Column

More colonisation than globalisation

One day someone broke into John’s home. When John tried to stop him the intruder merely laughed. He told John he had no idea how to live. John protested but whatever he said the stranger treated him like an idiot. When John eventually picked up a weapon the man took a little more notice, but he was much more powerful than John and moved him and all his friends far away from their stolen house.

Now imagine someone breaking into your own home. Not physically, but just as forcefully. Imagine the intruder erecting huge advertising signs outside your garden, sending endless, repetitive messages through your television, seizing your home computer for his purposes - and all the while laughing at you, treating you like an idiot, never listening to a word you say.

Both situations are overwhelming and both are happening this very minute. We call the first colonisation and the second globalisation, but they amount to the same thing in the end.

Indigenous people all over the ‘New World’ have had their homes stolen and their culture and language damaged, probably beyond repair. Westerners have sensibilities about colonialism now, but we don’t give them their homes back and at least one current Prime Minister cannot even bring himself to say ‘Sorry’.

‘Globalisation’ is typically used to describe the growing interdependence of national economies and international scope of markets, capital, labour and technology. But it is much more than an economic phenomenon – it too is a form of colonisation.

There is a reserve of bushland next to my house in New Zealand. I like to walk there for its deep-green peace and naturalness. Yesterday I bent down to pick up a piece of litter. It was part of a discarded sweet packet, and bore the address: New Mills, Stockport, Cheshire. By coincidence I used to live there too, years ago, but it was not a remarkable find. I just shrugged - New Zealand is part of the West and we are formed and governed by exactly the same influences which form and govern Londoners, New Yorkers, Melbournians and Vancouverites.

We debate globalisation. Is it a force for good – a chance for us to realise how similar we are to each other – or a force for evil – selfish exploitation of market opportunity and the eradication of cultural difference? Can we build on its good points and ameliorate the rest? Could we even turn globalisation into an opportunity for equality?

But our discussion misses the point. We speak of globalisation as if it is a natural phenomenon - like the weather or the law of supply and demand - something we might manage in order to achieve benefits for everyone. Yet it is nothing more than an extension of the process that began with Raleigh and Columbus and is culminating in the elimination of native thinking and environments.

Globalisation is neither natural nor planned beyond the shortest of terms (missionaries want everyone else to have the same addictions they do – end of story). To talk of globalisation enriching the lives of everyone given ‘good management’ is like saying to Aboriginal people driven from their homes and deliberately separated from their children: ‘we think we can make this process fairer to you’. There can be no compromise - you must be either for or against it.

As we are bombarded with the materialism that globalisation depends on, like aboriginals our experiences and ambitions are relentlessly polluted. If we are to survive as independent thinking, moral beings in an interesting world we must resist globalisation – not work with it.

We must support difference in others and not capitulate ourselves. And this means not playing by the globalisers’ rules – not accepting their idea of a good life based on acquisition and not accepting their version of morality. For the moment we do we become colonised ourselves.