Transcript of lecture
Date: Monday 8th October 2001
Speakers: Professors Anthony Giddens, John Gray, Fred Halliday, David Held and Mary Kaldor
Chair: Professor Lord Desai
Lord Desai:
I am Chairing this lecture and I hope that you will all cooperate in letting us have a good discussion in a good intellectual atmosphere that the LSE values very much.
My present duty is to introduce Tony Giddens, the Director of LSE who is going to welcome you. There is no need for applause, you will get used to having stars around you. We are all very famous. Remember, among you are the Prime Ministers and Presidents of the future, so you are as good as we are.
This lecture is something we started last year and it also kicks off the lectures that Tony gives every Wednesday at lunchtime on globalisation this term. This is the beginning. Here you have four or five speakers but later on you will have Tony all to yourself. Tony.
Tony Giddens:
Well, they are not actually every Wednesday, I'm only giving five lectures and they start half way through the term in fact, but there will be notices posted about them.
Well, can I add my welcome to everyone here tonight and particularly welcome new students in the LSE. This may very well be the first public event which you have come to at the LSE and I hope you will come to many others subsequently. They are all displayed on the screens around the LSE and there is an LSE Events leaflet, which gives a programme of all the public lectures, or most of the public lectures, that are happening here this term.
The debate about globalisation is, in my view, the most important debate that is going on in the social sciences today and as everyone sitting here will know it is not only an intellectual debate, although it started out that way, it's a debate which brings people out into the streets from the meetings of WTO in Seattle, right the way through to the events of Genoa more recently, which have quite often involved significant violence.
The reason why the debate is so important, I think, and the reason why I think we have such a big attendance here this evening is that it is a debate about what shape the 21st century will assume. It is a debate about our collective future and how we might shape it in the current century.
Now, those who protest against globalisation and also those who are sitting in their air-conditioned conference rooms who are the subject of those protests have a particular view of what globalisation is and I myself think this view is much too narrow and it does not provide an adequate basis for analysing and responding to the phenomenon. Most of the protestors who are against globalisation and most of the people from the World Bank, the IMF and so on who are in some sense for globalisation mean by it the increasing interdependence of the market place. Most of them mean by it the increasing role of financial markets in our lives.
Now, these things are undeniably important, if you look at the role of financial markets for example, you can show massive development over the past 20-25 years. About two decades ago only a few million dollars were turned over every year, a few hundred million dollars in global currency markets, by the latest estimate it is up somewhere near two trillion dollars turned over every day - an extraordinary intensification of global economic activity. But in my view anyway, and we'll see how far this is shared by other panellists, globalisation is much more profound, the changes going on in our world are by no means solely economic and I think it is a big mistake to treat globalisation as even primarily an economic phenomenon. For me the driving force of globalisation, the reason why, the prime reason why the world has changed so much over the past thirty or so years is the impact of communication, especially the advance of electronic communication and that kind of marriage between computerisation and satellite technology, which has been so influential in producing a much more interdependent world than ever before. You can even date that, the late 1960s was the first time at which an effective satellite system was set up above the Earth, from that time onwards instantaneous electronic communication was possible from one side of the world to the other.
In its simplest sense globalisation means interdependence and it is extremely difficult, impossible I think now, to deny that we live in a more interdependent world, but as other speakers no doubt will discuss, globalisation also means the ending of the Cold War. The ending of the Cold War has simply shifted in really dramatic ways the kind of broader structures of world society. So, globalisation is not a single phenomena, it does not have a single origin and it cannot be responded to in a simple minded fashion. For me anyway, to say you are for globalisation or against globalisation is incoherent, you have to say which aspects of these changes going on in the world you regard as positive and which you regard as negative and destructive.
Now, the protestors, in my view, have a great deal to protest about and their protests must be listened to by others who don't venture into the streets. Among the things the protesters are saying is that there is too much corporate power in the world, the world is driven too much by markets, the world is driven too much by the expansion of Western corporations and they are saying that the world is a highly unequal place in which one fifth of the world has become very prosperous while the rest of the world is left in poverty. We must respond to these issues. A good society is not a society where the market invades all aspects of our lives. A good society is not a society where corporate power becomes too predominant. Citizenship rights are not the same as the right to roam the isles of a supermarket. There is a clear political agenda there. The same is true of inequality, what can you say in seven minutes - we have only got seven minutes each - but in my view it is more or less completely wrong to blame globalisation as such for increasing inequalities happening around the world. The question for poorer countries is not to isolate themselves from these wider social and economic changes. No country which has isolated itself from the wider world economy has prospered. Those countries which have tried to like North Korea or Burma are among the poorest and most authoritarian countries in the world. So for poorer countries the question is the conditions of engagement and certainly we need to counter the lop-sided nature of world society which is surely still much too dominated by Western power and by the influence of an unequal power system. But we only know one way of overcoming mass poverty and that way is through economic development in which poorer people participate. What we know I think, one reason why a certain era of globalisation as John Gray might say has come to end is that we know this can't be achieved purely through markets. We know that to include poorer people in processes of economic development you must have the active hand of government, we should look in our time for a retrieval of the role of democratic government power as involved in successful processes of economic development.
In conclusion, a brief word about September 11, since this is obviously in everybody's minds. This debate was planned many months ago, it is a debate about the broader context of those events, not those events specifically themselves, but I feel I must say that in my view these events are not a clash of civilisations, they are not a clash between Islam and the West. They are a fight about the principles of the organisation of the emerging world system in the global age. On the one hand the possibility of cosmopolitanism, which David Held will no doubt talk about. A cosmopolitan order is one which admits many values, where you can have identities, where you can be many things and you can live along with ambiguity in these relationships. The enemy of cosmopolitanism in my view is fundamentalism, fundamentalism, especially when it merges with a kind of fanaticism, can happen in any area, it is not specifically limited to religion. In my view you can have religious fundamentalism certainly, but also ethnic fundamentalism, nationalist fundamentalism, we have seen the damage that these things can do. We stand still on the edge of a new century, we have the chance to create an effective cosmopolitan world order, a project which the 20th century failed to achieve. We should strive to achieve it in this century.
Thank you.
Lord Desai:
Thank you. Our next speaker is Professor Fred Halliday. Fred Halliday has an extensive number of works on the Middle East and the Cold War. He recently wrote a book on revolutions being the sixth great power and his last book was The World in 2000 which was an essay on the emerging forces in a global society today. Fred is a Professor for International Relations and he recently, of course, has been very very much engaged in interpreting, responding and debating about the nature of the current crisis. Fred Halliday.
