Global Policy Forum

By Serge Halimi

What should we - journalists, intellectuals - do in a world where 358 billionaires have more assets than the combined incomes of nearly half of the planet's population? What should we do when Mozambique, where 25% of children die before the age of five from infectious diseases, spends twice as much paying off its debt as it does on health and education? What should we do in a world where, according to the UNDP administrator, "if present trends continue, economic disparities between industrial and developing nations will move from inequitable to inhuman"? What should we do when, within democratic countries themselves, money dominates the political system until it becomes the system, those who write the checks write the laws and ask the questions, and increasingly citizens seem to be replaced with investors?

But can we still, as journalists and intellectuals, denounce this situation and suggest remedies when so many of these billionaires - the Bill Gates, Rupert Murdochs, Jean-Luc Lagardí¨res, Ted Turners, Conrad Blacks of the world - own the papers in which we write, the radios on which we speak, the television networks in which we appear? When so much of the news and culture that is fed into developing nations comes from industrial countries and so little of the news the industrial countries ever hear about seeps in from developing nations? When those who write the checks and write the laws and ask the questions and invest and divest and downsize, are also our employers, our providers of advertising revenue, our trend-setters, our decision-makers our news-makers?

In other words, can we even think of doing what we must in this global world, doing what we should, as journalists and as intellectuals, comforting the afflicted and afflicting the comfortable, being a counter-power, a voice for the voiceless, when so many of us are as much a part of the ruling class as the business elite itself? When so many of us echo the speeches of the powerful and blame the attitudes of the poor?

Unfortunately, if the questions are necessary, the answers are obvious. Most of us cannot, most of us will not do what they must. And this too is the result of the type of globalisation we have let happen. Although I do not believe this globalisation to be inevitable, the media are trying to make it seem inevitable and to pretend it to be desirable. And no one - least of all us journalists and intellectuals - should deny the power of the ideas which we disseminate and back to the drumbeat of around-the-clock propaganda in a sleepless and borderless world.

Two and a half years ago, at Le Monde diplomatique, we called this propaganda "pensée unique". The expression caught on so fast that, within a month, candidate Jacques Chirac used it to re-ignite his sputtering presidential campaign. And three months later, he had become president of France. Needless to say, the sense of the expression has lost a lot with its new popularity... So what is "pensée unique", or more precisely what was it before its meaning became so blurred? And why should we oppose it?

It is the ideological translation of the interests of global capital, of the priorities of financial markets and of those who invest in them. It is the dissemination through leading newspapers of the policies advocated by the international economic institutions which use and abuse the credit, data and expertise they are entrusted with: such institutions as the World Bank, the IMF, the OECD, the World Trade Organization.

Easy to spot in most countries, and in constant expansion because of globalisation, this new orthodoxy results in submitting democratically-elected governments to the one and only policy claimed to be sustainable, that which has the consent of the rich. Speaking of this, and trying to sound rational and Anglo-Saxon, a French essayist, Alain Minc explained: "The totalitarianism of financial markets does not please me. I find it alienating. But I know it is there. And I want everyone in the elite to know it too. I am like a peasant who does not appreciate hail and yet he knows he will have to live with it. What I mean is simple: I don't know whether the markets think right. But I know one cannot think against the markets. If you do not respect a certain number of canons, as rigorous as those of the Church, the 100,000 illiterates who make the markets will blow the whole economy away. Experts have to be the propagandists of that reality." When he said "experts", he also implied "journalists" of course. And, in this respect, he is served well enough.

But should one accept this nice vignette of "pensée unique", this suave legitimation of a new dictatorship, that of financial markets, politics will amount - and it largely does - to little more than a pseudo-debate between parties of government shouting out the minuscule differences that separate them and silencing the significant convergences that unite them. Electoral dissaffection will be, is already, the result of this non-debate.

In the United States, where foreign companies heavily invested in the White House "coffees" funding the President's reelection - thereby blurring even further the line between national politics and global commerce - only 48,8% of the eligible voters went to the polls last November, the lowest number since 1924. This indifference almost amounted to a quiet expression of civil disobedience.

