-----Original Message-----
From: Sid Shniad [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]
Sent: October 5, 2000 1:25 PM
Subject: Why all is not well with globalization - The Vancouver Sun
The Vancouver Sun Thursday 5 October
2000
Why all is not well with globalization
Its architects did not understand where the new world trade
order would lead. Or how to fix it later.
by Daphne Bramham
National boundaries are blurring, yet nationalism is rising. Worldwide
trade is exploding and so is worldwide crime. States and their politicians
are letting
power seep away not only to transnational corporations, but also to
multinational institutions and non-governmental organizations.
The per-capita incomes of more than 80 countries are lower now than a
decade ago, yet they have increased in developed countries. The fifth of the
world's people who live in the richest countries now have 74 times the
income of the fifth who live in the poorest countries. In 1960, that ratio
was
30 to one. In 1990, it was 60 to one.
AIDS and malaria have proven that infectious diseases are also
transnationals. And global warming has reminded us that environmental
concerns transcend boundaries.
People say they feel increasingly powerless, alienated and overwhelmed.
Yet protests at last week's Prague meeting of the World Bank and last
year's riots at the World Trade Organization meeting in Seattle attest that
never before have we been so plugged in. Never before has there been so
much information so readily available, or a tool as powerful as the
Internet to disseminate it.
All of this is generically called globalization -- set in motion by
intellectuals, unelected advisers and political leaders who devised a new
world trade
order. And some of them now admit they didn't fully appreciated where it
might lead.
Sylvia Ostry, who was Canada's ambassador for multilateral trade from
1985 to 1988, is one of them.
"We in the developed countries did not fully understand the implications of
the new trade system," she says "But if we didn't understand all of the
implications, the developing countries did not understand the implications
at
all."
Ostry says she thought of it as "the north-south grand bargain: The north
opened its markets, the south improved its trade systems to fit with that."
But what happened was quite different. Rather than simply making it easier
for goods and people to move across national borders, Ostry says what was
created was "a system of enormous intrusiveness into our domestic system."
This is not to say that removing trade barriers was the sole element. If
anything, it was just one piece of a puzzle that has put us at "the hinge of
history" -- the evocative phrase Ivan Head, a former policy adviser to
Pierre
Trudeau and founding director of the Liu Centre on Global Issues, uses to
describe our place in time.
While trade barriers fell and countries were aligning their systems to quick
passage of goods through their borders, the Cold War ended. The European
Union grew into a monetary, social and political unit. The Internet
exploded.
Asia rose and then fell back. Scientists began to notice that the polar ice
caps are melting.
The architects of globalization can be forgiven for not having predicted
all of that. But what is troubling is that few, if any, have clear ideas of
how to
fix things now.
"We are in the very difficult situation of deepening globalization and the
fragmentation of nation states," Ostry said at the recent opening of the Liu
Centre. "There is a real erosion of the nation state and I'm not sure what
the
replacement is."
It's put another way by Gordon Smith -- a former deputy minister of foreign
affairs, former Canadian ambassador to NATO, who is now chair of the
International Development Research Centre and the Canadian Institute for
Climate Change and head of the University of Victoria's Centre for Global
Studies.
"What the present globalization has introduced, along with its wealth of
opportunity, is a . . . new intrusiveness -- and a new destructiveness --
in the harm done."
In fact, in the book Altered States: Globalization, Sovereignty and
Governance that formed part of the discussion at last month's United
Nations' Millennium Assembly of world leaders, Smith and co-author Moises
Naim (Venezuela's former trade minister and a former senior adviser to the
president of the World Bank) raise questions that sound surprisingly like
those asked by protesters on the streets.
"After surviving the long progress to democratic government, men and
women have won a disturbingly ambiguous prize: responsible government,
yes, but responsible for what? Capable of what? If there is a power shift
that now disfavours the state, what is the remaining significance of
democratic government? Can states any longer govern? Can globalization be
democratized?"
They list institutions with a "democracy deficit" and include not just the
World Bank, the World Trade Organization, the International Monetary Fund
and the UN Security Council, but also Greenpeace, Amnesty International,
CNN, Microsoft and Reebok.
This public soul-searching, the admission that not all is well with
globalization and that not all may be quickly resolvable, has sent some
staunch
free-marketers into paroxysms.
The Economist recently chided world leaders to "defend globalization boldly
on its merits as a truly moral cause against a mere rabble of exuberant
irrationalists on the street and in the face of mild public skepticism that
is
open to persuasion."
Would that it could be so easy.
Last week, World Bank president James Wolfensohn talked publicly about
"sharing the emotions and the concerns" of the protesters on Prague's
streets, then went behind closed doors and raged against the mob.
We came to this pass because we trusted the globe-erati -- the unelected
technocrats like Wolfensohn who flit about the world pretending to know all
the answers. But these elites prefer to deal behind the closed doors of
five-star hotels, and until they realize that globalization also means
democratization, there's no reason to trust them or their moral cause any
more than the motley crew of protesters who turn up dressed either for war
or outfitted as endangered turtles.
==============================
