- A+
??the great populist-insurgent of 100 years ago, one
vladimir ilyich ulyanov, found time while in cozy zurich planning his bolshevik
revolution to pen an explanation for why things were “kicking off”, as we say
these days: his book was entitled imperialism, the highest stage of capitalism
or, in its french translation, the last stage. were his modern successor (if
political opposite) donald trump to follow suit in a tweet, he might substitute
“globalism” for imperialism, adding “bad, sick! build that wall!” marine le
pen, france’s far-right presidential candidate, would surely agree.
100年前，伟大的民粹主义造反者弗拉基米尔?伊里奇?乌里扬诺夫（vladimir ilyich ulyanov，即列宁）在安逸的苏黎世策划布尔什维克革命时，抽时间写了一本名为《帝国主义是资本主义的最高阶段》(imperialism, the highest stage of capitalism)的小册子，解释为什么革命已“箭在弦上”。如果列宁的现代继任者（虽然政治上对立）唐纳德?特朗普(donald trump)在twitter上进行效法的话，他或许会用“全球主义”取代帝国主义，再加上“糟糕，恶心！建起这道墙！(bad, sick! build that wall!)”法国极右翼总统候选人马琳?勒庞(marine le pen)一定会表示赞同。
one can imagine another author of a century ago,
however, taking one glance at trump and le pen and demanding that his
publishers issue an updated version of his two-volume epic, the decline of the
west. oswald spengler saw the west less in the form of nato, the us-japan
alliance and the european union, which all define it for us today, and more as
a european-american civilisation that was heading for history’s garbage-can — a
verdict that even the coolest observation of the trump administration’s opening
weeks in office could now seem to confirm.
然而，我们可以想象一个世纪前的另一位作家，他看着特朗普和勒庞，要求出版商为自己的两卷本史诗巨著《西方的没落》(decline of the west)发行一个新版本。奥斯瓦尔德?斯彭格勒(oswald spengler)看到的西方还没有如今为我们界定西方的北约(nato)、美日同盟和欧盟(eu)，他眼中的西方是一个正在走向历史垃圾桶的欧美文明——即便以最冷静的眼光来看，特朗普政府执政初期的表现如今似乎也在证实这一判断。
for this is the biggest issue of our times: a
matter of whether, having seen so much failure in foreign affairs since 2001
and in economic affairs since 2008, the world’s richest, long most successful
countries — i.e. the west — might now be slithering unstoppably down a slope,
their slide likely to be accelerated by the populist-insurgents who are coming
to power. or, to put it a cheerier way, the issue is whether the trumps and le
pens of 2017 can be proved as wrong as were lenin and spengler a century ago.
因为这是我们时代最大的问题：事关在2001年以来的外交事务领域、2008年以来的经济事务领域目睹如此多的失败之后，全球最富裕、最成功的国家（如西方国家）如今是否已无法阻挡地开始走下坡路，而这种衰落很可能因不断崛起的民粹主义反叛者而加速。或者，换一种更动听的方式说，问题在于，历史能否证明2017年的特朗普们和勒庞们犯了与一个世纪前的列宁和斯彭格勒一样的错误。
certainly, the word “globalisation” lies at the
heart of it. it is the centrepiece of the populists’ complaints, a word that
has come to signify a new bogeyman, a set of rapacious powers beyond national
control, economic forces that shape circumstances according to the interests of
alien others, far away. a new sort of imperialism, in other words, one that
through the exploitative mechanisms of “finance capital”, as lenin and plenty
of anti-globalists have called it, produces insecurity and feelings of powerlessness.
当然，“全球化”一词处于这个问题的核心。全球化是民粹主义者抱怨的主要对象；全球化一词已开始象征一个新的怪物、一套超越国家控制的贪婪的权力、将环境塑造得符合远方外国人利益的经济力量。换句话说，全球化已变成一种新型帝国主义，通过（列宁及很多反全球化主义者口中的）“金融资本”剥削机制造成了不安全感和无力感。
president trump, as a beneficiary of finance
capital in his business life, would not quite put it that way. otherwise, why
would he have filled his new cabinet with billionaires? nor could trump be
expected to agree that the world is at the last, or even highest, stage of
capitalism. he probably wants to make capitalism great again. but he would agree
that globalisation is his enemy, with the curious twist that he considers
foreign countries to have been the imperialist scourges of america, while most
non-american anti-globalists would put it the other way around. it is the
ultimate irony: the west invented what we now call globalisation and it is
america, epicentre of the west, that is demonising its own invention.
