CIAO DATE: 11/2008
February 1999
Institute on Globalization and the Human Condition, McMaster University
'The political problem of mankind is to combine three things: economic efficiency, social justice and individual liberty.' John Maynard Keynes, noted in Essays in Persuasion (1931)
Globalisation is now a near ubiquitous phenomenon.1 Indeed, it is the most over used and under specified term in the international policy sciences since the passing of the Cold War. However, as most actors in the international policy domain recognise, it is a term that is not going to go away. Policy responses--of state and non state actors alike--are increasingly coming to terms with globalisation, however defined.
More recently, globalisation has been associated with financial collapse and economic turmoil. Consequently, our ability to satisfy Keynes' three requirements under conditions of globalisation are as remote now as at the time he wrote. Neither markets nor the extant structures of governance are, individually and collectively, capable of providing for all three conditions at the same time.
Globalisation has undoubtedly improved economic efficiency and it has provided enhanced individual liberty for many; but in its failure to ensure social justice on a global scale, it also inhibits individual liberty for many more. At best we can issue only one and a half cheers for globalisation at century's end.
Even leading globalisers, that is, proponents of the continued liberalisation of the global economic order, occupying positions of influence on these matters in either the public or private domain, now concede that in this failure to deliver a more just global economic order, globalisation may hold within it the seeds of its own demise. As James Wolfenson, President of the World Bank, noted in an address to the Board of Governors of the Bank (October 1998) '...[i]f we do not have greater equity and social justice, there will be no political stability and without political stability no amount of money put together in financial packages will give us financial stability'.
This paper aims to come to terms with globalisation in just two areas--those of governance and justice. In so doing, it does not offer a full-blown agenda for coping with the relationship between global governance and justice in the coming century. Such an exercise would be immodest and foolhardy. Moreover, it would withstand no reality check in the face of our current under-developed understandings of this relationship. Rather, the paper more modestly suggests the manner in which we need to think about this relationship. Even this task is less straightforward than it appears.
Resource link: Coming to Terms with Globalisation: Non State Actors and Agenda for Justice and Governance in the Next Century [PDF] - 107K