Intellectuals Facing the Challenges of Globalization

The plethora of debate, interpretation and bandying about surrounding the concept of globalization for over a decade now might itself pose concerns in any consideration of the role of the intellectual in facing the challenges of globalization. One might question whether or not globalization is a permanent conceptualization, capable of taking its place among those concepts which guide collective actions and thinking, or one might question if it is merely a passing notion. Despite the relative newness of the term’s use or, as some might say, its “over-use” in justifying or criticizing all manner of human activity we have come to recognize that it is here to stay. Moreover, thanks to the work of social and human scientists, we also understand that globalization is a phenomenon that has been with us for most of the history of human society.

In some sectors of society, however, globalization is sometimes used interchangeably with “modernity”. When this is the case, both terms- modernity and globalization- have either very bad or very good connotations. When globalization is considered as bad, a particular traditional innocence is considered to have been wantonly destroyed by the imposition of foreign values. It is a much lamented and grieved loss. To make matters worse, the lost innocence has been replaced by something ugly and meaningless. When globalization is considered as good, lives are said to be enriched or saved because of the infusion of foreign technology or thinking.

But if globalization is as old as we believe it to be, if it is simply the concept we use to describe the transformations, changes and processes involved in the transfer of ideas from one culture to another, then it is mistaken to call it either good or bad. One can say it is natural and has appeared in many forms in every age known to humankind. One might even say, and I will here, that globalization belongs to the very nature of human society. It is difficult to find aspects of our life and lifeworlds that have not been transplanted via globalization. Religions. The spread of illnesses. The spread of cures. The list is probably endless. If we look at our history and our present through the various dimensions of globalization, we can see that it is indeed a powerful conceptualization to be hermeneutically explored and understood, to be prodded and expanded as a prime element of our humanity. The broader our understanding of the dimensions of globalization, the deeper our working understanding of the phenomena involved and hence, perhaps, the greater our capacity to control what might yet be called our “human destiny One of the roles of the intellectual regarding the challenges of globalization becomes clear here: surely it is to define and expand upon the very meaning of globalization by delineating particular instances in all their ramifications.

Francois de Bernard, in his address delivered at UNESCO in Paris in November of 2000 calls for marking the notion of globalization into broad categories and to think of globalization in the plural-globalizations-rather than as simply one entity or one process or one of anything. In this way we might conceive of the globalization of education, the globalization of printing, the globalization of science and so on. In this way, he says, we will not be so prone to call globalization itself good or bad. We will be unable to say we are against or for globalization. We will see it only as a process natural to human society.
We will also be able to discern the impact of one globalization upon another.

In leading us away from simplifying the notion of globalization or assigning it only to the economic or even the political realm, de Bernard allows us to expand upon other globalization movements which stretch across the world in the arts, philosophical notions of the individual and the collective, of self and other and more. To think of globalization in the plural, that is, as globalizations, frees us to examine the interaction and impact of one sort of globalization upon another and to explore newer categorizations like world citizenship or, as de Bernard says, “civic globalization.” And with this let me tip my hand and briefly state the roles of the intellectual I want to stress in this paper: I see the role of the intellectual as definer, delineator, explorer, and disseminator of knowledge regarding the ideas which guide the times. These roles are by no means passive. Not only are they active in and of themselves, they are also springboards to even more activity. The intellectual as scholar and researcher is moved to become civic world citizen acting upon convictions and beliefs for the betterment of the world community.

We owe our recent awareness and use of the concept of globalization in the realm of economy and markets to the social scientist, Wallerstein (1974) and to his conceptualizations of world-systems. It is especially to him that we owe our understanding of capitalism, socialism, and monarchy and such as systems competing for domination historically. While it took some twenty years for this notion of world systems to emerge as forceful in political parlance and action, it will not take so long for the current transformative explorations of the concepts to yield significant effect because the technology of communications has rendered the dissemination of ideas as swift as the speed of lightning. If an idea is deemed important enough, it will soon travel and, as it travels, it will develop. I am amazed at the development of my own comprehension and integration of concepts over the last decade. I am also very much aware that the comprehension of which I speak has come about because of information so readily available and so much discussed.

