Globalization: Chaos vs. Order

Question for Discussion: How is Globalization creating
chaos and disorder in the world? Is this just a
temporary phase of Globalization?

Readings: Lewis, "Global Industrial Civilization";
Lewis, "Cozy Assumptions"; Bergman, "The Polluters'
Rights"; "States of Discord: Friedman vs. Kaplan";
Collapse Cartoon

( To look at a longer version of reading 4, see
Lewis, The Paradox of Global Development )

Video: Visual History of the Earth
See Rachel Carson Quotes on Environmentalism

Response Paper: According to the Friedman and Korten,
what is globalization and what are the major problems it is creating? Do you agree with Korten that globalization isn't working? (1-2 page paper due on Friday, Sept. 18 .) See Debating Globalization: Friedman vs. Korten

Creating a more Human Future

Creating the Future in the 21st Century

Global Map (1997)
Creating a more Human Future
States of Discord: Friedman vs. Kaplan
Lewis, The Paradox of Global Development
The Global Economy and Economic Inequality
Globalization Indexes
GDP Per Capita Growth 1990-2001
World Bank: 2007 Worldwide Governance Incators
(in-class) [Use Internet Explorer in order to enable Java]
U.S. Military Budget vs. the World (in-class)

The Global Economy and Econmic Inequality

Global Map (1997)
How Unequal Are We? (in-class)
Korten Graph of Income Inequality (1992)
GDP Per Capita Growth 1990-2001 (in-class)
U.N. Study of Global Wealth Distribution, 2006
Wallar, Global Wealth: The Great Divide gets Larger
(Summary of the U.N. Study) (in-class) (in-class)
Growing Number of Billionaires in the World
(in-class)
The Global Rich and Poor: Percentage share (1997)
(in-class)
Where the Richest 225 people live in
the Global Economy (in-class)
Where the Rich live in Percentages per
Global region (1997) (in-class)
Development and Globalization:
Facts and Figures (2004)
Forbes list of 150 Largest Economic Entities
The American Dream is less Common
in the United States
Two Decades of Extraordinary Gains for
Affluent Americans
A Rising Economy that Lifts only Yachts

Globalization Indexes

World Bank: 2007 Worldwide Governance Incators
(in-class) [Use Internet Explorer in order to enable Java]
2006 Globalization Index
2006 Globalization Index Data charts (in-class)
2006 Globalization Index Press Release (in-class)
Foreign Policy: The Failed State 2007 Index
(in-class)
Failed States Index website
12 Indicators of Failed States (in-class)

United Nations Studies of Global Wealth Distribution, 2006

States of Discord: Friedman vs. Kaplan

Global Map (1997)

Friedman: "What is globalization? The short answer is that globalization is the integration of everything with everything else. A more complete definition is that globalization is the integration of markets, finance, and technology in a way that shrinks the world from a size medium to a size small. Globalization enables each of us, wherever we live, to reach around the world farther, faster, deeper, and cheaper than ever before and at the same time allows the world to reach into each of us farther, faster, deeper, and cheaper than ever before."

Friedman: " Since September 11, 2001, many people have asked me if terrorism will stop the process of globalization. I had often wondered about this sort of situation: What would happen if we did reach a crisis moment, a crisis like terrorism, or a major financial crisis, and things started to go in reverse? People would say, “Bring back the walls!” But I knew that was going to be a particularly defining moment for us, because that’s when we were all going to wake up and finally realize that technology had destroyed the walls already—that the September 11 terrorists made their reservations on Travelocity.com."

Kaplan: " In The Lexus and the Olive Tree, Tom wrote that globalization doesn’t end geopolitics. That’s the key. Globalization is not necessarily good news; it’s just the news. And the news could get scarier and scarier, because more interconnections will lead to complexity before they’ll lead to stability. "

Kaplan: " Today, too, everything affects everything else—we're affected by disease pandemics in Africa, by madrassas (seminaries) in Pakistan —but there is still nothing like a global leviathan or a centralizing force.
The world is coming together, but the international bureaucracy atop it is so infantile and underdeveloped that it cannot cope with growing instability.

