MINISTERIO DE HACIENDA Y ADMINISTRACIONES PÚBLICAS

any of the early anti-globalizers, even when differentially ani- mated by one or more of the concerns and intellectual argu- ments I have outlined, typically described themselves in unison as seeking recognition as “stakeholders” who sought a voice, even a vote, and at times a veto, in the globalization process.

But, as became fairly clear fairly soon, there were two kinds of stake- holders: those to be seen in the streets and heard at times in strident voices, who wished to drive a stake through the global system, and those who wished to exercise their stake so as to participate in and influence the system. The former are “stake-wielding” groups, the latter “stake- asserting” groups.

Indeed, the street-theater stake-wielding NGOs see themselves as the “people’s pitchforks,” to be used in the war against globalization. It is a sad reality that politicians such as the affable President Bill Clinton, who could feel your pain before you did, indulged the stake-wielding groups even when they broke into violence, while politicians with firmer backbones chided them instead.1 _{Prime Minister Tony Blair, with admi-}

rable forthrightness, called the violent among them “louts,” that archaic but evocative epithet that has unfortunately vanished from American parlance, when they trashed Trafalgar Square and much else on May Day some years ago.

By contrast, the stake-asserting NGOs—such as the Center for Sci- ence and Environment in India and the International Forum on Global- ization in the United States—prefer to be in the corridors rather than out in the streets, urging reasoned discourse as a way to advance their agendas, and using the sedate methods of glossy, researched pamphlets and policy briefs to put their oars into the policy waters.2 _{They worked}

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quietly at seminars and debates at the Madison Hotel during the WTO meeting in Seattle while the demonstrators and their militant friends took to the streets. And they plotted with the assembled conclave of the heads of leading U.S. foundations to get on the gravy train of grants for research and participation at meetings that were hitherto confined to more conventional scholars on campuses.

The tension between the stake-wielding and stake-asserting NGOs has now become manifest: I was witness to the heads of some leading NGOs, with serious preoccupations and matching research, at the 2001 Davos meetings urging that we not mix them up with these noisy pro- testers either.

If the stake-wielding proponents of hard-core anti-globalization attitudes were all we had to contend with, our prospects would be pretty dim. We would be talking to them across a chasm that they would not cross. If they extend their hand across the divide, it is not to shake your hand but to wrestle brutally with it. Fortunately, however, they are no longer the most compelling players on the stage.

The center of gravity among the anti-globalization movements has actually been shifting toward the stake-asserting groups, which are im- passioned but have a definable set of concerns that can be met by en- gagement and dialogue. These are the vast numbers of fairly serious civil society organizations that have emerged worldwide. As explored and explained in Chapter 4, some powerful ones have turned away from the traditional preoccupations with advancing domestic social agendas, such as the elimination of dowry payments and implementation of land re- forms to assist the landless, to an external preoccupation with the effects of economic globalization.3 _{Yet others, created deliberately to address}

worldwide concerns, have also emerged.

So as we sit down with these groups, alongside or across from them at the table, we must ask: what worries them? I would argue that it is the broadly social effects of economic globalization that they are concerned with. They have profound questions, and often alarming certainties, about globalization’s ill effects on many social fronts, such as the effect on poverty and on child labor. These dramatic concerns have dominated the globalization debate so much that people commonly assume that economic globalization harms, not advances, social agendas—that glo- balization needs a human face.

Indeed, we now confront the ready assumption (that is endemic by now even in some international institutions) that if capitalism has pros- pered and economic globalization has increased while some social ill has worsened, then the first two phenomena must have caused the third! It has gotten to an almost farcical level where if your girlfriend walks out

on you, it must be due to globalization—after all, she may have left for Buenos Aires. These critics need to be asked, with a nod to Tina Turner’s famous song “What’s Love Got to Do with It?”: what’s globalization got to do with it?

The chief task before those who consider globalization favorably, then, is to confront the fears that while globalization may be economi- cally benign (in the sense of increasing the pie), it is socially malign.4

These fears relate to several areas, among them accentuation of poverty in both rich and poor countries, erosion of unionization and other la- bor rights, creation of a democratic deficit, harming of women, imper- iling of local mainstream and indigenous cultures, and damage to the environment.

It is perhaps interesting to recall that (admittedly different) social effects were not entirely ignored by the earliest economist proponents of trade in nineteenth-century England. They argued, however, that these effects beyond the economic realm were benign, not malign. Just one quote from John Stuart Mill should illustrate:

[T]he economical advantages of commerce are surpassed in importance by those of its effects, which are intellectual and moral. It is hardly possible to overrate the value, in the present low state of human improvement, of plac- ing human beings in contact with persons dissimilar to themselves, and with modes of thought and action unlike those with which they are familiar. Com- merce is now, what war once was, the principal source of this contact. . . . There is no nation which does not need to borrow from others, not merely particular arts or practices, but essential points of character in which its own type is inferior.5

But today’s alarmist anti-globalization critics of the social effects of eco- nomic globalization would consider yesterday’s pro-globalization writ- ers to be complacent by contrast with themselves. And at first blush, which is what many are happy to settle for, their fears do appear often to be plausible. But the key task before us today is to consider whether, on closer analytical and empirical examination, these fears turn out to be well founded. We must also ask where the balance of arguments seems to lie. This is precisely the analysis that I undertake in Part II.

If I conclude, as I do after the close examination in Part II, that eco- nomic globalization is on balance socially benign, then the proponents of the view that globalization needs a human face are raising a false alarm. This is not an idle conclusion. It has important implications for appro- priate governance to oversee and manage the phenomenon.

If you believe that globalization needs a human face, that it is largely a malevolent social force, you will want to inhibit, constrain, reshape, and challenge it; you will want perhaps to throw sand into the gears, and

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in extremis to throw it into the tank and bring the engine to a halt, much as the stake-wielding anti-globalization groups wish to do. But instead, as I hope to convince the readers of this book, if you believe that global- ization has a human face, you will think of a very different set of policies and institutions to accompany it. Among them, you will want to think of policies to enhance, supplement, complement, and accentuate its good outcomes.

To illustrate: if you believe that globalization creates more, rather than less, child labor, you will want to draw back from globalization. But if you conclude that globalization reduces child labor, you will want to know what added policies will reduce it yet more.

Given that Part II concludes that globalization has a human face, Chapter 3 sketches how the question of appropriate governance must be addressed in that event. Chapter 15 specifically and Part IV generally do this in depth.

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Globalization Is Good