October 12, 2003

A euphemism for imperialism, globalization is an age-old urge whose motivations and underpinnings have changed over the centuries. The current stage is part of an ongoing process the future of which cannot be anticipated yet

AFTER the Berlin Wall came down in 1989 and the Soviet bloc disintegrated two years later the term globalization gained currency with unprecedented rapidity. It is now employed routinely by academics, politicians and journalists to convey a sense of interconnectedness, immediacy and simultaneity when referring to the way things happen in the world.

In the corridors of power in Western capitals and financial institutions there is also a sense of elation associated with globalization because it is seen as the triumph of capitalism and liberal values.

Before we proceed any further, it is important to set the context right; globalization is not a synonym for internationalization. International-ism means an outlook that assumes the existence of nation-states, but seeks to promote cooperation and common standards between them. Internationalization, therefore, represents processes premised on the existence of nation-states and territoriality. On the other hand, globalization refers to an increasing and perhaps irreversible integration of the disparate political and economic units of the world into a single structure, suggesting the end of the era of territoriality and nation-states. This is what mainstream globalization is all about. It is centred on the West, with the US as its leader.

Though within the West there are rival blocs — North America, the European Union and Japan, for instance — the discussion here will try to focus on the periphery: the various Third World countries comprising among themselves different types of economies, polities and cultures but sharing a history of colonialism or imperialist domination.

THE DEBATE: The protagonists of globalization praise the market and its concomitant communicative systems — the satellite dish, cable TV and Internet. The two together are expected to do away with economic autarky and totalitarianism.

While, on the one hand, economic prosperity will be achieved through free trade or liberalization, which requires the factors of production to move rationally all over the globe and thus be put to maximum and efficient use; on the other, the free flow of information through networking between national civil society actors such as development and human rights-oriented NGOs and other voluntary associational bodies and international inter-governmental organizations such as the UN, ILO and international NGOs such as Amnesty International, Minority Rights and so on, will usher in freedom, democracy and human rights (Held et al., Global Transformations, 1999).

In sharp contrast, the detractors deride the notion of globalization as merely novelty-hunting. They assert that what is being called globalization currently has been known as imperialism in the past, and, therefore, there is nothing useful or fruitful in contriving a new term. (I. Wallerstein, Globalization or The Age of Transition?, 1999) Rather the protectionist policies that Third World regimes set up in the 1950s and ’60s to achieve a self-reliant economic base are now being undermined, and in future the developing countries will be more vulnerable to manipulations by global actors such as powerful states, multinational companies and financial institutions such as the World Bank and the IMF.

It is alleged that the doctrine of free market requires in formal theory an unrestricted movement of capital and labour, but whereas the former, located in the industrialized centre, increasingly transcends whatever resistance may be offered by apprehensive Third World regimes, the latter, constituted by vast millions in the South, is being subjected to renewed regulation and control.

Moreover, the communications revolution is seen as an appendage of the US strategy to bolster its economic interests with carefully orchestrated information flows and entertainment shows which sustain and reproduce its cultural hegemony over the rest of the world. Consequently, though there is a marked increase in information flows, the traffic is one-way: from the North to the South. Therefore, the power asymmetries in the world remain intact and are likely to increase.

The discussion here, however, takes a very different view of the issue. It is argued that globalization is an age-old urge, but its motivations and underpinnings have changed over the centuries. Further, that the various stages of globalization have in the long historical process had a cumulative effect, and the current stage is, therefore, part of an ongoing process whose future course cannot be anticipated as yet.

PROTO-GLOBALIZATION: The first effort at creating a global community was undertaken by Alexander of Macedonia and later the Roman Empire pursued that objective for several centuries. Both of them tried to disseminate a common political culture and legal codes and, indeed, trade routes were also established.

Later, Christianity and Islam put forth far more comprehensive visions and ambitions of moulding the whole world into a cohesive and integrated system through the dissemination of common beliefs, rites and rituals and social norms and practices.

