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Opinion
Negotiating Globalization
by
Dr. Prasenjit Maiti
Introduction: The Problem
The idea of human freedom is essentially rooted in the concept of human
development, according to Noble Laureate Professor Amartya Sen�s �Development
as Freedom� thesis [that outlines an entitlement to
capacity-building process]. And the idea of human progress is a
construct that is designed around the axis of freedom. What is freedom?
Is it only lack of societal constraint, withdrawal of discipline and
punish, willing suspension of the panoptic Super Ego that they address
as the �mainstream�? Or is freedom a concept much more fundamental, to
be read into the texts of Rabindranath Tagore, Roman Rolland or even
Walden?
Sociologists claim that civilization is what we are and culture is
merely an arrangement of artifacts that we happen to use during the
course of our politics in everyday life. But then civilization is also a
system of values that is handed down generations as a movement of
socialization that laymen identify as �progress�.
Negotiating Globalization
Contemporary state systems guided by the dynamics of globalization are
like so many Januses - the phenomenon assumes a most robust character in
the developed North but an almost impotent identity in the developing or
still underdeveloped South. So globalization necessitates a dialog
between the rich and the poor outside its essentialist assumptions of an
uneven power discourse as conditions of Good Governance and Structural
Adjustment Programs benchmark most Third World postcolonial democracies
today.
While there are contentions that aggressive market forces make it
difficult for welfarist governments to protect their citizens from
transnational actors that are as elusive as their hot money, there are
also counter-arguments that institutions like the International Monetary
Fund or the World Trade Organization actually safeguard citizens from
the administrative limitations of their respective national governments.
There appears to be a consensus, however, that powerful markets tend to
undermine political elites at home.
Global Village
John Echeverri-Gent has pointed out that if globalization, on the one
hand, facilitates decentralization then, on the other, it also helps
develop pockets of dynamic Free Trade Areas in large developing
countries like China and India by reorganizing their economic geography,
Foreign Direct Investment and global commodity chains. This process,
however, creates large hinterlands of economic backwardness and
entrenches economic inequality within the developing South.
Globalization, therefore, intensifies regional disparities in the Third
World. John Rapley has found that Structural Adjustment Programs have
varied widely in the results they have yielded. While Latin America has
partially benefited from structural adjustment, Africa has not. Rapley
has also argued that Rolling Back the State - that is less government as
an imperative of contemporary globalization - does not always lead to
enhanced economic growth.
Globalization, therefore, would appear to be an open-ended journey
toward a globalized world order whose weightless economy may be
described as one that defies both national and international borders so
far as economic transactions are concerned. This is a situation where
freight charges are nil and trade / tariff barriers would disappear.
Such a pilgrim�s progress, however, is nothing new. Technological
innovations during the past five centuries have steadily helped
integrate the global community into an emergent global civil society.
Transatlantic communications have developed from sailing boats to
steamships, to the telegraph, the telephone, the commercial aircraft and
now the Internet where even nationalism as a conventional political
ideology has been reduced to �banal nationalism�.
State and Civil Society
Liberal democratic r�gimes like India or even the US can only be
politically successful, deliver the common good and thereby continue in
power in a more stable [read pro-people] manner if they are able to
correctly read the obtainable ground realities and problems thereof.
These problems are more or less popular in nature, and have a propensity
to develop into discontent of the ruled actors against their ruling
institutions. So the actors in power have to continuously shuffle and
delicately balance priorities of human development, well-being and
accessible freedoms like the ever-important agenda of human rights and
civil liberties, a responsive and responsible administrative machinery,
transparency at all levels of public expenditures and domestic and
international peacekeeping projects rather than playing mutually harmful
�spy versus spy� games.
Eminent political scientist Subrata K. Mitra has quite rightly cautioned
that �If the wielders of power concede the point to those who challenge
established values and norms, they risk losing their legitimacy. On the
other hand, the failure to give satisfaction to the discontented might
deepen their sense of outrage and alienation which can further reduce
their legitimacy.�
Powers-that-be [�Cabinets or Foreign Offices�] will do well to
continually redress grievances of political actors at the grassroots in
a political manner by establishing and ably handling pro-people
institutions. Only then organic identification would bind actors with
institutions - only then the incipient involvement noticed at the level
of �actors and institutions� would, arguably enough, transcend itself to
the level of �actors in institutions�, consolidating both the level and
the quality of progress of freedom in the process.
