In the increasingly acrid debate over the consequences of globalization, novelists and artists in general tend to be among the naysayers. Globalization, the argument goes, is smothering the world with bland American television shows, Hollywood action films, English-language pop music and hastily translated potboilers. Meanwhile, local artistic traditions and distinctive linguistic and cultural voices are being shoved to the margins.
Mario Vargas Llosa, the ubiquitous Peruvian novelist and former presidential candidate, does not subscribe to this view. During a lecture delivered at the IDB’s Washington, D.C., headquarters last September, Vargas Llosa offered an unabashed defense of globalization, both for its economic consequences, and–more surprisingly–for its effects on culture.
Using protests at the infamous 1999 meeting of the World Trade Organization in Seattle, Washington, as a starting point, Vargas Llosa denounced what he considers the contradictions and hypocrisies of the anti-globalization movement. He noted that it was developing countries–not industrialized ones–that pushed hardest for a further reduction in trade barriers at the Seattle meeting, and particularly of those tariffs that keep agricultural and manufactured goods from emerging economies from entering Europe and the U.S. That posture was not coincidental, according to Vargas Llosa. It came from a widespread awareness among developing countries that past policies of economic nationalism, protectionism and import substitution left them "impoverished and marginalized."
Vargas Llosa said globalization has benefited individuals from nearly all of the groups protesting in Seattle. Most of the young people who vandalized shops during the WTO meetings, for example, came from comfortable middle-class homes that have become even more comfortable thanks to the galloping U.S. economy. Likewise, he wondered how labor unions in the United States could decry the alleged loss of local jobs to developing countries when unemployment in their country was at a 30-year low and real wages were rising steadily. By opposing foreign investment in emerging economies, the labor unions "were fighting, in fact, against the progress of working classes in poor countries," Vargas Llosa said. This revealed what he called a "stingy and nationalistic vision of development."
Latin America is historically linked "to almost all the regions and cultures of the world," Vargas Llosa said. "And that fact, which impedes us from having a single cultural identity… is our principal strength, contrary to what nationalists believe."
While Vargas Llosa’s support for free-market economics is well-known in Latin America, his embrace of globalized culture can still raise eyebrows. He does not deny that the spatial and temporal boundaries that once kept local cultures in isolation are being eroded, and he recognizes that some traditional forms of expression will disappear as a result. The world in the 21st century will undoubtedly be "less picturesque, less full of local color, than in the previous one," he said. But this process is due to modernization, according to Vargas Llosa, and globalization is an effect of modernization–not its cause. More importantly, globalization opens a host of opportunities for society as a whole, and these benefits can be legitimately thought to outweigh the cultural losses. Despite what intellectuals and traditionalist leaders might say, most societies rapidly embrace the fruits of globalization when they are given a choice. That would not be the case if people were certain that globalization would hurt them.
Vargas Llosa even questioned the idea of a threatened "national identity" so often invoked by critics of globalization. This concept is "an ideological fiction" that serves the interests of nationalists but has little historical or empirical backing, he argued. Vargas Llosa reminded the audience that cultures are constantly in flux, and that no cultural tradition has survived without freely borrowing from other cultures and mutating to reflect the times. Moreover, movements that place too much of a premium on national identity inevitably threaten individual freedom and expression, according to Vargas Llosa. "Imposing a cultural identity on people is equivalent to imprisoning it and denying all its members that most precious of liberties: that of choosing what, who and how one wants to be."
The idea of national identity is especially questionable in Latin America, Vargas Llosa said. Past efforts at defining such an identity, such as the Hispanist or Indigenist movements, have notoriously failed to reflect the true diversity of the cultural and racial influences that shape the region’s societies. Latin America is historically linked "to almost all the regions and cultures of the world," he said. "And that fact, which impedes us from having a single cultural identity… is our principal strength, contrary to what nationalists believe."
Vargas Llosa argued that it is futile and counter-productive to try to perpetuate a particular cultural moment through policies or regulations. Cultures "need not be protected by bureaucrats nor commissars, they need not be confined behind bars or isolated by customs officials in order to remain alive and vital," he said. Instead of the homogenizing pressure of nationalist cultural policies imposed from above, the world needs more freedom to create and evolve. It is no coincidence, according to Vargas Llosa, that just as the traditional nation-state has been weakened by globalization in recent years, we have witnessed a renaissance of small and formally marginalized cultures and languages that are finding new avenues of expression and self-perpetuation in a wired world.