Globalisation From a Pastoral‐Theological Viewpoint

I

Since I do not intend to discuss pastoral counselling, I understand by the word ‘pastoral’ in this title that I must keep a clear eye on the element of agency, and on the human impact of globalisation – not to mention the human purpose of theology.¹² However, I haven’t managed to avoid abstract argument, since we can’t help talking here about a discourse of globalisation as well as a set of practices that tends to mark it. And ‘globalisation’ is an abstract noun: maybe (in our time)the abstract noun. In a special supplement of The Independent in December 2000, issued to mark the White Paper issued by the Department for International Development's (hence ‘DFID’), ‘Eliminating World Poverty’, Andrew Simms of the New Economics Foundation pungently attacked a kind of abstraction that is more than linguistic:

A basic misunderstanding of our global governors in the IMF, World Trade Organisation and other still‐emerging institutions, is to believe that abstract economic theory is more important than the real world. We are supposed to believe that encouraging the unrestricted flow of commodities and money across national borders will meet all our human needs. A commitment to these abstractions still remains the test of good international citizenship for governments.³

The phrase ‘global governors’ is a sarcasm best avoided. But Simms challenged an ‘autistic economics’ that failed to look at the world outside the discipline: specifically he claimed that the ‘real world’ was about to generate externalities that would ‘ridicule our faith in the compromised market mechanisms at the centre of our economic system’:

After the middle of this century the economic cost of global warming stands to surpass the value of total world economic output, according to the best guesses of the insurance industry. In 25 years time [now 20, FT], half of all people living in developing countries will be at risk from unnatural disasters.…[Yet], The Secretary General in‐waiting of the WTO recently said that a country's obligations to obey free trade rules came before their duties to international environmental agreements. In saying so he put method before substance – effectively saying that a plate was more important than food.

(Op cit, p. 9)

I’m reminded of a bitter joke by Joe Holland of the Washington Center of Concern: ‘the economy's doing fine, it's just the people having a hard time’. And that joke may in turn explain why I once heard a quite sober Brazilian bishop tell a meeting that he prayed every day for ‘the collapse of the international economic order’.

II

Like others before me I need to define globalisation. Here is an account given by the then Secretary for International Development, Clare Short in 2000:

Globalisation is neither good nor bad. It is simply an acceleration in the movement of information and capital and therefore trade. It is speeding up because the end of the Cold War means we now have one global economy. And because information technology has massively increased the speed with which information can be moved about.

That description appears neutral, though its exclusive focus on the economy is dubious; in addition, the claim that there is one global economy begs the question. But Short then credited globalisation with a virtuous underlying dynamic that far transcends economics:

This is creating a global community not just for trade but of human concern and values. We now have more democracy than ever before. Humanity increasingly sees itself as one.

(Independent, 2000, p. 2)

So the free flow of technology, goods and capital unites us. She argued that globalisation could be shaped but not stopped. It offers the possibility of eliminating extreme poverty, though it is also possible that ‘the poorest people and countries will become more marginalised and continue to suffer squalor and poverty in the face of growing abundance elsewhere’. We need ‘a tide of international public opinion that is determined to shape globalisation to benefit humanity’.

Her argument, therefore, embodied a dichotomy between:

1. — globalisation itself, which is impersonal and therefore in principle neutral, is in any case unstoppable, but which also tends to the human good.⁴

2. — the need for urgent efforts to shape globalisation to the human good, since this intrinsically beneficent tendency could possibly be thwarted: presumably by counter‐ tendencies, unnamed forces that sought something other than ‘the benefit of humanity’

Whilst at DFID, Clare Short worked assiduously on behalf of developing countries – while always accepting the logic of globalisation. Despite its risks opting out was futile, since no country could prosper cut off from the globalised economy.

