Are we witnessing signs of ‘de-globalisation’? Experts Donna Butorac and Ben Rich discuss globalisation in 2020 and the relevance of geographical borders today and into the future.
For decades, the world has been on a trajectory of rising globalisation with cross-border flows of trade, investment, data, ideas, technology and people.
But recent global events point to a trend that’s at odds with that narrative. The election of nationalist leaders in many powerful countries; Brexit and the subsequent weakening of the EU; and COVID-induced territorialism have all contributed to a sense of ‘us vs them’.
David is joined by Curtin University academics Dr Donna Butorac and Dr Ben Rich to discuss whether we’re witnessing a ‘de-globalisation’ that could impact our ability to solve global problems like climate change and food security.
Email thefutureof@curtin.edu.au.
Curtin University supports academic freedom of speech. The views expressed in The Future Of podcast may not reflect those of the university.
Music: OKAY by 13ounce Creative Commons — Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported — CC BY-SA 3.0 Music promoted by Audio Library.
View the transcript of this episode
Intro (00:00):
This is The Future Of, where experts share their vision of the future and how their work is helping shape it for the better.
David (00:09):
I'm David Blaney. For decades, the world has seen rising globalization with cross border flows of trade, investment, data, ideas, technology and people. But now, the trend appears to be reversing. A rise in popularity of far-right politics and nationalist leaders, the impact of Brexit on the European Union, and pandemic-induced nationalism have all contributed to a sense of us versus them. To discuss this topic with us today are Curtin's Researchers Donna Butorac and Ben Rich. Thank you very much for coming in today, Donna and Ben.
Dr Ben Rich (00:47):
Thank you.
Dr Donna Butorac (00:47):
Pleasure to be here, David.
David (00:50):
Are we retreating behind borders more? And if so, how did we get here?
Dr Donna Butorac (00:59):
I think if we are, I think it's mixed. When I listened to your introduction I think it's obviously, I would say it's probably more complex than that, but I think maybe because of decades of neoliberal globalization, we are. And there's been different things that have caused us to want to more recently because of the pandemic. There's that sense of always needed to draw in and to cut our ties in a really physical sense in order to halt the pandemic. But I think globalization, and not globalization per se, but neoliberal globalization, has really caused a lot of changes in society, a lot of people to feel that they're against globalization at all. But I think it's the impact of that particular economic ideology that has dominated globalization for the past few decades.
Dr Donna Butorac (01:46):
And I think one of the things it does is it shifts the concept of territoriality in really important ways. And that's probably because, even though the processes might be happening within national territories, this doesn't always mean that they are national processes. So you see this disconnect between the interest of the populace and the interests of big business. And increasingly, what we're seeing is that, in many liberal democracies, the government has been seen to be more likely to represent and protect the interests of businesses. We've seen in times of crisis that they'll bail out banks and large businesses, but that at the same time, impose austerity on ordinary citizens.
Dr Donna Butorac (02:23):
So, I think this disconnect contributes to broader feelings of disaffection with globalization as a concept, rather than just that it's neoliberal globalization. So, you see people wanting to move away from it, maybe, at the level of the general populace, but I think it's not stopping. It goes on anyway, because there's a... We can come back to this, but there is that disconnect between who does globalization benefit and what processes are truly globalized? So, we've got globalization of capital, but we don't necessarily have globalization of labor, for example. So yeah, I think it is globalization that has maybe caused their disaffection, and the key policies that underpin globalization. So things like trade liberalization and free trade agreements, deregulation of capital flow and privatization of public assets. That includes natural resources. But at the same time, elimination of social welfare programs and restrictions on immigration and the free flow of labor, those are the kinds of things that have been happening. And I think they have always suited a lot of people. A lot of theorists would say, and said at the time, that something like Brexit was actually a vote against globalization rather than anything else.
Dr Donna Butorac (03:41):
And similarly, with the vote for Trump, he was able to mobilize feelings of disaffection with the economic system that affected ordinary Americans. He mobilized that sentiment in order to get into power, I guess.
