I’ve always had a love-hate relationship with the tenets of the anti-globalisation movement. Books like Naomi Klein’s No Logo deftly document serious socio-economic concerns, but then, when it comes to proposing solutions of their own, ride roughshod over their own arguments with an unsubtle blend of pie-in-the-sky utopianism and New Left sermonizing. Canadian philosopher John Ralston Saul’s The Collapse of Globalism, published in 2005, boils the debate down to its constituent elements. At the outset, Saul’s skepticism is clear, but it’s uncertain where his line of reasoning will end: a return to across-the-board protectionism? A dismantlement of the institutions of international economic organisation (which, judging by the title of his book, are presumably in decline anyway)? Or merely an echo of Klein’s call for us to join the loose coalition of anti-globalisation groups that turned the streets of Seattle into a smoke-filled cauldron of violence?

None of these, as it turns out. The book opens with an exposition of the history of globalisation, familiar to any student of economic theory. Saul chronicles the birth of the Davos World Economic Forum – a court of the ‘corporate technocracy’ – and the genesis of the G7 (today’s G8) as Henry Kissinger’s wishful resurrection of the 1814 Concert of Vienna. He also rightly flags President Nixon’s 1971 decision to float the US dollar as a central landmark in the development of the global economic order.

From there, Saul’s argument emerges in fits and starts. Following the sluggish opening chapters, ideas begin to crystallize around his critiques of ‘managerialism’ – transferred to the public sector via crash privatization – and the corollary assumption that all human activity can be reduced to a series of economic indices and ‘managed’ accordingly. This has been paralleled by the rise of PR spin (not least in the current Federal election campaign) that a recent audit on the state of free speech in Australia identifies as a central impediment to the free flow of information in this country.

Saul’s central thesis – that the project of globalisation is collapsing under the widespread reassertion of national prerogatives – is hardly provocative. But unlike, say, Naomi Klein, Saul avoids directing his fire against capitalism as the demonic adversary of social justice. Indeed, he is at his most effective when contrasting the effects of neoliberal economics to the classical liberalism of Adam Smith: ‘the consolidation of transnational corporations has very little to do with open global markets in the free trade tradition and everything to do with the dark side of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century mercantilism’ – that is, with monopoly capitalism in the British East India Company mould. This can also be seen in the waves of international trade that take place within and between corporate subsidiaries as a means of obtaining inexpensive resources outside the marketplace. In actuality, this is a form of price-setting – once a vile, socialist tactic but now legitimized in the name of profit and efficiency, hardly a natural outcome of the interplay between producers and consumers in a free marketplace.

The economic resurgence of India and China proves Saul’s point that the logic of economic globalisation is not always clear-cut. As he points out, ‘the principle Chinese obsession is neither free trade nor free markets. It is dealing with internal poverty’, a perennial concern of the CCP since 1978. Likewise, both India and China emerged from the 1997 Asian financial crisis relatively unscathed, precisely because they maintained strict controls on capital flows, contrary to neoliberal orthodoxy. Compare this to the Thai, Malaysian and Indonesian economies, which were gutted by massive capital outflows and rapid devaluation in the wake of the crisis.

As Saul is right to point out, the rise of non-government organisations – themselves a by-product of globalisation – is no panacea to the vagaries of the free market. While NGOs represent a ‘clear sign of the citizen’s desire for choice’, he laments that they are also ‘a threat to the solid idea of elected government as the basis of responsible choice’. British political scientist David Chandler agrees: ‘the rejection of the formal [national] political sphere… leaves political struggles isolated from any shared framework of meaning or from any formal processes of democratic accountability’. Few NGOs are electorally accountable. And while ‘Make Capitalism History’ and Greenpeace may be the logical counter-ideology to neoliberalism, existing with the international economic technocracy in a self-reinforcing, adversarial symbiosis, they are hardly a prescription for the sort of ‘democratic renewal’ advocated in The Collapse of Globalism. (That is not to say that NGOs should have no role in the international community. Indeed, the United Nations relies on many such organisations to fulfill its aid, development and famine relief projects. But NGOs are a varied bunch, running the gamut from business lobbyists and religious organisations to anti-system anarcho-syndicalist ‘collectives’. Levels of credibility and accountability vary widely).

Overall, it’s refreshing to read a critique of neoliberal economics that doesn’t fall into the predictable cant of the anti-globalisation movement, with its righteous chest-beating and suspicions of state-based political action. Rather, Saul demonstrates just how far the neoliberal economic order has loosened from its classical liberal (and Keynesian) moorings, failing to achieve even the objectives of welfare maximisation and wealth creation that supposedly lie at its centre. The metaphor employed by Margaret Thatcher and others in the 1980s was that the new global economic tide would raise all ships. But Thatcher showed scant knowledge of seamanship. ‘If you raise tides’, Saul points out, ‘a lot of crafts capsize.’