This I Believe: An A to Z of a Life

G — Globalization

In the course of my lifetime, four political and socioeconomic themes have captured the world’s attention. From 1928 to 1939, it was revolution, fascism, and economic crisis. For Piers Bren-don, of Cambridge University, it was the age of the “dark valley.” Eleven years in which stupidity and evil fought for qualifiable supremacy. Evil was personified by the ascendant totalitarianism of the day: fascism in Italy, national socialism in Germany, militarism in Japan, Stalinism in Russia. The stupidity, blind cowardice, and elegant caution of the European democracies, France and England. The testing ground, as well as the battleground, was the terrible Spanish Civil War, the arena of all the bravery and all the cowardice, all the glory and all the misery of what Eric Hobsbawm has called “the shortest century.” From this terrible decade the United States of America was the country that came out best. Faced, as was the rest of the world, with economic depression, inflation, unemployment, and capitalism in crisis, Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal did not have to appeal to Stalinist or Hitlerian totalitarianism. It summoned human capital, democratic imagination, the social dynamic.

The second topic that mesmerized us was World War II. It has been called the only good and necessary war. Of that there is no doubt. Never before has evil emerged in such a horrifying and specific incarnation as that of the Nazi regime. Fighting this evil absolved of all sin any alliance with a “minor” evil— Stalin — but did impose an almost absolute faith in the goodness of liberty, which the Allied struggle represented. The evils of Western capitalism and Soviet totalitarianism were obfuscated by the absolute evil of the Holocaust, the concentration camps, the slavery imposed upon France, Belgium, Holland, Denmark, Norway, the Balkans, Greece. . Even the crimes of the Stalinist purges seemed to have been momentarily erased by the siege of Leningrad and the glory of Stalingrad.

The euphoria of the Allied victory quickly degenerated into the third topic, the long and terrible era of the Cold War. Almost half a century of unyielding Manichaeism — the good guys are here, the bad guys are over there. The total subjection of Central Europe to the Soviet dictatorship. The symmetrical reflection of the intolerance and witch hunts of the McCarthy era in the United States. And if the United States, in the end, finally rose up against “indecent” McCarthyism (as army counsel Joseph Welch called it in the Army-McCarthy hearings, 1954), it nevertheless subjected its backyard neighbor, Latin America, to a repressive, regressive demonization that, marrying U.S. imperialism with Latin American militarism, went against all economic reform and social democracy in the name of anti-Communist paranoia.

The wars of Central America began in Guatemala in 1954, and only ended thanks to the diplomatic efforts of the Contadora Group of peace mediators and the initiatives of Óscar Arias, president of Costa Rica in the 1980s. From John Foster Dulles (“The United States doesn’t have friends, it has interests”) to Ronald Reagan, who claimed that the Sandinistas could make it to Harlingen, Texas, from Managua, Nicaragua, in a matter of two days, Spanish America had to suffer the deaths of 300,00 °Central Americans and the torture, disappearance, and death of thousands of Argentinians, Uruguayans, Chileans, and Brazilians. This is the abominable arithmetic of the Cold War in Latin America, whose wounds have still not entirely healed. The memory of the horrors is alive. I have known Chilean women raped in front of their children and husbands, in the dungeons of that savior of Christianity, Augusto Pinochet. I have known Argentinian mothers who will never again see their children who were “disappeared” by the ruthless military officers operating under the command of Jorge Videla. I have seen the terror that blanches the faces of the men and women of the Southern Cone upon the mere mention of the so-called “Angel of Death,” the winsome blond Captain Astiz whose special predilection was throwing live nuns from airplanes into the River Plate, or of Contreras, the Chilean general who assassinated Orlando Letelier on the streets of Washington, D.C., in 1976, Carlos Prats on the streets of Buenos Aires in 1974, and Bernardo Leighton on the streets of Rome. Ariel Dorfman bears full testimony to the truth in his dramatic work Death and the Maiden. In the jail cells of the DINA in Santiago de Chile, the dictator’s thugs entertained themselves by inserting live rats into the vaginas of their female prisoners.

