Is the anti-globalisation movement anti-Semitic?

Strauss suggests that critics of globalisation view the process through the prism of prejudice: a US-led project for the hegemonic expansion of US-style capitalism to the rest of the world. Add to this the presumption that members of the Jewish diaspora are over-represented in the corporate and financial world in the West and one can make the leap to a 'Jewish conspiracy' lurking behind globalisation.

Strauss makes a number of important points and is right to expose the malcontents who masquerade as members of a progressive movement. Unfortunately, in his zeal to disparage the critics of globalisation as no more than a cover for anti-semitism, the author fails to accept genuine concerns about the current structure of global capitalism and the risk that the label of anti-semitism can easily be abused to suppress legitimate dissent and debate. He presents a caricature of a complex case of transnational activism -- on which, by the way, there is a large and sophisticated professional literature. I offer a less prejudicial way of analysing the anti-globalisation movement and show how the spirit of disquiet that pervades the debate on globalisation is, in fact, being shared by luminaries in the economics profession who are neither Luddites nor anti-semitic. I argue too that eminent practitioners, such as Judith Butler at the University of California at Berkeley, have raised concerns about the abuse of the term anti-semitism to smear all criticism of policies of the Israeli government.

Goethe, as Tariq Ali notes, once said that the world moves forward because of those who oppose it. It is possible to view the anti-globalisation movement in that spirit, despite the fact that ranks of the movement are infiltrated by the usual suspects as Strauss concludes. The Nobel Laureate Amartya Sen develops the thesis in the spirit of Goethe, although he invokes the wisdom of Francis Bacon. The point, according to Sen, is that the anti-globalisation movement, despite its rowdy and at times violent nature, is essentially a movement of dissent that raises 'global doubts' that could pave the way for 'global solutions'. Indeed, several luminaries in the economics profession are afflicted by 'global doubts'.

The Nobel Laureate Joseph Stiglitz and his recent views on 'globalisation and its discontents' are well-known. He has followed up his work with a rather critical analysis of the 'roaring '90s' that bred a triiumphalist vision of globalisation. I suggest that it is this triumphalist vision that is under intellectual onslaught. Propositions that may be regarded as 'articles of faith' by economists are increasingly being questioned. As Dani Rodrik at Harvard has shown, trade policy, for example, cannot be shown in the most recent empirical studies to have a large or even a significant influence on national economic prosperity after other factors and variables, such geographic location and institutions, are considered . Even pro-globalisation economists, such as Bill Easterly, Jagdish Bhagwati, Andrew Rose and Paul Krugman are disturbed by the findings that they themselves unearth.

Bill Easterly, a former World Bank economist and now at New York University, finds that the much-vaunted era of globalisation of the 1980s and 1990s were 'lost decades' for the average developing economy when seen from the perspective of the 1960s and 1970s -- a finding corroborated by Mark Weisbrot and others at the Centre for Economic Policy Research. Branko Milanovic, a World Bank economist, has shown that the state of the evidence on trends in global inequality is rather mixed, while Angus Deaton at Princeton and Reddy and Pogge at Columbia have raised serious doubts about the unambiguous declines in global poverty that have been approvingly reported by the World Bank in its recent publications.

Paul Krugman makes the important point that, despite the conservative counter-revolution in economics in the '70s and '80s, Keyensianism is alive and well and suggests that we should 'all be Keynesians now' given the return of 'depression economics'. Andrew Rose shows that, in statistical terms, the WTO has had little or no impact either on trade liberalisation or the growth in world trade, after other variables are allowed for. Indeed, Rose speculates that the WTO was deliberately created as a weak international institution by its powerful founding members. Jagdish Bhagwati at Columbia University has dedicated his professional life to studying international trade and its essentially benevolent nature. Even he is forced to talk of a 'Treasury-Wall Street-IMF complex' that has sabotaged a meaningful discourse on the benefits and costs of globalisation and a genuine agenda of multilateralism.

