From Melbourne to Prague:
the Struggle for a Deglobalized World
By Walden Bello
Talk delivered at a series of engagements on the occasion
of demonstrations against the World Economic Forum (Davos)
in Melbourne, Australia, 6-10 September 2000.
* Globalization Unravels I: The Asian Financial Collapse
* Globalization Unravels II: The Failure of Structural Adjustment
* Globalization Unravels III: The Debacle in Seattle
* Globalization Unravels IV: Meltzer Torpedoes the Bank
* The Davos Process I: Relegitimizing Globalization
* The Davos Process II: Coopting the United Nations
* The Davos Process III: Managing Civil Society
* Reform or Disempowerment?
* Disabling the Corporation
* The Struggle for the Future I: Deglobalization
* The Struggle for the Future II: A Plural World
We are, here in Melbourne in the next few days and in Prague in
two weeks' time, participating in an historic enterprise: that of
creating a critical mass to turn the tide against corporate-driven
globalization.
For years, we were told that globalization was benign, that it was
a process that brought about the greatest good for the greatest
number, that good citizenship lay in accepting the impersonal rule
of the market and good governance meant governments getting out of
the way of market forces and letting the most effective
incarnation of market freedom, the transnational corporation, go
about its task of bringing about the most efficient mix of
capital, land, technology and labor.
The unrestricted flow of goods and capital in a world without
borders was said to be the best of all possible worlds, though
when some observers pointed out that to be consistent with the
precepts of their 18th century prophet, Adam Smith, proponents of
the neoliberal doctrine would also have to allow the unrestricted
flow of labor to create this best of all possible worlds, they
were, quite simply, ignored.
Such inconsistencies could be overlooked since for over two
decades, neoliberalism or, as it was grandiosely styled, the
"Washington Consensus" had carried all before it. As one of its
key partisans has nostalgically remarked recently, "the Washington
Consensus seemed to gain near-universal approval and provided a
guiding ideology and underlying intellectual consensus for the
world economy, which was quite new in modern history."[1]
Globalization Unravels I: The Asian Financial Collapse
The unrestricted flow of speculative capital in accordance with
Washington Consensus doctrine was what our governments in East
Asia institutionalized in the early 1990's, under the strong
urging of the International Monetary Fund and the US Treasury
Department. The result: the $100 billion that flowed in between
1993 and 1997 flowed out in the bat of an eyelash during the Great
Panic of the summer of 1997, bringing about the collapse of our
economies and spinning them into a mire of recession and massive
unemployment from which most still have to recover. Since 1997,
financial instability or the constant erosion of our currencies
has become a way of life under IMF- imposed monetary regimes that
leave the value of our money to be determined day-to-day by the
changing whims, moods, and preferences of foreign investors and
currency speculators.
Globalization Unravels II: The Failure of Structural Adjustment
The Asian financial crisis put the International Monetary Fund on
the hotseat, leading to a widespread popular reappraisal of its
role in the Third World in the 1980s and early 1990's, when
structural adjustment programs were imposed on over 70 developing
countries. After over 15 years, there were hardly any cases of
successful adjustment programs. What structural adjustment had
done, instead, was to institutionalize stagnation in Africa and
Latin America, alongside rises in the levels of absolute poverty
and income inequality.
Structural adjustment and related free-market policies that were
imposed beginning in the early 1980's were the central factor that
triggered a sharp rise in inequality globally, with one
authoritative UNCTAD study covering 124 countries showing that the
income share of the richest 20 per cent of the world's population
rose from 69 to 83 per cent between 1965 and 1990.[2] Adjustment
policies were a central factor behind the rapid concentration of
global income in recent years -- a process which, in 1998, saw
Bill Gates, with a net worth of $90 billion, Warren Buffet, with
$36 billion, and Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, with $30
billion, achieve a combined income that was greater than the total
combined income of the 600 million that live in the world's 48
least developed countries, a great number of which had been
subjected to adjustment programs.
