The WTO meeting and protests in Seattle suggest the need for
a broadened public debate about economics and globalization, particularly
with respect to the developing world. Such a debate should start
by reexamining current ideas about democracy, markets, development
and grass-roots activism.
- Democracy: Political systems based on electoral competition
will be of limited value if they don’t produce at least
some of the benefits that have been associated with democracy
in the past: decent living standards; a say for ordinary people
in how they are governed; freedom to organize in the workplace;
possibilities for cultural expression. Democracies can function
relatively smoothly for years without securing these benefits
for the majority of people. U.S. foreign policy and international
economic institutions such as the International Monetary Fund
have relied on top-down conceptions of democracy and the rule
of law, but have not looked at how people actually live.
What would it mean for the vast majority of people not only to
vote but to exercise the rights of democratic citizens in their
daily lives in neighborhoods, schools, workplaces and cultural
activities?
- Markets: There is no evidence that free markets on
their own promote well being. Majorities of European and U.S.
citizens came to lead secure middle-class lives when working
people organized unions, political parties looked out for workers’
interests and governments acted to regulate business activity.
Free markets in the developing world today are re-creating the
vastly unequal economies of 100 years ago— boom and bust
export cycles and dazzling prosperity alongside misery. The
assembly plants that have burgeoned along the U.S.-Mexico border,
for example, are being replicated in the interior of Mexico
and throughout Central America. Their extraordinarily low wages
and harmful working conditions indicate a likely path for the
globalized future.
Instead of promoting this form of economic activity, U.S. and
international policymakers and scholars should be asking, as many
Latin Americans, Asians and Africans have been doing: "What makes
a humane economy? What models of production and distribution might
ensure decent standards of living?"
- Development: Economic growth in the developing world
has been a failure from the point of view of ordinary farmers,
factory workers, street vendors and domestic servants, many
of whom put in full days of work and go home to one room shacks
with bare light bulbs and no plumbing. It is time to acknowledge
that there is something wrong with the concept of development
itself. Development from what? To what? Can we imagine varied,
creative mixtures of the pre-industrial and the industrial,
the Indian and the "Western," the village and the city? What
alternatives have been overlooked, and how can new ones be forged.
- Innovation: Where do innovative cultural and economic
practices emerge? Sometimes in national government offices or
the conference rooms of global institutions. More often in the
developing world it is in shantytowns, municipal governments,
women’s groups and artistic and cultural programs that
creative solutions are born.
It is to such local forms of innovation that we should look in
formulating long-term goals for the global economy. Where are
new democratic practices developing on the ground and solving
the pressing problem of our age? How and when can these new possibilities
work in tandem with reform-minded governments and organizations?
Out of such thinking, international institutions and movements
can forge an exciting, collaborative, open-ended vision for the
future.
Not possible in the 21st century? Why not?
Jeffrey W. Rubin, a political scientist, teaches at the New School
for Social Research in New York, and Mt. Holyoke College in Massachusetts.
