Recommended: Melbourne Writer's Festival

Anonymous

19 - 28 August, 2005

The Age Melbourne Writers' Festival 2005
Globalisation and Human Rights Under the Microscope...
The 2005 Keynote Address

by His Excellency John Ralston Saul, CC

The Collapse of Globalism

His Excellency John Ralston Saul, accomplished novelist and one of the world’s truly great writers on the key issues that confront humanity today, will deliver the 2005 Keynote Address on The Collapse of Globalism.

Beginning at 8.00 pm on Friday, August 19 at the Melbourne Town Hall, the event will also feature the announcement of The Age Book of the Year Awards.

Globalisation, like many great geopolitical ideologies before it, is now officially dead.

Despite the near-religious conviction with which it was originally conceived, a growing vagueness now surrounds its original promise that nation states were heading toward irrelevance, to be replaced by the power of global markets; that economics, not politics or arms, would determine the course of human events; that growth in international trade would foster prosperous markets that would, in turn, abolish poverty and change dictatorships into democracies.

Yet, contends Saul, little has transpired as predicted. The collapse of globalism has left us struggling in a paradox — a chaotic vacuum. Instead of surrendering or sharing sovereignty, governments and citizens are reasserting their national interests. The United States appears determined to ignore its international critics. Europe is faced with problems of immigration, racism, terrorism and renewed internal nationalism. Many of these issues call for uniquely European solutions born out of local experiences and needs. Elsewhere, the world looks for answers to African debt, the AIDS epidemic, the return of fundamentalism and terrorism, all of which perversely refuse to disappear despite the theoretical rise in global prosperity.

However, in addition to the negative aspects of globalism, it has had its successes, such as the astonishing growth in world trade and the unexpected rise of India and China, which seem slated to become twenty-first-century superpowers.

Saul’s trilogy, Voltaire’s Bastards - The Dictatorship of Reason in the West, The Doubter’s Companion - A dictionary of Aggressive Common Sense and The Unconscious Civilization received widespread acclaim and placed him at the forefront of public debate on contemporary political issues, as did the continuation of that thought process, On Equilibrium. This year Saul publishes The Collapse of Globalism: And the Reinvention of the World, the subject of his Keynote Address.

find more: http://www.mwf.com.au/fest05townhall.html