Is Localism Just A Cover For Chauvanistic Nationalism?

I admire the way John Smulo man­ages to gen­er­ate con­ver­sa­tion and com­ment over on his blog. In recent weeks he’s had some really good posts and the read­ing the follow-up con­ver­sa­tions has been worthwhile.

That said, the recent inter­view dis­cuss­ing eth­ical cloth­ing stoked my ire. Whilst I con­sider eco­nomic glob­al­isa­tion to be a poten­tial force for good, I’m cer­tainly not blind to its lim­it­a­tions and fail­ures. I’m also no fan of the way it cre­ates cul­tural and com­mer­cial hege­mon­ies or the con­sequences of that in terms of reduced options and choices in the arts, in retail and in edu­ca­tion. I’ve never advoc­ated that we would be better off in a world lim­ited to McDon­alds, Star­bucks and Hol­ly­wood block­busters, or that we should per­petu­ally exploit global dif­fer­ences in stand­ards of living.

But, there’s some­thing mor­ally and intel­lec­tu­ally unsat­is­fy­ing about a lot of the anti-globalisation rhet­oric that I hear (and sadly most of what comes from church lead­ers on the topic). At the risk of sound­ing inhar­mo­ni­ous, I put it down to a com­bin­a­tion of naïveté and guilt. All too often the talk is of harsh third-world jobs that are “prob­ably” not worth saving, but with little ref­er­ence to what the altern­at­ives might be, if those jobs were done away with.

The prob­lem comes down to the inab­il­ity anti-globalists to artic­u­late a clear vision of what undo­ing the system would mean, in the short to medium term, for the people who depend on these jobs, and the future of devel­op­ing nations.

Of course, if you are more con­cerned with assuaging your own guilt and insur­ing your­self of moral respons­ib­il­ity, then you don’t have to worry about that. Just rant against glob­al­isa­tion and hope it works out (prob­ably?) for those poor people “over there.”

The neo-paternalism (I know what’s best for them) doesn’t end there. The latest buzzword in anti-globalisation circles is in loc­al­ism. The idea is to con­sume loc­ally, sup­port your local eco­nomy and direct your pat­terns of spend­ing loc­ally. It’s actu­ally not a bad idea. Loc­al­ism in terms of food has a lot going for it and sup­port­ing local artis­ans and design­ers is the key way we build up proven­ance. Both are lines of argu­ment I’ve sup­por­ted for a long time and writ­ten about on this blog.

When the place that some­where comes from mat­ters, the value of a good or ser­vice car­ries implic­a­tions beyond cost. Proven­ance is a way to change the value struc­ture in a global eco­nomy and a way to sup­port the strong com­munit­ies. Sup­port­ing local food pro­duc­tion is envir­on­ment­ally sound, sup­ports good nutri­tion and encour­ages a con­nec­tion between the sources of food and the con­sump­tion of food that bene­fits our long term health.

How­ever, some argu­ments in favour of this kind of loc­al­ism, espe­cially when it comes to indus­trial and semi-industrial products, elides the lan­guage of prox­im­ity with that of nation­al­ism. Dis­tance become for­eignness and prox­im­ity becomes pat­ri­ot­ism. Pretty soon the rhet­oric starts to sound like old-fashioned pro­tec­tion­ism, or worse.

It doesn’t take long to get the feel­ing loc­al­ists might well be com­fort­able with a lower stand­ard of living for the “for­eign­ers” than for their local neigh­bours. This is the worst kind of eco­nomic roman­ti­cism. As Julie Clawson , com­ments in her post “Glob­al­iz­a­tion and Con­sumer­ism,”

“…to naively pro­mote the idea of abandon­ing global industry in favor of only buying Amer­ican is to wish a death sen­tence onto these coun­tries. Abandon­ing them in the midst of a chaos of our making would des­troy them. (apo­lo­giz­ing and aton­ing for our sins is another issue entirely). In the busi­ness world national bor­ders are losing sig­ni­fic­ance quickly. To be so pro-America that our jobs and our eco­nomy mat­ters more than every other person on this globe is inex­cus­able selfishness.”

Reg­u­lar read­ers of this blog can see the pat­tern in the argu­ment for eco­nomic loc­al­ism — another ver­sion of the loc­al­ism versus cos­mo­pol­it­an­ism argu­ment. This time we just have eco­nomic fun­da­ment­al­ism in place of cul­tural fun­da­ment­al­ism, at least for now. It’s prob­ably fair to expect that they will merge over time.

I under­stand the con­cern with the neg­at­ive aspects of glob­al­isa­tion and I under­stand the desire to build up one’s global com­munity. But, anyone who thinks the two are inher­ently incom­pat­ible needs to, quite frankly, get out and see the world. Glob­al­isa­tion and loc­al­ism are lived real­it­ies in China and India, as they have been in Europe and Latin Amer­ica for decades.

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