LATIN AMERICA: The “Globalitarian” Temptation

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Analysis - Carlos Castilho

SAO PAULO, Jan 20 1997 (IPS) - Never before in Latin American history have so many countries lived under the same ideology as today: globalisation has become a sort of dogma among the continent’s business and political elite.

So pervasive is the phenomenon those who criticise it are called political reactionaries or intellectual dinosaurs.

In response to this negative labelling, some Latin American thinkers have set up an exclusive club for those who disagree with the new orthodoxy. They see what is happening across the continent as the spread of “globalitarian regimes.”

This term, inspired by ideas by European intellectuals like France’s Ignacio Ramonet, is like a warning against a possible intolerance similar to that which characterised authoritarian regimes in the past – a sad memory for the continent.

With the sole exception of Cuba, all the Latin American governments have adopted the cloak of globalisation, to a greater or lesser degree. Its features include massive privatisations, opening up markets to international capital and goods and reducing the role of the State.

Ideological unanimity in the region has made it tempting for those who support the concept of “globalitarianism” to become intolerant.

There are concrete historical reasons explaining the consensus in relation to the economic proposals presented by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF).

But this does not mean the phenomenon of globalisation is an infallible dogma. The World Bank and the IMF have themselves warned of the social imbalances caused by neoliberalism, the doctrine which inspired globalisation.

Those heralding the new ideology take these criticisms into account when they come from sympathisers with the concept of globalisation. But all the objections and doubts outside this circle are then discarded as lacking authenticity.

Claude Julien, former director of French monthly “Le Monde Diplomatique” says this attitude bears the seed of intolerance, adding that the global phenomenon is too complex for anyone to claim they have the only truth.

This is especially so in a social context where there are transcendent questions still unanswered.

What will be the future role of the State on a planet where 200 transnational megacorporations control a quarter of the planets economic activity?

What can we do with a world financial system which manages monetary resources five times higher than the value of all the agricultural and industrial production in the world? Who is controlling whom and for who’s benefit? Who will take responsibility for the world’s 500 million unemployed and underemployed?

According to Julien, “these problems are too complex (and) need to be resolved with the contributions of all those involved, without the temptation of using the hegemonies of the time to impose a new form of authoritarianism.”