*{Civil Society's Responses to Globalization - Global Policy Forum - NGOs Civil Society's Responses to Globalization By Candido Grzybowski Corporate Watch November 8, 1995} There is no worse slavery than to be deprived of our ability to think, create, and dare in freedom. There is no greater domination than an imposed way of thinking that cannot be challenged. Nothing is more tragic than to be limited by visions, desires and justifications presented to us as inevitable. Globalization is more than a process in human history; it seems to be and to act as a prison for hearts and minds, thoughts and movements. The dominant form of globalization appears as the only way out that nothing could oppose. We are told that anyone who does not adjust to this fate will perish. At least, this is how the concept of globalization has been disseminated by governments, businesspeople, financiers - or their ideologues. We must rebel against this way of thinking. Planetary citizenship requires nonconformist thought and action. The first response to globalization is to acknowledge that it was produced by us, by human beings. It is not a monster to rule over us, but a human invention, with its limitations and possibilities like our own life condition. We must use a different approach to think about globalization, taking alternative globalizations into consideration. For this, the conventional hegemonic way of thinking dictated by neoliberalism and by "free market" consensus is not very helpful. It is necessary that we, as citizens of the planet earth committed to democracy, build our own agenda, our own way of viewing issues and tasks, our own priorities. We can't ignore other approaches and their proposals, but let's not limit ourselves to them. Let's face up to them! *partie=titre Several globalizations, different responses *partie=nil Dominant forms of globalization are powered by an unrestrained drive to maximize profits. Open the borders, reduce and privatize the state, deregulate, be efficient and competitive, submit everything and everybody to savage free market law - such are the rules and basic principles of key economic globalization actors. In practice, global speculation was installed - a global casino. Productive structures and processes are increasingly more distanced from human development needs. Such globalization entails huge economic instability and political crisis. It is deeply destructive and antihuman. Never before has social inequality and exclusion reached such levels - too many human beings for an economy meant for less people, pursuing an unsustainable pattern of resource-use and consumption. Without borders, apartheid becomes global. In the face of this exclusionary globalization, we need to look at other globalizations. Some of them bear alternatives and hopes. In the struggle against globalization serving only business interests, actors emerge who are forging the bases of a planetary civil society founded on human rights and active citizenship. However, fundamentalisms of all sorts also proliferate in civil societies, propagating intolerance and violence. They destroy and exclude in their own ways. The key is that ongoing processes are challenging the world power system formed in the past. National states have been weakened and have been losing their regulatory capacity over economic forces active on a world scale. However, multilateral agencies are still deeply influenced by their origins and need many changes to confront challenges posed by globalization processes. In fact, the break with a bipolar world - with its hegemonic models and peripheries - does not just signal the victory of one pole over the other. It aggravates world contrasts within each particular society and within all humanity . However different we find ourselves, our destiny is also connected to others. Globalization processes do not remove us from where we live, from our culture, nation, or religion. They simply change the bases and perspectives of our lives, of our way of thinking and acting. Because our localized action can have substantial global impact, global dynamics - operating outside our control - redefines the possibilities and limits of what we do at a local level. More than ever we must "think globally and act locally." We live amidst very confusing proposals and concrete struggles. More than a new world order, we witness an extremely contradictory process of destruction and construction of a new civilization. Humanity goes through a period of uncertainties, lack of definitions, and absence of great utopian projects pointing the way forward. The task is precisely to rebuild such projects on new bases. We need to put forward globalization alternatives that could subject the market and state power to world citizens' demands. *partie=titre Priority task: strengthen civil society's democratic outlook *partie=nil Fundamental changes in humankind's history may occur along with economic or power changes. However, this doesn't imply that economic and power change should be the exclusive and priority focus of the strategy for change and for building a different globalization. Rather, it is a necessary, but not sufficient condition. After all, who makes up the economy and state power? Genetically, we ourselves do. The very human condition of living in society leads us to invent economic and power structures. Neither economies nor states create civil societies, just the opposite. With this approach, I have to acknowledge that civil society's most strategic and fundamental response to globalization is to reinvent itself. Civil societies must view themselves in the framework of globalization, enabling each inhabitant to think about himself or herself as a member of the same planet earth. Above all, we members of civil societies must redefine ourselves as citizens of a globalized world. This is a greater task than would appear at first sight. In fact, I'm saying that cultural change within