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 21 May 2008 @ 12:08
As one can observe from my previous articles, New Nationalism supports a continuous entry of investments to the domestic market from overseas. This article articulates the specific contention about the matter.
Autarchy is bad policy and practice to begin with. If it worked for the Habsburg Empire for a while, it worked only because there were draconian measures employed to make them work, and that the territory of the Empire was large enough for autarchy (also autarkie). This empire is long gone, autarchy is ridiculously obsolete, but Old Nationalists abound who still tend to be autarchic in their discourse. They are among our living dinosaurs, come to think of it.
Just because capital investments come from the outside shouldn’t make them necessarily suspect or deleterious to the national interest. As already previously articulated, there should be ‘safety nets’ or institutional and policy mechanisms, such as fair trade –based regimes, that can mitigate the deleterious impact of globalization. More >
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21 May 2008 @ 12:06
In a recently written book by me titled Fair Trade and Food Security: Framework and Policy Architecture (Kaisampalad, 2004), I was able to gather clear evidences of the failures of free trade policies. Not only free trade but the whole policy regime of economic liberalization—that paved the way to globalization—had downgrading effects on our currency, agriculture, and industry here in my home country.
I argued right then for a policy reform in the direction of fair trade. The totality of policy change should be the re-crafting of the entire policy architecture, which if commensurately followed can become fitful guides for foreign policy and diplomacy.
In the light of the massive acceptance of liberalization policy frameworks in the 80s and 90s, I gave their advocates a chance to prove the potency of free trade and laissez faire in general. In the long run, free trade is unsustainable, and can only be perpetuated, as shown by the experiences of the previous centuries, by imperialism. More >
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19 May 2008 @ 10:47
The antiquated debate regarding which domain should be the main source of national wealth—whether domestic or overseas—is still alive today. In the article of New Nationalism, I argued that in the emerging context of post-industrialism, this debate has become futile and unproductive. Instead of stressing a domestic versus international mindset, I argued for a both/and frame.
Admittedly, the overseas domain as a source of wealth is as palatable as it used to be during the era yet of the city-states of Northern Italy (Venice, Florence). This has become the backbone of mercantilism, which in turn became the backbone of nationalist economics. Old Nationalism henceforth carried the pro-mercantilist banner of seeking wealth primarily from international operations. But this time around, this position has to be revised in the light of import-substitution success.
New Nationalism, to my mind, should rather have it both ways, as culled from this and other parallel experiences in emerging markets. At this time particularly, Foreign Direct Investments or FDIs by Philippine-owned or controlled companies has begun to take off and contribute to our national coffers. Add to this our exports worth 40% of GDP, and remittances from labor export of worth 10% of GDP, and one can see the broad picture of the potency of the overseas domain as source of national income. More >
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19 May 2008 @ 10:45
Globalization is not only destroying the nation-state. It has also been destroying the ‘physical economy’ that is the economic foundation of the nation-state. All in the name of the greed of the financier oligarchs, who bred the monstrous ‘virtual economy’ founded on predatory finance.
The New Nationalism, as contended in my meaty article on the same, argues strongly for a restoration of the physical economy of affected nations. The USA, which produces 22% of the world’s gross economic output, is now in the phase of advanced decay as its physical economy had been looted and eventually destroyed by predatory financiers. There is now way that we citizens of the global community can’t be concerned about this, as the eventual crumbling of this megalithic economy will redound to global economic turbulence that can lead to global war.
In East Asia we all witnessed the horror of the economic meltdown in the late 1990s. Though the impact of that meltdown is hardly felt today, we saw the horror of it just the same. We peoples of the region simply felt so helpless as the contagion smelted the mightily growing economies here, beginning by destroying the currencies and ending with the crash of the physical economies. More >
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17 May 2008 @ 08:35
As already exacerbated in my previous articles, this development expert strongly argues for dirigisme (state intervention). Even in the yogic-mystical terrain, I strongly argue for interventionism in the physical plane, though this paradigm may hold water only here and not necessarily in other dimensions or trans-physical spheres where money economies are absent.