Structural adjustment has also been a central cause of the lack of
any progress in the campaign against poverty. The number of people
globally living in poverty -- that is, on less than a dollar a day
-- increased from 1.1 billion in 1985 to 1.2 billion in 1998, and
is expected to reach 1.3 billion this year.[3] According to a
recent World Bank study, the absolute number of people living in
poverty rose in the 1990's in Eastern Europe, South Asia, Latin
America and the Caribbean, and sub-Saharan Africa -- all areas
that came under the sway of adjustment programs.[4]
Confronted with this dismal record, James Wolfensohn of the World
Bank had the sense to move the institution away from its
identification with structural adjustment with public relations
initiatives like the SAPRI, or the Structural Adjustment Program
Review Initiative, that it said would be jointly conducted with
NGOs. But the IMF under the doctrinaire Michel Camdessus refused
to see the handwriting on the wall; it sought, instead, to embed
adjustment policies permanently in the economic structure through
the establishment of the Extended Structural Adjustment Facility
(ESAF).
Yet as a consequence of greater public scrutiny following its
disastrous policies in East Asia, the Fund could no longer pretend
that adjustment had not been a massive failure in Africa, Latin
America and South Asia. During the World Bank-IMF meetings in
September 1999, the Fund conceded failure by renaming the ESAF the
"Poverty Reduction and Growth" Facility. There was no way,
however, that the Fund could successfully whitewash the results of
its policies. When the G-7 proposed to make IMF certification a
condition for eligibility in the now defunct HIPC Initiative, Rep.
Maxine Walters of the US House of Representatives spoke for many
liberal American lawmakers when she commented, "Do we have to
involve the IMF at all? Because, as we have painfully discovered,
the way the IMF works causes children to starve."[5]
So starved of legitimacy was the Fund that US Treasury Secretary
Larry Summers, who in an earlier incarnation as chief economist of
the World Bank was one of the chief backers of structural
adjustment, told the US Congress that the "IMF-centered process"
of macroeconomic policymaking would be replaced by "a new, more
open and inclusive process that would involve multiple
international organizations and give national policymakers and
civil society groups a more central role."[6]
Globalization Unravels III: The Debacle in Seattle
Freedom, said Hegel, is the recognition of necessity. Freedom, the
proponents of neoliberalism like Hegel's disciple, Francis
Fukuyama, tell us, lies in the recognition of the inexorable
irreversibility of free- market globalization. Thank god, the
50,000 people who descended on Seattle in late November 1999 did
not buy this Hegelian- Fukuyaman notion of freedom as submission
and surrender to what seemed to be the ineluctable necessity of
the World Trade Organization (WTO).
In the mid-nineties, the WTO had been sold to the global public as
the lynchpin of a multilateral system of economic governance that
would provide the necessary rules to facilitate the growth of
global trade and the spread of its beneficial effects. Nearly five
years later, the implications and consequences of the founding of
the WTO had become as clear to large numbers of people as a
robbery carried out in broad daylight. What were some of these
realizations?
* By signing on to the Agreement on Trade-Related Investment
Measures (TRIMs), developing countries discovered that they
had signed away their right to use trade policy as a means of
industrialization.
* By signing on to the Agreement on Trade-Related Intellectual
Property Rights (TRIPs), countries realized that they had
given high tech transnationals like Microsoft and Intel the
right to monopolize innovation in the knowledge-intensive
industries and provided biotechnology firms like Novartis and
Monsanto the go-signal to privatize the fruits of aeons of
creative interaction between human communities and nature
such as seeds, plants, and animal life.
* By signing on to the Agreement on Agriculture (AOA),
developing countries discovered that they had agreed to open
up their markets while allowing the big agricultural
superpowers to consolidate their system of subsidized
agricultural production that was leading to the massive
dumping of surpluses on those very markets, a process that
was, in turn, destroying smallholder-based agriculture.
* By setting up the WTO, countries and governments discovered
that they had set up a legal system that enshrined the
priority of free trade above every other good -- above the
environment, justice, equity, and community. They finally got
the significance of consumer advocate Ralph Nader's warning a
few years earlier that the WTO, was a system of "trade uber
alles."
* In joining the WTO, developing countries realized that they
were not, in fact, joining a democratic organization but one
where decisions were made, not in formal plenaries but in
non-transparent backroom sessions, and where majority voting
was dispensed with in favor of a process called "consensus"
-- which was really a process in which a few big trading
powers imposed their consensus on the majority of the member
countries.
