DEVELOPMENT: Socialists Vow Campaign to Reform Global Economy

By Farhan Haq Reprint | | Print |

UNITED NATIONS, Sep 9 1996 (IPS) - Socialist International kicked off its 20th congress here Monday with a spirited attack on the ills of economic globalisation and a vow to seek changes in the current economic order.

Socialist International president Pierre Mauroy said that the Group of Seven major industrialised nations should be enlarged to include representation from the five largest continents, to assist debate on equitable development.

Mauroy also pleaded for the establishment of a social clause on commercial activity to uphold such principles as labour rights and an end to the exploitation of child labour.

“The wealth of the richest 358 people in the world is now greater than the annual revenue of the poorest 45 percent of the population, some 2.6 billion men and women,” Mauroy argued, citing the 1996 U.N. Human Development Report.

The goal of Socialist International, the coalition of Social Democratic organisations founded by the late German Chancellor Willy Brandt, is to join the current expansion of deregulated capitalism to some preservation of social welfare policies, speakers here contended.

“To keep the world economy on a right track of steady development, we need liberalisation of the market through deregulation, but also the creation of a framework in which social justice is ensured,” explained Takanobu Nagai, Japan’s Labour Minister.

“No economies can prosper without such a framework, or where justice is denied for individuals,” Nagai added.

“We assume the responsibility to adopt a non-extremist position,” argued Venezuelan Senator Lewis Perez of the Democratic Action Party. “We do not defend the statist thesis, but neither do we accept the position of a fictitious, totally free market.”

Globalisation has in fact hindered the free market, Perez argued. “The concentration and collusion of capital has chained ‘the invisible hand’ to monopoly power, creating inefficiency, inequality, injustice and social exclusion in the system,” he said.

Yet the challenge for the Social Democrats to find an alternative is immense. One telling point is that the International — once home to such European statesmen as Brandt, Francois Mitterrand and Andreas Papandreou — boasts more opposition leaders than heads of government in this meeting.

Some European leaders, including Norwegian Prime Minister Gro Harlem Brundtland, Portuguese Prime Minister Antonio Guterres and Hungarian Prime Minister Gyula Horn, are attending the current three-day meeting here.

But this summit boasts more former government heads from around the world, from Sandinista chief Daniel Ortega to Spanish Socialist Workers Party leader Felipe Gonzalez.

Similarly telling is the European Socialists’ problems in grappling with economic reforms. Gonzalez Monday weighed in against the excesses of privatisation and economic deregulation, but pursued a decisively neo-liberal course in his own term as prime minister.

Ironically, Spain is leading an effort at this meeting to question the credentials of Mexico’s ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), arguing that the Mexican government has abandoned social democracy in favour of neoliberalism. Both the PRI and its leftist opponents, the Democratic Revolutionary Party (PRD), are present at the congress.

Some of the delegates offer some concrete proposals to accompany the rhetoric about socialism. Brundtland and Mauroy support a tax on all global financial transactions, devised by U.S. economist James Tobin, which could both dampen the current level of speculation and raise funds for the United Nations and development aid.

U.N. Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali, who opened the meeting at the U.N. General Assembly, offered a more prosaic vision: for Socialists to mobilise governments and world opinion toward greater funding of the world’s poorest.

“The latent world crisis has aroused nationalist self-interest and encouraged, on the part of some industrialised states, an inward-looking temptation,” Boutros-Ghali said. “The result has been that today, some feel greatly tempted to allow the poorest regions, left to their own devices, to sink into economic underdevelopment or political chaos.”

The effect the Socialist International may have on that debate, however, will vary from region to region. In the United States, the two leading political parties have shunned the current congress, and President Bill Clinton’s administration questioned whether the United Nations was paying for the Socialist meet. (The United Nations says Socialist International is paying all the meeting’s expenses.)

Mauroy defended the idea that Socialist International is still relevant, with Socialist leaders ascendant from South Africa to India, and from Colombia to Hungary. And the debate over the next few days is expected to cover subjects as diverse as support for an International Criminal Court and calls to expand the U.N. Security Council.

But some defensiveness on the part of the members still remains, as seen in the title of a press release by the International: “Rumours of the death of socialism greatly exaggerated.”