Introduction
Paper presented at the Fourth Annual Kent State University Symposium on Democracy
Andreas Blüthner’s paper “We, the Stakeholders of Globalization . . .” presents the theory, history, and experience of the United Nations’ “Global Compact” (GC). The Global Compact represents a major new initiative of the United Nations (U.N.) toward business. It is barely a few years old, first announced by Kofi Annan at the Davos meeting in 1999. Dr. Blüthner gives an authoritative insider’s description of the founding and evolution of the GC.
The Global Compact is a new coalition between the United Nations and the founding participants—such as a number of major global companies, some of the major civil society organizations, a major association of employers, the major trade union federation, and a number of medium-sized businesses. On the positive side, the involvement of private business must be welcomed both for its vigor and can-do attitude and because it is a central player in the controversies surrounding globalization. Business already has an international framework governing economic issues (e.g., the World Trade Organization, International Monetary Fund, and World Bank), so Kofi Annan saw the overriding goal of the GC to fill the gap between business and the social and environmental issues. The GC provides a forum for discussion between diverse players in the globalization debates, and it further provides a framework for voluntary projects to implement the nine principles or pillars of the compact.
Since the GC looks so obviously like a good idea, I will focus on why my reaction is much more guarded. There are two broad reasons: the nature of the actions of the multilateral “development set” and the implicit theory of globalization.
The multilateral development agencies such as the World Bank (where I spent the last ten years), the International Monetary Fund, and the various development-oriented U.N. agencies (e.g., United Nations Development Programme [UNDP] and the United Nations Industrial Development Organization [UNIDO) are in the midst of crisis. The idea that economic and social development can somehow be engineered by international agencies is largely an idea of the last fifty-odd years, the post–World War II era. All the above-mentioned agencies are creations of that era. The Communist movement could be seen as a rival way to accelerate history and engineer modernization, but it has ignominiously failed. The West-led development establishment is now the only player in the field.
The problem is that this West-led
development effort has not been a success. Its history usually starts with the
Marshall Plan, but we now see that this was not development but reconstruction
and restoration in already-developed countries—a considerably different task.
The most successful examples of postwar development have been in East Asia
using a distinctly different model, and now
For some years now, a slow panic has been spreading in the multilateral agencies as the evidence continues to pile up. The “Development Set” of international leaders and managers of these agencies, as part of the larger “Davos Set,” are now even more devoted to public-relations-oriented symbolic actions—Summits, Resolutions, Principles, Declarations, Compacts (e.g., Global Compact), and now the mother of all compacts, the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). I think that the argument can be made that all this frenetic activity in the international spotlight is not very effective. It may even be detrimental. Salvation will not come to the poorest countries from the outside. As long as the governing elites of these countries are “persuaded” that outside-in help will come from the Davos Set, then the galvanization of the inside-out forces necessary for development will only be postponed.
The other problem is the implicit theory that the forces of globalization will somehow help rather than hinder the poorest countries to get on a path of development. This is an exceedingly complex area of contemporary debate but a simplistic metaphor will suffice to make one important point about trade. Boxers who do not test their skills against opponents will tend not to learn or develop. Competition and rivalry can be a great help rather than a hindrance to improvement. However, when the “level playing field” in this competition is interpreted as putting the light- and middleweights in the same class as the super-heavyweights, then learning, improvement, and development are unlikely to be the outcomes.
If a multinational corporation (MNC) wishes to go beyond public relations activities concerning development, then foreign direct investment in developing countries may be a better place to start than promoting a “level playing field” between heavyweights and lightweights. However, if the goal is really the development of the country and not just using it as a site of low-cost labor or an enclave operation, then means must be devised for the investment to become rooted in the country. This can happen in a number of ways.
Often foreign production begins with the local assembly of kits produced elsewhere. The MNC could work with local training institutions to see that the relevant skills are being taught, and it could work with some domestic firms to upgrade their quality control programs so that they might begin to produce some of the inputs otherwise supplied by foreign-produced kits.
