Globalisation has rendered us incapable of sanctioning tyrants

A modern, global economy was supposed to make war impossible. Instead it’s made it very costly to stand up to our enemies

Much has been said about Russia’s leap backwards into an earlier historical incarnation of itself. The pretext for Putin’s actions sounds so bizarre to Western ears that it must be understood as (and almost certainly is) a species of madness. A mythical sense of a people’s destiny and their blood bond with those who, they insist, share this inherited mission is now beyond the bounds of political discourse. It is not only intellectually absurd but morally repugnant because of its association with crimes against humanity.

The unforgivable geopolitical sin of the last century was nationalism – or, strictly speaking, nativism. Carried to its most hideous extreme it transmogrified into a doctrine of racial purity which led eventually to genocide. Agreement on this point among the political class in the West has been virtually unanimous, and there has been a similar degree of agreement in the post-Cold War world on the antidote to this curse. Globalism – the deliberate engineering of interdependence between countries of different historical traditions and stages of development – would bring an end to any possibility of murderous blood and soil national revivalism.

Here was the solution: create a mutually rewarding network of trade agreements and transactional fluidity from which no state would want to be excluded. Poor countries with valuable natural resources would be able to sell their commodities to states which required them to facilitate growth, and thereby become more prosperous themselves. Those with advanced technical production facilities could trade in their expertise and spread their superior skills to less sophisticated nations which would profit through inward investment.

Needless to say, this was an idealised picture which failed to take account of the ruthlessness with which investors would seek to maximise profits by, for example, making use of cheap labour in poor nations thereby creating unemployment and politicised resentment in the advanced ones. (This is the phenomenon which propelled Donald Trump into power.) But even if there was a degree of cynicism in this, the globalisation of the market economy was going to put an end to the possibility of reckless war-mongering. Wasn’t it?

There would be too much mutual advantage to be gained from cooperation and too much risk in being cut out of the game. No state of any significant size could afford to become an untouchable outlaw closed out of all the avenues of growth and expansion. Especially at a time when it was virtually impossible to keep ordinary people locked away from the modern communications which might give them glimpses of how the rest of the world was able to live. So everybody went for globalisation to a greater or lesser degree, and virtually every country of any size could become part of the greatest explosion of wealth and general prosperity the world had ever seen.

What almost nobody predicted was that the corrupt, shambolic, post-Communist behemoth of Russia – in spite of being gifted with vast natural resources – would make such a philosophical mess of its emergence from collectivist tyranny that even globalism would not stop its aggression. In fact, it has exploited its global clout to support its rampages.

The main purpose which that global connectedness served in post-Soviet Russia was to enrich a robber baron class of super-capitalists who very quickly got the hang of international banking’s dark side. But globalisation as a system held up because it could not be dismantled. It had become essential to the dealings of every mainstream government. All serious wealth creating business was now international, so it became almost impossible to disentangle, or even pause, the processes which were available to the fellowship of criminals without borders. Or, as we are seeing now, to a rogue government with a pathological obsession.

This is what we are witnessing in the controversy over excluding Russia from the Swift transaction system. However morally (or strategically) advisable such a move might seem, the actual operation of it is extremely complex. Swift is not a government-run service but a private cooperative owned by the world’s largest banks. One very senior international banking figure told me last week that removing Russia from its arrangements will be immensely challenging. There is far too much integration of the financial dealings of myriad national and supra-national interests to make such a surgical excision easy in the short term.

This is where the globalising of the economy leaves us. In an important sense, it has achieved its aim. The interests of all countries are now tied up with one another to such an extent that they cannot be separated out – at least not without catastrophic economic consequences for their populations. And no democratically elected government will be prepared to risk pauperising its own voters.

The only governments now free to indulge in national myths which allow them to commit crimes against humanity – as Russia is doing now in Ukraine – are those who don’t need to give a fig about the fate of their people at home. So long as Putin and his thugs can reign untouched, like the Tsars they idolise, they have nothing to fear from an economic setback – especially if they can rely on the stupidity of European leaders who have become dependent on their supplies of fuel. (If only for that reason, any setbacks are bound to be temporary.)

There is an awful irony here. Democracy was supposed to have been the outright winner of both the world wars and the Cold War. Maybe that will still prove to be true: liberal democratic societies and free markets have certainly proved to be the most flexible, dynamic, adaptable forms of human organisation in history. But at the moment, the countries that embody them seem in danger of being outmaneuvered by autocratic rulers, in Russia and in China, who are making diabolically clever use of the mechanisms that were created to protect free people. The arrangements that were supposed to put an end to war have ended up making it almost impossible to put a stop to it.

Globalism has not stopped Russia’s aggression. In fact, it has exploited its global clout to support its rampages