PHA-Exchange> PHA-Exchange>Amartaya Sen on Globalization

[sunil.deepak at aifo.it]

It's Right To Rebel

The protests against globalisation are often ungainly, ill-tempered,
simplistic, frenzied and frantic, even highly disruptive. And yet, they also
serve the function of questioning and disputing the unexamined contentment
about the world in which we live.
Amartya Sen


The world in which we live is both remarkably comfortable and thoroughly
miserable. There is unprecedented prosperity in the world, which is
incomparably richer than ever before. The massive command over resources,
knowledge and technology that we now take for granted would be hard for our
ancestors to imagine.  

But ours is also a world of extraordinary deprivation and of staggering
inequality. An astonishing number of children are ill-nourished and
illiterate as well as ill-cared and needlessly ill. Millions perish every
week from diseases that can be completely eliminated, or at least prevented
from killing people with abandon. 

The dual presence of opulence and agony in the world that we inhabit makes
it hard to avoid fundamental questions about the ethical acceptability of
the prevailing arrangements and about our own values and their relevance and
reach. 

One of the questions that we have to face immediately is this: given the
gravity and consequences of the contrasts between the comforts and the
miseries that we see in the world, how do most of us manage to live
untroubled and unbothered lives ignoring altogether the inequities that
characterize our world?  

Is the avoidance of ethical scrutiny the result of our lack of sympathy for
each other - a kind of moral blindness or breathtaking egocentrism that
afflict and distort our thinking and actions? Or is there some other
explanation that is consistent with a less negative view of human psychology
and human values? 

This is not an easy issue to settle, but let me begin by arguing that our
indifference and complacency may well be connected with a failure of our
understanding, rather than reflecting a basic lack of human sympathy. A
cognitive failure can arise both from unreasoned optimism and from
groundless pessimism, and oddly enough, the two can sometimes unite.  

To begin with the former, the obdurate optimist tends to hope, if only
implicitly, that things will get better soon enough. The combination of
processes, such as the flourishing market economy, that has led to the
prosperity of some in the world will presently lead to similar prosperity
for all. In this glowing perspective, the doubters tend to appear to be soft
in head, whether or not they are kind in heart. "Give us time - don't be so
impatient," asserts the voice of contented optimist. 

On the other side, the stubborn pessimists acknowledge - indeed emphasize -
the continuing misery in the world. But they are, frequently enough, also
pessimistic about our ability to change the world significantly. "We should
change things if we can, but to be realistic, we really cannot," goes that
argument. Pessimism can - and often does - lead to a quiet acceptance of a
great many ills.  

As Sir Thomas Browne put it more than three and half centuries ago (in
1643), "the world....is not an inn, but a hospital." People can learn to
live happily in a hospital, full of ailing patients, and manage to avoid
thinking about the miserable around them. 

There is, thus, a partial but effective congruence between the stubborn
optimist and the incorrigible pessimist. The optimist finds resistance
unnecessary whereas the pessimist finds it to be useless. As James Branch
Cabell put it (reacting to a very different manifestation of this
conundrum), "The optimist proclaims that we live in the best of all possible
worlds; and the pessimist fears this is true."  

The opposing viewpoints unite in resignation. Global passiveness is, thus,
fed not just by moral blindness, and by apathy and egocentrism, but also by
a conservative unity of radical opposites. Persuaded - or at least comforted
- by our alleged inability to do any good (either because it is not needed
or because we cannot make any difference anyway), we can lead our own lives,
minding our own business, and not see anything morally problematic in
quietly accepting the inequities that characterize our world.  

Ethics can be killed by premature resignation. 

It is in this general context that we have to view the doubts about
globalization that we see in the world today, including the protest
movements which have made organized international meetings so hard to hold.
These protests have many features (some of them rather hard to tolerate,
including arrogance and violence), but they can be, at one level, seen as a
challenge to the ethical complacency and inaction generated by the coalition
of optimists and pessimists.  

The protest movements are often ungainly, ill-tempered, simplistic, frenzied
and frantic, and they can also be highly disruptive. And yet, at another
level, they also serve the function, I would argue, of questioning and
disputing the unexamined contentment about the world in which we live.  

In this sense, the global doubts can help to broaden our attention and
extend the reach of policy debates, by confronting the status quo and by
contesting global resignation and acquiescence. That, it can argued, is a
creative role of doubts, even if some of the presumptions and many of the
proposed remedies that go with the protest movements are themselves under
examined and unclear.  

