Related Articles
ºñ¹Ð¹øÈ£
(°Ô½Ã¹° ÀÛ¼º½Ã ÀÔ·ÂÇÑ Æнº¿öµå¸¦ ÀÔ·ÂÇϼ¼¿ä)
HTML¾²±â
À̸§
¸µÅ©
÷ºÎÆÄÀÏ
¼öÁ¤¾ÈÇÔ
÷ºÎÆÄÀϼöÁ¤
÷ºÎÆÄÀÏ»èÁ¦
(
÷ºÎÆÄÀÏÀ» ¼öÁ¤ÇÏ°íÀÚ ÇÒ¶§¸¸)
Á¦¸ñ
From Melbourne to Prague: the Struggle for a Deglobalized World By Walden Bello* (Talk delivered at a series of engagements on the occasion of demonstrations against the World Economic Forum (Davos) in Melbourne, Australia, 6-10 September 2000.) We are, here in Melbourne in the next few days and in Prague in two weeks' time, participating in an historic enterprise: that of creating a critical mass to turn the tide against corporate-driven globalization. For years, we were told that globalization was benign, that it was a process that brought about the greatest good for the greatest number, that good citizenship lay in accepting the impersonal rule of the market and good governance meant governments getting out of the way of market forces and letting the most effective incarnation of market freedom, the transnational corporation, go about its task of bringing about the most efficient mix of capital, land, technology and labor. The unrestricted flow of goods and capital in a world without borders was said to be the best of all possible worlds, though when some observers pointed out that to be consistent with the precepts of their 18th century prophet, Adam Smith, proponents of the neoliberal doctrine would also have to allow the unrestricted flow of labor to create this best of all possible worlds, they were, quite simply, ignored. Such inconsistencies could be overlooked since for over two decades, neoliberalism or, as it was grandiosely styled, the "Washington Consensus" had carried all before it. As one of its key partisans has nostalgically remarked recently, "the Washington Consensus seemed to gain near-universal approval and provided a guiding ideology and underlying intellectual consensus for the world economy, which was quite new in modern history."(1) Globalization Unravels I: The Asian Financial Collapse The unrestricted flow of speculative capital in accordance with Washington Consensus doctrine was what our governments in East Asia institutionalized in the early 1990's, under the strong urging of the International Monetary Fund and the US Treasury Department. The result: the $100 billion that flowed in between 1993 and 1997 flowed out in the bat of an eyelash during the Great Panic of the summer of 1997, bringing about the collapse of our economies and spinning them into a mire of recession and massive unemployment from which most still have to recover. Since 1997, financial instability or the constant erosion of our currencies has become a way of life under IMF- imposed monetary regimes that leave the value of our money to be determined day-to-day by the changing whims, moods, and preferences of foreign investors and currency speculators. Globalization Unravels II: The Failure of Structural Adjustment The Asian financial crisis put the International Monetary Fund on the hotseat, leading to a widespread popular reappraisal of its role in the Third World in the 1980s and early 1990's, when structural adjustment programs were imposed on over 70 developing countries. After over 15 years, there were hardly any cases of successful adjustment programs. What structural adjustment had done, instead, was to institutionalize stagnation in Africa and Latin America, alongside rises in the levels of absolute poverty and income inequality. Structural adjustment and related free-market policies that were imposed beginning in the early 1980's were the central factor that triggered a sharp rise in inequality globally, with one authoritative UNCTAD study covering 124 countries showing that the income share of the richest 20 per cent of the world's population rose from 69 to 83 per cent between 1965 and 1990. (2) Adjustment policies were a central factor behind the rapid concentration of global income in recent years--a process which, in 1998, saw Bill Gates, with a net worth of $90 billion, Warren Buffet, with $36 billion, and Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, with $30 billion, achieve a combined income that was greater than the total combined income of the 600 million that live in the world's 48 least developed countries, a great number of which had been subjected to adjustment programs. Structural adjustment has also been a central cause of the lack of any progress in the campaign against poverty. The number of people globally living in poverty that is, on less than a dollar a day-- increased from 1.1 billion in 1985 to 1.2 billion in 1998, and is expected to reach 1.3 billion this year. (3) According to a recent World Bank study, the absolute number of people living in poverty rose in the 1990's in Eastern Europe, outh Asia, Latin America and the Caribbean, and sub-Saharan Africall areas that came under the sway of adjustment programs. (4) Confronted with this