John Ralston Saul

This book charts the rise and fall of the 'globalism' aka neoconservative or neoliberal movement from the 1970s to the early 2000s. Saul describes it as a movement which made economics the prime mover of international relations, the idea that capital could flow around the world with such ease that overall wealth would increase and nation-states would become obsolete. It was like a religious belief, not particularly borne out by the results of the experiment, which increased inequality and led to corporate enrichment at the cost of entire countries. Globalism ignored culture, society and religion in favour of trade.

Having defined Globalism thus, Saul continued to talk about the 'technocratic elites' and their 'globalism'. I didn't necessarily disagree with the thesis of globalism's decline; many events after the publication of the book have confirmed it: the Global Financial Crisis of 2008, the rise of Bad China, Trump and Brexit in the teens and lately the 2020s pandemic and Russia's invasion of Ukraine. However I wanted to know how these 'elites' came to dominate the thinking of 'Western' governments and how they stayed enmeshed in their institutions for so long with little apparent result. I wanted more historical analysis than this book could provide. Instead there was a cherry-picking of events from the two decades to demonstrate the author's arguments, which I found unsatisfying.

The book did remind me of various events of the 1990s and inspired me to pick up a related work, Timothy Garton-Ash's 'History of the Present' (also written in the 1990s). More on that in another review.… (altro)