Recently, Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad delivered the inaugural U Thant Lecture on "Globalization, Global Community and the United Nations" to a standing room audience at the United Nations University in Tokyo. U Thant, the statesman from Myanmar who served as the secretary general of the U.N. from 1961 until 1971, and is credited with proposing the establishment of the U.N. University, would not have been pleased to hear Mahathir's speech.
Mahathir has been prime minister of Malaysia since 1981. His speech made clear that he is no friend of globalization, at least in its present form. Globalization to Mahathir is an idealistic notion, initially full of promise, that has turned sour. The global push for free and open markets is a threat to sovereignty. Similar calls for transparency and deregulation are capitalist code for no governance at all. Clearly, Mahathir is disconcerted by the economic woes that have befallen the Malaysian economy and vexed by the reforms demanded by the global financial community.
Who are the villains in Mahathir's scenario? His wrath is mainly directed at currency traders, who wield the power to whipsaw economies by speculating in and then dumping currencies on the global market. This is done, according to Mahathir, to "discipline governments" that resist the borderless flow of capital. In other words, the problems faced by developing countries can be traced to the not-so-invisible hand of capitalist power-brokers who make or break economies from the trading desks and boardrooms of New York, London and Tokyo.