How is Globalization Doing?

Text of Inaugural Lecture of the “International Studies Lecture Series” Delivered at Grand Valley State University, Allendale, Michigan, November 8, 2001.
The views expressed in this paper must not in any way be attributed to anyone else but the author.
Globalization is today a very much-abused word. Developments such as the infamous El Nino, the resistance of the Zapatistas in Mexico, and the attack on the World Trade Center (WTC) in New York have been attributed to globalization. Suddenly, it is as if we are witnessing a new phenomenon. Yet, there are two discernible perspectives on what globalization means for peoples, cultures, political systems, and locations in the evolving global divisions of labor and power. For some, globalization is the long-awaited magic wand needed to overcome the problems of the global system be these economic, security related, environmental, or political. To this group, globalization will erode the sovereignty of the state, strengthen private accumulation, force capital to operate more vigorously across borders, and eventually redistribute the gains of global capitalism and technology. In recent times, especially since the advent of the Bush administration, we have been told that globalization is an engine that guarantees material improvement and freedom for the peoples of the world. The argument has been made since the WTC attacks that the terrorists come from countries that are undemocratic, underdeveloped, and where social justice and the rule of law do not prevail. The solution: get rid of undemocratic governments, open up the markets, integrate such nations into the global market, and terrorism and other extra-legal activities would disappear: just like that. I am sure, you can all see the poor logic in this position once you remember Tim Macveigh, the “Unabomber,” and the activities of hate crime warlords in the United States. This group also contends that protests by anti-globalizers in Seattle, Quebec City, Prague, and Genoa were organized by a few misguided ex-communists and opportunistic and unemployed persons who hardly understand the world and who hardly speak for any sizeable group: they should be ignored. The best way to evaluate this position is to imagine what would have happened without these protestors.
To the opposing group, globalization is just a more liberal or shorthand name for imperialism, domination, exploitation, marginalization, and the overall reproduction of the injustices, inequalities, and poverty that characterize the relations within and between nations. This line of thought contends that globalization is not about people but about money. People are relevant only to the extent that they carry credit cards, checkbooks, cash and huge lines of credit and are ready to spend. Globalization is bound to ruin the environment, commoditize human relations, destroy the welfare basis of society, and consolidate inequalities. It would result in what Aime Cesaire calls the “thingification” of people: reducing human beings into “things” to be exchanged at the market place with profit and nothing but profit as the main consideration. Finally, this group believes that pressures on weak and underdeveloped nations to open markets, relax environmental controls, and to adopt difficult reform policies without safety nets are more to the benefit of capital than to the states concerned. The net result would be increased poverty, unemployment, instability, corruption, and the negation of local or indigenous socio-cultural institutions and values. Globalization, they contend, in the face of mergers, is nothing but market and taste homogenization.
In some ways, both groups are accurate and reflect the confusion in the global system. This is a confusion arising from the absence of political will from the developed countries, international organizations, and the powerful profit and hegemony-seeking transnational corporations that are more interested in primitive accumulation than in bridging the gaps between the so-called north and south. Clearly therefore, it depends on where you stand on the global political and power canvass or how much you have been (mis)educated and deluded into believing an ideology that is based on the exploitation and impoverization of others for the benefit of the few. As well, your sympathies as to what globalization stands for could be influenced in a largely misdirected and misguided moral arithmetic that confuses, for instance, foreign aid as enough compensation for whatever harm you do to peoples, their environments, world views, and cultures. In practical terms, if you were living in the West you could swallow hook, line and sinker all the propaganda about globalization. You would believe that it is the only chance for global development, social justice, democracy and environmental protection all over the world. You might swallow the suffocating propaganda on why we should all support the expansion of Western market interests as a strategy to make our own lives better. As the IMF boldly articulates it for Europe: “The rest of the world has a strong interest in a successful EMU and a solid euro… since it would make Europe a better place in which to do business and to invest.”1 The question is has Europe showed such interest in the rest of the world, especially the developing world? Why don’t we for once reverse the argument that Europe has an interest in helping the rest of the world develop in order to promote European own interests? Unless you are a blind believer in so-called Reaganomics and supply side economics, you would really believe that supporting Europe would translate into some appreciable trickle down to the developing world. Well, there is no evidence of this ever happening in history. So much for “trickle down.”
Of course, if you were part of the millions of poor Americans, your views might be different. In fact, in large measure, it might be similar to the views of billions of third world peoples. This is because there is a third world within America in spite of its wealth and claims to political invisibility by its leadership. There are substantial communities in the US that are victims of corporate terrorism, wickedness, insensitivity, arrogance and a pathological fixation on profit. In spite of the market, America has not wiped out poverty, disease, alienation from the state, corruption, and bad leadership. It has not wiped out hate crimes, violence especially against women and children, and has not eradicated discrimination, racism, and other forms of intolerance. As we know, many European countries are barely surviving by increasing taxes on practically every activity or sphere of life. Clearly therefore, the market is NOT everything.
