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Canada & the UN > Newton Bowles Reports
ANNEX 4 Failing Currencies, Recriminations, Who's to
Blame? Not Excluding People Why do we deliberately miss a chance to guarantee that globalization is not only in the interests of haute finance-- the decent corporate managers, the megabanks and the Wall Street machos in the new old world of the West, the nouveaux riches in Asia and the Middle East and the robber barons in the chaotic capitalist states established on the ruins of communism in Eastern Europe and the ruins of colonialism in Africa-- but also in the interest of those people who in earlier phases of capitalist growth were underpaid, underemployed and now feel not only exploited but also excluded, people who raise their voices and demand access to the economy and a decent level of living? Why, in our negotiations on the modalities of entry into the global market, do we trust governments that do not trust their own people? Five years ago I said that the world was seemingly lacking the capacity to deal with the major issues of sustainable development: poverty, ecology, conflict. Now that in the post-cold war, post-colonial, post-adjustment and post-North-South world of the Nineties a broader consciousness has arisen that these are the main issues to be dealt with, we also realize that we stand left-handed because the development of our institutional and political capacity has not kept pace with this need. For this reason the present period will not be a decade of development cooperation but the transition during which we will be unable to do more than taking stop-gap measures. Looking back to the first half of this decade, we can say that there was stronger economic development and more intense international cooperation than I foresaw, but this development was uneven and the cooperation unbalanced. The process of globalization, faster than I anticipated in my address five years ago, has added to this unevenness and one-sidedness of development and international cooperation. It is technologically and economically driven, not politically. Political decisions seem only to follow events and to aim at a facilitation of the workings of the global market. This in my view is not sustainable. Globalization in its present form will sharpen inequalities. It will lead to ever-greater ecological distortions and physical scarcities. And by doing so it will enhance the conflict potential in the world.
At the same time the present globalization drive is further weakening
the capacity of the polity, nationally as well as internationally, to
deal with these three issues, which are major threats to the stability
and the cohesion of the global society. In the words of Benjamin Barber,
in his recent "Jihad vs McWorld," in which he describes Jihad
as a dogmatic and violent particularism resulting from identify politics,
partly as a reaction to a McWorld-globalization. "Jihad and McWorld
operate with equal strength in opposite directions... the one recreating
ancient subnational and ethnic borders from within, the other making
national borders porous from without... [They] both make war on the
sovereign nation-state and thus undermine the nation-state's democratic
institutions. Each ensures civil society and belittles democratic citizenship,
neither seeks alternative democratic institutions. Their common thread
is indifference to civil liberty." |
