“Globalization is rooted in human nature, in technology, in the deliberate attempt of certain individuals and groups to reach out into the whole world, in the increasing contacts among peoples, and nations and governments, in the efforts of donor-partner organizations to link hands on equal but different terms with receiver-partner organizations in the Third World in order to establish a new, Just World Order, diametrically different from the Unjust World Disorder which capitalist economic globalization hopes to achieve.”_______________________________
by Paul Caspersz
(April 05, Colombo, Sri Lanka Guardian) There is no need for us to be paralyzed by the spectre of the globalization now striding the whole world from the remotest villages of Africa and the mountain fastnesses of the Himalayas to the tribes in the Pacific rim of islands. For globalization is of many kinds and is not only the kind of globalization that is on the rampage in the world today. To this predatory type of globalization there is no need to capitulate and to say with Margaret Thatcher, who was probably the first to use the phrase, TINA, There Is No Alternative.
To the TINA of Thatcher we must oppose the TAMA of the Third World, There Are Many Alternatives. And they are real, practical and feasible alternatives. But they are practical and feasible on condition that our people and our leaders have the courage to stand up to the predominant type of globalization, now stalking the world in search of more and more prey. It is the globalization that has been hijacked by the Washington Consensus, consisting of the United States Treasury, the World Bank and the IMF.
Our task will be fourfold. First, the definition and description of globalization. Second, the delineation of the various phases of globalization in the history of humankind. Third, the signs of contemporary globalization in the world at large and in our own country in our own day and time. Finally, why TINA is a lie, why to submit to it is a superstition and why TAMA is the only way for us to go ahead with dignity and self-respect.
The Meaning of Globalization
The debate today is about capitalist economic globalization with its overflow into the areas of politics and culture. But this is only one of the types of globalization.
Globalization may be defined as a process by which an idea, or an event which gives concrete form to the idea, moves from being of merely local import and significance to assume not merely national but international, meaning and importance.
Globalization is rooted in human nature, in technology, in the deliberate attempt of certain individuals and groups to reach out into the whole world, in the increasing contacts among peoples, and nations and governments, in the efforts of donor-partner organizations to link hands on equal but different terms with receiver-partner organizations in the Third World in order to establish a new, Just World Order, diametrically different from the Unjust World Disorder which capitalist economic globalization hopes to achieve.
Of each of these roots of globalization much can be said. However, within the compass of the present brief essay, we shall limit ourselves to the globalizability inherent in human nature by the very fact that it is human.
The human is essentially social and communitarian. The human as human wants and needs to communicate with other humans from the time that it is first conceived in the womb of another human being. In order to communicate it uses language, not this or that language; but just language which is the fundamental means of communication between one human being and another who may be mother, father, sister or brother or anyone else near or far. Language used by the first human being by the very nature of the human is globalizable and is, in fact, globalized.
The great American linguistic anthropologist, Edward Sapir [1884-1939], writes: "Many primitive languages have a formal richness, a latent luxuriance of expression that eclipses anything known to the languages of modern civilizations... Popular statements as to the extreme poverty of expression to which primitive languages are doomed are simply myths.
As for language, so also for religion. To quote Edward Sapir again: "Religion is man’s never-ceasing attempt to discover a road to spiritual serenity across the perplexities and dangers of daily life... A very useful distinction can be made between ‘a religion’ and ’religion’. "The former appears only in a highly developed society in which religious behaviour has been organized by tradition, the latter is universal". Sapir may well have said, Religion is globalized, any particular religion is globalizable, but the words were not in popular usage when he wrote.
Because globalization is, as we have said, rooted in human nature, it should cause no wonder its beginning may be found in the beginnings of the human race. Actual globalization may be delayed by several thousands of centuries because of the limitations of travel and transport in those far distant times, but globalizability of human ideas and human events was always present.
Phases
The phases of globalization may therefore by briefly outlined as follows:
First in line is the phase of primitive globalization In terms of duration it is by far the longest phase. The motives of primitive globalizers were trade for the merchants and wonder and the excitement of discovery for the others. Much later came the globalizing vision of great religious leaders. "Without the existence of a global system," writes Samir Amin "we would not be able to understand how Islam, Buddhism, Christianity and other religions could have travelled so far." During this first phase globalization did not have the predatory character that was to begin in the third phase and then increase exponentially.
