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World Affairs
Letter from the Editor
By J C Kapur
Towards a New Paradigm
The World Affairs quarterly, entering its fifth year of publication, has set for itself the task of tracing the path of these emerging new compulsions and challenges moving towards a just and sustainable human order. In this process it must address new philosophical issues and the concerns of the victims of deprivation within cultures and societies. It must seek a new definition of human rights, including the right of dignified survival, and sustainable measures for quality of life. This hierarchy of values will also include ecological security and a deeper commitment to an ethical and moral order and spiritual beliefs. Profit- motivated interventions into the biosphere and human genetic structure are violence against nature and the larger human purpose and dignity.
The celebrations on the entry into the twenty-first century and the new millennium carried an implied message for the apotheosis of the most violent century we were leaving behind, and an approaching new globalised world order. Formerly, similar euphorias have crystallised into institutionalised continuation and magnification of the injustices of the past. Today once again we are witnessing the exercise of indiscriminate power; images are being forged of a new human order with an unidirectional compass and a route map with all roads leading into the closely held fortress of the market place. What is emerging is an anarchical order of power, with most countries overwhelmed by the consequences of some aspects of the parameters governing the paradigm. The pressures for globalisation further enlarge and aggravate these concerns. This dims our hopes that the twenty-first century will be any better or kinder than the twentieth.
All societies are a complex continuum of history, culture, psyche and environment. No single parameter can define its essence or alter its course at any moment in time. Yet pressures are being used with monotheistic fervour to forge widely diverse ethnic, racial, religious and cultural groups into a uniform consumerist lifestyle. In this process power is often exercised from external power centres without an understanding of the material and psychological compulsions of the developing states, nor is there an overwhelming concern to look beyond, at the human dimensions.
Thus influence, wealth and power are being appropriated within a unipolar system. It is obvious that the post-colonial emergence of GATT was hostile to the interests of the developing world. Now once again, World Trade Organisation (WTO) and Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) as constituted reflect an aggressive assertion of the interests of the rich against the poor. The increasing use of mega-force, and the multiplying flags of revolt against both the power structures within nation states and the international unipolar power system demand a moment for reflection on the genesis of these chaotic disruptions and challenges to the emergence of a sustainable human order. Their reckless enforcement is leading to a cascade of worldwide dissent of inestimable proportions. All signs of mutation within the human system, outside the deep psychic state, are an illusion, and so are the ideological claims being pushed by certain states. Thus those exercising a leadership role in the globalisation process have themselves become an important part of the problem and a catalyst of a growing discontent.
In the midst of these concerns, naïve fables are being crafted about the end of history and that an ultimate global arrangement is in the process of being constructed. Further, an illusion prevails in the power structure that the strength of arms and the media, as well as a brazen use of social advantages and the inordinate power of money for disconnecting the elites of the poor countries from their roots, will carry the planned order to its destination. Too, the mass projection of democracy and human rights and the reticence of the media with regard to social rights are considered adequate for submerging the clamour for food by hundreds of millions of people around the globe. Thus the hidden power of hunger and endless suffering are being grossly underestimated.
A civilised existence can only be attained by containing wants and not engendering new ones; however, the paradigm has become hostage to the limitless production of goods and services. Thus compulsive violence continues in all areas of deep human concern, and the world is given notice to fall in line or be decimated. And large masses of humans worldwide cannot see the purpose of it all, in the midst of the growing misery and starvation.
Take the issue of environment. A rapid march towards an environmental catastrophe is being reflected in one natural disaster after another; and nature does not differentiate between the rich and the poor. But there are no social safety nets for the poor, hence their greater deprivation, suffering and concerns. The purchase of pollution rights as advocated by some may postpone their own problems for some time but will not alter the course or reverse the processes of environmental degradation.
World food security is being threatened by the inordinate greed of some of the transnational corporations and the lobbies for the promotion of genetically modified foods, terminator seeds and other profit-multiplying exercises. By creating the psychosis of approaching food shortages, the food surplus nations are undermining the life support arrangements of the world’s poor subsistence farmers. Some experiments with genetically modified bacteria for biological warfare and AIDS have become a worldwide plague. Profit-maximising exercises in livestock feeds and the resultant mad cow and foot-and-mouth diseases, and their growing transference to other animal species in the food chain and to humans, has placed the food security and health of many countries in jeopardy. Who is responsible?
The promotion of chemical junk foods, often toxic and tasteless, is producing large-scale resistance to antibiotics and other drugs used in the production of such foods. As it becomes evident that the human system is unable to cope with the speed of scientific processes, physical and psychological actions are being initiated through cloning, so that human beings will be redesigned to stay in line with the evolving scientific and technological imperatives. Where will this human denigration end?
