The rise of the 'New Democracy'
The word 'globalisation' is often used in a positive sense to denote a 'global village' of 'free trade', high-tech marvels and all kinds of possibilities that transcend class, historical experience and ideology. According to one of its chief proponents, British Prime Minister Tony Blair, the very notion means that "the grand ideological battles of the twentieth century are over." What matters now, he says, are "recovery" and "growth", "competitiveness" and "flexible working"; all else is obsolete.
These terms could easily replace their equivalents in George Orwell's 1984, for their true meaning is the dictionary opposite. Devoid of social and moral content, they point to the nightmare struggle to survive of ordinary people and to a class war waged at a distance by technocrats of the new world order.
Globalisation has its roots in the Bretton Woods agreement of 1944 which established the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) as instruments of global US policy. The Asian Development Bank and the African Development Bank followed: 'international' institutions, in which capital subscription, not membership, determined influence. That is to say, Washington ran them.
Subsequently, Structural Adjustment Programmes, or SAPs, were dreamt up in the late 1970s when American, European and Japanese banks pressured poor countries to borrow petro-dollars accumulated following the boom in oil prices. Chile, under Augusto Pinochet, was the first to have its economy 'adjusted' by a group of economists trained at the University of Chicago under the laissez-faire cult leader Milton Friedman. The World Bank and IMF were proud of the results. This was puzzling. Chile's debt was higher than when the 'Chicago boys' took over. A country which, prior to Pinochet, had maintained a reasonable standard of living for most of its people, was ravaged. Industry was dismantled, the currency was devalued and the majority of Chileans were plunged into poverty.
By the time General Pinochet stepped into the shadows but not out of power, and a civilian government took over, 40 per cent of his people were so poor and their calorie consumption so low that hunger and malnutrition blighted most of them.
In the 1980s, under a plan devised by President Reagan's Secretary to the Treasury, James Baker, indebted countries were offered World Bank and IMF 'servicing' loans in return for the 'structural adjustment of their economies. This meant that the economic direction of each country would be planned, monitored and controlled in Washington. Industry would be deregulated and sold off; public services, such as healthcare and education, would be diminished. Subsistence agriculture would be converted to the production of foreign-exchange earning cash crops. 'Tax holidays' and other 'incentives', such as sweated labour, would be offered to foreign 'investors'. It was the surrender of sovereignty, and without a gunboat in sight.
In similar vein, the temporarily stalled Multilateral Agreement on Investment (MAI) negotiations represent the most important imperial advance for half a century. Once formulated, they will remove the last restrictions on the free movement of foreign capital anywhere in the world, while effectively transferring development policy from national governments to multinational corporations. So Colombia will have to repeal laws against the disposal of toxic and radioactive waste; Brunei, Pakistan and Brazil will no longer be able to stop foreign ownership of agricultural land and areas around national reserves and borders; Venezuela will have to surrender its national film, television and publishing industries to foreign interests. Effectively, they will legitimise the triumph of capital over democracy.
In the age of the global economy, 'New Democracy' is now the way. "First and foremost," wrote the commentator Peter Gowan, "a New Democracy is run by strong capitalist proprietors funding the political process and offering electors a choice of leaders who share opinions on most things but have different styles of leadership... At the same time New Democracy makes it easier for multinationals to advance their influence and for the 'global' media to shape public opinion."
The Americanising of political, economic and cultural life is an essential part of the process. Since the Berlin Wall came down, a revision of John F. Kennedy's famous utterance at the Wall in 1961 might be: "We are all Americans now." In the industrial countries American ideology has been so successfully reconstituted that cultural refugees are now hard to find. "America sets the tone for the world," says the voice over the opening titles of the movie. That is a concise way of saying that the world is ruled by the institutions of money, which are the cathedrals of the American Dream. No relationship is now more important than that between a human being and his or her cash. You must be a consumer/customer. Railway passengers and hospital patients are consumers/customers. People who drink water are consumers/customers. Time, music, cultural heritage and the forests are there to be consumed. Moreover, consumers have rights which non-consumers do not share.
The rising number of poor people is the mark of a New Democracy; and Britain is the laboratory to the First World that Chile was to the Third. No modern ideological figure created more poor and more rich so rapidly than Margaret Thatcher. The UN Human Development Report for 1997 says that in no other country has poverty "increased as substantially" since the early 1980s, and that the number of Britons in 'income poverty' leapt by nearly 60 per cent under her government.
Thatcher and her successors made Britain into a two-thirds society, with the top third privileged, the middle third insecure and the bottom third poor: a rigid class stratum copied by other former social democracies. So it made sense that she was among the first invited by Blair to Downing Street for 'consultations.'
The gravity of Blair's 'project' is not universally recognised, but I believe it will be, as the managed adulation recedes and the government's extremism reaches beyond Thatcherism. The Blairites have become the political wing of the City of London and the British multinational corporations and, in natural order, the trusted servitors of European 'central bankism' and American economic and military hegemony. They are indeed more trustworthy and more 'modern' than the Tories, many of whom are still smitten by English nationalism, some even by paternalism. New Labour and its ermine-rack of lords and bankers and downsizers will not allow unprofitable spending on the relief of poverty. After all, the poverty that exists is a condition of their wealth, as it is of the affluence of the middle class.
In Britain, too, it is no longer possible to justify a vote every five years on the basis of lesser-of-two-evils. Like the United States, Britain has become a single ideology state with two principal, almost identical factions, so that the result of any election has a minimal effect on the economy and social policy. People have no choice but to vote for political choreographers, not politicians. Gossip about them and their petty intrigues, and an occasional scandal, are regarded as political news. Not surprisingly, popular participation in general elections - both here and in the US has dwindled massively.
When in the 1950s, Aneurin Bevan described Parliament as "a social shock absorber placed between privilege and the pressure of popular discontent", he could not have imagined how close to the truth his statement would become.
