New Rules for Global Justice

Structural Redistribution in the Global Economy

Jan Aart Scholte, Lorenzo Fioramonti, Alfred G. Nhema

• Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield International
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781783487769
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Economía
• Subtopic: Economía política

Today’s globalised world means offshore finance, airport boutiques and high-speed Internet for some people, against dollar-a-day wages, used t-shirts, and illiteracy for others. How do these highly skewed global distributions happen, and what can be done to counter them? New Rules for Global Justice engages with widespread public disquiet around global inequality. It explores (mal)distributions in relation to country, class, gender and race, with international examples drawn from Australia to Zimbabwe. The book is action-oriented and empowering, presenting concrete proposals for ‘new rules’ in regard to climate change, corruption, finance, food, investment, the Internet, migration and more.

Chapter 1

Why Global Redistribution Is Needed

Jan Aart Scholte

Readers who open this book are presumably troubled (maybe also outraged) by global economic inequality. Today’s globalized world means offshore finance, airport boutiques, and high-speed Internet for some people, as against dollar-a-day wages, used t-shirts, and illiteracy for others. Latest research suggests that the richest 1 per cent of world population own 48.2 per cent of all assets, while the bottom half own less than 1 per cent of economic wealth (Credit Suisse 2014, 11). As this book goes to press, hundreds are drowning in the Mediterranean in desperate attempts to migrate across global inequalities. How do these highly skewed distributions happen, and what can be done to counter them? That is the concern of this volume.

The book engages with widespread public disquiet. Bank bailouts, Occupy protests, Greek plebiscites, and more have all put a spotlight on global inequality. In this situation, a 700-page analysis of economic inequality that would otherwise gather academic dust becomes a runaway bestseller (Piketty 2014). Antiglobalization icon Naomi Klein likewise returns to the headlines with a critique of capitalism and climate change (Klein 2014). Others bemoan that social justice has got lost amidst obsessions with growth (Fioramonti 2013). A debate is on.

This volume’s special contribution to this debate is twofold. First, the chapters collectively offer a veritably global exploration of global economic inequality; authors bring age, gender, race, and regional diversity from Australia, Canada, the Caribbean, China, Germany, New Zealand, Russia, South Africa, Sweden, Thailand, Turkey, and Zimbabwe. Second, the book is action-oriented and empowering, presenting concrete proposals that could reduce the global inequalities which most people deplore.

New Rules for Global Justice develops these proposals through three steps of diagnosis, prescription, and process. Diagnosis asks how current circumstances of global political economy generate highly skewed distributions of world resources. Prescription asks how alternative principles and rules of global governance could yield progressive redistributions of world resources. Process asks what opportunities and obstacles for implementation face these proposals for change. In short: how did we get here; where do we want to go instead; and how do we get there?

The following chapters relate these three core questions to specific suggestions in respect of various areas of activity. Chapters 2–4 address long-standing issues of the so-called ‘real’ economy, such as foreign direct investment and migration. Chapters 5–7 shift the focus of redistributive strategies to globalized money and finance. Chapters 8–10 put the spotlight on newly emergent issues of redistribution connected with the Internet and global ecology. The aim in each chapter is to offer novel workable ideas for resource redistribution in today’s global political economy.

Ahead of the elaboration of detailed proposals, this introductory chapter discusses the general problem of huge resource gaps in the contemporary global world. This opening overview has five steps. The first section below presents the project that has generated this book, thereby putting the analysis in a context. The second section describes the nature and extent of material inequalities in today’s global economy, thereby summarizing the problem under investigation. The third section identifies broad circumstances that give rise to these resource gaps, noting in particular the role of rules and policies. The fourth section reviews general types of prescriptions for global redistribution that are developed through specific proposals in later chapters of the book. The fifth section surveys process, assessing key possibilities and challenges in the politics of global redistribution.

Structural Redistribution for Global Democracy

All knowledge emerges from a context, so it helps to say something at the outset about the development of this volume. The book is part of a broad programme on Building Global Democracy (BGD). Since 2008, this initiative has pursued action-oriented research on the nature of democracy in today’s more global world (BGD 2015b; Scholte forthcoming). BGD has explored how to achieve people’s power (demos kratos) in relation to the global-scale issues that figure so strongly in contemporary society. For example, how can affected publics have due say and control on problems around global ecology, global trade, global health, global media, global conflict, and so on?

BGD has approached the question of global democracy in a holistic fashion from five interrelated angles: conceptual, pedagogical, institutional, economic, and cultural. Thus, a first project examined concepts of global democracy: that is, what the very idea of ‘global democracy’ could mean. A second project considered learning for global democracy: that is, how affected people could gain the information and knowledge required to be empowered actors in global politics. A third project investigated institutional processes: in particular, how marginalized (and usually silenced) groups could gain access to and impact on global policymaking. A fourth project (the one behind this book) explored economics of global democracy: that is, the material conditions for effective people’s power in global politics. A fifth project enquired how global democracy could respect, answer to, and benefit from cultural diversity across the world. BGD has therefore handled global democracy as a multifaceted issue that is at once philosophical, educational, procedural, material, and anthropological.