Fred Halliday:
Thank you very much Meghnad. First of all I would like to say what a great pleasure it is to take part in this discussion. The issue of globalisation is one that touches every discipline taught in this School and it touches people from all the 150+ countries from which we have students in this institution. We are an international institution, I'm glad to say I gave my inaugural lecture some years ago on internationalism but also the problems of internationalism and picking up on Tony's last point, the challenge we face today is to give substance and reality to that internationalism in the economic field, in the political field and in the cultural field. I think it was the German poet, Schiller, who said that one is as much a citizen of one's age as a citizen of one's country. It doesn't mean you are not a citizen of your country but you are also a citizen of your age. That was true when he said it at the end of the 18th century, it's even more true now.
I'd also like to say how much I welcome the contribution which the LSE has made to the debate on globalisation. I want to mention two people, one of whom you know, one of whom you may not know. Tony Giddens has pushed this debate forward in all sorts of ways, I don't always agree with him, thank heavens...
Tony Giddens:
Why not?
Fred Halliday:
'Cos you are wrong! We had one good example, we went on a visit some months ago to Kuwait and Tony gave lectures on globalisation and he had handed out beforehand his curriculum vitae and at the end it said he was a Tottenham Hotspur supporter. So the first question was "What about the WTO and global trade?" The second question from the Kuwaitees was "What about Tottenham Hotspur?" And then he spent most of the rest of time in Kuwait talking about Arsenal and Newcastle United and when we go and visit ministers, the ministers say "Well, I support one team, Chelsea, but I have three sons and they all support different teams, and my wife supports another team." And he kept this up for hours and hours and it was a very nice example of globalisation, and if I might say so of English globalisation which carried us forward.
The other is a former research student of mine who teaches in the University of Dublin, Peader Kirby. Peader did a PhD on inequality in Ireland in the context of globalisation but he's also a fluent Irish speaker and they recently had a debate in Ireland on what should the Irish word for globalisation be and I am glad to say that one of our alumni and one of our students and colleagues coined the Irish word for globalisation, which is now used on the RTE television and radio for this term. So we are making a diverse contribution to this subject.
Let me say something first of all about September 11. This is a very difficult time for everybody, it's a very difficult time because nobody knows what these processes will involve. This is clearly a major blow, a major puncture in the optimism of modernity, in the optimism of your generation and even the more qualified optimism of our generation, and in the optimism which is associated with the millennium and the period since the end of the Cold War. Nobody knows what is going to happen, if you take something as associated with modernity and optimism and your lives and ours as travel, travel is going to be much more difficult, much more fraught, and to this I would add two disciplinary points from my own particular perspectives. It may be that international relations has acquired the sobriquet, the title which was once subscribed to economics of being the dismal science, the social science that talks most about what people might not want to hear about. But the issue of conflict in the world, between states and between states and non state actors, gorilla groups and so forth, is central to our discipline and sadly a relevant one today. But I also look at this through the blends of the work I and other colleagues do on the Middle East. We have to explain, the motto of the LSE is Rerum Cognoscere Causas - 'to explain, to know the causes of things' - and it is our job and the students, all of you working on the region, to explain how this happened, what are the sources of it, why did it happen as well as what are the consequences.
I did, some years ago, picking up again on what Tony said, write a book called 'Islam and the Myth of Confrontation', some days I falter a little bit but actually I hold to that title. It does take two to have a clash of civilisations and there are idiots on both sides, demigods on both sides who do contribute to that. But it is a profoundly false and misleading approach to these questions.
But there are two perspective things I want to say and they pertain directly to globalisation. The first is this, if global cooperation in the economic field, in the security field, in the philosophic field cannot confront and face down this challenge then we are doomed. Far from this being a discrediting of globalisation or the end of globalisation this is the challenge of globalisation, we have to show that the coordination of states, at the level of security, at the level of the world economy, at the level of the specific diplomatic issues which we confront can face these questions down and to some extent resolve them. We look at what has happened in the short term, at the level of macro economic management by central banks and at fiscal policy we can see there has been a very very rapid global response, more money has been pumped into the system than at any other time and in interim term that system will hold. But I think it is also a moment to remind ourselves of the creative potential of globalisation and here in some ways I am even more of an optimist than Tony on some of these issues.
If we take the three main themes of globalisation, the economic, the political and the cultural. I do remain firmly of the view that the economic system we have is not necessarily unequal, it is not, to be more precise, necessarily oligarchic - the wealth of the few does not necessarily presuppose the poverty and weakness of the many and it is possible to change and dare I use the word to reform this system through conscious government and social action to spread the benefits which the rich have to the population of the world as a whole. The inequality that we see and rightly protest about is something that is resolvable, it is not inherent in the system, but it will not be removed in the absence of state policy and that includes redistribution, it includes a global regime for migration, it includes opening the markets of developed countries and it includes a very much tougher commitment which we do not see by the populations of developed countries to the problems of the environment.
The level of politics, the goals of democracy within countries and peace between them are in my view attainable. They are not myths and again they are not necessarily oligarchic. Democracy has many faults, it is by no means sweeping the world, there are a lot of people playing the fake game of democratisation, but it is an attainable goal, as is the goal of peace, and again this is part of the promise of globalisation.
In the field of culture, I am not a post-modernist, but I think the post-modernists are right to say we have got away from the idea of modernity or of progress moving towards a single goal. We are not moving towards a cultural world which everybody speaks the same language, Volapük or English or whatever it is, or eats the same food, or wears the same clothes, or, may I say, has the same kind of university system. Let us have diversity in culture, but that diversity can be within the framework of a set of shared values. I don't believe in dialogues of civilisations or dialogues of faith, I believe in universal principles within which different faiths and civilisations can be criticised and may also discuss. But I think we have a much more diverse and varied view of what an international culture would be. You only have to look at the LSE with people from 150 countries, to look at what is happening in world music, in world languages, to see we have diverse internationalist modernity, which is part of the cultural potential of internationalisation.
One odd little footnote, which I find very reassuring, the best selling poet, the poet whose works sell most in the United States, is a 13th century poet by the name Jalal al-Din Rumi and he was an internationalist, a mystical internationalist. He said "I am not Christian, I am not a Jew, I am not Muslim. I believe in the unity of all mankind." He was born in Afghanistan, in the little town of Balkh in the year 1207 and it is an amazing fact that his work, his poetry sells better than William Shakespeare or Robert Frost, or W H Auden, or all the other people in US book shops today, not because of this crisis, but over recent years because of this mystical universalism. I think that reminds us that there is a cultural universalism which predates the universalism of the market.
Four quick problems which concern me greatly. Tony has mentioned one, economic inequality, which is getting greater, will not be solved by the market. Also inequality between genders. I think globalisation in the last ten years has been bad for gender equality worldwide in lots of ways, in employment, in stereotypes, in domestic relations and this is not something, which is adequately recognised. There is a highly gendered character to globalisation which too easily gets swept away in the other analyses. That inequality breeds something for which that last book of mine, I gave the inadequate term global rancour. Now this is the term I used two years, you know what it means. Global rancour does not explain the 11 September, these guys came from a rather rich country. It does explain the response worldwide, the sympathy, or the denial, or the double standards, or that the people deserved it argument that you hear. That rancour is there, it won't go away easily, it is something we have to recognise and address.