Dr Ben Rich (03:57):
I come at this from, in particular, the study of extremist [inaudible 00:04:00] ideologies. I think there's a number of reasons why there seems to be a push back now against globalization. I would also echo Donna's sentiments, looking at liberalism and particularly, the promises that rung hollow out of neoliberalism. Neoliberalism promised this global cosmopolitan identity that we would transcend our national identities, our local identities, and come together for the good of humanity through our common humanity. In reality, what many people have found, living under regimes of globalization, living under unstable labor conditions or being bombarded by constant other forms of identity, is really a sense of alienation, a sense of loss of place in the world. Hyper-individualization, which itself is very much a part of the advertising approach that we see in modern business. This idea that you are yourself, very individual, you are very much on your own and you need to define who you are.
Dr Ben Rich (05:12):
And a lot of people find that very, I think, metaphysically confronting. At the same time, this idea that the economic assumption that labor is infinitely mobile. Labor can just pick up and go. If their particular form of employment has become redundant, they can just retrain. They can just re-specialize. It's very nice and Laboratoria economics, but in reality, people, again, find that very disruptive to their lives. If you've trained your entire life, for instance, to be a builder or something like that, and suddenly your job is gone. It's not just a case of, "Well, I just need to invest a few more years of my life to become a programmer or something." The old meme of learn to code is that that becomes incredibly disruptive to me, to my family, to my self identity.
Dr Ben Rich (06:11):
So, I think they're very cold economic assumptions at the heart of neoliberal ideology, very disconnected from the squishy reality of what it means to be a human. And they are so heavily embedded in the ideology of neoliberalism, so you can't desegregate them out. But, when societies and individuals who've been confronted with them and lived under regimes of these for decades, we have an entire generation who've come up under that, many of them find it incredibly dissatisfying. And, to the extent that we even have movements who will violently reject it now.
David (06:48):
Do you think the pandemic has affected or strained the trust that we placed in international organizations, like the World Health Organization, for example?
Dr Donna Butorac (07:00):
I think when you say, "Has it caused that mistrust," I think maybe not from everyone. Is it because the US is making so much noise? I think they are pretty much the standout case because we pay attention to everything they say in the West. So, I don't know that we could say that we all have mistrust of it. I think maybe the WHO was slow, the World Health Organization was slow at declaring the pandemic. Maybe this is due to political pressure because there are the economic ramifications of that. There's funding that's tied to declaring a pandemic need, like emergency relief and so on. And maybe there's some argument there about a loss of faith in global governing bodies. But I think yes, there is some general mistrust of governing bodies, but it's only the WHO.
Dr Donna Butorac (07:54):
We got the United Nations, the IMF, and The World Bank, but they're not all being singled out. Someone like Trump is sowing discord with organizations like The World Health Organization, but they're not taking swipes at the IMF or The World Bank. So I think you have to think about which global governing bodies are important to certain key players. And anything Trump says right now actually is really just a way of capitalizing on feelings of disaffection amongst the populace, because he's coming up for election again, so he wants to maybe use that in order for people to vote for him.
Dr Ben Rich (08:34):
I would probably take Donna's argument a bit further. I think, actually, the collapse in the trust in the WHO is really part of a broader trend that we've seen emerge in the last, over a decade, the collapse of capacity and commitment to international institutions that really, I think, crystallized with the election of Donald Trump, but have been emerging ever since, really, the GSC in 2008. I think if we look in the last, just even five years, there's been a real collapse in the confidence of regional bodies, like the EU. And we've seen the US itself really begin to hollow out the international architecture of international cooperation that it spent the entire Cold War building. The withdrawal from the JCPOA, the Iran nuclear deal, which itself was really seen by many as a triumph of this global cooperative activity.
