There ought to be something immensely positive about living at a time when people across the world have been more effectively interlinked than at any time in history. For much of human existence societies in different locations were able to conduct their lives without the existence of other humans thousands of miles away being of any significance for them. Now that is impossible. We are interlinked by a web of connections and the actions of people in remote countries can have very direct consequences for people in any location on the planet.
A product can be invented in a research facility in one location, produced in a factory in another, be consumed by people in virtually every province of every country and then be disposed of in ways that impact on the entire planet.
In a rationally organised world that ought to create opportunities that should excite us with the enormity of the possibilities. The ability to travel to where we wish with relative ease, to benefit from thoughts and ideas generated seconds ago by people we may never have met and to exchange foods, cultures, music, culture and insights across an entire planet is something we ought to be celebrating and glorying in.
Instead for far too many globalisation has become something to fear and those fears are being stoked and used to scare many of us into following leaders who have no solution to the problems of a global economy other than to wish it away and to retreat back into a narrow separation of nations and an attempt to protect privilege.
Denying the realities that drive those fears is not helpful. Instead politicians, economists and environmentalists from across the planet have to find ways of enabling us to enjoy the benefits of a global society whilst controlling the downside.
Logically there is only one ultimate mechanism that can achieve that. In a global economy and a single global environment it is necessary to have some form of effective global government. Left to their own devices market forces are capable of being hugely creative and are the reason why you can find a mobile phone, a television set or an internet connection almost anywhere on the planet. Yet those same forces are also capable of being enormously destructive. Market forces are the reason why you can find plastic at the bottom of the deepest oceans, they are the reason why we burn more fossils and pump more CO2 into the air every year and they are the reasons why millions of factory jobs have moved to locations where the wages are cheap and the health, safety and environmental standards are low.
In the first seven decades of the twentieth century within many prosperous nation states decades of political battles and decades of trade union struggles gradually built up mechanisms that provided ordinary citizens with reasonably secure living standards. The worst excesses of the pursuit of money for by one individual or corporation at the expense of the wider society or the environment were controlled by those nation states and a reasonable welfare system was created.
When globalism first began to really bite in the 1970s those national systems gradually became inadequate to the task. Any attempt to protect economic prosperity for a group of workers in one location or to boost a national economy by Keysian economic interventions began to fail under the new realities. No trade union can protect a factory worker’s wages and conditions if the manufacture can be moved thousands of miles away where wages are dirt cheap and there are no rights at work. No government can print money to boost its own economy if that money is simply spent on goods and services coming in from abroad instead of most of it circulating within the nation and generating economic activity at home. In those circumstances it became necessary to create cross national systems but the efforts to do so have been too weak, too ineffective and too bureaucratic to do the job that needs doing properly.
For example, the EU is a brave attempt to create a super-national organisation that enables decent standards to be maintained for close on a billion people and to establish serious controls and limits on what companies and individuals can do within a large trading block. That is the real reason why Brexiteers hate it so much. It puts limits on hours of work, imposes environmental standards, insists on workers having safe conditions and ensures that products and services must be of a guaranteed quality. The far right are correct when they describe that as an emerging European super state. They are wrong to see that as a problem. That is exactly the kind of international protection that needs to be put in place. The EU has been a brave experiment in recognising that certain decisions are best taken cross nationally and that it is sometimes necessary to give up national sovereignty in order to control and plan the standards by which we wish to live our lives.
It has also been a clumsy, slow and frustrating bureaucratic labyrinth that seems remote and distant from the control of ordinary people. If you happen to be a citizen of Greece watching the officers from the EU get off a plane and inform your government that it has to cut welfare payments yet again and that it must sack more employees at a time of 25% employment it doesn’t exactly come across as an organisation that is helping to defend your rights or your way of life. If you happen to be a farmer trying to produce food and getting frustrated by clumsy clunky subsidy mechanisms that you can’t se the logic of then it also doesn’t exactly sell itself as your friend and defender.
It is, however, a massively more successful effort at trying to make cross national decisions than any other mechanism we have created. The decision making of the United Nations is by comparison utterly inadequate to the scale of the need. Decades after it was needed we eventually got some kind of agreement to voluntarily control climate change and to start to direct a huge amount of money towards research into and implementation of technology that can free us from dependence on fossil fuels. That agreement has been so weak that within less than five years of it being signed the largest country in the world could simply rip it up and decide that it would rather save itself some money by drilling for every drop of oil and gas than bother to hold to its commitments to try and avoid the planet’s climate undergoing drastic change.
There is a real reaction underway to the necessity to make decisions cross nationally that is being led by Trump and Putin. A cynical determination to pursue narrow national interest and to launch trade wars or real wars and to insist that nations should try and close off their borders is being promoted by a tidal wave of bluster about putting America first or restoring Russia’s greatness.
Faced with the dead-end cynicism of such politicians, part of the answer it to assert the value of more open, more tolerant and more consciously planned societies and to refuse to accept their vision of a world driven by the self interest of a few ultra-powerful billionaires and the propaganda vehicles that they control and fund. Yet that assertion of a different set of values will ultimately fail if we cannot find ways of strengthening and improving international decision-making mechanisms to such a degree that they become popular and are seen to be helpful for ordinary people. It is not enough to simply assert that we ought to be proud of the EU because it protects our standards. We need to make sure that it is actually controlled by its elected politicians instead of its bureaucrats and that it influences what it needs to but no more. In a global world the freedom to make decisions at a local government level that really matter becomes ever more important as the necessity to make international decisions expands.
People have to feel that they remain in control of enough of what happens in their locality and in their nation if they are to accept the need to give up some of that control to help ensure that we are all protected against the negative sides of globalisation.
Successfully achieving an appropriate balance between the need to make global and regional decisions and the need to preserve the power and influence of local decision making has become the biggest challenge for the future. I leave readers to judge for themselves how aware Mrs May is of the existence of such problems and how successful her government has been in tackling them!