It is possible to argue that the world has always been global, and that in spite of the new intensity and changing structures and patterns of domination and exploitation, there is fundamentally very little that is new in the current order. In fact, it would not be wrong to argue that globalization is in some respect a myth both semantically and in reality. It is a myth constructed by capital at the expense of corrupt and weakened politicians and governments to commercialize and commoditize all spheres of human activity. This raises some questions: who or what is actually being globalized? Why is it being presented as if it is the best thing to have happened to the world since the remote control was invented? Can globalization truly take place without political democracy? If the state is declining and the market is expanding, to whom are the agents of the market accountable? If there is no such thing as a “global state,” or “global governance”; and if “global citizens” do not exist, why are we in such a rush to hand over the world economy, its people and cultures to private capital in spite of its terrible record with regards to peoples, systems, cultures, societies, the environment? Is the market really all that it is presented to be?
What is Globalization?
For the IMF, globalization means more closely integrated goods, services, and capital markets….”2 For Thomas L. Friedman, globalization is “the integration of markets, finance, and technologies in a way that is shrinking the world from a size medium to a size small and enabling each of us to reach around the world farther, faster, and cheaper than ever before… Like all previous international systems, it is directly or indirectly shaping the domestic politics, economic policies and foreign relations of virtually every country.”3 Paul Kingsnorth sees globalization as a process of “corporate infiltration of every area of life… a process of exclusion, homogenization, environmental destruction, and for many, death.”4 Though perspectives differ on its content, course, implications and so on, it is generally agreed to be characterized by new ideas, new strategies, speed, technology, new mechanisms for penetrating foreign markets, higher volumes of movement of goods and skills, and the shrinking of distances. No doubt, the power of the new globalization is affecting the character of domestic and international politics, economics and relations at every sphere. Unlike the cold war era when ideological and other divides separated the world and the great and super powers did everything possible to undermine, shortchange and weaken each other, today’s globalization seeks to bring all together in one global economic, social and political structure based on capitalist values and liberal democracy. Its watchword being “integration”, today’s globalization seeks to climb, domesticate and reshape all cultural and political barriers in the quest for profits. The World Wide Web is probably the best symbol of this new global movement and the Internet has become an economic and political and social weapon deployed by all, even in remote parts of the world to plug into the opportunities provided by globalization.
At no time in modern history has technology- “computerization, miniaturization, digitization, satellite communications, fiber optics and the Internet”5 shaped relations within and between states, communities, organizations and individuals. Speed has become the dominant feature of the current era: how fast can you get to a particular place? How quickly can you transfer funds? How fast can you retrieve, package and disseminate information: the so-called era of “instant news”. How fast can you produce goods and get them to the market? Everything now revolves around speed. Of course quality suffers and mistakes can be costly and devastating for institutions, corporate interests, communities and individuals. More importantly, in considering “speed” and “delivery”, the advocates of globalization hardly ever think of people, communities, rights, and democracy. Hardly any definition of globalization ever mentions civil society. Democracy, its liberal version, is seen as a possible product, not the guiding principle. This is why companies can afford to abuse the environment in the developing world in ways that they cannot even contemplate in the West.
For the developing world, the end of the cold war and the increasing integration of the global economy with the so-called triumph of the market and the demise of communism, pose severe challenges and opportunities. On the one hand, there is the opportunity to fully integrate into the emerging global capitalist order to exploit the developments in science and technology, the new information revolution, and the expansion of the global market. Such an integration, it is argued will open up extensive opportunities for trade, investment, foreign aid, and support for other developmental objectives. On the other hand, the changes in the global market hold out the risks of further marginalization and the redirection of investments and aid for a variety of reasons. The complaints about aid and compassion fatigue by the donors are evidence of increasing frustration with the intractable and complex problems and contradictions that bedevil the developing political economies.
It is contended by those who see the deepening crisis of underdevelopment as an inhibition to full and effective participation in the new global order that the legacies of colonial and neo-colonial exploitation and mismanagement, the crisis of the state and society, and conditions of poverty, foreign domination, instability, and institutional and infrastructural decay and dislocation make effective participation in the global order impossible. For instance, the World Bank is of the view that Africa’s future, in the increasingly complex and competitive global order is at best, bleak and uncertain:
…sub-Saharan Africa will be falling further behind the rest of the world, based on realistic projections of current policies and Africa’s current depressed per capita income level, while other developing countries and high-income countries will see their average income levels triple by the year 2030. Sub-Saharan Africa’s per capita income will probably be only … US$400 by the year 2030 that of the developing countries as will probably reach US$2,500.6
This sort of projection raises several questions not just about the future of Africa, but also about its post-cold war relations with other regions of the world. Such questions will include: What sort of internal restructurings are needed to empower the region to take advantage of current and future changes in the global order? Is the global system structured in such a way as to make it possible for a debt-ridden, crisis-ridden, and poverty-stricken region to effectively and profitably participate in the emerging dispensation? How will on-going implementation of orthodox and very painful stabilization and structural adjustment packages as well as difficult political liberalization programs in the context of deepening crisis and global marginalization facilitate or mediate participation in the new globalization? Will current democratization programs make a difference to the fortunes of developing societies? Let us first attempt a clearer understanding of the nature of the current globalization.