在自己的经商生涯中受益于金融资本的特朗普总统，未必会赞同这种说法。要不然，为什么他的新内阁里挤满了亿万富翁？也不必指望特朗普会赞同世界处于资本主义的最后（或最高）阶段。他八成想要让资本主义再次变得伟大。但他会赞同，全球化是他的敌人，他还有个古怪的观点，认为外国是导致美国苦难的帝国主义者，而大多数非美国的反全球化主义者的看法正好相反。没有什么比这更具讽刺意味了：西方发明了我们今天所称的全球化，而西方的中心——美国却在妖魔化自己的发明。
this all illustrates a great piece of writing
advice from george orwell: never use a long word when a short one will do.
whoever coined “globalisation” has a lot to answer for. if only he or she had
followed orwell and used instead the word “openness”, we might have got to the
point rather more quickly.
这一切都反映了乔治?奥威尔(george orwell)给出的一项伟大的写作建议：能用短词的时候就别用长词。“全球化”一词的创造者需要负很大的责任。如果他（或她）当初听从了奥威尔的建议，用了“开放”(openness)一词，我们或许已经迅速得多地搞明白了。
for there is something strange about the term the
populists love to hate. it is that it implies an active effort to make
everything global, a strategy to be planetary rather than national. yet while
that may be the sort of thing some companies include in their strategic plans —
remember “think global, act local” — it doesn’t accurately represent any sort
of public policy to “globalise” anything much at all. america, japan, china,
britain, germany: none of these countries has set globalisation as its active
goal except, funnily enough, britain now that it is leaving the 
eu.
因为全球化一词存在容易招民粹主义者憎恶的怪异之处，那就是：全球化意味着努力让一切都变成全球性的，意味着谋求一种超越国家的世界性。然而，虽然一些企业或许会将全球化纳入自己的战略规划——记得“着眼全球、脚踏实地”(think global, act local)的口号吧——但准确地说，并没有什么公共政策要将什么东西变得“全球化”。美国、日本、中国、英国、德国，这些国家没有一个将全球化确立为行动目标——只除了英国，可笑的是，如今倒是英国要退出欧盟了。
properly understood, globalisation has been an
outcome, not an objective. it has been an outcome of policies that have treated
openness as a virtue, including openness to trade, to ideas, to capital, to
cultural interplay and, what is now for many the most sensitive issue, to
migration.
正确的理解是，全球化只是一种结果，而非目标。全球化是将开放视为优点的种种政策的结果，包括对贸易、思想、资本、文化的相互影响以及移民（如今被很多人视为最敏感的问题）的开放。
in the early postwar decades, when trade
liberalisation and foreign direct investment chiefly occurred in america and
western europe, this was basically a matter of transatlantic relations,
although the french writer-turned-politician, jean-jacques servan-schreiber,
sounded alarms about “le défi américain”, the american challenge, as us
multinationals proved nimbler at exploiting emerging pan-european markets. then
it took in japan, the miracle economy of its time, soon to be labelled an
“unfair” trader as it racked up surpluses and then, in the 1980s, “bought part
of america’s soul”, as newsweek described sony’s acquisition of columbia
pictures.
二战后初期，当贸易自由化和对外直接投资主要存在于美国和西欧时，这基本上只是一个跨大西洋关系的问题，尽管作家出身的法国政治家让-雅克?塞尔旺-施赖伯(jean-jacques servan-schreiber)提醒人们警惕“美国的挑战”(le défi américain)——当时美国的跨国公司事实上更善于利用新兴的泛欧洲市场。接着，这种跨大西洋关系接纳了那个时代的经济奇迹——日本，随着日本对外积累起越来越大的顺差，随后在上世纪80年代《新闻周刊》(newsweek)将索尼(sony)收购哥伦比亚影业公司(columbia pictures)形容为日本“买下了美国的部分灵魂”，日本很快被贴上了“不公平”贸易国的标签。
it was really only once china followed japan’s lead
by opening its economy to freer trade and foreign investment that the word
globalisation took hold. more and more countries, all over the world, were
opening up, in a process further fuelled by the way information technology was
making communication cheaper and faster. thomas friedman of the new york times
jumped in and claimed in his 2005 book that “the world is flat”, which would be
unusual for a globe, though most people knew what he must mean, apart from the
billion or so still-impoverished indians for whom the world felt distinctly
hilly.
只是在中国以日本为榜样向自由贸易和外国投资开放本国经济之后，全球化一词才大行其道。世界各地越来越多的国家开始实行开放，而信息技术使交流更便宜、更快捷，进一步推动了这一进程。《纽约时报》(new york times)专栏作家托马斯?弗里德曼(thomas friedman)站了出来，在他2005年出版的书中宣称“世界是平的”(the world is flat)，对于球型的地球来说，这样说是不正常的，虽然大多数人都知道他的言下之意，除了约10亿仍然贫穷的印度人，对他们而言，这个世界显然崎岖不平。
who could object to a borderless world, whether
spherical or flat? john lennon had sung that we should imagine it as a sort of
paradise to which we should aspire. ryanair has been bringing more parts of
that world within the affordable reach of people of modest means. the internet
and satellite technology have made the whole world more visible, almost
touchable.
