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I have to admit that even I go into the MEGO (My Eyes Glaze Over) effect when those words come up. And, because I like to think of myself as a "thinking person," a person with some critical depth, I care about these terms, globalization and democratization. When G21 asked me to come back, I thought it would be appropriate to describe what I thought becoming a democratic society should be.
One of the reasons that we all have had such a time determining what we feel about the anti-globalization protests -- beside the fact that they are modern spectacle and tragedy -- is that the Powerspeak emanating from the closetted participants is that globalization means "more democracy" for the nations of the world because "free trade" tends to "normalize" authoritarian regimes. The counter-argument, from the street, the protestors, is that globalization only benefits the multinational corporations and the sycophantic politicians they have bought and paid for. "Free trade," this argument continues, is just a buzzword meaning that more countries need to be open to foreign (read: American) investment. "You people just don't get it," say your George W. Bush from behind steel walls and barricades.
What this top-down approach to economics and democratization has really done is open these societies, almost invariably, to hyper-inflation and the predominance of criminals -- be they the Russian mafia or less heinous black-marketeers -- while destroying what was left of the meager infrastructures by which most of their people survived. In all-too-many cases, food crops have been abandoned in favor of cash crops which only benefit corrupt politicians and multinational corporations in- and outside of the target country.
This leaves a bad taste in the mouths of many people in the Second and Third Worlds and leaves the impression that globalization, democratization and free trade are all buzzwords for the latest forms of mercantilism and colonialism. Rightly so.
What that means is that efforts for globalization become almost anathema to the notion of spreading democracy. Instead, globalization supports the status quo because markets demand stability over everything else --- including human rights. Which means there is no inherent reason why the forces of globalization would want or encourage any real social change. Change is anathema to the goals of investors.
Democratization, on the other hand, demands and forces social fluidity, even a bit of chaos, in order to empower the individual citizens who comprise the polis.
Democracy is built at the town meeting and the PTA, not at the World Bank or the IMF. It's that simple.
What this means, further, is that the protestors (excluding the provocateurs of the Black Block) are definitely right in insisting the World Trade Organization (WTO) and the G8 are anti-democratic by their very nature. They answer to no one and report to no one. They are not inclusive and they have been mandated the power to checkmate the structures of democratic societies everywhere. It's that simple. There is simply no evidence that the forces aligned to promote globalization have anything do to with promoting democratization. To say otherwise is disingenuous, if not a bald-faced lie.
If the industrialized nations had any true interest in establishing democracy around the world and promoting the advancement and well-being of peoples in less developed countries, the first steps would not be at the level of regimes, rather it would be among the citizens, at nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), religious and social organizations.
After Gotheberg and Genoa, there has been a lot of "official" and punditary talk about what democratization and globalization mean for the people of the world. Much of it has been gobblety-gook for most average people. My wife hits the "MUTE" button on our remote control whenever these two words come up in television commentary.
From where I sit, there's a problem with how the industrialized West offers democracy to the newly "liberated" Eastern Bloc countries and to the dictatorships of the so-called Third World. That problem is that democracy is advanced as a top-down proposition. Through mechanisms like loans from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) or World Bank that ask for "economic liberalization" of struggling economies --- meaning that the target countries open themselves to foreign investment, focus on those resources that maximize income (despite what the populace might want or need,) and open their internal markets to foreign products --- the prevailing Western (read American-lead) argument is that democracy will naturally ensue. This had proven (think: Russia, Argentina, et alia) to be a very cruel joke.
If we paid more attention to the history of liberal societies and less attention to self-serving cant, it would be clear that democracies develop and evolve from the bottom up. That we have to nurture institutions at the community level, from church groups to social clubs to civic organizations and small businesses, which are the building blocks of an involved polity. The problem that the mega-institutions of the West have had in taking this approach is that it militates against the overweaning concern for profit. We have ourselves become more focused on share-holders than stake-holders and what passes for democracy in the West is closer to an authoritarian than an Athenian model.
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