civil society is an indispensable condition for changing the economy and markets, as well as power and state. I understand cultural change as change in ways of thinking and doing by different social actors making up a given society in a determined historical framework. Fortunately, this is not a vague and distant concept, but something concrete within everyone's reach. I'm referring to real processes in our societies and at the international level which merit and should have our attention here and now. Identifying such processes, acting on them, and maximizing their democratizing possibilities is our most urgent priority. I will mention some clear-cut examples. The environmental movement has a potential for cultural change that I want to emphasize. Today we view our relationship with nature in a radically different way. This results from an approach to environmental degradation and to challenges posed by sustainability forged by certain citizens' groups in concrete and specific situations. Their capacity to identify issues, formulate proposals, and mobilize - thus creating the first large global movement - has become one of the most insurmountable barriers to economic globalization. Raising awareness, public debate, and concrete action against corporations and governments has created the possibility of re-thinking the development model itself. Is this enough? No, but without the environmental movement, civil society would be deprived of a fundamental instrument to come to grips with globalization imposed by free-market apologists. Still on the ecological movement, it's important to note how it interconnects global and local aspects. I can cite the example of Brazil's rubber-tappers and forest peoples. They have mobilized and started fighting to defend their immediate living and working conditions threatened by forest destruction to create pastures and set up large farming and cattle-raising projects. Ecological groups throughout the world have identified the global dimension in their struggle as an alternative to environmental destruction carried out by prevailing economic processes. The symbolic character of this struggle internationalized it and the murder of Chico Mendes was perceived as an assault upon planetary citizenry. Using the same approach, the feminist movement is rethinking gender relations and the women's condition throughout the world. The past twenty years, culminating in the recent Beijing conference, has witnessed the emergence of an issue that remains one of civil society's greatest challenges. After all, both the problem and its solution are found in civil society before new power and production relationships materialize. We are facing a process of cultural change in gender relations, barely underway, but indispensable to radical change and effective democratization of human societies. The extremely diverse process already underway in civil societies throughout the planet bears great potentialities for building another kind of globalization. I'm citing these examples to show the importance of change in civil society itself, as a precondition for other forms of globalization. I should also acknowledge the existence within civil societies of great obstacles and limiting forces to the alternative of global democratization. Religiously and/or ethnically-inspired fundamentalist movements have prospered because they attract followers and activists in our own societies. It's not cultural diversity that explains fundamentalism's destructive potential to create violence and social exclusion. On the contrary, non-acceptance of equality in diversity leads to isolation, fragmentation, and intolerance. It's in the hands of civil society's groups to build conditions to defy fundamentalism as a world vision and to confront its destructive practices. Above all, it's a confrontation among citizens. Israeli Prime Minister's recent murder in the conflict-ridden Middle East reveals the nature of the fundamentalist problem. However, our civil societies face great challenges on the issue of poverty and social exclusion. Globalization processes may also be seen to unveil and deepen the logic of inequality and exclusion in the world. Sparing no society, poverty and destitution are now global phenomena. Worse still, there is a radical separation between economic and social spheres - while economies are globalized, the social is nationalized. The greatest indicator of the narrow limits of economic globalization is increasing control over migration. All barriers to circulation of goods are lifted but their producers are blocked from moving freely! In addition, visions and wills are forged within societies to exclude foreign workers, denying them basic citizenship rights. These are globalization's contrasts and dead ends. In Brazil we have a movement that is particularly eloquent in showing potentialities for cultural change, forged by civil society itself around the issue of social exclusion and poverty. It has a universal dimension despite its unique Brazilian features. It joins with other similar movements throughout the world and contributes in its own way to forging a new way of thinking and acting by groups of civil society relating to business and government. After all, it appeals to citizens' consciousness and action as the basis for change. We are referring to the movement "Citizens' Action Against Hunger, Poverty, and for Life" (Citizens' Action). Since March 1993, Citizens' Action has, through successive mobilizations, forced society to look introspectively for ideas and energy to launch a process to alter the country's hunger and poverty situation. This article is not the place to describe that civic movement. It just draws attentions to its nature. The movement is a learning process for the citizenry based on ethical indignation. Citizens' Action was not created to remind the poor and the hungry that they are responsible for their own fate. This movement directs