While these worries hardly amount to the full frontal attack mounted by the likes of Joseph Stiglitz, the Nobel Prize-winning economist, they still constitute a remarkable turnaround in the intellectual climate. Moreover, even those who have not lost heart often disagree vehemently about the direction in which they would like to see globalization go.
For example, Jagdish Bhagwati, the distinguished free trader, and Fred Bergsten, the director of the pro-globalization Peterson Institute for International Economics, have both been on the frontlines arguing that critics vastly exaggerate globalization’s ills and under-appreciate its benefits. But their debates on the merits of regional trade agreements — Bergsten for, Bhagwati against — are as heated as each one’s disagreements with the authors mentioned above.
None of these intellectuals is against globalization, of course. What they want is not to turn back globalization, but to create new institutions and compensation mechanisms — at home or internationally — that will render globalization more effective, fairer and more sustainable. Their policy proposals are often vague (when specified at all) and command little consensus.
However, confrontation over globalization has clearly moved well beyond the streets to the columns of the financial press and the rostrums of mainstream think tanks. That is an important point for globalization’s cheerleaders to understand, as they often behave as if the “other side” still consists of protectionists and anarchists.
Today, the question is no longer, “Are you for or against globalization?” The question is, “What should the rules of globalization be?” The cheerleaders’ true sparring partners today are not rock-throwing youths but their fellow intellectuals.
The first three decades after 1945 were governed by the Bretton Woods consensus — a shallow multilateralism that permitted policymakers to focus on domestic social and employment needs while enabling global trade to recover and flourish. This regime was superseded in the 1980s and 1990s by an agenda of deeper liberalization and economic integration.
That model, we have learned, is unsustainable. If globalization is to survive, it will need a new intellectual consensus to underpin it. The world economy desperately awaits its new Keynes.
Dani Rodrik, a professor of political economy at Harvard University, is the first recipient of the Social Science Research Council’s Albert Hirschman Prize.
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