Gerard Henderson, one of our local clear thinkers, is both illustrative and to the point. ‘[T]here is little governments can do about the process of globalisation. People want to trade and people want to move … it is almost impossible to resist such developments.’ He goes on: ‘For a small trading nation like Australia, there is no alternative … A country with the population size and economic might of the US might be able to take a stand against aspects of globalisation. Likewise, possibly, the European Union. But not 19 million strong Australia.’ Then comes the clincher: ‘Not without a significant decline in living standards.’

Gerard Henderson has much support for his position. He certainly won’t be contradicted by the economic experts who regard the protestors as quite insane. Nor will he find resistance from Third Way thinkers — Tony Blair or Anthony Giddens for instance — who assume there is no alternative to globalisation as we have known it.

Yet with such a strong version of reality on the side of the global economy why have the protests gained such support? And in taking up this question it should be kept in mind that the WTO protests do have a larger picture with a definite momentum. This can be illustrated by reference to world-wide phenomena, but there is more than sufficient local material to make the point. Take for a start the meteoric rise and fall of One Nation, a party which rode the wave of deep resentment towards global restructuring and had mainstream politicians in fear of the political abyss. And as the political fortunes of One Nation sank like a stone, the forces of protest renewed themselves. They removed the most powerful politician in Australia, Jeff Kennett, and now John Howard is in their sights. Don’t talk to this embattled sector about the high living standards offered by globalisation.

What Gerard Henderson and others assume is that while there is pain, disruption, even loss of livelihood, there is no choice. Globalisation is just one of those tragedies of economic development, like the industrial revolution. Some people get hurt, but the greater good emerges given time.

In the face of this common sense those who protest against it have little to say that can shake it. They know they are against it. They know they are increasingly shut out of the core practices of social life and are, at best, being managed as problems. But to shake the common sense view and shape politics in a definite direction requires much more: a perspective which can locate how it is that globalisation has these effects, and which can then be drawn upon to develop social policy in a plausible alternative direction.

It is here, of course, that commentators like Gerard Henderson win hands down, for the moment. They win because there are no self-evident plausible alternatives, a situation the Left is reluctant to face. Certainly the socialist utopia has no credibility, and the implication of most commentators that to reject globalisation is to reject modernity in favour of a village level of development rings true for too many.

A policy which can cut through conventional globalisation needs an awareness of what is unique to global culture and economy: its capacity, through the combination of the market with the full range of high technologies, to render most, if not all, of social reality as elements of a market calculus. This universality, this capacity to reduce all particulars to a general value, laid the ground for what the economic rationalists called the ‘level playing field’. It was the renewed power of this market which has swept aside public institutions since the early 1980s.

At the same time it is this very universality of global culture, mediated as it is by the various high-tech media forms, which undermines all particular relations and institutions. What is a strength is also a weakness. While globalisation claims to re-assert the local, it nevertheless undermines diverse expressions of culture or economy based on particular social relations. Thus the emphasis on the ‘local’ in the global/local divide is more an expression of need and of loss than a practical reality with institutional force. And it is this structural process which gives the lie to the implicit hope in writers such as Gerard Henderson that things will balance out over time.

Neither Adam Smith nor Karl Marx faced such a bleak reality. Prior to ‘their’ market lay a community structure they assumed and built on. Here Smith found the basis for an ethics, while Marx found the basis for a politics. And these structures were composed of particular social relations — this family, that community, ‘our’ history.

In other words today’s global market is by no means merely a market. The fusion of the market with the new powers of high technology allows it to combine economy and culture in a new way. The nineteenth century could be characterised as having boundaries between the market and cultural contexts — a prior community — which was its foundation. These particularistic cultural settings had the effect of limiting the reach of the market because they co-existed with it. They limited the ‘freedom’ of that market.

The postmodern market, on the other hand, reaches into and reshapes those social forces which Smith and Marx took for granted. It is this background force which allows Gerard Henderson to speak with such confidence, even though he has no grasp of its special powers. He has history on his side, he might well conclude.

Yet just as the share market today experiences jitters even as it celebrates its latest triumph, he has no reason to feel too confident. A social order built on the global market is inherently unstable, as evidenced in processes which systematically destroy all local institutions and social relations. And its savagery towards stable work is legendary. Even in the heart of the booming techno-sector no job has security, as 16,000 Telstra employees have just discovered. Hence the ‘irrational’ vehement opposition to — and bitterness towards — the global way. Yet instability will not in itself turn the tide. It is the emergence of a social idea able to contain the global market which is the crucial matter. Such an idea combined with a social determination to make the idea practical would certainly put the cat amongst the pigeons.

The novelty of our situation lies with this special power of the global market over us: firstly the sheer power of its apparatus to devour and shape all social relations; secondly the widespread belief, shared by protestors, economists and Gerard Henderson alike, that there can only be one market structure in social affairs. These two aspects join to close off social policies which could contain and manage globalisation.

