Seeing that nobody has written anything here about the ongoing "global economic meltdown", as it's being called, I thought I'd offer some quick thoughts about it to, perhaps, get a ball rolling.

By "end" I don't just mean "the ending" of something in time. I mean "end" as in the end to which the means are directed. The goal, the culmination, the fulfillment, the underlying or overarching purpose, objective, or meaning of something. What the point is. The reason for the thing in the first place. That's what I mean by "end".

So, by the "end" of globalization I mean not only that globalization is over - done with, in terms of linear time - but that the worldwide financial crisis, and all the emergency government bailouts it makes necessary, is, apparently, the goal, the culmination, the fulfillment of globalization.

In his 2005 book, The Collapse of Globalism and the Reinvention of the World, Canadian philosopher John Ralston Saul points out how the grand theory of globalization, which got going in the early 1970s, is just one of many economic theories that have come and gone, and that globalism has now officially gone.

Before the era of globalization - which Saul says officially died in 1999, when national governments started to assert themselves again, rejecting the globalist orthodoxy of open markets unfettered by nation-state regulation - there was the era of Keynesian economics, which advocated a strong role for governments in the economic cycle. Governments are to "prime the pump" of the economy, rather than let the socalled free-market run itself without any human intervention, as though it possessed a mind of its own (which it doesn't).

Prior to this was another free-market era, which led directly to the stock market crash of 1929 (similar to ours today) and the Depression of the 1930s. To correct this, President Roosevelt famously initiated the "New Deal", a government program to correct the non-self-correctable free market. (How soon we forget: another free market system - globalization - would be in place less than forty years later. And look what's happening.)

Note that government direction does not necessarily mean "protectionism", which die-hard followers of the open-market system always invoke, hoping to scare anyone "foolish" enough to suggest that conscious government action could be a good and necessary thing in stabilizing our economies. In their more desperate moments they'll even accuse those who are for government involvement of being a socialist or communist.

That said, even during periods of "open" and "free" markets, a lot of protectionism goes on, even (or especially) by those that preach the sanctity of the free-market. Worse, foreign aid money for, say, Africa, meant for the AIDS crisis, is often "tied aid", meaning the recipient countries must spend a portion of the money on donor country goods. This is probably the most insidious form of protectionism. But I digress.

Recently, in his administration's dying months ("finally" we say in a collective gasp), George Bush Jr. has been paraphrasing his father, Bush Sr., claiming that "free markets" and "free people" are natural bedfellows. Of course, a quick glance at history shows that capitalism is definitely not a natural enemy of authoritarianism (ask IBM how much money it made off the Holocaust), but capitalist opposition to democracy is too rich and varied a topic to handle here. Just check out the film The Corporation.

So. What is the end of globalization? What is its goal? Its culmination? Well. Just turn on the news. You'll see it there. All the money is gone. Open-markets and the insane obsession with infinite (and therefore impossible) economic growth have led to the economic meltdown that we see in front of us. The largest financial institutions are begging national governments to save their monetary asses. I know this isn't what was meant to happen, according to globalism's architects and adherents. But it is what happened.

In 1989, the year the Berlin Wall came down, Francis Fukuyama, an influential (well, formerly influential) conservative political writer, published his much-since-ridiculed The End of History, and argued that Western economic liberalism had defeated communism in what was said to be the last major ideological battle to be fought in the world. The West was the victor of history. Liberalism and capitalism had conquered all. Globalization shall prevail.

The problem, of course, is that it hadn't. And the world is currently embroiled in hundreds of civil and ethnic wars, not to mention the global "war on terror". So much for Fukuyama.

In the roaring, conservative 1980s, U.S President Ronald Reagan and U.K. Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher were staunch allies and vigorous defenders of free-marketism. Thatcher even went so far as to say, as she is often quoted, that society doesn't really exist. Meaning, all society is is a bunch of self-interested individuals competing financially with each other. Therefore, governments should be smaller, and the economy should be bigger. Bigger and bigger and bigger, in fact. Forget community welfare and social justice. All we really are is a pack of consumers. Let the free market reign.

Well, we've seen the "end" of this anti-social (sociopathic, really) nihilistic, competitive individualism, and it's not pretty. Let's hope this really is the end of it.

Our narrow obsession with economics, and our irrational fear of everything government, is, hopefully, at a close. And speaking of "hope", maybe with the election of Barack Obama, who will, after all, become the head of the most powerful force in the history of the world, we'll see a healthier, more society-centered set of government and economic policies and practices emerge. Wouldn't that be a happy "ending"?