Secondly, security. Security, military security as well as personal security underpins globalisation, globalisation cannot override it, cannot dispense with it, we knew that before the 11 September, we know it afterwards. If there is no security of the high seas you cannot have trade, if there is no security in banking you cannot have an international banking system. If there is no personal security, if as is the case millions of women dare not go out of their houses in this country after dark every night because they are not personally secure and that is the case in many other countries, what price globalisation?
So security is the responsibility of states and of international institutions and here is one of my disagreements with Tony. I think that the highly centralised security system we have these days in the UN is probably the best we can have. I am not in favour of random democratisation of the Security Council, I'm not in favour of giving more power to talking shops like the General Assembly. International institutions fall into two parts, those who do and those who talk and it's very important to keep them separate because otherwise security will not be met.
Thirdly, I am perturbed by what I would call the growth in developed countries of an asocial individualism. Individualism is a very good thing, it is a right, it is part of modernity. Individualism is a source of creativity. But an individualism that is not tied to social responsibility, is not tied to international responsibility, that says "Who cares what is going on elsewhere?" or "Who cares about voting?" or "Who cares about educational standards?" is corrosive of the whole process of globalisation. The last election in this country was fought on two issues: education and health, but I have to say, and here I am way on the right of the spectrum, unless people take responsibility for their own health - you can pour all the money into health systems you want - you'll still end up coughing and spluttering or doing whatever they are doing in hospital at the age of 50 or 55 as too many people do. The same for education, you can put all the money you want into an educational system, if people don't do their homework, if people don't learn you won't get anywhere.
Finally, and we might come back to this identity politics and communitarianism. I think we have been far too indulgent of people running around with flags, blithering on about holy places and ancestors and tradition and all this stuff and it is the source of many of the problems in the world, and this is the enemy not part of globalisation. I think we need to have what I would call benign impatience with people who make community and tradition and ancestral this and that a basis of their politics and their conflicts.
But I end up on an optimistic note, I think that as individuals, as members of states and as supporters of international organisations as well as members of this university, we can, as Tony said, fulfil the unfulfilled potential of the 20th century. But we have then got to bring in our dear old friend agency, people have got to do things and they have got to lead and they have got to have ideas. The matter is open, it's not closed before or after the 11 September, I remain cautiously optimistic. It won't happen unless we do something.
Lord Desai:
Thank you, Fred. Our next speaker is John Gray, who is Professor of European Philosophy at the London School of Economics and he has a very, very interesting record; he has written books on Hayek, he has written books on general philosophy, on civil liberties and so on, but he clearly, in the globalisation debate, has brought his own very strongly, if I may say, pessimistic perspective on globalisation, as basically a dystopian experience if I may call it that. So, I will now give the floor to John Gray.
John Gray:
Thank you very much. Well, I am not sure how pessimistic I have been, it is actually quite difficult to achieve the level of pessimism which events warrant. Like many others I have fallen behind in this respect.
Let me begin by saying what others have said because I think it is perfectly true that it is a great privilege to take part in this debate here. LSE is the pivot of a worldwide debate on globalisation, there is nowhere else in the world where the issues have been debated and contested as deeply and intensively as they are at LSE. What I want to say just briefly now is what I would have said before September 11, it has not changed in any respect at all. I think it is very important to try and distinguish in our minds between two quite different meanings of globalisation, one of which I think was dystopian experiment and is now practically speaking over and the other of which is a completely inexorable historical trend.
The dystopian experiment was that which emerged only 12 years ago, at the end of the Cold War and in the aftermath of the fall of the Wall, it was the experiment of constructing a global free market. In other words of remodelling the world's economies incorporating and integrating them into a system which was essentially the Anglo-Saxon free market projected everywhere. And it is not the first time that that system has existed in the world, something like it existed from the 1870s up to the outbreak of the First World War. So in that sense of globalisation it is not new, neither is its end new that too happened in 1914. That's one meaning of globalisation and that I believe is coming to an end.
There is another meaning though which it is very important that we keep a grip on and I think that is the meaning to which Tony Giddens referred in his remarks. The deeper meaning of globalisation, which I think it makes no sense to be for or against, is that in which refers to a technologically driven phenomenon going back at least and most obviously to the telegraph in the 1860 and '70s and in particular to the underwater cables, which were laid then and which already by the 1870s enabled news of financial and other developments to be transmitted instantaneously from Europe to America. That development is really an episode or an incident or a phase in worldwide industrialisation. In other words, what globalisation really is, it seems to me, is that aspect of worldwide industrialisation in which technologies which abolish or foreshorten time and distance are central. That is what it really is and that is not going to stop, contrary to what some green thinkers would like, it is not going to be reversed, there isn't going to be a relocalisation of the economy, there is not going to be an end, thank God, to the cross fertilisation of cultures which occurs to the hybridisation of identities, none of those things which are, so to speak, spin-offs of these technologies are going to end. But I believe the dystopian experiment is pretty well over.
Now, if one thinks in this longer trajectory of history about globalisation in this way, well, we will have a number of thoughts, which I am not pessimistic, but I think should be sobering and will enable us to wake up from the light, frivolous, shallow thought that prevailed, it seems to me, in many of the media and much of politics and even in business in the wake of the fall of the Wall. If globalisation in the true deep sense of that term is an episode in worldwide industrialisation then one must expect and prepare for and try to mitigate and diminish the kinds of conflict, upheavals and indeed wars which went with industrialisation in the 20th century. I think it is possible to understand many of the upheavals, many of the conflicts, many of the divisions and many of the wars even of the 20th century as responses to often failed or distorted responses to ongoing globalisation. Stalinism was an attempt to industrialise Russia from above, Maoism in part of its meaning was something analogous. Even the Nazi regime was an attempt to appropriate modern industrial technologies to a genocidal purpose.
So, if one looks back at the 20th century there is no reason to think that worldwide industrialisation will by itself, without continuous human agency, without continuous efforts, as Fred Halliday has put it, would be peaceful, there is absolutely no reason to think it would be without revolutions, or upheavals, or tyrannies, or wars - they go with the territory of worldwide industrialisation. It's not a reason for resisting worldwide industrialisation; it can't be resisted and shouldn't be, because for most people in the world to this day it represents a better form of life, it represents things like clean water, it represents a longer life, it represents a great improvement in the human lot. But it does not represent peace, it does represent simple linear progress, it represents a profound and tremendously unsettling transformation in human affairs which in the 20th century produced some of the most terrible regimes in human history and in the 21st century could easily do the same.