Kaplan: "And more complexity does lead to more instability. Today, we have several factors driving this relationship. First, we are seeing youth bulges in many of the most unstable countries. Big deal if the world population is aging; that doesn't interest me for the next five or ten years. I care about the many countries or areas like the West Bank, Gaza , Nigeria , Zambia , and Kenya where over the next 20 years the population of young, unemployed males between the ages of 14 and 29 is going to grow. And as we all know from television, one thing that unites political unrest everywhere is that it's carried out by young males. Another factor is resource scarcity—the amount of potable water available throughout the Middle East , for instance, is going to decrease substantially over the next 25 years. When you put them together, these driving forces lead to sideswipes, such as the September 11 attacks. Another sideswipe could be an environmental event like an earthquake in an intensely settled area, like Egypt or China , that could lead to the removal of a strategic regime."

Kaplan: "One of the biggest elements of globalization has been urbanization.... And in the Middle East, what we call fundamentalism was just a Darwinian way of coping with urbanization.Unfortunately, it also provided a fertile petri dish for the emergence of disease germs like terrorists."

Friedman: "The dirty little secret about globalization is ...
that the way to succeed in globalization is to focus on the fundamentals. It’s about reading, writing, and arithmetic. It’s about churches, synagogues, temples, and mosques. It’s about rule of law, good governance, institution building, free press, and a process of democratization. If you get these fundamentals right, then the wires will find you, and the wires will basically work. But if you get them wrong, nothing will save you.....If the institutions through which these people have to operate to generate growth and interact with the global system are corrupted and corroded, then all the gadgetry in the world won’t make a dime’s worth of difference."

Friedman: " Of course, we also saw the forces of globalization on September 11, 2001. Again, globalization goes both ways. It can threaten democracies as well as strengthen them. But on net, I do believe that with the right leadership, globalization will be a force for more openness, more rule of law, and more opportunities for people to enjoy personal freedoms and challenge authorities."

Quotes taken from "The Paradox of Global Development" by Chris Lewis(2000)

The most prominent of these increasing structural contradictions that are tearing apart global industrial civilization are the increasing destruction of the global environment, increasing poverty and inequality between the First and the Third World peoples, and increasing threats to national and democratic governance by the World Trade Organization (WTO) and by global financial markets. Global industrial civilization is collapsing because the very economic growth and global development that it promises will address these structural contradictions is only exacerbating them. Our hope lies in the creation of local and regional cultures and economies that can truly solve these problems by focusing on sustainable development, the health of local peoples and communities, and the re-democratization of everyday life. Globalization will fail because it supports TNCs over peoples and communities, corporate profits over the environment, and demands the reign of global corporations and markets over people and nature.

Now let’s look at the most important structural contradictions that are undermining global industrial civilization: (1) Environmental destruction, (2) Increasing poverty and global inequality, and (3) increasing threats to state and local democratic goverance. All of these structural contradictions reinforce each other and are creating positive feedback loops that only accelerate the collapse of global industrial civilization. The best example of this positive feedback system is West Africa. Increasing deforestation and soil degradation is undermining rural economies, which forces rural refugees to swarm into exploding industrial cities, which in turn creates massive urban poverty and underdevelopment, which further stresses local and national resources, which can lead to the collapse of African states and violence, anarchy, famine, and untold suffering, which is now occurring throughout Africa. I tend to agree with Robert Kaplan who warns that “West Africa’s future, eventually, will also be that of most of the rest of the world.”(28) That is if unchecked globalization and this accelerating positive feedback loop isn’t closed with the collapse of global industrial civilization. The challenge for the emerging local and regional cultures and economies will be to close this positive feedback loop forever by creating local, sustainable economies that support all the people, protect the environment , and allow people to democratically control their lives and local communities. In such a new world order, the health of local people, communities, environments and economies would be paramount, not the profit and power of First World elites and TNCs.

(For a quick discussion on how these postive feedback
loops work to re-inforce each other and further de-stabilize global industrial civilization, see Bateson,
"The Roots of Ecological Crisis.")

