A Future Perfect - the challenge and hidden promise of globalisation
John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge William Heineman. 2000

Has it been your experience, we wonder, to read books such as Schama's Citizens or Figes's A People's Tragedy and find yourselves with the uncomfortable feeling that - in spite of all the massive scholarship on display - you are not privately any wiser as to how or why the French and the Russian Revolutions actually started?

This heretic feeling you may well have kept to yourself in the light of the explosive success such books enjoyed. But we are here to share your dark secret. We too thought these books were perfect examples of the grossest intellectual obesity : far too many facts, millions of details that should not have qualified as footnotes incorporated into the text, crumbly layers of opinions and comments…. Why does Figes, for example, get so personally annoyed with the Romanovs? Why can Schama not offer a working model of what happened in post-Bastille France and gently clothe it in tellingly embroidered proof? Theirs is a common feature of so much writing in this blockbusting genre : history as excessive journalism, barely history as analysis. Torture the poor readers on a rack of facts. Stretch their mental sinews over a canvas a mile high. Build a marquee for your colossal scholarship, a veritable marquee de sade.

(And, while we linger here, a brief word en passant on Hawkings's A Brief History of Time : a wantonly enigmatic, insultingly badly written, grotesquely over-rated waste of the poor reader's money. You did ask!).

Now, we quite liked A Future Perfect in some ways. It is if nothing else a lively song of praise for globalisation, identified here as a highly positive cultural and economic force in human affairs. In addition, it provides useful intelligence about just how integrated the world trading system has actually become while taking a reasonably sober look at the various "myths" which have come to cling like so much mental junk-mail to the process. The authors believe that globalisation has to be "defended stoutly" on the grounds that so far within the debate thereupon "the devil has tended to have all the best tunes". Allright so far……

But for a book that so knowledgeably and so self-consciously references Popper, Mill, Marx, Hayek and all the gang, there is a grimly annoying tendency to clutter rather than purify the analysis. A book written by journalists does not have to be a book of inevitably over-extended journalism. Maybe it's question of taste but we hate chapters - in this case relating to the future of the nation-state - that begin : "On a brisk autumn day, the junction of Friedrichstrasse and Zimmerstrasse can seem like just another Berlin construction site".In fact, it's openings like this that make the book's whole claim to intellectual legitimacy seem like just another construction site.

And thrill to the irresistibly narcoleptic effects of the opening to this section the funeral industry : "Different cultures deal with death in profoundly different ways. Ireland has its alcohol-fueled (sic) wakes, New Orleans its brass bands and wailing women. In India, funerals can be a riot of noise and color. In England, they tend to be muted affairs, with the bereaved hopelessly embarrassed about their emotions". Zeeeeeugh!

Wherever there is too much detail, platitudes prowl. A perfectly serviceable discourse on a serious subject is here subverted by just too many stories. A Future Perfect is somehow able to cover inter alia the licensing of massage parlors (sic), the "West Lothian" question (!), the number of porn studios in the San Fernando Valley, the history of the Fabian Society, the number of fixed telephone lines in Bangladesh, the commercial potential of Bluetooth, the allegorical value of Tom Wolfe's novels……

Piueeewoof! It's all just too much to make into a good read. Though we hate the word, it is surely the business of writers taking on a theme like "the challenge and hidden promise of globalisation" to conceptualise, to supply an organising perspective, to help us not just to learn things but to understand ideas. A Future Perspective is hardly under-researched; but it is seriously over-cooked. This is like watching Robin Williams do stand-up : too many jokes, too many references, too many feelings, anecdote eating into anecdote, effort turning into self-indulgence…... You just long for a diet coke and a dry wit.

And another thing. We are not here to comment one way or another on our authors' political opinions. But an otherwise useful if flawed disquisition on globalisation is spiked with ideological score-settling of the worst kind. The theory at work is this. If globalisation is a good thing, then it could only have come from the hands of, in every sense, the right intellectuals and politicians. So we read, in a brief history of the origins of globalisation, that : "Thatcher believed firmly that Britain could regain its former greatness only if it opened the economy to global competition". SORRY!?! We missed her ever saying any such thing.

And Micklethwait and Wooldridge do themselves further damage by claiming that Thatcherism and Reagonomics were a) the same thing and b) the practical exposition in both cases of the philosophy of one Friedrich von Hayek. This is just revisionist wish-fulfilment. And as for the argument that the "Chicago Boys" of Pinochet's Chile merely "made some damaging mistakes" before eventually succeeding, well, we do not really know what to say. We will just refer all readers to the actual GDP growth figures for Chile for the period in question. The statistics make for a very informative read. Our authors here omit to refer to them. A pity. An oversight, no doubt.

A Future Perfect sets out to tell an informative and gently opinionated tale about our ever-developing world order. A simple uncluttered framework and a determined analysis of the crucial, defining features of the new landscape would have been most welcome. And a lot of what is offered is not wrong. But this is journalism at the very limits of its potential. And propaganda with a very old and rusty axe to grind.