The Seattle Ministerial brought together a wide variety of
protesters from all over the world focusing on a wide variety of
issues. Some of their stands on key issues, such as the
incorporation of labor standards into the WTO, were sometimes
contradictory, it is true. But most of them, whether they were in
the streets or they were in meeting halls, were united by one
thing: their opposition to the expansion of a system that promoted
corporate-led globalization at the expense of justice, community,
national sovereignty, cultural diversity, and ecological
sustainablity.
Seattle was a debacle created by corporate overreach, which is
quite similar to Paul Kennedy's concept of "imperial overstretch"
that is said to be the central factor in the unraveling of
empires.[7] The Ministerial's collapse from pressure from these
multiple sources of opposition underlined the truth in Ralph
Nader's prescient remark, made four years earlier, that the
creation of global trade pacts like the WTO was likely to be "the
greatest blunder in the history of the modern global corporation."
Whereas previously, the corporation's operating within a more or
less "private penumbra" made it difficult to effectively
crystallize opposition, he argued that "now that the global
corporate strategic plan is out in print...gives us an
opportunity."[8]
Truth is eternal, but it only makes a difference in human lives
when it becomes power. In Seattle, truth was joined to the power
of the people and became fact. Suddenly, facts that had previously
been ignored or belittled were acknowledged even by the
powers-that-be whose brazen confidence had been shaken. For
instance, that the supreme institution of globalization was, in
fact, fundamentally undemocratic was recognized even by
representatives of its stoutest defenders: the United States and
the United Kingdom.
Listen to US Trade Representative Charlene Barshefsky after the
revolt of the representatives of developing countries that helped
bring down the Ministerial: "The process...was a rather
exclusionary one," she admitted. "All meetings were held between
20 and 30 key countries...And that meant 100 countries, 100, were
never in the room...[T]his led to an extraordinarily bad feeling
that they were left out of the process and that the results...had
been dictated to them by the 25 or 30 privileged countries who
were in the room."[9]
Listen to Stephen Byers, the UK Secretary for Trade and Industry,
after the Seattle shock: "WTO will not be able to continue in its
present form. There has to be fundamental and radical change in
order for it to meet the needs and aspirations of all 134 of its
members."[10]
Globalization Unravels IV: Meltzer Torpedoes the Bank
The Asian financial crisis triggered the IMF's crisis of
legitimacy. The Seattle Ministerial collapse brought the WTO to a
standstill. However, under Australian-turned-American Jim
Wolfensohn's command, the World Bank seemed likely to escape the
massive damage sustained by its sister institutions. But the
torpedo in the form of the famous Meltzer Commission found its
mark in February of this year.
Formed as one of the conditions for the US Congress' voting for an
increase of its quota in the IMF in 1998, the Commission was a
bipartisan body that was tasked to probe the record of the Bank
and Fund with the end in view of coming up with recommendations
for the reform of the two institutions. Exhaustively examining
documents and interviewing all kinds of experts, the Commission
came up with the devastating conclusion that with most of its
resources going to the better off countries of the developing
world and with the astounding 65-70 per cent failure rate of its
projects in the poorest countries, the World Bank was irrelevant
to the achievement of its avowed mission of global poverty
alleviation. And what to do with the Bank? The Commission urged
that most of the Bank's lending activities be devolved to the
regional developing banks. It does not take much, however, for
readers of the report to realize that, as one of the Commission's
members revealed, it "essentially wants to abolish the
International Monetary Fund and the World Bank," a goal that had
"significant pockets of support...in our Congress."[11]
Much to the chagrin of Wolfensohn, few people came to the defense
of the Bank, and it was in a state of shock that the agency held
its joint spring meeting with the IMF in a Washington, DC, that
was shut down by some 40,000 protestors. The spirit of
demoralization that gripped the Bank was conveyed in Wolfensohn's
missive to Bank staffers before the meeting that "the next week
will be a trying time for most of us."[12] That the April 2000
meeting of the Bretton Woods twins could take place only under
heavy police protection, with the use of a system of decoys to
breach protesters' lines in order to bring apprehensive delegates
to the fortified bunkers at Pennsylvania and 19th NW in central DC
spoke volumes about the tattered legitimacy of the two
institutions.
