The state, globalization and the environmental emergency Ricardo Cifuentes Villarroel
July 2000 (*)
ContactIn recent times a number of fora have focused on the state, globalization and the environmental emergency, placing the situation more or less in the following form: globalization has become the open road for the solution of many problems, including the environmental one, in the measure that it may eventually allow global monitoring of the ecological system, leaving aside the limitations of the previous period -a sum of national markets and of sovereign legislations that at the same time that they promote, for reasons of national interest, the destruction of natural reserves, they limit the rationalisation that a global perspective calls for. Even more recently, all sorts of appeals have been made, and even ideological agreements between developed powers and "emergent" economies have been subscribed, to give globalization "a more human face" by means of a bigger state intervention.
This speech, with its contradictions, comes as something of a surprise, since until very recently politicians and economists were celebrating the vanishing of the state, to the push -always sustained as positive- of globalization. At the last meeting of the WTO, proposals were still made to continue opening the frontiers to the free movement of capitals and earnings at a global level. There is a strong coincidence between the speech that now promotes a limitation of the sovereignties for ecological reasons (the states would be the culprits of the immoderate destruction of natural resources), and the previous statements.
The problem with these discursive itineraries is that apparently they don't define clearly the concepts they toss around. National states are put exclusively in the situation of negative entities from the point of view of environmental protection. It is not accepted that their legislations are able to install a legal protection of natural resources, and not so simply stimulate their exploitation. This speech ignores the fact that in recent years national legislations in same countries have yield to the pressure of social movements demanding a more firm governmental standing on ecological issues. It is true, on the other hand, that national states have been largely permissive of the exploitation of "scarce" resources, very in accordance with the vision of the object of the economy that the fathers of the current ideological establishment teach in Chicago, Stanford, Yale or Harvard. But in this field the state simply comes to coincide with the protection of entrepreneurial interests. And here is where the difficulties of this forum are born, since in the last years the state has been a useful instrument in the expansion of transnational interests toward the interior of national economies. Without the support of the state, -of the central states and of the states of the periphery- corporations would not have been able to settle down urbi et orbi, and with them the so called "globalization". To reach this end, the state was given a last name; it was called "competitive state". The purpose of the competitive state is to offer the transnational system optimum conditions -such as low wages, minimum social legislations and the almost total absence of environmental regulations- for the exploitation of its territories.
Under the current conditions, --as they were recently exposed in Berlin by the rulers of USA, Europe and of some "emergent" countries as Brazil, Chile and Argentina, -- we are faced with a very curious situation: on one hand the states would seemingly be requesting from each other to recover a lost social activity (maybe with demagogic or suspicious ends), in front of a globalization that doesn't want to be defined in its real economic terms, as the power -that it is- of the dominant corporation. On the other hand, here we are joined around an agenda that proposes limitations to the national sovereignties on behalf of the presumed goodness of the global system (that is, the power of the transnational corporations). The contradiction is visible, and it is also alarming because it diminishes our awareness of the serious and irreparable effects of a bad characterisation of the actors and systems that intervene in the current environmental emergency.
We cannot continue to support a naïve vision of globalization where transnational corporations do not exist. Neither can we continue to favour the idea in people's mind, that the states, associates as they are with the corporate power, could be themselves an useful tool of social redemption (one that could give globalization a human face) or an instrument with the capacity to avoid the ecological catastrophe (when its distant and recent record is demonstrating just the opposite).
The current environmental catastrophe, synthesised in global warming, the growth of the hole in the ozone layer, the unavoidable and short term destruction of the trophic chains in the oceans and seas, the vast and rapid deforestation and desertification, can be attributed to something which is more precise than the vague "human factor". The acceleration of these processes coincides with the latest ascent of capitalism, unleashed under the umbrella of "globalization": profit oriented industrial ventures mobilising capitals and technologies without any parallel in history, at the very visible cost of irreversible destruction of global resources in a very short term. For the first time in history we are tied to a system that seems totally unconcerned about future generations, maybe due to the fact that it is an economic system affected by a serious crisis.
Obviously, the states align themselves with global corporations to conquer those capital gains. The three Latin American heads of state who were present at the Third Way meeting, while speaking of "economic growth with social justice" have followed the road to the privatisation of practically every natural resource, public service or industry, undeterred by the irreversibility of the damages done to the environment and to the quality of life of the people. And in Peru, Fujimori "won" another five-year period to continue privatising what it is left.
Our Latin American governments, in alliance with the global corporate system and with the entrepreneurial establishment, have taken possession of the continent and the surrounding seas, trading their resources for cash at the fastest possible rate. The responsibility of paying the external debt is the excuse used by the Latin American governments to justify privatizations and the exploitation of natural resources. But a look at the figures will tell us that every day, every month and every year, that debt grows bigger. So big, in its merciless devouring of value that it has became an unsurpassable obstacle to any real possibility of development. Parallel to this situation something else is happening: almost any "economic project" produces a channelling of funds towards the private sector, that is the big financial corporations, either national or transnational. Little or nothing is left to stimulate internal growth, least of all governmental funding for the protection of natural resources.
Globalization, as a corporative entelechy, it is not the solution neither for the awesome unbalance of income distribution in Latin American countries nor for the ecological catastrophe in the making. On the contrary, globalization is emerging as a winner both in the growing polarisation between poverty and wealth, --where a corporate group may come to dominate 80% of the global gross product, -- and also, fundamentally, in the insane exploitation of natural resources, to the point of liquidation of the earth ecological niche. For that reason, it is necessary to point out very clearly who are those that contaminate our environment, that exploit our resources, that impoverish our countries, those who have the real power: the transnational corporations, the colluding national governments, and the extensive range of military, political and financial operators that give them world wide support.
Inevitably, on the other side, and not free of polluting situations, but exploited and impoverished, are the overwhelming majority of inhabitants of the planet, with their never declining interest in conquering better conditions of life. It is obvious that there cannot be conciliation between these two blocks of interest. It is also obvious that this new century will be filled with deep conflicts. And here, inevitably we will all be called to take sides.
In these conflicts we will see the intervention of the forms of social organisation that we have inherited, such as G7 and WTO. But in this scenario we believe that alternative social organisations can also be created to participate in the debate, as indeed they have been created as shown recently in Seattle, where they attracted world attention to the problems of the present. From Seattle we should learn that there is a very big space for mobilisation above the states, above the ruling political classes and above the very own central structures of globalization. These are big opinion movements that are being born, and these will be the forces that will intervene with a normative and democratic capacity. But this intervention of wise people, of poor and hungry masses, of activists, of workers, of teachers, of journalists, of students, of peasants, against such enormous machines of power and destruction, will not be a holiday: what is coming is a revolution.
Finally, it is a good thing that in a forum like this, we may have the occasion, at a time plagued by interests placed on semantics, to define globalization, the roles of the states, and the entities accountable for the environmental and social catastrophe.
(*) This paper was presented during the Workshop 21 on "Governing the Access to Natural Resources" within the Global Dialogue 2 and organized by SID, Hanover, 1-3 July 2000. It was published in Bridges, N° 5, 2000.
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