Since his early work, Wallerstein has continued to expand and deepen his theories of world systems. And other social scientists and philosophers are now expanding upon the notion of systems and cycles in other globalization conduits such as warfare or ecological degradation. We hear their voices not at all as the voices of disinterested scholars however; theirs are the voices of civic intellectuals raised in informed and reasoned protest.


The Interaction of Globalizations with Liberalism

In the core of intertwining and interactive globalizations about which we speak most today, the one which appears to threaten much of the world’s population is embodied in the world-system of economic governance known under various names such as liberalism, neo-liberalism, and market economy. Liberalism is a seductive notion because it holds emancipation and freedom as its core. Yet philosophers and politicians alike have recognized how unfettered liberalism creates and maintains an elite and denies freedom to a vast majority of the world.

At the close of World War II, many of intellectuals and world leaders feared that liberalism without restraints could fester into yet another war. It was, they felt, the economic inequalities that existed after World War I which had propelled World War II. They did not fear globalizing through trade but they feared what would happen if one nation or a group of nations engaged in practices that would damage other national economies. The United Nations Monetary and Financial Conference at Bretton Woods in 1944 is strong testimony of that fear. The institutions that originated at that conference-especially The International Monetary Fund, the now infamous IMF, have changed and not at all for the good. But the intention behind their origin was surely noble enough. The intent was to help those countries which had suffered most from the war and it was to assure that countries would help each other. The intent was to put humane restraints on liberalism. The intent was to insure that world economy was driven by the needs of people, not markets. Karl Polanyi expressed it best when he asserted that a market driven economy doomed the societies engaging in it. A market economy, he said, destroys our humanity by eroding the web of relationships that holds human society together (1944). In 1944, we must suppose from the reading the Bretton Woods documents, that the United Nations representatives there recognized that the freedom of liberalism belongs only to the powerful unless it is tempered with the more humanistic measure of socialism. And that was the Bretton Woods Agreement’s intent. As we all know, those good intentions were eroded as neo-liberalism gained influence and the market once again drove economies.

Socialism opposes market driven societies. It is the antithesis of capitalism and its extreme form has always been conceived as an antidote to pure liberalism. History has proved it a failed one in that it too has robbed a large proportion of its citizens of their most basic freedoms, even, freedom from hunger, despite its claims to end inequality. After the fall of communism in most of the world, liberalism began to appear in its unfettered form once again, as if communism had served but to contain it. Neo-liberalism, amidst the globalizing trend of decolonization, lured developing nations to its tenets with the promise of the same sort of wealth and freedom once enjoyed by colonizers. They were even welcomed to the liberalist den often by those same former colonizers who saw emerging nations as markets of a different exploitive stripe than they had been when they were colonies.

Those who, at the close of World War II, had read in its ashes a bleak future for a capitalist world if liberalism were not restrained by humanistic concerns, must have seen the same prophesy later in the panorama of developing industrialized countries trading with long established ones who were shearing themselves of any semblance to a welfare state via deregulation and privatization. The mottos of the “lean state” and “lean corporations” were palpable ghosts of Polyani’s nightmare vision. State and market merged to proclaim that global efficiency and competitiveness are a nation’s best goals. In this spirit, labor unions and agricultural subsides which had served as humanizing restraints to raw competitiveness, were dismantled.

