councilor.org
| Source | Dave Anderson |
| Date | 02/10/19/10:30 |
| Navigating the Ethics of Globalization
The Chronicle of Higher Education, 2.10.11 http://chronicle.com/weekly/v49/i07/07b00701.htm By PETER SINGER Consider two aspects of globalization: first, planes exploding as they slam into the World Trade Center, and second, the emission of carbon dioxide from the exhaust of gas-guzzling sport-utility vehicles. One brought instant death and left unforgettable images that were watched on television screens all over the world; the other makes a contribution to climate change that can be detected only by scientific instruments. Yet both are indications of the way in which we are now one world, and the more subtle changes to which sport-utility-vehicle owners unintentionally contribute will almost certainly kill far more people than the more visible aspect of globalization. When people in rich nations switch to vehicles that consume more fuel than the cars they used to drive, they contribute to changes in the climate of Mozambique or Bangladesh -- changes that may cause crops to fail, sea levels to rise, and tropical diseases to spread. As scientists pile up the evidence that continuing greenhouse-gas emissions will imperil millions of lives, the leader of the nation that emits the largest share of those gases has said: "We will not do anything that harms our economy, because first things first are the people who live in America." President Bush's remarks were not an aberration, but an expression of an ethical view that he may have learned from his father. The first President George Bush had said much the same thing at the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro. But it is not only the two Bush administrations that have put the interests of Americans first. When it came to the crunch in the Balkans, the Clinton-Gore administration made it very clear that it was not prepared to risk the life of a single American in order to reduce the number of civilian casualties. In the context of the debate over whether to intervene in Bosnia to stop Serb "ethnic cleansing" operations directed against Bosnian Muslims, Colin L. Powell, then chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, quoted with approval the remark of the 19th-century German statesman Otto von Bismarck, that all the Balkans were not worth the bones of a single one of his soldiers. Bismarck, however, was not thinking of intervening in the Balkans to stop crimes against humanity. As chancellor of imperial Germany, he assumed that his country followed its national interest. To use his remark today as an argument against humanitarian intervention is to return to 19th-century power politics, ignoring both the bloody wars that style of politics brought about in the first half of the 20th century, and the efforts of the second half of the 20th century to find a better foundation for peace and the prevention of crimes against humanity. That forces us to consider a fundamental ethical issue. To what extent should political leaders see their role narrowly, in terms of promoting the interests of their citizens, and to what extent should they be concerned with the welfare of people everywhere? There is a strong ethical case for saying that it is wrong for leaders to give absolute priority to the interests of their own citizens. The value of the life of an innocent human being does not vary according to nationality. But, it might be said, the abstract ethical idea that all humans are entitled to equal consideration cannot govern the duties of a political leader. Just as parents are expected to provide for the interests of their own children, rather than for the interests of strangers, so too in accepting the office of president of the United States, President Bush has taken on a specific role that makes it his duty to protect and further the interests of Americans. Other countries have their leaders, with similar roles in respect to the interests of their fellow citizens. There is no world political community, and as long as that situation prevails, we must have nation-states, and the leaders of those nation-states must give preference to the interests of their citizens. Otherwise, unless electors were suddenly to turn into altruists of a kind never before seen on a large scale, democracy could not function. Our leaders feel that they must give some degree of priority to the interests of their own citizens, and they are, so this argument runs, right to do so. But what does "some degree of priority" amount to, in practice? Related to that question about the duties of national leaders is another one: Is the division of the world's people into sovereign nations a dominant and unalterable fact of life? Here our thinking has been affected by the horrors of Bosnia, Rwanda, and Kosovo. In Rwanda, a United Nations inquiry took the view that 2,500 military personnel, given the proper training and mandate, might have saved 800,000 lives. Secretary General Kofi Annan, who, as under secretary general for peacekeeping operations at the time, must bear some responsibility for what the inquiry termed a "terrible and humiliating" paralysis, has learned from that situation. Now he urges that "the world cannot stand aside when gross and systematic violations of human rights are taking place." What we need, he has said, are "legitimate and universal principles" on which we can base intervention. That means a redefinition of state sovereignty, or more accurately, an abandonment of the absolute idea of state sovereignty that has prevailed in Europe since the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648. The aftermath of the attacks on September 11 underlined in a very different way the extent to which our thinking about state sovereignty has changed over the past century. In the summer of 1914 another act of terrorism shocked the world: the assassination of the Austrian Crown Prince Franz Ferdinand and his