But Clare Short's distinction seems to me a falsification – born precisely of inappropriate abstraction. Theologically, I take it that nothing intrinsically tends to the human good apart from the grace of God (who according to Romans 8: 18–25 has even made Creation ‘unable to attain its purpose’), and without coming into tension with evil and the structures of sin. Secondly, there is no globalisation that does not embody a whole series of decisions about technology, information, their domination by some and their effective withholding from others.⁵ So the economist Hazel Henderson identifies as a second inherent dynamic of globalisation ‘the fifteen‐year wave of deregulation, privatisation, liberalisation of capital flows, opening of national economies…following the collapse of the Bretton Woods fixed currency‐exchange regime in the early 1970s’.⁶ Thirdly, and most fundamentally, Short's language is a classic case of reification. What is this ‘it’ that is globalisation? Globalisation is a mass of distinct phenomena that can be seen as somehow related: some no doubt could be ‘shaped’ whereas others might actually need to be stopped.

The problem with Short's sanguine stance is that so far the shaping by the most prosperous countries expresses a single‐minded agenda of liberalisation. As Ian Linden notes, the term ‘globalisation’purports to describe a non‐conflictual process.⁷ It became popular just when the global ideological polarity between capitalism and socialism (both of which had claimed to transcend the boundaries of state sovereignty) seemed briefly to some commentators to have been resolved, so that world unity – or rather unification – seemed plausible to them.⁸ But critics such as Andrew Simms argued that in fact globalisation sought the universalising of some values at the expense of others, and was therefore intrinsically conflictual. Taking Simm's example, it is patently ultra vires for an officer of the WTO to assert that trade values must take precedence over the values of environmental responsibility. To do that would require a body that had the explicit mandate to co‐ordinate and supervise both trade and environmental protection. In the absence of any such body, the lack of adequate institutions to assure political and ethical control of globalisation becomes obvious. Crucially, Simms goes further by claiming that the WTOs claim to privilege the ‘value of trade’endangers the life of peoples.

That hegemonic claim, that trade considerations trump all others, is what feeds the (global) anti‐globalisation movement itself. Globalisation is seen as the favoured current expression of ideological neo‐liberalism: no competing freedoms must be allowed to impede the freedom of global corporations. A fierce version of this stance was taken by the Indian Jesuit Ambrose Pinto, speaking in 2003 at an elected body of the Society of Jesus:

Globalisation is another name for the loot and plunder of Third World resources by the corporations of the wealthy nations in the name of free markets.…Markets, as we all know, can never be free. Their aim is neither charity nor philanthropy. Their prime object is profit‐making through exploitation.⁹

In her 2000 Reith Lecture, Vandana Shiva recounts the case of a farmer in Andra Pradesh, India, who killed himself because he could not repay the debt for drilling a deep tube well on his two‐acre farm.

The wells are now dry, as are the wells in Gujarat and Rajasthan, where more than 50 million people face a water famine. The drought is not a ‘natural disaster. It is ‘man‐made’. It is the result of mining scarce ground water in arid regions to grow thirsty cash crops for export instead of water‐prudent food crops for local needs.¹⁰

For Ambrose Pinto, therefore, we of the First World must be brought to recognise that we are citizens of capitalist countries, who each owe allegiance to our country and its economy, and that we only then try to reconcile that allegiance with any ‘option for the poor’. Our capitalist context conditions us. So our response to the injustices of globalisation is reduced to a reactive humanitarianism. Worse still, he said, mistakenly accepting globalisation as inevitable, Jesuits in the developing world itself have responded by preparing local elites to take their place in the corporate world, as local agents of globalisation: for example, Jesuit colleges in India have their departments of electronics, finance, biotechnology. He called instead for the Society of Jesus to use its global outreach to ‘make the local work against the global’ by marshalling the ample evidence of prevalent exploitation:

There is already a global resistance of unprecedented spread and organisation. Adding our voice to it can accelerate the revival of global progressive forces.

(Prom Iust, 29–31)

Interestingly, Pinto's ‘acceleration’ of a global resistance aspires to mirror Clare Short's ‘acceleration’ of information, capital and trade; equally, he mirrors her by attributing an inherent value‐content to globalisation, though this time negative.

