Walden Bello on the Age After Globalization
The era of US-led capitalist globalization seems to be coming to an end. For Filipino scholar and activist Walden Bello, it’s time to build a new, more equal distribution of power and resources around the globe.
For Walden Bello, the dismantling of US global hegemony offers opportunities for a new politics. (Adam Berry / Bloomberg News via Getty Images)
- Interview by
- Teun Dominicus
These are confusing political times. For decades, “alter-globalists” resisted dictates from the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and the World Trade Organization. Under these institutions of US-led global capitalism, states had to lift tariffs on imports and open up their markets for foreign companies. Active industrial policy was out of the question, and externally imposed “structural adjustment programs” spread havoc in the Global South. Millions lost their jobs as local manufacturers were driven out of business by global competition.
The contradiction: now the US government, previously the lead actor in globalization, is itself busily dismantling these institutions. As both American and European leaderships put up new barriers and their supremacy is threatened especially by Asian powers, the idea of capitalist globalization no longer rules the roost in the way it did at the turn of the millennium. So has the Trumpian right stolen the critique of globalization from its former socialist partisans?
In fact, there are essential differences between their criticisms, insists Filipino activist-intellectual Walden Bello. The idea of deglobalization, as conceived by him and his colleagues from the Global South, was about creating economies based on justice, which would reduce inequality and exploitation. It would definitely not protect and benefit the most powerful countries.
Born in 1945 in the Philippines, Bello studied sociology at Princeton University in the late 1960s, and it was there that he obtained his PhD. There he got into contact with the movement against the Vietnam War. Faced with American imperialism in the belly of the beast, Bello became a member of the Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP), a Maoist force, and fought against the US-backed dictator Ferdinand Marcos in his homeland.
One of the most important lessons he learned was that institutions such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) play crucial roles in sustaining US imperialism. It was the World Bank, with the United States as its largest funder, that helped Marcos stay in power. With clever burglaries in the World Bank’s Washington, DC, headquarters, Bello and his comrades laid their hands on six thousand pages of revealing documents about financial support to Marcos’s dictatorship.
At the end of the 1980s, after Marcos’s overthrow, Bello bid farewell to the CPP and broadened his intellectual scope to the whole Global South. As one of the founders of the think tank Focus on the Global South, he became one of the most influential activist-intellectuals opposed to the Washington Consensus policies of liberalization, deregulation, and privatization. With his publications — including twenty-five books —Bello provided intellectual fuel for the resistance against the capitalist world order, and he helped to discredit neoliberalism as “the only remaining ideology.” It was thus that author and activist Naomi Klein called Bello the “world’s leading no-nonsense revolutionary.”
For Bello, the dismantling of US global hegemony offers opportunities for new politics with a more equal distribution of power and resources around the globe. He spoke to Jacobin’s Teun Dominicus about the breakdown of global neoliberalism, the rise of the far right, and how socialists can confront the new normal.
In the face of the crumbling of the neoliberal global economy, liberals and social democrats in Europe are mostly busy trying to slow down this process. They plead for a “return to normal,” without recognizing that the “normal” politics and economics were the problem. Why are they so lacking in the ideas or the language to fight for a new economic order — one without the exploitation of humans, nature, and the planet?
You are definitely right that they have basically given in to the basic propositions of neoliberalism, which is to judge everything in terms of narrow efficiency, or reduction of unit costs.
Neoliberalism has really theoretically disengaged individuals from one another. And [these liberals] do not have the sense that human beings and human relations need to be evaluated on more than just efficiency. That’s why you have a tremendous reaction to neoliberalism, because people are not just aggregates of individuals.
[People who are left behind] no longer feel part of something bigger, and the right wing has come and captured them. But it is a perverted community, based on blood and skin color. . . . People feel they have been left out. Resentment is fueling the rise of the Right. That’s why we must take the idea of community back from them but in a way based on solidarity and progressive values.
Where is US hegemony at right now?
There is a big isolationist bloc in the United States that is pushing for limits to its engagements abroad. Of course, Trump is very erratic and is zigzagging. But eventually, I think that he has to respond to this particular sense that the United States has to disengage, because it no longer has the resources to keep up its economic and military hegemony. So that is where we are at this point.
We need to monitor this very closely, because what we have is the emergence of a spheres-of-influence kind of approach on the part of the United States. Here Eastern Europe is seen as Russia’s sphere of influence. Western Europe is left on its own. Africa is now marginal to the interests of the political elites of the United States. In the Middle East, it is basically supporting Israel and wants no further major US engagement. And South Asia is being seen as a Chinese sphere of influence, although Trump and [India’s Narendra] Modi are ideological allies. . . .
True, the Kamala Harris–Donald Trump battle may have had contrasting “visions” for the United States on domestic issues, but I ask: Is it more of the same neoliberal pro–Wall Street/Silicon Valley policies cloaked with pious democratic rhetoric, versus an insurgent fascism that feeds on the failures of neoliberalism and liberal democracy? Fascism’s best ally is a liberal-democratic elite that presides over an economic order that has radically increased inequality while piously asserting it is the best defense against fascism.
The budget cuts to the US Agency for International Development led to a huge crisis in health care around the globe. Large-scale programs to combat AIDS are being stopped. Recent research published in the medical journal the Lancet forecasts that the budget cuts risk leading to fourteen million additional deaths by 2030. Do you see other institutions, for example from the Global South, that can step up to prevent this humanitarian disaster?
I do realize that there has been an impact in terms of US assistance to the health systems in the Global South, which is why Trump and Elon Musk dismantled USAID. Our reaction was to say that they dismantled the wrong institutions: they should have dismantled the World Bank, the IMF, and the different regional development banks for the fact that they created this poverty.
What’s your position on the International Criminal Court (ICC)? For a long period, only politicians from the Global South were prosecuted, while Western leaders were never held accountable by the ICC, which led critics to accuse the court of “neocolonialism.”
The International Court of Justice and the International Criminal Court are very important to push for ending genocidal and criminal policies. European countries were instrumental in the creation of these institutions, as were countries from the Global South. Lately however, the rich countries are becoming more and more worried that these institutions are running out of their control, and the countries of the Global South are converting them into fora for global justice.
You see this in the refusal of the United States to join the ICC. And it has opposed bringing Israel to trial at the International Court of Justice in The Hague. So I think that these institutions can be very important [in creating] global justice.
Can the BRICS countries play a role in ending the continuing debt crises of the Global South?
China has already been important in terms of dealing with the indebted countries. The IMF and Western countries, whose banks have played a great role in the debt crisis of developing countries, have been trying to get China to unite in a common front, in a program for the Global South that would basically continue the old policies and continue to force them to pay exorbitant interest. China has refused to do that. In fact, China has already forgiven the debts of so many countries in the Global South. And it said: we don’t want to be part of a multilateral front that is coercive. China deals with the debt on a bilateral basis. So China is now really the world’s largest development bank.
There are a number of countries, especially in the Middle East, with big sovereign wealth funds that can participate in relieving the debt burden of many countries in the Global South. There is always a potential there. What would be the kind of relationships that would be established between these countries and the Global South? That remains to be seen. But I’m not saying that it’s impossible to have new relationships whereby debt is forgiven.
Whether the BRICS countries were there or not, development financing from the West and the North is dead. We saw that the United States didn’t participate in the [two United Nations conferences on financing for development in June]. So basically, we are depending on the instability of the Global North if we want to continue to meet with them. The Global South needs to get those development funds and climate financing from elsewhere. [Financing from the Global North] is a dead end at this point.