The shortest century, from Sarajevo, 1914, to Sarajevo, 1994. How very long, in comparison, the nineteenth century seems, stretching from the French Revolution all the way to the First World War. How long it was in cultural terms, as well — in literature it went from Goethe through to Joyce; in painting, from Ingres and Delacroix to Matisse and Braque; in philosophy, from Schopenhauer and Kant to Husserl and Heidegger. And how very short was the century that began and ended with Picasso.

The last topic of the twentieth century extends into the twenty-first, and it is called globalization. Having lived through the four eras, I can now state that globalization is the name of a power system. Just like the Holy Spirit, it has no boundaries. Just like Mount Everest, it is there. And just like the Law of Gravity, its evidence is irrefutable. But like the Latin god Janus, it has two faces. The good face is that of technical and scientific progress— the most rapid in all of history. Free trade, the postulate of economic freedom since the days of the Prussian Zollverein that set the stage for the unification of Germany. Productive offshore investments. The accessibility to and dissemination of information that leaves many emperors, who once covered themselves with the vine leaves of the Asian, African, and Latin American jungles, with no clothes. The universalization of the concept of human rights and the invalidity of statutes of limitations for crimes against humanity such as those of Pinochet, the Chilean murderer and torturer, the source of all criminal order during his dictatorship.

But Janus has another, less attractive, side. The sheer speed of technological progress leaves behind — perhaps forever — those countries that are unable to keep up with the pace. Free trade increases the advantages to be gained by massive, competitive corporations (which are very few) and crushes small and medium-sized industry without which the employment, salary, and welfare levels of the great mass of people suffer, hindering support for the development of the Third World. As a consequence of this, globalization only widens the gap between rich and poor, both internationally and within each nation: 20 percent of the world consumes 90 percent of world production. And what begins to emerge is the specter of a kind of global Darwinism, as Óscar Arias called it. Speculative investments prevail over productive investments: 80 percent of the 6 billion dollars that circulate daily in the world markets is speculation capital. The crises of globalization, for this reason, are not business or information or technological crises: they are crises of the international financial system, brought on by the loss of social control over the economy and the weakening of political power in the face of cresohedonic power.

In this union of Croesus (money) and Hedone (pleasure) global culture becomes a fashion show, a giant screen, a stereophonic boom, an existence made of glossy, four-color paper. It transforms us into what C. Wright Mills called “cheerful robots,” and it condemns us, as the title of Neil Postman’s celebrated book goes, to “amusing ourselves to death.” In the meantime, millions of human beings die without having smiled once in their entire lives. A massive transfer from rural to urban life will, in the twenty-first century, bring about the eradication of one of the oldest forms of life, the agrarian life. All we will have is city life. And the widespread crises of urban civilization that go with its uncontrollable pandemics, homeless people, crumbling infrastructures, discrimination against sexual minorities, women, and immigrants. Begging in the streets. Crime.

Are there any answers to this crisis? What role is to be played in the twenty-first century by the left-wing ideology in which I was educated, whose ideals I assimilated, whose crises I witnessed and criticized? Can the political world resume control over the anarchy of the markets? Does the state have a role in the globalized world? There are. It can. It does. The Friedmanite antistate discourse of the Reagan-Thatcher years proved itself to be hypocritical and insufficient in time. The state, though declared obsolete, was certainly strong enough to save insolvent banks and fraudulent financiers and to coddle arms industries. In 2001 we realized that there is no such thing as a stable democracy without stable government. Far from reducing the role of the state, globalization has in fact broadened the areas that fall under public jurisdiction. What has been reduced is the proprietary state. And what is most necessary is a state that can regulate and establish standards. There is no developed nation in the world where this is not the case. And it is even more important in countries of weak economic agents, such as Latin America.

We have all witnessed the noxious effects of a globalization that eludes all national and international political control and promotes a speculative system that, according to one of its wisest protagonists, George Soros, has reached its limit. If this trend continues unchecked, Soros says, the world will be swept into catastrophe. The globalization crises — in the Philippines, Malaysia, Brazil, Russia, Argentina — can be attributed to the perverse fact that financial capital is overvalued and human capital undervalued.

