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The Right’s Infatuation With Globalization

Niall Ferguson makes an important observation that the Anglophone right, as he calls it, has been oblivious to the impossibility of pursuing three distinct goals. As Ferguson writes: Suppose that a government can have any two of the following things, but not all three: globalisation, in the sense of openness to international flows of goods, […]

Niall Ferguson makes an important observation that the Anglophone right, as he calls it, has been oblivious to the impossibility of pursuing three distinct goals. As Ferguson writes:

Suppose that a government can have any two of the following things, but not all three: globalisation, in the sense of openness to international flows of goods, services, capital and labour; social stability; and a small state. Or, to put it differently, conservatives can pick any two from an open economy, a stable society and political power – but not all three.

This seems true to me, which is why it puzzles me that pretty much everyone on the Anglophone right (with a few exceptions) has concluded that the things that need to be dropped are either “social stability” or “the small state” or both. If there is one fundamental area of agreement among almost all Republicans and Tories, it is that policies that support globalization must not be touched. There are quite a few people who agree that the right has to adapt to new circumstances, but very few of them are interested in altering support for policies that facilitate globalization. Bizarrely, just as the worsening of the Iraq war made the war the one unquestionable policy on the American right, the global recession has made globalization even more sacrosanct than it was. As with Iraq, the Anglophone and particularly the American right seems to enjoy embracing even more tightly something that the rest of the world and most Americans are souring on.

Dropping social stability together with a tweak of the “small state” model is what Ferguson recommends: embrace social change and support a “smart” state that will be interventionist in targeted ways. What hardly anyone on the right is interested in challenging or critiquing, much less rejecting, is globalization. As I have been saying several times this week, the things that conservatives claim to want to preserve are incompatible with globalization, just as George Grant observed decades ago that they were incompatible with the right’s embrace of technological progress (and empire). It seems to me that this vindicates one of the central insights of the “crunchy” and neo-traditionalist critique of the mainstream right, which is that when push comes to shove mainstream conservatives prize the fruits of “creative destruction” over all else. This seemed true several years ago, and the last three years have tended to confirm the claim.

MEP Daniel Hannan’s tongue-lashing of Gordon Brown has received a fair amount of attention, and certainly few deserve ridicule and scorn more than Brown, but Hannan is representative of the sort of thing I’m talking about. What was the first thing Hannan criticized? He attacked Brown’s hypocrisy for praising free trade while also having used the phrase “British jobs for British workers,” which is fair enough in that the two are contradictory, but it is telling that Hannan’s problem wasn’t simply the contradiction but that the problem with Brown’s position was that it was insufficiently globalist. Unlike Janet Daley, who has since come around to seeing the virtue of the idea of “British jobs for British workers” but still tut-tuts at protectionist measures, Hannan is a thoroughgoing globalist (and, I might add, a bit of a loon who says things like, “Israel is more than a country; it is an archetype”) and a perfect example of the sort of Conservative who would sooner defend globalization and abandon everything else if it were necessary.

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