Liquid Fear by Bauman Zygmunt;

Author:Bauman, Zygmunt;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Wiley
Published: 2011-10-20T16:00:00+00:00

4

Terrors of the Global

Thus far, ours is a wholly negative globalization: unchecked, unsupplemented and uncompensated for by a ‘positive’ counterpart which is still a distant prospect at best, though according to some prognoses already a forlorn chance. Allowed a free run, ‘negative’ globalization specializes in breaking those boundaries too weak to withstand the pressure, and in drilling numerous, huge and unplugable holes through those boundaries that successfully resist the forces bent on dismantling them.

The ‘openness’ of our open society has acquired a new gloss these days, one undreamt of by Karl Popper, who coined that phrase. No longer a precious yet frail product of brave, though stressful, self-assertive efforts, it has become instead an irresistible fate brought about by the pressures of formidable extraneous forces; a side-effect of ‘negative globalization’ – that is, the highly selective globalization of trade and capital, surveillance and information, coercion and weapons, crime and terrorism, all now disdaining territorial sovereignty and respecting no state boundary.

If the idea of an ‘open society’ originally stood for the self-determination of a free society proud of its openness, it now brings to most minds the terrifying experience of heteronomous, vulnerable populations overwhelmed by forces they neither control nor truly understand, horrified by their own undefendability and obsessed with the security of their borders and of the population inside them – since it is precisely that security inside borders and of borders that eludes their grasp and seems bound to stay beyond their reach forever (or as least as long as the planet is subjected to solely negative globalization, which all too often seems to be the same thing). On a globalized planet, populated by the forcibly ‘opened’ societies, security cannot be gained, let alone reliably assured, in one country or in a selected group of countries: not by their own means, and not independently of the state of affairs in the rest of the world.

Neither can justice, that preliminary condition of lasting peace. The perverted ‘openness’ of societies enforced by negative globalization is itself the prime cause of injustice and so, obliquely, of conflict and violence. As Arundhati Roy puts it, ‘while the elite pursue their voyages to their imaginary destination, some place at the top of the world, the poor have been caught into a spiral of crime and chaos.’1 It was the actions of the United States together with its various satellites, like the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and the World Trade Organization, that ‘prompted subsidiary developments, dangerous sub-products such as nationalism, religious fanaticism, fascism, and of course terrorism, advancing marching step in step with the neoliberal project of globalization’. ‘Market without boundaries’ is a recipe for injustice, and ultimately for a new world disorder in which (contrary to Clausewitz) it is the politics that becomes a continuation of war by other means. Global lawlessness and armed violence feed each other, mutually reinforce and reinvigorate; as the ancient wisdom warns – inter arma silent leges (when arms speak, laws keep silent). The globalization of harm and damage rebounds in the globalization of resentment and vengeance.

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