Hazel Henderson-
Advancing The Debate On Globalization
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FROM PORTO ALEGRE TO LYON:
Advancing the Debate on Globalization
Lyon, France:
Lyon, 2000-year old
World Heritage city, home of France’s first stock market in the 16th
century, also hosted the first Earth Dialogues on ethics for humanizing
globalization. Over 1000 delegates gathered from around the world –
parliamentarians, diplomats, business leaders, academics and civic leaders –
many fresh from the World Social Forum in Porto Alegre, Brasil.
Launched by Mikhail
Gorbachev, now President of Green Cross International and Maurice Strong,
Secretary-General of the 1992 Rio Earth Summit, the Dialogues were splendidly
hosted by the Mayor and the City of Lyon at a dinner reception at the historic
town hall. French Prime Minister Lionel Jospin, now running neck and neck with
President Jacques Chirac in France’s upcoming presidential elections, warmly
endorsed the Dialogues in his keynote speech. Jospin stressed the importance of
the conference goals of putting ethics and human values at the center of
globalization processes.
Even the officials
representing the World Bank, the IMF and the WTO were conciliatory. They
listened to the chastisements of Ann Pettifor of the worldwide Jubilee
grassroots campaign for debt relief and Jean-Luc Cipiere of ATTAC, which
advocates currency exchange taxes for poverty-alleviation and is one of the
organizers of the Porto Alegre World Social Forums. The WTO’s Deputy Director
Paul-Henri Ravier was obdurate. After reciting the familiar WTO mantra about
its status as an inter-governmental body not obliged to deal with civic society
and not competent on environmental issues, he left the Roundtable on Reforming
International Financial Institutions. Thomas Dawson of the IMF and Kristalina
Georgieva of the World Bank admitted the many faults and mistakes of their
respective institutions, and stressed reforms now being undertaken to correct
them.
Mr. Ravier of the WTO
could have benefited from hearing all the well-reasoned arguments of critics.
They showed how much more socially and environmentally-sound WTO rulings would
be if informed by full-cost pricing, corrected national GNP accounting for
external costs, social capital and ecological assets. If all world trade in
goods were thus accounted in accurate prices, it would reveal that, generally,
local and regional trade is the most efficient. This fact is also masked by
huge taxpayer subsidies to trade: infrastructure, roads, airports, harbors,
shipping and energy. Arguments against the patenting of life forms, GMO foods
and life-saving pharmaceuticals, led to recommendations that all these should be
outside the WTO and TRIPs agreements and remain in the public domain.
This Roundtable
reported out policy proposals including allowing heavily-indebted countries to
declare bankruptcy, following Chapter 9 US laws, which allow bankrupt
municipalities to maintain all public and social services. The IMF no longer
resists such proposals – after its involvement in the financial meltdown of
Argentina. Other proposals included international taxation of currency
transactions, airline tickets, fuel, carbon emissions, arms sales, etc.. to fund
global public goods: health, education, clean water and environmental
protection. A lively debate over the role of currency trading (currently $1.5
trillion daily) and “hot money”, i.e., short-term investment speculative capital
flight and the plight of Argentina, led to some new proposals.
Developing countries
were urged to help themselves, by diversifying their currency reserves away from
over-reliance on US dollars toward euros, since this desire for dollars merely
drives its current over-valuation (by some 15%) and helps precipitate crises in
countries whose currencies were tied to the dollar, such as Argentina. Holding
more of their reserves in euros would create a better world currency reserve
system of both euros and dollars. These two strong currencies might then move
toward parity, and could be pegged together – offering a new measure of global
financial stability. The fundamentals of the euro zone countries are sounder in
any case than the fundamentals of the US economy, which is burdened by huge
corporate and household debt, yawning trade deficits and losing its charm as the
world’s haven for flight-capital. These issues of finance are vastly more
important than those of trade, since 90% of global flows represent speculative
finance versus only 10% that represent actual trade on goods and services.
The “galloping
unilateralism” of the USA was decried by most of the other seven roundtables
(business, politics and democracy, media, religious organizations, global
governance, former foreign ministers and civic society). Resentment was
widespread about the USA’s penchant for throwing its weight about, abrogating
treaties, and simplistic bombast: “Are you for or against the US in the fight
against evil?” Mr. Bush’s immoderate rhetoric is distasteful in Europe and the
subject of many cartoons in major newspapers. Other targets were transnational
corporations and particularly media corporations that were criticized as
monopolistic, promoting unsustainable forms of over-consumption, violence and
human degradation. All corporations should adopt “triple bottom line”
accounting (economic, social and environmental), promulgate standards and
principles of ethical behavior and corporate responsibility to be externally
audited for compliance – particularly companies that have engaged with the UN
Global Compact and similar statements of principles of good corporate
citizenship.
New
institution-building at the global level was seen as a prerequisite for the
continuation of globalization processes. Many pointed out that today’s economic
globalization, the result of 1980s deregulation, privatization and spread of
markets was already unstable and might end in a global depression, as in the
1930s. Globalization could not continue without a new framework of global
ethics, values, norms, treaties and regulations to protect the global commons.
Taxing commercial exploitation of these common natural resources could provide
global public goods, as well as to protect human rights, labor standards,
cultures and traditional informal sectors and livelihoods.
The goals of many
delegates revolved around the two world summits of 2002, on Financing for
Development in Monterrey, Mexico, March 18-23 and that on Sustainable
Development in Johannesburg, S. Africa in early September. US obstructionism on
reform of the global financial architecture, together with the bi-lateral
politics between President Bush and President Vicente Fox of Mexico might abort
the aspirations of the Monterrey Summit.
Only a large
contingent of activist NGOs with Internet and media skills will keep the hopes
for Monterrey and Johannesburg alive. The old “Washington Consensus”
development model is now discredited after the meltdowns in Asia, Russia,
Turkey, Argentina and rising world poverty gaps – not to mention the current
Enron and accounting scandals. Like the Porto Alegre World Social Forum, the
Earth Dialogues spelled out a viable, rich vision of sustainable, equitable,
ecologically-sound development. Lyon confirmed that “Another World is
Possible!”
****
Hazel Henderson, author of Beyond Globalization and other books, is a partner with The Calvert Group (USA) in The Calvert-Henderson Quality of Life Indicators (updates on www.calvert-henderson.com). She participated in The Roundtable on reform of global finance at the Earth Dialogues.