Glocalism and Decentralized Networks

I think it was smart that Mark walked his arguments around free trade and globalism back a few steps in the light of well-founded arguments presented to the contrary. Not only is it the intellectually honest thing to do, but I think it gives us an opportunity to breathe and take a look at what it is that we’re actually arguing about.

In some senses I find these discussions about localism and globalism, free-market economics and distributism/protectionism, interventionism and isolationism to be among the most interesting and exciting discussions going. It’s my own humble opinion that the issues grappled there within are perhaps the most pressing and vital on our collective plate, both because they lie at the heart of the question we all face on a day-to-day basis (whether we choose to acknowledge it or not), “How shall I live?” and because that question is the pulse that lies within the veins of so many other truly daunting and important questions (economics, environment, politics, culture, technology, architecture, the list goes on).

Alternatively; however, I also find these conversations truly frustrating because the tendency for their participants is to get caught in dichotomous tropes, well worn pathways that inevitably lead to brick walls of disagreement and intractability. To wit, Mark and his interlocutors all chose to frame their discussion in either/or language; we either go local or we go global, period (Dr. Larison explicitly titled his well-received rejoinder as such). There is always some benefit to strongly stated cases and arguments flying about on either side, but at some point you come to an impasse when the letters “vs” are stuck into your articulation — and this is all the more the case when it comes to issues that are as well debated as globalism and localism. For me, the truly fascinating space of the debate is that sliver of an opening that suggests that both sides have a good deal of proprietary truth they bring to the table, but still possess enough cracks in their master plan to allow for a certain intellectual legoing of the ideas offered.

Hence, my real direction in all of this is to explore the notions of how the truths uncovered by localists about a certain way of living that seems increasingly vital, especially insofar as value and integrity are concerned, might be fit together with the powerful potential of global networks with which our free-market economic adventures and resulting global cultural cross-pollination have provided us with. In my first crack at this I termed what I was trying to articulate was a sense of glocality, and appropriately warned of my neologistic midwifery. Imagine my surprise (probably not all that surprising, actually, but delightful all the same) when a couple of posts down the road, Dara Lind alerted me to the fact that my somewhat half-baked wordplay had a semi-coherent correspondent body of thought. So it is that my belief in matters large and small have come to rest on the notion that neither globalism nor localism themselves provide a full answer to the question, “How shall I/we live?” Rather, each contains some element of powerful but limited truth in the matter and that a fuller picture is best painted by finding some kind of fusion between the two.

Welcome to glocalism.

Of course, it all fine and well to type words onto the screen, but the real challenge here is to attempt the mental exercise of fleshing out what the concept you think you’ve hit upon actually means, particularly in relation to real world issues. That’s where my head has been at over the past little while, and given that I have precious few sign posts by which to chart my direction the going has been somewhat predictably slow. But reading over Mark’s posts and, in particular, Larison’s response, I thnk I have something worth offering up.

By my lights, one of the most compelling arguments around localism and against globalism has to do with the eradication that the attendant free-market economic model unleashes upon local cultures. The idea of mono-culture is perhaps one of the most pervasive fears expressed about globalization, the reasons for which are all too apparent. Not only is the idea of living in a veritable McWorld disturbing to cultural dissenters of the west, but it is the primary cause of resistance from those in other parts of the world for whom a rooted sense of culture and tradition aren’t just quaint notions to squabble over on blogs, but provide the very foundation of life and meaning in an immediate and overwhelming way.

The question that occurs to me is whether global free-market economics must necessarily lead to an eradication of local culture, the answer to which I think is no. The focus around how global free-market economics flattens distinctive culture rightly revolves around centralization, both in the functioning of a broad democracy like America and on the planet as a whole. I’m disinclined to tackle the question about a centralized federal government in America, primarily because that isn’t my focus, but whole-heartedly willing to look at the centralizing entities of global interaction and how they result in a flattening of culture.

Entities like the WTO and the IMF were heralded as great international organizations birthed by the vision of an economically interconnected world following WWII by the pioneers of such economic interconnectedness. The purpose of these entities were to provide a a universalizing intermediary to ensure a level playing field and common lingua franca for the realization of interconnected economic order. The WTO and IMF succeeded only to well in their mission, not just in acting as the middleman and referee between national economic interests, but eventually becoming manufacturer of culture and order upon which interconnectedness itself was to be predicated.