dismal record, James Wolfensohn of the World Bank had the sense to move the institution away from its identification with structural adjustment with public relations initiatives like the SAPRI, or the Structural Adjustment Program Review Initiative, that it said would be jointly conducted with NGOs. But the IMF under the doctrinaire Michel Camdessus refused to see the handwriting on the wall; it sought, instead, to embed adjustment policies permanently in the economic structure through the establishment of the Extended Structural Adjustment Facility (ESAF). Yet as a consequence of greater public scrutiny following its disastrous policies in East Asia, the Fund could no longer pretend that adjustment had not been a massive failure in Africa, Latin America and South Asia. During the World Bank-IMF meetings in September 1999, the Fund conceded failure by renaming the ESAF the "Poverty Reduction and Growth" Facility. There was no way, however, that the Fund could successfully whitewash the results of its policies. When the G-7 proposed to make IMF certification a condition for eligibility in the now defunct HIPC Initiative, Rep. Maxine Walters of the US House of Representatives spoke for many liberal American lawmakers when she commented, "Do we have to involve the IMF at all? Because, as we have painfully discovered, the way the IMF works causes children to starve." (5) So starved of legitimacy was the Fund that US Treasury Secretary Larry Summers, who in an earlier incarnation as chief economist of the World Bank was one of the chief backers of structural adjustment, told the US Congress that the "IMF-centered process" of macroeconomic policymaking would be replaced by "a new, more open and inclusive process that would involve multiple international organizations and give national policymakers and civil society groups a more central role." (6) Globalization Unravels III: The Debacle in Seattle Freedom, said Hegel, is the recognition of necessity. Freedom, the proponents of neoliberalism like Hegel's disciple, Francis Fukuyama, tell us, lies in the recognition of the inexorable irreversibility of free- market globalization. Thank god, the 50,000 people who descended on Seattle in late November 1999 did not buy this Hegelian- Fukuyaman notion of freedom as submission and surrender to what seemed to be the ineluctable necessity of the World Trade Organization (WTO). In the mid-nineties, the WTO had been sold to the global public as the lynchpin of a multilateral system of economic governance that would provide the necessary rules to facilitate the growth of global trade and the spread of its beneficial effects. Nearly five years later, the implications and consequences of the founding of the WTO had become as clear to large numbers of people as a robbery carried out in broad daylight. What were some of these realizations? - By signing on to the Agreement on Trade-Related Investment Measures (TRIMs), developing countries discovered that they had signed away their right to use trade policy as a means of industrialization. - By signing on to the Agreement on Trade-Related Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPs), countries realized that they had given high tech transnationals like Microsoft and Intel the right to monopolize innovation in the knowledge-intensive industries and provided biotechnology firms like Novartis and Monsanto the go-signal to privatize the fruits of aeons of creative interaction between human communities and nature such as seeds, plants, and animal life. - By signing on to the Agreement on Agriculture (AOA), developing countries discovered that they had agreed to open up their markets while allowing the big agricultural superpowers to consolidate their system of subsidized agricultural production that was leading to the massive dumping of surpluses on those very markets, a process that was, in turn, destroying smallholder-based agriculture. - By setting up the WTO, countries and governments discovered that they had set up a legal system that enshrined the priority of free trade above every other good--above the environment, justice, equity, and community. They finally got the significance of consumer advocate Ralph Nader's warning a few years earlier that the WTO, was a system of "trade uber alles." - In joining the WTO, developing countries realized that they were not, in fact, joining a democratic organization but one where decisions were made, not in formal plenaries but in non-transparent backroom sessions, and where majority voting was dispensed with in favor of a process called "consensus" which was really a process in which a few big trading powers imposed their consensus on the majority of the member countries. (* This document was circulated through [International Network on Disarmament and Globalization] list
. If you want to read full text, please click an attached file.)
Copylefted by
JINBO.NET