In fact there have been many types of exchange historically. Some have coexisted with others for long periods of time. For example reciprocal exchange, which does not rely on the money form, is as old as human society. Its structures today still make a crucial mark on the formation of selves in co-operative relations with others, although increasingly they are truncated. With the economic market itself there are also important distinctions to be made. In his investigation of the meanings of the market, Marx emphasised the universality of its medium of exchange. This is a crucial insight but it can be overstated. Postmodern globalisation allows us to see this is a relative question. Some markets are regional. Their sphere of exchange is regional and hence they depend upon particular individuals and communities. Such markets emerged in the first instance around restricted mediums of exchange. Others have a more universal character but still are particular to a nation. These obviously contrast with global markets.

If reciprocal exchange has managed to co-exist with markets before the emergence of the global market, the same cannot be said for money markets. The policy problem is that our only experience of market exchange has been through one dominant form of exchange. Once there were regional markets. We know them only as traces within the national market. In the year 2000 it is now possible to tell a similar story about the national market. Now it ‘survives’ as it can within the logic of the global market. What most people assume is that there should only be one form of market exchange. And notably, today, that is the global logic of info-money.

A choice between a global market and a national market has little to recommend it. The choice is too stark and is not viable. But in the face of an all-consuming global market the co-existence of other market structures as well as reciprocal exchange which better preserve particular social relations and regional identities is a choice which is non-negotiable. Only then would the space for cultural choice open up and allow sectors within our economy which are not at the mercy of the global market. Then global diversity would mean something. The social policy question becomes one of how to have at least two markets which co-exist, employing mutually exclusive mechanisms.

It would be novel historically, and test the social and practical imagination of us all. But it is an alternative to what we have come to know as ‘globalisation’. Could this become one of the social policy issues at the World Economic Forum which is to be held at Crown Casino, Melbourne on 11–13 September, 2000?

An extended version of this editorial can be found in Arena Journal No. 14

Like a funhouse mirror, the brutal mass-bombing and shelling of Chechnya by Russian forces resembles a distorted version of NATO’s bombing of Serbian forces in Kosovo. And while there are differences, as Clinton and Blair are keen to point out, the complicity of the West in the Chechnya situation is both real and multilevelled. Firstly, Russia has taken a leaf out of NATO’s manual on how to wage contemporary warfare. Secondly, the United States has long been a supporter of Russian attempts to dominate Chechnya. Finally, the muted response by the West to such overt barbarism has as much to do with investments in the global economy, natural resources, and ideological attempts to restrain perceived growth of fundamentalist Islam as it has to do with the issues of opposing a powerful and nuclear-capable nation.

Despite some coverage, the media response, in proportion to the amount of killing and terror that is evident in Chechnya, has been restrained. While Russia over the past six weeks has relentlessly bombed cities and villages, resulting in indiscriminate destruction, causing over two hundred thousand people to flee to neighbouring Ingushetia, there has been precious little coverage in the media of a crisis that equals, if not surpasses, the one in Kosovo. Whereas dozens of television cameras were able to convey the multifaceted scenes of terror in Kosovo, we are yet to see anything comparable in Chechnya. One can speculate on the reasons for this. One is that Russia has ensured that media contact is minimal – it is fighting its own version of an ‘information war’. Few reporters are willing to go to an area made so obviously dangerous by random bombing, combined with threats of kidnapping. Russian shelling has destroyed local media structures, along with everything else. The lack of television coverage means that Russia can deny much of what it is doing, the attack on Elistanzhi and the bombing of five Red Cross vehicles (killing two staff and twenty-five civilians) being two notorious early examples.

Another reason may be the effects of the new post-1989 division between so-called Central Europe and what remains of the East, a kind of replication of Zygmunt Bauman’s ‘new poor’ at a national/regional level. In other words, if it is not in ‘Europe’ then it does not get priority – at some level it does not even exist. Perhaps it is all too much to cope with so soon after Kosovo. Here we have another example of forced movement, bombing from above, except that the same side is doing both the bombing and the forced emigration. Yet if Kosovo remains in limbo, with little in the way of positive results, if the ‘humanitarian’ values espoused as the reason for the high-altitude bombing in the Balkans have withered with time, is it not possible to find a degree of convergence between NATO-style abstract destruction in the name of humanitarianism, and the more obviously odious form destruction takes in Chechnya?

Since the breakup of the USSR, the republic of Chechnya has been a source of consternation for Russia. Claiming an independent heritage and a different ethnic composition (largely Muslim), Chechnya also contains much of the rich oil and gas deposits of the Caucasus. In 1994 Russia attempted to submit Chechnya to its will, first through what is known as the Russian ‘Bay of Pigs’ disaster, when Russian soldiers disguised as Chechens attempted to infiltrate the region, and were comprehensively routed. Six months later this was followed by open invasion. In the end Russia withdrew, having sustained large casualties in fighting a vicious ground war. There have been subsequent incidents of Chechen terrorism, including several bomb attacks in Moscow in ‘retaliation’.