So that's the first thing I really want to try and emphasise about this and even to emphasise about the recent events that are all in our minds. Shocking and surprising as they were, if one looks back at the 20th century there were similar events and larger events of this kind.
So what can we actually do? Well I think there are two things I would like to suggest for the future, which you as people at this global cosmopolitan institution from practically every culture in the world and many of you I think from more than one culture, many of you, many of us, have mixed hybrid identities, we don't just belong to one way of life as if it could be separated from others, we belong to several. What can be done? I can think of two things that can be borne in mind. In what I think will be a long protracted conflict that we are now entering into. It's very important, I think, to prevent the self fulfilling prophecy of a clash of civilisations. I think the idea of clashing civilisations is, if I may say so, the most poisonously erroneous idea of the last 20 years. But it has the potentiality of turning into something real. If mistakes are made, if errors are made by any of the major protagonists it could actually happen and that would be an unmitigated disaster. So, in this sense I think it is absolutely critical that we prevent that cataclysmic development which I think is a real risk, particularly if as I believe this conflict is only beginning.
The second is I think we should look beyond what's happened to the deeper and longer term challenges. I continue to believe that the deeper longer term challenges posed by globalisation are first and foremost environmental or ecological. That is to say if we think of globalisation as the industrialisation of the whole world we have to also bear in mind that many of the things that world wide industrialisation require are in short supply and some of them are irretrievably and irrevocably in short supply. Oil was laid down as fossil fuel by the energy of the sun some billions of years ago. It is in the world today, where it is, not because of any human decision, but because of what happened billions of years ago. That and other resources are coming up against rising human expectations which are entirely legitimate. One of the reasons I believed and still believe that the dystopian experiment of a global free market was bound to breakdown is that it contains no mechanisms within it which are adequate to deal with the depletion of natural resources. Essentially all it says is - the standard argument that you will have all heard or will hear many many times, it is an important argument to hear but I think it is completely superficial - all it says is that if free markets are allowed to work then scarce resources will become more expensive through the technological substitution etc., etc. That may be true in the models developed by social scientists and economists, it is not true in the real world. In the real world, when resources become very quickly more expensive, very quickly more scarce what happens is war, or conflict and this also aggravates existing conflicts, conflicts in the Middle East and in Africa now are being aggravated by struggle over water, declining water, they are being aggravated by that and it is quite obvious if one thinks of what was the last great war of the 20th century? The last big war was the Gulf war, what was that war, at least partly about? That war was about, partly, access to oil, a radically finite resource, whatever people tell you about that, that it is not finite, that in fact with better technology or better market mechanisms it can be turned into infinite. I don't think any of that is true.
So, as we look forward...
Lord Desai:
Scarcity of time.
John Gray:
Scarcity of time, that's another thing which we cannot do anything about. Well, actually he can, but he won't.
Let me conclude on a final remark. I think we have proceeded, all of us, we are all involved in this, by looking only at the bright face of globalisation and I have become a bit of a pessimist or have a reputation for looking at the other face, but I think that only looking at the bright face, it is not that there is not a bright face, there is, but the bright face itself has flaws and we are rather in the position of the hero of Oscar Wilde's wonderful fantasy story, 'The Portrait of Dorian Gray' who hides up in the attic a portrait of himself as he really is. And I think the poverty, the collapse of whole countries which has happened in Indonesia and in Russia and elsewhere and the tremendous upheaval that has gone with globalisation in the poor world which is still the majority of the human species is like that scarred, hideous portrait and if we continue to avert our eyes from it then we'll reap something like the 20th century again.
Lord Desai:
Thank you very much. Our next speaker is David Held. In terms of how long people have been at LSE, I am sort of a great-grandfather and he is a baby. He arrived very recently and he has written a massive tome about global transformations which you will all have to buy and read and I will ask you questions later on about that. David Held.
David Held:
Well, I would also like to say how pleased I am to be on this panel, to have the opportunity of talking for seven minutes to you this evening. When I thought about what I might squash into this time I thought I would try and take a tack that would be slightly different to the other speakers and so I frantically made phone calls over the weekend to find out what they were going to say. As a result of those phone calls I am going to focus my remarks to begin with on globalisation and democracy, or to put the point slightly differently, we have a very serious problem, and I am going to start with a rather poignant example.
There are certain countries in the world where animals are skinned alive for their furs. The value of a fur pelt it seems is higher if the fur is not damaged in any way, for example by a bullet. In a recent campaign to prevent this practice UK animal rights groups concluded that they could not take the campaign just to the UK government, because the UK government could not effectively legislate about this matter if the EU did not do so more broadly. But the EU could not do so more broadly because attaching particularly animal welfare provisions to the fur trade could constitute a violation of trade rules as laid down by the WTO. The campaign had to be taken to the WTO and to the best of my knowledge is there become ineffective. So, what is the proper jurisdiction for handling such issues: local, national, regional, global?
We no longer live, if we ever did, in a world of discrete national communities which have the power and capacity alone to determine the fate of all those within them. In our world it is not only the violent exception that links people together across borders, the 11 September, last night. But the very nature of every day problems and processes which joins people in multiple ways, from migration to the movement of ideas and cultures, let us not just start in the 1870s and '80s, let us think about the world religions and their extraordinary impact on the world. From AIDS to genetic engineering, from the conditions of financial stability to environmental degradation the fate and fortunes are increasingly intertwined. We live in a world not of national communities of fate but of overlapping communities of fate.
Now, during the period in which the modern nation state was being forged and the territorially bound conception of democracy was consolidated, democracy and states, the idea of a close mesh between geography, political power, democracy and borders could be taken for granted. But now globalisation raises profound issues concerning the proper scope of politics, regulation, democracy, jurisdiction and so on and I want to make four brief points about this and they get to the heart of what I think is the change in relation between globalisation on the one side and the modern nation state on the other. Four points, four disjunctures.
First, the idea of a self determining people, a Demos which shapes its own futures and fate can no longer, it seems to me, simply be located within the borders of a single nation state. Many of the most fundamental, economic, social and environmental forces and processes now lie in terms of their operation and dynamics beyond the reach of individual polities. The current concern about animal furs, where I started, or genetic engineering and human cloning or trade rules and the social conditions of trade rules are just a few of many cases to the point.
Secondly, it can no longer be presupposed that the locus of effective political power is synonymous with national governments and nation state - Fred's getting uncomfortable, now. National states and national government are now embedded in very complex networks of political, social and economic power at regional and global levels, as even the Bush administration has discovered as a result of the reaction to its position on Kyoto and in the aftermath of 11 September. In other words political power is increasingly negotiated, shared, brokered among diverse forces from the local to the global.