Structural Redistribution for Global Democracy (SRGD) is the fourth and economically focused BGD project. The starting premise of this investigation is that meaningful public participation and control in global politics requires that all affected people have sufficient resources to make their voices heard and their influence felt. In other words, achieving global democracy requires more than clear concepts, educated citizens, open processes, and cultural sensitivity. Global democracy that is worth its name also demands that everyone has adequate – and equitably shared – material means for effective political involvement. If those economic preconditions are not met, then – if one wants the global world to be democratic – measures are needed to achieve a more level resource distribution.

As the next section details, today’s global world is very far from that more even and just distribution. Hence, a key question for contemporary democracy becomes to understand how current huge global inequalities are produced and what could be done to reverse them. That has been the challenge for the ‘structural redistribution’ project and the essays collected in this book.

This volume on structural redistribution for global democracy involves, suitably, a global conversation. The contributors herald from diverse world regions, diverse cultural frames, diverse academic disciplines, diverse social groups, and diverse ideological outlooks. The project has assembled participants from the Caribbean, East Asia, Europe, Latin America, Middle East, North America, Pacific, Russia/Central Asia, South East Asia, and Sub-Saharan Africa. The group includes researchers from the fields of economics, gender studies, international relations, philosophy, politics, and sociology. Social diversity figures across age, gender, language, and race – albeit less so across class and faith. Ideological outlooks range from reformism to radicalism. Thus, while the authors in this volume are united by a broad goal to promote an economically and politically more equitable global world, they hold divergent perspectives on that objective and how to achieve it.

Indeed, the BGD programme has deliberately fostered dialogues of difference. Other thinking on global democracy has tended to come mainly from narrow and privileged geographical, social, and ideological locations. To put the point somewhat crudely, past research on global democracy has largely been a preserve of middle-aged professional liberal white heterosexual men (and some women) in the global north. (See the extensive bibliography at BGD 2015a.) The BGD premise – implemented also in the SRGD project – is that exchanges which better encompass the world’s diversities can generate ideas and practices of global democracy that could be more meaningful for more people in actual global politics, including marginalized people in particular.

Together with the benefits of diversity, most contributors to the SRGD project are action researchers who combine academic enquiry with substantial engagement of governance institutions and/or social movements. Whereas much mainstream research on global democracy and global justice more generally has focused on theory (cf. Brooks 2008; Pogge and Moellendorf 2008), the writers in this volume integrate academic knowledge and non-academic practice. Alongside their intellectual labours, many of the authors have held public office, advised policymakers, and interacted with civil society and resistance struggles. This praxis orientation, too, hopefully helps this book speak effectively to the concrete circumstances of global politics.

The SRGD researchers came together for a workshop at the University of Pretoria in South Africa on 4–6 June 2014. The deliberations examined the three aspects already highlighted: namely, diagnosis, prescription, and process. The workshop explored these questions across a range of issue-areas, including climate, corruption, finance, investment, knowledge, land, migration, and money. Importantly, the transregional, transcultural, transdisciplinary, transsocial, and transideological character of the meeting generated especially searching, dynamic, and creative discussions.

With so much diversity around the table, it could hardly be expected that the SRGD workshop – and this book that follows from it – would produce a consensus on how to achieve a democracy-enhancing redistribution of global resources. That said, the three framing questions of diagnosis, prescription, and process gave the proceedings considerable coherence. The rest of this introduction examines these themes in general terms.

Problem: Global Inequalities

Recent research indicates that, as of 2008, the top 5 per cent of households worldwide obtained two hundred and forty-five times more income than the bottom 25 per cent (Milanovic 2013). Yes, that is an astounding ratio of 245:1. Moreover, this calculation only covers income and excludes assets. How much higher the ratio could rise if the value of private property were also brought into the equation (Davies 2008)?

Economic inequality across today’s global population is larger than inequality within just about every country in the world. The global-scale Gini coefficient, a statistical measure of the distribution of household incomes, is reckoned to be as high as 70 (Milanovic 2012; also Nissanke and Thorbecke 2007). This number is equivalent to the highest country-based Gini coefficient (namely, for South Africa). A global Gini of 70 makes Brazil at 55 and United States at 48 look egalitarian by comparison, not to mention Slovakia at 26 and Sweden at 25 (Gini 2014).

