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Le Canada et l’ONU > Newton Bowles Reports Ce document est disponible seulement en anglais.
ANNEX 4 Failing Currencies, Recriminations, Who's to
Blame? Challenges of Globalization This may be true, but I still think that it is worthwhile to try to appoint someone to sit on the other end of the phone and to pick it up when it starts ringing. Or, even better, someone or some institution with the right not only to answer the phone but also to initiate calls, asking questions, issuing timely warnings to potential victims of the herd, demarcating grazing areas for the herd and helping to avoid stampedes. It's worth a try, because globalization is making victims: by universalizing the market advanced labor standards can be undermined, sophisticated environmental regulations can be avoided, forest and water resources can be pillaged and local artisanal production can be wrecked. As William Pfaff recently argued: "The trade, labor and environmental regulations that globalization undermines were put there for a reason. Much of this regulation came about as a direct result of the rampant abuses and exploitation of the industrial and colonial systems of the 19th Century. Do we really wish to restore the conditions for such abuses?" The answer obviously has to be negative. Globalization cannot imply a worldwide application of the minimal rules and regulations that the least-advanced last entrant considers affordable. Neither will it be feasible to impose on all countries all the rules and regulations that are valid in the economically more-advanced countries as the result of democratic political action of free citizens in those countries. But there is a third way, which would consist of three elements. First, the strengthening of existing and the build-up of other international organizations that could act as countervailing powers to transnational corporations and mega-banks, elaborating a framework of rules, guidelines and codes of conduct not only for governments but also for the transnationally acting private enterprises and conglomerates, and assisting governments of nation-states at risk of being overwhelmed by forces beyond their territorial control. Second, an international agreement between governments, monitored by
such institutions to allow for a gradual integration of national economies
into the global market-- not too fast. A smooth transition will make
less victims than a big bang. Strengthened and reformed international
institutions can help formulating transparent conditions and time paths,
not dictated by a greedy or rampant herd of dealers in financial assets
but by authorities with a public responsibility for broad-based sustainable
economic growth, social cohesion, a reasonable income distribution and
the preservation of the ecology for future generations. The build-up
of such international institutions would require a sharp deviation from
the present trend: no weakening of the United Nations but a strengthening
through a radical reform, rendering this system capable to deal with
the challenges posed by the global market and the demands of the global
civilization of the 21st Century. These challenges and demands are different
from, and far greater than, the need for international cooperation after
the Second World War when the UN was established. At that time cooperation
had to be institutionalized at the intergovernmental level mainly. Globalization
requires an extension into two other directions: international co-operation
to manage major instabilities and conflicts within countries and international
public action to try to step excessive transnational private economic
power. This also requires a mandate for the basically economically-oriented
international institutions such as the World Trade Organization, the
IMF, the World Bank and also the European Commission, which would not
consist of a sheer facilitation of globalization but of guiding and
phasing it. Facilitation, the present mode, is too passive, betraying
public responsibilities. Planning globalization would be too ambitious
an endeavor, because the market forces are too strong to be planned
or controlled. But steering the process, countervailing these forces,
giving weight to motives other than fast profit maximization, demarcating
the spheres of life within which market forces can play, strengthening
the voice of those who feel excluded or stampeded by these forces--
that is a public duty. |
