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The National Interest
Capital Ideas
by Harold James
. . . Globalization produces a dilemma for people who think they can and should help in addressing the world's problems, and thus make themselves more "moral." It is exactly the feeling that true morality cannot be realized, but only limited compromises brokered, that produces the consequent perception of globalization as sin. More people—even one of the most rhetorically persuasive economists in the world (Stiglitz), or one of the most powerful financiers in the world (Soros)—seem unable to alter the course of an apparently inexorable automaton. After the Asia crisis, there was a great outpouring of papers, books, conferences and high level discussions on a new "financial architecture", but very little came of this—hence Soros's frustration with the status quo. Hence also the problem of the IMF—which is thought to be central to the stability of the world economy, and which consequently arouses expectations so great that they are inevitably disappointed. We trundle on, however, as best we are able; what choice really do we have?
One of the central figures in the drama of the IMF's troubled relations with Russia in the mid-1990s was Prime Minister Viktor Chernomyrdin. He once commented: "We hoped for the best, but things turned out as they always do." That, in the end, is why so many people feel dissatisfied with globalization as it is, and why it gets such a bad rap. It evokes the equivalent of religious passions, but the logic of capital is not sentimental. That is exactly why it produces such great discontents. . . .