The 49th Revolution

Extract from Academic Work – because I quite like what I say in this one…

Just as the world benefits from greater integration, cooperation and trade as a result of globalisation, so does it suffer from division, self interest and greed. As a collective group of nations attempting to work for common goals, many economic achievements and technological advancements have been made through the spread of global capitalism. However, without giving up some of their sovereign power, and subjecting themselves to the system they have created, the world’s nations have not been able to meet the challenges of poverty, environmental destruction and the threat posed by weapons of mass destruction that significantly endanger the world and its community today. Without trust in their international governance systems, the world will never be able to move past these intractable issues.

 Globalisation, and with it global capitalism, has changed the world in significant ways. Using the term globalisation in his book Power, profit and protest: Australian social movements and globalisation, Burgmann (2003, p.2) refers to the emergence of a global economy, based on transnational corporations, international banks and increasing socio-economic polarisation (Burgmann, 2003, p.2). As the Global Policy Forum (“Globalization”, n.d.) describes it:

 “As globally mobile capital reorganizes business firms, it sweeps away regulation and undermines local and national politics. Globalization creates new markets and wealth, even as it causes widespread suffering, disorder, and unrest. It is both a source of repression and a catalyst for global movements of social justice and emancipation.”

(Global Policy Forum, n.d.)

The personal growth and economic advances possible as a result of greater interaction and the expansion of the free market has put pressure on the world’s leaders to work together more cooperatively. This has resulted in increased liberalisation and regulation of the world’s nations, with the creation of the United Nations (UN), World Bank, International Monetary Fund (IMF) and other global organisations – targeted at controlling, regulating and easing the transition into an integrated global economy.

 The rise of global capitalism has brought with it many benefits to humanity. As Reich (2007, p.3) points out, since the 1970’s the United States and global economy has soared. Consumers in the Western World have been given access to a vast array of new products and services, including personal computers, iPod’s, cars, food and clothing – while the standard prices of goods and services has declined. As it was designed to do, Capitalism has fulfilled its role of enlarging the economy and its benefits for the people (Reich, 2007, p.4). It has allowed for greater and faster developments, regulated by the amount of space it is given by democracy and regulation. As seen in most western economies (Reich, 2007, p.4), an effective trade-off between growth and equity, managed by democracy, has enabled global capitalism to grow through its reliance on personal incentives to save, invest and compete.

 However, the role of democracy in taming capitalism has been weakening. As economic capital and growth inevitably migrates to the top (Reich, 2007, p.209), the means once used to tame it have eroded , including progressive income taxes, effective public schooling and powerful trade unions (Reich, 2007, p.5). Supercapitalism – a concept explored in depth by Reich in the book Supercapitalism: The Transformation of Business, Democracy, and Everyday Life - has emerged to replace democratic capitalism (Reich, 2007, p.7). Under supercapitalism, capitalism starts spreading across the world and intensifying completion begins to spill over into politics. Elected officials have become less concerned with communities and more concerned with corporations, businesses and funding their election campaigns, and lobbyists now push for economic advantages rather than community growth (Reich, 2007, p.7). Supercapitalism has enabled the prioritisation of profit over equity.

 The effects on humanity have been severe, more so in less developed nations who fall victim to global capitalism.  While there are widening inequalities in Western economies, most citizens enjoy a reasonable level of social security, housing and basic rights provisions, as well as access to cheap goods and services.  The wealth and accessibility of resources to provide this comes at the expense of less developed nations, with corporations and big business outsourcing production of goods to less developed nations, desperate for a slice of the capitalist pie. Big business, whose aim is to make production as cheap as possible – plays these nations off against each other, forcing them down to increasingly lower prices at the expense of their workers. Kelsey, a journalist who toured the world’s developing nations and production areas, describes workers who are forced to work in what are essentially sweatshops because they need money to save their children from being sent to Saudi Arabia, who have to pay a bribe to get a job, who have to work inhuman hours for pittance so that we can have cheap clothes (Kelsey, 2009, p.234). In 2005 it was estimated that 3 billion people live on less than $2 per day (Broinowski, 2005, p.210). The Western world has achieved economic security and advantage, and significantly reduced the exploitation of its people – by outsourcing the exploitation to the less developed nations.

 There has been significant work across the world to ameliorate this poverty and exploitation. The UN has created financial institutions such as the World Band and the IMF, who work to sustain the global economy and pull many countries out of poverty through sizeable loans (Broinowski, 2005, p.4). At the Millenium Summit the UN’s member states agreed to attempt to significantly improve the welfare of poor countries by 2015, and eradicate extreme poverty and hunger (Broinowski, 2005, p.169). In the 80’s and 90’s the development of microfinance institutions – formalising the practice of extending small loans to those without meaningful collateral (Sundaresan, 2009, pp. 4-5) – made great strides in assisting the poor in areas such as South East Asia to engage with the profits of capitalism. However as Broinowski (2005, pp.4-5) goes on to describe, despite initiatives such as these up to 3 billion still live on less than $2 per day, over 30million have AIDS/HIV, and poverty, famine and disease continue to threaten the lives of the poor. The global strategies to ameliorate world poverty and hunger do not appear to be working.