The Changing Global Order
As mentioned earlier, the world economy has always been global. The differences between the old and new globalization are in the rapidity, depth, and intensity at which global markets are being penetrated and integrated while the hands of finance capital seems to reign supreme. Of course, some of the changes were rather unanticipated, at least, not exactly at the time they occurred: the reunification of Germany with the collapse of the Berlin Wall; the peace talks between Israel and Palestine; the end of apartheid in South Africa and the entrenchment of majority rule; the collapse of the Soviet Union as a super power and nation; the widespread adoption of market reform programs as dictated and supervised by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF); and the emergence of the United States as the hegemonic military power in the world. As well, we can add a renewed role for the United Nations especially in the areas of humanitarian relief, peacekeeping, and peacemaking; the preponderance of micronationalism; efforts by the United States to sell the “American way of life” as the only credible alternative left for the entire world in the face of the assumed victory of the bourgeoisie over communism and totalitarianism; and, the deluge of struggles for multipartyism that have altered the global political environment. To these we can also add the near redundancy of non-alignment as a political/ideological posture in global power relations; the drastic alteration of cold war-based foreign policy platforms; new economic alignments such as the North American Free Trade Area North America (NAFTA), the African Union (AU), and the European Union (EU); and new immigration restrictions. In particular, the end of the cold war and the triumph of the market and the United States have received intellectual support and rationalization from scholars like Francis Fukuyama in his “End of History” thesis, and Samuel P. Huntington in his “Clash of Civilization” postulations.7 To be sure, the “Asian Miracle” which suddenly turned to the “Asian Mirage” recently has clearly shown the dangers of primitive globalization and the dangers of growth without development: skyscrapers, highways, aggressive trade relations, and the construction of huge and overstretched corporations do not equal development!8
These changes, as the World Bank jubilantly declared in its World Development Report 1995: represent “… revolutionary times in the global economy” marked by “great advances in the ease with which goods, capital and ideas flow around the world are bringing new opportunities, as well as risks, to billions of people.”9 Communications are faster, cheaper and more open; the activities of governments are increasingly more open to external scrutiny; and there are more discussions of economic cooperation and integration beyond ideological and political lines. Even Cuba and communist China are doing more business with capitalist economies and carrying out internal reforms along market lines, even if they refuse to admit to such ideological somersaults. A crisis-ridden continent like Africa, with most of the least developed nations of the world, is increasingly caught in the unpredictable and highly sophisticated and competitive vortex of this emerging global order. Yet, in its own way, it is adjusting to the changes in the global order. Not only did the continent voluntarily abandon the Organization of African Unity (OAU) to set up the African Union (AU), it has come up with several bold initiatives such as the New African Initiative (NAI) to reorder politics, reorganize the economy, and rejuvenate social life.
The State and Globalization
One major feature of the new globalization is the increasing powerlessness of the state, at least, as far as regulating the movement of information, ideas, capital, even skills is concerned. Governments, caught in the storm of globalization, however defined, are taking steps to give more autonomy to private initiatives and to cede some political ground to powerful corporations. Rapid changes in information technology have greatly impacted on the autonomy, capabilities, and spheres of action open to the nation state. Boutros Boutros-Ghali once observed that “(t)he time of absolute and exclusive sovereignty…has passed” and states must “find a balance between the needs of good internal governance and the requirements of an ever more interdependent world.”10 As well, the state is increasingly under pressure and attack, and quite a handful have become stagnant, exhausted or have collapsed out rightly.
Yet, globalization, in my view, has only strengthened the state. Contrary to the shallow analyses of so-called experts that we often see on CNN and other leading media, where the power of capital over the state is celebrated, the reality is that the state is becoming stronger, leaner, more efficient and more effective. The state retains the capacity to reign in capital at any time it so desires. When Microsoft thought that it was too big for its own good, a few moves by the US government shook the powerful corporation to its foundations. The events of September 11 in New York saw the sudden re-emergence of the American State as the most central and most powerful institution in the country. Not only is it supervising and funding the rescue operations, it is subsidizing all sorts of corporations and interests from airlines to restaurants. It is not the corporations that are waging the war on Afghanistan and global terrorists. The truth is that those that complain about too much government are often the first to seek the help of the state. The airlines are one such group: they do not even want to pay for increased security at the airports!
The developments in the post-cold war era have opened the way for articulating new patterns of responses to deepening political problems around the world. This is evidenced in the responses to crisis situations in Africa, Latin America, Eastern Europe and the Middle East. Though these responses have been bedeviled by inconsistencies and other financial and logistical problems, the fact remains that the United Nations is becoming a central point of legitimacy even for already contemplated unilateral actions by the United States as we saw in the case of Iraq. When the UN Security Council adopted resolution 688 that states that humanitarian suffering in any member state was a threat to global peace and security; it also laid the grounds for a global response to domestic conditions that might have political and non-political dimensions. Though this has in some way strengthened the UN, there has been a tendency to present the vintage position of the United States and the Western world as truly reflective of the conditions of poor, dominated, vulnerable, and underdeveloped nations. With the recent attack on America by terrorists, the UN was badly needed by the United States to give added legitimacy to its quest for a global coalition against terrorism. Not only did the Mayor of New York address the UN General Assembly, but also, the United States intensified efforts to pay out long overdue bills to the global body.