The social collective existing within the entity that (for lack of a more appropriate term) we continue to call “the nation” has, then, a mission: that of rediscovering values such as work, health, education, and savings. In other words, that of recovering the central role of human capital.

In today’s world, 9 billion U.S. dollars would suffice to address the basic educational needs in developing countries; in today’s world, the same amount is spent on cosmetics in the United States alone. Is this tolerable?

In today’s world, an initial investment of 13 billion U.S. dollars would suffice to resolve the problems of water, health, and food in the poorest countries; the same amount is spent on ice-cream consumption in Europe alone. Is this acceptable?

No, according to many people, including Federico Mayor, ex-director general of UNESCO, and James Wolfensohn, director of the World Bank, who find it “unacceptable that a world that spends approximately 800 billion U.S. dollars a year on weapons cannot find the money needed — an estimated 6 billion U.S. dollars per year — to put every child in school.” A mere 1 percent decrease in military spending worldwide would be sufficient to put every child in the world in front of a blackboard.

All these facts and statistics should motivate the international community to give the global age a human face.

Nevertheless, in the end, we find ourselves back on our home turf and there are problems that cannot wait around for a new international enlightenment that may arrive on the scene either too late or not at all.

Charity begins at home, and the first thing that we must ask ourselves, as Latin Americans, is this: what resources do we have to establish the foundations for a progress that, beginning with the local village, will allow us eventually to become active agents and not passive victims of rapid-fire global movement in the twenty-first century?

Globalization is not a panacea for Latin America.

We will not be an exception to the fact that is becoming clearer and clearer with every passing day. If the locality is weak, the globality won’t work.

In other words: effective participation in the global arena can only begin with sound governing in the local arena.

And local government needs strong, robust private and public sectors that are conscious of their respective responsibilities. The goal is “to clean one’s own house, build a stable economy. . and a solid state, one that is able to offer security in every area,” as Héctor Águilar Camín states in his book México: la ceniza y la semilla (Mexico: The Ash and the Seed).

Globalization will be judged. And the judgment will be a negative one if globalization comes to mean more unemployment, fewer social services, the loss of sovereignty, the disintegration of international law, and political cynicism. And now that the democratic flags have disappeared from sight, the same ones that were so furiously waved during the Cold War to defend the free world against Communism, the free world congratulates itself for the fact that instead of totalitarian Communist governments and military dictatorships, the world is filled with efficient, authoritarian capitalist governments (like that of China) which, according to the current global logic, are always preferable to failed neoliberalist systems which in reality are crony capitalism (like that of Russia).

Globalization has the power to render the world a highly undesirable place, dominated by the logic of speculation, disregard for the human being, disdain for social capital, mockery of what still remains of many deeply scarred national sovereignties, obliteration of international order, and the consecration of authoritarian capitalism as the fastest track to security without the need for very much accountability.

But the challenge is there. Everest will not move. How can we climb it, then? How can we take the negative trends of globalization and turn them into positive ones?

Can we take advantage of the opportunities offered by globalization to create growth, prosperity, and justice?

What I am trying to say here is this: perhaps globalization is inevitable, but that doesn’t mean it has to be inevitably negative.

It means that globalization should be subject to control, its social consequences evaluated and judged.

Will it be possible to socialize the global economy?

Yes, I think it will, no matter how difficult and demanding the effort may be.

Yes, as long as new forms of international economic relationships can be held accountable to the core activities of civil society, democratic control, and cultural realities.

Yes, as long as civil society is able to offer alternatives to a supposed single-model system.

Yes, as long as civil society rejects the idea that things are a foregone conclusion, a fait accompli, and instead strives constantly to reenvision social conditions, reminding the power structures that we live in contingency with one another, and connecting globalism to concrete and variable social actions within — for lack of new terminology — the entities we continue to refer to as “nations.”

Globalization in and of itself is not a panacea.

It calls for a base of active civil societies, diversified cultures that stand up to the encroaching global culture of unadulterated entertainment, uniform, exclusionary, and vapid.

