Taking the highlands of Ladakh as her starting point,
Helena Norberg-Hodge reveals how the economic process
of globalization has made us all increasingly insecure.Globalization
and extremism
-- j o i n t h e d o t s
FEATUREI
n the US, it’s Donald Trump. In
Hungary, Viktor Orbán. In Turkey,
Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. In Brazil, Jair
Bolsonaro. With rightwing authoritarian
leaders and extremist political parties
gaining strength, people who care about
equality and the future of the planet have
good reason to be worried.
To counter this trend we need to
address its root causes – not the person-
ality traits of individual leaders or the
unique conditions that fuelled their rise.
In short, we need to look at the process of
economic globalization.
While its supporters portray globaliza-
tion in terms of international collabora-
tion and interdependence, it is actually
an economic process by which diverse
cultures and economies are amalga-
mated into a single, global monocul-
ture dominated by huge businesses and
banks. Critics of globalization acknowl-
edge its role in expanding the obscene
gap between rich and poor, but there
is little recognition of globalization’s
profoundly personal impacts: in country
after country, it is leaving the majority
feeling increasingly insecure – not only
economically, but psychologically. And
insecure people can be highly susceptibleto false narratives purporting to explain
their precarious situation.From co-operation to conflict
Let me illustrate how this happened
in Ladakh, an Indian-administered
region on the Tibetan Plateau where I
have worked for the past four decades. I
arrived in the mid-1970s, when the area –
until then largely closed off to the outside
world – was first opened up to tourism,
development and the global economy.
At that time, the Ladakhi people
were still in control of their economy.
Although there was little money in the
typical Ladakhi household, there was
no real poverty: everyone had a place
to live and no-one went hungry. In fact,
throughout Ladakh I was told regularly:
‘We are tung-bos za-bos’, wh ich mea ns,
‘We are self-sufficient, we have plenty to
eat and drink.’
There was also a remarkable degree of
social harmony; the Buddhist majority
and Muslim minority lived peacefully
side by side. For generations they had
been economically interdependent,
rather than being dependent on distant,
anonymous institutions over which they
had no control.Within a decade of economic ‘devel-
opment’, however, there was a terrifying
shift, as Buddhists and Muslims found
themselves competing for scarce jobs.
Ethnic and religious differences began
to take on a divisive political dimension,
causing bitterness and enmity on a scale
previously unknown. Muslims began
requiring their young daughters to cover
their heads with scarves. Buddhists in the
capital began broadcasting their prayers
over loudspeakers, so as to compete
with the Muslim prayer call. Religious
ceremonies once celebrated by the whole
community – Buddhist and Muslim
alike – became occasions to flaunt one’s
strength.
In 1989, tensions between the two
groups exploded into violence that took
several lives. I heard mild-mannered
Buddhist grandmothers – who, a few
years earlier, were sipping tea with their
Muslim neighbours – declare: ‘We have to
kill the Muslims before they finish us off.’
Outsiders attributed the conflict to
old ethnic tensions flaring, but any such
tensions had never led to group violence
in 600 years of recorded history. To
me, living in Ladakh and speaking
the language fluently, the connection48 NEW INTERNATIONALIST