Symposium: How Should the Left Respond to Globalization?
Chang, Ha-Joon
Debate on the global economy is intense, provoked especially by the protests in Seattle; Washington, D.0 . ; and Prague. But the arguments often come without real proposals. With this in mind,...
...With this in mind, Dissent posed the following question to several commentators: In recent years, the left in the United States and abroad has raised tough questions about "globalization...
...Many of these policies have been airbrushed out of history...
...The degree of globalization during the early postwar years was limited not because technologies did not exist but because then there was a firm international political consensus that unrestrained capitalism would eventually selfdestruct, as it had done through the two world wars and the Great Depression...
...It would be naïve to assume that such changes in decision-making structures alone can do the job...
...rIRST OF ALL, we need to question the widespread assumption that the driving force behind globalization is technological change—cheaper communications and transportation—that cannot, and should not, be "politically" influenced...
...WITH INCREASING international economic integration, it has become popular to argue that we need more and stronger global institutions to deal with new problems that have been overwhelming the existing national and global institutions...
...For example, how many American defenders of free trade know that the United States maintained, in an attempt to protect its "infant industries" from British competition, the highest tariff barrier in the world for nearly a century until the Second World War...
...The WTO may be formally more democratic than the UN, as it does not give veto power to any country, but in practice the more powerful states have disproportionate influence, and its dispute settlement mechanism is beyond the financial and human-resource capabilities of the developing countries...
...The most powerful of them, the World Bank and the IMF, are run on the one-dollar-one-vote principle, while in the ostensibly more democratic United Nations, the most powerful countries have formal veto power...
...Nevertheless, making decisionmaking structures in existing global institutions more democratic is the necessary first step, if we want to see them adopt more "progressive" goals that take into account the interests of the less powerful countries (and indeed of the less powerful in the advanced countries...
...In my view, what is more urgent is not setting up more global institutions (the WFA may be a partial exception here) but changing how the existing institutions work...
...This, in turn, will require a more informed and open debate on the policy options based on a more objective and humble reading of history...
...HA-JooN CHANG teaches economics at the Faculty of Economics and Politics, University of Cambridge, United Kingdom...
...How many of the Swiss or the Dutch who advocate the TRIPS (Trade Related Intellectual Property Rights) agreement in the WTO know that their own countries did not have a patent law until the early twentieth century...
...At the moment, none of them are run "democratically...
...Please present at least two or three practical ideas and the means by which to carry them out.—EDS...
...How many German human rights activists know that in the late nineteenth century the exports of goods made by German convict labor was a big "human rights" issue in Britain...
...10 n DISSENT / Winter 2001...
...Over the last two centuries, technology progressed more or less constantly, but the degree of globalization of the world economy fluctuated wildly...
...On one level, this would require a change in the decision-making structure of major global institutions...
...What institutions—or reforms of existing institutions—would you advocate as the centerpiece of a program of alternatives proposed by the left...
...Second, there has to be wider recognition that when now-advanced countries were "developing," they used all kinds of "developmental" policies that are now frowned upon, if not deemed illegal...
...But, clearly confronting their own history will force advanced countries to have more humility and realism when they demand this or that "standard" from poorer countries...
...The world economy was a lot more globalized in the late nineteenth century than in the 1950s and the 1960s, despite the fact that the earlier period had much less developed communications and transportation technologies...
...Whatever the structure, if decision makers are ill-informed, the best policies won't result...
...Two essential elements need to be part of the debate on the future of the global economy if it is to become more "informed...
...Needless to say, the actual structure of a "democratic" alternative decision-making structure is debatable (for example, one-person-one-vote on a global scale...
...Historical evidence suggests that politics rather than technology DISSENT / Winter 2001 n 9 SYMPOSIUM ultimately shapes the patterns of globalization in a given era...
...The recent plethora of proposals to reform existing institutions, such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Bank, and the Bank for International Settlements, and introduce new ones (for example, the Multilateral Agreement on Investment and the World Financial Authority [WFA]) reflects this trend...
...In the late nineteenth century we had no more than steamships and telegraphy, whereas by the 1960s, we had almost every communications and transportation technology we have now except the Internet...
...Of course, recalling this history is not an attempt to justify deplorable practices that go on in the developing countries today, nor is it to deny the need for some minimum of global standards...
...What we need for a better global order is not yet another proposal for a new institution, but an attempt to make the existing institutions more democratic and just...
...qualified majority voting by countries as in the European Union...
...one-country-one-vote...
...We need a much more open intellectual environment than what is currently offered by the "establishment" academia and mass media...
Vol. 48 • January 2001 • No. 1
