Perhaps we are living the beginnings of a major rebalancing in which other cultures, with more complex ideas of what makes up a society, are coming to the fore. The reality that large numbers of people are moving between places at astonishing rates. This fluidity is perhaps unprecedented. It is certainly one of the most complex periods of human migration, because unlike the nineteenth-century version or those of other eras, it has no set pattern.

The questions this will raise about social habits and beliefs will take a great deal of our time. Developing education that will work in such a complex situation will require a great deal of imagination, and a broad, inclusive approach. We have been promised or threatened with an era dominated by English. For technical and contractual purposes, this dominance will probably remain true. But if you look beyond the tech­nical and the contractual, we are probably entering a period of multilingualism supported by all of the cultures that go with the languages.

There is no particular culture unsuited to what is happening. There are only unsuited political movements.

Yet in reaction to Islam, the religion that most concerns’ the West’ (although East and West exist simultaneously in any single place, meaning in reality there is no such divide) these days, there is also a growing desire among citizens for their democracies to' take the lead on issues of justice and inclusion. And that desire no longer comes in the standard nineteenth-century packages of left and right.

Fact is however that the more complicated our national and international relationships are, the more all of us will need to use our most complicated sense of belonging both to feel at home and to find multiple ways to be at home with the widest variety of people and situations. Thus the common call today is for an examination of values. I am not clear what this means. It has a slight ring of nineteenth-century self-serving nationalism. It would be better to concentrate on something more real, such as serving the public good.

 

History is there to learn from

Early twentieth centuries did not think their situation was particular. They thought it was universal. They believed this with as much conviction and sophistication as people do today. If anything, they were more sophisticated about the world and how it works.

The true believers in today's chorus forget that nineteenth-century European free trade was double buckled by enormous empires, which held the world as one in a manner we can no longer imagine.

That pre-1914 naively contented middle class was obviously a much smaller percentage of society than those who today are convinced that they are not naively contented, but are the clever beneficiaries of global economic destiny. For a reminder of reality, those clever beneficiaries might think of Keynes's five words describing open borders – without passport or other formality. Today only some European countries (given the fact that France in the wake of the London bombings returned back to border controls last week) has managed to remove the border barriers that didn't exist at all last time around. Elsewhere, it is not uncommon for travellers to be half stripped in airports. Looking at the steady evolution of security over the last thirty years - not just since September 11- it is possible that this tendency will intensify.

Gouverneur Morris, American representative in France, July 14, 1789: "Yesterday it was the fashion at Versailles not to believe that there were any disturbances in Paris." In truth, also today there are signs everywhere of intellectual and ethical disturbance.

Thomas Friedman, the New York Times columnist, sees "the inexorable integration of markets, nation-states and technologies to a degree never witnessed before." (Friedman, cited in Franklin Foer, How Soccer Explains the World: An Unlikely Theory of Globalization, 2004, p. 2.) Businessmen who have become critics, like for example George Soros, say it is all about the creation of uncontrolled Global financial markets, the growth of transnationals and of "their increasing domination over national economies." (Soros, On Globalization, 2002, p.1.)

Others, spooked perhaps by the growing criticism of these non-economic projections, now protest that to claim "deeper economic integration would enfeeble national governments is a formula sold mainly by opponents of the liberal international order." (William Watson, "Globalization: Resting, But Not Dead," Literary Review of Canada, June 2004, p. 9.)

The general tenure of these dozens of definitions is that "international finance has become so interdependent and so interwoven with trade and industry that ... political and military power can in reality do nothing.." But of course that was written in 1911, (Norman Angel writing in 1911) just before political and military power destroyed the reigning economic order.

Truth is we've had every form of political, military and religious arrangement. And international trading arrangements, even international production integration systems, have always existed. Rome had all these for centuries across a territory so large that it included most of Europe as well as today's Islamic world, with the exception of the Asian part. For our critical history of early 'Globalization' and not so 'free trade' see.

The last time free trade was tried - from the mid-nineteenth century to the First World War – people were able to combine the dropping of commercial barriers in Europe with the astonishing reach of those same European countries around the world. The British, French, Dutch, Italian, Belgian, German, Russian and Austro-Hungarian empires, with the new American empire joining in at the end of the nineteenth century, were able to apply their political, legal, social and economic methods to the entire world. Along with those methods came a complex maze of regulations. As a that time leading economist Keynes, pointed out, raw materials, manufacturing and goods flowed in every direction. And the assertion that all civilizations from now on were going to be led by commerce grew.

However, Globalization isn't in trouble. India and China are there to prove it. Two gigantic developing countries - one socialist and bureaucratic, the other communist - have embraced the theories of liberal economics and trade. What's more, it is bringing them happiness: So much so that their exports are exploding, high-tech jobs are flowing their way, poverty is shrinking and the middle class growing.