What followed might be viewed as a global fiasco on the world stage if it were not for its most tragic effects on whole communities of real people. In developing countries, that tragedy was compounded because it was also the betrayal of the hope held out by liberalism. We now know that many other dimensions of globalization combined to effect the disaster: political and cultural globalizations, for example, lagged well behind the economic practices of liberalism so that peoples of developing countries, most especially, had few resources to call upon to help realize their dreams of wealth. Instead they grafted onto their newly embraced political and cultural structures the authoritarian traditions of their pasts. Even their technological globalization processes were skewed and imbalanced so that roads never reached the provinces of the poor nor did communication networks exist for them. The fruits of ecological globalization are restraints in themselves because they offer bitter knowledge of the effects of unsustainable development. But the growth of these fruits was, at best, stunted in those countries bent on developing at whatever cost. Alas, ecological globalization has been slower throughout the world than have other globalizations. Liberalism, after all, goes back, at the least, some 600 years. But only in the second half of the twentieth century did the world begin to know the spreading, global effects of ecological destruction in even the most remote corners of the world. First, however, as the poor in developing countries know well, ecological destruction is felt by the people closest to it, the people who live in close proximity to a polluted environment or a raped and barren landscape.

The disasters of which I speak have called the principles of liberalism into question at last. Even some of the staunchest supporters of liberalism are calling for humanizing measures. We see some of the new millionaires of the West, for example, donating huge sums to assist the poorest peoples of the world in entering the modern world with dignity and freedom. The motives of these donors may not be clear to us, nor even, perhaps, acceptable if they were. Nonetheless, they represent humanizing efforts in the marketplace that are qualitatively and quantitatively superior to the charitable deeds which characterized previous generations of liberalists.

In addition to these humanizing charities, we have organized hues and outcries against liberalism’s hold. Much of the current protest against liberalist policies is fueled by the disseminated work of intellectuals. Not only are intellectuals analyzing the globalizing phenomena of neo-liberalism, they are also placing the processes in other globalization contexts. Intellectuals are rigorously comparing and exploring interactions and effects of globalizations in ways they had not before; sophisticated ways, ways which are more comprehensive, covering more concrete examples and including more reliable statistics. There is also much greater awareness of the gaps among globalizations and the relationships of those gaps to the effects and processes of each globalization. The globalization of women’s rights, for example, lags far behind economic globalization. A report from the Women’s Environment and Development Organization (WEDO) in 1998 notes the disproportionate share of the costs of economic globalization women in economies in transition bear while they are excluded from benefits like health care and equal opportunity. Girls and women are always the first to be given poorly paid jobs in restructuring economies.

Facts and figures, very nearly names and faces can be attached to the statistics that are available on the Internet. The globalization of technology enables intellectuals to empathetically theorize from concrete example and fact. Their theories are meant to be, as they say, accountable. In unprecedented ways, the globalization of communication technology enables intellectuals to examine world-guiding theories like liberalism or socialism in terms of accountability, that is, by the degree to which they deliver their promises.

Having, as they do, information and insights from the past and the present, social scientists and philosophers have been able to look at the world economic governance systems in new lights. Only yesterday communism, the extreme of socialism, was at war with liberalism. And even before that, they were fierce competitors. Yet, for some time, many theoreticians and activists have seen socialism and liberalism as companionable. We speak of socialistic democracy, or socialized liberalism. John Dewey spoke of reformed liberalism. Notions of individuality, of tolerance, of peace, of freedom are becoming more and more globalized and they have expanded and taken on new depth and meaning with time and with their travels. As these notions become more and more widespread, both pure liberalism and pure socialism become unworkable and untenable. It is time to construct new systems from old, to amalgamate and refashion. And that is just what is happening. It is happening here at this conference and at others around the globe. The work we share here will be shared with others in distant lands. Just as all of us here have drunk at the cyber web site pools listing “liberalization,” “globalization,” “sustainable development,” and more, so too will others derive nourishment from the papers read here. Our thinking is nourished there on the net as is the thinking or organizers and protestors. This kind of communication does more than nourish us as individuals however; we must not forget that it also nourishes and energizes collectivity and collective action.

I do not wish to suggest that peace, tolerance, justice and fairness in all things are the inevitable outcomes of the processes of globalizations. We have certainly seen that such is not the case in our own backyards, even in those backyards which had easily or uneasily taken up the mantles of peace, cooperation, and tolerance. The human spirit is made up of so many abilities, so many propensities and combinations of these that by now we must know that there will always be conflicts of ideas and feelings. History will never end simply because each generation defines it anew even as each generation contributes to the next generation’s history and history making. Utopias are the ideal of human society while the destiny of human society is to continually strive but never to reach its ideals, if for no other reason than because those ideals change and expand.