The increasing interest in human rights at the global level has opened up new debates on the issues of sovereignty and autonomy. To be sure, in some instances, as is the case with China, Western nations have been willing to ignore allegations of human rights abuses in order to promote trade relations. We all know that globalization has not focused on rights. It is still overly concerned with profits and money flow. Thus in the area of meting out justice within its borders, the contemporary state can no longer claim an absolute degree of sovereignty. Every action against groups, communities, individuals, dissidents, even coup plotters, come under the very critical scrutiny of international human rights groups and foreign governments. Organizations like Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and Greenpeace have challenged the claims of governments to sole control within their territories.
Of course, we know the power of the IMF and the World Bank in today’s world economy. At no time in the post-Westphalian history of the contemporary state system have non-state actors wielded more relevance, influence, and power than at the moment. For whatever it is what, the Afghan war is a fight between a state, a super power for that matter and an individual, Osama bin Laden and a non-state organization, al-Queda. This is certainly the first such war in modern history. The breakdown of ideological orthodoxies and the search for new patterns of social, economic and power relations have further reduced the relevance of the state in favor of less formal and private structures and institutions. The singular influence and power of election monitors in the current global order attest to the ever growing significance of non-state actors as newly elected or re-elected governments often require their stamps of approval for international acceptability and legitimacy.
On balance, it would appear that scientific, economic, and social factors, rather than political developments, have contributed more significantly to the erosion of state sovereignty and in shaping the character of the new globalization in recent times. As the nations of the world came to depend more on each other, as transportation narrowed distances, as communications made it possible for people to interact and exchange information and ideas, and as nations became readily permeable to the power of new communications systems, the ability of the state to lay claim to some higher level of authority gradually weakened. The pervasiveness of market ideas, consumerist habits and tastes, and the accompanying traits of possessive individualism mark the reality of today’s evolving global divisions of labor and power. Yet, I continue to wonder how come Africa, with about 700 million people, 52 nations, and abundant space-age minerals is overlooked in the current discussions on globalization. Is globalization really for all peoples and nations? Is there equality between those that own capital, technology, information and military hardware on the one hand, and those that do not? I do not think so and I have not seen any serious institution dedicated to bridging existing gaps.
There is no doubting the fact that in a world relatively liberated from hard ideological constraints, “new technology is rewriting old concepts of sovereignty and over time will also change national objectives.”11 Recent struggles for democracy in developing countries have benefited significantly from the cellular phone and fax machines that Western-supported despotic and repressive governments could not control: “Ideas transmitted by satellite broadcasts, fax machines, and Internet ports are prying open even authoritarian regimes.”12 What has been referred to as the “digital age” with “powerful data networks” is drawing developing nations “into the borderless information economy.”13 Nations of the world really have no choice about joining or opting out of the new information age. To opt out is to be isolated and cut off from the massive flow of ideas and information badly needed to move into the next century. On the other hand, participating in the information age requires a high degree of political openness, administrative flexibility, rapid changes in science and technology, even a revolutionary transformation of the educational system of the country. Internet connections are expanding by 16 percent every month, fiber optics are transmitting 40 billion bits of data per second, and the US army claims that there are almost as many computers as there are people in the world. Governments have practically lost the capacity to keep pace with the generation, processing, manipulation, and dissemination of information around the world.14 The World Bank further supports these claims when it notes that in line with the new global emphasis on the market as the prime mover of growth and development, “technological changes…have made the world easier to navigate-goods, capital, people, and ideas travel faster and cheaper today than ever before. Underlying these changes have been huge reductions in transport and communications costs.”15 So far, most developing countries are not poised to move in the direction of exploiting these new developments. Yet, as these nations wallow in confusion, poverty, superstition, the recycling of outdated information and ideas, and continue to rely on old and already discarded technology, around the world, medical practices, experiments in science and technology, banking services, academic research and so on are being undertaken in cooperation, by persons separated by hundreds of thousands of miles. The use of computers, even by faculty members in the sciences is still a rarity at most third world universities in the twenty-first century! Globalization is yet to narrow the technology gap between rich and poor nations. If anything, the gap is getting wider and more dangerous.
All over the world, even in the most developed market economies, governments are rapidly losing control over the flow of money. As the IMF itself has admitted, “this integration of financial markets is not only irreversible, but it can only broaden and intensify in the future. Let us not make the mistake of believing that the answer to financial crises lies in reviewing this globalization through exchange controls and less open markets.”16 The most efficient Central Bank cannot boast of having full knowledge of, or control over domestic financial transactions. The computer has put within the reach of average citizens the power to execute complex banking transactions within the confines of their homes. Geographical location or currency denominations, in some cases, now mean almost nothing to the new financial market place.17 Where do poor, debt-ridden and unstable developing states stand in this new globalization of the financial market place? Their currencies are either worthless, excessively devalued, or generally inconvertible. Most of the countries are so poor that their central banks only exist in name. Others can no longer control inflation, while several countries only do business in the weekly auctioning of foreign exchange in the name of rationalizing the financial market as part of a usually poorly implemented adjustment package. Businesses are not going into these countries in spite of globalization because the near worthlessness of the currencies is depressing the market and there are practically no buyers for non-essential commodities and services. Banks are yet to be computerized, and transactions still take forever. Globalization is actually trying to homogenize world currencies. It is no longer unusual to see shops and fees in developing countries being marked in the US dollar!