All of this is in some ways true. The question is whether their success is about Globalism or something quite different. Take the 1997 Asian meltdown. Neither India nor China melted. In fact, they did better than average during the crisis. Why? They had capital controls and various other limitations on movements and investments. In general, they have done well out of economic modernization by not following the economic principles of Globalization.' Whatever market reforms there have been, they have come in the context of nation-state interests.

Part of the explanation is that both countries do see modernization from a national - indeed, nationalist - point of view. The Chinese government still controls half the country's industrial assets. It invests heavily in infrastructure, shapes much of the development. The Indian government does less, but it is still very much involved.

The principal Chinese obsession is neither free trade nor free markets. It is dealing with internal poverty, which is a political time bomb. We hear a great deal about new model cities built around high-technology factories. But China also has the most dangerous mining industry in the world, with some five thousand accidental deaths a year. These are real challenges for a gigantic and contradictory economy. In such a context, global theories of economics are quite silly. India has the same tensions and complexity, and an identical poverty time bomb. China's view of economics "is flexible enough that it is barely classifiable as a doctrine.... [P]ragmatic and ideological at the same time, a reflection of an ancient Chinese philosophical outlook that makes little distinction between theory and practice. [G]roping for stones to cross the river."

The Indian government defeated at the polls in 2004 had tried to embrace much of the global economic ideology. The result was a sharp increase in the tension between rich and poor. When the elections came, the rural poor threw them out. The new government, although led by a modern, efficiency-minded, market-reform technocrat, is clearly driven by the central national question. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh: "Economic growth is not an end in itself. It is a way to create employment, to banish poverty, hunger and homelessness, to improve the lives of most of our people. [The direction] is equality and social justice." Translated from Le Monde (Paris), 26 June 2004, p.4; "La croissance [économique] n'est pas une fin en soi. C'est un moyen de créer des emplois, de bannir la pauvreté, la faim et l'absence de toit, d'améliorer les conditions de vie de la masse de notre peuple." "Cap sur l'équité et la justice sociale."

These two approaches come out of extremely experienced civilizations. India is not, as some English are fond of saying, an invention of the British Empire. In the sixteenth century, two Mogul emperors, Babur and in particular Akbar, created and administered highly sophisticated systems that dealt with productivity, commodity pricing and balanced taxation. By the time the British began to take over, this system had been radically decentralized and regional princes had become dominant.

This rich and complex culture in good part explains why Natwar Singh, wrote before he became Indian foreign minister in 2004: "India never subscribed to the assumptions of the cold war. India was not interested in either the theory of balance of power or the domino theory, which became a part of American diplomatic mythology during the 1960s and early 1970s. We have never believed in spheres of influence, nor have we subscribed to any other concept so dear to European and American thinkers and intellectuals." (Singh, Heart to Heart, p. 164.)

As for China, it was experimenting with its own market approaches long before the Europeans knew there was something to experiment with. These two countries have two of the world's most powerful armed forces and armaments industries. India is the world's third importer of arms. China is number one.

In turn on the basis of this false populist agitation, the BJP won power at the national level and held it until 2004. Indeed, it was a classic case of false populism in which reality is swept aside and replaced by a sort of dream world - or nightmare world - in which 82 percent of the population are meant to be frightened by 12 percent.But, the new government has a strong, non-sectarian core and is concentrated on an egalitarian, inclusive nationalism.

One of the unexpected comic turns that began to develop in the early twenty-first century was an uncontrollable fear among Western market leaders of the Chinese capacity, and eventually the Indian capacity, to buy large chunks of Western industry. For a quarter-century the same Western business leaders and economists had assured citizens and governments that the geographic location of ownership was unimportant. To worry about it was old-fashioned economic nationalism. Suddenly it appears that they meant it didn't matter inside the West. Their intent was that Western investors should be able to buy and sell anywhere in the world. Seen in that way, their Globalism has its roots in the old trading and industrial-trading models of the sort that led to the limiting of movement for Indian cloth from the eighteenth century on and the obligation to buy theory that led to the Opium Wars against China. Globalization, looked at from a Chinese or Indian perspective, was always about Western-centred regionalism.

In 2004, Beijing introduced its New Security Concept: "No hegemonism, no power politics, no alliances and no arms races." It is a formula designed neither for a global, shapeless world nor a U.S.-led world. It is all about the traditional Chinese view of regionalism based on geography, combined with China's contemporary view of shared concepts with different regions of the world.

Meanwhile, the two new economic stars of Asia - India and China - are being presented in the West as rivals. Looked at from an Asian point of view, they are building a complex economic relationship based on large and relatively equal capital flows. Their mutual trade is soaring. China is now India's second-largest trading partner.

But where in the first publication of Davos January 1971, it was declared that "Nationalism is economically indefensible." (Business International, S.A., Managing the Multinationals, p.26.) Now the two leaders of global economics - are strong, classic nationalists.

As for the recent move by the Chinese to revalue their currency, this changed little to nothing, except maybe takes off some protectionist pressure. And over time, the dollar will fall, against the yuan.

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