For developing countries, globalisation
 is a two-edged sword
In theory, globalisation promotes free trade. In practice, however, the benefits of the new global trading regime tend to flow mostly in the direction of rich countries, adding to the huge economic disadvantage that poor countries suffer from
By Kaleem Omar

When share prices on Wall Street nosedived in the wake of the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon, billions of dollars in global funds fled the United States and moved into Europe. Fund managers loaded up on European stocks and bonds, reasoning that corporate profits in Europe would be the best of a bad lot and the European governments would be hit less hard by the costs of reconstruction, retaliation and revenge – the new “Three Rs”.

The trend may have been a new experience for Americans, accustomed as they were to thinking of their economy as invulnerable. But the sudden flight of capital from one market to another has become an all too familiar phenomenon for developing countries around the world in recent years with the advent of the ideology of globalisation and the creation of such instruments of this new ideological enterprise as the World Trade Organisation (WTO).

The WTO regime took effect on January 1, 2005. That’s when textile and other quotas were done away with, supposedly giving producers in developing countries greater access to European and North American markets. That, at least, was the theory. In practice, however, this promised greater access has failed to materialise in the case of many developing countries, including Pakistan.

Some commentators have long argued that globalisation actually means the concentration of economic power in fewer and fewer hands, that it is, in effect, imperialism under a new guise.

One such commentator is Tony Benn, formerly the leading light of the parliamentary radical left in Britain, a Labour Party MP for nearly 50 years, a two-time minister in Labour cabinets in the 1960s and 1970s, a long time peace campaigner, and the author of such books as “The Speaker, the Commons and Democracy”, “On the Falklands War” and “Why America Needs Democratic Socialism”.

In a speech to the ICU Labour Club in London in January 1998, Benn warned that if the pleas of the poor countries were not heeded by the West, the world could see another rise of fascism as seen in the 1930s, born at that time out of the extreme poverty in Europe.

Three years later, in an interview published in Britain’s Red Pepper magazine in January 2001, Benn again spoke about the dangers of globalisation. Globalisation, he said, is the free movement of capital, but not the free movement of labour. It is imperialism under a new form, he said, only the agents of imperialism are companies rather than countries.

But, of course, these companies are supported by countries. Thus America backs up its oil companies by going to war where there’s an oil interest (the 1991 Gulf war and the on-going Iraq war), as Britain did in the Falklands in the early 1980s, because the Falklands, too, was an oil war.

There is more oil around the Falklands than there is around the United Kingdom, and that’s what that war was about.

Some companies are now bigger than nation states. Ford is bigger than South Africa. Toyota is bigger than Norway. “Some of these big companies come and dominate the world, bring pressure to bear on governments, and to make sure they then buy both the main political parties in Britain and America, and then expect the payoff whichever one wins. And imperialism, of course, is coming back now. It really is a direct counterattack on democracy,” Benn said.

Referring to the protests in 2000 in Prague against the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, Benn said that both institutions were initially presented to people as instruments of world development (just like the WTO is being presented today).

In the beginning these institutions at least put on a humanitarian front. “Today, however, everything is humanitarian,” Benn said, even “the war, when we used depleted uranium and cluster bombs in Kosovo.”

American dissident academic Noam Chomsky said that whenever you hear the words ‘Peace Process’ or ‘Humanitarianism’, remember that this is what American national interest is really about.

Humanitarianism isn’t the only euphemism, of course. There are a lot of euphemisms being used by the West today. “Free Trade” actually means protectionism in the United States. “Globalisation” actually means the concentration of economic power in fewer and fewer hands. The “International Community” actually means America and the rest of the elites within the G-8 countries.

The notion of capitalism gives off the idea that there are free markets and various institutions struggling between themselves to lower prices. But this is not true, of course. One of the things Chomsky points out is that the state is more often used to funnel public money into private hands.

In a radio broadcast on October 10, 2000, Benn said the so-called “victory of the free market” is, in fact, a victory of market forces and the state over people.

“Now that communism is gone and people aren’t terrified that they’re going to be invaded by the Red Army tomorrow, they’re now having a chance to look at capitalism and they don’t really like it very much,” he said. “Most people would like publicly owned railways; they’d like the schools to be run by elected people. They don’t want private companies taking over schools. They would like the Health Service to be free of PFI (Private Finance Initiative). So I feel at the moment that the tide is coming in, not in an explicit, socialist way, but in a very, very powerful anti-capitalist way.”

Never a shrinking violet, Tony Benn was at his best on BBC’s “Hardtalk” programme in late September 2001 when he lashed out at America for bypassing the United Nations in President George W. Bush’s “war against terrorism.”

In March 2003 Bush bypassed the UN yet again when US forces invaded and occupied Iraq in a totally illegal, unprovoked and unjustified war of aggression that violated every canon of international law and was in flagrant defiance of world public opinion.

Once an oil-rich country, which had the best educational and healthcare system in the Middle East, Iraq has been reduced to little more than a basket case in the five years that it has been under US military occupation.