuss would arise, for example, in Russia if the missions of the IMF and the World Bank demanded that they be given real powers in the field of control over the expenditure of funds allocated to Moscow by these organizations. “They don’t trust us,” “The West wants to bring Russia to its knees,” “We can live without their handouts”—the angry speeches of Russian politicians would certainly have been expressed in this tone. And, being largely political organizations (no matter how much their leaders deny it), international financial institutions often prefer to cover up thieves, thereby avoiding conflicts with “developing democracies.”

This, in my opinion, is the real, and not the imaginary, fault of the IMF and the World Bank. And also in adherence to the ideology of universalism, according to which common recipes for economic recovery are good for the whole world. The 90s showed that this is far from the case: while in Poland and Hungary reforms carried out in accordance with IMF recommendations were generally successful, in Mexico, Brazil, Indonesia, Argentina, and partly in Russia, their consequences were disastrous.

Hold and don't let go

Disappointment in one's own ideals of recent times, in a naive belief in progress and the imminent triumph of Western democracy throughout the world is generally characteristic of today's West. Another group of skeptics is emerging, so far less numerous than the left, but perhaps more intellectually sophisticated, who can be called neo-isolationists . They are inclined to think that the West interferes too often and decisively in the affairs of its neighbors on the planet, while its own forces and resources, despite its apparent power, are far from unlimited. As S. Huntington writes in his famous book “The Clash of Civilizations and the Redivision of the World,” “The time has come for the West to abandon its illusions about universality and begin to strengthen, unite and increase the viability of its civilization among all others. It is not in its interests to interfere indiscriminately in the conflicts of others peoples."

In this case, as a rule, we are not talking about the West’s refusal of geopolitical and economic dominance, but rather, on the contrary, about tougher and cheaper methods of ensuring this dominance. Reduce assistance to non-Western countries to a minimum, providing it only in cases where the lack of such assistance could lead to immediate threats to Western interests. Use every lever of pressure on the rest of the world to avoid unpleasant economic surprises - such as the sharp rise in world oil prices this year, which has hit the United States, Western Europe and Japan, which are heavily dependent on oil imports. Tighten immigration policies to protect your labor market from an influx of cheap labor displacing local workers, and Western cities from noisy and unsafe newcomers.

In a word, “Fortress Europe”, and perhaps Europe plus America. In the “soft” version, such ideas are propagated by the right wing of the German CDU, British conservatives, part of the French Gaullists and Italian right-wingers. In "hard" - Frenchman Le Pen and Austrian Haider. The latter are still subject to pan-European political ostracism, but as the negative consequences of globalization for the West itself become more obvious, such politicians may become masters of the minds, especially of the younger generation of Europeans. Sadly, the response to the costs of globalization in developed countries may eventually become a second wave of fascism. This, in particular, was almost openly stated by German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder, who at the end of August made a trip to the eastern lands of his country, where the ultra-right became especially insolent.

However, “Fortress Europe” is undoubtedly as much a utopia as the world of equal partners imagined by the left. The logic of globalization is the logic of overcoming and destroying borders, and politics here clearly does not keep up with the economy. If, for example, it is profitable for Polish and Czech entrepreneurs to hire Ukrainians, Belarusians, and Slovaks, rather than their compatriots who are more picky about their earnings, they will do this bypassing all and sundry state “slingshots.” (Which is what is happening: in the Czech Republic alone, which has tightened the border and visa regime with its eastern neighbors, about 200 thousand Ukrainians and more than 100 thousand Slovaks work, at least 40% of them illegally). Several years will pass - and after the admission of Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic to the EU, tens of thousands of Poles, Hungarians and Czechs themselves will find themselves in a similar situation in Western European countries. In Germany today, immigrants from India already make up a significant part of the specialists working in the field of computer technology (in this case, however, the state encourages the influx of foreign workers).

Globalization erases borders, but brings many new problems. Among them is the problem of mutual adaptation of different peoples, civilizations, and cultures. It is likely that in the next 10 - 15 years it will sharply worsen.

I do not understand you

Can society accept all the material and technical benefits of modern consumer civilization and at the same time preserve its cultural identity, its own spiritual and social values? At first glance - undoubtedly. The most striking examples of this are Japan, which experienced at least two stages of modernization (at the end of the 19th century - after the famous Meiji Revolution, and after the defeat in World War II), and the “oil emirates” of the Middle East. In both cases we are dealing with a society that is modernized, but not Westernized .