The Davos Process I: Relegitimizing Globalization
Why do I keep coming back to the question of legitimacy? Because,
as the great Italian thinker Antonio Gramsci pointed out, when
legitimacy has vanished and is not regained, it is only a matter
of time before the structure collapses, no matter how seemingly
solid it is. Many of the key advocates of globalization realized
this in the wake of the joint crisis of the WTO and the Bretton
Woods twins. They knew that the strategy of denial that these
three institutions deployed in the past would no longer work and
that the aggressive approach of pro- globalization firebrands like
Martin Wolf of the Financial Times, who accused NGOs of ignorance
and of being an "uncivil society," was likely to be
counterproductive.
To the more soberminded among the pro-globalization forces, the
first thing to do was to recognize the facts. Fact No. 1,
according to the influential free trader C. Fred Bergsten, head of
Washington's Institute of International Economics, was that "the
anti-globalization forces are now in the ascendancy."[13] And Fact
No. 2 was that central to the response to these forces "has to be
an honest recognition and admission that there are costs and
losers," that "globalization does increase income and social
disparities within countries" and "does leave some countries and
some groups behind."[14]
Here is where the Davos process -- of which the current exercise
of the World Economic Forum (WEF) is a part -- has proven to be
central to the project of relegitimizing globalization. Davos,
high up in the Swiss Alps, is not the center of a global
capitalist conspiracy to divide up the world. Davos is where the
global elite meets under the umbrella of the WEF to iron out a
rough consensus on how to ideologically confront and defuse the
challenges to the system. Meeting shortly after what many regarded
as the cataclysm in Seattle, the Davos crew in late January
composed the politically correct line. Repeated like a mantra by
personalities like Bill Clinton, Tony Blair, Bill Gates, Nike CEO
Phil Knight, and WEF guru Klaus Schwab, the chorus went this way:
"Globalization is the wave of the future. But globalization is
leaving the majority behind. Those voices spoke out in Seattle.
It's time to bring the fruits of globalization and free trade to
the many."
It was British Prime Minister Tony Blair who best articulated the
vision and rhetoric of "compassionate globalization." Blair said:
"Alongside the advance of global markets and technologies, we are
seeing a new search for community, locally, nationally, and
globally that is a response to change and insecurity, but also
reflects the best of our nature and enduring values. With it is
coming a new political agenda -- one that is founded on mutual
responsibility -- both within nations and across the world."[15]
He continued: "We have the chance in this century to achieve an
open world, an open economy, and an open economy with
unprecedented opportunities for people and business. But we will
succeed only if that open society and economy is underpinned by a
strong ethos of mutual responsibility -- by social inclusion
within nations, and by a common commitment internationally to help
those affected by genocide, debt, and environment."[16]
"I call it a Third Way," Blair declared with passion. "It provides
a new alternative in politics -- on the centre and centre-left,
but on new terms. Supporting wealth creation. Tackling vested
interests. Using market mechanisms. But always staying true to
clear values -- social justice, democracy, cooperation.... From
Europe to North America, Brazil to New Zealand, two great strands
of progressive thought are coming together. The liberal commitment
to individual free in the market economy, and the social
democratic commitment to social justice through the action of
government, are being combined."[17]
Now, one thing that the British public has finally realized about
Mr. Blair is that with him, there is a huge gap between rhetoric
and substance. What actually does "globalization with a
conscience" or the "Third Way" or "globalization with compassion"
have to offer? To find out, one must turn from Blair to Bergsten,
who, to his credit, dispenses with the soaring rhetoric and admits
that the program is actually a system of "transitional safety
nets...to help the adjustment to dislocation" and "enable people
to take advantage of the phenomenon [of globalization] and roll
with it rather than oppose it."[18] In short, instead of being run
over by the globalization express, people will be asked to quietly
and peacefully roll over and adjust to the constant and
unpredictable change wrought by the TNCs search for profitability.
The Davos Process II: Coopting the United Nations
As important as the rhetoric in the Davos response is the process
of bringing people onto the bandwagon. This would be achieved
through dialogue, consultation, and the formation of
"partnerships" between TNCs, governments, the United Nations, and
civil society organizations.
The UN was a piece of cake. Discussions with Secretary General
Kofi Annan produced the "Global Compact" that has become the
centerpiece of the United Nations' Millennial Celebrations. Signed
by 44 TNCs, the Compact has been promoted by Annan as a major step
forward for it supposedly commits its signatories to respect
human, labor, and environmental rights and provide positive
examples of such behavior. To many NGOs, on the other hand, the
Global Compact is turning out to be one of the UN's biggest
blunders for the following reasons:
* Despite a Compact provision that membership in the Compact
will not be given to business entities complicit in human
rights violations, the founding membership includes the worst
corporate transgressors of human rights, environmental
rights, and labor rights: Nike, Rio Tinto, Shell, Novartis,
and BP Amoco.