 Some argue that the failure of these initiatives is in the very nature of capitalism itself.

 “…each actor preys off the defeat of others so that capitalist globalization promotes a self-interested me-first attitude that generates hostility and destroys solidarity between individuals, industries, and states. Public and social goods are downplayed, private ones elevated. Businesses and nations augment their own profits while imposing losses on others. Human well being and development for everyone is not a guiding precept.”

(Albert, 2001)

The argument that global capitalism is inherently flawed, that it is not built for equity and cooperation but for profit and greed, is a strong one. Reich places the blame not in capitalism but in the democratic system – stating that as global capitalism has developed it has become more responsive to consumers, while democracy has become less responsive to citizens (2007, p.5). Just as capitalism’s role is to enlarge the economy and its opportunities, it is democracy’s role to define the rules of the game – how the revenue is distributed and regulated, the balance between equity and growth (Reich, 2007, p.4). The responsibility for this should lie with the UN, however Broinowski (2005, p.210) posits that the UN is only as good as its member states allow it to be – and they have chosen to keep it powerless, with non-binding treaties, preservation of sovereign interests and prioritising personal economic growth over world equity. The preservation of veto in the creation of the UN Security Council – allowing any of the 5 permanent members to protect themselves from sanction or disciplinary action (Lepard, 2002, p.310), has been exercised many times since the UN’s inception to limit and halt the UN’s power to enact regulation or change.

 The negative impacts of global capitalism have not just been in poverty, hunger and development – but also in its impacts on the natural environment. Consensus among the majority of climate scientists and many policy makers (Roberts, 2005, p.120) is that man-made greenhouse gases have pushed the world temperature up 3 degrees Fahrenheit in the last century – significant considering the end of the last Ice Age was triggered by a 3 degree rise in temperature. Already this has resulted in a 15 percent shrinking in the polar ice caps, a significant rise in sea level, and environmental devastation due to increasing floods and hurricanes (Roberts, 2005, p.121). Roberts (2005, p.121) describes a study by British Energy, which found that a potential further four degree increase would result in agricultural losses, soil erosion, desertification and flooding in excess of $265billion per year worldwide. It goes on to state that the potential impact on water supplies could exceed $300billion per year – and none of these costs include the resulting health costs, weather damage etc. There is now an unavoidable awareness that the global community needs to manage and attempt the prevention of the global climate crisis.

 The first international steps to address this were taken in September 2002, at the UN World Summit on Sustainable Development. The summit was a 10 day policy conference targeted at reducing world poverty, and as a part of the strategy they discussed the role sustainable energy could play (Roberts, 2005, p.281). At the summit, there was a proposal by the UK, Germany and other European states which called for a commitment to increase renewable energy to a 15% share of the global energy market by 2010. However  Roberts (2005, p.282) notes that other countries – especially diplomats from the OPEC oil states fearing threats to their market share, poorer nations fearing a threat to cheap hydrocarbon energy, and America concerned with its political viability back home – banded together under America’s leadership to oppose the motion, and voted it down. Other provisions since have included the Climate Change Convention negotiated at the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, later reviewed at the Johannesburg Summit in 2002, which obliged all signatories to reduce man-made greenhouse emissions but didn’t set any targets (Broinowski, 2005, p.187). Some small success was gained in 1997 when the Kyoto Protocol was added to the convention, with a limit for emissions by each industrialised country. With Russia’s ratification, this became a binding treaty on February 16, 2005 – with the 34 industrialised nations undertaking to reduce their own carbon dioxide emissions by 5.2 percent of 1990 levels by 2012 (Broinowski, 2005, p.187). The international community agreed on the need to reduce emissions, and made binding agreements to do so.

 However not all polluting countries were obligated to decrease their emissions, or chose to ratify the protocol. The United States, which is responsible for 36.1 percent of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions, refused to ratify the Kyoto Protocol, as did Australia and some small emitters (Broinowski, 2005, p.188). Broinowski (2005, p.188) noted others that were classed as developing countries were not required to meet the targets, inclusive of China – one of the world’s largest polluters and growing rapidly. Strong factors at play were the profitability of non-renewable resources, the costs of sustainable energy development, and the investment of the global community in non-renewable energy.

 “…nearly every participant in the modern energy economy, from individual consumers to multinational oil companies to superpowers, is so deeply invested in the status quo that any fundamental change poses enormous political and economic risks.”

