In search for humane governance in globalization era

By Richard Falk

This is the first of two articles on globalization and post- cold war politics.

PRINCETON, New Jersey, U.S. (JP): The speed of history continues to accelerate. One effect is to require an almost constant updating and refocusing of any discussion of global trends. Such an observation is underscored by the unevenness of conditions that exists at all levels of social reality, and particularly at the level of regions and countries.

At the same time, fortunately, certain fundamental tendencies seem to persist in this period that form the core of the analysis set forth in the original publication of On Humane Governance: the integrative and homogenizing impacts of economic globalization, as well as the fragmentation associated with a variety of backlash phenomena, including extreme forms of ethnic nationalism and religious politics.

Such an analysis supports the general conclusion that although globalization has produced material benefits for many of the poorest peoples of the world, it has also encouraged dangerous forms of polarization and an increasing pattern of indifference towards those societies and sectors of society that cannot improve their circumstances by reliance on the logic of the market.

The role of the sovereign state in relation to this unfolding regional and global setting has become particularly troublesome. By and large, with variations that it is important to identify, governments have felt obliged to shape foreign economic policies to conform to the logic of global capital. The rationalization that is offered for such logic is that this is the only way to take full advantage of growth and investment opportunities provided by world trade and financial markets.

What is left out of this policy equation is people, and especially those who are being victimized in various ways by the forms that economic globalization is taking. It would seem that virtually everywhere profits are increasing while wages are stagnant or declining in real terms. Such a pattern partly reflects the political weakness of organized labor to influence public policy.

In some countries this weakness is a direct outcome of suppression by authoritarian governments. In others, especially in the constitutional democracies of the West, it reflects the overall decline of organized labor, the passing of industrialism, the discrediting of socialist orientations and the persuasiveness of neo-liberal advocates of fiscal austerity as necessary for enhancing competitive prospects on the world scale.

This regressive climate of opinion also affects the way governments allocate their revenues and shape their participation in international institutions. Again, the trends are disappointing. Despite continuous impressive expansions in the gross planetary product, fewer resources are available to promote public goods involving health, education, housing, culture, environment, and global institutions, especially the United Nations.

It is ironic, yet revealing, that the greatest financial crisis and loss of confidence throughout its entire history should be hampering the United Nations at this stage, given the degree of economic prosperity that is being achieved globally and considering that the political obstacles of the Cold War that so often blocked effective cooperation within the organization in the past have been removed.

Such a development discloses both the extent to which the UN is a creature of the states that constitute its membership, especially the most powerful of these states, and the degree to which the prevailing governmental outlook now is one of "downsizing" all expenditures on public goods with the notable exception of military outlays. True, most military budgets have been somewhat reduced in recent years, but far less than the absence of strategic conflict in international society would justify, and on the basis of national security considerations, rather than in deference to the sort of fiscal pressures invoked to slash social expenditures so as to cut budget deficits and correct trade imbalances.

The most encouraging resistance to the adverse aspects of globalization is situated in civil society, taking various activist forms and linked across borders by transnational associations of citizens dedicated to the promotion of human rights, environmental quality and social justice. This resistance is motivated primarily by an emergent view of politics as premised upon what Walden Bello has called "substantive democracy", that is, meaningful participation by the people in control of all dimensions of their destiny.

Such a view of democracy should be set off against the conventional view of democracy as consisting only of free elections, universal suffrage and governmental operations within some sort of constitutional framework. In contrast, substantive democracy embraces the totality of the life of society, and its enactment depends on activating the creative energies of each society, as well as liberating political leaders from the rigidities of either neo-liberal ideologies or the alleged structural constraints associated with globalization (for example, sustaining competitiveness).

Such a project of liberation accepts the basic reality of economic globalization as a fact of life. It is not a matter of liking or disliking, but an acknowledgement that it would not be politically or economically feasible to contemplate a future separated from regional or global markets. At the present time, more than 90 percent of the world's people live in societies that base their economic policies on promoting access to and success in markets.

There is no alternative on distant horizons. But such a posture is not a call for a suspension of criticism. Far from it. The position being advocated here is one that seeks to base reformist initiatives on two features of the state: first, that governing processes are not monolithic, exhibiting internal tensions with respect to the policy balance to be struck between economic and social pressures; secondly, that civil society initiatives can alter the political climate in which the state operates, generating opportunities for collaboration in forms that curtail the influence of business and finance.

These opportunities for reorienting the state in relation to globalization depend on the particularities of country and region, but they have hardly been explored. There is no foundation in fact or theory for accepting a deterministic view of globalization that structurally deprives government of its discretion to pursue more compassionate policies toward its own citizenry.

Another important source of potential resistance to the dynamics of inhumane global governance derives from regionalism. Nothing can be assumed. Regional frameworks are primarily inter- governmental by character, and have themselves been made instrumental by market forces that have subjected most governments within a region so effectively to the discipline of global capital. What regionalism encourages is an effort by many important countries to become more detached from the exploitative elements of geopolitics, thereby opposing the hegemonic underpinnings of economic globalization, while accepting the associated marketization of policy formation.

Especially in Europe, regionalism has fostered the evolution of norms, practices, procedures, and structures associated with a sense of shared history and a high degree of cultural solidarity. The willingness of governments to allow their own citizens to petition the European Commission on Human Rights, to accept decisions by the European Court of Human Rights that invalidate official government policy and to operate in a setting where the European Parliament is directly elected by the citizenry of the region are exciting extensions of democracy beyond the sovereign state that could be adapted to other regions with comparable beneficial results. A study of the European regional experience can help us realize that crucial aspects of substantive democracy can be attained despite an ideological acceptance of the logic of regional and global capital.

The writer is professor of international law and practice at Princeton University, United States.