Development Ethics, Globalization, and Democracy

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Development Ethics, Globalization, and Democracy?


Globalization and democratization—and their links—are matters of intense and often
bitter worldwide debate. How should globalization be understood and assessed? Is
globalization a permanent change in the world order or an “over-hyped fad of 1990s,”1 to
be replaced by forces—such as terrorism and U.S. unilateralism—that tear the world
apart? Is globalization good or bad? Who should say and in what terms? What should
we mean by global democracy? Can and should democracy be “globalized”—imposed in
authoritarian countries, resuscitated in countries in which it is under attack, and installed
or deepened in global institutions? Can democracy be “imposed” or “installed” without
undermining its moral foundations?

This final chapter in our study makes a case that globalization is an important
worldwide change that development ethicists and others should ethically assess as well as

? I adapted the first and fourth sections from “Development Ethics, Globalization, and Democratization,”
in Deen Chatterjee and Michael Krausz, eds., Globalization, Democracy, and Development: Philosophical
Perspectives (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2007), earlier versions of which appeared as
“Development Ethics and Globalization,” Philosophical Topics, 30, 2 (2002): 9---28; “Globalization and
Human Development: Ethical Approaches” in Proceedings of the Seventh Plenary Session of the Pontifical
Academy of Social Sciences, eds. Edmond Malinvaud and Louis Sabourin, the Vatican, 25-28 April 2001
(Vatican City: Pontifical Academy of the Social Sciences, 2001), 45-65; “Globalización y desarrollo
humano: Aproximaciones éticas,” in Jesús Conill and David A. Crocker, eds. ¿Republicanismo y educación
cívica: Más allá del liberalismo? (Granada: Editorial Comares, 2003), 75---98; “Development Ethics and
Globalization,” in The Ethical Dimensions of Global Development, ed. Verna V. Gehring (Lanham, MD:
Rowman & Littlefield, 2007), 59---72. The second and third sections have not been previously published.
For helpful comments, I thank Deen Chatterjee, David P. Crocker, Edna D. Crocker, Nigel Dower, Jay
Drydyk, Arthur Evenchik, Des Gasper, Verna Gehring, Denis Goulet, Xiaorong Li, Toby Linden, Nasim
Moalem, Jerome M. Segal, and Roxanne Walters.


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understand with respect to its causes and consequences. Moreover, the chapter argues
that ethically-justified globalization promotes and is promoted by the sort of robust local,
national, and global democracy defended in Chapters 9 and 10. Urgently needed,
increasingly argue development ethicists, is both a democratization of globalization and a
globalization of (a kind of) democracy.
The present chapter draws on the conception of the nature and practice of
development ethics I set forth in Chapter 2 and other chapters above and argues that such
an ethics is one resource that can and should be applied to the ethical evaluation of
globalization and democratization. I first discuss leading theories of globalization. Next I
consider both empirical (section 2) and ethical (section 3) issues (in assessing
globalization. In the final section I analyze and evaluate three strategies for “humanizing”
and “democratizing” globalization.

Globalization and Development

Development ethics faces the new and pressing task of understanding and ethically
evaluating “globalization” and proposing ethically appropriate institutional responses to
this complex and contested phenomenon. The debate about globalization since the late
1990s reminds one of earlier controversies about development. Like the term
“development” in the 1960s through the mid-1990s, “globalization” has become a cliché
and buzzword that the mainstream celebrates and dissenters condemn. Moreover, like



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“development” earlier, “globalization” challenges ethicists to move beyond simplistic
views—such as “globalization is (exceedingly) good” or “globalization is (terribly) bad”
—and to analyze leading interpretations of the nature, causes, consequences, and value of
globalization. Development ethicists, committed to understanding and reducing human
deprivation, will be especially concerned to assess (and defend norms for assessing) the
changing global order as well as local, national, and regional development. How should
we understand globalization and evaluate its impact on individual and communal well-
being? Which types of globalization are most threatening to ethically-based development
at all levels? Which kinds are most promising?