The focus here is deliberately on global material inequality. Researchers have typically calculated resource distributions in relation to country units (cf. Wilkinson and Pickett 2010; Ostry et al. 2014; Piketty 2014). Yet with heightened globalization over the past half-century, it increasingly makes sense to assess economic inequality also on a planetary basis. Of course world-scale inequality is not particular to recent decades, with economic disparities between continents growing particularly after the early nineteenth century (Maddison 2001; Bourguignon and Morrison 2002). However, contemporary globalization has hugely increased the amounts, types, frequencies, speeds, intensities, and impacts of transplanetary transactions and interdependencies (Scholte 2005: Chapters 2 and 3). Thus, material inequalities are now more deeply entwined in global relations (Weiss 2005; Therborn 2006). Resource gaps have become that much more a function of the ways that people are connected on a planetary scale – and by implication, those gaps could be reduced if global relations were organized differently.

Today’s global world lives with huge material inequalities. Gated settlements of the rich exist alongside a sprawling ‘planet of slums’ (Davis 2006). Major gendered economic gaps pervade across the globe (WEF 2013). Indigenous peoples constitute 5 per cent of current global population, but around a third of the world’s extremely poor (UN 2009). Persons living with disability, an often invisible 15 per cent of humanity, likewise face comprehensive socio-economic disadvantage (WHO 2011). Other global resource divides on lines of age, caste, faith, race, and sexual orientation go uncalculated, but the structural discriminations are plain for those who will look.

Global inequality is therefore complex (Holton 2014). It is not merely, or even primarily, a question of rich countries and poor countries. Nor is it simply a question of wealthy classes and deprived classes. Nor are the cleavages only between Western and non-Western cultures, or between men and women, or between whites and coloureds, or between middle-aged and youth. These various axes of inequality intersect with each other in intricate ways (Grzanka 2014). Global economic gaps tend to become particularly large and entrenched when several structures of privilege intersect (e.g. rich country and wealthy class) and when several structural disadvantages converge (e.g. female gender and black race).

Enormously skewed distributions in today’s global economy fail pretty well every test of equity. Hundreds of millions lack access to resources which could substantially improve their life chances (Collier 2008). Oases of concentrated plenty amidst sweeping deserts of deprivation offend most moral sensibilities (Caney 2005; Pogge 2008). Huge resource inequalities easily subvert democracy as the wealthy capture regulatory processes. Consequent feelings of injustice can weaken social solidarity and fuel (violent) social conflict. In addition, overconsumption by the very rich and resource exhaustion by the desperately poor inflict major environmental damage. In sum, large inequalities undermine a good society: economically, morally, politically, and ecologically (Wilkinson and Pickett 2010; Therborn 2013).

And yet, so little is done to reverse global economic inequality with proactive progressive global redistribution. ‘Aid’ and ‘development cooperation’ have a redistributive motivation, but their flows are paltry relative to global resource gaps. ‘Fair trade’ constitutes but a tiny fraction of overall world commerce. Transactions in alternative currencies amount to seconds of turnover on global financial markets. Global justice campaigns for inter alia debt cancellation and access to essential medicines usually take years to achieve limited results. Meanwhile, a more comprehensive systematic programme of global redistribution to take the world away from 254:1 and 70 is not in sight.

Certainly, there has been periodic collective resistance against global inequality. Already 150 years ago, labour movements urged international action to counter class inequalities (van Holthoorn and van der Linden 1988). In the 1970s, governments of the so-called ‘Third World’ jointly campaigned for a New International Economic Order (NIEO) that would reduce resource inequalities between rich and poor countries (Murphy 1984). Around the turn of the millennium, a so-called ‘antiglobalization movement’ (AGM) attacked neo-liberal capitalism for producing unacceptable material inequalities worldwide (Starr 2001). Similar arguments were revived during 2011–12 in Occupy and related protests on behalf of ‘the 99%’ (Sitrin and Azzellini 2014).

Class-based mobilizations of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century achieved some significant progressive redistribution of resources on a national scale. Welfare states developed in certain countries, and anti-capitalist regimes emerged in others. On the whole, intra-national inequalities came down considerably during this period, particularly in the first and second worlds, albeit they have widened again in many countries since the 1980s (Roine and Waldenström 2014).

Thus far, initiatives of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries have not achieved similar progressive redistribution on a global scale. The NIEO, the AGM, and Occupy have each subsided without advancing a global welfare state or other significant global redistributive policies. However, experience from the era of nationalized capitalism suggests that such outcomes take time. The current moment in the mid-2010s may be a waystation in a long-term struggle for global reallocation. On this reading, the need for fresh creative proposals (as developed in this book) remains great.

Diagnosis: Governance Matters

Struggles for global redistribution can be greatly strengthened when actors understand the dynamics which generate the large inequalities. Strivings for change can be more effective when the sources of the problem are clearly identified, so that campaigners know what to target. To be sure, multiple and at some points conflicting explanations for global inequality are available, as is reflected in the varying ap...