The Globalization of Intellectuals

In all the globalizations I have talked of here, the emphasis has been on the transformative spread of ideas. Our notions of capitalism and socialism changed dramatically with the conceptualization of world systems. They are changing even more dramatically as we take them out of their warring contexts and place them in the expanding contexts of other transformative notions, like tolerance, peace, and human rights. Cultural, political, ecological as well as economic globalizations are all transformed by the globalization of communication. The compression of time and space brought about by today’s technology has accelerated movements and changed whole societies. Moreover, all of these globalizations have worked toward the development of a federation of states, of a global state. Global international organizations which assume the powers of states are weak at this point, but as political notions become even more globalized, they will become stronger and more influential. The United Nations, for example, is an institution whose membership has been garnered through choice and not coercion. Choice, of course, does not necessarily equate with good. There are bad choices and there are choices which turn bad, like those of Bretton Woods. We have come to see the make up of the institutions originating there depart from their original purpose and we deplore that change. There are lessons to be learned here, not the least of which is that institutions should be monitored in terms of their original purpose. If that purpose embodies, as the Bretton Woods Agreements did, noble or humanitarian ideals, then any change in the institution must be rigorously examined in terms of accountability.

I do not wish to debate whether or not intellectuals took a hiatus from morality during the many years in which rationalization was deemed to be separate from morality in every sphere save the rational morality of religious thinking. The trend now is to put morals into reasoning. We have agreed to accept the notion of human rights as universal, for example. Having done that, we can now insert that notion into our practical reasoning. We can measure economic practices under liberalism in terms of their adherence to human rights. We can discuss humanitarian goals as viable and necessary. And more and more intellectuals are stepping forth to do this.

The Intellectual as World Citizen

Globalizations are intertwined, to be sure and we tend to see them as related as we talk of one or the other. World economic governance systems involve the nature of societal life within a society and between and among societies and so it is in this specific context that I wish to place several other globalizations, including that of civic globalization as I discuss the roles open to intellectuals facing the challenges of the times.

We are agreed that capitalism will not be overthrown as Marx predicted. In fact, it is the workers in highly industrialized countries who prefer capitalism. They have also often been active in initiating socialistic, humanistic reforms. Under the present globalization strategies used by transnational companies, labor led reforms are becoming harder and harder to achieve. Companies simply up and move for one thing, or they threaten to do so if workers protest injustices or destruction of the environment. Much of this sort of tactic went unnoted when social scientists gathered their data in the past. That is not the case now. Incident after incident can be recorded and documented. If a social scientist were following Sartre’s injunction to act by denouncing, the social scientist would then write a book or article analyzing the behavior of the employers and condemn it. The word would constitute action and Sartre would insist upon action. Habermas would take Sartre’s call for action one step further and would insist that the intellectual engage in public debate, democratic debate and write articles for newspapers and journals or write books. These roles are certainly options for today’s intellectuals. I want to suggest however that in this world of globalizations, there are other paths more in keeping with the times. Those paths are suggested by John Dewey whose own time was before Sartre’s. Dewey was appalled at the liberalism of his day. He felt it was destroying what he saw as honest and creative competition. He also saw liberalism as destroying the rights of individuals to develop fully and to explore their potential in the service of society and self. Liberalism thus needed to be reformed. His notion of reforming it was to democratize it. He envisioned a great society in which citizens had a say at every level. The purpose of schools thus was to create a public educated in democratic principles and processes. To do this, schools had to be democratic in every way. What Dewey envisioned was a civic society trained in a participatory democratic environment. In such a civic society, one would not imagine workers struggling against management alone. One would imagine, at the least, a coalition of community members including intellectuals and professionals speaking out for the worker’s concerns, and one would imagine that the concerns of human rights and environmental protection would be chief among the concerns of the total community as they approached all decisions.

