Justice at the speed of light?

Empire by Antonio Negri and Michael HardtParadoxes of Prosperity: why the new capitalism benefits all by Diane Coyle

On 11 September, anti-globalisation activists turned on their televisions to discover that their cause had attracted some strange bedfellows. That many commentators sought to explain events in New York and Washington as fall-out from globalisation, and that the activists themselves cancelled demonstrations designed for the meetings of the World Bank and the IMF, was, at first glance, extremely odd. No one has owned up for the atrocities, after all, and the political demands of the perpetrators remain obscure.

In retrospect, morbid soul-searching about the effects of globalisation may have told more about the outlook of American society than about the motives of its attackers. And one of the consequences of the pervasive uncertainty which shrouds the operation of the globalised economy is that the defence of globalisation is now coming from some unexpected quarters.

Empire, written by the veteran Italian radical Antonio Negri and his academic protégé Michael Hardt, is a case in point. Bizarrely, for a dense synthesis of material drawn from the arts and social sciences which situates itself firmly within the Marxist tradition, the book has enjoyed rave reviews in the New York Times and is currently being reprinted in response to massive demand. Karl Marx, the book is to remind us, was quick to see the positive sides of globalisation: its sophisticated division of labour, and its ability to integrate the mass of humanity into a common society. The contemporary political task, according to Negri and Hardt, "is not simply to resist these processes but to re-organise them and redirect them to new ends".

In between some uncomfortable wading through the backwaters of post-colonial theory, Empire throws up some suggestive images. The original contribution made by Hardt and Negri is to argue that the engine of globalisation has migrated upwards from the economy to supranational institutions, backed up an array of non- governmental organisations. The book describes the transition from imperialism, based on the competition between nation-states where sovereignty was bound up with imperialist expansion, to "Empire", where sovereignty becomes difficult to locate and embedded in a complex web of overlapping legalities.

At the heart of Empire, they claim, is no single superpower but a juridicial concept and an idea of universal justice which justifies Empire in the policing of its boundaries. The global expansion of Empire, they argue, is accompanied by a hollowing-out of democracy and its replacement by anodyne technocratic ideas of governance and administration.

Like Negri and Hardt, Diane Coyle seeks a quiet word in the ear of the anti-globalisation activists in an attempt to persuade them to redirect their energies to more fundamental issues. Coyle, formerly economics editor of this newspaper and a fully-modernised social democrat, sees herself as a constructive critic of the protesters in Genoa, Prague and Seattle. Paradoxes of Prosperity is a lucid and compelling argument that, after the industrial wasteland presided over by Thatcher and Reagan in the 1980s, globalisation – together with the integrative possibilities of new information technology – offers a real chance to secure a virtuous circle of economic growth alongside greater social cohesion. The upshot, simply put, is that anti-globalisation activists should sit tight and enjoy the ride.

Coyle is most fun when she champions the cultural benefits wrought by globalisation. McDonald's may be less than fully nutritious, but it's a good place to east fast and cheap – and luxurious when we compare it to Wimpy, the dreary British chain which went before. Besides, cultural exchange goes both ways, and – driven by an insatiable appetite for the exotic among Western consumers – those exchanges are increasingly moving in the other direction. We are, she reminds us, all sushi-eaters now.

Like Hardt and Negri, Diane Coyle is all too keen to hitch the new information technologies to her political mast. But whereas they fall back on the standard left-wing formula of "neo-liberalism" – which imagines that the contemporary market, has under pressure of globalisation, reverted to its rapacious Victorian heyday – Coyle is well aware that current rates of global growth are much less impressive than are often imagined. What squares the circle of her enthusiasm for globalisation is her faith that information technology will, after a false start, kindle a boom which will fuel the world economy for decades.

Her discussion of the potential of the new communication technologies makes most writers on the "weightless economy" look like lightweights. But what if, contrary to her thesis, the recent US boom was a result of productivity improvements within IT manufacturing, and not the benefits of using that technology throughout the rest of the economy? And what if the internet revolutionises the business of marketing and business intelligence, but its usefulness to the rest of the economy remains limited?

More fundamentally, the relationship between technical and social progress is not as straightforward as Coyle implies. The current wave of globalisation comes after a postwar period in which industry was nourished by incentives to produce for domestic markets. With that safety blanket removed, what distinguishes this wave is its peculiarly timid character. While technical change means that capital is capable of zipping around the world at lightning speed, that is often a sign of weakness rather than strength.

Homelessness, in the economy as in real life, is not a good position from which to make money. When capital does settle down, it is most often to invest in the low-value-added manufacturing dealt out to the developing world – where the only involvement of IT may be in e-mailing the order.

The breast-beating of the past few weeks will not reverse the current wave of globalisation. It is, however, likely to end in further restraints on the transfer of goods and people. But when everything from junk food to the catastrophe at the World Trade Centre can be laid at the door of globalisation, the use of the concept tells us little about the real processes of economic change, and instead flags up a broader perception that events are outside human control.

It is no use claiming, as Tony Blair did on Tuesday, that Western anxieties about globalisation can be resolved by "the power of community": by combining economic liberalisation with political institutions driven by a universal quest for social justice. As Hardt and Negri note, the defensiveness of the new global world order means that its political institutions, far from expressing common interests, are often motivated by a Western "fear of contagion". What is urgently required is a debate on how and within what time limit the market is capable of transferring its resources and know-how to the developing world. But in order for that debate to be had, we need first to cut through the fog thrown up by the idea of globalisation. From wildly different starting-points, both books go some way towards clearing the air.

James Harkin is a forecaster at the Social Issues Research Centre, Oxford