On the one hand, global economic integration, which is known as globalization, is creating spectacular wealth and progress for the twenty percent who live in the developed world, but, on the other hand, it is creating massive poverty and social unrest for the eighty percent who live in the underdeveloped world.(Barnet and Cavanagh 1994) Between 1960 and 2000, rather than shrinking, the income gap between the rich and the poor actually grew. According to the 1999 UN Human Development Report, in 1960, the richest 20 percent of the world earned 30 times as much income as the poorest 20 percent, 60 times as much income in 1990, and 74 times as much income by 1997. This UN report also reported that the richest 20 percent of the world consumes 86 percent of the World Gross Domestic Product, the middle 60 percent consume just 13 percent, and the poorest 20 percent consume just 1 percent of the world GDP.

In Vital Signs 2000, the World Domestic Product was 41 trillion dollars. Forty-five percent of the income from this global economy went to the 12 percent of the world’s people who live in Western industrial countries. The world’s 200 richest people more than doubled their net worth in the four years to 1998 to more than $1 trillion dollars. In The Divided Planet, Tom Athanasiou (13) argued that in 1995, the North, with a fourth of the world’s people, consumes 70 percent of the world’s energy, 75 percent of its metals, 85 percent of its wood, and 60 percent of its food. The increasing result of this global inequality in the 1990s and early 2000s is environmental destruction, poverty and violence, and societal decay and the collapse of states throughout the Third World.

The profits of development are largely appropriated by the rich in the free trade zones of Asia, Latin America, North America, and Europe. According to the 1998 UN Human Development Report, the richest 20 percent consume 86 percent of the world’s resources. (24) Seventy percent of all international trade is controlled by a mere 500 corporations. (15) Instead of ending poverty and improving the quality of life, development seemed to be creating more poverty and even underdevelopment. Thus, the continuing and growing Third World debt crisis is another symptom of the collapse of global industrial civilization.

With the growth of a global economy since the 1960s, TNCs are limiting the ability of even the most powerful First World nations such as the United States, Germany, and Japan to control their own national economies. Indeed, the only currently functioning global agents are TNCs, not First World national governments. TNCs conduct 70 percent of international trade and 80 percent of foreign investment.(Chatterjee and Finger 1994:112) According to the United Nations, the TNCs control 80 percent of cultivated land for export crops worldwide and a mere 20 of them control 90 percent of pesticide sales.(Chatterjee and Finger 1993:106)

Of course, most critics would argue, probably correctly, that instead of allowing underdeveloped countries to withdraw from the global economy and undermine the economies of the developed world, the United States, Europe, and Japan and others will fight neo-colonial wars to force these countries to remain within this collapsing global economy. These neo-colonial wars will result in mass-death, suffering, and even regional nuclear wars. If First World countries choose military confrontation and political repression to maintain the global economy, then we may see mass-death and genocide at a global scale that will make the deaths of World War II pale in comparison. However, these neo-colonial wars, fought to maintain the developed nations' economic and political hegemony, will cause the final collapse of our global industrial civilization. These wars will so damage the complex economic and trading networks and squander material, biological, and energy resources that they will undermine the global economy and its ability to support the Earth's six to eight billion people.

I need to be very clear here. I am not arguing that human overpopulation and the resulting destruction of global resources will be the primary factor causing the collapse of global civilization. It is the rich not the poor who are destroying the Earth. Tom Athansiou argues that “if current patterns of consumption do not change, the 57 million Northerners born in the 1990s will consume and pollute more than the 971 million Southerners born in the 1990.” The global environmental crisis is the result of the expansion of modern industrial civilization and the development of the First World and the underdevelopment of the Third World since the 1600s. In Sustaining the Earth, John Young (1990:107) argues that "people constitute an environmental problem, not because of their existence, but because of what they do, and the parts of the environment they use up or damage."

A more hopeful cause of the global collapse of the global corporate economy is a global financial panic caused by unregulated global financial flows. This would be the same kind of global economic collapse witnessed during the Great Depression of the 1930s, but only on a much larger more devastating scale. More than 2 trillion dollars flows through the global financial markets everyday in 2000. According to the 1999 UN Human Development Report, “financial crises have become increasingly common with the speed and growth of global capital flows.” The financial crises caused by the 1994 collapse of the Mexican peso, the 1997 Asian financial panic, and the 1998 Russian financial panic are all examples of recent financial crises that really stressed the global financial system. During the 1997 Asian financial crisis, U.S. Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin said, “There was a moment when I thought it could have come undone.” He was, of course, referring to the global financial system.
A global depression caused by a financial panic could finally undermine the entire structure of globalization. With the loss of trillions of dollars of paper money, First World elites would find that they don’t have the funds to bail out Third World countries and banks, and even bail their own banks and corporations out. With the loss of trillions of dollars, the global economy would come to a halt and there wouldn’t be the collective resources or the will to restart it. Of course, these are the precise sorts of crises that lead to World Wars and military conflict.

