Read Online In Defense of America by Bronwen Maddox - Free Book Online

as “Germany’s Margaret Thatcher” —intended as a compliment, out of the conviction that Germany needed a dose of Lady Thatcher’s prescriptions even though her legacy remains contentious at home. But Merkel was never going to be a German Thatcher, and she did not even manage to become the chancellor she wanted to be, such was the opposition to her reforms.
    In fact, it has been German companies themselves who have managed to push through the changes in deals with their own workers that politicians have failed to accomplish. In 2005, the year when this phenomenon gathered pace, Mercedes pushed through 8,500 job cuts while Volkswagen was able to make large workforce reductions because its union accepted that without these cuts, a plant would close. Changes that were too controversial as German national policy were possible for managers and union bosses sitting across a table.
    In Sarkozy’s case, once elected, he developed a new refrain that European countries “should not be so naive as to expose our companies to competition,” which contradicted his earlier free-market rhetoric.
    In backing away from making such market reforms, these French and German politicians are responding to the ambivalence of their own people about America and “American-style capitalism.” They want the best of the United States —the scientific discovery, the technological innovation, the anticancer drugs. Quite a few want American music and movies, too —those products were not thrust on foreign audiences against their will. But they criticize or reject the system that produced them.
    Anti-Globalization, Anti-American
    In this short argument I cannot do justice to the extraordinary tangle of agendas and players in the anti-globalization movement, which has set itself against the opening of trade barriers and which has come to identify the United States —and American companies —as the prime villains. But the movement has been an exercise in such systematic misrepresentation of the benefits of free trade and free markets that it has, through jeopardizing trade talks, done real damage to the interests of the poorest people on the planet, those it says it wants to help.
    If there is a single moment when the movement came of age, it was the November 1999 Seattle trade riots, when the cast of a chaotic opera assembled on the streets of that normally serene city. European diplomats, dressed in their uniform of coats with fur collars, Homburg hats, and good leather shoes, tried to pick their way through dreadlocked demonstrators wearing papier-mâché turtle shells. José Bové, a sheep farmer from France’s Larzac and a nationally loved figure back home for his campaign against “McDomination,” drew thousands to his rallies as he held lumps of Roquefort cheese aloft, with Danielle Mitterrand, wife of the late president, sitting adoringly at his feet.
    The opponents of globalization are, as Martin Wolf at the
Financial Times
has written in his superb book on the phenomenon, a mixture of those who have something to lose from the opening of trade barriers —such as labor unions and, in the past, farmers —and a medley of environmental campaigners, nongovernmental organizations, and charities (prominently, Christian Aid) who argue that trade, on terms they believe are set by America, hurts the world’s poorest. 8
    It would be foolish to suggest that there are no cases in which free trade makes some people worse off. Paul Collier, a professor of economics at Oxford University who worked for five years at the World Bank, in his passionate analysis of how to rescue the world’s poorest countries, particularly those in Africa, argued that rich countries should give them preferential terms of trade if they are in no position yet to compete. 9
    But to take the cause of anti-globalization beyond those particular cases is a grotesque misrepresentation of the principles of the benefit from trade. As Adam Smith described that benefit in 1776,