The Collapse of Globalism - John Ralston Saul

   It matters that we carefully identify these four categories of economic scholastics – the economists, the managers, the consultants and the propagandists – because they are central to how we deal with the collapse of globalism. It is important to point the finger accurately. Otherwise we will all resemble the citizens of a country coming out of a disastrous war – in 1919, for example – and leaving the architects of trench-warfare massacre in place.

   What is confusing to most citizens is that abruptly, as if out of nowhere, studies are announcing that half the world’s population cannot satisfy its basic needs. Or that over thirty countries are at risk of falling into genocide or that countries are in some way defaulting on their debts as if it were normal. Abruptly it seems that democracy, having been on the rise around the world for decades, is now in sharp decline. Suddenly the effects of deforming our measurements of inflation and employment and income over the last few decades are rising to the surface. As a result, it is now revealed that middle-class wages in the bottom tier have declined 30 percent in 30 years. These phenomena are not the sudden outcome of Globalization’s collapse. Rather, as it has collapsed, so people have begun to understand parallel realities in a different way. It is as if the disappearance of the economic inevitability of Globalization has revealed the self-evident: the world truly has contradictory tendencies. No longer is every question we face, from health care to education to culture, first dragged through and economic prism to ensure it is elevated to a Globalist context. Suddenly the obvious becomes clear: Globalization was just and economic theory, not a replacement for all concepts of internationalism. 

   But the obvious is merely observed, if it is not fully understood, if we don’t get a handle on the ideological process we have just been through, we may simply fall back into some marginally reformed version of the failed school. We might even find ourselves trapped in a whole new closed belief system,

           

-John Ralston Saul, The collapse of Globalism, 2009,  p289-290