* The Compact will provide a great public relations venue for
these corporations to promote a clean image very different
from the reality since compliance with the Compact will be
self-monitored and no sanctions exist for violating the
Compact's principles.
* The Corporations will be able to use the UN logo as a seal of
corporate responsibility, thus appropriating the UN's image
of international civil service "not only for short-term
profit but also for the long-term business goal of positive
brand image."[19]
The Davos Process III: Managing Civil Society
As for civil society organizations, they were not as naive as
Annan and the UN and thus neutralizing them demanded more
sophisticated measures. As a first step, one had to divide their
ranks by publicly defining some as "reasonable NGOs" that were
interested in a "serious debate" about the problems of
globalization and others as "unreasonable NGOs" whose agenda was
to "close down discussion."[20] Then towards those identified as
"reasonable," one put into motion what one might call a strategy
of "disarmament by dialogue" designed to integrate them into a
"working partnership" for reform.
Here the model was the "NGO Committee on the World Bank" and other
joint World Bank-NGO bodies set up by Wolfensohn and his
lieutenants in the mid-nineties. While the NGOs that joined these
bodies may have done so with the best of intentions, Wolfensohn
knew that their membership in itself already helped to legitimize
the Bank and that over time these NGOs would develop a stake in
maintaining the formal relationship with the Bank. Not only was
Wolfensohn able to split the Washington, DC, NGO community, but he
was able to harness the energies of a number of NGOs -- many of
them unwittingly -- to project the image of a Bank that was
serious about reforming itself and reorienting its approach to
eliminating poverty before Meltzer Commission was able to expose
the hollowness of the Bank's claims.
Wolfensohn 's neutralization of a significant section of the
Washington, DC, NGO community in the mid-1990s should serve as a
warning to civil society of the mettle of the forces it is up
against. The stakes are great, and how civil society responds at
this historical moment to the aggressive courtship being mounted
for its hand will make the difference in the future of the
globalization project. Developments are so fluid in the
correlation of forces in the struggle between the pro-
globalization and anti-globalization camps that strategies that
might have been realistic and appropriate pre-Seattle, when the
multilateral institutions had more solidity and legitimacy, may be
timid and inappropriate, if not counterproductive, now that the
multilateral agencies are in a profound crisis of legitimacy.
Let me be specific:
* Will NGOs breathe life into a WTO process that is at
standstill by pushing for the incorporation of labor and
environmental clauses into the WTO agreements instead of
reducing the power and authority of this instrument of
corporate rule by doing all in their power, for instance, to
prevent another trade round from ever taking place?
* Will they throw a life saver to the Bretton Woods
institutions by participating in the civil society-World
Bank-IMF consultations that are to be the central element of
the "Comprehensive Development Framework" that Wolfensohn and
the IMF leadership sees as the key to the relegitimization of
the Bretton Woods twins?
* Will they allow themselves to be sucked into the Davos
process of "reasonable dialogue" and "frank consultation"
when the other side sees dialogue and consultation mainly as
the first step to the disarmament of the other side?
Reform or Disempowerment?
Our tactics will depend not only on the balance of forces but will
turn even more fundamentally on our answer to the question: Should
we seek to transform or to disable the main institutions of
corporate-led globalization?
Institutions should be saved and reformed if they're functioning,
while defective, nevertheless can be reoriented to promote the
interests of society and the environment. They should be abolished
if they have become fundamentally dysfunctional. Can we really say
that the IMF can be reformed to bring about global financial
stability, the World Bank to reduce poverty, and the WTO to bring
about fair trade? Are they not, in fact, imprisoned within
paradigms and structures that create outcomes that contradict
these objectives? Can we truly say that these institutions can be
reengineered to handle the multiple problems that have been thrown
up by the process of corporate-led globalization?