Dr Ben Rich (09:36):
The withdrawal from the Paris climate Accords, the collapse of the TPP, these are organizations and agreements that, traditionally, the US would be championing, that would be leading. But instead, we're seeing a pullback from them, not just from the US but from many other nationalist governments. If we look at Duterte in the Philippines, we look at Orbán in Hungary, these are highly internationally skeptical governments that are rising, AND in many ways, being driven by populace sentiment. So, I think there's a broader skepticism of the manifestations of globalization that we see in these [inaudible 00:10:18] institutions and norms.
David (10:20):
And why is that?
Dr Donna Butorac (10:22):
Is with all of them? Because, are they taking flights at The World Bank or the IMF? Or is it just the ones that powerful countries like the US no longer feel that they have complete control of? Which was the original idea, was it going to be a European North American consensus that, in setting up some of those original central organizations, global governance organizations. And this is a genuine question, is it simply that it's the ones they know that they see other developed nations or developing and upcoming nations exerting more influence on? Perhaps in things like the UN, the WHO? Because I don't see them wanting to dismantle the IMF or The World Bank, whose leaders they still choose and who are made up of the finance ministers of the contributing countries. World Trade Organization is the trade minister, and so on. It's a very narrow group, but could we still say that those are still controlled by the countries that are now agitating for the dismantling of other organizations? And I guess I'm suggesting, or I'm asking, is it quite selective here? And is it about power [crosstalk 00:11:34]?
Dr Ben Rich (11:33):
No, I don't actually think it is. It doesn't necessarily mean that the US is exclusively out to dismantle all of these organizations. But for instance, you cite the WTO, that the US has held up the election of the [Pell 00:11:47] judge in the WTO, which means that many of the core functions of the WTO have essentially ground to a halt. So, they certainly haven't destroyed the institution entirely, but they're making it much more ineffective. The US as well and NATO is another good example that the US exerts overwhelming influence in NATO, yet it seems to be undermining that same international alliance.
Dr Donna Butorac (12:11):
Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Dr Ben Rich (12:11):
And I think that there's this understanding that the United States never had full control of these institutions. You go back and you read about France is rolling NATO during the 1960s, and that was always very problematic. But, what the US understood this array of international architecture to constitute was a mean in which it could exert a significant amount of influence that, yes, it had to make sacrifices to support these various institutions. But at the same time, in the long run, it helped the US shape the gradual nature of the international system, which was demonstrated in '91 when it came out on top of the pile at the end of the Cold War, and we had that new polar moment that was [inaudible 00:12:55] paying off.
Dr Ben Rich (12:56):
But what the election of Trump and these other the populous leaders has signaled is that, the short term, the very transactional cost benefit view that, being the short term, this isn't necessarily benefiting me right now, has seemed to come to the fore and seems to be guiding again and again, and again, the policies of states like the US and other countries in how they approach these, rather than approaching them as, well, this is a long term investment for us.
David (13:26):
How does our geographical location influence our sense of identity, and has this changed over time?
Dr Donna Butorac (13:35):
Interesting question. I actually think it shapes us quite a lot. And I think, to the extent that we find connection with the physical land, it also helps construct our sense of belonging. And things like identity and belonging are not just tied to the physical world, they're closely tied to the social world. And so, people within a particular nation state can form ideological and emotional connections to a place, but also to what is really only an imagined community. This is something that was suggested back in the 1980s by Benedict Anderson, political scientist, but it's really held, I guess... The people have found a chord with that idea. He was writing about nationalism, and he described how people saw themselves as belonging to what were essentially imagined communities because they couldn't actually ever have meaningful interactions with all the people that they saw themselves as being connected to, but they could still identify with a sense of belonging to a particular nation, a particular physical state or an idea of the nation state.
