Nepal: Globalization, Democracy and the burden of pseudo-nationalism

In the last last two decades, the neo-liberal political scientists have been involved in writing a grand narrative of a post-Soviet world order. The significance of the narrative lay in its unique theorization that has made globalization as a phenomenon and neoliberalism, ideologically complementary. To say that world is shrinking into a global village has become a way of asserting that it’s a triumph of neoliberalism and an end to the “Great Debate”.

What I attempt to do here is to challenge this epistemological blunder and rescue the concept of globalization which for me is a historic process of integration of differing human society and not merely a resulting phenomenon of a paradigm shift in international political-economy.

The neoliberals have given three word solution to the problem of poverty and destitution in the third world- privatization, liberalization and globalization. The most popularized line being that, the ultimate proof of a democratic society lies to the extent to which it deregulates its market, i.e democracy implies minimal State interference.

In the early 20^th century, Vladimir Lenin, who was one of the earliest scholars to move away from classical Marxist understanding of capitalism wrote in his famous essay, “Imperialism, the highest stage of Capitalism” about how capitalism was changing in its nature moving towards global accumulation by entering into foreign market. Earlier, the imperialist powers exploited their colonies for resources and market, like the British did in India and the French in Indo-china.

But with the GATT coming into existence, powerful economies got an unrestricted access into developing economies sanctioned under international law. The war torn Asian and Latin American countries were the easiest victims who lost out most in the bargain. Countries like South Korea which was devastated by the Korean War needed aid for rebuilding its infrastructure and economy and had to kneel down before the clauses put forward by the global financial institutions like the World Bank and the IMF forcing them, the ROK, to liberalize their market. The cold war period was characterized by the wars of regime change and “democracy promotion” as weak economies were forced open and the western multinational companies established themselves wherever they went, feeding on local resources and industries, throwing them out of business. The worst part of the GATT regime was that it forbade States from protecting their domestic industries. The Korean farmers lost their agriculture sector to the WTO. Hundreds of Korean farmers committed suicide under the burden of debt because the government failed to protect them. Nepalese carpet industry, which was thriving until the first half of the last decade has reached brink of extinction because our government can neither encourage the local industries through subsidy, nor protect the local market from being flooded by carpets from India and the gulf countries thanks to our WTO ticket-  proof that Nepal is going global.

The neo-liberal advocate like Anthony Giddens has been very persuasive in his argument that “Globalization” integrates not just world-wide financial systems and real-time market interdependencies but more profoundly, it leads to a more open, culturally pluralistic and democratic globe. Joseph D. Lewandowski has methodologically exposed this rhetorical claim and says that “the basic if somewhat elusive idea is that the radical forces of globalization, powered by information and communication technologies, promote democratization by lifting agents out of the spatio-temporal confines of the local and linking them to ‘the global’.

In this way globalization is characterized not as a hegemonic agent of world-wide capitalism but rather as a disembedding agent of global democracy and social equality.”

Giddens’ arguments call for de-mystification of at least two myths here. First, although the 20^th century breakthrough in communication and transportation has revolutionized the way we live, it would not be correct to say that this triggered globalization. I say this because as long as the human civilization has existed, man has always moved in search of knowledge to improve quality of life. Some of the earliest civilizations like Chinese and Mesopotamians thrived due to their Scholars who travelled around the world bringing home knowledge and technologies. Knowledge was not patented then. Instead it was shared for the betterment of humanity as a whole. States focused in strengthening their local industries and market. Exports and imports took place but local production was always encouraged as it increased capital investment and opened new possibilities through profit generation and creation of new jobs in the economy.

Joseph Stieglitz in his acclaimed book Globalization and its discontents has argued that, what we have come to know today as “Globalization” is a resulting phenomenon of a politico-economic process propagated by powerful States. He insists that globalization, as a historic process of integrating human society remains a key to overall human development. However the way powerful States and their lobbyists in global financial institutions like IMF and World Bank have pushed their agendas under the pretext of “Globalization”, it has led to erosion of sovereignty and integrity among the smaller states and de facto colonization of the third world.