Perhaps we can best appreciate the current situation by borrowing
from Thomas Kuhn's classic Structure of Scientific
Revolutions.[21] Scientific paradigms, says Kuhn, enter into
crisis when they can no longer explain or handle dissonant data
after dissonant data thrown up by observation. At this point, the
community of science diverges in its responses. Some try to
salvage the dominant paradigm with endless minute adjustments that
merely prolong its inevitable demise. A brave few try to cut
cleanly from it in favor of a simpler, more elegant, and more
useful paradigm -- in a manner similar to the way the founders of
early modern science simply junked the old, hopelessly complex
Ptolemaic paradigm for explaining the cosmos (the sun and other
celestial bodies moving around the earth) in favor of the simpler
Copernican paradigm (the earth moving around the sun).
Like scientific paradigms in crisis, the dominant institutions of
globalization can no longer handle the multiple problems thrown up
by the process of corporate-led globalization. Instead of trying
to reform the multilateral institutions, would it in fact be more
realistic and "cost- effective," to use a horrid neo-liberal term,
to move to disempower, if not abolish them, and create totally new
institutions that do not have the baggage of illegitimacy,
institutional failure, and Jurassic mindsets that attach to the
IMF, World Bank, and WTO?
Disabling the Corporation
Indeed, I would contend that the focus of our efforts these days
is not to try to reform the multilateral agencies but to deepen
the crisis of legitimacy of the whole system. Gramsci once
described the bureaucracy as but an "outer trench behind which lay
a powerful system of fortresses and earthworks." We must no longer
think simply in terms of neutralizing the multilateral agencies
that form the outer trenches of the system but of disabling the
transnational corporations that are fortresses and the earthworks
that constitute the core of the global economic system. I am
talking about disabling not just the WTO, the IMF, and the World
Bank but the transnational corporation itself. And I am not
talking about a process of "reregulating" the TNCs but of
eventually disabling or dismantling them as fundamental hazards to
people, society, the environment, to everything we hold dear.
Is this off the wall? Only if we think that the shocking
irresponsibility and secrecy with which the Monsantos and
Novartises have foisted biotechnology on us is a departure from
the corporate norm. Only if we also see as deviations from the
normal Shell's systematic devastation of Ogoniland in Nigeria, the
Seven Sisters' conspiracy to prevent the development of renewable
energy sources in order to keep us slaves to a petroleum
civilization, Rio Tinto and the mining giants' practice of
poisoning rivers and communities, and Mitsubishi's recently
exposed 20-year-cover up of a myriad of product-safety violations
to prevent a recall that would cut into profitability. Only if we
think that it is acceptable business practice and ethics to pull
up stakes, lay off people, and destroy long-established
communities in order to pursue ever-cheaper labor around the globe
-- a process that most TNCs now engage in.
No, these are not departures from normal corporate behavior. They
are normal corporate behavior. And corporate crime against people
and the environment has, like the Mafia, become a way of life
because, as the British philosopher John Gray tells us, "Global
market competition and technological innovation have interacted to
give us an anarchic world economy." To such a world of anarchy,
scarcity, and conflict created by global laissez-faire, Gray
continues, "Thomas Hobbes and Thomas Malthus are better guides
than Adam Smith or Friedrich von Hayek, with their Utopian vision
of a humanity united by "the benevolent harmonies of
competition."[22] Smith's world of peacefully competing
enterprises has, in the age of the TNC, degenerated into Hobbes'
"war of all against all."
Gray goes on to say that "as it is presently organized, global
capitalism is supremely ill-suited to cope with the risks of
geo-political conflict that are endemic in a world of worsening
scarcities. Yet a regulatory framework for coexistence and
cooperation among the world's diverse economies figures on no
historical or political agenda."[23] Recent events underline his
point. When the ice cap on the North Pole is melting at an
unprecedented rate and the ozone layer above the South Pole has
declined by 30 per cent, owing precisely to the dynamics of this
corporate civilization's insatiable desire for growth and profits,
the need for cooperation among peoples and societies is more stark
than ever. We must do better than entrust production and exchange
to entities that systematically and fundamentally work to erode
solidarity, discourage cooperation, oppose regulation except
profit-enhancing and monopoly-creating regulation, all in the name
of the Market and Efficiency.
It is said that in the age of globalization, nation-states have
become obsolete forms of social organization. I disagree. It is
the corporation that has become obsolete. It is the corporation
that serves as a fetter to humanity's movement to new and
necessary social arrangements to achieve the most quintessentially
human values of justice, equity, democracy, and to achieve a new
equilibrium between our species and the rest of the planet.
