Jihad vs. McWorld - Benjamin R. Barber [137]
Public relations aside, the World Bank, for example, is less concerned to create a sustainable environment or forge sustainable national economies in the debtor nations it services than to assure an open (though by no means level) playing field for international business. Its loans often bankrupt its clients: Poland’s total debt in 1993 was over 60 percent of its annual GDP, while Hungary’s approached 80 percent of its GNP;14 Uganda owes 62 percent of its foreign debt to the bank while Guatemala’s controversial World Bank—financed Chixoy Dam accounts for 40 percent of its external debt. The bank has also been known to impose population resettlement on peoples who have had no part in deciding on the irrigation or transportation projects being undertaken in the name of “their” development.15
Those who believe in the continuing vitality of the nation-state may not worry. Robert Kuttner, for example, still thinks that although “the global intelligentsia may think of itself as stateless, and global capital may see nation-states as anachronistic encumbrances … the state remains the locus of the polity” that “remains the structure best suited for counterbalancing the excesses of the market.”16 The state is certainly “best suited” to balance wild capitalism, but the question is whether it is any longer capable of doing so or willing to try. The reality seems to be, as Stanford University economist Paul Krugman has noticed, that “governments have consented to a regime that allows markets to boss them around.”17 The new government of the Czech Republic boasts that it wants to create “a level playing field for investors, both domestic and foreign” and is actively “preaching minimum government interference.”18 Those new states that, “as civil society has been progressively colonized by organized crime,” have been led slowly to discover the “positive uses of power,” must contend both with the old state-hating victims of imperious communism and their new state-hating laissez-faire advisors who urge them to turn the very state institutions by which they might control rapacious markets into their primary adversary.19
Even where states weigh in on behalf of civil society, there is no surrogate for the polity in the international domain—certainly not the state’s weak supranational imitators—that has the clout to countervail multinational corporations and the markets in which they operate. Business leader Walter B. Wriston observes that governments no longer can even “measure” capital formation because so much new capital is intellectual.20 How then can they regulate or control such capital? As he wryly suggests, a computer wizard with a bold new program in his mind can walk across a border untithed and untariffed, carrying more capital assets with him in his head than might be contained in a thousand cargo ships. As we saw earlier (in Part I), the new goods are virtual rather than durable, and their producers—Robert Reich’s “symbolic analyst professionals”—represent a new transnational class pretty well beyond the purview of particular national sovereignties. The Senate banking committee can look over the shoulder of the nation’s banks (if not very wisely or very well), but who has the power (or the vision) to look over the shoulders of international bankers and currency dealers? Or of the programmers and analysts who make banking and currency markets function? Currency markets trade up to a trillion dollars a day: no national bank, no collection of national banks, can have much of an impact on them. When in the summer of 1994, seventeen of the world’s largest central banks (including America’s Federal Reserve) tried to prop up the dollar, they could come up with only $5 billion. Their effort had (in Thomas Friedman’s charming image) all the impact of “a zoo keeper trying to calm a starved gorilla by offering it a raisin for lunch.”21
Free-market