Volte-face as Voltaire's farce

PASSING THROUGH: John Ralston Saul

John Ralston Saul revels in leading opinion. "My books run a little bit ahead of received wisdom," he boasts, while explaining his interest in Voltaire "" Voltaire's Bastards, on the perversion of reason, being a famous work of his "" on a nine-day visit to Delhi enroute from Singapore to Frankfurt, having spent some time in China, before he heads home to Canada.

He revels in stirring things up, too. "I guess a writer who thinks everything is fine is not a writer," adds the author, whose current stirrer is a book called The Collapse of Globalism and the Reinvention of the World.

Like Voltaire, he professes an abiding interest in the human condition. Like a good agent provocateur, he ascribes to human ideas an authority no greater than the limits imposed by that very condition.

And taking such an interest, perforce, necessitates the sort of analysis that spans multiple ages and multiple disciplines. So, is American politics the reason that globalism is in trouble? "The probability is, by the next election, the best way to lose it would be to be in favour of global economics..."

To his mind, globalisation as we know it is founded on naive assumptions that grant Economics ("a minor speculative domain, particularly after its separation from politics") an importance far too exalted for its own good.

The brief history of the post-Cold War world, as he sees it, goes thus. Market text thumpers went all out to evangelise laissez faire ideals and trumpet the coming of global economic glory.

But once China and India got into the act "" once multi-fibre quotas vanished and the impact of free trade hit home in America "" panic began to set in. Globalisation, as packaged, was but "a reconfiguration of the old idea that the West knows best, backed by economic theory".

In Saul's perspective, it has only just begun to dawn on the West that the rise of India and China are actually functions of indigenous phenomena, not the outcome of their buying into the theories it was peddling.

"In India, your strength is that your involvement in the global market has been from an Indian point of view""" a view open to the challenges thrown up by "the great alienation" of the non-beneficiaries of globalisation. China, too, is trying to rebalance its growth on a five-point "humanist" versus "globalist" scale: protection versus free trade, interior versus coast, rural versus urban, people versus market and nature versus self-interest.

Saul's worry is that the best aspects of globalisation, such as the moderation of hard nationalism (in the Erich Fromm conception), are being endangered by the naivete of market fundamentalism.

"It's the first time in history that civilisation is attempting to run itself on just Economics," he sighs, trying to recall other historical examples. Venice ran well as a city-state on pure trade for a while, though freedom of speech was a casualty (a reason that paintings had to take the place of books).

"Another interesting city-state was Dubrovnik, which had no army, was run by poets, and lasted 1,000 years "" whenever they were attacked, they sent out their writers to talk 'em out of it."

Not that Saul is anti-market, mind you. It's just that Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations has not crowded Moral Sentiments out of the man's head. The market is just another mechanism, to him. And the success formula remains simple:

"If you over-regulate, you kill the market," he sort of shrugs, "If you under-regulate, the market kills you."