Thirdly, and this is a very important point. The nurturing enhancement of the public good, however any of us want to conceive of it, whether as financial stability, environmental protection, sustainable development, global egalitarianism increasingly requires co-ordinated multi-lateral action to make any of it work; to ensure security, to prevent global recession, to halt money laundering and so on. The other side of this at the same time the resolution of trans-boundary issues such as responsibility for carbon emissions may often impose significant domestic adjustments. There has been a shift in the operation and dynamics of political power and political authority. This is not to say that the intensification of globalisation simply displaces states or disorganises state power, rather it is to say that the context of national politics has been transformed by the diffusion of power and authority and the shift from government to multi-layered governments regionally and globally. Political power, in short, is being reconfigured.
Fourth. The very distinction between domestic and foreign affairs in no longer clear cut. Think of how the great ministries of state were founded in earlier centuries, it was all very simple: Home Office, Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Now most of our ministries cross cut this distinction in all sorts of complicated ways. Governments face issues such as the international drugs trade, the use of non-renewable resources, the spread of weapons of mass destruction, the fight against terrorism, global warming which cannot be meaningfully categorised in these terms: domestic, foreign, internal, external. In fact in nearly all major areas of policy the enmeshment on national political communities in regional and global flows involves them in intensive trans-boundary coordination and regulation.
In the context of these complex transformations, not just economic but political the meaning of accountability and democracy is changing and it is a puzzle and a serious problem for us and for all of you. The question, who should be accountable for whom and on what basis, what is the proper jurisdiction for handling some of these very fundamental questions? These are puzzling questions and they do not easily resolve themselves and the goods to think with we have early modern political theory from Hobbes to the present day, do not equip us well to address them. The mesh between geography, political power and democracy is challenged if not unravelled by the intensification of regional and global relations.
One could be very pessimistic about the future of democracy, there are plenty of reasons for pessimism, but there are forces at work which I want to end on a more optimistic reading. Just let me list them and come to a final point.
First, we note not just the last 20-30 years as the era of neo-liberal deregulation, but the 20th century is the emergence, however imperfectly, of regionally and global institutions; from the UN system to the EU and other regional groupings.
Second, we must note the development of international law from the law of war, the human rights regimes to the establishment of the ICC, which will happen with or without American support.
Third, we note the new regional and global transnational access contesting the terms of globalisation; environmental movements, women's movements and of course the mixed groupings of the anti-globalisers themselves.
These are new voices of an emerging transnational civil society, they are in early stages of development and there are absolutely no guarantees that they will develop further. But they point in the direction of establishing new ways of holding transnational power systems to account and they help open up the possibility of cosmopolitan governments or cosmopolitan democracy.
This cosmopolitan position is simply that democracy needs to be rethought of as a double-sided process. By this I mean the deepening of democracy and social justice within national communities combined with the extension across borders. Democracy for the new millennium must allow people to gain access to, mediate between and render accountable the social and economic and political processes which cut across and transform their communities.
So, to return to where I started, the practice of skinning some animals alive. We need new ways of attaching welfare rules, in this case animal welfare rules, to the global trade system. We need new ways of deliberating over the content of these and many other rule systems in diverse democratic forums from the local to the global and we need new ways of ensuring that such rules are adequately entrenched and enforced. Improbable, unlikely, unrealistic, but then who thought the Berlin Wall would fall down as part of the velvet revolution?
Lord Desai:
Thank you, David. Our final speaker is Mary Kaldor, who is part of the Centre for the Study of Global Governance, where she is a Programme Director and the programme has just published a Global Civil Society Yearbook - a very innovative publication that Mary has played a very active part in.
All her life Mary has actively agitated and marched against war, but she has also written very authoritatively on armaments and war, because she is one of those people who has been able to combine action and research in a way that many, many of us would have loved to but are either one or the other.
Mary Kaldor:
Thank you, Meghnad.
...Very difficult combining action and research, but let me first say how pleased I am to see so many people and perhaps when we talk about globalisation, the most optimistic thing is that so many people have come to have this discussion, because I actually think having this discussion at this moment is more important then ever.
What I am going to do is to talk about the dark side of globalisation. At this very moment I think we are all overwhelmed by what is called the new war on terrorism, it invades every moment of our lives, it seems to me sometimes it is like a kind of black hole sucking in our everyday activities and I think it's terribly important that we try to somehow move out of this black hole, think about it and discuss alternatives. So, what I want to do is to talk about my own work on new wars and how it might be relevant to understanding this new war on terrorism.
Well, Bush uses the term, this is a new type of war and my view is that it is new in the sense that it's very different from the kinds of wars between states that we experienced from the end of the 18th century to the middle of the 20th century. Iit's different from the Second World War or the First World War, even different from the Cold War in that it is not a classic war between states. On the other hand there have been new wars, not on the same spectacular scale, in the last decade, what I call new wars, wars like Bosnia, the Middle East, Africa, Central Asia and I think there are a lot of lessons to be learned from those wars about the current conjecture.
So, let me very briefly, because I have seven minutes, say something about those...
Lord Desai:
Only six now.
Mary Kaldor:
Only six now?
I think the first point I want to make is that these new wars do have to be understood in the context of globalisation and let me say a few things about that. I think the first point is what globalisation does to political authority. Tony said it's not globalisation per se that creates inequality, but what I do think happens is that globalisation erodes the capacity of states, both to provide security and to redistribute resources and if erodes that capacity in countries like Britain then the effect in many countries is much more devastating and people talk about collapsed states, failed states, but I think particularly in states which were formally closed authoritarian states, the impact of globalisation is such that it creates the kinds of problems that we see. It involves an undermining of the structures of the state, a fall in the tax base, an erosion of legitimacy and eventually a breakdown of the monopoly of legitimate violence; private armies, paramilitary groups appear, extremist ideologies and that is in a way the breeding ground for the new wars.
Second point, the actors in the new wars are transnational networks. They are transnational networks organised around the claim to political power on the basis of some kind of fundamentalism, be it to do with religion or ethnicity as Tony suggested and they are networks that can involve private groups but also bits of state apparatuses, they are not necessarily non-state but nor are they state and they are trans-national. But I think the key point is that they are about the claim to political on the basis on labels. They arise as a result of the collapse of earlier emancipatory projects around ideas like socialism or post-colonial nationalism and they are about trying to gain access to power in the name of a particular religion or nationality and excluding others. It is very different from ideas, just to give you an example, in the 17th century there were wars about religion but they were actually wars about ideas, they were wars about breaking the power of the church, or about individuals. These conflicts are not about the character of the religion, although you may want to impose Islamic law or whatever, they are about the claim to the power because you are a Muslim, a Hindu, a Protestant, a Catholic. That is what I mean by these networks of identity.