It is important to recognise that the question-mongering role of doubts can
itself be creative and productive, and we have to separate the disruptive
parts of the protest movements from their constructive function. 

The Nature of Globalization 

The protest movements can, thus, be seen as expressing creative doubts. But
doubts about what? There is, I would argue, a serious interpretational issue
here. The protesters often describe themselves as "anti-globalization"? Is
globalization a new folly? And are the protesters really against
globalization, as their rhetoric suggests? 

The so-called anti-globalization protesters can hardly be, in general,
anti-globalization, since these protests are in fact among the most
globalized events in the contemporary world. The protests in Seattle,
Melbourne, Prague, Quebec and elsewhere are not isolated or provincial
phenomena.  

The protesters are not just local kids, but men and women from across the
world pouring into the location of the respective events to have their
global voice heard. Globalized interrelations can hardly be what the
protests want to stop, since they must, then, begin by stopping themselves. 

I should presently come back to the question as to how we may sensibly view
what the protests are about, but before that, let me turn to the second
question: Is globalization a new folly? I would argue that globalization is
neither especially new, nor in general, a folly.  

A historical understanding of the nature of globalization can be quite
useful here. Over thousands of years, globalization has contributed to the
progress of the world, through travel, trade, migration, spread of cultural
influences, and dissemination of knowledge and understanding (including of
science and technology). To have stopped globalization would have done
irreparable harm to the progress of humanity. 

Furthermore, even though globalization is often seen these days as a
correlate of Western dominance, consideration of history can also help us to
understand that globalization can run in the opposite direction as well. To
illustrate, let us look back at the beginning of the last millennium rather
than at its end.  

Around 1000 A.D., global spread of science, technology and mathematics was
changing the nature of the old world, but the dissemination then was, to a
great extent, in the opposite direction to what we see today. For example,
the high technology in the world of 1000 A.D. included paper and printing,
the crossbow and gunpowder, the clock and the iron chain suspension bridge,
the kite and the magnetic compass, the wheel barrow and the rotary fan. Each
one of these examples of high technology of the world a millennium ago was
well-established and extensively used in China, and was practically unknown
elsewhere. Globalization spread them across the world, including Europe. 

A similar movement occurred in the Eastern influence on Western mathematics.
The decimal system emerged and became well developed in India between the
second and the sixth century, and was used extensively also by Arab
mathematicians soon thereafter. These mathematical innovations reached
Europe mainly in the last quarter of the tenth century, and began having its
major impact in the early years of the last millennium, playing a major part
in the scientific revolution that helped to transform Europe. 

Indeed, Europe would have been a lot poorer - economically, culturally and
scientifically - had it resisted the globalization of mathematics, science
and technology at that time. And the same applies - though in the reverse
direction - today. To reject globalization of science and technology on the
ground that this is Western influence would not only amount to overlooking
global contributions - drawn from many different parts of the world - that
lie solidly behind so-called Western science and technology, but would also
be quite a daft practical decision, given the extent to which the whole
world stands to benefit from the process.  

To identify this phenomenon with the "Western imperialism" of ideas and
beliefs (as the rhetoric often suggests) would be a serious and costly
error, in the same way that any European resistance to Eastern influence
would have been at the beginning of the last millennium. We must not, of
course, overlook the fact that there are issues related to globalization
that do connect with the imperialism (the history of conquests, colonialism
and alien rule remains relevant today in many different ways), but it would
be a great mistake to see globalization primarily as a feature of
imperialism. It is much bigger - much greater - than that.  

The Well-frog and the Global World 

The polar opposite of globalization would be persistent separatism and
relentless autarky. It is interesting here to recollect an image of
seclusion that was invoked with much anxiety in many old Sanskrit texts in
India, beginning from about two and a half thousand years ago.  

This is the story of a well-frog - the kupamanduka - which lives its whole
life within a well and is suspicious of everything outside it. Beginning
from about 500 B.C., there are at least four Sanskrit texts, Ganapath,
Hitopadesh, Prasannaraghava, and Bhattikavya, that warn us not to be
well-frogs.  