However, globalization is putting the cultural resilience of non-Western societies to new tests. The pressure of mass culture is becoming unprecedentedly strong, and new means of communication sometimes directly threaten traditional values ​​and the political regimes that embody them. Thus, this summer, the Saudi Arabian authorities closed the Yahoo network of Internet clubs that had recently appeared in the country. In their opinion, clubgoers had free access to pornographic and anti-Islamic materials, and representatives of sexual minorities, which officially do not exist in the kingdom, became - oh horror! - get acquainted using the electronic “web”.

The problem of cultural compatibility is reaching a qualitatively new level. Even seven years ago, when the same Internet was only at the beginning of its path to global power, judgments were heard in the West that this invention was a powerful mine laid under the authoritarian regimes of the entire planet. A resident of Iran, Yugoslavia or Libya, they say, crushed by official propaganda, gets onto the Internet - and here it is, alternative information, I don’t want to take it!

Today, few people risk spreading such nonsense. Firstly, our generalized Iranian (Libyan, Yugoslavian) still needs to get to the computer, which is not so easy. Secondly, electronic media, as it turned out, are subject to control (for example, in Turkmenistan there is only one - state - Internet provider, which simply blocks users’ access to sites that seem dubious to the regime there). Thirdly, very different ideas can be disseminated on the Internet: go, for example, to the website of RNE or the Chechen separatists. Finally, fourthly, action gives rise to reaction, and the unevenness of information flows, the main source of which remains the Western world, often causes the opposite effect to what was expected: rejection of the values ​​and ideals that this flow carries with it.

The last factor seems to be the most important. If we add to it the above-mentioned uneven distribution of life's goods in the world, numerous religious and social prejudices, an inferiority complex that, as a result of global changes in recent years, has appeared among entire nations, and finally the fact that modern civilizations are at different stages of their development - the near future humanity begins to be painted in a far from rosy light. The main consequence of globalization, paradoxically, is not the unification, but the separation of countries and peoples.

Since material progress is constantly ahead of spiritual progress, the most terrible result of globalization in the coming century may be the implementation of a scenario in which the world will be divided into 3-4 opposing blocs, each of which will be armed with the latest scientific and technological achievements. Straight from Orwell: Oceania, Eurasia and Eastasia. There are prerequisites for this, since the West is gradually losing its dynamism, and for reasons of at least a demographic nature in the coming decades will be forced to move from an offensive to a defensive geopolitical strategy (I tried to present an outline of it in a recent article “So that the tide does not go backwards,” published in “ RJ"). Conversely, the Far Eastern civilization, primarily China, as well as the Islamic world, are gaining momentum.

Is there a way out?

Five and a half centuries ago, the Roman-German emperor Friedrich III Gabsburg described the cycle of world events and their main reasons: "The world brings wealth, wealth gives rise to pride, pride leads to war, war brings poverty, poverty gives birth to humility, humility leads To the world ". Nowadays, the situation has changed somewhat: poverty leads not to humility, but rather to war. We are on the eve ... of the world revolution. No, I did not go crazy and did not sign up for the Trotskyists. It is simply that the disproportions in the development of various regions of the world are so obvious - as well as the inefficiency of the modern system of interstate relations and most international organizations - that while maintaining the status of the world, the world is unlikely to expect anything other than the Hunting collision of civilizations.

Another thing is that from any situation there are several exits. Recipes offered by both left and right opponents of globalization, in my opinion, do not move away, but only bring a probable collision (see above). Neither the indulgence of the world south, to incite the greedy and unclean in the hands of the elites of the poor countries with gratifying money, nor the fencing off of the "rich" from the "poor" and the creation of the "fortress of the West" - they do not solve the problem. Truth, as always, lies somewhere in the middle. Most likely, in the near future, the current world order will finally collapse, the foundations of which were laid in the 40-60s of the twentieth century and slightly corrected after the fall of communism. It is unlikely that it will be possible to survive such attributes of this order as the IMF, the World Bank and even the UN - in any case, in the form in which they exist today.

It is important, however, so that the foundation of a new order was laid down in a timely manner - not perfect, no matter how our whole world is ideal, but more balanced and harmonious. You will not achieve this demonstrations. According to the former Minister of Foreign Affairs of the Czech Republic, the well-known human rights activist Irji Dyntbir, "the growing criticism of the shortcomings of modern world order is very important. But it does not achieve the goal, if it is aimed only at the destruction of institutions that need to be improved and strengthened. This is only chaos, Social Darwinist The world in which strong impunity strangle the weak, and international terrorism and crime acquire an unprecedented scope. "

It is difficult to disagree with such a sound judgment.