Dr Donna Butorac (14:40):
And this gets constructed and reinforced through literary and media accounts, and then reinforced through socialization, even when the actual reality might be quite different. And I think of a country like Australia, it's a modern multiethnic country, but there can be a vast difference between the official construction of the nation state as this singular entity that's based around a single official language, in our case it's the English, as opposed to the actual lived reality of, what we have is multiple languages and multiple cultures all co-existent within the borders at the same physical nation state. And so, I don't know. I think these connections, that even though they're connections to something imagined, but are made through language and cultural identity, they're good ways of mobilizing those [inaudible 00:15:25] the nation states, but they're always subject to ideological positioning that inevitably creates insiders and outsiders. So, by constructing the nation as a single physical entity that gets expressed through the use of one language, you actually needlessly exclude and erase what are vast numbers of its citizens.
Dr Donna Butorac (15:46):
And this impacts people's sense of identity and belonging within that nation state. So I guess, a long answer, but I think yes, there can be a connection to the physical land, but I think it's also very much tied up with the social world and the forces that I'm describing there. I think about the nation state and the idea of the nation state, I would say it is necessary because people can come to think, "Well, do we even need to have countries? Is there a necessity for that?" But I think it is necessary. And it's not just that it's a repository of self and other forms of identity construction, but in order to support the flourishing of society, you need the nation state because it has to manage elements of the social contract, like the law and provision of financial and economic infrastructure, communications infrastructure, all of that.
Dr Donna Butorac (16:40):
But it also plays a role in providing emergency support and other services that the private sector wouldn't consider profitable. It's tremendously important, I think, in ensuring some kind of balancing in the distribution of income and wealth through mechanisms like progressive taxation systems or social services infrastructure, and all of this moves us on from, if you go way back, competing against each other or operating alone.
David (17:10):
How can we solve global problems if we have countries like the... Well, as you mentioned, like the US, for example, perhaps placing less stock in international organizations. Can we solve these international problems if we are becoming more inward-looking or if we're not part of global organizations?
Dr Ben Rich (17:34):
I think we can. I think we can do it less efficiently. We've been solving international problems ever since there was an international, and the efficiency is really the question. And I think the reality is when we have a breakdown in institutions and we have a lack of trust in them, as we see with the WHO. And countries will go it alone and they'll go it more alone, and they will find their own particular approaches to... And I think we've seen that in the case of the response to corona. Had this incredibly decoupage response out of various countries trying their own strategies, some of which would be more successful here at home in Australia. I think we've done probably one of the, if not the best, jobs in containing it and balancing all the other things.
Dr Ben Rich (18:23):
There's a few other exceptions such as South Korea and New Zealand, but really, we are at the top. But the reality is we have the failures of that approach. There's obviously the United States. We have over a hundred thousand deaths there. We have social anarchy. We have all sorts of overflows pulled back from those international frameworks and methods very quickly and decided to, essentially, go it alone, and we see what happened there. I think as we move forward beyond this, and I think this is the thing that keeps me up at night is when we see things like global warming, whether or not that's going to be sustainable. Because I think global warming is going to be a challenge, internationally, that is going to affect all of us, perhaps existentially. And if we continue to revert back to this inward-looking go-it-alone approach, are going to be able to fundamentally address the causes of global warming if we're just acting reflexively to it. If we're just flaying out our own individual approaches and our own emissions rating standards, et cetera.
Dr Ben Rich (19:30):
Do we need to find some form of global government? Now, whether or not that's possible is another question. We've had these 30 years to come together and sort out global governance. And now, we're seeing a reactionary push back against it across the international system. But it, certainly, I think the more we can work together and we have hearings, we are collective action beans, and when we do work together, we solve things more effectively, the better chances we have. Doesn't mean that nation states, as Donna points out various correctly, that nation states aren't very powerful, capable, potent forces. But at some point, that potency does trail off when you get these worldwide spanning problems.