The well-frog does, of course have a "world view," but it is a world view
that is entirely confined to that little well. The scientific, cultural and
economic history of the world would have been very limited had we lived like
well-frogs. This remains an important issue, since there are plenty of
well-frogs around today - and also, of course, many solicitors and advocates
of well-frogs. 

The importance of global contact and interaction applies to economic
relations among others. Indeed, there is much evidence that the global
economy has brought prosperity to many different areas on the globe.
Pervasive poverty and "nasty, brutish and short" lives dominated the world a
few centuries ago, with only a few pockets of rare affluence.  

In overcoming that penury, modern technology, as well as economic
interrelations, has been influential. And they continue to remain important
today. The economic predicament of the poor across the world cannot be
reversed by withholding from them the great advantages of contemporary
technology, the well-established efficiency of international trade and
exchange, and the social as well as economic merits of living in open rather
than closed societies.  

Rather, the main issue is how to make good use of the remarkable benefits of
economic intercourse and technological progress in a way that pays adequate
attention to the interests of the deprived and the underdog. That is, I
would argue, the principal question that emerges from the anti-globalization
movements. It is, constitutively, not a question about globalization at all,
and the linkage with globalization is only instrumental and contingent.  

Non-market Institutions and Equitable Sharing 

What then is the main point of contention? The principal challenge, I would
submit, relates, in one way or another, to inequality - international as
well as intranational. The inequalities that irk concern disparities in
affluence, and also gross asymmetries in political, social and economic
power. The issue of inequality relates centrally to the disputes over
globalization. A crucial question concerns the sharing of the potential
gains from globalization, between rich and poor countries, and between
different groups within a country.  

It is not adequate to understand that the poor of the world need
globalization as much as the rich do, it is also important to make sure that
they actually get what they need. This may require extensive institutional
reform, and that task has to be faced at very the same time when
globalization is defended. 

Perhaps the most important thing on which to focus is the far-reaching role
of non-market institutions in determining the nature and extent of
inequalities. Indeed, political, social, legal and other institutions can be
critically significant in making good use even of the market mechanism
itself - in extending its reach and in facilitating its equitable use. Their
overwhelming importance are relevant both for disparities between nations
and for inequalities within nations. 

Distributional questions are far more complex and far-reaching than the
recognition that they typically get in the usual advocacy of globalization
and the championing of high rates of economic growth. Consider the on-going
debate on the role of economic growth in removing poverty, which if often
fought over very a narrow ground.  

It is obvious enough that economic growth can be extremely helpful in
removing poverty. This is so both because the poor can directly share in the
increased wealth and income generated by economic growth, and also because
the overall increase in national prosperity can help in the financing of
public services (including health care and education), which in turn can be
particularly useful for the poor and the deprived. 

And yet the removal of poverty and deprivation cannot be seen to be an
automatic result of economic growth. The basic problem concerns not merely
the obvious point that it must make a difference how the new incomes
generated are distributed among the different classes.  

But more fundamentally, we have to recognise that deprivation with which we
have reasons to be concerned is not just the absolute lowness of income, but
different but interrelated "unfreedoms," including the prevalence of
preventable illness, needless hunger, premature mortality, unceasing
illiteracy, social exclusion, economic insecurity, and the denial of
political liberty. The income going to the poor is only one determining
influence among many others in dealing with deprivation.  

Institutional Bases of Participation and Security 

A second issue concerns the process through which income is earned as
economic growth occurs. The ability of the poor to participate in economic
growth depends on a variety of enabling social conditions. It is hard to
participate in the expansionary process of the market mechanism (especially
in a world of globalized trade) if one is illiterate and unschooled, or if
one is bothered by undernourishment and ill health, or if artificial
barriers such as discrimination related to race or gender or social
background, exclude substantial parts of humanity from fair economic
participation.  

Similarly, if one has no capital (not even a tiny plot of land in the
absence of land reform), and no access to microcredit (without the security
of collateral ownership), it is not easy for a person to show much economic
enterprise in the market economy. 

The benefits of the market economy can indeed be momentous, as the champions
of the market system rightly argue. But then the non-market arrangements for
the sharing of education, epidemiology, land reform, micro-credit
facilities, appropriate legal protections, women's rights and other means of
empowerment must also be seen to be important - even as ways of spreading
access to the market economy (issues in which many market advocates take
astonishingly little interest).  