The most powerful actors in the new globalization are transnational corporations. They are rapidly streamlining technology, labor training, utilization, and exploitation; regulations, and production processes. This also includes a strategy to as much as possible, streamline and rationalize consumption around the world to facilitate the production and marketing of goods and services without frequent retooling, investments in fixed capital or skill development. The end of the cold war is strengthening the power and influence of the corporations and encouraging them to move into untested waters. The end of apartheid encouraged Macdonald’s into South Africa, and encouraged South African corporations to move rapidly into neighboring countries.18 You wonder why Macdonald’s is not operating in populous countries like Nigeria and Ghana. While Western business interests have not been deterred by the uncertainties in the Middle East and Eastern Europe, “the foreign direct investment response has been, at best, hesitant and weak in Africa.”19 As Ellen Johnson Sirleaf has noted, though most African states have developed “new investment codes…; the number of sectors previously reserved for nationals has been sharply reduced; screening procedures have been simplified and one-stop investment centers have been established; the relative equity share that foreigners are allowed to hold in enterprises has been raised; and tax holidays of up to ten years or more are now common,” “the annual average flow of foreign direct investment to Africa over the 1985-89 period was $2.6 billion.”20 In the same period, Latin America and the Caribbean received $6.0 billion, the East, South and South-East Asia received $13.6 billion, North America received $55.8 billion, and Western Europe received $60.8 billion. In fact, of the “23 Sub-Saharan African countries with more than 2 million people, ten had no foreign direct investment inflows and only six had inflows of more than two dollars per capita.”21 It is clear therefore, that the new globalization is not redirecting resources towards Africa in any substantial sense. Rather, most developing regions, remain producers of primary commodities.
The Limits of the New Globalization
The world before the “new” globalization was not a just one. It was characterized by inequality, poverty, injustice, exploitation, racism, discrimination, and conflicts. Globalization has not reduced genocide, civil wars, inter-state wars, and violence. In the US, hate crimes actually increased with economic boom and the recent attacks on the WTC, even the American state seems to be joining in a sort of ethnic and racial, even religious profiling. This hardly helps the cause of globalization.22 Governments in the developed world and in the communist countries spent trillions of dollars on building weapons of mass destruction rather than in wiping out poverty and pain from the world. This has not changed. The Bush administration still wants to spend billions in building a so-called missile defense shield and other harmful weapons. There is very little evidence in today’s world that the developed nations have altered their arrogant and bullish attitudes towards developing countries. Of course, criminals should and must be punished. But the frequent invasion and bombing of developing countries hardly alters existing perspective. They do not show that the developed countries have bothered to develop new strategies for dealing with rogue nations. Quite often, it is never a war between equals and it is the poor, women, children and the youth as well as public infrastructures that suffer.
Of course, decades of mismanagement, coups and counter-coups, environmental degradation, the exploitation and marginalization of women, misplaced priorities, and the neglect of basic human needs have precipitated distortions and disarticulations in the political economies of developing countries. As well, unbridled corruption, the privatization of the state and its resources, the suffocation of civil society, the manipulation of primordial loyalties, and criminal abuse of power have also eroded opportunities for creativity, innovation, growth and development. Furthermore, the reproduction and rationalization of neo-colonial economic relations and unequal exchange relations with powerful profit and hegemony-seeking transnational corporations have hampered the overall economic environment. With such an environment that bred inequality, it was easy to lure developing countries into the arms economy and into heavy borrowing: today they are heavily in debt and at war with each other. The net result has been that these countries remain unprepared for the shocks, deceptions, opportunities, costs and challenges of globalization. Rather that improve on social, political and economic conditions, “poverty increased in both the rural and urban areas; real earnings fell drastically; unemployment and underemployment rose sharply; hunger and famine became endemic; dependence on food aid and food imports intensified; diseases, including the added scourge of AIDS, decimated populations and became a real threat to the very process of growth and development; and the attendant social evils-crime, delinquency, family disintegration-intensified with a vengeance.”23
Clearly, globalization has not presented a clear and realistic strategy for responding to the problems listed above- from global crime through the HIV/AIDS pandemic to debt and poverty. The apostles of globalization have been rather short on the truth, especially its implications for weak economies. Only those economies with goods and services to sell, and which can attract investors because of viable political structures, high credit rating, good infrastructure, and an aggressive global agenda will benefit from the emerging global economy. Only those nations with the ability to harness and process information, link up with or develop new technology, and those with the level of skill development relevant for a growing competitive globalized economy will benefit from the emerging order. Africa for instance can hardly make a stake on any of the grounds above. Even Nigeria with its estimated huge population of over a hundred million is in total disarray, bedeviled by the legacy of military rule, corruption, infrastructural decay, violence, and political uncertainty. As well, “approximately 180 million of sub-Saharan Africa’s 500 million people can be classified as poor, of whom 66.7 percent, or 120 million, are desperately poor. By every international measure, be it per capita income ($330), life expectancy (51 years), or the United Nation’s Index of Human Development (.225 compared to .317 for South Asia, the next poorest region), Africa is the poorest region in the world.”24 With its sovereignty under pressure, if these debilitating conditions are not addressed, they would undermine global peace and security: globalization cannot thrive in conditions of violence and uncertainty beyond selling arms!
