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Deglobalization
THOMAS MCARDLE was a White House speechwriter for President George W. Bush and writes for IssuesInsights.com. Thomas McArdle
Fearful Globalists
The globalist aristocracy wants to safeguard globalization
When we hear José Manuel Barroso, former president of the European Commission and current chairman of Goldman Sachs International, lamenting on the eve of this week’s first postCOVID meeting of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, of recent trends that he fears portend “a decoupling world,” what could he mean?
Barroso’s worries were extensive, as globalization contends with “friction from nationalism, protectionism, nativism, chauvinism if you wish, or even sometimes xenophobia, and for me, it is not clear who is going to win.” He cited “tension between the US and China ... accelerated by the pandemic and now this invasion of Ukraine by Russia.” The mood seems to be distinctly along the lines of “if it weren’t for this confounded war, on the heels of this confounded pandemic, this super party of ours wouldn’t have been pooped.”
That a figure such as a former Portuguese prime minister could end up occupying the upper echelons of the second-largest investment bank in the world, with its name being a byword for corporate capitalism, is reminiscent of John O. Brennan casting his vote for Communist Party USA head Gus Hall in the 1976 presidential election and then, four years later, being given a job at the CIA—which knew of his Communist allegiance—before finally being appointed director of the CIA by then-President Barack Obama in 2013.
Soviet-style communism wasn’t pure enough for Barroso. At university, he was one of the leaders of the Maoist Portuguese Workers’ Communist Party (at the time, a secret organization known as the Re-Organized Movement of the Proletariat Party). There’s an embarrassing video of Barroso in 1976 bemoaning “the crisis of the bourgeois education system,” which he called “anti-proletarian,” and contending that “it throws students against workers and workers against students.” What would the young, Maoist Barroso have said if a TV interviewer had asked if he thought Goldman Sachs was anti-proletarian?
Barroso’s curious protectiveness of the land of Mao Zedong always seemed to manifest itself in the following years. In 2008, he was arguing that “China could and should have a greater voice in international financial institutions.” In 2014, Barroso was scolded in strong terms by Human Rights Watch for his reticence regarding China’s persecution of its own people.
“We deplore the fact you have not been specific in past public statements about human rights violations in China and thus failed to engage in a public dialogue with both the people of China and Europe,” Lotte Leicht, the organization’s EU director, wrote in a letter to Barroso while he was president of the European Commission on the eve of Chinese leader Xi Jinping’s visit to Brussels in March 2014.
“At a time where courageous Chinese activists, journalists, and lawyers are demanding government accountability and implementation of rights enshrined in both Chinese and international law, it is quite simply unacceptable for you as President of the Commission not to speak out as set out in the EU’s Strategic Framework.”
Quoting that formal commitment, Leicht pointed out that “the EU pledged to raise human rights issues ‘vigorously in all appropriate forms of bilateral dialogue, including at the highest level.’ We call on you to live up to this pledge and support those inside China struggling to ensure their human rights.”
“Democracy” is a word that passed through Barroso’s lips often during his EU years, but when, in the summer of 2008, 53 percent of Irish voters opposed the Lisbon Treaty, Barroso bullied and bribed Ireland into submission, helping assure that a second referendum approved it the following year.
Nigel Farage, the father of Brexit, described Barroso’s philosophy in 2012.
“Whilst you think the nation-state should continue to exist, it mustn’t have any democratic powers. All democracy is to be vested [within the EU] under what you call ‘the community method,’ which of course means that your unelected commission has the sole right” to present legislation.
The litany of vices Barroso rattled off recently, led by “nationalism,” can’t be managed by a bureaucratic creature whose underlying purpose is to shrink nationality. No matter how much money the likes of Barroso can wield to buy compliance, no international body can keep the lid on the boiling pot of free, industrialized nations’ citizens’ anger at a level of inflation unseen by most in their lifetimes, the consequences of dovish Europeans practically inviting Russian President Vladimir Putin to invade Ukraine through the shortcomings of their energy and military stances, and years-long migration crises in Europe and the United States.
Only people running their own countries—nation-states’ representative governments in action—carrying out the messy work of passing, changing, and repealing laws in a manner seen by the populace as legitimate, can let off the steam that will otherwise lead to an explosion.