Progress and Development: The Eternal
Duo
But how can progress be distinguished from �development�, if at all? A
most prominent item on today�s humanitarian global agenda, apart from
mantras like good governance, social capital, neo-liberal
communitarianism, grassroots empowerment, civil societal
capacity-building and gender sensitization, is certainly the notion of
sustainable development. This has become almost a catchword of sorts in
the Third World, decolonized state nations that are more or less
grappling to muster a political system around pluralistic identities of
nationhood enmeshed in ethnicity, language, religion, region and mutual
distrust. It is almost as if �softy states� are hanging loose and can
only be brought back on to the fast track of development by way of
external intervention and advocacy on the past of the Eurocentric West.
Development, it may be appreciated at this point, is not anything
extrinsic like politics imposed from the above without any regard
whatsoever to the end-users of limited political resources. Actors who
are supposed to interface with their very own institutions are nearly
always better comfortable if left alone with the material conditions of
daily life that breed organic ethos of community existence. This is
where the colonial masters went wrong in Asia, Africa and South America
when they bled the colonies white and left behind a legacy of comprador
bourgeois and crony capitalism that, in turn, fostered a repressive
state apparatus and a perverted anti-people bureaucratic managerial
state system that was not only anti-people but was also occasionally
anti-progress.
What Richard Cobden implies by �Cabinets or Foreign Offices� is
actually this mechanistic attitude of the political elite [in capitalist
systems] and party leadership [in socialist societies] that are smug in
the cocoon of their mistaken convictions that people at the top echelons
of power, authority and influence have necessarily a working knowledge
of �the greatest good of the greatest number�. This is not a utilitarian
or even a welfarist state approach - it is actually self-defeating as
amply evidenced in the erstwhile USSR where an insane arms and space
race with the United States [incidentally the only country in the entire
world to have actually materially gained from the First and Second World
Wars with minimum military casualties] led the once powerful communist
country to a more or less incredible situation of mind-boggling
bankruptcy.
Military hardware and nukes were being manufactured at the cost of basic
consumer requirements like bread, potatoes and vodka, following Stalin�s
rhetoric of an entire generation making sacrifices [read being purged if
found to be politically incorrect] for the cause of a better Russia of
the future. Moscow�s huge and sprawling department store GUM was always
nearly empty while the party�s top brass were running around in their
imported limousines, shopping in dollar shops selling Swiss chocolates
and watches, Scotch whisky, French champagne and perfumes. Add rampant
corruption and repression to accept a second-hand political ideology not
originating from the ground realities of people and you have ideal
recipes for killing fields like the infamous Prague Spring.
Back to Basics: Public Action
Enterprises
We are reminded of Professor Mohammad Yunus of Bangladesh in this
respect - the magician of the Grameen Bank [�rural bank�] microcredit
revolution who even hugely impressed Hilary Rodham Clinton. What
Professor Yunus still does is amazingly simple - he organizes self-help
groups in the manner of cooperatives and tries to make them economically
self-reliant in areas as humble as poultry, weaving, dairy and even
small-scale production. But when such cottage industries are linked
[�forward and backward integration�] in the larger context of market
forces they become formidable in their control of the overall agrarian
and even the urban economy. Peasant women in Bangladesh carry mobile
telephones to communicate with distant markets, distributors and
dealers! This may sound incredible but it is true nevertheless, proving
the validity of Cobden�s observation.
Operation Flood in Anand [Gujarat, India] and the Lijjat and Kissan
enterprises are other such brilliant instances of people working toward
their common good [based on innovative techniques like outsourcing of
manpower and material resources, subcontracting or leasing of plant and
machinery, breaking down the production process to delimit financial
risk liability ventures somewhat akin to Adam Smith�s exposition of the
division of labor dynamics] without any outside intervention whatsoever.
