Globalization And Governance And The Rhizome Of Reality
June 29th, 2011
As Mr Lamy says there is a lack of governance in the global economy. This is in my mind code for the need for social control or socialism. My contention is that a world government is emerging but there are key impediments, one is the persistence of the nation state, and the tendency for local interest to overwhelm the interests of the whole. This is very evident in the EU where Greece may end up leaving the body finding restrictions to be intolerable. Germany resents having to bail out Greece, after German banks were allowed to promote such great debt. The problem is the German people were not involved in generating the loans that incurred the debt but they must participate in the bailout. This is the same with the Greek people. They were not asked if they wanted the government to go into debt. They were simply told that the government had things under control and when they didn't they were asked to pay as if it was their responsibility. Even if they had benefited from going into debt with better salaries etc., it was essentially not their choice.
That is the problem with globalization as far as I can see. There is no mechanism for a world vote by citizens. Only governments which are theoretically representing the people are represented in the UN. Economically there is the dictatorship of the capitalist class, with economic democracy limited to shareholders, similar to the 19th century concept of the vote being limited to property holders, now it is limited to proxy holders. This is obviously the next step in democratization, direct economic voting power for all workers, whether they are owners or not. With the logical development that the capitalist class becomes superfluous except as some sort of coordinating body responsible to the voting workers. This would make the executive of any corporate entity responsible to the workers who have become the voters instead of merely the stock holders, although there could be a vote for stock holders and workers.
There needs to be mechanisms that allow for both the vote of the people, and insurance that the rights of minorities are not overrun. This can't be a winner take all system with simply majorities deciding issues. There has to be mechanisms created that incorporate decision making going in both directions. Governance needs to reflect upward and downward in the progression of authority from individual to collectivity; with rational gradations, sort of a metric system of governance. That leads one to increased democracy. How could there be a world body if portions of the world had people with no right to representation? Would all votes be equal? Theoretically but initially there will be a need for many safeguards to keep from one group dominating that would be unacceptable to the vast majority. Three-fifths would be a good number for a voting majority. It's a thought. But what we have now, with non-representative governing bodies often having only the legitimacy of power and not popular support. Would we see world political parties? Certainly there would be a dilution of parochial bodies in individual areas in the totality of the polity.
Interesting, the Club of Rome reports back in the 1970's predicted a decrease in democracy, something like the American security state that we have now. With political opinion manipulated by both focusing attention on fewer issues, and diffusing resistance by allowing for a multiplicity of niche's of resistance. This is similar to concept of the Rhizome as portrayed by Deleuze and Guattari.
As they put it "Smooth space is a field without conduits or channels. A field, a heterogeneous smooth space, is wedded to a very particular type of multiplicity: nonmetric, acentered, rhizomatic multiplicities that occupy space without "counting" it and can "be explored only by legwork." They do not meet the visual condition of being observable from a point in space external to them; an example of this is the system of sounds, or even of colors, as opposed to Euclidean space (Deleuze and Guattari 371)." This is complex but basically as I understand it, they propose a space that is more like that proposed by Spinoza than Descartes. This is a world defined by "movement and rest, slowness and speed,… not atoms, in other words, finite elements still endowed with form" (253-254). But I am wandering a bit too far into the theory of reality.
A few links.
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From Terraviva
THE MAIN PROBLEM WITH GLOBALISATION IS TOO LITTLE GOVERNANCE
By Pascal Lamy(*)
*Pascal Lamy is Director-General of the World Trade Organisation (WTO).
JUNE, 2011 (IPS) - Globalisation dominates our era, but it is an increasingly fragile dominance. Even as global integration delivers enormous benefits growing wealth, spreading technology, the rise of billions of people in the developing world- it also creates new risks -financial instability, economic imbalances, environmental stresses, growing inequalities, cyber penetration that we seem to have difficulty managing, writes Pascal Lamy, Director-General of the World Trade Organisation (WTO).
This is not a new concern. Since the industrial revolution, market capitalism's power to generate both incredible progress and enormous disruption what Joseph Schumpeter called "creative destruction" has preoccupied governments. And globalisation is nothing if not the worldwide technology-driven spread of market capitalism, a process that has been unfolding, in fits and starts, for three hundred years.
(see link for balance of article).
http://ipsnews.net/newsTVE.asp?idnews=56267
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Oxford: Paper Published in later form.
Who should govern the world economy: the challenges of globalization and governance
As protesters vent their fury at international meetings concerned globalization, they
express a more widely held concern about who is governing the world economy, and
at whose behest? This article describes the ways in which the new global economy is
being managed. Using the international financial system as an example, I draw out
four emerging models of governance and discuss the implications of each for
democratic accountability. In conclusion I argue that policy-makers face a deep
challenge in respect of global economic governance today, requiring clearer thinking
as to where globalization is heading and by what processes its trajectory should be
managed.
(See link for balance of article)
http://www.globaleconomicgovernance.org/wp-content/uploads/renewal.PDF
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From Dept. of Poly. Sci. U. of Georgia
"Social Democracy, Globalization and Governance: Why is
there no European Left Program in the EU?"
Christopher S. Allen
This paper addresses globalization and governance in the EU by attempting to generate some
plausible hypotheses that might explain the policy choices of the 12 out of 15 European democratic left governments. With all of the discussion in recent years of a democratic deficit, and then need to maintain a "social Europe," why have these governments not produced more explicit left-wing policies?
It suggests three possible hypotheses to account for this apparently mysterious outcome.
Hypothesis #1: They want to but they can't.
Hypothesis #2: They don't want to because they aren't really left anymore.
Hypothesis #3: They could, but they all are suffering from a fundamental failure of imagination.
The paper explores each of these hypotheses in two ways. First it examines the initial years of the Schröder government in Germany apparently, pursuing each of these three hypotheses and different times during this period. Then it looks more systematically and comparatively and each of the three hypotheses by including analysis both of Germany and several other EU member states.
The larger goal of this work is to provoke discussion and research on what role left political
movements can actually play. Is it even reasonable to expect such a group of nation states to develop innovative forms of cross-national governance? Or are new and/or revised forms of representation and governance beyond traditional nation-state models.
(For balance of article see link below).
http://aei.pitt.edu/9301/1/ChrisAllen.pdf
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Book about:
Governing Globalization Ed. Held and McGrew.
http://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=UshmkxDiAWsC&oi=fnd&pg=PR7&dq=Problems+of+globalization
+and+governance&ots=j0Wp940shZ&sig=a78UOjtMS69Dz6FgG02xRA4PhDc#v=
onepage&q=Problems%20of%20globalization%20and%20governance&f=false
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Link to Deleuze and Guattari - A Thousand Plateaus Capitalism & Schizophrenia
http://danm.ucsc.edu/~dustin/library/deleuzeguattarirhizome.pdf
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