It calls for public and private sectors that are aware of their respective responsibilities: private initiatives need a government that is strong — not big, just strong. And this can be possible with a tax base and a social policy that works in favor of a private sector that, for its part, needs an educated, healthy workforce that can be consumers as well. “Poverty doesn’t create a market,” says Carlos Slim, a lucid Mexican businessman. “The best investment of all is to do away with poverty.”

It calls for a democratic framework that can give the now-weakened notion of sovereignty back its true political meaning. The only sovereign nation on the international stage is one that is sovereign on the national stage as well. One that respects the cultural and political rights of a population that it conceives of as a complex, qualitative whole, not merely a number: citizens, not inhabitants.

I invoke the words of Juan Bautista Alberdi of Argentina in the nineteenth century: to govern is to populate. Yes, this is true, but as his contemporary Domingo F. Sarmiento would add, to populate is to educate, and only an educated citizenry can govern for the good of its country and the world.

That base is the only solid, creative one from which the processes of globalization may be transformed into opportunities for growth, prosperity, and justice. And its key lies in the active identification of civil society, democracy, and culture as inseparable repositories of a new twenty-first-century sovereignty and a renewed commitment to that daily plebiscite that, as Renan said, constitutes what we define as “nation.”

Good national governments can only emerge when both the public and the private sectors are conscious of their obligations to the local communities: that should be their first priority, in the interest of becoming a positive, active player in the global community.

To this end, there must be an intermediary between these two sectors, one which can play the role of bridge, supplementary instance, and political supervisor: the third sector.

As we navigate the waters of globalism, we cannot throw the public and private sectors overboard, nor the societies in which they operate. Without these three elements, globalization could well become a kind of helpless Titanic facing the unexpected icebergs of a world history fraught with peril, thunderstorms, displacements, financial and economic surprises, revivals of old prejudices, and opposition from older cultures. History is far from becoming a thing of the past; it is, in fact, more alive, more contentious, more defiant than ever.

Why? Because the vices of the global village have been matched by the resurgence of the vices of the local village. Tribalism. Reductive, chauvinistic nationalism. Xenophobia. Racial and cultural prejudices. Religious fundamentalism. Fratricidal wars.

This is far from the first era of “globalization.” The first one took place, overwhelmingly, during the age of discovery, the days of the circumnavigation of the globe and the creation of the jus gentium, the notion of international law as the answer to the global processes of conquest, colonization, and mercantile rivalry.

Rather contentiously, this first era of globalization was also manifested by the “first wave” of the agrofeudal world (Toffler) and its transition to the “second wave” of rapid industrialization that supplanted the agrarian, manual-labor world and sparked the rebellion of the Luddites, who destroyed the machines that robbed artisans and manual laborers of their jobs.

Today, the neo-Luddite sentiment that the former president of Mexico Ernesto Zedillo regards as “globaliphobia” is simply another manifestation of this old attitude of opposing the unstoppable: the new techno-information economy that favors quality over quantity, as manifested in vast global alliances for improved production, distribution, and optimization of profits.

The fact that this revolution will provoke disgruntlement, pain, and injustice is as true in today’s world as it was in the nineteenth century.

The fact that the new economy will not suddenly disappear when confronted with outward displays of protest is as true in today’s world as it was in the nineteenth century.

As I said earlier, the new global economy, just like Mount Everest, is there. It isn’t going to budge. The question, then, is this: how do we climb it?

The Christ of Corcovado is there. That doesn’t mean we should blow it up because the world isn’t perfect. We should embrace it so that the world can become less imperfect.

There are already 2 billion computers in the world. Increasingly, telephones connect to computers, voices and data multiply, and communication from one person to another person is transformed into communication from one person to many.

Even guerrilla warriors, as Subcomandante Marcos has demonstrated in Chiapas, will fight their revolutions on the Internet.

The fact is novel and stunning: Bill Clinton, in his address entitled “The Struggle for the Soul of the Twenty-first Century,” offers an astonishing bit of information: when he assumed the presidency of the United States in 1993, there were only fifty sites on the World Wide Web. By the time he left the White House eight years later, “the number was 350 million and rising.”