One can thus find enough examples to show that there are leading economists who are highly circumspect about a triumphalist story of globalisation and have provided intellectual succour to the strident sentiments expressed by the anti-globalisation movement. In this specific sense, the Strauss thesis of the anti-globalisation movement as being no more than an anti-semitic front is blissfully unaware of the implicit alliance that has been forged between the 'street protests' that started in Seattle and continued in Cancun and the break-down in professional consensus among leading economists.

Let me now turn to the vexed issue of the use and abuse of the term 'anti-semitism'. Of course, antisemitism , like all forms of discrimination and prejudice, must be consistently and unambiguously opposed. There is, however, the risk that, in their zeal to deal with this scourge, the self-appointed watchdogs of anti-semitism -- such as Strauss -- may lack a sense of balance in propagating their views. To start with, no state authority -- or their lobbies -- must be given latitude in their exercise of influence, power and authority to use the cover of anti-semitism to cover their dubious deeds. It is difficult to argue that the Israeli government's treatment of the Palestinians is an example of morally and ethically consistent behaviour. It is difficult to dismiss the view that the Christian Right in the United States has forged an alliance with the pro-Israeli lobby (the so-called 'Likudniks' who form part of the 'neoconservatives' or 'neocons') and exert a powerful influence on American foreign policy, hobbling the capacity of the US government to adopt an even-handed approach to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

The 'Likudniks', after all, were identified by such commentators as Kinsey rather than by an anti-semitic and swarthy Arab. Even some mainstream foreign policy historians, such as Arthur Schlesinger, Jr refers to a 'neocon fantasy' in current US foreign policy (New York Review of Books, Vol.50, No.16, October 23, 2003) as a routine statement of fact. Will Strauss be prepared to dismiss Kinsey and Schlesinger as 'part of anti-Semitism bandwagoned on the anti-war movement and rising anti-Americanism'? Strauss is enraged with the villains in the anti-semitic camp, but where is his zeal to be a moral crusader when some eminent members of the academic community in Israel and the Jewish diaspora are prepared to condemn Palestinians for their violence but unwilling and unable to condemn injustices committed by the Israeli government?

Why isn't Strauss distressed that Van Creveld, a historian at Hebrew University, proposed that the Israeli army should kill as many Palestinians as possible to impose 'peace' in that troubled part of the world (Creveld as reported in March 1, 2003 in the Hebrew Weekly Yerushalyim)? Where is the outrage expressed by Strauss when Allan Dershowitz, Professor of Law at Harvard University wrote on March 11, 2003 in the Jerusalem Post that the Israeli army should not hesitate to liquidate entire Palestianian villages in order to quell the resistance by Palestinians, giving such communities '24 hours to leave' before the bulldozing could begin? Are we not seeing a semblance of these ideas being carried out by the Israeli government in the West Bank and Gaza? Is it anti-Semitic to condemn the intellectual and moral justification for state-sponsored violence being offered by Creveld and Dershowitz?

What Strauss needs to recognise, as Judith Butler has so eloquently argued, "that Jews cannot legitimately be understood always and only as presumptive victims...No political ethics can start from the assumption that Jews monopolise the position of victim. 'Victim' is a quickly transposable term: it can shift from minute to minute, from the Jews killed by suicide bombers ...to the Palestinian child killed by Israeli gunfire.The public sphere needs to be one in which both kinds of violence are challenged insistently and in the name of justice." (London Review of Books, vol.25,No.16, Nov 2003). I urge Strauss to heed such advice rather than dismiss the anti-globalisation movement as anti-semitic or selectively use the term to suppress legitimate debate about the abuse of state power and authority, whether it occurs in Israel or elsewhere.

Iyanatul Islam teaches at the School of International Business and Asian Studies, Griffith University, Australia. He is the founding co-editor of the Journal of Asia Pacific Economy (Routledge, London and New York).