wife in Sarajevo, by a Bosnian Serb nationalist. In the wake of that outrage Austria-Hungary presented an ultimatum to Serbia in which it laid out the evidence that the assassins were trained and armed by the Black Hand, a shadowy Serbian organization headed by the chief of Serbian military intelligence. The Black Hand was tolerated or supported by other Serbian government officials, and Serbian officials arranged safe passage across the border into Bosnia for the seven conspirators in the assassination plot. Accordingly, Austria-Hungary's ultimatum demanded that the Serbs bring those responsible to justice and allow Austro-Hungarian officials to inspect files to ensure that that had been done properly. Despite the clear evidence of the involvement of Serbian officials in the crime -- evidence that, historians agree, was substantially accurate -- the ultimatum Austria-Hungary presented was widely condemned in Russia, France, Britain, and the United States. Many historians studying the origins of the First World War have condemned the Austro-Hungarian ultimatum as demanding more than one sovereign nation may properly ask of another. They have added that the Austro-Hungarian refusal to negotiate after the Serbian government accepted many, but not all, of its demands is further evidence that Austria-Hungary, together with its backer Germany, wanted an excuse to declare war on Serbia. Hence those two nations must bear the guilt for the outbreak of the war and the nine million deaths that followed. Now consider the American response to the terrorist attacks of September 11. The demands made of the Taliban by the Bush administration were scarcely less stringent than those made by Austria-Hungary of Serbia in 1914. (The main difference is that the Austro-Hungarians insisted on the suppression of hostile nationalist propaganda. Freedom of speech was not so widely regarded, then, as a human right.) Moreover, the American demand that the Taliban hand over Osama bin Laden was made without presenting to the Taliban any evidence at all linking him to the attacks of September 11. Yet the American demands, far from being condemned as a mere pretext for aggressive war, were endorsed as reasonable and justifiable by a wide-ranging coalition of nations. When President Bush said, in speeches and press conferences after September 11, that he would not draw a distinction between terrorists and regimes that harbor terrorists, no ambassadors, foreign ministers, or United Nations representatives denounced that as a "vicious" doctrine or a "tyrannical" demand on other sovereign nations, as the Austro-Hungarian demands had been denounced. The U.N. Security Council broadly endorsed it, in its resolution of September 28, 2001. It seems that world leaders now accept that every nation has an obligation to every other nation of the world to suppress activities within its borders that might lead to terrorist attacks carried out in other countries, and that it is reasonable to go to war with a nation that does not do so. If Kaisers Franz Joseph I and Wilhelm II could see this, they might well feel that, since 1914, the world has come round to their view. Terrorism has made our world an integrated community in a new and frightening way. Not merely the activities of our neighbors, but those of the inhabitants of the most remote mountain valleys of the farthest-flung countries of our planet have become our business. We need to extend the reach of the criminal law there and to have the means to bring terrorists to justice without declaring war on an entire country in order to do it. For that we need a sound global system of criminal justice, so justice does not become the victim of national differences of opinion. We also need, though it will be far more difficult to achieve, a sense that we really are one community, that we are people who recognize not only the force of prohibitions against killing each other but also the pull of obligations to assist one another. That may not stop religious fanatics from carrying out suicide missions, but it will help to isolate them and reduce their support. It was not a coincidence that just two weeks after September 11, conservative members of the U.S. Congress abandoned their opposition to the payment of $585-million in back dues that the United States owed the United Nations. Now that America was calling for the world to come to its aid to stamp out terrorism, it was apparent that it could no longer flout the rules of the global community to the extent that it had been doing before September 11. We have lived with the idea of sovereign states for so long that they have come to be part of the background not only of diplomacy and public policy but also of ethics. Implicit in the term "globalization" rather than the older "internationalization" is the idea that we are moving beyond the era of growing ties between nations and are beginning to contemplate something beyond the existing conception of the nation-state. But this change needs to be reflected in all levels of our thought, and especially in our thinking about ethics. For most of the eons of human existence, people living only short distances apart might as well, for all the difference they made to each other's lives, have been living in separate worlds. A river, a mountain range, a stretch of forest or desert, a sea -- those were enough to cut people off from each other. Over the past few centuries the isolation has dwindled, slowly at first, then with increasing rapidity. Now people living on opposite sides of the world are linked in ways previously unimaginable. One hundred and fifty years ago, Karl Marx gave a one-sentence summary of his theory of history: "The hand mill gives you society with the feudal lord; the steam mill, society with the industrial capitalist." Today he could have added: "The jet plane, the telephone, and the Internet give you a global society with the transnational corporation and