Is Globalisation Unethical?

Is Globalisation Unethical? That seems to be the view of many critics of globalisation. Former President of Ireland and former United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights MaryRobinson is taking an initiative to address that concern. The Ethical Globalization Initiative that shedirects seeks to integrate human rights norms and standards into a more ethical globalisation process and tosupport local and national human rights capacity building efforts using the New Partnership for Africa'sDevelopment (NEPAD) as a case study.

At the invitation of the Yale Center for the Study of Globalization,Robinson and several international experts and Yale University scholars gathered at the Center on January 15to discuss the issue of human rights and ethics raised by globalisation. The following are excerpts from thediscussion, which was chaired by Ernesto Zedillo, former President of Mexico and current Director of theCenter.

Other participants cited below are:

• Philip Alston, Professor of Law, New York University, NYU Centerfor Human Rights and Global Justice;
• Arjun Appadurai, William K. Lanman, Jr. Professor of InternationalStudies, Yale University and Director, Initiative on Cities and Globalization;
• Jagdish Bhagwati, UniversityProfessor, Columbia University; Drusilla Brown, Associate Professor of Economics, Tufts University;
• Thomas Hammarberg, Chairman of the International Council on Human Rights Policy and Ambassador and Special Advisor onHumanitarian Issues;
• Ayesha Imam, Women's Rights Activist;
• Ben Kiernan, A. Whitney Griswold Professor ofHistory, Yale University and Director, Genocide Studies Program;
• Harold Hongju Koh, Gerard C. and BerniceLatrobe Smith Professor of International Law, Yale University;
• Michael Merson, Dean of Public Health, YaleUniversity and Founder, Center for the Interdisciplinary Research on AIDS;
• Gus Ranis, Frank Altschul Professorof International Economics and Director, Yale Center for International and Area Studies.
  

Ernesto Zedillo: I would like to start by posing a question to you, which might be a silly question, butstill I want to make it, and that refers to the starting point, why speak of ethical globalisation? Do you seeglobalisation as a threat or as an opportunity to strengthen, enforce human rights throughout the world?... Doyou see globalisation as an instrument that could accelerate the establishment of the values and practices ofhuman rights in the world or do you see in globalisation something that inherently could weaken the prevalenceof human rights in the world?

Mary Robinson: Well, I think it's a very good question and I'm happy that you posed it. In a wayjuxtaposing the words ethical and globalisation was intended to be slightly provocative, especially for myfriends who are protesting and don't always like to be described as anti-globalisation but who are verydisillusioned by globalisation as it is, and are very amazed that the words ethical and globalisation couldsit together in an initiative.

And what I've been trying to do is to get people to think about globalisation... I think it has positive aspects, and it has, at the moment, negative aspects. And in my viewit could have many more positive aspects if it were more ethical, and that's to give you a very simple answer.Because I believe that the main driving forces - I identify two in particular - underpinning globalisation aswe know it today are first of all market forces, increasingly pushing for open markets for trade, the trade ingoods, services, and capital.

We don't have movement of people, so to a certain extent that's one of thefactors, and the other one which worries me a bit and is quite complex is that we're seeing increasingly aprivatization of power. We could see that very much in the human rights world where the way in whichtraditionally there has been accountability has been to pin states as being primarily responsible, but nowwe're seeing prison services being privatized, education being privatized, health care, and where is theaccountability?

And I think that this is being accelerated in a way, and there is a belief that if youprivatize it will be done better. So for those who are thinking now about public goods, we believe there is avery significant human rights element to that, and we'd like to discuss how we bring it in. So what we'resaying is, globalisation is a reality, it can be more beneficial, and we look to what the millenniumdeclaration of the heads of states said, that globalisation should work for all the world's people.

It doesn'tdo that at the moment, but if it was more values-led, and we don't say that human rights are the only values,we say that they are part of the rules of the road, and there are also the ILO standards, environmentalstandards, even arms control, whatever, but that there should be more attention paid by governments to thesevalues that they have signed up to. But also there is the role of private sector. How do we have increasingaccountability and responsibility of the private sector where what they're doing has such an impact on people?So these are all dimensions linking globalisation to the word ethical, as meaning there must be more valuesimpacting on globalisation as it affects people in order that it has a more positive effect on the majoritywho it affects, which it doesn't at the moment.

Jagdish Bhagwati: Obviously any economist whom you mention and ordinary citizens are interested in humanwelfare. Nobody seriously is interested in globalisation or growth or whatever just in itself. There could bepolitical values in growth because you become more powerful and so on, but essentially it's an instrumentalvariable.