Human rights and environmental protection are among those notions which are globalized. One can also imagine that workers in situations in which no community was locally present to represent them would, today, be able to call upon international groups, -I am thinking of NGOs here- to assist them. Dewey perhaps did not have to think in terms of globalization but we must. Still, he was not wrong to insist that building humanitarianism into liberalism at local and national levels was pertinent. It is still pertinent. Today, however, we would also insist that effort must be put into building humanitarian resources at transnational and international levels. Labor has not yet done this, I think, but environmentalists and feminist movements have. And now intellectuals are as well, not simply in meetings such as this but as intellectuals taking part in protests and demonstrations and promoting such NGOs as International Amnesty and Human Rights Watch.

Regional coalitions of civic groups have been very active in Asia. In 1999, for example, a group of representatives from several civil society organizations and academics from Korea and other parts of the world met to launch a collective effort to meet the major challenge resulting in that part of the world from economic globalization. Among other things the group created an Asian Social and Economic Institute, which would meet to solve issues of regional trade, investment, foreign debt management and short-term regional controls. The Taegu Round as the conference was called also issued a declaration regarding the IMF and other the other institutes stemming from the Bretton Woods Agreement, the World Bank. The Taegu Round Declaration called for the demise of the IMF and the World Bank on the grounds that their policies caused poverty, unemployment, and redistribution of the world’s wealth in ways that cause tensions and destruction of social peace and that this violated human rights law. I have not much paraphrased the wording of the declaration and I want to note that the declaration wording is not much different from the wording of the Bretton Woods Agreement. In deed, in spirit it is the very same. In this instance, intellectuals were holding the institutions accountable to their original purposes. And the failure of those institutions to act in accordance with their purposes is grounds enough for their dismantling. Not only were those institutions found to be not acting in compliance with their purposes, they were found to be, and have been found to be since, acting directly against those purposes.

On other occasions civic groups in Korea have taken globalized concerns before the elected government and insisted that they be recognized. Civic groups have lobbied for labor, for women’s rights, and for environmental issues. They have insisted on monitoring the government about just about everything from budget waste to taxes, favoritism and then they hold press conferences to make sure the word gets out. They use the media at every opportunity. And the largest of these civic groups, the Citizens’ Coalition for Economic Justice (CCEJ) constantly sets about restructuring itself to achieve a more democratic, participatory and efficient movement.

In all of these examples, I see globalized notions of human rights and democracy being articulated at local, national and regional levels. They represent Reformed Liberalism at the turn of the new century and they are examples of the next step for intellectuals facing the challenges of globalization to take: civic activism

There are many spheres in which intellectuals can operate and several in which they should operate. Certainly they need to be au courant via the Internet both in getting and disseminating information. They need to meet as we are and they need to join NGOs in some capacity even if it is only at a membership fee support level. Where health and circumstances indicate that more is possible, intellectuals should exercise their civic duties through volunteer work, writing and teaching. When intellectuals belong to local NGOs they should not be afraid to utilize the press and television to promote their causes.

It is no secret that ideas rule the world. The ideas I have talked of here- from liberalism to socialism, from individualism to collectivism, from human rights to tolerance-were first articulated by intellectuals. They belong, like our reasoning itself, to our humanity, to our endless exploration of who we are and what we are and what we mean. Reasoning, articulating, communicating and acting are the tasks of the intellectual. They are, it would seem, as never ending as history.


References:
de Bernard,Francois. 2000. From “globalization” to globalizations: dominating the world or sharing control? Address delivered at UNESCO in Paris at a symposium on the topic: “Globalization and Identities.” Seewww.mondialisations.org
Wallerstein, Immanuel. 1974.The Modern World-System, Vol. I. New York. Academic Press.
Conference at Bretton Woods document.
ww.ibiblio.org/pha/policy
Polanyi, Karl. 1944.The Great Transformation. Beacon Press.