But I would like to take another example, this one from Greece, and see how the mainstream press, in this instance The Washington Post, reacted to it by drilling into our brains the major postulates of what we, at Le Monde diplomatique, also like to call "market journalism". Last December, as Greek peasants were barring the roads in protest of austerity measures threatening their survival, one of them complained: "The only right we have is the right to vote and it leads us nowhere." An election had been held, leading to the victory of a pro-business socialist party. And when it happened, The Washington Post had concluded: "This was the first truly modern election in the history of the birthplace of democracy ... The two parties essentially agree on most of the major issues."

Can we, as journalists, as intellectuals, accept the idea that a "modern democracy" is one in which the major parties agree on most issues? And if we do, as is too often the case, how dare we bemoan the rise of so-called "extremism" and "populism" when it is but the mere consequence of the legitimate anger that comes from a truncated political debate in a socially polarised society? We all make fun of the tendency, especially in America, to be "politically correct". But don't we fall in the trap of being economically correct - cheerleaders for the stock market, asleep at the switch when Robert Maxwell was robbing his companies, or maybe just too busy then writing fawning profiles of Carlos Salinas's "economic miracle"...?

"In three years, the new millennium", "a bridge to the 21st century" : the definition of modernity and of its opposite is, I believe, one of the most telling instances of the weight of this "pensée unique". When one listens to the mass media, "modernity" is almost invariably equated with free trade, strong currencies, deregulation, privatisations, communication (of those who have the means to communicate with each other in the virtual "communities" they create), Europe (insofar as it is that of free trade, strong currencies, privatizations, and communication).

"Outdated notions", on the other hand, are almost invariably associated with the welfare state, government in general (unless it shrivels into a lean and mean law-and-order machine), unions (which are said to defend "special interests", unlike those of, say, big business), the nation-state (guilty of fostering "nationalism"), the people (always likely to be entranced by "populism").

Then let me say this: their modernity is archaic. It is as old as the steam machine. And their outdated notions have never been more necessary. Too often, we journalists pretend the opposite. So, yes indeed we must oppose globalisation and its logical consequences. And, most of all, we must fight the belief that it is inevitable. In this respect, Le Monde diplomatique and the Financial Times cannot but be allies. Because, what, at Le Monde diplomatique, could we add to the excellent analysis of Martin Wolf in an article he wrote two years ago. The article was entitled: "The Global Economy Myth" and it said: "Global economic integration is far from irresistible. Governments have chosen to lower trade barriers and eliminate foreign exchange controls. They could, if they wished, halt both processes." They must. Let us help them.

But, clearly, this is not the sense of the comments we have just heard. Because, what strikes me in the discourse of the apostles of the market and of globalisation is its extremism, its oblivion of the notion of healthy doubt. It's the analogy one easily can draw with the cant of communists thirty or forty years ago. According to you, markets have to be a great model for human kind, and so does globalisation. And when these don't quite work out, we hear: "Give us more time", "Let's go one more step", "Change is always painful", "What we've seen wasn't quite pure enough", "If only the people were better, more pliable, things would have worked beautifully".

Social inequalities? Let's deny their existence or claim they exist because ... we don't have enough markets. Not enough school or hospital vouchers. Not enough enterprise zones. Not enough tax breaks. Not enough pension funds. Not enough competition within the civil service. Like with Stalinism before, every stumble in the march toward a pure, radiant, bountiful market society is explained by the timidity of the march, not by its direction. And, like with Stalinism before, the critics of your model have to be irrational, in need of a reeducation program or of a mental treatment?

Well, it might be - just might be - that the market is a model that doesn't work well for most people ; that markets can be a great wealth-creating machine, but not so great when it comes to building a human, just, and decent society for most of us. And what will it take us to learn that? How many people living in poverty? How many people sealed out of what Mr Alan Greenspan, the Chairman of the Federal Reserve, called the "irrational exuberance of the market"? How many people sealed out of the gated communities of the rich? How many people behind bars? How many riots? And which proportion of us convinced that democracy is not for them?

If the fall of communism and of its related certainties about the nature of mankind have taught us anything, it should not be the need for another totalitarianism, for another tyranny - that of financial markets. But the value of doubt and the need for dissidents. Let us all relearn the value of doubt.

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