Second, the claim that ending of a spatio-temporal confinement automatically leads to democratization of the society is misleading. The idea was propagated strappingly around the newly emerging states after the decolonization of Africa and disintegration of the Soviet Union. The need to strengthen the nation building process through rebuilding of the fractured social fabric in these post colonial societies was at worst overlooked and at best underplayed by the powerful States. While the military colonization of the third world became unacceptable under the United Nations Charter, the imperial powers found a suitable substitute in the market. By liberating the third world market from the State control, the imperialist powers did what they had always done, but with greater efficiency. They no longer had to ship the natural resources from these countries to their industries back home. Instead they shifted their industry to countries where resources were in abundance. This is what liberalization was all about.

Structural adjustment programs calling for deregulation of market, privatization of State owned corporations and opening national wealth like water, forests and land (with its mineral resources), i.e  jal ,jungle and zameen for corporate appropriation. The rampant corruption, resource related conflict and genocides in countries like Nigeria, Congo, Somalia, Cambodia, etc remind us of the price humanity has had to pay for the greed of the few opulent. And this ironically became a quintessence of a democratic society, actively promoted by powerful states, it still is.

The designers of this grand strategy knew that for the policy to work, it would have to be voluntarily accepted not just by the elites of the developing world but also the toiling masses in these countries. This would only be possible when the masses saw their interests in it, and where there were none they simply had to be manufactured. Thus began the most sophisticated collusion between the State, the corporate and the media. The resulting effect is what we know today as “corporatization of the national interest”. It acts in a way that a toiling individual in some remote corner of the country, in spite of being exploited and deprived of opportunities, draws immense satisfaction watching a familiar face in television and goes to sleep satisfied that “the nation” is progressing. This is evident in countries like India where glamorous picture of a double digit economic growth is propagated by the State to appease the masses reeling under chronic poverty. Pseudo-nationalist projects like “Rising and Shining India” are promoted in the media with common man at the forefront of nation building. The technological advancement in space travelling is applauded and military might is revered, giving it a tint of nationalism in a society where 72 percent of the population still lives in the villages that struggle to meet basic amenities like electricity, drinking water, education and health care for ever growing population. This is such a well orchestrated design that any voice of democratic dissidence will die out under massive outcry of nationalism.

Do we hear about any protest against forced evictions of thousands of slum-dwellers in different cities of South Africa in the wake of ongoing FIFA World Cup 2010? So much of nationalistic sentiments have been attached to the event that a common South African hardly has any problem convincing himself/herself that all is fair and square for the national cause. Over 70,000 peoples have been uprooted from Narmada Valley in the last two decade since the construction of Sardar Sarovar Dam project began in Gujarat, India in 1991. Government and media made it an issue of national pride calling it a step towards national food security and energy security. The movement was violently crushed but the nation remained silent. Media called the protest as “marginal dissenting voices that oppose development.”

Today, there exists a world order controlled and run by few powerful States which cater to interests of an elite club of corporates who own over three-fourth of the earth’s wealth. They control almost every aspect of human life on earth and in space. They tell them what to eat, drink, read and think. They tell them if the clothes they wear are wearable. They tell them whether or not they are right because only they are authorized to say so. They decide which government policies are in public interest and which should be opposed. They often decide who should be entrusted with running the country. It’s not surprising that this has happened because they kept on manufacturing and people kept consuming. People kept on consuming and they kept manufacturing. They began by manufacturing goods but today they engage in what Noam Chomsky would say “manufacturing consent”, i.e. they decide what we shall decide and they decide how we react. Mechanically, they feed public intellect with the set of data that they want processed to obtain a desired outcome. And unless we stop processing everything that is fed into us, we will keep living like guinea pigs under a controlled environment. The idea then should be to challenge the existing paradigm by engaging critically with the universe around us. The claim to a universal truth that is being normalized into our conscience has to be constantly put under question and one has to be willing to engage with it methodically venturing into frontiers of contending paradigms.

The need of the hour thus is to create a philosophical basis to bring about an epistemological breakthrough in the way we see and perceive things around us, their ontological being. But one cannot be carried away by the deterministic emacipatory claims of classical Marxism either. Instead one has to adopt a post-positivist approach of engaging with the event itself rather than trying to classify it and theorize about it based on some point of reference or the other.

Posted on : 2010-07-07 06:11:59

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