Third point. The aim of the violence is political mobilisation. In old fashioned wars, wars like the Second World War, people were mobilised in order to take part in the military effort and the aim was a military victory. In these wars it is exactly the other way around, the aim of the military effort is to mobilize people politically, to create the kind of fear and hatred, the atmosphere of terror in which people will feel very insecure and more attracted to these extremist causes. The aim is to actually eliminate tolerant people and to create enemies among people of a different ethnicity.
So what you see in the new wars is that almost all the violence is directed against civilians, you see very high civilian casualties and also very high population displacement, people being pushed out of their lands because they are a different identity or because they simply represent democratic, multicultural forces.
Now, a fourth point about the new wars is that they are not just about political power, they are about economic power as well. That in these situations where the tax base is eroding, where no new wealth is being created the warring parties finance themselves through a range of activities which are related to violence. Loot and plunder is the most obvious one and I was very struck actually reading the Observer yesterday, a quote from the letter found in a Boston car park which belonged to the hijackers, which said, "If God grants any one of you as slaughter you should perform as an offering on behalf of your mother and father for they are owed by you. If you slaughter you should plunder those you slaughter for that is the sanctioned custom of the prophets." So loot and plunder, drug trade, illegal smuggling in cigarettes and alcohol, taxing humanitarian assistance, all of these are forms of financing which are actually dependant on violence.
So if these are the characteristics of these wars, what are the lessons we learned? Well, I think the first lesson is that these are wars that are very difficult to contain and very difficult to end. They are very difficult to contain because they spread through refugees and the virus of extremism. They are very difficult to end because every bout of warfare strengthens the extremists and weakens democratic politics and the extremists have vested interests, both political and economic, in the continuation of war and I think what you find is that in those areas where war has lasted longest you develop a kind of culture of violence, in which children are actually brought up to become martyrs, to become extremists who are mobilised at an early age. The sort of thing you are seeing in some of the madrasas in Pakistan.
What do we learn from these wars about building an alternative? (I am coming to the end now.) I think what we learn is that central to building an alternative is reconstruction of legitimate political authority, but that doesn't mean going back to nation states, and that's where we come back to globalisation. These emerge out of globalisation, they emerge out of the erosion of the state, I think the only alternation is building a global political legitimacy, the kind of cosmopolitan project that both David and Tony were talking about.
Unfortunately, as I have come to the end I cannot tell you what that involves, but I will give you just the headings. First of all I think it involves strengthening of the rule of law, both internationally and domestically and it means that military action which may have to be taken has to be taken as a form of law enforcement not as form of fighting a war. It means security is essential but you cannot win these wars all you can do is to provide security in which alternative politics can develop.
Secondly, it means support for democratic politics, for civil society, it means the necessity of events like this where we discuss and debate the causes of conflicts, the problems of globalisation.
Thirdly, it means a real effort, a genuine effort at global social justice. The key importance of finding ways in which young men can find legitimate ways of earning a living. Many young men in many of these places just do not have any alternative to becoming a criminal or joining a paramilitary group.
I think it is in these areas, even though it is slow and torturous, that you see where some progress has been made in places like Northern Ireland and the Balkans.
Now, some of these things, the Prime Minister, Tony Blair, said in a speech...
Lord Desai:
Mary...
Mary Kaldor:
I am just at the last sentence. That of course it has to be serious and I think perhaps the most important lesson that we can learn is that we cannot shut down global politics, that we cannot allow this war on terrorism to stop us from having the kind of discussions that we are having here. Thank you.
Lord Desai:
Thank you. Before I turn to the audience to ask questions I am going to ask for some reactions from the panel itself. But let me say this to the people who are going to ask questions. Your question shall be two sentences long and they will start as a question, does the panel agree that ...? I don't want to know your views about globalisation, I don't want to know your views about capitalism and socialism, Marx, Hobbes, Engels, anybody. I want questions, because the longer you take to ask a question you are hurting all the other members of the audience who cannot have their say. So equity demands that questions are short, to the point and not speeches - I will shut you up if you do that. Now I would like some reactions from the panel. Tony.
Tony Giddens:
Well, shall I start, I mean there are so many questions one could raise, I will just raise one, because I don't really agree with what Mary just said, earlier on, and to me it drives home the importance of what this discussion will help everyone understand that globalisation has become a kind of code term for so many changes, you have to be really careful when you either attribute any benefits to it or you blame it for anything.
Of course, you see states around the world that become destabilised and you have problems of coping with security, poverty, redistribution of income. But what held them in place before? Well, it was largely the Cold War. The Cold War was a security system, especially if you lived in the West, but what kind of security system was that? I mean Mary quite rightly, like many of us, we were out in the streets protesting against the ultimate violence that brought that security and what happened in the world is that many of the areas that Mary's describing as areas of being destabilised, they haven't been destabilised primarily by the effect of global markets in the way Mary seem to be implying I think, they have been destabilised by the Cold War. Most of these areas were areas where the bi-polar system was fought out by proxy and Afghanistan is such an obvious example of this because there is tortuous history of the very groups the Americans supported against the Russians have now come back to haunt the Americans and, to some degree, all of us. It is true of ex-Yugoslavia, it is true of Africa which was the kind of cockpit of the Cold War fought by proxy.
So, we are dealing with a world where the Cold War has disappeared, that has brought us many advantages as well as problems but you can't simply blame all that on some kind of blanket villain of globalisation.
Lord Desai:
Fred.
Fred Halliday:
I would like to perhaps take the sceptical position about the anti-globalisation movement. The criticisms made of the WTO, or of the multi-nationals or of the World Bank and so forth, the European Union, are often valid, but I do think that the Seattle protestors have had too easier a ride from too many people. Do you want to ask the question, "What is the alternative, what is going to fly here?" Not only have they very diverse views as between, you know, green fundamentalists and tree huggers on the one hand and the FLCIO on the other, not just between representatives of Third World countries who are desperate to get a minimal WTO regime so that they could at least negotiate about something but whose concerns were swamped by well-intentioned kids from San Francisco or Canada, wherever, who came and said "We don't want a world trade regime." We have got to find a critique that is tough minded and real and not give in to every waffly, vague, alternative spiel which we hear. I think too much of what comes out of those protestors won't fly is actually extremely harmful to people in the world. There needs to be a trade regime, there needs to be an international security regime. There needs to be a system for guaranteeing transparency of banks, transparency of loans, transparency of governments and yes people should be listened to but they have got to meet certain criteria.
Secondly, as several of the speakers have said, there is an antiary history of protest and denunciation of global capitalism, it was called Communism. It did pretty well for itself but in the end made a terrible mess and failed. Those who want to tear the whole thing down again didn't begin life in 1995 or 2000, they should look back at what came before. An anarchist is an anarchist, but I do not think the anarchists have a program. So I think both in terms of the tough mindedness of the proposals and in terms of the history we should just say "All the old people in the streets are wonderful." I much prefer to talk to a tough minded economist who's done the work in India or in Africa and is working in the World Bank than to someone who is out in the streets saying, "Forgive all debt", or "Stop all this WTO imperialism." All the rest of it.