Disabling, disempowering, or dismantling the transnational
corporation should be high on our agenda as a strategic end. And
when we say this, we do not equate the TNC with private
enterprise, for there are benevolent and malevolent expressions of
private enterprise. We must seek to disable or eliminate the
malevolent ones, like the Mafia and the TNC.[24]
The Struggle for the Future I: Deglobalization
It is often said that we must not only know what we are against
but what we are for. I agree -- though it is very important to
know very clearly what we want to terminate so that we do not end
up unwittingly fortifying it so that, like a WTO fortified with
social and environmental clauses, it is given a new leash on life.
Let me end, therefore, by giving you my idea of an alternative. It
is, however, one that has been formulated for a Third World, and
specifically Southeast Asian, context. Let me call this
alternative route to the future "deglobalization."
What is deglobalization?
I am not talking about withdrawing from the international economy.
I am speaking about reorienting our economies from production for
export to production for the local market;
about drawing most of our financial resources for development from
within rather than becoming dependent on foreign investment and
foreign financial markets;
about carrying out the long-postponed measures of income
redistribution and land redistribution to create a vibrant
internal market that would be the anchor of the economy;
about deemphasizing growth and maximizing equity in order to
radically reduce environmental disequilibrium;
about not leaving strategic economic decisions to the market but
making them subject to democratic choice;
about subjecting the private sector and the state to constant
monitoring by civil society;
about creating a new production and exchange complex that includes
community cooperatives, private enterprises, and state
enterprises, and excludes TNCs;
about enshrining the principle of subsidiarity in economic life by
encouraging production of goods to take place at the community and
national level if it can be done so at reasonable cost in order to
preserve community.
We are talking, moreover, about a strategy that consciously
subordinates the logic of the market, the pursuit of cost
efficiency to the values of security, equity, and social
solidarity. We are speaking, in short, about reembedding the
economy in society, rather than having society driven by the
economy.
The Struggle for the Future II: A Plural World
Deglobalization or the reempowerment of the local and national,
however, can only succeed if it takes place within an alternative
system of global economic governance. What are the contours of
such a world economic order? The answer to this is contained in
our critique of the Bretton Woods cum WTO system as a monolithic
system of universal rules imposed by highly centralized
institutions to further the interests of corporations -- and, in
particular, US corporations. To try to supplant this with another
centralized global system of rules and institutions, though these
may be premised on different principles, is likely to reproduce
the same Jurassic trap that ensnared organizations as different as
IBM, the IMF, and the Soviet state, and this is the inability to
tolerate and profit from diversity.
Today's need is not another centralized global institution but the
deconcentration and decentralization of institutional power and
the creation of a pluralistic system of institutions and
organizations interacting with one another, guided by broad and
flexible agreements and understandings.
We are not talking about something completely new. For it was
under such a more pluralistic system of global economic
governance, where hegemonic power was still far from
institutionalized in a set of all-encompassing and powerful
multilateral organizations and institutions that a number of Latin
American and Asian countries were able to achieve a modicum of
industrial development in the period from 1950 to 1970. It was
under such a pluralistic system, under a General Agreement on
Tariffs and Trade (GATT) that was limited in its power, flexible,
and more sympathetic to the special status of developing
countries, that the East and Southeast Asian countries were able
to become newly industrializing countries through activist state
trade and industrial policies that departed significantly from the
free-market biases enshrined in the WTO.
Of course, economic relations among countries prior to the attempt
to institutionalize one global free market system beginning in the
early 1980's were not ideal, nor were the Third World economies
that resulted ideal. But these conditions and structures underline
the fact that the alternative to an economic Pax Romana built
around the World Bank-IMF-WTO system is not a Hobbesian state of
nature. The reality of international relations in a world marked
by a multiplicity of international and regional institutions that
check one another is a far cry from the propaganda image of a
"nasty" and "brutish" world. Of course, the threat of unilateral
action by the powerful is ever present in such a system, but it is
one that even the most powerful hesitate to take for fear of its
consequences on their legitimacy as well as the reaction it would
provoke in the form of opposing coalitions.
