Globalization: what is at stake

UNESCO Courier, Oct, 1998 by Bonnie Campbell

Fifty years after the 1948 Universal Declaration, is there a new generation of human rights? If so, how does it relate to the rights enshrined half a century ago?

The international situation in the late 1990s demonstrates more than ever the indivisibility of all rights - economic, social, civil, political and cultural - in the broadest sense. We have reached a critical juncture where the number of rights is increasing while their wording and practical application are changing. The ideals which inspired the Universal Declaration may be devalued and the principles it has tried to protect used to serve special interests lest we focus on the stakes, players, institutions, strategies and interests involved in defending them.

Since the 1980s, the planetary interdependence stemming from globalization has increased debate and media coverage of human rights in many arenas. The recommendations that came out of conferences held during the present decade - Rio de Janeiro, Cairo, Copenhagen, Beijing and Istanbul - have usually been based on an affirmation of rights: rights to a clean environment, socio-economic rights, the rights of women and the right to housing.

A growing number of people and organizations are involved in these issues, which is helping to raise awareness of human rights and to spread more information about them in specific areas of concern. But these sometimes powerful, sometimes weak players have conflicting positions and interests and advocate strategies that do not always coincide. Interdependence does not necessarily mean establishing symmetrical relationships and equal opportunities. The various forms that globalization is taking and their destabilizing effects on social relationships may even explain the growing concern with human rights.

These "new rights" are appearing in a particular context, which explains why there is an urgent need to defend them and accounts for certain problems relating to how they have emerged. For they must be defended without dividing up the issues and diverting attention from the political and social relationships that lead to violations.

We can tell if we are really looking at the emergence of new rights or whether we are just seeing an updating of the 1948 Universal Declaration by studying the various forms globalization takes and current strategies of economic growth. More specifically, we must focus on the new forms of exclusion and marginalization that characterize a whole chain of relationships from the international to the regional, national and grassroots levels. We must re-examine our conceptions of globalization and economic growth to try and understand the complexity of the current process and the emergence of new human rights demands.

Most economists argue that globalization is the outcome of unavoidable adjustments to the new rules of international competition and to the laws of the market-place which supposedly ensure the optimum distribution of resources around the world. But globalization should be seen more as an eminently political process involving negotiations and struggles for influence and power engineered and institutionalized by players such as governments, transnational corporations and multilateral financial institutions.

What is more, the globalization of financial markets and that of goods and services has different social, economic and political implications depending on the region. Even though they are all part of the same worldwide process, these different situations have their own special features, which must be taken into account when it comes to questioning human rights and the necessity of defending them.

The liberalization underway goes hand-in-hand with a programmed withdrawal by the state from certain areas such as planning, production and social reform and a re-orientation of its involvement in others, like redistribution, regulation and mediation. The aim is to encourage special economic growth strategies based on the promotion of private interests. That has helped to undermine the legitimacy of states already beset by fiscal crisis - especially in the South, where countries are struggling with "structural adjustment". That has special implications for human rights.

The growing politicization of the globalization process, and especially the politicization of how the crisis is managed in the developing countries undergoing structural adjustment, has led to a redefinifion of the state's role. But in both the North and the South, economic recovery based on the private sector involves special forms of integration with global markets and new relationships with transnational corporations.

Domestically, reform programmes that seek to create a set of economic and social relationships in accordance with international norms of productivity, capital returns and competitiveness are directly or indirectly attacking long-held rights, where they exist, such as employment and social security benefits. The aim is to help redistribute resources from "less productive" sectors - social welfare, health and education, for example - to "more productive" ones. That shift comes at an incalculable social cost because it involves dismantling rules by which society has operated over the last several decades.