Dr Donna Butorac (20:19):
Yeah. I think that's true. And I agree that for these problems like the problems with the environment, they know no borders. And so, we have to have the political will to push for positive change at a global level. We can't withdraw into ourselves into our countries because we won't be able to solve the problem. It requires some action at a global level, and some agreement, and so on. When you were talking, Ben, I was thinking of something that thing you mentioned about us all being a shared humanity, I guess, and about where our sense of community or kinship starts and ends. And I think is the kind of comments that were made by the feminist scholar and philosopher, Judith Butler.
Dr Donna Butorac (21:14):
She talked about the idea that we don't choose who we co-habit the earth with. And so, we have to honor the obligations to preserve other people's lives. Actually talks about to preserve the lives of those we may not love and those we may never love or don't know and didn't choose because those obligations come from the social conditions of political life, not from any agreement we have made or from any deliberate choice. So, she's saying, "We don't have to know and love someone in order to want to support their flourishing. We should do it because of our shared humanity." And because they've no inherent privilege that flows from the [inaudible 00:21:52] first, and inequalities that happen between people in one nation, but also across the nations of the world, are the crystallization of historical and systemic global relations of power. And they have little to do with the individual. So it's like we have to step outside the idea of choosing who to love, as it were. And we should be focusing on our shared humanity when it comes to solving very global-scale vexing problems like climate change, the impacts of climate change.
Dr Ben Rich (22:17):
Yeah, for sure. It's a very positive way to look at it. I think, unfortunately, that the darker side of collective identity and one of the things that the international, the idea of the global citizenship has always struggled with is the negative, which is that identities... And John Mearsheimer talks about this in his recent book on the failure of liberal dreams, that he says that one of the real powerful parts of nationalism is it tells us what we aren't. So, we define ourselves, not just as through our common humanity, but through what we are, what other parts of humanity we don't share that with. And I think that's something that we continue to struggle with through this day because group identity, at the core of it, not only just tells us who we are, it tells us who we are.
Dr Ben Rich (23:11):
And that's a question that the neoliberal approach and the idea of a global citizenship still hasn't failed to really find an answer for. If we had an alien invasion or potentially, if we had a global threat that was experienced by everyone, that might give us that external impetus, that external pressure to collectivize. But again, the thing I worry about is, by the time we're feeling that, is that going to be too late before something catastrophic happens?
Dr Donna Butorac (23:47):
Yeah, maybe. But I feel like climate change is that very thing that you're talking about that could mobilize the realization of our shared humanity. And I think the idea of the us versus them has so many contradictions in it because we can gather behind what, as I was saying before, it's really an imagined community that is the nation state. But while, at the same time, within that nation state, we're multiethnic, we're multicultural, where multi-lingual. So, we are the world, in a sense. We have these weird contradictions in how we define our sense of identity.
Dr Donna Butorac (24:20):
And I think that gets really influenced by the way politicians and leaders mobilize certain sentiments. You get so many Australian politicians saying, "Australians are these," or, "Australians are that." And I would think, "Who do you mean by that? Who's us? Who's the us and them here? Because are you just thinking of one particular type of Australian who speaks your language or looks like you, or are you speaking about all?" So, there's these strange contradictions in how we establish identity based on borders or on sense of community, and so on.
David (24:50):
One of the things that the pandemic has done is it really has demonstrated our economic interdependence, how much we rely upon each other to be able to function as economies and as communities. Are international supply chains, perhaps, more fragile than we realize?
Dr Ben Rich (25:10):
Yeah, I would say, yeah. It has shown the general international fragility. Now, this doesn't mean that we can't bounce back from it relatively quickly, but we have to remember that, for the most part, particularly for the last three decades, we've experienced a time of grace for [inaudible 00:25:30]. It's been relatively stable, internationally, and it's allowed these very complex, interconnected supply chains between many, many countries to flourish and crystallize. And now that we're seeing these shocks, this is being called into question. But I think if you look at products that are out there today, the amount of different sourcing of materials. And you see that something like, for instance, the F-35 fighter jet that Australia is currently taking on board, it takes parts from at least 20 different countries.
