Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-lnqnp Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-25T02:01:48.958Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Can Democracy Survive Globalization?*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 March 2014

Benjamin R. Barber
Benjamin R. Barber*
Affiliation:
Director of the Walt Whitman Center for the Culture and Politics of Democracy, and Whitman Professor of Political Science, Rutgers University, New Jersey
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

Democracy is far less fragile than we sometimes imagine. Although hard to establish, it is remarkably robust and is corrupted only by dint of persistent effort. Yet, as Rousseau wrote of freedom, once lost, democracy is nearly impossible to regain. Today, the forces of democracy face a new source of corruption all the more sinister because it appears so innocuous, often even identifying itself with the liberty it undermines. Having survived the nation-state and in time subordinated it to its own liberal purposes, can democracy now survive globalization? Only if democracy is globalized.

At present, the encompassing practices of globalization have created an ironic and radical asymmetry: we have managed to globalize markets in goods, labour, currencies and information without globalizing the civic and democratic institutions that have historically comprised the free market's indispensable context. Put simply, we have removed capitalism from the institutional ‘box’ that has (quite literally) domesticated it and given its sometimes harsh practices a human face.

Type
Original Article
Information
Government and Opposition , Volume 35 , Issue 3 , July 2000 , pp. 275 - 301
Copyright
Copyright © Government and Opposition Ltd 2000

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

*

This is the text of the Government and Opposition/ Leonard Schapiro Lecture delivered at the London School of Economics on 4 May 2000.

References

1 The insider is Joseph Stiglitz, Clinton’s first-term Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisors, and more recently the Chief Economist of the World Bank, in his extraordinary essay ‘The Insider: What I Learned at the World Economic Crisis’, The New Republic, 17 April 2000. After describing the IMF as staffed by ‘older men … who act as if they are shouldering Rudyard Kipling’s White Man’s Burden’, Stiglitz asks ‘did America — and the IMF - push policies because we believed the policies would help East Asia or because we believed they would benefit financial interests in the United States and the industrial world? And, if we believed our policies were helping East Asia, where was the evidence? As a participant in these debates, I got to see the evidence. There was none’.

2 Soros, George, The Crisis of Global Capitalism Revisited, New York, Public Affairs Press, 2000, manuscript, p. 23.Google Scholar

3 Manuel Castells, The Rise of the Network Society, (3 vols), Vol. 1, Information Age, Oxford, Blackwell, 1996, p. 250.

4 Pope John Paul’s Apostolic Exhortation, cited in New York Times, 24 January 1999.

5 Wolfensohn, James D., President of the World Bank. Cited by Jim Hoagland, ‘Richer and Poorer’, Washington Post National Weekly Edition, 3 05 1999, p. 5.Google Scholar

6 This was the thrust of Fareed Zakaria’s hostile review of my Jihad vs. McWorld in The New Republic, March 1995.

7 Putnam, Robert, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community, New York, Simon & Shuster, 2000.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

8 Boyte, Harry C., Evans, in Sara M. and Boyte, Harry C., Free Spaces: The Sources of Democratic Change in America, Chicago, Chicago University Press, 1992.Google Scholar

9 Zollo, Peter, Wise Up To Teens: Insights Into Marketing and Advertising To Teenagers, Ithaca, NY, New Strategist Publications, 1999, p. 24, p. 336.Google Scholar

10 McNeal, James U., Kids as Customers, Jossey-Bass Publishers, 1992, p. 250.Google Scholar

11 Peters, Tom, Brand You 50: Or: Fifty Ways to Transform Yourself from an ‘Employee’ into a Brand that Shouts Distinction, Commitment and Passion, Knopf, New York, 1999.Google Scholar

12 Whyte, William H., The Organization Man, New York, Simon & Schuster, 1956.Google Scholar

13 George Soros, The Crisis of Global Capitalism Revisited, op. cit.

14 Rushdie, Salman, ‘Rethinking the War on American Culture’, New York Times, 5 03 1999 Google Scholar. Rushdie’s status as an adversary of fundamentalist Islam gives him credibility, but also blinds him to the very different — less fearsome but more indelible — dangers presented by markets.

15 Joseph Stiglitz writes: ‘In theory the (IMF) supports democratic institutions in the nations it assists. In practice, it undermines the democratic process by imposing policies. Officially, of course, the IMF doesn’t “impose” anything. It “negotiates” the conditions for receiving aid. But all the power in the negotiation is on one side.’ Stiglitz, Joseph, ‘The Insider: What I Learned at the World Economic Crisis’, The New Republic, 17 04 2000.Google Scholar