WHAT'VE 'YA GOT?:

Think Global, Act Local: To understand why the antiglobalization movement has lost its edge, you should study the recent Indian elections. (THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN, 6/06/04, NY Times)

T The Wall Street Journal had a front-page story last Wednesday that caught my eye. It was about how the antiglobalization movement seemed to be losing steam, with police not expecting the sort of violent protesters of the late 1990's to show up at the G-8 summit in Sea Island, Ga., this week. If you want to understand why the antiglobalization movement — which was always a mishmash of groups and ideologies — has lost its edge, you should study the recent Indian elections. And if the antiglobalizers want to understand how they could again become relevant, they should study those elections as well.

To everyone's surprise, India's elections ended with the rightist Hindu nationalist B.J.P. alliance being thrown out and replaced by the left-leaning Congress Party alliance. Of course, no sooner did the B.J.P. — which ran on a platform of taking credit for India's high-tech revolution — go down than the usual suspects from the antiglobalization movement declared this was a grass-roots rejection of India's globalization strategy. They got it exactly wrong. What Indian voters were saying was not: "Stop the globalization train, we want to get off." It was, "Slow down the globalization train, and build me a better step-stool, because I want to get on."

"Every time an Indian villager watches the community TV and sees an ad for soap or shampoo, what they notice are not the soap and shampoo but the lifestyle of the people using them, the kind of motorbikes they ride, their dress and their homes," says Nayan Chanda, the Indian-born editor of the invaluable YaleGlobal online magazine. "They see a world they want access to. This election was about envy, anger and aspirations. It was a classic case of revolutions happening when things are getting better but not fast enough for many people."

Indeed, Indian villagers and farmers are just like all other consumers today — better informed.

Mr. Friedman is certainly correct that in the Information Age, when even the poorest people in the world's most backwards regions can see what life is like in the uber-affluent developed world, the pressure for reform is going to be driven from below--this is how globalization is essentially a form of American imperialism, forcing everyone to adopt our system in order to satisfy the material wants of their people. But that has nothing to do with the collapse of the anti-globalization protests--they were made up of knuckle-headed youngsters who were more interested in having something to protest than in the actual issues. They moved on to the anti-war protests and when they failed there seem to have lost some of their enthusiasm. They'll get another wind soon and find some anti-American cause to rally 'round.

Posted by Orrin Judd at June 6, 2004 9:45 AM