Sorry, but that's...
Lord Desai:
Anyone else? Mary, yes.
Mary Kaldor:
I just want to say a couple of things. First of all, to Tony. I mean of course we should be very happy that the Cold War is over and we should be very happy that old wars are over, because the kind of deaths that we saw in the Second World War is now unimaginable, something like 100,000 people...What?
Panelist:
We hope.
Mary Kaldor:
We hope? No, but I think, well, we hope. But what I am trying to say is that, what I actually said was I didn't attribute new wars to globalisation, what I said was it is where you have the impact of globalisation on formally authoritarian closed states. I think it is that combination, it's definitely the heritage of the Cold War, but you can't neglect the impact of the opening up to the outside world and the inability of states to adapt to this new world and that does not at all negate that there are positive aspects of globalisation too.
On this issue of the Seattle and the Genoa protesters, there was a range of protesters. There were some who were fundamentalists, but there were some who were extremely positive, who have put a lot of positive proposals on the global agenda: whether it is debt reduction, or to be iin taxes or whatever, and there is an excellent chapter in our new yearbook written by Meghnad Desai and Yahia Said which points this out and we will be having a debate about this issue on Thursday, so don't all come because it is in the Old Theatre and we will not have room, but do come if you can.
Lord Desai:
John.
John Gray:
Just two brief comments on what has been said before. I think the end of the Cold War, in fact I thought this at the time actually when it happened, illustrated the deep wisdom in an old Polish saying, "Never expect too much from the end of the world." It is a great mistake because the end of the world does not end, it goes on, the conflicts of history change and one needs the same kinds of commitment, the same kind of clarity of thought you needed earlier to really understand them and try and have some effective grip on them.
Just one slightly sceptical remark about global governance. Transnational institutions are created, funded or not funded, by sovereign states and when the most powerful sovereign states find them inconvenient they do their business in other ways, they ignore them. They may need to use them for some purposes to legitimate what they are doing, but the route truth is that transnational institutions have very little effective autonomy of their own and very little legitimacy, partly because they aren't and, in my view, cannot be effectively democratic. So, I think one of the things which is important now is not to expect too much from them. Now, that does not have to mean one has to despair because contrary to what some people have said so far, I'm actually moderately optimistic about some features which are going ahead. One thing which I think is likely in the coming decades is that the trade regime and the regime that we have for capital flows and other important matters will be less doctrinal, less fundamentalist if I may put it like that, less an example of market fundamentalism and more a result of a variety of bargains and pragmatic adjustments. I think we could get out of this conflict a world which is less tidy, more messy, less pleasing to purists, but actually safer and even, in some respects, more equitable, because of course it is true that there are a large part of the world which have very little effective bargaining power. But one feature which is going on and is completely inextricable in my view, which distinguishes this face of globalisation from the last one in the 1870s up to the First World War, that one depended upon European colonial power. Now, power and initiative and technology have inextricably already flowed away from the European powers and they are flowing away from the United States to countries like China and India and other countries in the world. There is no way that the radically unequal bargaining relationships that have existed up to now will survive into the future.
So, my hope is for a less tidy, a more messy, partly an even de-globalised world, because I think it will be safer and could even be more equitable but it won't please people who want to renew any simple universalist project, it will actually be more pluralistic than that and for that reason I think it should be welcomed.
Lord Desai:
David.
David Held:
Just very briefly...
Lord Desai:
And that is the last comment from the panel.
David Held:
Just very briefly, a slightly different tack to John's. I mean a lot has been said about the mixed views of the globalisation protesters and they are a very mixed range of groups indeed, but I have had two equally depressing experiences in countering discussions and debates about globalisation. One is some interviews with anti-globalisation protesters in London who had very little to say a) about what globalisation is or b) how it should be replaced. But second and even more depressing for me was talking about globalisation in the boardrooms of some the largest multi-national companies, where those at the most senior level simply said the issue for them, the problem of globalisation was the problem of publicity, the image was wrong, the PR had to be got right, and once the PR was right...
Lord Desai:
Sounds like the Labour Party.
David Held:
...There would be no problem. I think both views are equally mistaken and equally problematic. Just one thing, it seems to me as Tony Giddens has said, the issue is not globalisation per se, but its form. We need to reconnect the project of social and economic globalisation, as Mary has said, to the rule of law, to democracy and social justice. It is not the market per se that is the problem, it is the frame of rules in which the market is embedded. We need to reframe it. That is a big challenge, practically and intellectually, that is why we are all at the LSE because that is the project that we need to pursue.
Lord Desai:
I was really getting worried, we have had a debate for nearly an hour and a bit and nobody had used the word 'embedded'. Now, as you know, you cannot proceed in international political economy without 'embedding' somebody or other.
I also apologise for the wild outbreak of optimism on the platform. I will just offer my definition, optimists are those who think the world will end tomorrow. Pessimists are those who think that the bloody mess will carry on.
Okay, who has got a short, sharp question, like "Why?" or something?
Question 1:
May I ask if the panel sees any merit in feeding their views to the European Commission's exercise in governance poised as it is for the extension to formally communist countries and wider than that, how can we make lots more people raise their eyes above the World Cup to what we are talking about?
Lord Desai:
Okay, so for those who didn't hear the question, it is about what does the panel say about the European Commission's experiment on enlargement or things like that. Who wants to take that up?
Let's take several questions - next question?
Question 2:
Yes I would like to find out if the rest of the panel agrees with Dr Held in that there should be an emergence of a transnational civil society, for there is an overwhelm of evidence that national civil society organisations, for example, are proved to be more efficient.
Question 3:
Can I ask the panel, does globalisation represent the end of ideology as Prime Minister Blair suggested the other day or are there circumstances in which globalisation can be seen itself as an ideology?
Lord Desai:
Somebody called the recent events the end of the end of history, maybe it was the end of the end of ideology.
Question 4:
I would like to know if the panel feels that the recent transnational mobilisation of militant Islamic groups is more directly attributable to the negative effects of globalisation or to the failures of the governments of the states from which these groups primarily come?
Lord Desai:
That is a very good essay topic. Now, who wants to take this on? Fred.
Fred Halliday:
Shall I answer the last one?
Lord Desai:
Yes.