Consequently, armies, priests, monks, sufis and elaborate legal codes accompanied the movement of Christianity and Islam as they set out to convert the world in the image of a transcendental socio-political order. At one point in time Christianity and Islam constituted two rival contemporaneous globalization movements that confronted each other with all the power they could muster. The crusades are a testimony to such violent competition. (I. Ahmed, Globalisation and Human Rights in Pakistan, in International Journal of Punjab Studies, 2001)

However, Christian and Islamic expansionisms also played a part in the movement of wealth, skills and populations all over the world, and enabled high literary cultures and trade flows to develop. Similar tendencies can also be associated with the Buddhist movement, emanating from South Asia and spreading into Central Asia, China and in South East and East Asia. However, these earlier forms of globalization could not sustain their ambition to spread influence all over the world because neither the economic structure nor transport and communications technologies were fully developed to make that possible.

COLONIALISM & INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION: The Christian project of winning converts all over the world was gradually eclipsed by the secular project of building colonial empires that gave priority to economic exploitation. Beginning sometime in the 16th century, the new, essentially temporal, project began in increasing measure to prioritize economic and political advantages over missionary gains (Huberman, Man’s Worldly Good, 1968: 165-69).

Of course this change in emphasis varied with each of the major colonial actors. Nevertheless the ‘civilizing’ concern remained a part of the colonial baggage even when driven forward by mundane objectives. Globalization of the modern type based on economic advantage has its origins in the industrial and technological revolutions of the 18th and the 19th centuries. In the 20th century it was challenged by the worldwide socialist movement and after the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution the communist and capitalist blocs constituted two rival globalization projects.

The Islamic project had gone into abeyance during the colonial period, but after the Muslim states of Asia and Africa gained independence in the second half of the 20th century it started coming back to life gradually. However, in the 1950s and 1960s the ruling elite in the Muslim world mainly relied on adaptations of either the capitalist or the socialist models to achieve development. Both failed in that endeavour and from the 1970 onwards we find a revival of the Islamic globalization project. It has in recent times been drawn into violent conflict with the West, but its concerns are primarily cultural.

MAINSTREAM GLOBALIZATION: As mentioned earlier, after the demise of the Soviet bloc there is only one globalization that enjoys hegemonic position in world affairs. It is the liberal-capitalist model led by the US. It typically contains a classic dualism. On the one hand, it commends social Darwinist ethics as the legitimate means for progress and development, and, on the other, democracy and human rights, whose fortunes are linked with the consolidation of civil society (Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man, 1992: 39-97).

THE THIRD WORLD: Main-stream globalization should be seen as an attempt to impose discipline and order through liberalization of the economy, promotion of civil society and the communications revolutions. Its cultural influence in terms of Westernization and ‘MacDonaldization’ naturally follows as a result. (B. Barber, Jihad vs. McWorld, 1995; J. Tomlinson, Cultural Imperialism, 1991).

It cannot be denied that some Third World countries have successfully integrated into the world economy and achieved faster growth and have reduced poverty. For example, the export-oriented policies of East Asian countries brought dynamism and greater prosperity, transforming it from one of the poorest areas of the world in the 1950s to one in which living standards have been rising progressively.

On the other hand, there is little evidence that democracy has been enhanced as a result. It is rather the state itself that has managed to re-structure the economy in an outward-oriented direction. The role of civil society, NGOs and other such supposed democratization agents has been marginal. Moreover, the economic crisis of 1996-97 has hit the East and South East Asian economies rather badly and the risks in integration can be quite considerable.

India has changed course, too, largely as a result of the power elite’s decision to abandon the protectionist economy in favour of a liberalized one. It has also achieved high growth rates through integration. It has made impressive gains as an exporter of computer software and is also involved in the export of skilled labour and professionals to the industrialized countries.

On the other hand, Indian democracy has actually been tainted more with its turn towards globalization and liberalization. The ruling Hindu nationalist BJP has been an unabashed supporter of liberalization while simultaneously seeking to promote a majoritarian type of democracy which the minorities find threatening to their rights and interests.