Dr Ben Rich (26:11):
That's great during the time of peace and stability, but during times of uncertainty, this is perhaps not as sustainable. And we're seeing a number of these particularly right-wing authoritarian populace governments call for more forms of autarky, self-sufficiency, which ultimately, costs more to everyone involved. In basic economics, you're going to look at it, much better for you to focus on producing a few things that you're good at, rather than trying to do everything at a more costly method. These are questions and debates that are being had at home. Perhaps we are overextended. Perhaps it's not just a case of one or the other, but to have more degrees of self-sufficiency are better than just being completely beholden to things. So, I think we will see, in response to COVID, a growth of some degree of some industries coming home. I think, particularly, medical industries. Oftentimes, you see historically, when you have crisis that the supply chain that are particularly pertinent to that will come home. We saw this, for instance, in the US after World War Two with the defense industry.
Dr Ben Rich (27:21):
But, I don't necessarily think that we're going to see countries skew towards autarky entirely. I don't think we're going to see a replication of what they do in North Korea with juche, which is try and do everything at home. But I think there will be some degree of [delt timing 00:27:35] .
David (27:37):
It's progressively become easier to move capital and goods across borders. What about moving ourselves around and working across borders?
Dr Donna Butorac (27:47):
Yeah, that's always been one of the contradictions, I think, neoliberal forms of globalization that capital has been allowed to... There really haven't been separate countries to capital for some time. It's been allowed to flow freely and without concern for geographic and political borders. It's just ordinary people who've continued to be contained by nation state borders, and quite aggressively as time's gone on. But, it's hard to imagine it changing, even though if we look back in the past, there have been times when we've had free movement of labor. Some theorists have argued for some time that we should be allowed to return to that and allow things like market supply or supply and demand for labor determine where people go, and more organically control the global labor market in that way. People move to where the work is and then move away when the work dried up.
Dr Donna Butorac (28:43):
This was the case in many years in things like the Mexico-US border. It was a very porous border for so many generations. There's a real history of Mexican people traveling into the US to take up really important jobs in agriculture and industry and keep those industries going. And then going back to Mexico when there's no work. And so, we see problems with the tight border because they've put that in place, all that does is create social problems because workers could not any longer move back and forth easily, and see their families in Mexico and their lives in Mexico, their sense of belonging there. Now, they have to either permanently be separated or risk all sorts of hardships by trying to bring their families and so on, and even bring themselves risk, all sorts of hardships. And it's also created economic and logistical problems in the US because they now have to police the border.
Dr Donna Butorac (29:30):
So, there are all sorts of problems with stopping it. But there is this real... People talk about globalization as there's mobility regimes within globalization, I think some theorists talk about, in the way that people are controlled, quite tightly, big businesses allowed to go, some professional class people have more ease of movement. They can actually participate in those flows, but for most workers, there's these really tight border controls. But it has been theorized that we should, as I say, loosen it up. I don't know whether it would work or not, but what the theorists argue is that allowing...
Dr Donna Butorac (30:12):
They say that that labor is handicapped by being a prisoner of territory. And so, allowing labor to move would be truly globalizing, that other forms of economic activity are globalizing, but not labor, not the movement of labor. So, yeah. It's an interesting question. I'm not sure how it would work, but we do have examples from history, I guess, is what I'm saying. Italians also, generations ago, moved back and forth between the US. They're encouraged to from Italy because they thought it would lead to insurrection if they stayed around with no jobs. So, yeah.
Dr Ben Rich (30:47):
Yeah. It's a very multifaceted problem challenge, however you want to construe it. I think you've got the role of the nation state in relation to its own citizens. The big question here, and I remember a long time ago, my old supervisor posed a question to me, "How comfortable would you feel having to compete directly with graduates of Yale for academic jobs here at home in Australia?" Which we do to some extent, but there are also some degree of protections that the state, in some ways, takes to give more purchase to its own citizens than say, people from outside. So there's a question of the responsibility of the state.
