Globalisation, social action, and human rights

Miloon Kothari

Introduction

The concern with social action and development dates back to the struggles for independence in the period following World War II. The original notion of development was to open up spaces for deprived social sectors who were themselves often deeply involved in the struggles for self-determination. In that context the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) was conceived, and the United Nations (UN) was set up to promote processes which subsequently gave rise to the concept of development. The state was supposed to be, in its counter-imperial and post-colonial role, a catalyst for social action: a role that received serious attention from civil society organisations (CSOs).

The state's role as a catalyst for social action was, however, subverted by monopolistic tendencies. Soon after the post-colonial phase, both the state and international agencies began to emphasise social and economic policies that focused on wealth-creation. 'Development' thus became tied to the creation of national market economies, to be integrated into a global economic system that was based on market principles. This approach, much accelerated by the deregulation of global markets from the 1980s, has led to growing disparity in the distribution of wealth, polarisation of social classes, and increasing dependence on foreign aid and international capital in many Third World countries. The most recent of these tendencies, especially after the collapse of the socialist states and the emergence of a unipolar world, is known as economic globalisation.

This paper argues that there is a major crisis in the philosophy, the reality, and the very notion of development which, instead of being a process to create conditions for self-reliant, sustainable communities, has become simply a project. The misuse and atomisation of the original understanding of development, which was directly linked to the achievement of social justice, has led to deepening poverty, even in times of economic boom for investors and soaring stock-market indices. This misappropriation has left a painful legacy whose lexicon of acronyms — IMF, WB, SAPs, GATT, WTO, NAFTA — represent lost ideals, lost decades, and a consistent assault on the true development capacities of people and communities.

For those who advocate stable social institutions that can foster policies, laws, and programmes aimed at bringing about social justice, respect for human rights, and development, economic globalisation is already leaving pernicious and long-lasting effects. Further, the dismantling of socially conscious legislation, institutions and programmes, is eroding the social gains made through decades of civil-society struggle.

This paper also argues both that the onus is on CSOs to recapture the radical notion of development and that, ironically, the catalyst for doing so is to be found in the very processes that have been produced by economic globalisation. Ever more intense collaborative transnational alliances are needed to restore what has been destroyed in recent decades. But the inability to understand the many dimensions, some quite technical, of globalisation, the reluctance to challenge the institutions that spearhead it, and a focus only on local-level action will serve to marginalise CSOs, and to consign many millions of people to further exclusion and poverty.

At the dawn of the twenty-first century, economic globalisation is the phenomenon that dominates the world stage. Its many manifestations are all around us, as are its manifold failures. The iniquitous outcomes of economic globalisation have been confirmed in numerous UN reports. Even the international economic policy forums now recognise that the so-called 'trickle down' effect, for long the social justification for economic liberalisation, is not occurring. Studies such as UNCTAD's Trade and Development Report 1997 and UNDP's Human Development Report 1997 (HDR) convincingly show that the opposite is true. UNCTAD demonstrates that since the early 1980s the world economy has been characterised by rising inequality, both among and within countries, that income gaps between North and South continue to widen, and that the income share of the richest 20 per cent has risen almost everywhere, while that of both the poorest 20 per cent and also the middle class has fallen. The HDR 1997 similarly shows that, although poverty has been dramatically reduced in many parts of the world, one-quarter of the human race remains in severe poverty; that the human development index (HDI) declined in the previous year in more than 30 countries — more than in any year since the HDR was first issued in 1990; and that economic globalisation had indeed helped to reduce poverty in some of the largest and strongest developing economies, but had also produced a widening gap between winners and losers among and within countries.

The USA, whose ideology created and sustains the global architecture on which economic globalisation depends, is disgraced, both politically and in terms of its own domestic dispossession and poverty. Poverty is now more widespread and extreme in the USA than in any other industrialised country. What right, then, does the USA have to dictate the world's economic ideology? Powerful voices are now emerging within the USA to question the 'Washington Consensus', the basis of economic globalisation as we know it, including such establishment figures as the Chief Economist of the World Bank, Dr Joseph Stiglitz.

As if the adverse effects of the liberalisation of trade and investment were not enough, attempts are being made to create conditions which will allow for uncontrolled capital flows. The trend began with the establishment of global deregulated markets in the 1980s and 1990s. While massively increased financial mobility has become a primary danger to the health of national economies — as demonstrated by the crisis in...