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Foreign Affairs
Coping With Antiglobalization: A Trilogy of Discontents
By Jagdish N. Bhagwati
Jagdish N. Bhagwati is University Professor of Economics at Columbia University and Andre Meyer Senior Fellow in International Economics at the Council on Foreign Relations.
Globalization — a focal point of hostile passions and sometimes violent protests — has become a phenomenon doomed to unending controversy. Advocates cite its virtues and its inevitability. Opponents proclaim its supposed vices and vincibility. Central to many of the protests against it is a trilogy of discontents about the idea of capitalism, the process of globalization, and the behavior of corporations. And all three of these discontents have become interlinked in the minds of many protesters. Globalization's enemies see it as the worldwide extension of capitalism, with multinational corporations as its far-ranging B-52s.
As the twentieth century ended, capitalism seemed to have vanquished its rivals: fascism, communism, and socialism. The disappearance of alternative models of development provoked anguished reactions from the old anticapitalists of the postwar era, who ranged from socialists to revolutionaries and remained captive to a nostalgia for their vanished dreams.
But globalization has also fallen afoul of a younger group of critics. And the nostalgia of the fading generation cannot compete with the passions of these younger dissidents, who were so evident on the streets at recent world economic gatherings in Seattle, Washington, Prague, Quebec City, and Genoa, and who have made themselves heard on college campuses in movements such as the antisweatshop coalition.
Far too many of the young see capitalism as a system that cannot meaningfully address questions of social justice. Many of these youthful skeptics seem unaware that socialist planning in countries such as India, which replaced markets system-wide with quantitative allocations, worsened rather than improved unequal access. Such socialism produced queues that the well connected and the well endowed could jump, whereas markets allow a larger number of people to access their targets. Capitalism is a system that, paradoxically, can destroy privilege and open up economic opportunity to many — but this fact is lost on most of the system's vocal critics.
The Perils of Education
Many of today's young, virulent anticapitalists experienced their social awakenings on campuses, in fields other than economics. English, comparative literature, and sociology are all fertile breeding grounds for such dissent. Deconstructionism, as espoused by the French philosopher Jacques Derrida, has, with its advocacy of an "endless horizon of meanings," left the typical student of literature without anchor. Derrida's technique is to deconstruct every political ideology, including Marxism. Typically, however, it is capitalism that becomes the focus of these efforts, not Marxism. And this process often has nihilistic overtones, with the paradoxical result that many of its followers now turn to anarchy.
Within sociology, new literary theory and old Marxist thought have equal influence on many students. These students have contempt for economic defenses of capitalism, asserting that economics is about value whereas sociology is about values. Economists retort that as citizens they may choose ends, but as economists they choose the means for harnessing humanity's basest instincts through appropriate institutional design to produce public good.
The presumption made by many of its radical students — that sociology is a better guide to ethics than is economics — is also misplaced. Certainly sociology's related discipline . . .