Of course there has been a proliferation of NGOs working with development issues and human rights, but how much they have helped the promotion of democracy is difficult to assess. They have certainly helped internationalize some issues such as the Gujarat carnage of Muslims and the sordid situation of Dalits, but on the whole their influence is marginal.

Pakistan and Bangladesh have also made some significant gains through liberalization and the various NGOs play a useful role in keeping the development and human rights situations in the limelight, but their ability to facilitate the growth of democracy seems to be limited.

In Africa, only a few countries, such as Ghana and to some extent Uganda, have benefited from globalization and integration. In most other cases, liberalization has not proven to be benign. It has required severe cuts on public-sector employment, schools and hospitals. The result is increasing poverty and misery.

What one observes is that some individuals and prominent families co-opted into the globalization networks have amassed great wealth. Almost everywhere globalization has placed great pressure on the working people. In an attempt to attract foreign investment with the promise of low costs, national governments have almost invariably lowered down labour standards.

One can even say that the winners and losers from globalization in the Third World are the strong and the weak respectively. Thus, the countries that had already achieved some level of industrial growth and created an industrial infrastructure during the period of protectionism have generally benefited from globalization in terms of overall growth rates, but the distribution of wealth has been uneven, with the result that the poor have often become much worse off.

On the other hand, barring some individuals and groups most poor nations of Africa and elsewhere have been the losers. It is now universally acknowledged — especially after the East Asian crisis of 1997-98 — that the losers will be the poor. In terms of a North-South interaction one can say that after the first Iraq War of 1991 greater integration and globalization has meant more volatile capital movements and, therefore, the risks of social and economic dislocation may have actually increased, and this can be particularly perilous for poor and weak Third World nations.

Moreover, the free trade regimes, earlier the GATT and now WTO, clearly show that there is no level playing field on which free trade can proceed smoothly and rationally so that all sides benefit from increasing interaction and integration. Thus, a situation in which all players can compete from a situation of relative advantage simply does not exist.

This fact was brought into sharp relief when the WTO meeting at Cancun, Mexico, earlier this month ended in failure. This time the main culprit was the European Union, which refused to budge on its massive subsidies to its agricultural sector — $360 billion dollars per annum! Under the circumstances, most of the poor Third World countries which are producers of agricultural goods stand no chance of gaining from free trade.

ALTERNATIVES: Is there any alternative to globalization? In one sense there are some challengers already in the field presenting alternatives. A counterpoint Islamic globalization project can be identified. It is essentially a cultural response to Western-type globalization. In a superficial sense it confirms the Clash of Civilisation thesis of Samuel Huntington (1998), which sees the Western world and the Muslim world locked up in an irreconcilable competition over values, norms, power and influence.

The fact is that neither in economic nor in military terms is it a serious challenger to the Western sense of globalization. Within the Western world, an anti-globalization movement has been evolving. The protests and riots it carried out at the meeting of the leading industrial nations in Seattle in 1999 was an indication of popular anger at the onslaught of global capitalism against the Third World. There is yet another globalization process under way in the world; it is the UN-based movement for human rights. It is often critical of the excesses of the neo-liberal capitalist agenda of Western globalization and emphasizes the need for democracy and respect for human rights.

Globalization is necessary and inevitable and, therefore, there is no alternative to globalization in the form of economic autarky, cultural isolation or totalitarianism. Perhaps Third World countries need first to develop regional economic units of free trade and then from that vantage point enter international competition with the industrialized world.

However, what is needed the most is a vision of globalization which is based on the recognition of a common humanity with similar needs and aspirations. It would mean the recognition of global citizenship which would entitle all individuals to universal civil, political, social and economic rights to achieve both material as well as moral well-being.

The economic means of achieving that are already in hand; what is needed is an ongoing dialogue about how to live peacefully in the global village that the world is fast becoming. The massive power asymmetries and inequalities of wealth that obtain on the world level and within all societies do not seem to be lessening with the current model of globalization.

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