Is a New Economic Consensus Emerging from the Ashes of the Old?

By Walden Bello, Foreign Policy in Focus. Posted January 13, 2009.

Joining Brown in articulating the Global Social Democratic discourse has been a diverse group consisting of, among others, the economist Jeffrey Sachs, George Soros, former UN Secretary General Kofi Annan, the sociologist David Held, Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz, and even Bill Gates. There are, of course, differences of nuance in the positions of these people, but the thrust of their perspectives is the same: to bring about a reformed social order and a reinvigorated ideological consensus for global capitalism.

Among the key propositions advanced by partisans of GSD are the following:

• Globalization is essentially beneficial for the world; the neoliberals have simply botched the job of managing it and selling it to the public;
• It is urgent to save globalization from the neoliberals because globalization is reversible and may, in fact, already be in the process of being reversed;
• Growth and equity may come into conflict, in which case one must prioritize equity;
• Free trade may not, in fact, be beneficial in the long run and may leave the majority poor, so it is important for trade arrangements to be subject to social and environmental conditions;
• Unilateralism must be avoided while fundamental reform of the multilateral institutions and agreements must be undertaken -- a process that might involve dumping or neutralizing some of them, like the WTO's Trade-Related Intellectual Property Rights Agreement (TRIPs);
• Global social integration, or reducing inequalities both within and across countries, must accompany global market integration;
• The global debt of developing countries must be cancelled or radically reduced, so the resulting savings can be used to stimulate the local economy, thus contributing to global reflation;
• Poverty and environmental degradation are so severe that a massive aid program or "Marshall Plan" from the North to the South must be mounted within the framework of the "Millennium Development Goals";
• A "Second Green Revolution" must be put into motion, especially in Africa, through the widespread adoption of genetically engineered seeds.
• Huge investments must be devoted to push the global economy along more environmentally sustainable paths, with government taking a leading role ("Green Keynesianism" or "Green Capitalism");
• Military action to solve problems must be deemphasized in favor of diplomacy and "soft power," although humanitarian military intervention in situations involving genocide must be undertaken.

The Limits of Global Social Democracy

Global Social Democracy has not received much critical attention, perhaps because many progressives are still fighting the last war, that is, against neoliberalism. A critique is urgent, and not only because GSD is neoliberalism's most likely successor. More important, although GSD has some positive elements, it has, like the old Social Democratic Keynesian paradigm, a number of problematic features.

A critique might begin by highlighting problems with four central elements in the GSD perspective.

First, GSD shares neoliberalism's bias for globalization, differentiating itself mainly by promising to promote globalization better than the neoliberals. This amounts to saying, however, that simply by adding the dimension of "global social integration," an inherently socially and ecologically destructive and disruptive process can be made palatable and acceptable. GSD assumes that people really want to be part of a functionally integrated global economy where the barriers between the national and the international have disappeared. But would they not in fact prefer to be part of economies that are subject to local control and are buffered from the vagaries of the international economy? Indeed, today's swift downward trajectory of interconnected economies underscores the validity of one of anti-globalization movement's key criticisms of the globalization process..

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Walden Bello is a columnist for Foreign Policy In Focus, a senior analyst at the Bangkok-based Focus on the Global South, president of the Freedom from Debt Coalition, and a professor of sociology at the University of the Philippines.

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