The belief that globalisation has tended to express harsh capitalist values has animated more mainstream critiques too. Addressing the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences in May 2003, Pope John Paul II argued that the processes of globalisation ‘often elude the traditional mechanisms of regulatory control put in place by national governments and international agencies. Special interests and the demands of the market frequently predominate over concern for the common good.’ So the poorest suffer the costs and fail to gain the benefits. What is needed is a regulatory structure of such potency that economic activity can be directed towards a higher good.¹¹ I take it that the subordination of economics to such a higher human good is an axiom for Christians. But the problem remains, on the Pope's own account, how can it be achieved? Only, I suppose, by projecting to the global level a principle of national government:

In an industrial democracy there is commonly a conflict between economic growth and social justice and when a choice has to be made two opposing propositions will be advanced. The first will aver that if priority is given to justice growth will be inhibited, the second that if priority is given to growth justice will be delayed. This conflict between social and economic ends can be resolved only by political action.¹²

Naturally, proposals have been made for such ‘global governance’ and I mention just one, from a church source: the proposal made to the bishops of The Commission of the Bishops’ Conferences of the European Community (‘COMECE’) in 2001, by an ad hoc committee established for the purpose, for a ‘Global Governance Group’(the ‘3G’).¹³ The Group's report noted a key defect I have already mentioned, ‘the lack of coherence and the deficit in inter‐institutional arbitration between international organisations’:

All countries must be linked in a structure that is both sufficiently restricted and legitimate. The authors of this report therefore recommend complementing the current G7/G8 mechanism and creating a Global Governance Group (3G), made up for instance of the 24 heads of governments that have executive directors on the boards of the IMF and the World Bank, as provided for in their Articles of Agreement.

(§ 66)

This proposal has the significant merit of being both specific (as against some comprehensive but generalised menu for a better world) and resolvable – in fact, only resolvable – at the level of cooperating sovereign governments. Whereas national governments tend to be regarded in the neo‐liberal model as no more than ‘enablers’ of free trade, the COMECE report returns to them their primary responsibility to work together for a further and more fundamental good. The defect of the proposal is that success would require unprecedented and implausible levels of international co‐operation and trust.

III

Hazel Henderson has offered a helpful typology of the various spheres of economic and societal activity that must be respected and reconciled in order to ‘shape’ globalisation justly. These are more than just interlocking systems. They each represent a mode of consciousness for everyone: I live my one life in each sphere, or at least cannot help engaging with each. To continue and conclude, I’ll adapt her framework and offer comments on some of its elements (Henderson, op. cit., p. 23 seq.).

The Global System: human societies beyond the borders of nations, and their planetary ecosystem effects. The ‘global commons’, including the oceans, the sea‐beds, the atmosphere, the planet's biodiversity, transcend the international political architecture. Here the UN is naturally central. ‘On a budget of less than New York City's municipal fire department’, notes Henderson, the UN has cajoled its member states to collaborate in addressing major global concerns, often through operating agencies such as UNICEF, UNESCO, UNCTAD, WHO and the World Summit for Sustainable Development in Johannesburg. Of course, the UN's leading role is far from guaranteed or universally accepted. It is interesting, for example, that the WTO is independent of the UN, whereas its predecessor, GATT, was a UN structure.

The International System: including evolving treaties, agreements and unions between nations. Only at this level can the legal framework be sustained by which the global commons can be preserved: but the refusal of key states to ratify, say, the International Criminal Court and the Kyoto Protocol of 1997 (that limited permissible greenhouse gas emissions and was signed by seventy countries, not including Russia and the USA) shows how far distant is a move from an economic universalism that seeks the lowering of trade barriers to a deeper multilateralism that might compromise political autonomy. The prime example is maybe that of migration: barriers against migration to the wealthy world are continuously strengthened. Now I don’t believe that the mass migration of peoples and of labour straightforwardly tends to the common good. Labour is not as mobile as goods, let alone as capital, and the human costs of uprooting are severe and poignant¹⁴ Yet surely the West must recognise that mobility of production entails the rootlessness, the internal displacement or the external migration, of labour, and act accordingly.

