More Globalisation

Globalisation may be interpreted as a secular western liberal adaptation of a Christian vision. The linchpin of globalisation is a liberal view of market economies, so that trade barriers are minimized if not removed (as they were between Australia and the USA in 2004-5). Free trade can have the positive effect in small economies of breaking down the wealth and power of oligarchies in favour of the majority; which has the apparent effect of advancing western liberal values.

This of course worked in Eastern Europe, where religious life had been by and large suppressed; but has had limited success in the Islamic world. It was relatively easy to dazzle the citizens of the gray cities of the communist bloc with consumer goods and so to turn them against their governments. As President George W. Bush’s 2005 inauguration address revealed, the emancipatory master narrative of freedom is also being applied globally (and, ironically, by force if necessary). Globalisation means, in reality, the universal application of liberal values. Human fraternity – a secular catholicity – will be achieved in the end because Western culture is assumed to be the universal – or, at least, the universally desired – civilization. This is a soteriology without an eschatology: in other words, the ‘end of history’ is to be proclaimed from within history. In other words, what we may readily observe with secular western liberalism is a secular form of post-millennialism.