Another way for foreign productive operations to contribute to local development is to sponsor spin-offs by managers and employees, which can then have a contractual relationship to the mother firm and develop other business relationships in the country. The spin-offs could be parts of the operation that need not be organized in-house and could be done through a contractual relationship with a local company. Another opportunity arises when once the locals have learned many of the productive skills and operations, they then may be able to apply them to the production of other nearby products that are however outside the focus of the multinational company. By fostering these spin-offs, the multinationals would be making a direct contribution not only to the local ownership of the jobs that are there but also to the creation of new jobs in related sectors.
The MNC could aim to have a time limit on how long the investment will be foreign-owned before it becomes a domestically owned company with a contractual relationship to the foreign multinational. Albert Hirschman (1971) long ago made the case for eventual disinvestment by foreign owners in favor of domestic owners as a key to the country’s development—rather than long-term dependency. Hirschman also suggested a Disinvestment Corporation working alongside the national or regional development banks to finance the deals.
There are so many productive ways that MNCs can contribute to developing countries that there seems to be little real reason for so much more to-and-froing with the Davos set to demonstrate good corporate citizenship.
Guobin
Yang”s paper is a case study—informed by theory—of how the Internet and NGOs
(largely environmental) have coevolved in
Today, it is the Internet. The Internet has been no exception to the tug-of-war over how the technology will be used. It has greatly enhanced the ability of the authorities to track people’s activities and communications with others, but it has also vastly increased the ability of people to communicate directly and horizontally with, at worst, some monitoring by the authorities.
Guobin Yang’s case study sees the Internet largely in optimistic terms as greatly enhancing the abilities of civil society organizations to communicate and organize action in China as well as elsewhere.
I share that optimism about the impact of the Internet, at least for now. Yang also noticeably refrains from presenting the Internet, and the information and communication technologies (ICT) revolution from which it sprang, as being panaceas for the older problems of development.
In many of the poor countries or poor regions of middle-income countries, Internet penetration is quite low—like literacy itself. The initial effect of the Internet in these contexts is best described by what has been called the “Matthew Principle”: to those who have, more will be given, and from those who have not, even that will be taken away. That is, the initial effect of the Internet, like that of many new technologies, is to strengthen the hand of those who are “plugged into” the benefits of modernity, which includes both the authorities and the swarms of NGOs run by computer-savvy young people largely in the cities. I, like Yang, am betting on the long-run democratizing power of the Internet, but at the same time, we must try to close the digital divide so that the “glad tidings” of this revolution will finally reach “the hind [peasant] in the furrow and the shepherd on the hill” (Tawney, 1920, 16).
John Hochheimer’s paper could be described in short as using the ICT revolution to bring up to date the pedagogy of the oppressed of Paulo Freire and the therapy of meaning of Victor Frankl. Instead of seeing the new technologies as providing some deus ex machina to resolve the dilemmas of development, Hochheimer relates the technologies back to the human methodologies of social transformation as in Freire’s and Frankl’s work.
This pedagogy of meaning is a powerful discourse. Hochheimer has given an attractive description of an end result, the situation in which diverse people are willing to dialogue with others meaningfully, respecting differences, and finding new cognitive and spiritual commonalities along the road to democracy.
My comments focus less on what is in the paper than on what is left out of the picture. The picture of the desired end-state is unremittingly harmonious, and the path to reach that state is paved with cooperation and dialogue. Yet, I think there is room here for some important disagreement (not just academic nitpicking).
My first point is that the road
from here to there goes through the valley of contested debate and
criticism—particularly, speaking truth to power—not just along the high ridges
of harmonious compromise and accommodation. Those in power always tend to see
“dialogue” as a one-way street. I mentioned before that the use of the modern
media had resulted in the situation where, for example, something like half of
the American people thought that
How can we maintain a culture for the exercise of critical reason so that we can see through the half-truths, exaggerations, innuendos, and outright fictions of our own experts, pundits, and leaders as well as we see through those of others?
My second point is related. What is there not to like in universal love and harmony? It is not a rhetorical question. The problem with “universal love and harmony” is that the springs of progress and development lie in rivalry, contestation, and antagonism. Perhaps Orson Welles gave the most famous overstatement of the point.
In
The mollusk on the ocean’s floor is in total harmony with his environment. He is “happy as a clam,” and that is all he will ever be.
