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The New World Disorder
By Edmund Conway (The Telegraph)
Economics Last updated: January 13th, 2010
"A couple of weeks ago I wrote a column about the possibility that at some point in the future we may abandon cash in favour of electronic payments. I expected to receive a pretty healthy dose of criticism for what was a pretty radical suggestion; what I hadn’t expected was the direction in which that criticism would soon flow.
Within a few comments, I was being accused of being part of a vast global conspiracy to create a New World Order (NWO, I gather one should shorten it to) in which the absence of cash would be a key factor. Well, to be more precise, the end of hard currency would also coincide with the introduction of a world government, a world currency and so on – you get the general idea.
It’s probably worth me pointing out, then, hand-on-heart, that I am not part of any conspiracy to replace national governments with an international super-authority, though I’m flattered some of our readers believe I would ever be considered by the authorities to be worth involving in such an enterprise. Moreover, from the contact I’ve had with Governments around the world, with international agencies, politicians and economists, I should add that the idea of a secret plan to create the NWO is frankly laughable: not because it isn’t something a few people would be keen on, but because it is almost inconceivable that they would be able to carry it out. To think they could, is to presume these politicians are significantly more switched-on, organised and capable than they really are.
And yet rumours of an NWO are still more pervasive than ever before. Why? In part, because members of governments around the world do talk to each other a lot, most often in open and usually well-reported fora (ie the IMF, UN, EC, Davos, the G7 and G20 etc). The whole premise of many of these multilateral meetings is precisely in order to forge a more internationalist style of politics where every country’s leadership thinks not merely of their own voters but also of the interests of overseas nations when they create policy. But this push is less an attempt to create an NWO than it is to avert the opposite – the threat of war. Remember – these institutions were set up in the wake of the Second World War, when politicians were trying to pull every lever they could to ensure there wouldn’t be a third war. So the conspiracy theorists are right: there is a push towards international government – but to suggest they could overreach each nation’s individual national interests is really endowing them with far more capability than they have.
In part, the rumours are associated with the fact that some people forever give the impression of being able to pull levers behind the scenes to influence policy. Take, for instance, the fact that Goldman Sachs has so many of its alumni in leading political positions around the world. But while it is probably fair to say that by exporting so many high-flying bankers to governments around the world, Goldman may have marginally skewed financial regulation in their favour, to suggest that this is merely the tip of a broader NWO iceberg is frankly bonkers.
Throughout my time covering economics and politics for a number of newspapers, I have come over time to the conclusion not that there is a carefully orchestrated global plan being masterminded by leading politicians (be it to create a NWO or, in some other way, to dupe people out of their liberty or prosperity) but that the politicians and policymakers have less of a clue about what to do than the rest of us. It’s been obvious every step of the way through this financial crisis – and that to me is actually rather scarier than the idea of a conspiracy. Are these people, who have stumbled their way from one disaster to another, really capable of engineering a global conspiracy, overturning peoples’ deep local tribalism? Not a chance.
None of this is to deny that there are people who would rather like to have a world government. But in the most part they do so not for megalomanic reasons but because it would (they think) make preventing financial crises and wars a bit easier. Nor is it to deny that there aren’t a few mysterious institutions which satisfy our appetite for salacious stories about internecine international conspiracies: the obvious example being the Bilderberg Group, an intensely secret conference of world “elite” designed to allow them to get in touch discretely. The Bilderberg meetings (to which I should add that I’ve sadly never been invited) do happen; indeed, George Osborne and Peter Mandelson are among those invited to some of their recent shindigs. But from what I understand, and from the evidence of old minutes, the meetings are 1. pretty boring affairs and 2. regarded as pretty marginal, unimportant networking events by the civil servants and policymakers back home who actually construct policy.
All the same, I understand why stories about these kinds of conspiracies are compelling. But this owes more to our in-built human proclivity to see the world in simple narrative terms and our inability to contextualise the far more chaotic reality than to any real evidence either way. Plus, it makes for great books and films.
PS One of the issues a lot of people had with ditching cash in favour of electronic money is that cash is anonymous. But, as more than a couple of people commenting below the piece pointed out, every sterling banknote or dollar bill has a serial number: if the Government so desired it would not be all that difficult to start tracking our cash purchases.
For more on the subject, check out my colleague Phil Aldrick’s feature on it."
http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/finance/edmundconway/100003000/the-new-world-disorder/comment-page-1/#comment-100005168
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