Indeed, many advocates of the market economy don't seem to take the market
sufficiently seriously, because if they did, they would pay more attention
to spreading the virtues of market-based opportunities to all. In the
absence of advancing these enabling conditions for widespread participation
in the market economy, the advocacy of the market system end up being mere
conservatism, rather than supporting the promotion of market opportunities
as widely as possible. Institutional broadening needed for efficient access
to the market economy is no less important for the success of the market
economy than the removal of barriers to trade. 

A third issue concerns the recognition that the fruits of economic growth
may not automatically expand the important social services; there is an
inescapable political process involved here. Decisions have to emerge at the
social and political level about the uses to which the newly generated
resources can be put.  

The route of "growth-mediated" advancement may be full of promise and
favourable prospects for living conditions and freedoms of human beings, but
political and social steps have to be taken to realise that promise, and to
secure those prospects.  

For example, South Korea did much better than, say, Brazil (which too grew
very fast for many decades) in channelling resources to education and health
care, and this greatly helped South Korea to achieve participatory economic
growth and to raise the quality of life of its people.  

On the other hand, South Korea, too, continued to neglect arrangements for
social security and for safety nets needed to prevent destitution, thereby
remaining vulnerable to downside risks. It had to pay heavily, as a result
of this lacuna, when the Asian economic crisis of 1997 came. This was also
the time when the voice that democracy gives to the poor was most missed,
and democracy became a major political cause in South Korea.  

We need provisions for "downturn with security" as well as "growth with
equity," and also have to recognise the need for democracy for the provision
of political incentives (in addition to the intrinsic importance of
democratic rights). The market economy may be highly productive, but it
cannot substitute for other important institutions.  

International Asymmetries and Institutions 

Development of appropriate non-market institutions is important also for
tackling inequalities between nations. The need for a global commitment to
democracy and to participatory governance can hardly be overstressed.
Contrary to an often-repeated claim, there is no basic conflict between
promoting economic growth and supporting democracies and social rights, and
in fact democratic freedoms and social opportunities can contribute
substantially to economic development.  

However, as George Soros has pointed out, international business concerns
often have a strong preference for working in orderly and highly organized
autocracies rather than in activist and less regimented democracies, and
this can be a regressive influence on equitable development.  

Further, multinational firms can also exert their influence on the
priorities of public expenditure in less secure third-world countries in the
direction of giving preference to the safety and convenience of the
managerial classes and of privileged workers over the removal of widespread
illiteracy, medical deprivation and other adversities of the underdogs of
society. 

These possibilities do not, of course, impose any insurmountable barrier to
development, but it is important that the surmountable barriers be diagnosed
and actually be surmounted. 

Aside from the impact of asymmetries in global economic power, the
distribution of the benefits of international interactions depends also on a
variety of global social arrangements, including trade agreements, patent
laws, medical initiatives, educational exchanges, facilities for
technological dissemination, ecological and environmental restraints, and
fair treatment of accumulated debts (often incurred by irresponsible
military rulers of the past who were in many cases encouraged by one side or
the other in the Cold War which was particularly active over Africa).  

These issues urgently need global attention. So does the issue of the
management of conflicts, local wars and global spending on armament (often
encouraged by arms-selling rich countries). For example, as the Human
Development Report 1994 of the United Nations Development Programme pointed
out, not only were the top five arms-exporting countries in the world
precisely the five permanent members of the Security Council of the United
Nations, but also they were, together, responsible for 86 per cent of all
the conventional weapons exported during the period studied. It is not
difficult to understand why the Security Council has done so little to curb
and restrain the merchants of death.  

Ethical Challenges and the Future Confrontations 

As it happens, the international economic, financial and political
architecture of the world, which we have inherited from the past (including
institutions such as the World Bank, the I.M.F., and other institutions),
was largely set up in the 1940s, following the Bretton Woods Conference in
1944. The main challenge at that time was to respond to what were then seen
as the big problems of the post-war world.  

In the middle 1940s, the bulk of Asia and Africa was still under imperialist
dominance of one kind or another, and was hardly in a position to challenge
the institutional divisions of power and authority that the allied powers
imposed on the world. Tolerance of economic insecurity and of poverty was
much greater then than it is today; the idea of human rights was still very
weak; the power of NGOs had not emerged yet; and democracy was definitely
not seen as a global entitlement. 