谁会反对一个无国界的世界——无论是球型的还是平的？约翰?列侬(john lennon)曾唱到，我们应该把它想象成一种我们应向往的天堂。瑞安航空(ryanair)一直在将全球更多地区纳入一般收入人群可以去得起的范围之内。互联网和卫星技术使整个世界更加真实可见——几乎触手可及。
yet here we are, with globalisation commencing some
sort of a retreat and with the panoply of western institutions built during the
past 70 years to keep the peace and facilitate openness — the world trade
organisation, the eu, nato, the un in all its forms — under attack. when times
feel hard, blaming foreigners, those rapacious powers of globalisation, is
naturally tempting. where this will lead, we cannot know. but to make it
likelier to lead to better times rather than worse ones, it is as well to
diagnose our ailments properly.
但现在我们的处境是，全球化开始出现某种倒退，过去70年间为维持和平、促进开放而建立的大量西方机构——世界贸易组织(wto)、欧盟(eu)、北约(nato)、各种联合国(un)机构——正在受到攻击。当时局艰难时，指责外国人（全球化的贪婪力量）自然成为诱人选项。局势会如何发展，我们不得而知。但如果想让局势可能往好的方向发展，最好对我们的问题做出恰当的诊断。
that is why, in good orwellian manner, the short
word is preferable to the long one. but it mustn’t be left on its own. for
although throughout the history of economic and social development openness has
been a necessary virtue, it has not been a sufficient one. in practice, it has
needed some contemporary interpretation of another word alongside it: equality.
这就是（按奥威尔的方式）短词“开放”优于长词“全球化”的原因。但仅靠开放肯定不行。因为，虽然在整个经济和社会发展史上，开放是一个必要条件，它并非充分条件。实际上，“开放”需要当代意义上的“平等”一词与它并肩作战。
the virtue of openness is that it brings change in
the form of better ideas, better ways of doing things, better sources of this
good or that service. as the science writer (and now conservative member of the
house of lords) matt ridley memorably put it in his 2010 book the rational
optimist, progress and prosperity arrive “when ideas have sex”. in an age
obsessed by uber, this is known as “disruption”, but there is nothing new about
it at all.
开放的优点是，它可以带来各种变化：更优秀的思想、更佳的做事方式、更好的商品或服务。科普作家（现为上议院保守党成员）马特?里德利(matt ridley)在自己2010年的著作《理性乐观派》(the rational optimist)中写道，“当不同的思想‘交配’时”，就会出现进步和繁荣。在一个被优步(uber)困扰的时代，这被称为“颠覆”，但这根本不是什么新鲜事。
the trouble with change is indeed that it brings disruption,
from which some people feel like winners and others feel like losers. for that
reason, the societies that have absorbed and even embraced change most
successfully have been those that gave a wide group of citizens some sort of a
voice about what was going on, and about what collective efforts might be
needed to deal with its consequences.
改变的问题其实就是它带来了颠覆，有些人在其中感觉成了赢家，其他一些人感觉成了输家。因此，最成功地吸收甚至拥抱变革的社会，是那些让广大市民对如下问题拥有一定发言权的社会：正在发生什么事情以及需要共同采取何种努力来应对其后果。
we now call this democracy, as the equality of
political rights has been extended to entire adult populations, but the same
principle applied beforehand. open societies such as 18th-century britain and
the netherlands, which had relatively fluid elites and which traded ideas
widely, prospered more than did closed ones. the secret to evolutionary success
over the longer term has been the balancing of that openness with forms of
equality that help to build social trust and provide reassurance.
如今，随着平等的政治权利扩展到所有成年人，我们称这为民主，但同样的原则早已在社会中应用。开放社会——如18世纪拥有相对自由流动的精英且思想得到广泛交流的英国和荷兰——从前就比封闭社会更加繁荣。从长期来看，演进式成功的秘诀在于，在开放与各种形式的平等之间实现平衡，平等有助于建立社会信任、安稳民心。
so why has this gone wrong? the first answer is
that it frequently goes wrong. the real question is whether stumbling societies
can get on their feet again; whether they retain the power to evolve while
rebuilding social trust. in 1975 the trilateral commission, a private body
dedicated to dialogue between america, western europe and japan, published a
report entitled “the crisis of democracy”. that report quoted willy brandt as
having said, just before he stepped down as west germany’s chancellor in 1974
that: “western europe has only 20 or 30 more years of democracy left in it;
after that it will slide, engineless and rudderless, under the surrounding sea
of dictatorship, and whether the dictation comes from a politburo or junta will
not make that much difference.”