the World Economic Forum." Technology changes everything -- that was Marx's claim, and if it was a dangerous half-truth, it was still an illuminating one. As technology has overcome distance, economic globalization has followed. In London supermarkets, fresh vegetables flown in from Kenya are offered for sale alongside those from nearby Kent. Planes bring illegal immigrants seeking to better their own lives in a country they have long admired. In the wrong hands the same planes become lethal weapons that bring down tall buildings. Instant digital communication spreads the nature of international trade from actual goods to skilled services. At the end of a day's trading, a bank based in New York may have its accounts balanced by clerks living in India. The increasing degree to which there is a single world economy is reflected in the development of new forms of global governance, the most controversial of which has been the World Trade Organization, but the WTO is not itself the creator of the global economy. Global market forces provide incentives for every nation to put on what the foreign-affairs columnist Thomas L. Friedman has called a "Golden Straitjacket," a set of policies that involve freeing up the private sector of the economy, shrinking the bureaucracy, keeping inflation low, and removing restrictions on foreign investment. If a country refuses to wear the golden straitjacket, or tries to take it off, then the electronic herd -- the currency traders, stock and bond traders, and those who make investment decisions for multinational corporations -- could gallop off in a different direction, taking the investment capital that countries want to keep their economy growing. When capital is internationally mobile, to raise your tax rates is to risk triggering a flight of capital to other countries with comparable investment prospects and lower taxation. The upshot is that as the economy grows and average incomes rise, the scope of politics may shrink -- at least as long as no political party is prepared to challenge the assumption that global capitalism is the best economic system. When neither the government nor the opposition is prepared to take the risk of removing the golden straitjacket, the differences between the major political parties shrink to differences over minor ways in which the straitjacket might be adjusted. Thus even without the WTO, the growth of the global economy itself marks a decline in the power of the nation-state. Marx argued that in the long run we never reject advances in the means by which we satisfy our material needs. Hence history is driven by the growth of productive forces. He would have been contemptuous of the suggestion that globalization is something foisted on the world by a conspiracy of corporate executives meeting in Switzerland, and he might have agreed with Friedman's remark that the most basic truth about globalization is, "No one is in charge." For Marx that is a statement that epitomizes humanity in a state of alienation, living in a world in which, instead of ruling ourselves, we are ruled by our own creation, the global economy. For Friedman, on the other hand, all that needs to be said about Marx's alternative -- state control of the economy -- is that it doesn't work. (Whether there are alternatives to both capitalism and centrally controlled socialism that could work is another question, but not one for here.) Marx also believed that a society's ethic is a reflection of the economic structure to which its technology has given rise. Thus a feudal economy in which serfs are tied to their lord's land gives you the ethic of feudal chivalry based on the loyalty of knights and vassals to their lord, and the obligations of the lord to protect them in time of war. A capitalist economy requires a mobile labor force able to meet the needs of the market, so it breaks the tie between lord and vassal, substituting an ethic in which the right to buy and sell labor is paramount. Our newly interdependent global society, with its remarkable possibilities for linking people around the planet, gives us the material basis for a new ethic. Marx would have thought that such an ethic would serve the interests of the ruling class, that is, the rich nations and the transnational corporations they have spawned. But perhaps our ethic is related to our technology in a looser, less deterministic way than Marx thought. Ethics appear to have developed from the behavior and feelings of social mammals. They became distinct from anything we can observe in our closest nonhuman relatives when we started using our reasoning abilities to justify our behavior to other members of our group. If the group to which we must justify ourselves is the tribe, or the nation, then our morality is likely to be tribal, or nationalistic. If, however, the revolution in communications has created a global audience, then we might feel a need to justify our behavior to the whole world. As Clive Kessler argued recently in Third World Quarterly, that change creates the material basis for a new ethic that will serve the interests of all those who live on this planet in a way that, despite much rhetoric, no previous ethic has ever done. If this appeal to our need for ethical justification appears to be based on too generous a view of human nature, there is another consideration of a very different kind that leads in the same direction. The great empires of the past, whether Persian, Roman, Chinese, or British, were, as long as their power lasted, able to keep their major cities safe from threatening barbarians on the frontiers of their far-flung realms. In the 21st century the greatest superpower in history was unable to keep the self-appointed warriors of a different worldview from attacking both its greatest city and its capital. My thesis is that how well we come through the era of globalization (perhaps whether we come through it at all) will depend on how we respond