Op-Ed Contributors

Globalization is not equal to national interest

By Martin Albrow (China Daily)
Updated: 2010-07-01 07:52

There's one word we are unlikely to hear from the new British government and that is "globalization". Even though there may be countries in worse trouble as a result of the global financial crisis, such as Greece, no other has experienced it quite so much as a psychological shock as Britain. For Britain, first in the 1980s under Margaret Thatcher and the Conservatives and then, after 1997, under Tony Blair, Gordon Brown and New Labour, globalization appeared to be the answer to a historic problem.

That problem was the loss of Empire. In the aftermath of World War II former US secretary of state, Dean Acheson, famously said that Britain had lost an Empire and not found a role. Though militarily relatively insignificant and with a tiny economy compared with the United States, the new imperial superpower, this small country aimed to be "global Britain", demonstrating the benefits of globalization to the whole world in raising standards of living and promoting liberal values.

Conservative and Labour governments both promoted the free movement of capital and the reduction of trade barriers. They opened the domestic market to unrestricted foreign investment and allowed British firms to be taken over by foreign companies. They attracted the world's billionaires to settle in London, a global city, striving to replace New York as the world's financial center. London Heathrow airport was to become the global communications hub, the BBC the world's news provider.

Britain might no longer rule the world, but it could be an example to it, of how a country could take on a global role for the benefit of humankind. It was not disconcerted by the downsides of economic globalization, like the disruption of national markets, mass migration to cities and across borders, and growing inequality between rich and poor. In response, Britain became a cheerleader for meeting United Nations targets on aid, and on global environmental and health issues.

The global financial crisis has swept all this away. Gordon Brown, famed as co-architect of the new global economy, was hailed as its saviour in April 2009 when the leaders of the world's largest economies met at a crisis summit in London. But this did not save him or New Labour in the May 2010 general election. Instead the new Conservative Prime Minister David Cameron has to tell the country it faces a budget deficit of 12.8 percent of its GDP, the largest in the world for any major economy.

So what went wrong and are there any lessons for China in this latest British experience? In answer to the first question one can point to Britain's failure to make a clear distinction between globalization as a process, where countries make policy choices on how open they want their borders to be, and all those global issues, like climate change and nuclear security for which every country needs to take its share of responsibility. The former poses pragmatic choices, the latter moral imperatives.

Intoxicated by their adoption of a new global role, the British lost the sense of proportion and all things global became confused with each other. It would seem the trauma of loss of Empire still remains to be overcome. Could there be lessons for other powers in the post-imperial experience of globalization of that small island?