The paradox of global economic development is that while it creates massive wealth and power for First World elites it also creates massive poverty and suffering for Third World peoples and societies. The failure of global development to end this suffering and destruction will bring about its collapse. This collapse will cause millions of people to suffer and die throughout the world, but it should, paradoxically, ensure the survival of future human societies. Indeed, the collapse of global civilization is necessary for the future, long-term survival of human beings. Although this future seems hopeless and heartless, it is not. We can learn a lot from our present global crisis. What we learn will shape our future and the future of the complex, interconnected web of life on Earth.

Web Readings on Reasons for Hope

Lewis, Global Industrial Civilization (2000)

Ways Out: What You Can Do to Help Create a Better Future

1. Support groups challenging globalization such as the International Forum on Globalization, the People-Centered Development Forum, Third World Network, Fifty Years Is Enough, Focus on the Global South,
and Public Citizen.

2. Support local businesses and local and regional economies through purchases and public support. Boycott global chain stores and transnational corporations, which are the driving forces behind globalization.

3. Simplify your life. Reduce your consumption, reduce your use of energy and material resources, and focus on the quality of life in your local community.

4. Support sustainable local economies and local farmers and businesses. Support your local farmers' markets and recycling programs. Reduce, reuse, and recycle materials in your local community.

5. Challenge the national and global rights of corporations. Work to end the legal fiction that corporations should have the same rights as individuals. Make corporations responsible to their local and regional governments and economies.

6. Demand campaign finance reform and end the selling
of local and national governments to the highest bidder.
Get corporations and "big money" out of politics.

7. Recognize and restore the rights of local communities and peoples to control their lives, their environments, their economies, and their cultures. Challenge globalization's "race to the bottom" by encouraging local communities to set their own standards for human rights, environmental quality,and quality of life.

8. Support efforts to restore local and regional environments. Work to create what Paul Hawken calls "restorative economies" (1993), economies that protect, support, and restore the environment while at the same time supporting local communities.

9. Support solar and alternative technologies that reduce energy and material resource use. Try to find ways to support alternative technologies in your daily life and in your community.

10. Accept the collapse of global industrial civilization as an opportunity. Instead of focusing on the tragedy of this collapse, focus on what you can do to help your local community and economy survive and prosper in this emerging new world of small local and regional economies and cultures.

For Common Things, by Jedediah Purdy (2000)

"This book is a plea for the value of declaring hopes that we know to be fragile. It is an argument that those hopes are no less necessary for their fragility, and that permitting ourselves to neglect them is both reckless and impoverishing. My purpose in writing is to take our inhibition seriously, and to ask what would be require to overcome it, to speak earnestly of uncertain hopes." (xi)

"To do so requires understanding today's ironic manner. There is something fearful in this irony. It is a fear of betrayal, disappointment, and humiliation, and a suspicion that believing, hoping, or caring too much will open us to these. Irony is a way of refusing to rely on such treacherous things." (xi)

"The rest of the book is an attempt to express a hope that seems to me too important to let go unacknowledged. I do not believe that, even where it is strongest, irony has convinced us that nothing is real, true, or ours. We believe, when we let ourselves, that there are things we can trust, people we can care for, words we can say in earnest. Irony makes us wary and abashed in our belief." (xv)

"We live in the disappointed aftermath of a politics that aspired to change the human predicament in elemental ways, but whose hopes have resolved into heavy disillusionment. We have difficulty trusting the speech and thought that we might use to try to make sense of our situation. We have left behind an unreal hope to fall into a hopelessness that is inattentive to and mistrustful of reality. What we might hope for now is a culture able to approach its circumstances with attention and care, and a politics that, as part of a broader responsibility for common things, turns careful attention into caring practice." (xxii)

"We are wary of hope, because we see little that can support it. Believing in nothing much, especially not in people, is a point of vague pride, and conviction can seem embarrassingly naive."
(6)

Hunting for Hope, by Scott Russell Sanders (2000)

