Globalization: A Threat To Democracy

Corporate globalization is a coordinated, coherent suite of initiatives -- and it is unfolding on a canvas much broader than is generally appreciated. Tight budgets, competitive markets, downsized companies -- these aspects of globalization are known to nearly everyone. Those who inform themselves learn that globalization also brings accelerating environmental damage, increased poverty, destabilized societies, a house-of-cards global financial system, and a severe threat to democracy.

But even that does not adequately capture the scope of the globalization

project. I hope it will become clear, as this investigation unfolds, that

globalization amounts to an overall restructuring of the world order, a

political rebuilding project that goes very deep. The image that comes to

mind is a block of small shops being bulldozed away to make room for a

shopping center. Globalization is a revolutionary project, not an

evolutionary one.

In globalization's new world order, it is democratic governance and

national sovereignty which are to be bulldozed clean from the global

building site. The system of strong national republics, which was the

West's heritage from the Enlightenment era, is being systematically

dismantled. Political arrangements are being scraped way back, and old

political strata, so to speak, are re-emerging.

In some ways, globalization scrapes us back to the robber-baron era of the

late nineteenth century, when laissez-faire capitalism reigned supreme,

boom and bust cycles were frequent, and politicians were "in the pockets"

of magnates such as John D. Rockefeller and the J. Pierpont Morgan. Today

they call it deregulation instead of laissez-faire, and it is giant

transnational corporations (TNCs) that exert the political influence

instead of colorful robber barons, but the game is the same, and the

results are identical.

In other dimensions, the globalization project is scraping back even

further, taking us back to the feudal era, with wealth and power

concentrated in the hands of a super-rich elite, and with the rest of us

reduced to a kind of disenfranchised serfdom. We are to have

no-entitlements employment, instead of fiefs, and the relationship of the

person to the TNC is becoming that of vassal to lord.

In still other aspects, globalization takes us all the way back to the

Roman Empire, only this ti...

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...s-roots democracy -- genuine democracy -- will be developed, grounded

in successful precedents, as a contribution to the "vision thing."

In fact the question of genuine democracy arises when the movement is still

in its early stages. A massive global movement must find a way to

coordinate itself, to find a sense of common direction, and of solidarity.

This movement won't be led by an existing aristocracy, as was the American

Revolution, nor does it come with a pre-packaged ideology, as did the

Russian Revolution. It is rising from the people themselves, starting from

a thousand places around the world, and a thousand circumstances, and with

a thousand agendas.

As the movement evolves, one can hope that it develops democratic ways of

operating, and finds ways to develop consensus agendas that originate from

the grass roots. Such a movement, in fact, can become the vehicle of

genuine democratic governance. Not a political party, such a movement

would be better characterized as an empowered civil society -- a sound

basis, I will argue, for a robust and lasting democratic system, which is

in turn a sound basis for a sustainable, humane, and livable world.