Definitions of Globalization: Let's Not Get Confused
By Felicity Hill, Director, Women's International League for Peace and Freedom -
UN office in New York City.
One of our biggest difficulties is defining globalization. Globalization
is a word that describes macro-economic polices that remove barriers to trade
and investment through trade liberalisation, privatisation and deregulation.
Economic globalization, we decided, was the dominant trend from which cultural
and political globalization flow. The aim of economic globalization, or
corporate globalization or global corporatization is to remove the obstacles to
the global movement of capital and the production of goods and services that
have accumulated in industrially developed capitalist countries.
It is absolutely clear what economic globalization is when you look at the big
fat treaties known as GATT and NAFTA, where you find precise procedures and laws
relating to economics. But, the proponents of globalization often sanitise
what they are doing by invoking internationalism. This is a real trap for
us all.
Globalization is not another word for internationalism. It should not
inspire us to hum "It's a small world after all." We should not
use globalization interchangeably, or as a metaphor, to mean communications
technology, especially the internet. We should not speak of the
"globalization of human rights" and replace the concept of
universality. They don't mean the same thing, unless you want to give
human rights a monetary value (and some do). Internationalism and
solidarity are two concepts on which the UN was based. These should not be
described as "grassroots globalization."
Martin Khor has shown that the notion of softening the image of globalization by
using this word out of context or giving economic globalization "a human
face" is a cruel joke. Khor likens the structure and policy of
globalization to the structures and policies of colonialism and apartheid.
Colonialism and apartheid were not flawed because their benefits didn't quite
trickle down to the bottom. Rather, these systems were based on
discrimination and oppression, and the organisation of resources so they could
never trickle down. When you examine corporate globalization, its
structures, laws and effects, you see that it too is based on
exploitation. And, it is rooted in exploitation of the earth and peoples,
particularly peoples of certain classes and colours.
When you search for origins, of course you can go back to the industrial
revolution and beyond to find the building blocks upon which the economic
globalization of today is built. The UN Millennium Forum globalization
group said that one of the defining features of economic globalization is its
accelerated speed. The 1999 UNDP report on globalization said that
globalization is not really new. This era is different because there are
new 24-hour-a-day markets, new tools such as media networks, cell phones and the
internet, new actors such as the WTO and huge multinational corporations, new
rules on intellectual property and multilateral agreements like GATT that
severely reduce the role of national governments.
Definitions are also misleading and often politically created or culturally
specific. The terms 'capitalism' and 'democracy' have become merged in
some quarters. This is as dangerous as defining one monolithic economic
system as appropriate for all countries and peoples.
Another thing worth defining is the TINA factor (There Is No Alternative).
McCarthyism has lobotimised our ability to think outside the
capitalist/communist divide. Both systems begged us to find other ways of
organising the wealth and the abundance of this planet. There are
alternatives, and they start with turning the permanent war economy around to
serve people and not profit.
Everyone knows Iraq was about oil, and so is Chechnya. The oil in the
Timor Gap is understood by some to be why Indonesia occupied East Timor.
Sierra Leone is about diamonds. Because Kosovo's Sanjac mountains are rich
in minerals, Milosevic offered independence at one stage if Kosovo's
border could be shifted to south of those mountains. The list goes on.
Yugoslavia
Michael Chossodovsky has written very well about former Yugoslavia, and I'm
going to summarise his work here. The IMF required reform of Yugoslavia's
banking system and the devaluation of its currency in the mid-1980s. In
order to service the debt, the World Bank forced the government to slash
spending on public services and provinces. Worker managed enterprises were
either forced into bankruptcy or sold cheaply and converted into privately-owned
businesses. Western lawyers and consultants assisted in the preparation of
new legislation permitting foreign investors to buy socially owned assets at
bargain prices. Unrestricted foreign investment in industry, banking,
insurance and services would now be permitted, whereas only joint ventures had
been allowed previously. As domestic production stagnated, imports flooded
into the country. Hyper-inflation, frozen wages, soaring unemployment and
cuts in health and social services were the consequences of these policies.
Real incomes were 30% lower in 1980 than in 1979. By 1989 inflation was at
100% a month. The government put together a package but by 1989 it was too
late. The falling standard of living had brought frustrations to the
boiling point. These economic factors made it very easy to enflame
nationalism and ethnic hatred. Poverty provides fertile soil for all kinds
of nationalists to appeal to emotions, to foment hatred and to mobilise for
succession. So, the argument is that ethnic divisions are not the cause
but the consequence of the systematic destruction of healthy economies.
The recognition of Slovenia and Croatia by certain western governments, made it
inevitable that the Serbs and the Croats would fight it out for the division of
Bosnia. According to Sean Gervasi, "the struggle to force changes in
Yugoslavia was driven less by tensions between socialism and capitalism than
those between independence and recolonisation.
Rwanda
In Rwanda, approximately 70% of rural households grow coffee, which comprises
more then 80% of foreign exchange earnings. The deregulation of coffee in
1989, caused a 50% reduction in coffee prices. In 1990, a structural
adjustment program was imposed on Rwanda by the World Bank and IMF. This
loan was made conditional on public spending cuts, the elimination of thousands
of jobs, the privatization of state assets and the devaluation of the Rwandan
franc. State enterprises went bankrupt, health and education programs were
dismantled, malnutrition and malaria soared, fees were introduced in primary
schools and therefore enrollment went down. In reaction to the coffee
crisis, farmers uprooted some 30,000 coffee trees in 1992 by which time coffee
prices had dropped another 25%. Because the crops planted to replace the
30,000 coffee trees didn't produce food quickly, heavily subsidised food poured
into Rwanda. In 1992, the World Bank ordered the privatisation of the
state Electrogas enterprise, which cut more jobs, electricity prices went up and
government money all went to service the debt. It was in this climate that
one of the best-planned genocides in history took place in 1994.
The Permanent War Economy
How does economic globalization protect the military industrial academic,
bureaucratic, cultural, media complex? Government departments that have
been most eroded are those dealing with health, education and social services -
not the military. In fact, the repressive capacity of the state's military
and policing functions are being reinforced and strengthened.
Each year, US$860 billion are spent on militarism. One quarter of that
amount would provide the world's people with housing, food, education and
environmental clean up. This spending is driven by corporations. A
top executive in Lockheed Martin, the biggest military corporation on earth, the
biggest profiteer in nuclear weapons, headed up the lobby in Washington DC
working for NATO expansion. What does NATO expansion mean? A new
military market, a huge project of harmonising new countries to the forces of
other NATO member states, new training and research initiatives, etc. The
political power of military corporations, and the network between the military,
industrial, cultural, academic and bureaucratic institutions has been the
inspiration, if not the basis upon which other international monopolies have
evolved.
At the first Summit of the South held in Cuba in April 2000, Fidel Castro
described the world as a big ship that we are all on, but we are travelling
under extremely different conditions. Some have air conditioned cabins
with internet, a great diet, clean water, good medicine etc, while 85% of the
crew are crowded together in the pestilential filth and disease and hopelessness
of poverty. The goal is not merely to avoid icebergs, but to change the
ship. This means changing the permanent war economy which is the basis for
the current era of globalization.
Source: "Definitions of Globalization and Globalization of
Militarism," a speech to Department of Public Information NGO
Conference "Global Solidarity: The Way to Peace and International
Cooperation" at UN Headquarters, August 28, 2000. Web site: <http://nyc.indymedia.org/>