"Jesse rubbed his own eyes, and the words came out muffled through his cupped palms. "Your view of things is totally dark. It bums me out. You make me feel the planet's dying and people are to blame and nothing can be done about it. There's no room for hope. Maybe you can get by without hope, but I can't. I've got a lot of living still to do. I have to believe there's a way we can get out of this mess. Otherwise what's the point? Why study, why work : why do anything if it's all going to hell?" (9)

"And if despair had so darkened my vision that I was casting a shadow over Jesse's world, even here among these magnificent mountains and tumultuous rivers, then I would have to change. I would have to learn to see differently. Since I could not forget the wounds to people and planet, could not unlearn the dismal numbers--the tallies of pollution and population and poverty that foretold catastrophe--I would have to look harder for antidotes, for medicines, for sources of hope." (15)

"That's one of the things I wanted to be sure and do before things fall apart."

I rolled onto my side and propped my head on an elbow and looked at his moonlit profile. "Things don't have to fall apart, buddy."

"Maybe not." He blinked, and the spark in his eyes went out and relit, "I just get scared."

"So do I. But the earth's a tough old bird. And we should be smart enough to figure out how to live here." (16)

"Anyone who pays attention to the state of the world
knows that we are in trouble. Anyone who looks honestly at the human prospect realizes that we face enormous challenges: population growth, environmental degradation, extinction of species, ethnic and racial strife, doomsday weapons, epidemic disease, drugs, poverty, hunger, and crime, to mention only a few. These stark realities press on my mind as I write. What I have been saying in this book is that they are not the only realities, nor the most powerful or durable ones. I see light shining in the darkness. I live in hope." (185)

"My search for hope has convinced me that we can change our ways of seeing and thinking and living. We can begin living responsibly and alertly right where we are, right now, no matter how troubled we may be about the human prospect. If we set out to solve the world's problems, we are likely to feel overwhelmed. On the other hand, if we set out to act on our deepest concerns and convictions we may do some good."
(186)

"As we transform our own lives, we join with others who are making a kindred effort, and thus our work will be multiplied a thousandfold across the country and a millionfold around the earth. Whether all such efforts, added together, will be enough to avert disaster and bring about a just and enduring way of life, no one can say. In order to live in hope we needn't believe that everything will turn out well. We need only believe that we are on the right path." (187)

"Our truly abundant resources are mostly intangible, difficult to describe and impossible to measure, and among them are love, beauty, skill, compassion, community, fidelity, simplicity, and wildness. Through cruelty or carelessness we can destroy the conditions that nurture these powers, but the powers themselves are not used up in our experience of them." (188)

"Memory grips the past," as my friend wrote to me, "and hope grips the future:" I think of the scarlet seeds quietly burning against the cold black dirt, waiting for spring. I think of my children, and of the children they may have one day, and of those children's children, on and on, like ridge upon ridge of mountains stretching out before me as far as I can see. I think of my students hard at work learning what our clever species has already discovered, and adding their own new knowledge to the store." (190)

Rachel Carson, OF MAN AND THE STREAM OF TIME (1962)

"Man has long talked somewhat arrogantly about the conquest of nature; now he has the power to achieve his boast. It is our misfortune-it may well be our final tragedy-that this power has not been tempered with wisdom, but has been marked by irresponsibility; that there is all too little awareness that man is part of nature, and that the price of conquest may well be the destruction of man himself. " (5)

"We still talk in terms of "conquest"--whether it be of the insect world or of the mysterious world of space. We still have not become mature enough to see ourselves as a very tiny part of a vast and incredible universe, a universe that is distinguished above all else by a mysterious and wonderful unity that we flout at our peril." (8)

"So nature does indeed need protection from man; but man, too, needs protection from his own acts, for he is part of the living world. His war against nature is inevitably a war against himself. His heedless and destructive acts enter into the vast cycles of the earth, and in time return to him." (9)

"Your generation must face realities instead of taking refuge in ignorance and evasion of truth. Yours is a grave and a sobering responsibility, but it is also a shining opportunity. You go out into a world where mankind is challenged, as it has never been challenged before, to prove its maturity and its mastery--not of nature, but of itself. Therein lies our hope and our destiny. "In today already walks tomorrow!'" (11)