What’s next?

This is an automated message. By the time you read it I will have handed in my dissertation and as such, will have finished my master’s. Like Vince Lombardi said:

any man’s finest hour, the greatest fulfillment of all that he holds dear, is that moment when he has worked his heart out in a good cause and lies exhausted on the field of battle – victorious.

Overdramatic, perhaps. But it has been a long slog and I am pleased to say that my dissertation not only reflects my genuine views (my essays rarely do this), but it also has practical proposals, which at least makes me feel that I’ve contributed something tangible and meaningful, even if only about five people are ever going to read it.

Books issued from university library: 400*

No. cups coffee/tea: 1460 (approx)

Blog posts: 151

Blog views: 9,697

Essays: 8

All-nighters: 2

No. of dissertations: 1

The future is unclear – I’ll keep you posted.

* Not quite sure how this happened. That’s more than one per day…

IPE in a nutshell?

Economy is the bone, politics is the flesh

- Marge Piercy, from In the men’s room(s)

The crisis in quotes: part III

According to IMF calculations, emerging economies will account for 100 per cent of the growth in world output in the three-year period 2008-10. And even assuming that the US and European economies return to their long-term growth paths from 2011 onwards, the IMF expects emerging markets to account for 70 per cent of global growth for the following five years.

– Anatole Kaletsky, writing in yesterday’s Times.

The crisis in quotes (part two)

I must have missed this one first time around:

I always lived very frugally. I flew around in a private jet, I had a boat, but I always lived very frugally

– Allen Stanford

H/T: Outside the Beltway

Shift happens

So, I realise there are other things happening right now, but being as it’s a little early to be effectively talking about the G20 action, I thought I’d post this video. Keep things in perspective.

The Three Globalisations

Globalization 1.0 (1492-1800) shrank the world from a size large to a size medium, and the dynamic force in that era was countries globalizing for resources and imperial conquest. Globalization 2.0 (1800-2000) shrank the world from a size medium to a size small, and it was spearheaded by companies globalizing for markets and labor. Globalization 3.o (which started around 2000) is shrinking the world from a size small to a size tiny and flattening the playing field at the same time. And while the dynamic force in Globalization 1.0 was countries globalizing and the dynamic force in Globalization 2.0 was companies globalizing, the dynamic force in Globalization 3.0—the thing that gives it its unique character—is individuals and small groups globalizing… Globalization 3.0 is not only going to be driven more by individuals but also by a much more diverse—non-Western, non-white—group of individuals. In Globalization 3.0, you are going to see every color of the human rainbow take part.

- Thomas Friedman, The World Is Flat

On American exceptionalism

America began free; its struggles were never to become free, but to stay free. Moreover, it never, for a single moment, lost its freedom. History, in other words, has made America naive. It has made Americans the luckiest and the least understanding people in the world. Indeed, the happy American experience with freedom may be at the root of the time-honored American inability to find its proper global place. The appeal of American isolationism and the awkwardness of American interventionism-both may be owed to the American unfamiliarity with the political oppression and social injustice that is the common experience of most of the rest of the world. Our natural consciousness of freedom has equipped us badly for the spreading of it. That may be history’s bad joke on the American century.

– The New Republic, 30 April 1984

Deglobalisation?

I’ve been reading an unusually pessimistic analysis from The Economist, in which globalisation is discussed as a process ‘going into reverse’. Yet in the meantime, Moisés Naím, writing in Foreign Policy, is arguing that globalisation hasn’t been in itself harmed by the financial crisis, ‘not unless you believe that globalization is mainly about international trade and investment… it is much more than that’. This is a good point. One might even argue that the fundamentally global nature of crises like this one can help to increase global solidarities, or at least some feeling of interdependence. Of course, one can’t help but notice that this wasn’t wholly the case following the Great Depression. As its article develops, The Economist moves from pessimism to a guarded and conditional optimism:

Despite the downturn, the nations of the world have not shunned globalisation. It has been protected by the belief of firms in the efficiency of global supply chains. But like any chain, these are only as strong as their weakest link. A danger point will come if firms decide that this way of organising production has had its day.