ethically to the idea that we live in one world. For the rich nations not to take a global ethical viewpoint has long been seriously morally wrong. Now it is also, in the long term, a danger to their security. There is one great obstacle to further progress in this direction. It has to be said, in cool but plain language, that in recent years the international effort to build a global community has been hampered by the repeated failure of the United States to play its part. Despite being the single largest polluter of the world's atmosphere, and on a per-capita basis the most profligate of the major nations, the United States has refused to join the 178 states that have accepted the Kyoto Protocol. Along with Libya and China, the United States voted against setting up an International Criminal Court to try people accused of genocide and crimes against humanity. Now that the court seems likely to go ahead, the U.S. government has said that it has no intention of participating. Though it is one of the world's wealthiest nations, with the world's strongest economy, the United States gives significantly less foreign aid, as a proportion of its gross national product, than any other developed nation. When the world's most powerful state wraps itself in what, until September 11, it took to be the security of its military might, and arrogantly refuses to give up any of its own rights and privileges for the sake of the common good -- even when other nations are giving up their rights and privileges -- the prospects of finding solutions to global problems are dimmed. One can only hope that when the rest of the world nevertheless proceeds down the right path, as it did in resolving to go ahead with the Kyoto Protocol, and as it is now doing with the International Criminal Court, the United States will eventually be shamed into joining in. If it does not do so, it risks falling into a situation in which it is universally seen by everyone except its own self-satisfied citizens as the world's "rogue superpower." Even from a strictly self-interested perspective, if the United States wants the cooperation of other nations in matters that are largely its own concern -- such as the struggle to eliminate terrorism -- it cannot afford to be so regarded. I have argued that as more and more issues increasingly demand global solutions, the extent to which any state can independently determine its future diminishes. We therefore need to strengthen institutions for global decision making and make them more responsible to the people they affect. That line of thought leads in the direction of a world community with its own directly elected legislature, perhaps slowly evolving along the lines of the European Union. There is little political support for such ideas at present. Apart from the threat that the idea poses to the self-interest of the citizens of the rich nations, many would say it puts too much at risk, for gains that are too uncertain. It is widely believed that a world government would be, at best, an unchecked bureaucratic behemoth that makes the bureaucracy of the European Union look like a lean and efficient operation. At worst, it would become a global tyranny, unchecked and unchallengeable. Those thoughts have to be taken seriously. They present a challenge that should not be beyond the best minds in the fields of political science and public administration, once those people adjust to the new reality of the global community and turn their attention to issues of government beyond national boundaries. We need to learn from the experience of other multinational organizations. The European Union is a federal body that has adopted the principle that decisions should always be taken at the lowest level capable of dealing with the problem. The application of that principle, known as subsidiarity, is still being tested. But if it works for Europe, it is not impossible that it might work for the world. To rush into world federalism would be too risky, but we could accept the diminishing significance of national boundaries and take a pragmatic, step-by-step approach to greater global governance. There is a good case for global environmental and labor standards. The World Trade Organization has indicated its support for the International Labor Organization to develop core labor standards. If those standards are developed and accepted, they would not be much use without a global body to check that they are being adhered to, and to allow other countries to impose trade sanctions against goods that are not produced in conformity with the standards. Since the WTO seems eager to pass this task over to the ILO, we might see that organization significantly strengthened. Something similar could happen with environmental standards. It is even possible to imagine a United Nations Economic and Social Security Council that would take charge of the task of eliminating global poverty, and would be voted the resources to do it. These and other specific proposals for stronger global institutions to accomplish a particular task should be considered on their merits. The 15th and 16th centuries are celebrated for the voyages of discovery that proved that the world is round. The 18th century saw the first proclamations of universal human rights. The 20th century's conquest of space made it possible for a human being to look at our planet from a point not on it, and so to see it, literally, as one world. Now the 21st century faces the task of developing a suitable form of government for that single world. It is a daunting moral and intellectual challenge, but one we cannot refuse to take up. It is no exaggeration to say that the future of the world depends on how well we meet it. Peter Singer is a professor of bioethics at Princeton University. This essay is adapted from One World: The Ethics of Globalization, to be published later this month by Yale University Press. |
Copyright (c) 1998, Joongpil Cho