In some senses it is entirely predictable that organizations like the WTO and the IMF would oversteps their bounds and overreach in their roles eventually, the uncharted territory of global economic interconnectedness requires a certitude of its standard bearers that practically begs a tipping into unwarranted and corrupting arrogance. Despite my sustained frustration with her approach and tactics, I think that Naomi Klein makes a compelling case for the Achilles heal of these institutions: namely, the biasing infiltration of specified ideology.

Over the preceding the decades, both the WTO and the IMF became infected with the same economic myopia that has unleashed what may be the most devastating economic meltdown in the planet’s history. One of the most compelling elements of capitalism as a system is its flexibility, it’s fluidity in adapting to the lives and mindsets of disparate agents. But the brand of cookie-cutter capitalism that has come to dominate the global free-marketism prevalent in globalization as we know it and championed by institutions like the WTO and the IMF stands as anathema to what may be free markets’ greatest strength. And while it is true that economics and culture are not identicle twins, it is easy to see how they remain kissing cousins and how a homogenization of one would deeply influence the other.

At the same time, the trend of globalization that the liberal free-trade order built also built a stunning tramway of network interconnections that are, in many regards, the rail road tracks of the globe’s twenty-first century frontier wilderness. It is those networks and trade of not just goods but ideas and cultures via those networks that I’m most concerned about a thorough going localism turning away from and the idea that, indeed, if we cultivate a greater degree of autonomy and decentralization in the use of those networks that we might be able to realize a kind of diversity that far surpassing anything we might cultivate by choosing only to play in our own sand boxes.

In this regard, it is my belief that we are rapidly outgrowing the stabilizing influences IMF and the WTO and would be well advised to continue our project of increasing integration by advancing an agenda of increasing decentralization. Just as we learn to ride a bike with the use of training wheels, the embryonic conceptions of a centralized global system of trade made a lot of sense decades ago. But just as those training wheels inhibit us from tasting the full experience of riding a bike after a time, so too has our centralized global system begun to demonstrate its short comings. The corrosive phenomenon of mono culture is in many ways just one of those symptoms.

A truly decentralized global system will surely start out a messy affair, prone to challenges and difficulties a plenty. But I would suggest that those challenges could be no more daunting than any of the myriad of challenges that we face with our decrepit and stifling centralized system currently. At the end of the day, a decentralized system frees different nation-states and cultures to explore those global networks as themselves and not what they are told they must be to gain entrance. Free trade could be enabled to take on the distinctive flavours of its hosts and different trading partner would be forced to interact with and learn about the quirks and idiosyncrasies of doing business without one another without the facade of an overarching understanding of what it means to “do business”. Inequalities will be present and power dynamics will have to be negotiated without the benefit of a free-market referee. But then, how many of those countries and cultures who will be on the short end of the stick feel like those leveling institutions are actually working in their favour right now?

The fact of the matter is that we live in a world of unfathomable diversity and if we truly want to live in a global community and not just contently paste that phrase on bumper stickers and reports, we have to find the wherewithal to reckon with that diversity on its own terms. Our centralized global system has demonstrated that while it has been effective in placing that diversity within reaching distance, when push comes to shove it is incapable of avoiding the violence done to particular cultures because its focus is on its own maintenance.

My own opinion is that the project of global integration is, at this point, close to inevitable; gravitational in its pull. The question then, is what that integration will look like and from a glocalist stand point nothing could more harmful than to turn our backs, stick our fingers in our ears and pretend like we can ignore the rest of the world. Rather, the important ideas and concerns of the localist movement need to be centre stage as we fashion an ever connected world, to attempt to realize the best possible outcome of that construction. To do so, we must first acknowledge that globalization remains a maleable proposition and find ways of arguing for the contours we see as vital to its shaping.

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Tags | Decentralization, distributism, Free Trade, global community, global free market, global networks, globalization, glocalism, IMF, local culture, localism, mono culture, WTO