Seeking Social Justice through Globalization

...Even as globalization holds out hope for reducing poverty in poor countries, it also causes serious pain, not least in the already developed nations...

...After all, the miserly way the United States deals with its poor almost certainly reflects more the efforts of the wealthy in this country to maintain their privileges than it does globalization's requirements...

...As Kitching sees it, there is a need to implement social policy of this kind at the international level...

...In the past, poor nations were confined to being suppliers of raw materials and agricultural goods...

...Advances in communications and transportation have allowed manufacturing production processes to be located practically anywhere that the appropriate infrastructure (and welcoming policies) is in place...

...But aside from a reference to the increased competitive pressures that are experienced in the global economy, there is little here to justify his conclusion that poor people "will be able to look less and less to the government of their national states for effective protection from the economically polarizing or impoverishing effects of free-market capitalism...

...He is very pessimistic about the ability of public sectors to provide the supports that globalization's dislocations require...

...Kitching concedes that he is less clear about what will replace the nation as the unit of decision making than he is about the need for such a change...

...The movement of jobs to poor countries means job loss in rich countries...

...The problem for Kitching in all of this is that he believes the nation-state is no longer an effective vehicle by which to correct such damage-in this case providing income support and job retraining...

...For Kitching, the increase in human interdependence that has accompanied the dispersion of production is the essence of globalization...

...What is worse, because there is not yet an antinationalist (pro-globalization) left, no political force has even started to call for such supportive social policies at the global level...

...That alone should make Kitching's book required reading for all who would take seriously their commitment to a moral social order in an age of increased international economic integration...

...What drives Kitching's analysis is the increasing economic integration of the world economy resulting from the relocation of economic activities away from Europe and North America in the last thirty years...

...Only if we transcend a nationalist perspective will we be able to get beyond the belief that an advance in domestic well-being is more important than economic growth elsewhere...

...He believes that the unit of policy making has to be raised from the nation-state to the global level in order to implement policies that successfully alleviate suffering...

...ECONOMIC JUSTICE FOR MOST Jay R. Mandle In this book, Gavin Kitching, a British citizen who teaches in Australia, has taken on the responsibility of addressing and attempting to reverse the humanitarian left's opposition to globalization...

...But almost certainly he has gone too far in writing off the viability of the national welfare state...

...It follows, therefore, that nationalism and nationalist thinking are increasingly anachronistic...

...As Kitching puts it, "if the same capital movement which leads to the loss of 200 jobs in Australia leads to the creation of 450 jobs in China there has been a net human gain in welfare...

...Jay R. Mandle is W. Bradford Wiley Professor of Economics at Colgate University...

...Since the 1960s, though, manufacturing in such countries has in-| creased very rapidly, bringing with it as well financial and service activities...

...To try to limit policy making in this way, Kitching writes, "actually and actively prevents us" from seeing what we need to see "if we are to act aright...

...Where this has occurred, living standards have risen...

...In particular, policies to alleviate poverty and suffering can no longer be adequately crafted at the national level...

...Similarly, the success the French have experienced in implementing a thirty-five-hour work week, despite the alarms that doing so would bankrupt the country, suggests that there is more scope for national social policy than Kitching or other theorists of globalization acknowledge...

...Thus, even as globalization means that more and lower-cost goods are made available and employment opportunities are created where previously there were none, the innocent victims of this progress have to be attended to...

...Rather than being a process that should be approached with caution and constrained if possible, Batching believes that "globalization can be of enormous benefit to the poorest and most oppressed people of the world, but only if the process is carried much further than it has been to date...

...What he has gotten profoundly right is that as globalization proceeds, we will have to adjust our sights increasingly away from the national to the international if our search for justice is to be fruitful...

...If, as I suspect, many readers of this magazine are in fact globalization skeptics, then the Commonweal readership represents a segment of his intended audience...

...Though he overstates his case, Kitching has performed a valuable service in calling for an "antinationalist left politics...

...Policy has to be adopted and enforced in what he calls "some transnational way" but, he continues, "as yet (and for very good reasons) nobody has any clear idea what such arrangements might be or how indeed they might practically be put in place or enforced...

...Kitching's call to consider the interests of everyone, not just those who share nationality, is a challenge that will assume enhanced importance with the passage of time...

...Kitching, of course, uses this argument to bolster his claim that such supportive policies will have to be implemented globally...

...In this, of course, there is an issue of morality at work as well...

...But as he is only too well aware, nothing of the kind is even remotely on the political horizon...

...Though I share much of Kitching's perspective, I think he has painted himself into a corner by exaggerating the extent to which national governments no longer can effectively act to raise incomes...

...Kitching's thesis turns on its head the conventional wisdom that prevails among many liberals and activists...

...Indeed, just the threat of relocation can put downward pressure on wage rates...