So when you talk about privatization for example which has nothing to do with globalisation, for youcould have the problem in a closed society on an island economy, so the real question is have peopleovernationalised? Coming from India, to me it's a moral issue to have greater growth because if there is nogrowth it can be hardly impacted on poverty and when you don't have rapid growth you can't even have sociallegislation implemented.

Like if somebody is beating up on their wife, and your laws against that, unless awife can walk out and get a job, it's no fat use to have. So to me the economic globalisation that bringsprosperity goes hand in hand with social legislation, etcetera. So I think we should get away from the focuson human rights or welfare. We really have to ask, is the economic globalisation that is going on, is good orbad. On balance, nothing is totally good or totally bad, but it's what the economists call a central tendency.

What is the central tendency? My own view is that on balance economic globalisation has a human face, meaningyou do actually tend to by and large do better. There are downsides, but that's really the issue I think,rather than the conceptualization which you're focusing on, because it's pretty clear, if you have a more freeeconomy, your society is better but you know, where do we go from there?

So the real issue I think you peoplewant to focus on is what do you mean by the kinds of human rights and so on, you know that you're interestedin terms of defining your social objective, rights objective, and then looking even at globalisation in somedepth rather than generality. So if we just take one question, like trade and human rights. I'm a tradeeconomist, primarily, so when we talk about human rights, what do we mean by trade?

Now to me trade is a moralissue, and I do believe with Ernesto and a lot of other people that the evidence shows that trade leads tomore prosperity, and more prosperity leads to more people being put up into gainful employment, so it's not atrickle down strategy but a pull out strategy, and it is really a positive impact on balance.

But human rightsseem to me to come in on a different dimension, we may be talking poetry pretending it's prose, but fordecades we've really written about the need for adjustment assistance. Now if you simply open markets too fastlike shock therapy, you could throw a lot of people into dislocation. Now to me that is an importantdimension, economists have talked about it. And in fact Western nations do have adjustment assistanceprograms.

When we look at poor countries, the real issue there is that they don't have the money for all to bein any social safety net. So many of the developing countries are getting into trade liberalization becausepeople have demonstrated, like we have, that trade is good for you. It's the transition to more trade and alsomaintaining free trade that should have a dimension of an adjustment system program. Now I think this is wherea commission like yours could try and define what in fact we mean by trade and human rights.

We could definehuman rights as essentially in terms of more concrete dimensions, rather than getting bogged down inconceptualization. I would say rather than the World Bank throwing money at everything that comes its way, itshould focus on some important things and one of these could be to develop a program, a systematic program tosupport economic globalisation that's going on trade, both naturally through market forces and throughgovernment policies like liberalization, and say look, we're going to finance and systematically supportadjustment assistance programs which countries like many poor countries can't afford, so ...it's that level ofconcretization which I think would be very helpful in your work.

I've seen NGO reports which simply say in anytime you go into unemployment, that's bad for human rights, well what about the people who are gettingemployed? What about their human rights? Right? To some extent human rights have become like socialism waswhen I was younger. I mean any one word, you attach socialism to it, it sounds like a good phrase. I wouldjust urge more concreteness, and try and see exactly, try and relate, be actually focused on the issue, not ofwhat is happening in the context of globalisation as you said, but what is happening as a result of globalisation, and maybe the real issue is not about culturalglobalisation which some people worry about butabout economic globalisation.

Mary Robinson: I don't think there is a fundamental disagreement about the potential benefits and indeedconcrete benefits of economic globalisation, but what we're saying, taking again the millennium declaration,the benefits are not either benefiting or perceived to be benefiting the majority of people. It's an areawhere we're trying to link the thinking from a human rights perspective with the work that the World Bank cando.

Arjun Appadurai: I think the issue of the perception of, let's call it the equities involved in globalisation is, I think, not an extrinsic issue. It's intimately tied up with the ways in whichglobalisation, in fact even economic globalisation, are either driven or not driven...

If we consider thathuman rights is a language we all indeed share, and have our own picture, but overlapping pictures I wouldsay, maybe the right that this initiative could place in the center which no one would deny today ought to bea human right, though it's not the normal folk list of human rights, is the right to participate in thedirections that globalisation will take.

That's a hard right to define, it's not a simple legal right, it'snot a simple ethical right, it's not a simple economic right, it's not a simple political right, it'ssomething of all of those, but I would say it's tied up with issue number one. Very large numbers of peopleneed urgently to feel and to be, insofar as things will permit, realistically part of the processes thatdetermine the shape that globalisation will take.