(Roberts, 2005, p.283)

Countries need to balance economic development with environmental protection, and the effectiveness of the Kyoto Protocol reflects how the competing interest between the principle of state autonomy and the need for international cooperation limits the powers of the UN (Shaw, 2008, p.850). Yet again we see the conflict posed when an individual country’s personal economic interests or needs are given priority over global issues, creating intractable problems for the globalised world.

 A contributor to this issue is the preservation of security for nations and citizens. Time and time again in the past century the threat of nuclear weapons and other weapons of mass destruction have impacted on the decisions, actions and reservations of the international community. Only limited areas of international law have been applied to nuclear weapons, despite numerous attempts to address the issue. Koppe covers some of these in the publication The Use of Nuclear Weapons and the Protection of the Environment during International Armed Conflict. Koppe (2008, pp.1-3) describes the shift from the first resolution of the UN General Assembly – establishing the Atomic Energy Commission to make proposals for the elimination of Weapons of Mass Destruction – to the focus in the 60’s on a step-by-step approach, necessitated by a mutual distrust and the volatitlity of the situation. The international community was forced to set more limited and less ambitious goals, targeted at preventing the creation of weapons of mass destruction, limiting nuclear testing, and in the case of the U.S. and Russia, agreeing to reduce their stock of weapons. Some progress was made to reduce the threat of weapon’s of mass destruction to the world’s security.

 The target of eliminating weapons of mass destruction is still very far off. One constant and immovable spectre in the international community is that of North Korea, who survived after the collapse of the Soviet Union, defying 60 years of predictions for its collapse, and which has gained an oversized place in global politics through its pursuit of nuclear weapons (Evans, 2007). It shuns engagement with the global community or economy, making it difficult for other parties to intervene. Currently in possession of several nuclear missiles, it uses them to force the global community to provide support for it’s impoverished, teetering economy. In his foreword to the book North Korea on the Brink: Struggle for Survival , by Glyn Ford – a pioneer in relations between the European Union and North Korea – Evans notes that there is no other effective solution to the problem except to work long term at trying to bring North Korea into the international world (Evans, 2007). Even today, North Korea threatens the world with nuclear attack to force international aid from the global community. This situation among many others, has intensified the nationalistic, security focused stance of world nations attempting international cooperation.

 Global capitalism has brought much growth and development to the world, but unrestrained and unregulated it has created vast challenges for humanity in its disregard for human life, the environment and those left behind. As a system based on the realist concept of inevitable self interest, it requires strong, democratic liberalism and international cooperation to keep it in check and to regulate it. The world has attempted this with the United Nations and associated institutions, but is reluctant to give them any power for fear of their economic and personal security. Unless the world’s nations place some trust and power in their international governance systems, they will never be able to overcome the challenges that face the world today. In the end, the UN is only as powerful as its members choose to make it, and their own self interest will continue to damage humanity and the environment unless this begins to change.

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References

 Albert, M. (2001, September 6). “What Are We For?”. Retrieved March 2009, from the Global Policy Forum Website: http://www.globalpolicy.org/globaliz/econ/2001/0906gbz.htm

 Broinowski, A., & Wilkinson, J. (2005). The Third Try: Can the UN Work? Carlton North, Victoria: Scribe

 Burgmann, V. (2003). Power, profit and protest: Australian social movements and globalisation. Crows Nest, NSW: Allen & Unwin.

 Evans, G. (2007). Foreword. In G. Ford & S. Kwon (2007). North Korea on the Brink: Struggle for Survival. Pluto Press. Retrieved March 30^th, 2009, from: http://www.crisisgroup.org/home/index.cfm?id=5058

 Global Policy Forum. [n.d.]. “Globalization”. Retrieved March, 2009, from the Global Policy Forum Website: http://www.globalpolicy.org/globaliz/index.htm

 Kelsey, T. (2008). Where am I Wearing? : A Global Tour to the Countries, Factories, and People that Make Our Clothes. Hoboken: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

 Koppe, E. (2008). The Use of Nuclear Weapons and the Protection of the Environment during International Armed Conflict. Oxford: Hart Publishing Ltd.

 Lepard, B.D. (2002). Rethinking Humanitarian Intervention: a fresh legal approach based on fundamental ethical principles in international law and world religions. Pennsylvania, University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press.

 Reich, R.B. (2007). Supercapitalism: The Transformation of Business, Democracy, and Everyday Life. New York: Alfred A. Knopf

 Roberts, P. (2005). The end of Oil: On the Edge of a Perilous World. New York: Mariner Books

 Shaw, M.N. (2008). International Law. Leiden: Cambridge University Press.

Sundaresan, S. (2009). Microfinance: Emerging Trends and Challenges. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar Publishing Limited