What is Globalization?

What is “globalization?” And why has the word, “globalization,” suddenly gained such wide currency in the language of business, government, academia, and the mainstream media? Why have we seen such a pervasive proliferation of a new term to describe a very old process that goes back at least as far as 1492.

1492 was the year when a Genoan navigator named Christopher Columbus accidentally stumbled on a whole hemisphere in his quest to prove that our terrestrial home is round. 1492 was the year when two huge continents, soon to be christened as “the Americas,” began to enter the cartography and consciousness of Europe. 1492 was the year when humanity’s most massive barriers of geography and self-awareness began to be stripped away. 1492 was the year when all the world’s peoples embarked on a new saga of encounter, a saga that continues until today. 1492 was the year when the modern era of globalization began. This modern era of globalization has been marked by both massive achievements and monumental injustices.

Since the process of globalization is at least five centuries old, what changed in the 1990s to transform the name of our planet into the name of a process? Why did such an old historical pattern suddenly acquire a new name? What ideological need was reflected in the pervasive application of the new word, “globalization,” over so many fields of politics, trade, and punditry? I believe that one answer lies in the sudden termination of the Cold War with the demise of the Soviet Union. Between 1945 and 1989 global geopolitics revolved around the antagonisms that polarized two competing superpowers, two competing regimes of governmental power and economic organization. The dismantling of the Berlin Wall seemed to signal that the United States and capitalism had triumphed. Hence there appeared to be no major obstacles to prevent the worldwide hegemony-- the globalization-- of both.

In some circles the events of 1989 stimulated even more ambitious interpretations and policies. The demise of the Soviet state was taken as an indicator that all forms of state activity were suspect; that all governments in all countries should be downsized so that the profit motive could be given maximum latitude across every field of human enterprise. From education to health care, from energy policy to the provision of clean water, tasks previously performed by governments were frequently downloaded and handed over to the so-called private sector. One indicator of this trend lay in the widened applications given the word, “privatization,” over the same general period when the language of globalization became so pervasive. Indeed, in the 1990s the process of privatization, the modern-day extension of the enclosure movement, penetrated deeply into virtually every corner of the remaining global commons. The granting of deeds of ownership over life’s genetic blueprints was emblematic of this process. As the laws of intellectual property were extended into new frontiers of inner space, the genetic codes underlying the regenerative energy of plant life and animal life, including human life, were transformed into the capital and currency of biotechnology’s DNA gold rush.
For many, therefore, the idea globalization has been closely connected with the process of cashing in on capitalism’s apparent conquest over communism during the Cold War. Hence globalization became synonymous with the process of extending the range of the world’s largest business enterprises to truly worldwide proportions. It became synonymous with the process of re-engineering the legal, commercial, and ideological framework of human governance to accommodate the transformation of transnational corporations into global corporations. It became synonymous with the incorporation of the former Soviet empire into the expanded domain of the American empire.
This American empire is very different from the British empire, from which the United States emerged after 1776. Unlike the British empire, the American empire’s expansion was not accompanied by the construction of a worldwide framework of imperial law. The fact that the United States possesses few formal colonies, however, should not be allowed to obscure the dominant international reality of our times. Never before in history have we experienced an epoch when a single global system incorporated the entire range of human economic relationships. That overarching system is capitalism. And the military, financial, political and pedagogical chains of command on which capitalism currently depends are overwhelmingly centred in a single country, one that doubles as the planet’s sole remaining superpower.

The outward thrust aimed at integrating the domain of the former Soviet empire into capitalism has been accompanied by an internal privatizing push. The effect has been to reduce the jurisdictional reach of public governments, as vested usually in elected assemblies, and to increase the power of private governments as vested primarily in the executive branches of large corporations. In the new climate even the Labour Party, the Liberal Party and the Democratic Party in Britain, Canada, and the United States were induced to favour the language of the share holder state over the polemics of the welfare state. For those overseeing the conduct of business at a global level, the prospect of applying a single economic system to the unique circumstances, politics and laws of 200 or so nation states seemed too complex and inefficient. The result was the creation of a few continentally- and hemispherically-based trade blocks. At the symbolic core of this geopolitical retooling was the transformation in 1995 of the General Agreement on Trade and Tariffs-- GATT-- into the World Trade Organization. The central dynamic of these changes has been to upload power over economic decision making to new supranational agencies such as the WTO. The reverse side of this same process has been to subordinate the sovereign authority of all national governments save one; to diminish the capacity of national governments to modify substantially the material conditions of their own citizens.

There is, I believe, another way to interpret the sudden proliferation of the word, “globalization,” in our language. That interpretation involves a mixture of hope and forboding, a combination of optimism and alarm. Could it be that, because of the demands of our shared survival, we have collectively chosen this moment to highlight the picture of our shared planet as the appropriate symbol of our shared dilemmas, aspirations and destiny? Could it be that we have come collectively to appreciate that we are at the eleventh hour of a looming ecological crisis whose magnitude may transcend anything we can even imagine? Could it be that we are arriving simultaneously at an understanding that there may be no future for all of humanity-- indeed, for all life on the planet-- unless we radically change our ways to emphasize what share in common rather than what holds us apart.

