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Statements like these infuriate John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge, editors of London's classical liberal weekly newsmagazine, The Economist. In A Future Perfect, they jointly find the pope's remarks, if not hypocritical, then at least bizarre. Here, they write, we have "one of the men who has most turbocharged the pace of globalization" by helping to remove the "greatest barrier to the universal role of market capitalism," and yet:
[A]s the 1990s wore on, the pope became increasingly uneasy about what he had wrought. As he contemplated the spread of sin, selfishness, and inequality, he worried that "unbridled capitalism" was little improvement on "savage Marxism.". … Globalism began to assume the same role in his life that communism once had.
In response, the pontiff might cite Peter Jay's The Wealth of Man, which—among other unsavory aspects of global capitalism—chronicles Russia's disastrous transition from communism. Where the government would not allow enough latitude for regular markets to function, the black market and organized crime arose, inspiring lawlessness and murder. Vodka, which the communists had supplied in enough quantity to keep the population sedated, now became more affordable in greater quantity, and Russian men promptly began drinking themselves to death. Through rigged auctions, valuable state properties were sold for rubles on the dollar and then resold, the wealth being funneled into foreign bank accounts; they wisely didn't trust their own crony-ridden financial institutions.
Most of the former Soviet Bloc nations haven't fared much better. Micklethwait and Wooldridge tell of one former satellite dumping raw sewage into the river that it and a neighbor satellite jointly share in a tiff over non-payment for sanitary water. Africa continues to be a war- torn wreck. Asia, though it evidenced—and continues to show—real progress, nearly dragged the whole world into a financial pit in 1998 following the unexpected devaluation of Indonesia's currency, the rupiah. And while vast wealth has accumulated in places such as America, the distribution of said wealth is seriously skewed. Maybe the Seattle rioters had a point. Maybe we should turn to a more heavy-handed but survivable governance and relegate globalization, with communism, to the dustheap of history.
Not so fast, say our classical liberals. The thesis of A Future Perfect is that globalization, on the whole, is tugging us in the right direction and hence needs to be "not only. … understood but. … defended stoutly." With characteristically witty Oxbridge prose and a raft of subtitles, they set out to do just that: explain and defend globalization against its enemies and, more important, its erstwhile friends. Globalization, they argue, has been badly (and under-) sold by free-market types, American enthusiasts, and center-left politicians the world over. Nearly every camp has giddily embraced one or more of the refutable myths about what they call "a process rather than a fact."
Micklethwait and Wooldridge attempt to hack through the hyperbole that surrounds the issue. Yes, they admit, globalization has been driven by "the gradual decision by politicians to step out of the way since the end of the Second World War," but that hardly amounts to a laissez-faire regime: control could be, and historically has been, reinstated quickly. Contrary to the wishes of anarchists and utopian libertarians, the nation state is not about to wither away anytime soon. Yes, it does create losers, but if this sometimes "savage process" is allowed to run its course, the number of winners end up "far outnumber[ing]" those it shortchanges. Too often, globalization has been held accounatable for social ills that are in fact directly traceable to suffocatingly corrupt local governments, which often seek to deflect blame by foisting it off on a foreign force.
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