The idea of the constructive role
of contested debate and criticism goes back at least to the role of Socrates in
For if you kill me you will not easily find a successor to me, who, if I may use such a ludicrous figure of speech, am a sort of gadfly, attached to the state by God; and the state is a great and noble horse who is rather sluggish owing to his very size, and requires to be stirred into life. I am that gadfly, which God has attached to the state, and all day long and in all places am always fastening upon you, arousing and persuading and reproaching you. (Plato, Apology, 30–31)
The penchant for competition seems to be one of the key features of Athenian Greece that distinguished it from other societies of antiquity, and Socrates represented the use of dialogue and contestation as the road to improving knowledge. “The form Socrates’ teaching took—intellectual dueling before a sportive audience—looks much odder to us than it did to Athenians, whose whole culture was based on the contest (agōn), formal and informal, physical, intellectual, and legal” (Wills, 1994, 163).
This also relates to the broader theme of democracy as being based on government by discussion.
The traditional theory of the contest and interplay of group interests was not so much a scientific description as a normative injunction; in fact it contained the moral basis of liberal democracy. In order for the truth to be known, this theory argued, speech must be free; in order for wise decisions to be made, all the interests must be in the field and all the values articulated. The ancestry of this liberal pluralism might well be traced, beyond Mill and Madison and Montesquieu, all the way to the dialectical principle of Socrates: the method of verbal contest or discussion grounded on the faith that there was indeed a truth to be reached, through mutual deliberation, on which reasonable men could agree. (Matson 1966, 107)
Immanuel Kant recognized that the “means which nature employs to bring about the development of innate capacities is that of antagonism within society” and he represented the insight with the analogy of trees competing in a forest:
In the same way, trees in a forest, by seeking to deprive each other of air and sunlight, compel each other to find these by upward growth, so that they grow beautiful and straight—whereas those which put out branches at will, in freedom and in isolation from others, grow stunted, bent and twisted. All the culture and art, which adorn mankind and the finest social order man creates, are fruits of his unsociability. (Kant 1991 [orig. 1784], 46).
Of course, not all antagonism or unsociability is helpful, so Hirschman (1995) has investigated which forms of social conflict are beneficial (see also Coser 1956), a question that also goes back to the contrast between Socrates’ provocative dialogues to improve knowledge and the Sophists’ eristic methods to simply defeat an opponent.
For our purposes, the focus is on
the difference between a society that incorporates (we hope beneficial) antagonism
and one that aims at a nonantagonistic idea of
agreement, cooperation, and “playing with the team”—a small society like that
dryly satirized by Kant as the Arcadian ideal in which men would be “as
good-natured as the sheep they tended.” Some modern research (Lloyd 1996) has
used this contrast to address the question of why, after such a promising
beginning in ancient
In contrast, the Greek intellectual life exhibited “radical revisability” (Lloyd, 1996, 216) in which the masters would offer theories completely at odds with those of their rivals—a practice that would not be allowed where the Mandate of Heaven was seen as being the basis of power. Chinese intellectual life put the emphasis on accommodation and harmony while the Greeks thrived on antagonism and adversariality. The differences extended throughout social and legal affairs.
Differences
between individuals or groups that might well have been the subject of appeal
to litigation in
Disharmonious contestation is not a vice to be eliminated in order to reach universal love and harmony; it is the coiled spring whose energy drives us along our way. Meaning is not like a pot of gold to be found at the journey’s end; it is to be found along the way.
Bibliography
Coser,
Lewis. The Functions of Social Conflict.
Eisenstein, Elizabeth L. The Printing Revolution in Early Modern
Hirschman, Albert O. A Bias for
Hope: Essays on Development and
—. A
Propensity to Self-Subversion.
Kant, Immanuel. “Idea
for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose.” 1784. In Kant Political Writings, ed. H. Reiss, 41–53.
Lloyd, G. E. R. Adversaries and
Authorities: Investigations into Ancient Greek and Chinese Science.
Matson, Floyd. The Broken Image: Man, Science, and Society. Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor, 1966.
Wills, Garry.
Certain Trumpets: The Call of Leaders.
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