Reviewed by David Cromwell
Localization: A Global Manifesto
Colin Hines, Earthscan (London), 2000,
290pp., £10.99, ISBN 1 85383 612 5
So - you're against global capitalism, but what are you actually for? Colin Hines, co-author with Tim Lang of the landmark The New Protectionism (1993), argues that the answer ought to be localization: 'a set of interrelated and self-reinforcing policies that actively discriminate in favour of the local'. Trade and investment liberalization, or 'beggar-your-neighbour' economics as Hines puts it, is destroying people and planet. What is needed now is Protect the Local, Globally by emphasising local trade and reducing damaging, long-distance trade to a minimum.
How will such a radical transition be funded? Ecological taxes on energy, other resource use and pollution will all help. But how will corporate obstructionism be overcome? By a broad-based citizen movement demanding action at the level of powerful regional groupings of countries, especially Europe and North America. Instead of the corporate-led World Trade Organisation, a shift from economic globalisation to localisation would be facilitated by a World Localization Organisation administering a Global Agreement on Sustainable Trade. Presumably this WLO would eventually become obsolete, as local economies begin to flourish.
Development NGOs are scolded for adhering to the 'flawed paradigm that exports from the South to the North are a major route for the poor's development'. Indeed, Hines points out how the majority of social-needs activists have failed to take into account the pressures of globalization on government expenditure which is subservient to the mantra of 'international competitiveness'. It is therefore no surprise that social and environmental priorities fall by the wayside. Hines therefore warns that unless NGO 'demands are put within the context of overarching change that prioritizes protecting and rebuilding local economies, then campaign gains will be very limited in their scope'.
So, campaign issues such as Third World debt, pollution, global warming, ozone depletion and biodiversity loss all have to be placed within a context of opposing global capitalism and replacing it with Protect the Local, Globally. But just as important is the structure of the corporate media which processes, filters and distorts these campaign issues. That structure, which Hines disappointingly neglects, is a crucial cog in the profit-driven system that created the need for such campaigns in the first place. Given the immense power of the mainstream media, and its capacity to block any shift of power in society, it seems to me a significant omission in the book.
How is the message of Protect the Local, Globally to reach beyond a small ardent band of cognoscenti? The author crucially notes that: 'Localization requires widespread involvement; it will therefore be something done by people, not something done to them'. And yet the book, like so many ardent polemics about globalisation and how to counter it, tends towards the dry and impersonal. This sparked a barrage of questions in my head: What exactly will motivate people to become involved in a mass movement? Will people act out of compassion, a sense of fair play, or raw self-interest as they seek to protect their own jobs, health and backyard? What are the roots of localization in ethics, morality, culture and human emotion? What motivates Colin Hines to write and campaign for localisation? Why do so many activists consider such questions irrelevant in the struggle to developing alternatives to globalisation? Are they, in fact, not central to developing a mass movement to achieve our common aims?
That a reviewer can even raise these issues is perhaps a measure of how much Hines has actually achieved here in laying out the nuts and bolts of an alternative economy, and suggesting in broad terms how it might come about in the political arena. But what about the interface between the personal and the political? To kickstart a 'mindwrench' in sufficient numbers that will actually effect the transformation to localization will surely mean addressing the demons of greed, hatred, ignorance and, frankly, plain indifference that lurk within us all.
As Bertrand Russell wrote in Roads to Freedom (1918), 'The great majority of men and women, in ordinary times, pass through life without ever contemplating or criticising, as a whole, either their own conditions or those of the world at large.' Therein lurks the roadblock to radical societal change. The fundamental challenge, therefore, is to connect with the hearts and minds of those around us.
David Cromwell
22 August, 2000.