The growth that is accompanying the new globalization is generating severe environmental pressures and problems. As transnational corporations compete for market hegemony they are stretching regulations and utilizing several extra-legal mechanisms to gain one advantage or the other. This has increased corruption and further eroded the already weak ability of these states to regulate the corporations. Even with globalization, corporations have not changed their traditional habits of distorting wages, political interference and encouraging corruption. Of course, Western governments continue to ignore the roles of their companies in the reproduction of underdevelopment and anti-market behavior in the developing world. Because the developed markets offer better pay and conditions of work, and in the context of deepening systemic crisis in the third world, the brain drain has intensified as hundreds of thousands of the most educated and experienced professionals flee, mostly to the West, from other parts of the world. In many countries of the so-called South this has extended to unskilled labor and has ruined the universities, the bureaucracy and other professional institutions. The new globalization has not stemmed the deepening employment crisis, spiraling inflation, the lack of international confidence and the weak structures of state and society that impede creativity and productivity. Automation, the use of robots, reliance on synthetics, stock-piling, and other cost-cutting production and marketing techniques are actually stifling the expansion of the labor force and creating antagonistic stratification within the ranks of the working classes. Globalization is making things worse: the developing world is not flooded with outdated technology and the rejects from the West in the name of global trade.
Given the desperate conditions of third world economies, the new globalization, rather than alleviate the region’s poverty, is actually consolidating and deepening it. As social and cultural specificities become more pronounced and politicized, poor nations increasingly become ineligible for most forms of support from the developed economies. The USAID itself has admitted that programs sponsored by donors and aid agencies “have achieved negligible or limited results”25 over the decades. Such poor results have made it almost impossible for developing countries to capitalize on current developments, innovations, and opportunities in the global system. In any case, donors are cutting aid to the poorest nations and expanding investment and support for the more vibrant or promising economies like South Africa, Indonesia, and Malaysia. Of course, reduced aid to developing countries would mean further environmental degradation, disease, conflict and refugee flows. The human and financial costs would be terrible and the implications for global peace can best be imagined. The contradictions and weaknesses of state and society have been compounded by ethnic, religious, regional, and other primordial contradictions and conflicts that scare away investors and force regimes to divert scarce resources to security, survival, and conflict containment. It might not be fair to attribute the murderous wars that accompanied the end of the cold war directly to globalization. However, it has contributed to the new hunger for autonomy at any costs and by any means necessary. The market and new technologies have not stopped the fragmentation of states, the reification of identities, secessionist movements, terrorism, ethnic cleansing, and unprecedented massacres. As well, globalization has not stopped inter and intra-state wars. The lesson is clear; the market must respect peoples, cultures, values, history, and the autonomy of communities. Of what use is a market that wants to have dead, miserable, and insecure peoples as customers? Ironically, most of these nations, under criminalized juntas were the darlings of the United States and other Western countries. Today, the poverty that is the legacy of these juntas is one of the major obstacles to globalization.26
The inequality and injustice of the current global order is hardly addressed by globalization. Citizens of the world are just to have faith: to believe that globalization would solve all existing problems. The fact that 80 percent of the world’s resources are owned by the richest fifth of the world’s population while the poorest fifth owns just 0.5 percent; that of the global population of almost 6 billion, more than three quarters hardly live comfortably; and that the combined wealth of 358 richest people in the world is more than the annual income of 45 percent of the poorest in the world hardly bothers the apostles of globalization. Almost 2 billion people in the world live on less than a dollar a day according to the UNDP. They have no use for computers, fiber optics, supersonic jets and the glitter of globalization. In the European Union the unemployment rate continues to rise. In early November 2001, the unemployment rate in the US hit its highest level in 25 years. In Austin, Texas, the high-tech boom is turning into a nightmare as hundreds of young professionals and over ambitious but inexperienced investors have suddenly become unemployed with the downturn in the technology market. They have only just begun to learn that there is nothing like a perfect market. Clearly, globalization has not delivered on its promises. Of course, we are all living witnesses to the Asian crises that for the first time exposed the rotten, corrupt and false underbelly of the much-publicized “unprecedented growth.” The crisis in Asia clearly exposed the difference between “growth” and “development.” If globalization continues to ignore community, humanity and environment; and if it continues with the suffocating and vitriolic propaganda about the so-called “invisible hands of the market”, it would build a huge arsenal of opposition that might render useless its positive aspects.
GLOBALIZATION AND DEMOCRATIZATION
In spite of my criticisms above, I do believe that globalization would be good for the democratic project in the third world. Of course, democracy is not part of the globalization package. Profit is. However, I believe that the costs and pains of globalization, just as it happened in the infamous era of adjustment without safety nets would spur a new struggle for change, political empowerment and social reconstruction. I could be wrong, though I very much doubt this. Many of the elites in the south are either non-globalizers or are at best opportunistic globalizers. They still believe in short-term primitive accumulation strategies. The state in the South is still without stability, hegemony, legitimacy or efficiency. It is not in charge of its own destiny. This leaves foreign capital that is accountable to only foreign investors and a handful of local elites. Be it in Mexico or South Africa or Bangladesh, the people have always been shortchanged and they know that capital has no morals when it comes to a choice between the environment, community and the people on the one hand, and profit on the other.