In the midst of the growing technical competence of the medical profession and effectiveness of some new life-saving drugs, health care is moving out of reach for those who may merely need a few simple lessons in hygiene, safe drinking water and some elementary remedies. In some role-model countries health care constitutes a major proportion of the social cost, next to armaments. Consequently, biologically manipulated foods, drugs and warfare materials are converting human suffering into the most profitable and least cost-effective enterprise. These trends are now spreading to the poorest countries, those without any social safety net, and are undermining the health of the growing young population of the developing world, with long-term consequences.
The single most important input into the expanding consumer and information systems is energy. The pre-emption and control of the world’s fossil energy resources, particularly oil and gas, has been the cause of some of the major international conflicts. To sustain a high-voltage economic system there is a need for an uninterrupted energy supply. That requires weapons not only for self-defence but also for the acquisition and transport of energy resources, and both the ownership of energy and control of supply routes carry a potential for insecurity, manipulation of nations internally and external aggression.
A protective veneer now appears to be emerging, particularly around energy- rich smaller countries who wish to retain a preferred access and price structure, and a larger share of the profits, within their own control. Thus the unipolar system, even with all the violence at its command, will in the years ahead be obliged to share both the control and the benefits with the emerging multipolar producers and user systems.
The historical aggregations of the sensitivities of nations are reflected in their culture. This continuum is significantly linked to their evolution with regard to a whole range of social, political, technological and economic parameters. In some countries, individualistic knowledge and emotion – conditioned competence are often reflected in proficiency in the mathematical and computer sciences, in information software, the medical profession and the film industry. Culture, far from becoming the foundation of development and social organisation, is now being transformed to fit into the movement of the scientific and technological processes and its contours are conditioned by the need to sustain these processes. Thus culture as an aggregate of sensitivities is being transformed into a by-product or adjunct of the market place. Its speed and direction of change, foundation of values, and ethical and moral conditioning are all becoming technical.
We do not wish to discuss the havoc wreaked by such cultural mores on the psychic state of industrialised societies. Our concern is with growing belief – and the accompanying aggressive acts – within the unipolar power system that the cultural mores of certain great civilisations and emerging new nations should be transformed so as to fall in line with the idiom of the market place. Such disruption of sensitivities and their subversion into a transitory commercial culture is a form of sacrilege worse than the desecration of places of worship or nature’s stored capital of energy and resources which cannot be replaced in millions of years, apart from the permanent damage to the environment occasioned by their use. The simulated cultural confrontations are inventions of fertile minds attuned to glorification of the market place.
The blatant and continuous encouragement and use of the weapon of terrorism as state policy to achieve political, techno-economic and cultural objectives has not been effective in any way in bringing nations to their heels, but has certainly ravaged many a soul and destabilised the human system.
The widening gap between media and truth is fast diminishing the credibility of the former, perhaps beyond repair. It carries within it the seeds for the containment of its effectiveness and compounds its inability to provide the corrective thrust for a directional change. The world is being overwhelmed with unrelated fragments of experiences or concoctions of information. Everything sacred or subjective becomes a subject for violence or misinformation. The projection of minor indiscretions as criminal acts and trivialisation of grave crimes into indiscretions is a special competence which the media are increasingly acquiring.
A unidirectional movement and the aggregation of resources, production capabilities, technologies, markets and profits have been ballooned to the highest levels of vulnerability in the market place, thus catalysing powerful movements for the transition to a multipolar world which has already begun to take shape. The growing environmental compulsions are making their own contribution to this process.
A decade after the end of the Cold War the idiom of international relations is also being transformed. Since consumerism has now almost reached the dead end of the market place and cultural manipulations have gone beyond all social constraints, every obscene instrument is being used to sustain the growing boredom with material objects. With the push for globalisation in search for new pastures, national and ideological issues are retreating; cultural and philosophical issues are assuming a greater significance because the sound barriers of austerity, limitation of wants and mysticism cannot be simply penetrated by media missiles.
Within this process of reconstruction we present three important statements on globalisation, by Gorbachev, Sweeney and Soros, and articles by some leading Russian scholars focusing on the predicaments and prospects for the Russian Federation. A Chinese scholar discusses the ethnic and cultural framework of the Chinese policies and actions. And we offer some reflections on the eternal, the embattled, and the strategic triangle of China, India and Russia.
New Delhi, J C Kapur
March, 2001