Thu, Nov 01, 2001 page19

• Time for frivolities and 'business-as-usual' is all in the past

  A thorough redefinition of our priorities and the global economic order is what is now called for, not just new ways to titillate more thrifty consumers

  • By Patrick Smith / BLOOMBERG
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  There was a marvelous item in the Financial Times the other day. Did you see it? It seems that Hutchison 3G, the mobile phone operator jointly owned by Hong Kong, Japanese, and Dutch interests, has just named an exec to figure out how to offer softcore porn through its handsets.

  "Online pornography could prove to be a vital way of boosting revenues for struggling mobile telephone operators," the FT noted with a perfectly straight face.

  Very patriotic -- pro-American, really. Young George tells us that the best thing to do is go about our ordinary business, and that is precisely what the good people at Hutchison 3G are doing.

  No American toughing it out over those stony slopes in Afghanistan will have to wonder now what it is he or she is fighting to preserve.

  It focuses the mind brilliantly, in fact. Think about it for a moment, and you are forced to recognize how utterly trivial one's pursuits become when the only logic applied is the logic of the market. And if pornography is trivial, the trivial, in our present circumstances, is pornographic.

  The conclusion to be drawn from this is simple: Going about our ordinary business now that Sept. 11 is part of our history is the last thing we ought to be doing. If that is our way triumphing over terrorism, it is a victory of the hollowest kind.

  Indeed, we are challenged today to think the previously unthinkable -- to redraw our boundaries so that what was once outside of them is now wholly within. There's no logic in saying the attacks on New York and Washington altered more or less everything, as we acknowledge, and then pointedly altering more or less nothing in the way we look upon our circumstances.

  In my last column, I promised some specific thoughts on this point in response to readers' inquiries. One comes readily to mind.

  "We will bring the terrorists to justice," President Bush has promised with Texas solemnity, "or we will bring justice to the terrorists." It's an interesting choice of terms. If Bush means what he says, he ought to round up those people in the hills and caves -- so like the set of a Hollywood Western, Afghanistan -- and put them before the International Criminal Court, an organization most of the world favors but one (of many) the US repudiates.

  One doesn't wait for it. But in a stroke such a move would show the way forward in judicial matters that are growing ever more international -- think of Pinochet, think of southeastern Europe -- while making the war on terrorism truly international in a way that it simply has not been to date.

  This week, the Council on Foreign Relations released a report called Building Support for More Open Trade. It's by a task force "deftly co-chaired," as the foreword modestly explains, by former Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin and Kenneth Duberstein, who was White House chief of staff under President Reagan. It offers another example of what I mean.

  The report acknowledges the problems widely associated with free trade and the globalization process: social inequities everywhere you look, environmental degradation, a "race to the bottom" among developing countries, "a general increase in economic insecurity in the United States." But what is on offer by way of recommendations? The old familiar pabulum, repackaged like soap and labeled "new and improved." Instead of negotiating large trade agreements such as NAFTA, we should go after a series of "discrete agreements" over time.

  This is called "a confidence-building approach," though it sounds more like an ordinary con. After nodding toward the above-noted problems, the report concludes that "the trade agenda, however, cannot carry the principal responsibility for addressing these concerns." Haven't I heard that a few hundred times before? Not all the hallowed names the Council on Foreign Relations can gather will make this kind of thinking adequate to the challenge. It reflects, quite simply, an inability to change: It's America going about its business.

  Even the International Monetary Fund now looks back on its years of bad advice to Third World nations and acknowledges that open markets and unrestricted investment have brought few benefits to host countries. If Sept. 11 carried any messages, among them, surely, is that we indeed have a war on our hands, but we had better define it properly.

  The war I see has to do with those very things the Council on Foreign Relations report flicks off the table. The connection must be made between uncertainty, insecurity, and deprivation on the one hand and on the other resentment, "fundamentalism," and violence. There's no such thing as Third World instability anymore. There's only instability.

  Fighting this war, it follows quite easily, requires a large and sophisticated arsenal: aid at a level we have abandoned, engagement of a kind we have quite frankly abdicated. We have to learn how to encourage genuinely democratic institutions that may or may not work in our short-term interests and -- through such instruments as trade -- the development of economies that work for their populations, not merely foreign investors.

  One good example, one bad. Long before the Sept. 11 attacks, Pakistan had embarked on a plan to modernize its educational system -- specifically the religious schools in which the more extreme interpretations of Islam are cultivated. This is delicate but to be encouraged (though Americans would be ill-advised to go anywhere near such a program with aid dollars).

  Then there's the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum, the annual meeting of which just concluded in Shanghai. This was a missed opportunity for Americans. Young George could have fought the war against terror far more effectively had he spent less time on useless generalities and a little more on some of APEC's neglected programs, such as its sustainable development agenda. (Yes, it has one.)

  I can't put this point any better than Benjamin Barber, the American author of the book Jihad vs. McWorld. He considers our new war to have two fronts, one military, the other "civic." Here he is on the second: "It will entail a readjudication of North-South responsibilities," he wrote in a recent Financial Times article, "a redefinition of the obligations of global capital as it faces the claims of global justice and comity, a repositioning of democratic institutions as they follow markets from the domestic to the international sector, a new recognition of the place and requirements of faith in an aggressively secular market society."

  This is dexterous thinking, and there's more and more of it around. It has to with more globalism, not less. But it is the new globalism, as this column names it, not the old. And there's nothing X-rated, nothing trivial, about the difference between the two.
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