Take the story cited by Archbishop Rowan Williams:

a Thai woman had moved from the country, from backbreaking labour in the fields, first to a sweatshop making textiles, then to work as a street vendor selling rice dishes outside the factory. The globalisation story seems to be working according to plan. Then, as a result of some complex currency trading, the Thai currency undergoes drastic revaluation; debt increases (being measured in dollars), various development projects are aborted, the price of Thailand's main indigenous product, rice, is pushed up. The street vendor has to pay more for rice and sell it for less; she disappears from the new economy, presumably becoming part of the developing urban sub‐proletariat’.¹⁵

(Or, in a trend apparent in 2004, the Thai production plant, having once successfully undercut European competitors, might itself be sharply undercut by China's combination of a ban on independent trade unions, $1 dollar per day wages, and up‐to‐date technology. In Indonesia, and Bangladesh, one million jobs are expected to disappear by 2010, with devastating implications for social stability. By the same date, China's share of the world garment market is expected to rise from 20% to 50%. Should these workers try to go back to the land?)

The Nation‐State: sovereignty and domestic economic domains. Clearly, ‘free’ markets rely on government regulations: property rights, contracts, national and international law, accounting rules, reliable tax‐collection, etc. But such measures as the Multilateral Agreement on Investment, at least temporarily defeated by a remarkable alliance between the global civil sector and some governments, sought to impede and roll back such national laws as would ‘distort trade’ by enacting other legislated values such as labour rights and environmental protection: law was thus regarded entirely instrumentally, on the criterion of whether it promoted or inhibited international trade. That's not, of course, a new story. As J.P. Morgan is supposed to have said, ‘I don’t employ lawyers to tell me what I can’t do, I employ them to make it legal when I do it’. Yet Henderson rightly insists on the constructive measures still within the powers of national government: to shift tax burdens from incomes and employment to over‐consumption and waste, to lessen subsidies to unsustainable industries, to recognise and reward socially productive work outside the industrial/commercial sectors, etc. Agreeing a positive role for nation‐states seems to me vital.

However, I do think we remain all too liable to take for granted the primacy of the nation‐state as the yardstick for all broader good. The British Government competes with others to bend EU policies and decisions to its particular national benefit. Again, in a well‐known speech of 1999, delivered significantly to economists in Chicago, Tony Blair exemplified the moral pitfall when he claimed to notice ‘the beginnings of a new doctrine of international community’:

By this I mean the explicit recognition that today more than ever before we are mutually dependent, [and] that national interest is to a significant extent governed by international collaboration.…Just as within domestic politics, the notion of community – the belief that partnership and co‐operation are essential to advance self‐interest – is coming into its own; so it needs to find its own international echo. Global financial markets, the global environment, global security and disarmament issues: none of these can he solved without intense international co‐operation.¹⁶

So ‘community’ is defined by Mr Blair as the belief that partnership and co‐operation are instrumental (but no more than instrumental), ‘essential to advance self‐interest’; and international co‐operation is esteemed judged by its efficacy in promoting the national good. Perhaps Tony Blair's Chicago argument enshrines the shift from the Thatcherite tenet that ‘there is no such thing as society, only people and families’ to new Labour!

Biblically, there is a productive and illuminating tension between the centrality of the narrative and symbolism of Exodus and that of Genesis. Exodus crucially constitutes the people of Israel as a people: but it entails the danger that a ‘most‐favoured nation’ mentality dominates religious consciousness and becomes a mortgage on the universal Lordship of God. Its potentially destructive effects can nowadays be seen in the more literalist versions of Jewish and Christian Zionism. In the Old Testament as a whole, however, this strand of meaning is controlled and complemented by the universalist symbolism of Genesis. Nationalist consciousness always needs such a corrective.

The Corporate System: global corporations, charters and governance. Current efforts to enhance corporate standards: employment rights, transparency and disclosure, and to broaden the parameters of companies’ responsibility from their shareholders to their stakeholders, are crucial. David Korten has written:

Conventional national income accounts…measure the costs and benefits of economic activity from the stand point of the firm, not the community. The differences here are fundamental. For example, the firm profits by employing the least possible number of workers at the lowest possible wage. The community profits by having its members fully employed at the highest possible wage. The firm may profit by depleting a local forest of mineral resource, while the community is left devastated.¹⁷

