THE INFORMED READER: “Columbia Lures Investors as Violence Wanes,” from BusinessWeek, 28 May 2007, excerpted in Wall Street Journal, 19-20 May 2007, p. A6.
Uribe’s government continues to do well in Colombia, and so BusinessWeek dubs it an investment “hot spot.” FDI has doubled since 2001, and its stock market has boomed 14-fold--all because the government successfully cracks down on this drug trafficking problem.
Maybe nation-states aren’t exactly defenseless against Robb’s global guerrillas after all?
But Colombia gets some help, showing how the macro forces of globalization are so crucial:
Colombia’s rebound has been aided by broader trends: the increasing amount of money coursing through global markets, and investors’ increasing tolerance for taking on risk in once-shunned destinations.
Actually, those two trends are highly linked: the more money, the more roaming the investor’s eye toward riskier environments.
This is a very good thing, demonstrating the virtuous cycle of globalization: nothing succeeds like success.
But, as the piece points out, increasing security was everything as an enabler of this growing financial connectivity. Medellin’s murder rate drops more than 90% over the past fifteen years.
Yes, the druggies still rule too much of the hinterlands, but it appears that nation-states can “refill” as well as be “hollowed out” by such global guerrillas, and globalization is not the disease but the cure.
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Comments (2)
Cool observation Tom.
"but it appears that nation-states can “refill” as well as be “hollowed out” by such global guerrillas, and globalization is not the disease but the cure."
If you think of globalization as a curve - be it like a supply curve or a Bell curve - it would be the point where the line begins to steeply ascend but has yet not reached any great height that the danger of " pushback" from reactionary-radical global guerillas would be at maximum. Once society ascends too far along the curve it is too late to halt or highjack the process.
Posted by zenpundit
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May 26, 2007 10:34 PM
And yet, to John's point, a good article recently on a new port through which the Colombian druggies running most of their product and thus sending the murder rate skyrocketing.
So it's a constant yin-yang struggle whereby "cores" are created, as well as slippery new "gaps"--sort of a spray-one-apartment-and-the-roaches-go-one-over-phenomenon that speaks to John's arguments about them learning "faster."
Point being, I don't want to crow on this one too much, because two days later I can find a very Robb-friendly article.
Posted by Tom Barnett | May 27, 2007 11:33 AM