Who screwed up globalization?

THE WORLD SOCIAL FORUM — and the anti-globalization movement that it represents -- convened in Nairobi on Saturday, and if you hear or read anything about its proceedings, it will be surprising. What started as an annual event in Chile six years ago -- building on the extraordinary visibility of the Seattle anti-globalization protests in 1999 -- has become a nonevent for most of the world's media. The forum has made itself nearly irrelevant to the future of the global economy because it, among other things, has aimed at the wrong targets -- capitalists, corporate power and such international institutions as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund.

The anti-globalization activists in Nairobi who want to slow down or even reverse the tides of globalization have a point: The post-Cold War world is an increasingly dangerous place in which to live, in part because of the dark side of globalization. New diseases roam across national borders; trade in drugs and women flourishes; pollutants spread to less-policed jurisdictions; deadly weapons find their way easily into the hands of anyone with hard currency. And yet the underlying flows that make up globalization -- the mobility of ideas, capital, technology and labor -- are nothing new. Although container ships and the Internet have speeded up commerce, goods and services have been moving across geographic borders for centuries. So what has lately increased the perils of globalization?

Rather than capitalists and corporate power, national governments are to blame. The World Bank and the International Monetary Fund are creations of national governments and are ruled by them. Corporations are legal fictions, made responsible to their shareholders (not to some vague notions of social good), and are born of and depend on the laws that governments make to empower them. Globalization's reputed villains respond to the incentives and constraints that national governments create for them.

The end of the Cold War was supposed to bring peace and prosperity to the globe. Many in the Clinton administration, for instance, shared Francis Fukuyama's "end of history" vision -- a future world of trade and commerce in which the biggest conflicts would be waged over things like interest rates and cellphone standards. President Clinton's first national security advisor, Anthony Lake, coined the term "enlargement" to replace "containment," arguing that the spread of democracy around the world would inevitably bring peace on top of that prosperity.