Dr Ben Rich (31:35):
There's also the question of the social impact of having large demographics when people move around. The neoliberal world view is that we should all be very comfortable with each other socially, culturally, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, but we've seen again and again, and again, when you see large demographics, people from external to a particular geographical space move into that space, it does cause all sorts of consternation, not necessarily because those demographics are going in and causing any particular problems, but because they are going in and being different to the local people there, and it gives you a gap.
Dr Ben Rich (32:11):
For instance, one of the things that really drove the Brexit party was this sense of a lot of loss of "Britishness," whatever that might be, and the subsequent reactionary push back in people seeking to get rid of the free flow of labor and people that came with that into Britain by re-hardening those borders. This isn't saying it's a good or a bad thing only, but that it is a reaction to these kinds of forces and that perceived loss of identity, that perceived loss of culture, as you get more and more groups of people pushed up against each other.
Dr Ben Rich (32:49):
It also depends on the economic conditions. Studies have shown historically that during times of economic success and political stability, multicultural societies are very, very successful. They bring together all sorts of different ideas and peoples with perspectives into a small space and get all sorts of new kinds of things coming out of that. But at the same time, when there are points of economic downturn, political instability, those same division lines become, often, points of complication and conflict between people. There's a schizophrenia that, in certain conditions, it can be very good and in certain conditions, it would be very bad.
Dr Donna Butorac (33:40):
I think they get cynically mobilized by political leaders as well, as we saw with Brexit. The racism gets whipped up. Not because of for political gain on the part of people who are trying to mobilize those feelings, those ideas within the populace.
David (33:56):
Absolutely. Donna, is the ability to communicate in the same language, a prerequisite for the global citizens of tomorrow?
Dr Donna Butorac (34:08):
I would say, "No," because I it brings to the fore, the idea of a single language has so many problematic ideological underpinnings, I guess, because if we think about what language is, it's not just a way of communicating. It's also a way of expressing culture. Languages are located in culture and people learn languages in social cultural settings. They learn it through that early socialization to a culture, not just to a language. So, you can't disconnect language from culture. They are completely interwoven. So, if you talk about, in a sense, imposing or making people all speak one language. You're also eliminating cultures in doing that. And we've seen that quite a lot. We've seen that with the colonial project and even, more recently, with globalization and the way that English language has come to the fore and is now considered a hyper central language.
Dr Donna Butorac (35:10):
It has so much influence globally. And so many people have been encouraged or forced or wanted to learn English because of being able to gain access to certain job marks and so on. But in [inaudible 00:35:23] pushed out other languages and we don't just lose languages when we lose, we lose cultures as well. And I think you've probably touched on this thing in previous podcast when you spoke to Alan [Denchi 00:35:32] about linguistic imperialism. So, yeah. I would say, "No." I think the focus be... And I feel like that idea that there should be one language is probably coming more from people who only speak one language and maybe that's English. So maybe, that's a very developed world, English world sentiment because I think maybe the focus should be that we should be embracing more languages, and that being able to speak more than one language should be the idea, not that it should be one language. Because whenever I hear one language, I think, "Oh, do you mean English, don't you?"
Dr Donna Butorac (36:06):
So, I think that it's a very problematic idea. And it also, you could look at it pragmatically and say, "Well, then everyone would understand each other, and it would be really great." But I think it's sweeping under the carpet a whole lot of history, and culture, and individuality, and difference, and so on that goes along with language. You can't separate all of those things from language.
David (36:30):
Well, I think we'll leave it there. Thank you very much, Donna and Ben, for coming in and for sharing in your... phoning in.
Dr Donna Butorac (36:36):
My pleasure.
David (36:37):
And for sharing your knowledge on this topic.
Dr Ben Rich (36:40):
Thank you very much.
David (36:42):
You've been listening to The Future Of, a podcast powered by Curtin University. If you have any questions about anything that we've raised today, you can get in touch by following the links in the show notes. Bye, for now.