The idea of deglobalisation is gaining support from a range of scholars, thinkers and public intellectuals. This comes in the wake of the potentially disastrous “decoupling” of Africa from the global political economy, and the autarchy that a “distinguished professor” who is best known for his grand capitalist conspiracy theories called for in the case of SA. But that can be discussed another time.
I want to focus here on the social and historical dimensions of globalisation, a process that began centuries before concepts such as “mercantile capitalism” or “primitive accumulation” grew among Marxists with mouldy beards encrusted with dried soup and breadcrumbs, who ran out of fresh ideas long ago.
I want to focus on a time when caravanserai from Samarkand to Istanbul were places of sharing food and knowledge, a time when human migration following African intercontinental dispersions left evidence of social and cultural exchange (engravings, statues, images, inscriptions, as well as human-made menhirs and masseboths); when travellers plied African and Levantian trade routes.
I once joined an informal journey in search of what was called the Caminho de Peabiru — an ancient cross-continental travel and trade route across South America. These were times before the sovereign state system established fixed borders and created an insider-outsider problem, and when trade among countries was simultaneously prescribed (it should be free) and proscribed; it should be regulated by organisations such as the World Trade Organization.
I will be the first to admit that as much as I accuse ossified Marxists of imagining a world unchanged since William Blake’s “dark satanic mills”, Charlotte Bronte’s “soot vomiting mills”, and Charles Dickens’ “serpents of smoke”, my criticism is aimed at the crude economism, and scientism that frames everything, or anything they have to say. They fall into the trap that economics necessarily ought to be the final arbiter of all human behaviour and agency. I may be attempting idealism.
What then is good about globalisation? I’m not talking about the staffriding of national corporate capitalism. It has to do with eliminating limits on the movement of people, the free exchange of ideas, the sharing of technology, diversity and knowledge production that benefits the common good, which transcends territorial or human-made borders.
Consider the fact that among the remaining hardline communist countries, such as North Korea, it is illegal to leave the country, to read or listen to information that is not state-sanctioned. While we’re at it, if Soviet communism was so good and great — I’m looking at the generation of Stalinists now hiding in plain sight and promoting “economic justice” — why was it illegal and virtually impossible to leave the country, or read literature from other countries?
I guess what I am referring to may be open societies and “cosmopolitanism”, which was, admittedly, advanced through trade and war, but which spread people and their kin or clans across the world. For instance, the 11th-century letters of a group of Jewish merchants, found centuries later in a Cairo synagogue, revealed a family firm with branches in India, Iran, Tunisia and Egypt. (Any South African or Zimbabwean trying to get a Schengen visa is today required to provide both a pound of flesh and proof that they are not a cannibal).
The earliest social and historical globalisation was not always nonviolent. While it sparked innovation, integration and technological advances, it invariably created conflict. In Blood Rites: Origins and History of the Passions of War Barbara Ehrenreich pithily observed that “our impulse to make war resides in a deep ancestral memory of our role as prey”. It is precisely this earliest “ancestral” interaction that accounts in most part for globalisation having been part of life for thousands of years.
What is indispensable for the world, that thing so disparaging referred to by Condoleezza Rice, who said “there is no such thing as an international community”, is the idea of a common good. That there are pools of common resources — material, like air and water, or nonmaterial, like kindness and openness — and resources are not stockpiled, withholding them from others and shutting borders to “others” as if they were brutes and savages bent on destroying European civilisation, whatever that may mean.
The world would be worse off, or at least culturally poorer, without global exchange and the worldwide diffusion of knowledge and products. We see this from evidence of rice-growing, which spread from East Asia to India, west Asia, North Africa and southern Spain. Sorghum spread from Africa to the Mediterranean; cotton was introduced from India to Iraq as early as the 600CE, and followed travellers to Cyprus, Sicily, Tunisia, Morocco, Spain and eventually to the Nile valley. Paper-making methods were brought from China to Europe, and we have certainly come a long way from using birch polypore as a cure for diarrhoea.
The globalisation that should be promoted has to include the movement of people, the sharing and development of regionally discrete cultures and traditions — and treating humans as ends in themselves, never as a means to an end. I guess I should conclude with something I have a bit of insight into. As much as we are entering a transnational phase of capitalism, it’s hard to see capitalism ripped from the hands of states.
• Lagardien, an external examiner at the Nelson Mandela School of Public Governance, has worked in the office of the chief economist of the World Bank as well as the secretariat of the National Planning Commission.
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