In July 2002, the Bishops of Central Africa described how 25% of the USA's oil supply is soon expected to be taken from sub‐Saharan Africa. But whereas the OPEC countries have tended to nationalise their oil industries, those of Central Africa have handed over control to foreign corporations. The bishops allege that the oil companies have been complicit in the diversion of oil revenues to single‐party governments and their senior officers. Corruption has been rewarded and reinforced.¹⁸(International complaints about defects and governance often skate over the moral reality that it is no less corrupt to offer a bribe than to accept one.) Since local criticism was deemed subversive and dangerous, people suffered in silence the exploitation of the mineral wealth by trans‐national corporations. (Worse still, the valuable resources have fuelled terrible military conflicts.) In short, the dominance of extractive, rather than productive, industries (logging as well as oil) has too often damaged the host countries – their politics, their ecology and their social structures.¹⁹ This is the context of an important campaign for ‘transparency’ waged by an alliance of Catholic development agencies under the heading ‘Publish what you Pay’, and by Catholic Relief Services of the USA.²⁰

Regional and Local Systems and Cultures: small business, local government, community organisations, traditions. Regional consciousness and loyalties remain full of vitality. Last month, on holiday in Mayo (Maigh Eo), I saw flags and pennants everywhere, enthusing over Mayo's prospects in the big Gaelic football game against Co. Fermanagh, as well as high‐street banners, good will messages from local Councillors, etc. It's easy to exaggerate the cultural homogeneity entailed by trans‐national commerce: as the philosopher Julian Biaggini has amusingly pointed out, ‘No one would confuse Madrid's Puerta del Sol with Piccadilly Circus just because there were Macdonald's at both’. (Guardian, 17 August 2004). But the key issue – and the key conflict – occurs when externally imposed trade rules overrule deep‐rooted traditions and cultures. Here is an example given by Vandana Shiva:

India processes a minuscule 1% of the food it grows compared with 70% for the US, Brazil and Philippines. It is not that we Indians eat our food raw. Global consultants fail to see the 99% food processing done by women at household level, or by small cottage industry, because it is not controlled by global agribusiness.…In August 1998, small‐scale local processing of edible oil was banned in India through a “packaging order” which made sale of open oil illegal and required all oil to be packed in plastic or aluminium. This shut down tiny ‘ghanis’ or cold‐pressed mills. It destroyed the market for our diverse oilseeds.…The take‐over of the edible oil industry has affected 10 million livelihoods. The take‐over of ‘atta’ or flour by packaged branded flour will cost 100 million livelihoods. These millions are being pushed into new poverty. The forced use of packaging will increase the environmental burden of millions of tonnes of plastic and aluminium. The globalisation of the food system is destroying the diversity of local food cultures and local food economies. A global monoculture is being forced on people by defining everything that is fresh, local and handmade as a health hazard.…[Yet] in the process new health and ecological hazards are being forced on Third World people through dumping genetically engineered foods and other hazardous products.

(Shiva, op.cit., p. 17–18)

Civil Society: voluntary, non‐profit groups, the civil sectors from local and global, in contradistinction to both the state and the corporate world. Civil society is often portrayed as an almost unqualified good, saving us from the depredations of the state and big business. That is naïve: civil society includes the Colombian drug cartels as well as the Catholic Theological Association! Hazel Henderson's scheme is secular, and so she does what perhaps no one here would do, implicitly subsume the world faiths within the category, civil society. I will limit myself to making two points about religious consciousness. As Jonathan Raban has expounded the notion of ummah in Islam, it virtually annuls the polarity between local and universal. As Raban notes, the post‐Enlightenment, post‐Romantic self, with its autonomous subjective world, is quite different from the self as it is conceived in Islam:

Muslims put an overwhelming stress on the idea of the individual as a social being.…Broadly speaking, who you are is: who you know, who depends on you, and to whom you owe allegiance – a visible web of relationships that can be mapped and enumerated. Just as the person is public, so is the public personal. The recent demonstrations against the US and Britain on the streets of Cairo, Amman and Islamabad may look deceptively like their counterparts in Athens, Hamburg, London and New York, but…what they register is not the vicarious outrage of the anti‐war protests in the west but a sense of intense personal injury and affront, a violation of the self.²¹