Fred Halliday:
A lot has been said about the relationship between globalisation and the events of 11 September and in one sentence I said this, I don't think that the inequalities and problems of globalisation were a cause, the people who did this came from a relatively rich country, Saudi Arabia. They were relatively well educated, they did not speak on behalf of the oppressed of the world, they spoke on behalf of one particular group only. But I do think that the inequalities of globalisation say much about the response. I think we have to take that response seriously even if we disagree with it. Eighty percent of the population of Brazil said in the survey a week after the events that they thought Brazil should stay neutral in the coming war. The argument that the West deserved it or America deserved it is very widespread in China, in the Middle East and elsewhere, in some cases coupled to various forms of denial of what happened. Therefore, if one has to see why is there this rancour out there, some of it conspiratorial, some of it specific, that is part of a response, an analysis of the consequences of the reaction but not of the cause. Having said that one has to look at the cause and I think there are several causes, but I think one is the resistance of many young people in these countries to their own governments who they see as corrupt and after all the main aim, as John Gray said and others have said of fundamentalist movements, is to take power in their own country - that is the goal and the rest is secondary to that. That was very clear in a statement made by Mr Bin Laden yesterday, where he said our target are the pro-Western rulers of the Middle East, he said it straight out.
Secondly, there is the emergence of, for want of a better word; I've called the greater West-Asian crisis, that is issues which are separate in cause and where in the past relatively discreet from each other have now become linked in one related discourse. You have Palestine question, Iraq question, Afghanistan question and then at one end in the West you have all the Balkan stuff and in the East you have Kashmir. Now, these are separate in their causes but they are seen as combined. I was teaching in the Arab gulf in the spring and people who were government officials, they were not poor, they were well travelled and on all three of these issues there was a very strong sense of them being linked, to the Western policy being wrong. Not that I shared those views but I heard it and these were not the street, these were not illiterates, these were people who were educated and travel and had decent incomes. So I think that broader coming together of this West-Asian crisis on top of resentment of governments, plus the third point, which Mary said, is absolutely right, it is these cult and culture of violence and I think perhaps as social scientists we may have looked at nationalism, we may have looked at war, we have moved away from looking at violence itself. I want to go back and read some people like Erich Fromm, the psychologist who wrote about violence in the 1950s. I suspect most of his books are out of print, I hope they are not. But I think one has to look at that drug of violence itself linked to these two other things. That is the cause.
Lord Desai:
Yes. Anybody else want to take any of the questions? Mary.
Mary Kaldor:
Well, the question really, your question related to the debate we were having here, is the problem a failure of governments or is it globalisation? And I think what both David Held and I was saying was that the framework of governments has come under challenge because of globalisation, whether it is because of political interconnectedness or whether it is because of economic interconnectedness. Nevertheless, it seems to me those governing institutions have been much slower to adjust than economic and there is a real problem of a disjuncture in a way between our political institutions and our other institutions and it is that disjuncture which I think creates enormous problems, they may not be the cause, but as Fred said, it is the cause of rancour.
I would say something about the European Commission, if...
Lord Desai:
Very, very briefly.
Mary Kaldor:
Because also the other question was transnational civil society.
Lord Desai:
Just one sentence.
Mary Kaldor:
Transnational civil society of course local and national civil societies are more effective but nowadays it is through transnational links. I think that was the lesson of the re-emergence of civil society in both Latin America and Eastern Europe in the 1980s. They developed this term, they developed spaces in their society in conjunction with groups elsewhere and it is precisely because you can no longer maintain a closed society and precisely because nowadays, as David said, decisions are made at a global level that civil society has to be transnational.
Lord Desai:
Okay, thanks.
David Held:
I just wanted to say that I think what Fred said about some of the key issues or causes of Islamic fundamentalism are absolutely right. It is hard to see a close connection between the reasons given for the violence and the wider questions of globalisation and social justice. But I think there is a connection in the end and it is this: unless people are convinced that their legal and specific ways of addressing their grievances they will often turn to violence as an alternative. The stagnation in the Middle East of foreign policy, of the peace efforts and so on over generations, is one instance of that and for that we are all, it seems to me, culpable and all as it were need to engage with. That is the first point I would say.
Lord Desai:
One more point.
David Held:
I am only allowed one more. On the issue is globalisation the end of ideology? No. Globalisation and I agree with Tony Giddens, is an empty category, it is a spatial category, it is like a local and a national, you cannot be for and against it coherently. Globalisation is re-awaking ideology as these discussions are showing. It is re-awaking the debate about the proper form of these social and economic processes, so it is not the death of politics it is the reconfiguration of politics.
Lord Desai:
John.
John Gray:
I just wanted to say two things, one is to agree with that and to say that globalisation is in a sense used properly an empty category. It has had ideological uses by politicians, no doubt about that but we should try and avoid them when we are trying to think clearly.
On violence, just one thought. Our experience over the last 30 years, even in this country is that terrorism, however one wishes a broad or narrow one and wishes to want to understand that activity, is very, very difficult to eradicate. It has not been eradicated in Northern Ireland, in the broader community of Europe, it has not been eradicated in the Basque country, it is very difficult to do. The idea that any simple measure, military or otherwise, can actually remove it is one of the illusions you should get rid of. What we should kind of summon the will for is, as it were, a permanent attempt, an on-going permanent attempt to diminish and mitigate the causes and the sources of this type of activity, but we will never remove it altogether if our experience so far is anything to go by, and that is not a reason for despair it is a reason for deeper, more realistic, more resolute commitment.
Lord Desai:
Tony.
Tony Giddens:
Well, can I just comment on the EU question that was asked? I am very strongly in favour of the European Union, I am very strongly in favour of its enlargement towards eastern Europe, I believe this is central to the future history and peace of Europe and I think the European Union. debates about the future of European Unions is very closely related to all the things that we are talking about. The EU itself started as largely a Cold War formation like so many other things. But now you have to see it as a response to globalisation, as an attempt to pioneer a form of government above the level of the nation which still recognises and defends the integrity of the nation and I take it that is the core part of what the European project is about and what it is for.
Lord Desai:
I can only take a couple of questions and I will answer them myself.
Question 5:
Is it possible to have universal standards in animal welfare and environmental protection in a globalised world where so far everything is sacrificed to financial gain?
Lord Desai:
No!
Question 6:
Does the panel...
Lord Desai:
That was a deep answer, think about it?
Question 6:
Does the panel believe as mentioned earlier that globalisation could lead to a large-scale class of civilisations?
Lord Desai:
I think we have had that issue already and I think the answers are all over the place. I think one said yes, others said no and I think since two people have spoken I will ask Tony Giddens to give his final verdict on clash of civilisation. Yes or No?
Tony Giddens:
Well you have to say no, but if we are going to, are we going to wind up now, I think because we have to. I would just like to say, just to echo the points that Fred made at the beginning.
LSE for me is the very prototype of cosmopolitan community and it is great that so many people have come to this debate and I would like to thank all my colleagues for appearing on the platform with me and I would like to thank our very own Don King, LSE's Don King...
Lord Desai:
Thank you very much.