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Canada & the UN > Newton Bowles Reports
ANNEX 4 Failing Currencies, Recriminations, Who's to
Blame? Strengthening Civil Society The third element of an alternative approach to globalization would be a strengthening of the civil societies within nation-states to be integrated in the global market. Strengthening laws, procedures and institutions guaranteeing human rights, fostering democratization and pluriformity, and inviting and welcoming the formally as well as informally organized civil society and citizens to speak out and communicate ideas, to voice their interests, feelings and desires without having to fear retaliation in case of dissent. All this is not a separate issue, unrelated to globalization, but a conditio sine qua non if globalization will have a chance to be not just the ultimate phase of pure capitalism but a process serving the interests of all people, including those who consider their identity and dignity based on ideas and culture rather than on what they consume. I want to strongly emphasize this third dimension of what I would like to call a developmental approach to globalization. So far, the international financial community seems to be blindfolded in its greed, and the governments and the system, which ought to have a broader and farsighted outlook, keep silent. How else can we, for instance, explain that the IMF in its most recent Article IV consultation on Algeria concluded that "Directors agree that Algeria's exemplary adjustment and reform efforts deserved continued support of the international financial community." Algeria-- where each week some 100 to 200 people's throats are being cut, including women's and infants', month after month, for several years now. Its government accuses the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights of intervention in domestic affairs when she dares to call for international attention to this systematic slaughtering of innocent people. But the global economy applauds: "Algeria's exemplary adjustment and reform efforts deserve continued support of the international financial community." Money turns people blind, money silences, money kills. How else can we explain that the bullying of countries into the global economy is not linked with efforts to bully them to respect basic human rights and values? I am not referring to the debate on Asian versus Western values accompanying the process of globalization. This debate is becoming rather heated, witness the recent exchange between Mahathir and George Soros, or the confrontation between Asian and Western countries at the UNCED Review Conference earlier this year, when Europe and the United States were accused of imposing a more cautious economic lifestyle on the rest of the world at a time when other countries were not yet in a position to compete with the West. Indeed, the credibility of the West is at stake when it looks as if advantages are being protected and denied to newcomers in the global economy and to the citizens of these countries. That debate should continue, with mutual respect, and Western countries have to understand that a debate consists of speaking and listening to the arguments of the other. A dialogue is not a sermon, and not all Western values can stand the criticism coming from other cultures and traditions, certainly not those Western values that are overly materialistic and overly individualistic. An open and respectful dialogue with other cultures might even help the West to get rid of some of the distortions of Western beliefs, and to value spiritual well-being and social relations as at least as important as money and consumption. Mahathir's remarks on currency trading were a bit extreme, but he had a point. Money should not be an aim in itself; it is an instrument helping to exchange goods and services to enhance people's welfare. There is some immorality in a system which puts money above welfare and declares the freedom to exchange money in all circumstances as more important than the right to work, to feed, educate and house oneself and the family and to get proper sanitation and health care. These rights and freedoms do not collide by definition, but more and more they do, if only because basic human needs are seldom adequately provided for by the market alone. |