In other words, what developing countries and international civil
society should aim at is not to reform the TNC-driven WTO and
BrettonWoods institutions, but, through a combination of passive
and active measures, to radically reduce their powers and to turn
them into just another set of actors coexisting with and being
checked by other international organizations, agreements, and
regional groupings. These would include such diverse actors and
institutions as UNCTAD, multilateral environmental agreements, the
International Labor Organization, the European Union, and evolving
trade blocs such as Mercosur in Latin America, SAARC in South
Asia, SADCC in Southern Africa, and a revitalized ASEAN in
Southeast Asia.
More space, more flexibility, more compromise -- these should be
the goals of the Southern agenda and the civil society effort to
build a new system of global economic governance. It is in such a
more fluid, less structured, more pluralistic world, with multiple
checks and balances, that the nations and communities of the South
-- and the North -- will be able to carve out the space to develop
based on their values, their rhythms, and the strategies of their
choice.
Let me quote John Gray one last time. "It is legitimate and indeed
imperative," he says, "that we seek a form of rootedness which is
sheltered from overthrow by technologies and market processes
which in achieving a global reach that is disembedded from any
community or culture, cannot avoid desolating the earth's human
settlements and its non-human environments." The role of
international arrangements in a world where toleration of
diversity is a central principle of economic organization would be
"to express and protect local and national cultures by embodying
and sheltering their distinctive practices."[25]
Let us put an end to this arrogant globalist project of making the
world a synthetic unity of individual atoms shorn of culture and
community. Let us herald, instead, an internationalism that is
built on, tolerates, respects, and enhances the diversity of human
communities and the diversity of life.
Walden Bellow -- Executive Director of Focus on the
Global South, a program of research, analysis, and
advocacy of the Chulalongkorn University Social Research
Institute (CUSRI) in Bangkok, Thailand; and Professor of
Sociology and Public Administration at the University of
the Philippines. Author or co-author of 11 books on
Asian economic and political issues, including A Siamese
Tragedy: Development and Disintegration in Modern
Thailand (London: Zed Press, 1998) and Dragons in
Distress: Asia's Miracle Economies in Crisis (London:
Penguin, 1992)
Notes
1. C. Fred Bergsten, "The Backlash against Globalization," Speech
delivered at the 2000 Meeting of the Trilateral Commission, Tokyo,
April 2000. Downloaded from Internet.
2. Cited in Giovanni Andrea Cornia, "Inequality and Poverty Trends in the
Era of Liberalization and Globalization," Paper delivered at the
"United Nations Millenium Conference," Tokyo, January 19-20, 2000.
3. Ibid.; see also, "Number of World's Poor Unchanged in the 1990's,"
Reuters, August 3, 2000.
4. Cornia.
5. Quoted in Associated Press, reproduced in Business World, Nov. 15,
1999.
6. Op-ed column, Washington Post, reproduced in Today (Manila), Nov. 15,
1999.
7. Paul Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers (New York: Vintage
Books, 1989).
8. Ralph Nader, speech at International Forum on Globalization Teach-in on
"The Social, Ecological, Cultural, and Political Costs of Economic
Globalization," Riverside Church, New York, Nov. 10, 1995; quoted in
Joshua Karliner, The Corporate Planet (San Francisco: Sierra Club,
1997), p. 207.
9. Press briefing, Seattle, Washington, Dec. 2, 1999.
10. Quoted in "Deadline Set for WTO Reforms," Guardian News Service, Jan.
10, 2000.
11. Bergsten.
12. James Wolfensohn, Memo on "Disruptions at Spring Meetings," World Bank,
Washington, DC, April 13, 2000.
13. Bergsten.
14. Ibid.
15. Prime Minister Anthony Blair, Speech at the World Economic Forum,
Davos, Switzerland, January 28, 2000.
16. Ibid.
17. Ibid.
18. Bergsten.
19. Letter of International Coalition against Global Compact, July 26,
2000.
20. The Wolfensohn memo, above, is an interesting exercise in this branding
or categorization of NGOs.
21. Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1971).
22. John Gray, False Dawn (New York: New Press, 1998), p. 207.
23. Ibid.
24. For excellent recent critiques of the corporation, see David Korten,
When Corporations Rule the World (San Francisco: Kumarian
Press/Beret-Koehler, 1995), Joshua Karliner, The Corporate Planet (San
Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1997), and Richard Barnet and John
Cavanagh, Global Dreams: Imperial Corporations and the New World Order
(New York: Simon and Shuster, 1994).
25. John Gray, Enlightenment's Wake (London: Routledge, 1995), p. 181.
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