Can new technologies and computers solve the basic problems of the overwhelming number of people who live in poverty, in Latin America and all over the world?

Not by themselves, no.

But to the extent that technological innovations can be used more widely to accelerate and improve the education of people in certain geographical areas and of certain social classes, people who may now be able to receive training without having to walk three hours to a school, people who cannot even afford to pay the few and poorly compensated teachers they have available to them — then the answer is yes.

To the extent that technology and information may reach people in the most eroded and barren dead zones of Latin America, and teach them how to save their land, water, and forests, and how to modernize and optimize their agricultural endeavor, then the answer is yes.

To the extent that technology and information can become the vehicles of a basic solution to poverty — that is, the promotion of the micro-credit — then the answer is yes.

To the extent that technology and information can multiply the income of small-scale producers through the identification of markets, then the answer is yes.

To the extent that information and technology can empower citizens with the strength they need to rebuild political and social regulators of the economy, then the answer is yes.

To the extent that information and technology give every individual the cultural tools he or she needs for learning, producing, influencing, then the answer is yes.

To the extent that information and technology can allow citizens to acquire their own character, identify their own interests, and embrace culture, then the answer is yes.

To the extent that information and technology can help the state and politics reclaim their indispensable central role in society, then the answer is yes.

Globalization and politics. As the Mexican political analyst Federico Reyes Heroles so aptly put it, “In our Latin America. . the economic agents do not have the capacity to replace the state. . Let us dismiss the state as benefactor but strengthen the state as regulator.”

Reyes Heroles reminds us that there is no such thing as a stable democracy without a stable state. This is true in all the strong democracies of all the strong economies of the Northern Hemisphere. Far from reducing the state, globalization and open markets broaden the scope of public jurisdiction and reaffirm the redistributive function of the state via the taxation system.

The Latin American state continues to be a critical factor for the implementation of policies concerning health, education, and nutrition. The state cannot abandon its function as money-gatherer, nor can it renounce its commitment to spending more efficiently and directing additional resources toward social policies.

Not big government; strong government. Not recumbent politics; politics standing on its own two feet. Productive rather than speculative private enterprise. A civil society conscious of the fact that social rights depend upon social action and organization. The third sector as a conduit for social intelligence: What is my identity? What are my interests? What are my challenges? In no way am I attempting to cover up the evils of global economy. The ever-widening gap between rich and poor. The decline of traditional occupations. Rapacious urbanization. The plundering of our natural resources. The disintegration of social structures. The vulgarity of commercial culture.

There are, however, two modes of policy I reject: that of the ostrich which buries its head in the sand, and that of the bull which bursts into the china shop, simply to destroy everything in sight.

Categorical denial will not put an end to the globalization process. The question, then, is how can we take advantage of it?

Once the virtues have been ascertained, the rough spots smoothed over, the opposing arguments exhausted, resistance reinforced, and the realities of the jungle and the global zoo legislated for and held accountable to political will, what might be the new topics of debate in the next forty, fifty years, when I am no longer here? I venture to offer three. The protection of the environment. The rights of women. And the defense of the personal sphere against public encroachment, as well as the defense of the public sphere against private avarice.

The merits of globalization will amount to empty urns if they are not filled with the elixir of local government. I am talking about policies for economic growth, welfare, labor, infrastructure, education, health, and nutrition that can be enacted on a local level. Policies whose goal is to activate the “virtuous cycle” of a healthy internal market that, in turn, could come to be an active contributor to a robust but also fairer global marketplace, truly global insofar as it would include more and more men and women who find themselves in the process of achieving very real improvement in their lives. Exclusion cannot be the price we pay for achieving greater efficiency.

Only with this kind of local government as a starting point, I believe, can we aspire to an international order that is both innovative and sound. The more the national state enacts, cooperates with, and protects national measures to resolve the galaxy of problems that I have mentioned here, the more authority it will have to propose international laws governing the environment, family policy, feminism, education, health, child care, immigration and labor regulations, financing for developing areas, and international jurisdiction to combat organized crime.