These conditions of pain and poverty generated by globalization would congeal into anger and a struggle for change. These would in turn encourage and intensify the struggles for accountability, participation, democracy and social justice. If our contention is that, in view of the rapid erosion of state sovereignty and the deepening systemic and economic crisis in developing societies, democratization is the only way out, what are the features and constraints of this new agenda for reconstructing state power? To be sure, such struggles for political liberalization would unleash a new brand of intolerance, violence, instability, uncertainty and stalemate. Largely a precipitate of long-standing repression of the popular will, the current state of near-anarchy in most developing nations is also a reflection of the privatization of the democratic enterprise by opportunistic elites.
CONCLUSIONS: BEYOND GLOBALIZATION, TOWARDS DEMOCRATIZATION
Globalization might sure have some very good opportunities. However, it cannot be the beginning of the story neither can it be the whole story. The market is not everything. The US Treasury department has cut interest rates eleven times this year (2001) alone: why not really leave the market alone so that water would find its own level? Clearly, in the United States, the market has not solved all problems: teenage pregnancies, unemployment, inner city decay, rising prison populations, decaying infrastructures, corruption, violence and so on. Communities, people and society still matter. And that is where the story must begin. For developing countries, democracy and democratization must be the start of the story. Without these globalization would be more pain than progress and markets would never be efficient. Those who cry globalization without first talking about democratization, and by implication human and environmental rights, gender equality, social justice, popular participation, transparency, accountability, and community values, are enemies of the already poor and marginalized developing world. The truth is that globalization is yet to positively change the location and role of developing societies in the emerging global divisions of labor and power: they are still largely pawns in the geo-strategic and economic calculations of powerful western corporations and governments. Our so-called globalizing world is still divided between the rich and poor; weak and strong; developed and underdeveloped; technologically strong and technology-deficient; stable and unstable, industrialized and non-industrialized, north and south- with a few nations scattered in-between.
It would appear therefore that the new agenda for reform and reconstruction has to be internally driven, deriving its power and direction from domestic sources rather than from the global system. This in no way implies that the West does not owe some support to developing nations, at least for the centuries of colonization, brutalization, exploitation, domination, and underdevelopment. Even on the grounds of self-interest, the West should realize that a peaceful and developing third world will produce fewer wars, fewer refugees, fewer terrorists, and fewer immigrants who enter North American and European nations legally and illegally and overstretch social and other services. But developing countries must not wait for the developed countries to make up their minds. This means that third world nations must abandon traditional notions of sovereignty, territoriality, and so on, pull their resources together, mobilize their peoples, integrate their economies, and plan a grand internally-driven strategy for moving forward.
Today, virtually all donors and lenders have come to endorse regionalism as the only way out for nations in an increasingly competitive and complex global order. This is even more necessary for poor and underdeveloped nations that have failed to attract sufficient foreign investments and are clearly behind in the new technologies. The developed countries of Europe and America are taking regionalism very seriously, as evidenced in the establishment of the European Union (EU) and the North American Free Trade Area (NAFTA). The states of Western Europe have already given up some state authority and plan to set up a uniform defense force, a single currency, and common policies on the environment and health. Clearly, they are moving rapidly in that direction. Mexico’s membership in NAFTA certainly made it easier for President Clinton to arrange a huge loan to support the former’s declining currency, the peso. In Africa, regionalism has had a very poor record but the recent establishment of the African Union (AU) and the adoption of the New Africa Initiative (NAI) should open a new path to growth and development. If the developed countries are “ganging” up for economic (and political) reasons, why not developing countries: on their own, developing countries would be penetrated, domesticated and exploited to the maximum. They require viable regional arrangements to survive and resist unfettered globalization.
International organizations must be democratized so that the voices and will of the majority must truly rule. The Security Council at the UN is, for instance, a grossly undemocratic arrangement. I see no reason why is should be more powerful than the General Assembly. It was refreshing to see the UN vote unanimously to support the US-led war against terrorism. We must also realize that thousands of Africans died under apartheid and remember how it was so difficult to convince Western, especially the US government, that apartheid was a crime against humanity. The huge international banks, the European Union, the World Bank, IMF, the OECD, the G7, G1, and the WTO must be truly democratized to make the world a truly competitive market place. When America subsidizes already super wealthy farmers like Scottie Pippen and Ted Turner and says that third world countries should cut subsidies, then there is something wrong with such an arrangement. When European countries conspire to undermine the wine industry in South Africa just to avoid competition, then there is a problem with globalization. When the developed countries, especially the United States attack South Africa, Brazil and other developing countries for trying to stretch the rules on international property rights in order to produce cheaper medicines for millions of AIDS victims but are willing to do so to produce cheaper generic anthrax drugs, then there is a problem with globalization. Equity, sensitivity, and social justice must constitute the bedrock of globalization else it would worsen our already complicated, violent and uncertain world.
