Globalization is fashionable word today. It means many things to many people, but most of them include the international economy, the information and communications revolution, the rapid pace of the mass media communications and transnational travel and cooperation. While these are goods that most of the people in the developing world take for granted, they are also increasingly reminders of how far behind the minority of the population, the majority of the population is falling. While we have more money in circulation than ever before, more natural wealth has been discovered, and there are more powerful technological inventions than ever before, there are also more people living in poverty, more people dying from preventable diseases and more people lacking the necessities on a list of necessary that grows longer by the day.
Globalization is thus a blessing to some and a curse to others. It is development to some and merely a stark reminder to the lack thereof to others. Yet the debate about globalization has often ignored this point. Instead this debate has often turned towards how globalization can be productive to the rest of the world. In other words, instead of debating the utility of globalization, we often debate how it can be used to serve us and we take the phenomena of globalization as a given. This assumes the reality of globalization and the prerequisites for its existence. This in fact creates our own reality for each of us. Because globalization is such an abstract concept, if we think it exists, it will indeed exist, at least at a level of basic abstraction.
While this is true for most of the world, there is a growing strata of individuals who realize the threat that globalization poses to social justice. These individuals are not numerous, but their base of power is the popular support they accrue from diverse social circles from the population at large. These individuals define social justice as a degree of equality, a degree of social goods being guaranteed for all and the lack of an imposed social order. They are liberals in so far as they based their demands on norms, but conservatives in so far as these demands have often been codified by the very governments to whom they direct their claims. They are idealists because they believe that they can achieve their demands to a more just world.
Like the dot.com entrepreneurs they have also been surprisingly successful in their efforts to acquire capital however virtual and unconventional they may be, the social justice movement has been surprisingly influential in the realm of international policy dealing with the phenomena of globalization. They have rung concessions from international organizations and states through a combination of logical arguments and loud voices. It is in fact the last, which although condemned as foolish and irrational by establishment observers such as the Economist, have brought home most clearly the meaning of globalization for civil society. In Seattle, Washington, Ottawa, Philadelphia, Los Angeles and Prague, young people and old, from diverse backgrounds and with diverse concerns gathered together for a common goal. This goal was to protest the social injustice being perpetrated by the world’s financial institutions. Despite the conflicting minute of the messages, any intelligent observer would have denoted the common thread of social justice.
Indeed, there is a growing social justice movement. This movement does not oppose globalization because it is a bad thing, but because it is not working for the right people. Furthermore, this movement does not advocate merely revising globalization, but instead supports a whole-scale reconceptualization of globalization as global social justice. They are saying that states and international organizations must provide basic entitlements as these states have stated they would provide in the numerous human rights instruments that they have ratified and in the expectations they have created. These entitlements are being demanded by a growing number of individuals. Today it is neither tenable nor wise for a state to ignore these demands. If a government does so it is at its own peril as Peru, Yugoslavia, Israel and a host of other examples indicate. While these examples cannot be explained merely by the demonstrations of social justice advocates, the existence of these demonstrations cannot be discarded. They are at least a variable and often a very influential one.
Take for example the social justice demonstrations against the World Bank. They achieved more concessions from the Bank by the Prague Summit than others like chief economist Joseph Stiglitz achieved in many years with the Bank. By Prague, Bank President Wolfensohn was forced to concede that human rights—the minimum core of social justice—were central concerns of the Bank. This was something that Bank officials had long denied despite dissent from within their own ranks. It appears that while people within the Bank spoke in a low tone of rational and reason, the demonstrators outside were better able to communicate through yells, chants, dances, sit-downs, and other non-violent and more basic means of communication.
The limited success of such efforts indicates an important direction for the individual in the globalized world. With cheap communications facilitated by the Internet and callback companies, activists are beginning to understand what their comparative advantage is against the regimes of states and international organizations. It is not the traditional tool of diplomacy or even economic power that a few non-governmental elites enjoy mostly in the United States where an estimated 75% of the world’s capital resides, but it is the loud voice of popular participation. Through the medium of shouting screaming, obstructing, blocking and other annoying tactics, the social justice movement is raising consciousness of injustice in the international community.
Furthermore, the social justice movement makes use of the media to acquire even greater support. The mere rationality of the social justice movement contrasted to the irrational of state and IGO messages is often enough to substantially challenge these structures. This is a phenomena that cannot be ignored by policy makers. It is directed at them without any intermediary and it requires their recognition because alternatively it threatens to keep them under siege until they recognize and confront the problems of social injustice.
The power of individuals to come together for a common purpose and despite their many differences is not new, but it has rarely been so effective or so developed as it is in the current movement. Using a mix of high technology and sophisticated arguments the social justice movement has entrenched itself under the skin of states and their international organizations. It looks like it is there to stay and maybe even grow, maybe it is time that its arguments start to be considered for the relevance they undoubtedly have.