First and foremost, effective local government: political will. And rapidly following, international alliances bolstered by local politics and vice versa. Two-way streets, true, but if the national community does not create its own instruments for solving problems locally, international aid may very well end up in a bottomless pit where, as we all know, corruption is the most insatiable of monsters.

Globalization only favors human development if, at the same time, national and international public institutions grow stronger, so that the multitude of nonpolitical actors who currently rob elected officials of their power and hand it over to nonelected people can be made to adhere to the law.

The decisions that work against legality in the global realm are those decisions that ignore environmental protection treaties, multilateral disarmament treaties, and most of all, the tremendous effort being made to unite globalism and criminal justice.

To proclaim an axis of evil is a simplistic way of fighting terrorism by identifying it with two or three poorly chosen countries. Terrorism knows no country. That is both its advantage and its danger. Terrorism has no flag. No face. One day it surfaces in Afghanistan, another day in the Basque Country, a third day in Oklahoma, and the following day on the streets of Belfast. The tragedy of September 11, 2001, horrified everyone and confirmed for all of us that terrorism is a universal fact. It must be fought with tenacity wherever it manifests itself, but without demonizing entire nations or cultures. We cannot fall into the preposterous trap of attributing terrorism to a historical hatred of the United States, to the corruption or inefficiency of certain Islamic governments, and much less to the clash of cultures. No: we most certainly should agree that the deepest sources of conflict in our world are instability, illegality, poverty, exclusion, and, in general terms, the absence of a new legality for a new reality.

For this reason it is so important to begin building, step by step, the foundations of an international legal body for the global age. Let us not open, as did Virgil in Hell, an ivory gate to send false illusions into the world. Far more preferable is the patience of Job, for whom the waters did ultimately erode the rocks but also allowed the tree to sprout anew.

Nevertheless, what we see on the streets of Seattle, Prague, and Genoa is impatience — an impatience that bit by bit helps us to move toward understanding that globalization should not be simplistically demonized but rather transformed into a tool for the public good, for increasing benefit and welfare.

In an extraordinary speech given before the French National Assembly, the then president of Brazil, Fernando Henrique Cardoso, offered guidelines to meet this challenge. The international economic system should create funds to fight poverty, hunger, and sickness in the neediest countries. The debts of the poorest countries in Africa and Latin America should be reduced or cancelled altogether. A new international contract should be drawn up between states, so that the people can be better served. Solidarity should be, in a word, globalized. Rather than a few predominant states and markets, a new international contract between free nations should be drafted and implemented.

President Cardoso does not only propose an ideal — and in any event, a goal cannot be worthy of human action if it does not rest upon ideals worthy of our human condition — he shows us that we are living in a world of mutant reality and uncertain legality, just as was the case in Western cultures as the transition was made from the secure, consecrated order of the Middle Ages to the uncertainty of the brave new world of the Renaissance — an uncertainty that is expressed most eloquently in the tragedies of William Shakespeare and the novels of Miguel de Cervantes.

Today, one of the many challenges of our new century is that of envisioning the new legality.

Shakespeare and Cervantes, yes, but Vitoria and Bodin, Las Casas and Grotius as well.

From this, our Latin America, from these fertile, beautiful, aching, trampled lands that have been shot down by themselves and by those who covet either their poverty or their beauty — I don’t know which — we ask, today, to globalize not only the fact but the right to make rights out of commerce and health, education and environment, work and security.

Let the North, for its own benefit, understand how to distribute profits and reduce burdens in the global era.

Let the South, instead of reading its register of complaints, its cahier de doléances, over and over again, learn to clean its own house first, before demanding from the world those things that we do not give ourselves: the sovereignty of internal freedom, democracy, and human rights, the legitimacy of a justice system that eradicates corruption, impunity, and the culture of illegality in our own land.

Only then, by using that as a point of departure, can we create a legitimate globalism of shared rights and obligations in accordance with the conviction that globality isn’t worth a damn if it doesn’t have a working locality behind it.