Engagement: neoliberal globalization
President Bush is off on his trip to asia and the APEC conference
Bush leaving next week for trip to Asia - Yahoo! News. There is a planned agenda for these things. For this event trade agreements WTO membership, and it seems, a lot of background talk on North Korea. In the run up to this trip a sideshow developed, a monkey wrench in the public relation works
A Prisoner of Global Impact . There were arrests
U.S. urges Vietnam to resolve case against Americans | US News | Reuters.com, trials
BBC NEWS | Asia-Pacific | US citizens face trial in Vietnam, convictions, and opportune release
BBC NEWS | Asia-Pacific | US citizen deported from Vietnam. But not quite opportune enough; Sen Mel Martinez (R. FL) in whose state Ms Cuc Foshee (Nguyen Thuong Cuc) lives still worked to block then defeat a bill that would grant Vietnam permanent normal trade status with the US. It is noteworthy that she was joined by Dennis Kucinich (D, OH) in this
House defeats Vietnam trade bill - Yahoo! News. Without question this was embarrassing for the White House and wasted what could have been a harmless feel-good moment for the President
Online NewsHour: Analysis | President Bush Begins Asia Trip | November 16, 2006 | PBS. This little crisis was put in motion by an exile group from Orange county called the Government of Free Vietnam
Government of Free Vietnam - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia (considerably aided by the truculent reaction of the Vietnamese government). This group which may or may not be the political front of an armed insurgent force is committed to ending communist rule of Vietnam. My own inclinations are to view the activities of such groups as counterproductive. Surely investment and trade, as I said in an earlier post,
Boger All, - is the best thing for Vietnam. Again I found as I discussed this with Tran, this is not the way she feels. She knew of, and is sympathetic with this GFVN. There can be no engagement with the communists, they can't be trusted, they can't be reasoned with. They will never willingly retreat from their dogmatism and hold on power. And she added, I know nothing of this. I've never lived under communist rule. Point taken. I came away from that, wondering where exactly my faith in the power of engagement comes from. What do we mean by engagement: dialog and trade against, well nothing, is how I think it's viewed. Bargaining at minimum. Globalization Capital culture and labor flows as the ideal state. Outside that there seems only poverty and regime change dreams. A box of trouble
The limits of free trade | | Guardian Unlimited Business. I looked into the ideology of free trade and liberalization. Zibigniew Brzezinski in a book called the Choice 1 refers to it as the Natural Doctrine of Global Hegemony. Something he feels is "Transcending economics to become a national creed", an "explicit norm." He quotes President Clinton: Globalization is not something we can hold off or turn off. It is the economic equivalent of a force of nature [^] like wind and water ...we can not ignore it [^] and it is not going away. (Vietnam National University 17 November 2000)
Further he points out this Neo-liberalism is a joint American ideology. It appealed to Wilsonian Idealists with their utopian aspirations of openness and cooperation, encompassing transnational outlooks, and belief in perfectibility. It also appeals to business elites, free marketeers and market expansionists with its promise of goods and profit transportability. It lends legitimacy to both. Legitimacy is required by both dominant and dominated. In its markets and cultural flows, rising ppp standards of living. It engenders merged outlook, lessened resentment. Essentially this doctrinal legitimacy, Mr. Brzezinski says, reduces the costs of the exercise of power. This dubious edge with with he regards Neo-liberalism, formulates itself in a handful of myths of free trade engagement. These briefly are that in Russia we saw democratization, in China we see development and structural change, and last that the benefits of trade are neutral they do not favor one group over another, one nation over another. Benjamin Barber (who teaches in the GVPT department at Maryland) in Fear's Empire 2 looks at distinctions and relations between capital markets and democracy. He lays this out in two adjacent chapters. In the first on exporting Macworld (a reference to his previous book) he sees a cause and effect question: free markets originated and flourished inside national democracies. Democratic states and their institutions of democracy tempered and channeled capitalism allowing its success. Globalization has altered this precarious balance: "Democracy remains trapped inside the nation state box, leaving global capital utterly unchecked." Investment and development in such circumstance does not aid a culture and can be like pouring gasoline on discontent and wealth imbalance. In the next chapter he looks at the fixed belief Americans have in Exporting America. Not merely limited to preventative democracy, but a compulsion. However these institutions their authority, their particular development, the instinctual habit of those living within and among them do not aggregate to a single transportable thing. Democracy is not a commodity, but an inaugurating process, Barber seems to think if there is a underlying germ to democracy it is the love of argument and ability to allow argument. Avenues of procedural argument must be found within a culture and the mechanics of civil society consensus built up on this before elections will accomplish anything. Seemingly in another corner from all this is Neo-conservatism, and its more proactive approach to spreading democracy. Some critics of trade such as Neil Smith in a book the Endgame of Globalization 3 see no essential difference between neo liberalism and Neo conservatism, both examples of re-territorializing globalism, ie imperialism. They ask does liberalism survive the transition to Neoliberalism [really modern American post progressive liberalism back to the Classic liberalism of Burke, Locke and such]. Can liberalism be compatible with anything colored with nationalism. Speaking for myself I would take an ambitious universalism over internationalism, everytime. Another book I looked at was the Hero's Journey 4 by Michael Salla This book featured a model (more descriptive than predictive) similar to those that speak of generation x,y, & z seeking to explain waxing and waning periods of the American psyche, in how we view and engage the rest of the world, our great revivals through hero's quests and Jungian archetypes. Which aims to illuminate the nature of the crises of a period. While a theory doesn't need to predict the future, it shouldn't be undone by it. Salla (writing in 2000) has the current period of engagement starting with President Carter's Quest to lay American foreign policy on a foundation of human rights. For my friend Tran, freedom is not about free markets. Nothing about markets and trade tariffs, shiny electronic goods in stores matters. Vietnam has some of that stuff, and there is plenty more in Montgomery county. It's not about just a job (she works where I work - it's /not/ about the job). It is about whose hands the markets are in, the hand that is never invisible. It is about the autonomy a job gives you, not what you have to give up for it. It is about your financial and personal security not being based on someone's whim. It is about institutions of underlying value. For Tran it is about being fiercely Catholic. She was viewing a picture in her email a week or so ago. This was a few days after the conversation that provoked this post. She was in the picture standing on the steps of the National Basilica (Shrine of the Immaculate Conception Catholic University Washington DC) singing with a combined choir. It was an event commemorating Our Lady of
La Vang. In the late 1790's the government of Vietnam (according to this story) decided they didn't trust their catholic population, in development for a hundred years at that point. They decided they must all be persuaded to give it up or be killed. And there was great slaughter in the land. One group fled to a forest in what is now Quang Tri provence to hide, but became sick with an illness, at which point a woman with a child appeared among them and advised them to take leaves from a particular tree and make a herbal medicine from them and they would be cured. And as long as they remembered her they would be safe and secure. The Catholic church regards this a visitation from the Virgin Mary. For Tran freedom consists of the choice to so believe and so remember. Engagement delivers this, or it brings nothing.
_______ 1. Brzezinski, Zbigniew, 1928-
The choice : global domination or global leadership/ Zbigniew Brzezinski. New York : Basic Books, c2004.
2. Barber, Benjamin R., 1939-
Fear's empire : war, terrorism, and democracy / Benjamin R. Barber. New York : W.W. Norton & Co., c2004
3. Smith, Neil.
The endgame of globalization/ Neil Smith. New York : Routledge, 2005
4.
The hero's journey toward a second American century / Michael E. Salla. Westport : Praeger 2002
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