the application of common sense in the current international political situation as led by the US with an even more incomprehensible UK tagging along. Most confounding of all, though, might be where support has been seen to be lacking. Although the Wall Street Journal has been quite hawkish, the commentary in Business Week, “The High Price of Bad Diplomacy” in the current issue shows clearly that the business press is not universally supportive of the recent turnings of events.
This is interesting for a dozen reasons, but mostly (to me) because it points, somewhat ironically, to a seeming flaw in the anti-globalization movement’s rhetoric, which I largely agreed with though being personally in favour of politically-moderated globalization. The rhetoric suggested that behind the moves in international trade circles was a more profound overturning of political structures by business interests.
In the current context, this seems clearly to have been incorrect, that the political world will go against the broad interests of international commerce without even lip service. Though much is made of the money issues that are embedded in the current positions regarding Iraq, the money works in several directions at once which, as Ed pointed out, serves to cancel its influence.
Another aspect of this whole thing that has been interesting is that globalization was supposed to mean that states’ political interests were supposed to have been subsumed to the US-led commercial system. Nowhere else was this supposed to have been more evident than in Canada and Mexico, whose membership in NAFTA is the most advanced example of globalization in the world today. Nevertheless, both Mexico and Canada have been quite openly resisting the US pro-invasion rhetoric (though in Canada, sadly, it seems to be mostly due to confusion and incompetence than to dearly held principles).
When all is said and done it will be very interesting to see if the anti-globalization movement can take these counter examples into account to develop a more sophisticated and subtle account of the effects of the concentration of global capital.