The second phase, which prepares the way for the third, begins with the breakdown of European feudalism, maybe as early as the 10th or 11th century. Feudalism is tied to land, which by its very nature is local. As it breaks down, the social economy begins to allow more and more the penetration of money, which by its very nature is international or global.
The third phase is that of classical colonialism, beginning in the late 15th century, by which vast lands in Asia, South and Central America, Africa and elsewhere were seized by European people and drawn into the service of the colonizing countries. It is in this phase that great differences in wealth and poverty both among nations and among persons arise: a few become very wealthy and the majority of nations and persons are forced into poverty.
The fourth phase is the period of the industrial revolution beginning in the 18th century or earlier in Europe, and from then maintaining a symbiotic relationship with colonialism, to strengthen the stranglehold of European people over the economies of the colonized.
During this period two events took place in the Western world which should have led it to give thought to the rights of millions of people in the colonies and dependencies: the French revolution of 1789 with its ideas of liberty, equality and fraternity and the American War of Independence of 1776 which abolished slavery. But these remained events of the western world and did not resonate in countries like India or even in Africa from where the slaves were collected.
A third event took place towards the end of the fourth phase in 1917 in Russia. There the October Revolution heralded the coming into being of the socialist Second World. An alternative then began to present itself to the unjust division of the world between a few colonizing countries and many countries colonized or made dependencies of the colonizers. But the latter came to be capable of choosing for their peoples between the alternative ways of life of capitalism or socialism only after, at the end of the Second European War, India and other dependencies became independent and the Chinese resurgence took place under Mao.
The fifth phase is the period be beginning with the closing years of the War which saw the establishment of the United Nations and the Bretton Woods institutions. The UN, working on the principle of ‘one country, one vote’ sought to be basically neutral between the two alternatives of the free enterprise capitalism of the First World and the centrally planned socialism of the Second World. But progressively, because of the pressures of the United States, the United Nations lost ground to the World Bank and the IMF. The latter, working on the principle of ‘more money, more votes’ became the peddlers of free market capitalism all over the world and with the most pernicious results in the Third World.
In the newly independent countries of the Third World - the major influence being India’s - the new leaders followed the path of development or anti-development opened up by colonialism, industrialization and growing economic globalization prescribed with frantic zeal by the United States, the World Bank and the IMF. It looked almost as if the leaders wanted legal independence together with real dependence on the thought patterns of their former colonial masters. The claims of colonialism had fallen off their feet but remained in their minds. The colonized mind is a much greater tragedy than the colonized country and has manifestations much more difficult to eradicate. Gandhi was nearly the sole dissident voice in the wilderness which everyone praised but no one heeded. China too under Mao seemed to offer an alternative to capitalist economic globalization until it too began to capitulate in post-Mao days western capitalist intrigues and pressures.
Finally came the neo-colonial period which we have the misfortune to be in. It is the period of economic globalization and the propagation of a false concept and a wrong process of development.
Signs of Globalization
In numerous articles in the daily and Sunday newspapers and in one composite article in the Economic
Review of April-May 2000 Dr. J. B. Kelegama has magisterially listed and commented upon the signs of globalization worldwide - reliance on the free market as against state action especially to protect the poor from the ravages of the free market steep devaluation of the currencies of poor countries, the phenomenal and ever-expanding growth of the transnational corporations, mergers and acquisitions among the transnationals, their growing power by means both fair and foul over governments’ especially the economically weak and bribeable governments of the Third World, the new bipolarism between the minority rich and the majority poor both within each nation and between nations, the violations of the human rights of workers especially in the more vulnerable developing countries by the transnational giants, the growing criminalization of society, the damage to the environment, the threat to human culture. There is no need again to adduce the figures abundantly given by Dr. Kelegama
However, if the signs of globalization are narrowed down to Sri Lanka, some important points have to be made while there is still some time left for our people to demand that our government takes stock and retraces where necessary its steps.
The first of these is the damage done to the cultural values we have for long centuries held dear.
These are the values of simplicity, sharing generosity and hospitality, especially to the visitor and to the poor - in a word, the value of community. In our country these values have received the unreserved support of Buddhism: they are the values of all traditional societies. Diametrically opposed to these values are the values held dear by economic globalization. These are the values of insatiable consumerism, competition, individualism - in a word, the value of private and personal economic advantage.
