Globalization in Your Face: A New Book Humanizes Global Captialism

If you thought globalization is the fastest-growing phenomenon today, think again. Books about globalization are. A Future Perfect is only the latest in a torrent of writings on the subject, chief among them being The Lexus and the Olive Tree by Thomas Friedman. Yet it stands as one of the rare exceptions to the law of diminishing marginal utility; its many merits far outweigh the sense of déjà vu that afflicts most books taking yet another look at globalization.

It is not just that Micklethwait and Wooldridge (both of The Economist) write gloriously. As journalists, they have learned the art of making a point vividly by buttressing it with an apt anecdote, a striking interview, or a telling quote. Yet the book's substance is what really makes it stand out. The authors neatly sketch and defend globalization, examine its pitfalls, and analyze how to avoid them. Given such an overwhelming agenda, they cannot hope to paint on this immense canvas without incurring minor blemishes of detail and errors of judgment. But judged in its entirety, with all its ambition and achievement, the book is a spectacular success.

The authors' predilection for free markets makes them skeptical of the many populist critiques of globalization. Yet they often manage to turn these critiques on their head to show the exact opposite -- that globalization can work to lift overall prosperity and reduce poverty. Indeed, Micklethwait and Wooldridge are at their most eloquent and persuasive when they broaden the scope of their case to include liberty and democracy as globalization's additional benefits.

Then again, since the authors are historians by education, they are aware that globalization had been halted in the past and that it can run into rough weather again as it did in the first half of the twentieth century. Therefore, they analyze at length the nature of growing antiglobalization sentiments, which in turn leads them to suggest how globalization should be "managed" if it is to survive and deliver on its immense promise for humankind.

MOTLEY CREW

No one can escape the antiglobalists today. One can simply turn on the TV, read the news reports on the street theater in Seattle last year and in Washington, D.C., this year, or read profiles of the professional anti-World Trade Organization (WTO), anti-Bretton Woods, antiglobalization agitators in The Wall Street Journal (Lori Wallach of Public Citizen) or The New Yorker (Juliette Beck of Global Exchange).

This motley crew comes almost entirely from the rich countries and is overwhelmingly white, largely middle class, occasionally misinformed, often wittingly dishonest, and so diverse in its professed concerns that it makes the output from a monkey's romp on a keyboard look more coherent. But it has become powerful enough to force many rich-country politicians to play along. Micklethwait and Wooldridge excoriate the latter as sellouts, contrasting them unfavorably with great leaders such as Robert Peel, who took huge political risks to liberalize Britain's trade in 1846. It has now become customary among politicians -- particularly those who claim to share others' anguish but whose own anguish relates primarily to the votes they seek -- to say that "globalization needs a human face." This implies, of course, that it lacks one. And there starts the rot -- an implicit surrender, in the face of logic and evidence, to the worst fears and loudest rhetoric of globalization's critics. In response, Micklethwait and Wooldridge insist that our leaders debunk the myths.

Statesmanship requires that politicians say, "Globalization has a human face; it works wonders in all sorts of ways. Sure enough, like every gigantic force or phenomenon, it has a few downsides. But what this simply means is that the indisputably human face of globalization needs a trinket in one ear and cosmetic surgery on the other."

HISTORY'S LESSONS

Only a little knowledge of postwar history on attitudes toward globalization is needed to toughen up politicians' spines: it shows that policymakers who succumbed to antiglobalization fears lost out to contrary experience -- and are consigned by the now eagerly globalizing poor countries to the dustbin of history, to be returned to center stage only when their sorry images are invoked to underline what went wrong.

In the postwar period there has been an ironic reversal of attitudes toward globalization. Rich-country politicians embraced globalization in the decades following World War II, forging the liberal international economic order. By contrast, poor countries walked away from it, treating it as a peril rather than an opportunity. But today, mainstream policymakers in poor countries are busily abandoning autarkic attitudes while rich-country lobbies and responsive politicians are reinventing for themselves the very fears that the now-chastened policymakers in poor countries consider to have been disastrous for their well-being.