Conversely, and on a darker note, the realist in Naim overcomes his earlier claims that all is well for the globalist project. He signs off as follows:

Unfortunately, it is highly likely that the efforts to minimize the costs of globalization, steer international integration, solve international crises, and better manage the global commons will continue to fall short. Whether the issue is climate change or terrorism, loose nukes or avian flu, the gap between the need for effective collective action at the global level and the ability of the international community to satisfy that need is the most dangerous deficit facing humanity.

How do you solve a problem like Davos?

Jeff Jarvis at Buzzmachine brings an outsider’s perspective to the proceedings:

I’m talking with other people who are getting more depressed as the day goes on and here, I think, is why: We are surrounded by the leaders who fucked it up: bankers, marketeers, regulators, and the press. They were in charge. That’s what Davos is: the people in charge. So who’s to say that we’re going to find the answers in Davos? Well, the people in Davos will. But I think the evidence is strong that the answer is not here.

Though you’ve got to ask, who is looking to Davos for ‘answers’ anyway? The WEF is not a policy-shop, or a legislature or really anything other than a big exhibition or conference. It’s about networking and symbolism.

The thought of looking for answers elsewhere leads me to consider the World Social Forum and the idea that ‘another world is possible’. Yet bear in mind that the more heterogenous WSF (which probably isn’t actually as diverse as it would like to think) is self-selected. Also, only those who can afford to travel can attend. The WSF is not really about anything other than a big protest and party. It too is about the very same things – networking and symbolism. Don’t get me wrong though, symbolic statements matter hugely, but it would be foolish look to them for substantive solutions.

Multiple personality disorder: Davos Man and Nationalist Man

According to Timothy Garton Ash in today’s Guardian,

The biggest danger to the world’s economic system is not a surfeit of Davos-type internationalism; it’s the strengthening of economic nationalism. Davos has always been a small part of a larger effort not to supplant international competition but to place it within a stronger framework of international co-operation.

Now we are at a crossroads. One road leads back to economic nationalism, protectionism and beggar-thy-neighbour policies. Another leads forward to more international co-operation, including more regulation and transparency. Without a conscious effort, the dynamics of both democratic and undemocratic politics, which remain national, will lead us down the former road. Inside Davos Man, there is his predecessor and possible successor always struggling to get out. If you don’t like what you’ve seen of Davos Man, wait till you see Nationalist Man get to work.

Though as one comment suggests, they might just  have been the same person all this time.

The crisis in quotes (part one)

A couple of thoughts:

“Capitalism without financial failure is not capitalism at all, but a kind of socialism for the rich.”
– James Grant

“Economists are pessimists: they’ve predicted 8 of the last 3 depressions” — Barry Asmus

(HT: financial-crisis-blog.com)

Condemned to freedom?

I once called it Pinocchio’s problem. The strings that held each of us to the nation-state seemed to me rather like the strings that were attached to Pinocchio, making him the puppet of forces he could neither control nor influence. His problem, at the end of the story, was no longer that when he told lies his nose grew longer. He had already learnt that lies were wrong. His problem when he finally turned, magically, from a wooden puppet into a real boy was that he had no strings to guide him. He had to make up his own mind what to do and whose authority to respect and whose to challenge and resist.

If indeed we have now, not a system of global governance by any stretch of the imagination, but rather a ramshackle assembly of conflicting sources of authority, we too have Pinocchio’s problem. Where do allegiance, loyalty, identity lie? Not always, obviously in the same direction. Sometimes with the government of a state. But other times, with a firm, or with a social movement operating across territorial frontiers. Sometimes with a family or a generation; sometimes with fellow-members of an occupation or a profession. With the end of the Cold War, and with the triumph of the market economy, there is a new absence of absolutes. In a world of multiple, diffused authority, each of us shares Pinocchio’s problem; our individual consciences are our only guide.

– Susan Strange, The Retreat of the State