It seems to me that this picture of globalization places particularly large responsibilities on us in the West to look beyond the apparent safety of our fenced backyards and our walled enclaves of monied privilege. Similarly, it demands that we see through the fatuous rhetoric supporting false doctrines of national security and missile defence. Without such a concerted effort of critical self-awareness within the West, globalization will remain nothing more than a continuation through new means of the old cycles of European colonialism that began in 1492.

As the twenty-first century dawns, we in the West stand poised to initiate a major war in the volatile tinder box of the Middle East. If and when the toll begins to mount of innocent lives destroyed and maimed, what rationale will we be able to offer for this tragedy? How might we respond to those who will undoubtedly accuse us of acting actively, or with complicity, in a campaign said to combine the self-righteous zealotry of the Crusades with the acquisitive aggressions of the Indian wars?

And how might a protracted war in the Middle East affect our capacity to deal with our most menacing enemy lurking within. I refer here to the rich West’s near pathological resistance to bringing our patterns of production and consumption into ecological equilibrium with the earth’s regenerative cycles. Indeed, a cynic might allege that one of the reasons for the insistent pounding of war drums over some of the earth’s richest repositories of oil and gas is to distract us from what threatens us most. A cynic might allege that one of the reasons for the deployment of the West’s massive arsenals of destructive weaponry is to help defend entrenched interests still clinging to the wealthy privileges emanating from the continuing economic grip of a dirty twilight industry. One inevitable outcome of this brand of reaction must be to further impede the true entrepreneurs among us who seek a level playing field on which to develop more efficient and sophisticated energy sources. Such a level playing field can never be achieved as long as the White House and the Alberta Legislature remain the site of publicly-financed lobbies for the private interests of the oil and gas sector.

Let me conclude with a few words on globalization and the politics of the international treaty on global warming whose elements were first pieced together at Kyoto, Japan in 1997. It becomes clearer every day how internationally important is Canada’s stance on the Kyoto Protocol. In fact in my view the Kyoto Protocol has established the groundwork of a precedent-setting case whose outcome will determine much about the state of planet that we bequeath to posterity. Kyoto has become a pivotal test of political will to determine whether or not the process of legislated globalization will move beyond the realm of trade and investment to encompass rules-based initiatives aimed at both worldwide ecological preservation and at the enforcement of universal standards in the protection of human rights. As it now stands the juridical changes ushered in by the end of the Cold War have extended primarily to the protection and enhancement of monied interests. The result has been to widen further the gap between rich and poor, both within all nations and between North and South. Peruvian economist, Hernando de Soto, conceded as much in his recent text entitled, The Mystery of Capital: Why Capitalism Triumphs in the West and Fails Everywhere Else. In this recent volume de Soto muses, “the economic reforms underway open doors only for small and globalized elites and leave out most of humanity.”

There can be no genuine economic progress for both the rich and poor worlds unless all branches of humanity, but especially those wielding the greatest power, learn to apply the maxims of moderation to living within the ecological cycles of Mother Earth. An enormous body of evidence has been assembled to indicate that the most pressing manifestation of our need for industrial moderation points to the burning of excessive quantities of fossil fuels as the main cause of global warming. The Kyoto Protocol represents humanity’s most concerted effort to date to deal in a truly international fashion with this most pressing component of our global ecological disequilibrium. There are, however, powerful interests who do not want legislated globalization to move beyond the protection of monied interests to the protection of human rights and the environment. This conviction has been demonstrated especially clearly by the political agents in Canada of the US-based oil and gas industry.

The very interests in Canada who have most aggressively promoted the continentalization and globalization of our investment and trade regimes are now campaigning with public funds against our ratifying the Kyoto Protocol on global warming. The internal contradictions inherent in these two positions speak volumes about the nature of the special-interest politics currently practiced by the governments of Alberta and the United States, two centres of anti-Kyoto activism. That internal contradiction demonstrates the anti-globalization biases that are integral to the linked regimes of George Bush and Ralph Klein. Internal opposition to Kyoto is going forward in the name of a “made in Canada” solution. Now who is motoring on the information highway of globalization with eyes firmly fixed on the rear view mirror? The “made in Canada” advertising slogan of the publicly-funded, anti-Kyoto activists severely misrepresents the Kyoto approach. It already calls for “made in Canada” solutions. It leaves the hard choices about how to reach set limits on polluting emissions to the domestic politics of individual countries.
One of the common themes in the critiques of the Canadian government’s decision to ratify the Kyoto Protocol is that our country’s natural resources, including oil and gas, are owned by provincial governments. That position, however, fails to take into account the full content of section 109 of the Constitution Act, 1867. Section 109 begins by referring to “all Lands, Mines, and Minerals belonging to the several Provinces of Canada.” It qualifies this ownership, however, by specifying that these resources are “subject to any Trusts existing in respect thereof, and to any Interest other than that of the Province in the same.” As I see it, one of the ways to transform the modern era of globalization from a time of imperialism to one of human liberation and ecological equilibrium is to dramatically widen our notion of the nature of trust responsibilities. If life is to remain sustainable on this planet, then the notion of a public trust must be made to extend beyond national boundaries towards a truly transnational vision of global law and citizenship. Such an adjustment will inevitably place disproportionate levels of responsibility on those of us in the West who have benefited most from the modern era of globalization which began in 1492.

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