By Charles Norchi
As President Clinton addressed the World Economic Forum at Davos on Saturday, more than 1,000 people penetrated the Swiss Army, snow, and this secluded Alpine village to protest the forces of globalization. While heads of state, corporate titans, and influential academics pondered the future of globalization in closed sessions, the demonstrations continued.
The picture is one of contrasting extremes - inside, the great beneficiaries of globalization, and outside its discontented, for whom globalizing trends are paved by organic repression dictated by a closed oligarchy. These conflicting perspectives must be bridged or a new global architecture will rest on a shaky foundation.
Globalization is a term describing the inexorable march of forces accelerating the interdependence of the planet to the point where we can speak of a true world community. The process began shortly after World War II, when delegates meeting in the new United Nations decided that how a government treated its own people on its own soil would no longer be its own business.
The Universal Declaration of Human Rights was drafted, and there was a hole in the national armor of sovereignty. In response to global demands, the new force of the idea of human rights began to transcend national borders. This idea of rights - individual choice and human dignity - were the stakes of World War II and the Cold War.
When the Cold War ended, the trends toward globalization accelerated. Ideological boundaries fell, technology and capital flows rendered economic barriers superfluous, and gaps in the armor of sovereignty widened. The early days of globalization were about power, about the individual in the grip of the state. Today it seems to be about wealth and how widely it is shared. However, globalization both enhances and rattles many other values - skill, education, respect, well-being, cultural certitude. And because these trends are about the individual in the grip of global organizations, the problem of power never went away.
In the new global order, international security is widely supplanted by personal insecurity. Thus, organized labor protests world trade meetings in Seattle, farmers attack McDonalds restaurants in France. For globalization's discontents, decision-making power affecting local lives resides with international organizations in Geneva, or a grouping of the most relevant government finance ministers, or an elite membership organization that meets annually at a posh Swiss ski resort. The levers of power appear hidden and out of reach.
For many cultures, globalization is the West over the rest. Ideas, politics, and technology are perceived as following in the footsteps of explorers, missionaries, and soldiers. From a certain standpoint, the trend is in-your-face America. The reaction can be discontent in the extreme, a blowback motivating terrorists like Osama bin Laden. There are gaps in the value of respect that must be bridged. Thus the human rights norms and values that are the prerequisite of globalization must be promoted with cultural sensitivity.
On a global scale it remains to be seen what values will be shared and which individuals and communities will shape them. Who will participate in these decisions and who will decide them? Will free trade be tied to workers' rights, hurting Third World companies and benefiting comparatively rich Western workers? Will Third World economies be forced to adopt First World intellectual property protection, harming their infant industries? Will the new concentration of information content and conduits restrict access to fundamental enlightenment? In short, how will 21st-century humanity divide up the weal and woe of life?
The forces of globalization are proclaimed to carry prosperity to a civilization spanning the planet. This civilization is defined by those with access to capital, education, and advanced communications conduits and content. This is the epidermis of humanity. It does not yet run deep. The great challenge is to render horizontal trends vertical so the benefits reach those who are outcast from globalization's feast. The point of globalization is not that it is global. The point of globalization is that it is local.
The Davos discussions about information technologies, high finance, management, and the environment are important. But absent a hard look at values and their sharing, elite meetings will do little to place the architecture of globalization on a sound footing. Globalization is more than open markets, free capital flows, and international policy cooperation. If the 21st-century path is to be anything less than bumpy, the Davos Club might reflect on what started it all. The new global architecture must not stray from these roots. The cacophony bouncing off Alpine peaks may sound like globalization's discontents, but it is a rising common demand for human dignity.
Charles Norchi is senior fellow in international security studies at Yale University.
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