It is important to ask and sketch the answers to four questions about globalization:
• What is globalization?
• What are the leading interpretations of globalization? What explains
globalization and how unique is it in relation to earlier forms of global
interaction and integration? Does globalization result in the demise,
resurgence, or transformation of state power? Does globalization eliminate,
accentuate, or transform the North/South divide?
• How should (different sorts of) globalization be assessed ethically? Does
globalization (or some of its variants) undermine, constrain, enable, or
promote ethically defensible development?
• Can and should globalization be resisted, contested, modified, or transformed?
If so, why? And, finally, how, if at all, should globalization be humanized

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and democratized and what role does democracy play in this humanization?

What is Globalization?

First, what should we mean by “globalization”? Just as it is useful, prior to assessing
particular normative approaches to the ends and means of development, to demarcate
development generically as “beneficial social change,” so it is also helpful to have a
(fairly) neutral concept of globalization. David Held, Anthony McGrew, David
Goldblatt, and Jonathan Perraton have suggested an informal definition useful for this
purpose: “Globalization may be thought of as the widening, deepening and speeding up of
worldwide interconnectedness in all aspects of contemporary social life, from the cultural
to the criminal, the financial to the spiritual.”2 More rigorously, the same authors
characterize globalization as:

A process (or set of processes) which embodies a transformation in the
spatial organization of social relations and transactions – assessed in terms
of their extensity, intensity, velocity and impact – generation of
transcontinental or interregional flows and networks of activity,
interaction, and the exercise of power.3




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Three Interpretations of Globalization

Similar to the theories of development discussed above in Chapters 2 and 3,
interpretations or theories of globalization—which all contain historical, empirical, and
normative components—differ with respect to (i) the nature, number, variety, and relation
of processes or flows, for example, tokens (money, for instance, remittances from
Mexicans working in the US to their kin south of the border), physical artifacts (goods),
people (immigrants, tourists), symbols, and information; (ii) causation: monocausal or
reductive (economic or technological) approaches versus multi-causal or non-reductive
approaches; (iii) character: inevitability versus contingency and open-endedness; (iv)
consequences, for example, the impact on state sovereignty and the division of countries
into North or South; and (v) desirability (and criteria for assessment).

Although no one generally accepted theory of globalization has emerged, at least
three general interpretations or models of globalization are on offer. Following Held et
al., I label these approaches (i) hyperglobalism, (ii) skepticism or anti-globalism, and (iii)
transformationalism.4

Hyperglobalism, illustrated by journalist Thomas L. Friedman5 and trade
economist Jadish Bhagwati,6 conceives of globalization as a qualitatively unique global
age of economic (capitalist) integration characterized by open trade, global financial
flows, “outsourcing” of work to producers in other countries, and multinational
corporations. Driven by capitalism, communications, and transportation technology,

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integration into one world market is increasingly eroding state power and legitimacy. The
hierarchical North/South dichotomy is being rapidly—and fortunately—replaced by a
“flat” global entrepreneurial order structured by a “level playing field” and new global
“rules of the game,” such as those of the World Trade Organization (WTO). Although
hyperglobalism concedes that there are short-term losers as well as winners, it insists that
the rising global tide will eventually lift all national and individual boats—except for
those who perversely resist the all-but-inevitable progress. Newsweek editor and
hyperglobalist Fareed Zakaria, sympathetically reviewing Thomas Friedman’s best-
sellling book The World is Flat, observes:


He (Friedman) ends up, wisely, understanding that there’s no way
to stop the [globalization] wave. You cannot switch off these forces except
at great cost to your own economic well-being. Over the last century, those
countries that tried to preserve their systems, jobs, culture or traditions by
keeping the rest of the world out all stagnated. Those that opened
themselves up to the world prospered.7

Commenting on trade economist Bhagwati, economist Richard N. Cooper exactly
captures the normative dimension of hyperglobalism:

His [Bhagwati’s] main thesis is that economic globalization is an
unambiguously good thing, with a few downsides that thought and effort

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can mitigate. His secondary thesis is that globalization does not need to be
given a ‘human face’; it already has one. . . . His conclusion: that the
world, particularly its poorest regions, needs more globalization, not less.8

At least when development is identified with economic growth, “global
integration,” as Dani Rodrik observes, “has become, for all practical purposes, a
substitute for a development strategy.”9 According to this view, a nation’s government
should focus its attention and resources on rapidly (and often painfully) removing tariffs,
quotas, and other devices, especially agricultural subsidies, that block access to the
globalizing world. British Prime Minister Tony Blair succinctly expresses the
hyperglobalist faith:

[We] have an enormous job to do to convince the sincere and well-
motivated opponents of the WTO agenda that the WTO can be, indeed is,
a friend of development, and that far from impoverishing the world’s
poorer countries, trade liberalization is the only sure route to the kind of
economic growth needed to bring their prosperity closer to that of the
major developed economies.10

Skepticism rejects hyperglobalism’s view that global economic integration is (or
should be) taking place and that states are (or should be) getting weaker. Skeptics argue
that regional trading blocks are (or should be) getting stronger, resurgent

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fundamentalisms either insulate themselves from or clash with alien cultures, including
those shaped by North American consumerism, and national governments are (or should
be) getting stronger. These skeptics of hyperglobalism include Stephen Krasner,11 Paul
Hirst and Grahame Thompson,12 and Samuel Huntington.13 In a more explicitly
normative approach, Herman Daly goes beyond empirical skepticism to anti-globalism.
He concedes that globalizing trends, which hyperglobalists celebrate, exist but argues that
states should be “brought back in,” should resist economic openness, and should
emphasize national and local wellbeing.14 Instead of extinguishing the North/South
divide, skeptics and anti-globalists argue that economic integration, cross-boundary
financial investment, the digital revolution, and multinational power have increased
inequality between and within countries and have mired poor countries in the South in
even greater poverty and autocracy. Rodrik, for example, argues:

By focusing on international integration, governments in poor
nations will divert human resources, administrative capabilities, and
political capital away from more urgent development priorities such as
education, public health, industrial capacity, and social cohesions. This
emphasis also undermines nascent democratic institutions by removing the
choice of development strategy from public debate.15

Marxist skeptics contend that the hyperglobalist thesis is a myth that rich and

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developed countries perpetrate to maintain and deepen their global dominance over poor
countries. Countries—especially poor and transitional ones—must resist the Sirens of
economic and cultural openness; instead, they should aim for national or regional
sufficiency and develop themselves by their own lights. Authoritarian skeptics endorse
efforts—such as those of Fidel Castro in Cuba or Hugo Chavez in Venezuela—to
centralize power, pull out of free-trade pacts, reduce the presence or power of
multinationals, bring top-down improvement in living standards, and weaken civil
society. Liberal skeptics emphasize that national sovereignty, with its demanding duties
of justice, cannot and should not be replaced by global economic or political institutions
that either lack legitimacy or threaten global tyranny. Democratic skeptics promote
national and local control, target health and education, and promote public deliberation
about development ends and means. In sum, the variants of skepticism conceive of
globalization as something inimical to genuine development.
Transformationalism, such as that which Held and his colleagues advocate,
conceives of recent globalization as an historically unprecedented and powerful set of
processes (with multiple causes) that is making the world more interconnected and
organizationally multileveled. They argue that it is too simple to say that states are either
being eroded or reinforced; it is more accurate to conclude that states are (and should be)
reconstituting themselves in a world order increasingly populated by global and regional
economic, political (regulatory), and cultural institutions, and by social movements.
Transformationalists insist that globalization is not one thing—and certainly not

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merely economic—but many processes with diverse consequences. The new economic
(trade, finance, transnational corporations), political, cultural, criminal, legal, and
technological global processes proceed on multiple, sometimes inter-linked, and often
uneven tracks. Rather than being inexorable and unidirectional, globalization is more or
less contingent, open, and multidirectional. Rather than uniformly integrating
communities, globalization results in new global and regional exclusions as well as novel
inclusions, new winners and new losers. The nation state is (and should be) increasingly
reconstituted in relation to regional, hemispheric, and global institutions; the old
North/South dichotomy is being replaced by a trichotomy of elite/contented/marginalized
that cuts across the old North/South polarity (and justifies development ethics confronting
poverty wherever it exists):

North and South are increasingly becoming meaningless categories: under
conditions of globalization distributional patterns of power and wealth no
longer accord with a simple core and periphery division of the world, as in
the early twentieth century, but reflect a new geography of power and
privilege which transcends political borders and regions, reconfiguring
established international and transnational hierarchies of social power and
wealth.16

Just as development ethicists have stressed that national and local development —

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