Incidentally, we now have emerging models for dirigist paths to sustainable development. For lack of a better term, the model is simply called ‘social market’. It is an integration of state intervention and market-driven economy. Extremes of socialism and laissez faire have both proved as flops. These extreme forms are beyond salvation and are both being junked today. They have become junkshop models.
Asia is the best laboratory today for the conscious evolution of ‘social markets’. China, Vietnam, and India are the countries to watch. I just hope that the original ASEAN 6 (Philippines, Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand, Brunei) will move towards their respective version of social markets. More >
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17 May 2008 @ 08:33
New Nationalism, as I argued in the foundational article of mine, must also reckon with people as the most important assets of economy and society. The contention cogitated from the vantage point of human capital.
I already elucidated in the portion on ‘basic needs’ that people matter most. Interestingly, in Maoist China, this human capital contention was elevated to the level of cult: the cult of the masses. Mao Zedong himself declared as an adage that “people not things are most decisive.” Many poems and songs were written by the youth vanguards of Mao’s revolution, and this literary-cultural explosion centering on the populist adage spilled over to other developing states as well. More >
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 15 May 2008 @ 09:54
As I was browsing through the pages of the newspapers this morning, my eyes immediately caught the item about the China earthquake update. The latest quake flattened many towns to ground level, killing over 22,000 folks, and destroyed infrastructures thus cutting off the affected areas from outside relief operations. The quake registered 7.9 magnitude on Reichster.
That quake was 2000 times more powerful than the Big One that struck Luzon in the early 1990s and caused extensive damages across couples of regions and cities. Obviously much bigger, the China quake must be expected to wreak greater destruction than Luzon’s (Philippine’s) big tremor.
The difference between the Luzon and Sichuan (China) quakes is not just magnitude and damages however. The Luzon quake was natural, as it had got to do with tectonic plate movements. Past the Luzon quake came those secret innovations on building a new weapon of mass destruction or WMD, the leading one being the Tesla Earthquake Machine or Tesla-EM (my own term for it). China’s quake has got to do more with the latter, though its own authorities may keep mum about their findings. More >
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15 May 2008 @ 09:50
Within a nation-state, from micro to macro levels, there better be cooperation among the three main sectors of development: state, market, civil society...
The emerging term for cooperation today is ‘synergy’. In the original sense of the term, it denoted the causal chain of “one thing leading to another.” It had since become a staple term in ecology and cybernetics. Gradually the meaning of the term underwent change.
Today the term ‘synergy’ had come closer to the term ‘symbiosis’ of ecology. The neo-Weberians were among the advocates of this largely symbiotic signification, applied to the three sectors. Joel Migdal, Vivienne Shue, Theda Skocpol and Peter Evans are among these chief advocates of synergism as strategy for effecting development.
Synergism isn’t really new here in Asia, even here in my country of origin. For centuries now, we had at the grassroots level the ‘bayanihan’, practiced by helping each other in times of need. Bayanihan’s closest translation is gemeinschaft (Ferdinand Toennies’ term) or community. It means synergy precisely in today’s context. More >
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13 May 2008 @ 12:36
While I argue strongly for a dirigist paradigm of development, I do not at all go for maximum state intervention such as the ones experimented on in socialist states and welfare states. Government is no Big Mama nor Santa Claus that provides everything for its citizens.
There should always be room for private initiatives, social spaces for people to think creatively and innovatively to provide for their own needs. State and civil society can come in to do enabling tasks when needed, but not to role-play as the Big Mama Forever of her infantile clientele who are forever dependent on ‘milk from mama’ (dole-outs, essentials of life). More >
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13 May 2008 @ 12:35
Sometime back, the ‘basic needs’ framework rang strong bells in the development field as a potent framework for development. Having started with the defunct Ministry of Human Settlements in 1981 as a community development specialist, I still recall then how brilliant and exquisitely crafted was this Ministry’s adoption of the ‘basic needs’ framework as its guiding light.
“Higit sa lahat, Tao!” is the core premise of the Ministry’s development paradigm. Roughly, this translates as “man precedes everything else.” Meaning, man should be at the core of all development efforts, and not the objects of a synthetic (infrastructures, industries) or physical nature (raw materials, livestock, plants). More >
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