Anti-globalization is so yesterday: The anti-globalization movement is toast

Anti-globalization is so yesterday


Clifford Orwin
National Post
Overnight, the anti-globalization movement is toast. Neither its good arguments nor its bad ones are going to gain it a hearing now. An affluent public at peace will fret over the wages Nike pays its workers in Honduras, but a public at war will not. Even Naomi Klein, \"the world\'s most influential person under 30,\" risks demotion to the B list.

That\'s why throughout North America the movement is hustling to redefine itself as an anti-war movement. This hasn\'t proved much of a challenge for it. After all, its weakness as a movement was always that it never knew what it was for. Its strength was that it surely did know what it was against: the United States, as the titan of international capitalism. Anti-globalization so-called was the New Left merged with the New Age (a vague anti-materialistic \"spirituality\" having replaced discredited Marxism) and retooled for the New Millennium. For these young activists, just as for the mullahs of Iran, America was the Great Satan. So it\'s only to be expected that now, responding to President Bush\'s stern charge that he who is not with America in the fight against global terrorism is against it, they haven\'t hesitated to proclaim themselves against it. Terror is one commodity the globalization of which suits them. They think that it entitles them to say \"we told you so.\"

The academic wing of the new movement will now set about instructing us that, as University of Ottawa economist Michel Chossudovsky has put it, \"war and globalization are interconnected.\" But we knew that already, didn\'t we? Who hasn\'t heard of Benjamin Barber\'s thesis that an ever more globalized world is increasingly polarized between \"McWorld\" and \"Jihad\"? Precisely as globalization succeeds, resistance to it will harden, both from those who oppose modernity as such, and those who are resentful at not having benefitted from it as they think they deserve. For its successes no less than its perceived failures, globalization is bound to incur smoldering hatreds. No, countries don\'t benefit equally from globalization, and Islamic ones, for all the oil money flowing into some of them, have not been among the winners. And for reasons over which we have little control, Islamic fundamentalism has arisen as the most powerful anti-modern ideology ever. As McWorld continues to expand, Jihad will continue to flourish, fed by apocalyptic hopes that precisely as the worst of times for Islam this must be the best of ones, heralding the destruction of the Great Satan.

But what to do about this? Nothing else has stopped the juggernaut of modernization, and surely Chossudovsky\'s lectures won\'t. Globalization is bigger than all of us. Whatever the appropriate long-term strategy for dealing with the Islamic world, the terrorism must be addressed now, and it must be addressed as terrorism.

At its lowest level, the new face of the movement is students appearing on CNN to groan through watching President Bush\'s speech (\"Like, can you believe that guy?\") and to tell us to \"like, give peace a chance.\" To their credit, some of them will admit that something has to be done in response to the terrorist attacks. They don\'t know what, but surely not going to war because that never accomplishes anything and any war that the United States fights has got to be wrong anyway.

At the highest level (all height being relative) the new-old movement is celebrity rioter Jonathan Oppenheim of Edmonton, threatening to \"shut down the American war machine.\" (He said this not on Comedy Central, but in an interview with The Globe and Mail.) Oppenheim is a legend in his own mind. Remember, Jon, you\'re a proud Canadian, and Canada couldn\'t shut down the American war machine even if we all decided to try. It\'s up to the Americans whether to do it, and you know what? The brutal murder of thousands of its citizens can make a nation somewhat stubborn.

Oppenheim\'s rhetoric is vintage 1967. He wants to pretend that this struggle is Vietnam, so that his breast can swell with righteous indignation at the thought that the United States is going to wage it. But it isn\'t Vietnam. The vicious, unprovoked attacks on New York and Washington were not the Tonkin Gulf Resolution. They were, as others have said, Pearl Harbor. Representative Barbara Lee of California, who alone dissented from the Congressional resolution endorsing retaliation, will share her footnote to history with Rep. Jeanette Rankin, the Montana isolationist who cast the sole vote against the declaration of war on Japan. There will be no significant support for the view that the only proper response to the attack is one of abject repentance at how very horrid America has been. (Here the movement should learn from the example of the Reverend Jerry Falwell, who\'s an old pro at hawking the sinfulness line but got absolutely nowhere with it this time.) That kind of stuff will play to America haters up here, and at your occasional campus kick-us-we\'re-American session down there. I wouldn\'t try preaching it anywhere else unless my life insurance was paid up.

There are other ways in which this isn\'t Vietnam and isn\'t the Second World War either. There won\'t be a draft to mobilize students against. There will be no internment of Muslim-Americans. If there is intensive bombing, it won\'t be of Afghan shepherds but of the troops and capitals of regimes that Americans are united in finding odious. And there won\'t be any of the stupidities for which the movement is so desperately hoping. This administration is nothing if not careful. If there are more terror attacks, that won\'t encourage breast-beating either. People will get still angrier, and the blame-it-on-America movement will look still more contemptible.

In short, there will be no grassroots from which to weave a strong anti-war movement. If Oppenheim and his ilk persist in nursing a weak whiney one, they\'ll be fiddling while Rome burns. But at the end of the day they\'re music lovers: They\'ll stoop to anything rather than give up fiddling.

Clifford Orwin is a political science professor at the University of Toronto.