I take it that ummah defines an exclusive religious solidarity, so it is not equivalent to what Pope John Paul sometimes calls the ‘globalisation of solidarity’.²² But the notion of ummah does suggest that religious perspectives, potentially emerging from the deepest levels of human social consciousness, may be a fruitful basis on which to challenge the colonising mode of globalisation.²³ Of course, Saudi oil wealth has financed the international expansion of Wahhabi Islam and militant mudrassah schools: so some forms of Islam at least are themselves moulded by less savoury elements of globalisation.²⁴

As to the Christian principle, Cardinal Murphy‐O’Connor, in an article in The Times in 2002, sought to apply the principle of the globalisation of solidarity even in the challenging context of the prospective war against Iraq. He recalled the sympathy expressed by African bishops at a Vatican Synod in 2001 for the USA victims of ‘9/11’ whilst also insisting on the no less awful catastrophes of their own continent, including the daily deaths of people in their thousands for lack of food, potable drinking water, etc. In other words, the ‘world crisis’ was not necessarily that defined in the then current rhetoric of the Western allies. So the Cardinal called for an ‘unprecedented coalition of aid to the poorest peoples of the world – to Africa in the first place’.

Would not that be a more far‐reaching, sustainable and positive way to challenge both the evil of terrorism and the scandal of world poverty [i.e., more far‐reaching, etc. than war]? Terrorism can never be portrayed or defended as a protest against poverty; but neither can it be defeated simply by force of arms. Even a decisive and ‘successful’ war would create swathes of new victims and tend to deepen existing patterns of hostility.…In a globalised world, the wisdom of specific actions or policies with international impact must ultimately be judged by the extent to which they improve the lot of all mankind, especially the poorest, and enhance the prospects for world peace. At present there are genuine reasons to doubt that military action against Iraq would pass that test.²⁵

That call, too, effectively went unheard. But perhaps the call had to be made. Why? Because it is always worth challenging false assumptions and generalisations.²⁶ Mrs Thatcher, I believe, once claimed that ‘a rising tide raises all boats’. For ten years I lived on a succession of council estates. As more people got cars, the worse the bus service became: as more people got washing machines, the less the local laundrette was viable: so those not sharing in prosperity, and especially the elderly, were actually worse off than before. By analogy, just because of the then obsessive focus on purging the evil of Iraq, it was opportune for the Cardinal to try to universalise our sense of community and appeal for the millions who suffer almost unnoticed. No pastoral or theological response to globalisation can ignore those basics whereas political leaders so easily do.

IV

A participant in the Jesuit debate to which I referred earlier, the Slovenian Franc Kejžar, suggested that ‘an egoistic capitalism and consumerism threaten values, justice and human dignity’: a cliché, perhaps: but he neatly found a pre‐echo of his claim in The Brothers Karamazov, Book VI. The second half of this quotation is Dostoievsky's (or Aloysha’s) pre‐emptive strike against Clare Short!

Because the world says ‘you have needs, satisfy them, you have the same rights as the great and the rich; do not fear therefore to satisfy them’.…[In this way] one has conferred on them rights but not shown them the means of satisfying their needs. One is assured that the world, in shortening distances, in transmitting the thought through the air, is more united, that brotherhood will reign. Alas! Do not believe in this union of men. Conceiving of liberty as enhancing needs and promptly satisfying them alters their nature, for it gives birth in them to a crowd of mad desires, practices and absurd imaginings.

(Prom Iust, 25)

Globalisation has so far functioned predominantly as an enhanced opportunity for the economic, political and cultural outreach of the powerful. Unless it entails a correlative openness to other values and influences, it will produce more evil than good: more poverty, more division, more resentment and violence. To be redeemed, it needs, I think, two fundamental attitudes to gain ground:

— that the international and global level is never abstracted from the ‘subsidiary’ levels that are prior in human experience, the communitarian and local;

— that the national and ‘sovereign’ remains open to the horizon of the universal (or even the ‘planetary’, including the non‐human) good.

The Church has the charism and therefore the obligation to serve these complementary elements. I once heard Julian Filochowski describe solidarity with the poor as a ‘fifth mark of the Church’: for a universal Church, the ‘globalisation of solidarity’ becomes an evangelical imperative.