SUNS 4316 Wednesday 4 November 1998
DEVELOPMENT: FOLLOWING UP ON THE SOCIAL SUMMIT
Copenhagen, Nov 2 (IPS/Dipankar De Sarkar) -- Worried by the lack of social progress worldwide, a diverse but select group of academics, officials, politicians, non-governmental activists and thinkers from around the world are meeting here and throwing up some unusual ideas.
The group has been gathering every year since the landmark United Nations Summit for Social Development in Copenhagen convened in March 1995. That event wound up with grand commitments to promote social progress by eradicating poverty, realising full employment and
achieving social integration.
In line with a string of other U.N. 'summits' in the 1990s, the so-called 'Social Summit' was aimed at creating a platform where the voices of the poorest people of the world would be heard, leading to
solutions to improve their quality of their lives.
Instead things may have actually got worse for the poor, especially the estimated one billion people who live on a dollar or less a day. And to underline just how premature the summit optimism has since proven to be, the current financial crisis now racking the world has hit the poorest hardest.
The group gathered here are considering many questions, whose varied answers will be pooled into an effort to inform a planned follow-up to the Social Summit in Geneva in the year 2000.
Despite their many differing and often contradictory views, the participants during their closed-door four-day meeting are all agreed that in an era dominated by economic globalisation, the construction of a "world community" is a necessity.
And for this, the State has a crucial role to play. Not only is economic globalisation insufficient in itself for the creation of a world community, but it is fragile and can create a backlash against
it. And democracy is neutral to such things as equality and social justice. It is neither necessarily a good thing nor an end in itself.
All their deliberations might seem theoretical, even irrelevant, to the developing world, were it not for the fact that these conclusions go to the heart of problems to do with what they call 'global capitalism' and efforts by some governments to sustain it.
"This is a new opening, with the possibility of a better discourse on global economic policy," said the well-known left-wing U.S. economist Richard Falk on the last day of the seminar Sunday.
The world financial crisis, he told the seminar, could bring about a revival "of a 'Keynesian' style of thinking," with its emphasis on the role of the state.
He foresaw a "new equilibrium between capitalism and society in the absence of organised labour with the erosion of the industrial society and the growing strength of market forces" with a "new re-empowerment of the state" and a "new social contract."
Later he told IPS: "There is so little we know to justify either optimism or pessimism about the future. If you could not understand the end of the Cold War, how can you be an optimist or a pessimist? There is a radical uncertainty."
Denmark's minister for development cooperation Poul Nielson, who chaired the seminar titled 'Political culture and Institutions for a World Community', called on governments to seriously think about the issue of re-distributing wealth, without which the goals of the Social Summit would remain unrealised.
"All our discussions on the left or right or the third way touches on re-distribution and the role of state in society," Nielson said, backing Falk's call for a 'politics of conviction'.
But the participants, who came from 17 countries as diverse as Malaysia, the United States, Burkina Faso, Argentina, Malawi, Sweden, Egypt and Russia, differed strongly on the issue of U.S. leadership of global affairs.
Critics of U.S. leadership said Washington had wasted opportunities provided by the collapse of the Soviet Union, undermined the U.N. system and had adopted an irresponsible global agenda.
There were equally vocal disagreements on the role of the Bretton Woods institutions -- the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund -- with many participants calling for their reforms and others insisting they were the best the world could hope for.
"Capitalism has won -- that's clear," declared Pierre Uhel of the Asian Development Bank. "There's a crisis of capitalism but it's not the end of capitalism." And "the proof of the pudding", he told the delegates, was China which had made enormous economic strides despite problems with the environment and social equity.
"Our answer would be to regulate markets at the international level," Uhel said.
He was opposed among others by Faith Innerarity, a senior bureaucrat in the Jamaican Ministry of Labour. She pointed out how Jamaica and other small banana-producing Caribbean countries had suffered at the hands of one such global regulator, the World Trade Organisation (WTO).
The WTO upheld a complaint by the U.S. against European Union banana trade preferences, part of the EU's integrated trade and aid development initiatives for the Caribbean. The complaint was made in the name of central American banana producing nations who presently deliver the bulk of bananas to the EU.
"The U.S. took the complaint to the World Trade Organisation, not because of any concern for poor banana growers in Latin American countries, but because it wanted to promote such huge American multinational corporations as United Fruit," she said.
But it was globalisation which, more than any other issue, exercised the minds of the gathered intellectuals and officials.
"We recognised that globalisation as a trend has been going on since the 19th century, but that as a political project, as 'global capitalism', it is only about 20 years old," said Jacques Baudot, who
as Secretary, Copenhagen Seminars, is responsible for keeping the Copenhagen agenda alive.
Another participant, Bob Deacon of the University of Sheffield in Britain, warned that unless there is a social dimension to globalisation, such as that offered by the integrated welfare systems in the Scandinavian states, globalisation can be challenged -- and may even collapse.