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GLOBALISATION: A Positive Force or Source of World’s Woes?

Gustavo Capdevila

GENEVA, Feb 21 2004 (IPS) - One of the most provocative interpretations of globalisation comes from former U.S. secretary of state Henry Kissinger, who has said the process “is really another name for the dominant role of the United States.”

Opinions along that line – and sometimes even more controversial – have been heard over the past few years, making the globalisation phenomenon a hotly debated issue at the top of the international agenda, a fact that prompted the International Labour Organisation (ILO) to set up a special commission.

Finland’s President Tarja Halonen has identified two of the mostly widely held viewpoints about the term “globalisation”: “Some see it as an irresistible and good force for delivering economic prosperity to people all over the world. For others, it is a source of all contemporary ills.”

Halonen and her Tanzanian counterpart, President Benjamin William Mkapa, are the co-chairs of the World Commission on the Social Dimensions of Globalisation, created by the ILO two years ago with the mission of channelling impassioned confrontation into constructive dialogue.

Working with the two heads of state were 19 members of the commission, from all over the world and diverse backgrounds, including government, parliaments, businesses and multinationals, labour unions, universities and civil society.

The effort of this commission, whose mandate this week has reached an end, also entailed drafting proposals about the conditions needed so that the benefits of the globalisation process reach the greatest number of people.

Because of its focus, which includes a diagnosis of the human aspect of globalisation’s impacts and an outline of the policies that constitute appropriate responses, the release of the commission’s report on Feb. 24 is awaited with much anticipation.

“A Fair Globalisation: Creating Opportunities for All” will be presented Tuesday in London by the commission’s co-chairs and the ILO director general, Juan Somavia.

The text of the document, kept confidential by the ILO, will be distributed in the three languages in which the United Nations conducts its operations: English, French and Spanish. A summary of the report will be released simultaneously in three other official U.N. languages: Arabic, Chinese and Russian.

Mkapa told the African press this week that the report “looks at perceptions and facts.”

The report “seeks to identify innovative ways of making economic, social and environmental objectives of globalisation coherent, sustainable and mutually reinforcing,” said the Tanzanian president.

Halonen anticipated in November some aspects of the commission members’ views, summarised in the statement: “The current course of globalisation must change.”

This is founded, said the Finnish president, on the premise that “the present situation (of globalisation) is not ethical, nor politically feasible.”

“Too few share its benefits. Too many have no voice in its design and no influence over its course,” she said.

The members of the commission “wish to make globalisation a force to increase human freedom and well being, and bring democracy and development to the communities where people live,” said Halonen.

From the statements of the commission’s co-chairs and from other members, it can be deduced that the report takes the position of the majority, in that its authors consider the phenomenon irreversible.

The text, which is the first contribution of an independent international body to the study of globalisation, nevertheless contains proposals aimed at attenuating the polemics surrounding the process by “making globalisation work for all.”

The members of the commission are: economist Giuliano Amato, former prime minister of Italy; Brazilian academic Ruth Cardoso, former first lady and director of anti-poverty campaigns; Egyptian economist and parliamentarian Heba Handoussa; former Dutch cooperation minister Eveline Herfkens, coordinator of the U.N. Millennium Development Goals Campaign; Ann McLaughlin Korologos, vice chair of the Rand Corporation and former U.S. secretary of labour; economist Lu Mai, head of the China Development Research Foundation.

Russian diplomat Valentina Matvienko, governor of St. Petersburg; Indian economist Deepak Nayyar, vice chancellor of the University of Delhi; Japanese business leader Taizo Nishimuro, chairman of Toshiba Corporation; French businessman Francois Perigot, president of the International Organisation of Employers; Thai politician Surin Pitsuwan, former foreign minister; former president of Uruguay Julio Sanguinetti; Peruvian economist Hernando de Soto, head of the Lima-based Institute for Liberty and Democracy.

U.S. economist and 2001 Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz; John J. Sweeney, head of the AFL-CIO, the largest U.S. labour union; Filipina indigenous activist Victoria Tauli-Corpuz, director of the Tebtebba Foundation; Aminata Traoré, author from Mali, organiser of the African Social Forum; Zwelinzima Vavi, general secretary of the Congress of South African Trade Unions; and German scientist Ernst Ulrich von Weizsaecker, chairman of the Bundestag environment committee.