But even this destruction of humanistic traditional values is ally the result of a wrong conception of development. The source of all the evils that flow from capitalist economic globalism is that it places money, and not the human person-in-community, at the centre of the concept and process of development. The word, economy, etymologically meaning the management of the household, came with the march of time to mean the management of the affairs of the nation and of the world. If so, it should encompass all that is of concern to the nations of the world, chiefly the quality of life. This is evidently much more than a question of money. The management of the household, the nation and the world should above all else be about the management of the women, men and children of the household, the nation and the world. It is because capitalist economic globalization concerns itself only with money that it truncates development and reduces it to the management and the increase of money.
While it is not true to say that the J. R. Jayewardene government in 1977 was the first in Sri Lanka to accept that there was no alternative to capitalist economic globalization, it was this government that openly and unequivocally made capitalism the keystone of economic development in our country. Within a few years it became clear to all but the wilfully blind that the rich were ostensibly growing richer and that the gap between them and the masses was growing. For the first time we began to detect in the country the class of the ‘stinking rich’ - stinking because of the unprecedented display of their wealth and the obscene extravagance of their way of life. Not so long ago, even as the Sri Lanka Army was suffering severe losses in the North in its war against the Tigers, a local arms supplier, in an obvious bid to rake in further millions from the notoriously lucrative arms industry, hosted a party to political and business high-ups at which liquors of various kinds flowed like water.
Many doctors and lawyers welcome the contemporary capitalist economic globalization process because it enables them to levy fees at own will and pleasure and to earn an easy Rs. 1 million a year or, almost certainly, much more than one million, which of course is not declared to Inland Revenue (hence clients must pay in hard cash and not by cheque, and are not receipted).
Health and Education
Nowhere perhaps are the signs of capitalist economic globalization more clearly visible than in the fields of health care and education.
Governments should be the main providers of mother and child health services, measures for the prevention and control of AIDS, tuberculosis and venereal diseases, leprosy control and the rehabilitation of the victims of leprosy, free outpatient medical treatment. Yet the introduction of "cost recovery" or "user pays’, systems by means of economic globalization processes all over the world, and also increasingly in Sri Lanka today - at the behest of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund and their affiliates - leads to reduced government spending in the interest of balanced budgets and the promotion of the private sector in medical care. In not a few cases doctors in the infamous channels and private hospitals act in collusion with private pharmaceutical companies and private pharmacies, prescribing expensive branded drugs even when the generic drugs or less expensive substitutes are available, relying an the ignorance and simple unsuspectingness of the patients.
Education is the other casualty of capitalist economic globalization. Plans are afoot in Sri Lanka — obviously under pressures from the World Bank and the IMF — drastically to curtail free education. In the controversial new constitutional proposals it is stated that school education will be free between the ages of 5 and 14. Does this mean that all education beyond Grades 8 or 9 will be on a for-fee basis? Maintenance of school buildings, school laboratories and libraries is to be made the responsibility of the parents and private benefactors and maybe of NGOs. The richer parents and past pupils in the schools for the rich will respond, even generously. But what of the schools in the poorer urban areas and in the villages and on the estates? Are they to be allowed to deteriorate until the government will have cause to close them down, which is probably what the pundits of the World Bank would like to see happening.
Capitalist economic globalization will affect the health and education of the poor. But the poor are the overwhelming majority.
Alternatives
Imperialism once was said to be the highest form of capitalism. The last two decades of the 20th century have shown that there is a higher than this highest form. It arises when imperialism becomes neo imperialism, colonialism becomes neo-colonialism and both advance with what look like the invincible weapons of capitalist economic globalization. Especially after the decline and fall of the Soviet Union and its East German allies at the end of the 1980s, even the stoutest defences against capitalism began to crumble. TINA, they say, There Is No Alternative.
Those who say TINA are the inorganic intellectuals. Until the 1980s they mouthed the slogans of socialism but had no base among the people in whose favour ostensibly the struggle _ capitalism had to be undertaken. Now, one after another, the drums of revolution are silenced and ignominious surrender to the enemy is made by the comrades of yester year.
It is the task of all organic intellectuals who have irrevocably taken their places among the people to search for alternatives. The alternative is to live "as if" the falsehoods and the half-truths of hostile globalization did not exist and to pursue service to the People "as if" hostile globalization did not exist. The alternative lies in humanizing globalization. It is in effect a return to primitive globalization but with one tremendous difference: today primitive globalization will take place with all the productive forces of modern times.
There are real possibilities of alternatives. What these are will have to be the subject of future discussion.
- Sri Lanka Guardian
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