This time, it is different. Russia has followed the model of the United States in Iraq and NATO in Kosovo and has conducted war at a distance. When the weather is clear Russian airplanes have made over 150 sorties a day. On 3 November the Russian airforce commander complained that his pilots had dropped so many precision-guided bombs that they were running short. At the time of writing the bombing has increased. Not that precision seems to have been of much importance. The city of Grozny is decimated, its central marketplace and hospital destroyed. It may even be that the airforce and army do not even know what they are hitting, with many Russian pilots having received minimal training. Patrick Cockburn of the Independent reports that the most common sound in Chechnya is that of the notoriously inaccurate Grad missile launcher.

There is no doubt that in the short term many in Russia are reaping the benefits of this new style of mediated destruction. The approval ratings of Prime Minister Putin have soared as he vows to teach a lesson to the ‘bandits, terrorists and gangsters’ in Chechnya. That this can be done without apparent risk of the humiliation and defeat of Russian soldiers, as in the first war, means that Putin’s military posturing has made him currently the most popular Russian politician. By conducting this ‘safer’ NATO-style war, Russia gains a double revenge – against Chechnya after the humiliations of the 1994-6 war, and against the West – as Russia reasserts itself after being largely left out of the negotiations in Kosovo. The assertion of national power also provides a useful deflection away from the recent money-laundering scandal that rocked Moscow.

There is also a more material gain. It seems that Russia is determined not only to liquidate Islamic rebels (an attempt which has largely failed), but also to regain control of the Caucasus via first gaining control of Chechnya – the gateway to the rich energy resources of the Caspian and Central Asia. Notably, Russia’s ‘recovery’ has been led by profits generated from oil and gas. Indeed Russia’s current account surplus may top 20 billion US dollars, thanks to oil and gas revenue, something that was no doubt made clear to the IMF on a recent visit.

The West has been slow to criticise Russia for conducting the form of abstract terrorism it is now engaged in. Reasons are easy enough to find. Firstly, the Clinton administration has been a long-time supporter of Russia’s attempt to dominate Chechnya. Indeed in the first campaign of 1994-6 President Clinton was highly vocal in his support for Russia, comparing Russia’s ‘struggle’ with Chechnya to America’s civil war, even going so far as to call Boris Yeltsin a Russian Abraham Lincoln. The fact that Chechnya is largely Muslim, and the fact that bombs had been planted in Moscow by Chechens has allowed the rhetoric of the ‘war on terrorism’ to flow freely. In December last year the New York Times declared that ‘Mr. Yeltsin is justified in using military force to suppress the [Chechnya] rebellion’. Only very recently, Madeline Allbright expressed US support for Russia against fundamentalist terrorism. Al Gore has said that he will be even tougher than Clinton on Muslim fundamentalist campaigns of violence. This general tenor has created a paradoxical effect upon the world stage. At the same time as President Clinton was ordering Indonesia to get out of East Timor (albeit without real commitment), his administration was supporting a savage invasion of Chechnya, in the name of a war on terrorism. While support has recently waned in the light of Russia’s open and ‘disproportionate’ campaign of terror, this complicity explains the West’s muted criticism, and both the United States’ and Britain’s affirmation at this point that they will not attempt to impose sanctions.

The relation between Russia and the global economy points toward a further level of complicity. Some commentators have called for the United States to stop financial assistance to Russia, as this is clearly, at some significant level, underwriting the war on Chechnya. Yet, while this may happen, the United State is reluctant because of the effect this might have on the global economy. As Rupert Cornwall writes, ‘Economic sanctions could backfire by triggering loan defaults or a repeat of Russia’s 1998 financial crisis that might destabilise international markets’ (Independent, 6 November 1999). For a number of reasons then, it would seem that the hands of the United States are tied. If Prime Minister Putin thumbs his nose at the West, gaining in popularity as he does so, it is perhaps this knowledge that the West simply cannot afford to risk another financial collapse that underscores his immunity to criticism.

After the disaster in Kosovo, and after the destruction of the Chechen republic, it is increasingly clear that the only solution to such racial and territorial aggression is a strengthened United Nations able to intervene on the ground and outside of regional or national interest. While this is a tall order, it is the only realistic possibility. In the last six months we have seen that neither the United States nor NATO is able to act as the world’s policeman. The style of intervention – abstract killing at a distance, the generation of genuine, if often fleeting, upwelling of humanitarian support via media concentration – has proven highly selective, as well as ultimately ineffective. Now Russia has used the methods of the West in a brutal parody of Kosovo-style intervention. The West is unwilling to act due to varying degrees of complicity, its media almost turning a blind eye to the problem.

Note: For the full version of this article, see issue 44 of Arena Magazine.