John Ralston Saul - "The Collapse of Globalism and the Reinvention of the World", Viking Canada, Toronto, 2005 ISBN 0-670-06367-3

This excerpt from Ralson Saul's book is very relevant to the recent banlieu (suburb) "riots" in Paris. Chapter 10, p. 96

There was a disturbing hint in the early 1970s of how this managerialist global economic theory would work. Europe’s technocratic leaders suddenly realized that their national working classes had disappeared. A century of social progress encouraged by public policy and regulation —in particular a highly successful quarter-century after 1945 — had increased education levels, developed skills, raised wages and living standards in general. In fact, the situation had been increasingly obvious through the 1 960s. Rather than attempt to rethink and reorganize that part of the economy dependent on a traditional working class, the technocracy decided simply to create a new working class by bringing in hundreds of thousands of guest workers from the Mediterranean basin. Most of them were Islamic. Most of them came from major imperial civilizations such as Turkey and Morocco. Others came from ex-colonies such as Algeria, Tunisia and Somalia, which were also textured and complex civilizations. That those brought in came from the poorest, least-educated part of the population allowed the managers to pretend that these rich origins did not need to be taken into account. The technocrats’ model was old-fashioned utilitarianism mixed with abstract management theory. It was a radical reworking of late-nineteenth-century Taylorism, with its conscious confusing of men and machines.

The theory was that these guest workers would arrive, along with their wives to look after them, and therefore their children. They would work, receive access to the social services offered citizens, but not become citizens — a combination guaranteed to provoke alienation and humiliation — and of course be prepared to be sent home whenever the host wished. Thirty-five years later, 17 million Muslims, including guest workers, many now retired, their children, grandchildren and newer workers, are caught up with 450 million other Europeans in the ethical, human contradictions that this global managerial approach has created. Many of them can now become citizens. Many now are. But the whole process toward inclusion has been based on a utilitarian maze of exclusion. The result tends therefore not to be the joy and pride of belonging, but much more complex feelings on all sides. Of anger, often sublimated anger. Of misunderstanding. Many differences have become unscalable mountains instead of rich opportunities. The advantages of complex human relationships have been replaced by the disadvantages of the simple. If nationalism of a negative sort is reappearing in Europe among both old Europeans and new, it stems in good part from this managerial approach to the reality of human lives.

At the heart of the problem lies the Globalist idea of viewing society through an economic prism. In practical terms this has meant demoting the values — ethical and moral — of community in favour of the certainty that humans are primarily driven by self-interest. They will therefore not mind being confused with machines, provided their income is raised. It would be difficult to find a clearer example of the self-delusion of Globalization theories.

This story of 17 million people is only one aspect of contemporary worker mobility. The word mobility carries a positive implication. But if they are on the move because their poverty drives them, then a more accurate phrase would be contemporary worker instability.

There are today over 120 million migrant workers with their families, of which only 20 million are in Europe. This level of displacement resembles a wartime or immediate post-war situation. It does not suggest a period of economic progress — let alone social progress —toward greater prosperity. On the other hand, it does resemble other eras of extreme economic change, which in general have led to periods of great social instability and violence, as happened in the nineteenth century. In other words, we live in a period obsessed by management, yet managed by people who are in general so unfamiliar with history that they are unconscious of the effects of their utilitarian methods.

Europe’s guest worker experiment involved a fascinating alteration in classic free trade economics. Adam Smith, David Ricardo even more so, and most of the nineteenth-century enthusiasts all believed fervently that you should produce what you had a comparative advantage in. Everyone would somehow end up buying cheap and selling expensive. The early Globalist managers altered this theory by importing not cheap goods but cheap workers. Why? To maintain their old model of the buy-sell balance. How? By compensating for rising social justice within their own borders. How? By creating a new working class, one that could not rise socially. Why? Because, like the working class of the nineteenth century, it was bereft of citizens’ rights. Behind a modern technocratic discourse, the aim was to preserve a nineteenth-century idea of how markets must work, an idea dependent on the existence of a working class — better still, a disenfranchised working class. In the 1990s there would be yet another reinvention of the old buy-sell idea. In the meantime, this highly original abstraction of human lives would become the foundation for a revival of Western racism, something we thought we had defeated in 1945.