One must remember that neither India nor Bangladesh tends to practice
authoritarian r�gime maintenance. What was possible once in Beijing�s
Tiananmen Square when the People�s Liberation Army crushed pro-reform
students under tanks and armored carriers is unimaginable in either
India or Bangladesh [that secured its liberation in 1971 by way of
Indian military cooperation]. So democracy is an essential requirement
if �the progress of freedom� is to continue unabated.
Voice of the People: Evolution of
Democratic Policy Prescriptions
By democracy we ordinarily mean popular authority or rule. As made
popular by Jean Jacques Rousseau, one of the ideologues of the French
Revolution [that effectively altered the course of European history by
beginning the disintegration process of the medieval and feudalistic Age
of Empires], the voice of God is heard in the voice of the People. This
was a far cry from the autocratic self-styled pronouncement of French
Emperor Louis XIV - �I am the State�. It was no wonder that Louis XVI�s
wife Marie Antoinette [later sentenced to die to rather unceremoniously
at the guillotine] had once expressed her wonder in such a naive fashion
on hearing about the simmering discontent among the Parisian mob
standing in endless queues or bread lines and more often than not
starting violent riots among themselves - �If they cannot eat bread why
don�t they eat cake!�
This vulgar ignorance of the ruled on the part of their rulers is rather
inimical to democracy. But we must remember that democracy as dynamic
capacity-building agency in the post 9/11 world has all of a sudden
underscored its long-ignored extrinsic quality. Democracy is not really
insular, stretching from the East Coast to the West Coast of the US. If
the notion of external sovereignty has suffered quite extensively since
the height of the Cold War when the world was almost vertically divided
into the NATO and Warsaw Pact countries [save the NAM states being led
by Nehru, Nasser and Tito], the idea of external democracy has gained
much popular and diplomatic acceptance.
Simply put, powerful nations can no longer ignore internal human rights
or civil rights agendas vis-�-vis world public opinion. But this is what
the US is consistently trying to follow as its most shortsighted foreign
policy since the Malta Summit Conference when President George Bush
Senior and CPSU General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev officially declared
the end of the Cold War, a historic event that even prompted Francis
Fukuyama to write a banal work on the end of history and the last man.
Since the
days of its Nineteenth Century isolationist Munroe Doctrine the US has
put up apparently impregnable walls around itself that couldn�t even be
dismantled during the Marshall Plan for the Reconstruction of Europe
after the Second World War or establishment of first the League of
Nations [as an initiative of President Woodrow Wilson�s historic
Atlantic Charter] and then the UNO, the International Monetary Fund,
World Bank and now the omnipotent World Trade Organization that
apparently dictates the movements of a new specter of the new
millennium, namely Globalization.
The US foreign policy has always been designed on lines of �muddle and
meddle� - Vietnam, Korea, Bay of Pigs, Iran Contra scandal, Afghanistan
and now Iraq. The country boasts of democracy and swears by it, boiling
with righteous motivation to export Yankee democracy around the
underdeveloped world, but has, however, classified the JFK assassination
archives for no apparent reason whatsoever. Clandestine covert
operations, the strategic defense initiative [Star Wars], research in
biological and chemical weapons - you name it and you would find the
dirty trick invariably up America�s [read the CIA and FBI�s] sleeves. In
fact, it is the only nation to date that has used atomic weapons during
a war, destroying Hiroshima and Nagasaki in the process to avenge the
Pearl Harbor attack and crippling generations of Japanese children long
after the holocaust as a result of toxic radioactive radiation carried
forward genetically by succeeding generations.
Since the Gulf War fought by Senior Bush as the much-hyped Operation
Desert Storm so graphically shown by CNN across millions of idiot boxes
around the world, nobody knows exactly how many innocent Iraqi children
have died from malnutrition, disease and hunger due to the US-imposed
and UNO-condoned sanctions against Iraq. The US condemns Osama bin Laden
but should actively engage in soul-searching regarding its own virulent
international terrorist status in our contemporary unipolar world where
might is right in a Hobbesian state of affairs where human life,
property and security are all indeed �solitary, poor, nasty, brutish,
short�. The US, in brief, should radically reorient its foreign policy
to address the dignity of human life and internal sovereignty of nation
states around the world.
December 14,
2008
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