那么，为什么出了问题？第一种回答是，出问题是很常见的。真正的问题是，跌倒的社会是否还能站起来；它们能否还保持着一边重建社会信任、一边演进的能力。1975年，致力于在美国、西欧、日本之间推动对话的民间组织——三边委员会(trilateral commission)发布了一份名为《民主的危机》(the crisis of democracy)的报告。报告援引维利?勃兰特(willy brandt)在1974年辞去西德总理前不久说的话：“西欧民主只剩二三十年的时间；在那之后，他将衰落，失去动力，失去方向，陷入独裁统治汪洋大海的包围，无论是共产党政治局的独裁统治、还是军政府的独裁统治，都不会有太大区别。”
not a great prediction, given that in the same
period greece, portugal and spain all replaced dictators with democracies, but
brandt’s mind was no doubt swayed by the terrorism and disorder being felt in
several european countries, by the discovery of an east german spy in his own
office, and the economic troubles all western countries were then mired in
thanks to the 1973 oil shock.
这预言不是太准确，因为在同一时期，希腊、葡萄牙和西班牙都以民主取代了独裁者，但多个欧洲国家出现的恐怖主义和无序、勃兰特自己的办公室里发现一名东德间谍以及1973年的石油危机后所有西方国家都陷入经济危机，无疑坚定了他的想法。
the second answer, however, is that we’ve messed
things up, again. we did so most spectacularly, and potentially fatefully, with
the 2008 financial crisis, which we call global but was really american and
european. that crisis reflected serious policy errors, of course, but also the
excessive, because unequal, political power wielded by the financial industry.
that is almost a decade ago now, but the effects live on, in household incomes
that are no higher, and often lower, than in 2007. and, crucially, it lives on
in the sense that the unequal grip of bankers and other oligarchs has been left
largely unchanged.
然而，第二种回答是我们再次把事情搞砸了。我们以一种极为引人注目的方式（或许是注定的）把事情搞砸了——2008年的金融危机，我们称之为全球金融危机，但实际上是美国和欧洲的危机。当然，此次危机反映了严重的政策错误，但也反映了金融业掌握的不平等的政治权力。那场危机距今已过去近10年，但影响依然还在，反映在家庭收入如今还没有超过（通常低于）2007年的水平。关键是，这种影响还反映在人们的这种感觉中：银行家和其他寡头享有的不平等的支配力基本上毫发无损。
plenty of today’s ailments can be traced back to
long before 2008, as technology disrupted labour markets, say, and demography
raised the burdens on public finances of healthcare and pensions. but what 2008
did was to shake people’s faith in the whole system. it weakened or in some
cases destroyed their belief that evolutionary solutions would eventually be
found.
当今的很多问题都可以追溯到至2008年之前很久，比如，随着技术颠覆劳动力市场，人口结构加重了医疗和养老金方面的公共财政负担。但2008年金融危机动摇了人们对整个体制的信心。它削弱或（在某些情况下）摧毁了他们的信念，即最终会找到演进的解决方案。
是时候为“全球化”正名了.jpg
the sense of equality has been badly damaged, not
just in terms of incomes but of political voice. openness to fully free flows
of capital has been shown to be not just dangerous to economies but also liable
to corrupt democracies. social trust has been eroded.
平等的感觉已遭严重破坏——不仅在收入方面，而且在政治发言权方面。对资本完全自由流动的开放已被证明不仅威胁经济体，而且容易腐蚀民主国家。社会信任已被侵蚀。
what trump has done, as lenin did a century ago,
has been to sense the political winds and to sail into power thanks to their
strength. populists such as him and le pen get many things right: they should
not be ignored. it is their solutions that are dangerous, because they are
liable to close societies, to lead to fewer ideas having sex, and to damage the
vital ability of democracies to evolve.
像一个世纪前列宁做得那样，特朗普一直在感知政治风向，并利用其力量进入权力中枢。特朗普、勒庞这样的民粹主义者在很多事情上是对的：他们不应被忽视。危险的是他们提出的解决方案，因为这些方案有可能导致社会封闭，导致更少的思想“交配”，破坏民主演进的重要能力。
now, it is up to all those democracies to show
that, like brandt 40 years ago, the declinists are wrong. to do so, they will
need to restore the harmony between openness and equality. it can be done. the
question is whether it will be done.
如今，所有这些民主国家都肩负着如下责任：向世人证明，像40年前的勃兰特那样，衰落论者是错误的。要做到这一点，它们需要让开放与平等重新和谐共处。这是可以做到的。问题在于是否有人做。
bill emmott will be speaking at the ft weekend
oxford literary festival on saturday april 1 about ‘the fate of the west’,
published by economist books in april (uk) and may (us)
比尔?艾默特(bill emmott)的新书《西方的命运》(the fate of the west)将由economist books于今年4月在英国出版，5月在美国出版。
cdic???pg?
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