Gus Ranis: I welcome the idea of trying to build bridges between the human rights community and the socialsciences, including economics which is probably the most difficult one. I also agree with what Jagdish wassaying about putting a serious emphasis on particular issues such as adjustment assistance, I think theargument could be made that foreign aid put into a pool of international adjustment assistance would be muchmore effective way to have foreign aid.

The second, I would say would focus more on the human rightssituation, not so much on what globalisation does for growth or what growth does or does not do for humanrights but what it does for the issue of the disenfranchised, including poverty, ethnic divisions within theworld, Africa in particular being the focus. I would emphasize two dimensions that I think would be useful.One is emphasizing decentralization, of a vertical type, to global bodies, civil society and so on, and thehorizontal type -- the question of moving away from the monopoly of decision making.

Drusilla Brown: You may be very concerned about putting good policies in place that ameliorate the impactof globalisation on the poorest. But there's another part of story that what globalisation does is eitheraggravates or it helps political failure. And in the case of child labor globalisation has the potential toeither improve the quote unquote economy of getting children out of the workplace, but it can actuallyaggravate it as well ...

But you can mess up through globalisation and privatization of the security system,turn around and trigger privatization of the education system, and what you do is lose the external effectsand social benefits of education that go above and beyond the five things. So when you're thinking throughexactly what you think of as human rights and what problems of globalisation you're going to solve with arights approach, you need to think about a lot of these other impacts of globalisation that have human rightsconsequences but don't necessarily have a rights approach solution. ...

As you move into globalisation and itsimpact through economic channels, you're going to often find that the problem isn't distribution of marketfailure, but market failure of the markets functioning, of the political process functioning, which doesn'talways have a human rights or a rights based solution.

Philip Alston: I was provoked I suppose by Professor Bhagwati into going back to an ideological analysis ofthe debate. I think he sought to de-ideologize globalisation by suggesting human rights have always been partof development definition, which I strongly contest, and by suggesting that privatization, for example, hasnothing to do with globalisation.

I think it's possible to describe globalisation in a very objectivetechnical sort of sense but I think it's also possible to describe it in a highly politicized sense, that itdoes bring with it, the way it's currently structured, inevitably and in a very big way, deregulation,privatization, the elevation of the power and opportunities of private actors who are not subject to any ofthe traditional restraints of human rights ...

Trade seems to be the engine which will bring whateverconsequences we like to see, but my sense is in fact trade brings a limited variety normally of, or limitedrange of, benefits in terms of economic and political rights. I think when ... talked about the need to lookat the voices of the disadvantaged, those who perceive that they are passed by and so on, we can go furtherthan that. It's not just a question of perception, it's a reality that empowerment, that the possibility, notin globalisation in the broadest sense but in the actual domestic political processes is being reduced as aresult of many of the phenomena of globalisation. I think trade is an important part of that. I'm not antitrade in any sense but I think we need to go beyond the trade agenda.

Jagdish Bhagwati: I would simply say whether the language of rights can help you improve and enhance aconsciousness in many of these things. I think that's a valid point. That translates partly into thisdemocratic deficit argument, the notion that somehow globalisation, through bypassing the masses or somethingand concentrating benefits is somehow necessarily creating a deprivation of the democratic rights of the poor.

That's absurd in my opinion, because on balance it's actually improving their access and their aspirations andso on, and there's a huge literature on that. It's certainly not, they're being deprived of rights anyway,earlier on. The question again goes back to whether globalisation is ameliorating, even in a small way, orworsening their situation, and I think that's really what you want to focus on. I really disagree with yourconclusion on that, Mr. Alston.

Thomas Hammarberg: There has been quite a bit of discussion in the human rights community about what wouldbe added by a human rights approach to development. Basically there are three things which have beenhighlighted. One is the one of participation.. With a rights based approach in development work, there will bemore focus on participation, that those who are involved, those who are concerned will be more involved.

Second, accountability. A key concept in all human rights discourse is accountability. And the third pointthat has been defined is more emphasis on non-discrimination, that no one should be left out. That of courseis combined with the aspect of human rights to focus on the individual. Development tends to focus more on thegroups, human rights more on the individual.

The other point I wanted to mention is that the human rightsstandards are international. We talk about them as universal. For me I was representing the UN in Cambodia fora couple of years, there was one very clear illustration of the importance of the international human rightsstandards. It was a period when textile was developing around Phnom Penh, so many companies came from outsideto set up their factories, and the working conditions were terrible, awful.