The world is a very different place now from what it was then. The force of
global protests partly reflects a new mood and a fresh inclination to
challenge the world establishment, and it is, to a great extent, the global
equivalent of the within-nation protests associated with labour movements
and political radicalism.  

Indeed, the recent outbursts of global doubts have something in common with
the spirit of an old American song - a defiant verse traced to the great
Leadbelly: 

In the home of the brave, land of the free,
I will not be put down by no bourgeoisie. 

In fact, of course, radicalism was not really as powerful in America then as
the song suggests, but the determined spirit which it reflected contributed,
over time, to many practical changes, and even ultimately to the power of
organized labour about which so many industrialists complain so much today. 

To some extent, there is a parallel here with global protest movements: they
are not particularly powerful yet in organizational terms, but they are, to
a great extent, an intimation of things to come. Since the questions they
raise are real, adequate answers have to be sought, no matter how
unpolished, crude and breathless the protesters may look to the world
establishment.  

There is a need for change. The world of Bretton Woods is definitely not the
world of today, and there is a strong case for far-reaching re-examination
of the institutional structure of the international world. Indeed, I do not
believe that the constructive possibilities of protest movements can be
harnessed, nor their destructive presence removed, without some kind of a
clearly characterized institutional response. 

To some extent, this has begun to occur in the form of changing priorities
within international institutions. For example, even though the removal of
poverty and deprivation was not the major object of the Bretton Woods
resolutions, it has now become, at least formally, the acknowledged
principal goal of the World Bank.  

There is more rethinking on the burden of debts of poor countries, and also
on the older IMF-World Bank practice of imposing grossly formulated
"structural reforms" on poor countries often with damaging consequences on
social infrastructure. These are good directions for change, but much more
will be needed, especially in terms of institutional construction (for
example, through setting up dedicated agencies to deal with global equity
and the environment).  

While welcoming what is happening already in the established institutional
structure (such as the World Bank), there has to be a clearer recognition of
the need for a larger departure from the international architecture
inherited from the Bretton Woods. 

The United Nations, including the Secretary-General's Office, can play a
much bigger part in forcing attention on these broader institutional, as
well as policy, concerns, particularly if the U.N. is liberated from the
penury in which it has been typically kept by inadequate financial
provisions and by the refusal of some member countries to pay their dues.
These issues need urgent attention, and doubts provide a better starting
point than complacency.  

Concluding Remarks 

To conclude, there is a compelling need in the contemporary world to ask
questions not only about the economics and politics of globalization, but
also about the values and ethics that shape our conception of the global
world. It is particularly important not to be overwhelmed by the mixture of
obdurate optimism and senseless pessimism that leads to global resignation
and complacent acquiescence. 

We have to think not only about the moral commitments of a global ethics,
but also about the practical need for extending the institutional provisions
in the world, and also of expanding enabling social institution within each
country. It is particularly important to take note of the complementarity
between different institutions, including the market, but also democratic
systems, social opportunities, political liberties, and other institutional
features - old and new.  

And newer institutional departures will be needed both to address the
substantive issues raised by global doubts, and to halt the cycle of
non-communication in which the protest movements have increasingly tended to
confine themselves. 

The global protests of activists across the world can indeed play an
importantly constructive role. However, in order for that to happen, we have
to assess these movements and challenges in terms of the global questions
they pose, rather than for the apparently anti-globalization answers that
their slogans offer. Indeed, the anti-globalization protests are themselves
part of the general process of globalization, from which there is no escape
and no great reason to seek escape.  

But while we have reason enough to support globalization in the best sense
of that idea, there are also critically important ethical and practical
issues that need to be addressed at the same time. We need global ethics as
well as global doubts. What we do not need is global complacency in the
iniquitous world of massive comfort and extreme misery in which we live. We
can - and must - do better than that. 



----------------------------------------------------------------------------
----

Amartya Sen is Nobel Laureate in Economics (1998) and Master at Trinity
College, Cambridge. This article was adapted from comments he gave at a
seminar on globalization arranged by the Falcone Foundation, in memory of
Antonio Falcone, on 23 May, 2001.

By arrangement with: Yale Center for the Study of Globalization 




----------------------------------------------------------------------------
----
# You may be missing other accompanying blurbs, related stories, graphics
etc.
Link to this story as it appears on the site :- It's Right To Rebel
www.outlookindia.com