The argument can be made that it is not enough to adopt stabilization and adjustment programs or to initiate new programs for regional integration as responses to the predicaments of dependence, underdevelopment and marginalization. Only a democratic political arrangement can guarantee the ability to make concessions to subregional arrangements, mobilize the people, get the masses to accept the pains of economic and political reforms, and facilitate political negotiations that would reconstruct the power of the nation-state without creating conditions of disintegration, suspicion, fear, and insecurity. If democracy does not become the basis of governance, recovery from the current socioeconomic and political disorder would be impossible. The need to open up the political system, create popular and democratic structures and processes, guarantee basic freedoms and liberties, and empower the people and their communities and organizations cannot be overstressed. In fact, without a genuine mass-based democratic agenda, third world peoples will continue to flee their respective nations for greener and more peaceful pastures; intellectuals and professionals will continue to relocate abroad; the masses will remain alienated from the state; and all qualities of statehood will come under challenge.
Is there hope for the future? At the internal level, the focus on democracy would reduce expenditure on defense and promote dialogue, creativity, and productivity within nations. At the external level, the lack of democracy would no longer be an excuse for denying foreign aid; withholding new investments, and imposing externally designed economic and political programs. A genuine democratic agenda will have as its core the deconstruction and recomposition of the repressive and inefficient neocolonial state. This is largely because such neocolonial states, which parade themselves as democratic (even in the liberal sense), are incapable of decentralizing the bureaucracy, extracting support and legitimacy from the people, carrying out far-reaching reform programs, bridging the rural-urban gap, improving the lot of women and the poor, controlling the influence of transnational corporations, whipping some discipline into the ranks of the dominant elites, and establishing a credible basis for growth, stability and development. Such state structures remain vulnerable to mass uprisings, the withdrawal of loyalties by regional, religious and ethnic groups, and international sanctions. In the final analysis, such state structures have little time—or the desire and the resources—to participate effectively and profitably in the changing global order. Under such conditions sovereignty will have no meaning; states will collapse, become dormant, or remain perpetually violent and unstable; and remain an irrelevant actor in the emerging global divisions of labor and power. Therefore, third world nations need first, new national socio-economic and political orders, to be followed by new continental orders, before a new global order can have meaning for their creative, resilient, and hardworking peoples. Thus no matter how generous we might want to be, unless the various national orders are drastically restructured in the primary interests of the people, the developing world will not and cannot be part of what the World Bank refers to as a “truly global golden age in the twenty-first century.”27 For now, if you asked me: “How is globalization doing?” My answer would be, “Not very well, not very well.”
Thank you for your patience.
Endnotes
1 “Advanced Economies: Labor Market Issues and EMU,” IMF Survey (September 17, 1997), p. 275.
2 “IMF Responds to Globalization’s Challenges in Many Fronts in 1996-97,” ibid, p. 277.
3 Thomas L. Friedman, “Dueling Globalizations,” Foreign Policy (Fall 1999) Website version, p. 1.
4 Paul Kingsnorth, “What now for the anti-globalizers?” Open Democracy (03 October 2001), p. 1.
5 Thomas L. Friedman, “Dueling Globalizations” Op. Cit., p. 2.
6. Mary Chinery-Hesse, “Divergence and Convergence in the New World Order,” in Adebayo Adedeji, (ed.), Africa Within the World, op. cit., p. 145.
7. See Francis Fukuyama, “The End of History?” The National Interest (16) (1989), pp. 3-18; and Samuel P. Huntington, “The Clash of Civilizations?” Foreign Affairs Vol. 72, (5) (Summer 1993), pp. 22-49.
8 See Robert Kuttner, “Globalism Bites Back,” The American Prospect (7) (March-April, 1998).
9. World Bank, World Development Report 1995, op. cit., p.1.
10. Cited in Francis Mading Deng, “State Collapse: The Humanitarian Challenge to the United Nations,” in I. William Zartman, (ed.), Collapsed States: The Disintegration and Restoration of Legitimate Authority, (Boulder: Lynne Rienner, 1995), p. 212.
11 … Walter B. Wriston, “Technology and Sovereignty,” Foreign Affairs (Winter 1988/89), p. 73.
12… ibid.
13… ibid
14… UNRISD, States of Disarray, op. cit., p. 9.
15… World Bank, World Development Report 1995, op. cit., p. 51.
16… Michel Camdessus, “Close Integration in Global Economy Vital for Africa,” op. cit., p.218.
17… Walter B. Wriston, “Technology and Sovereignty,” op. cit., p. 72.
18… Christopher Farrell, “The Triple Revolution,” op. cit.
19… Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, “Some Reflections on Africa and the Global Economy,” in William Minter, (ed.), U.A. Foreign Policy: An Africa Agenda, (Washington, D.C.: Africa Policy Information Center, 1994), p.9.
20… ibid.
21… ibid, p. 9.
22 “How thw World Sees America,” The Wilson Quarterly (Spring 2001).
23… Sadig Rasheed, “Africa at the Doorstep of the Twenty-First Century,” op. cit., p. 41.
24… U.S. Agency for International Development, Africa: Growth Renewed, Hope Rekindled-A Report on the Performance of the Development Fund for Africa 1988-1992 (Washington, D.C.: USAID, n.d.), p.20.
25… USAID, Africa: Growth Renewed, Hope Rekindled, op. cit., p. 5.
26… Michel Camdessus, “The IMF in a Globalized World Economy,” Third Annual Sylvia Ostry Lecture, Group of Seven (G-7), Ottawa, June 7, 1995. Reproduced in IMF Survey (June 19, 1995), p. 194.
27 World Bank, World Development Report 1995, op. cit., p. 125.