itself to those with means, to those integrated in the current development model, to enable them to see the others and assume responsibility as citizens for their fate. Thus, basic values of human togetherness, the foundation of democracy, are recovered. It's not a matter of struggling for one's own rights, but for citizenship rights denied to the hungry, the destitute, and the excluded of all sorts. Denying the citizenship of others limits ours. Democracy and misery are ethically incompatible. In Citizens' Action there is no denying the importance of the state, governments and their policies, nor corporations' social responsibility. However, we seek the catapult for change that comes from citizens changing their attitudes when confronted with this issue. They can, in a sovereign way and without asking anyone's opinion, invent, take initiatives, organize decentralized committees - without duplicating models. They can mobilize forces and resources, promote partnerships, and contribute their share. Such actions create the atmosphere for a political and cultural movement favoring change. The lesson to draw from Brazil's Citizens' Action is that the potential in civil society for change is huge and decisive but needs to be primed. A question worth noticing is the emergence of ethics in civil societies' response to the neoliberal outlook and its globalization proposals. Mere defense of a human society based on free market laws condemns us to barbarism. Its destructive social and ecological potential results from denying primacy to values or to ethical considerations in relationships between human beings and between peoples. Even worse, this is a cynical way of thinking because it denies any possibility of an alternative approach. Dubbing itself as modern, this deeply conservative thinking invites each society in particular and the planetary society under construction to renounce the possibility of advancing civilization. Neoliberal thought is authoritarian and technocratic, prioritizing the economy to the detriment of politics and culture. Humankind had to struggle and suffer to identify and uphold values and rights whose central role is now negated by this narrow-minded utilitarianism. To see beyond the neoliberal wave and re-affirm the primacy of ethics and human beings is one of the greatest challenges for humanists and democrats on the threshold of the XXI Century. Forging another kind of globalization within civil society is possible. To do that we must re-affirm the primacy of the ethical principles constituting democracy: equality, freedom, participation, and human diversity and solidarity. They are capable of touching the hearts and minds of civil society's different groups and sectors. These principles should regulate power and market and be upheld and practiced throughout the world. The priority task is to counterpose a deepening process of global democracy and of planetary-scale cultural change to worldwide neoliberal disorder. A viable strategy: combining social mobilization and political pressure Having explained that the basic proposal is viable, let's tentatively discuss the strategy as a whole. We live in a concrete world, within time and space, with ongoing real processes. We want to shape globalization taking into account that it may open new possibilities for humankind. This is not only desirable but necessary. But how can civil society redirect globalization's course? The strategy I propose is to prioritize ways of viewing and thinking - the prevailing attitudes and values within civil societies themselves concerning globalization. Perceptions and proposals of different civic groups, their movements and large mobilizations are forged in political and cultural confrontation and through action and public debate. To get the other side of the proposal to work - pressure, lobbying, and demands on governments, multilateral agencies and corporations - it is necessary to create a favorable atmosphere for linkages and networks within civil society, at both the national and international level. This is not the place to analyze the ample openings for political action by different actors in the planetary civil society being built today. We all have shown already that, when based on concrete local mobilizations, our intervention in negotiating forums such as large international conferences changes the quality of negotiations, both in their content and in the type of commitments governments undertake in those events. We also realize that conferences are only a starting point. Carrying out action plans requires new pressures and lobbying efforts. Again, broader engagement of different social sectors and a favorable atmosphere become decisive factors. Therefore, our strategy must combine actions and proposals to strengthen and mobilize civil society, and efforts to urge governments and multilateral agencies to take the pathway already indicated on the international agenda. The official agenda should not set the limits of our action. We need to expand our independent spaces for political action, with our own agenda, even at the international level. NGO and social movements' conferences, debates, forums, and networks (including computer networks) should help in the task of emancipating societies, of providing them with autonomy and capacity for exercising their role. In formulating globalization proposals we must free ourselves from narrow national and local outlooks and from the hegemony of governments, multilateral agencies, large corporations and finance capital. Although we don't shy away from this arena of struggle, the possibility of our intervention at this level does not only depend on competence and creativity. Above all, political action to confront the power system and the market for a democratic globalization presupposes strengthening our civil societies. Our challenge is to combine both poles. This confrontation will certainly shape a different globalization.