Political Science > Globalization's Negative Effects

Failed states: State failure can flow from a nation’s geographical, physical, historical and political circumstances, such as colonial errors and Cold War policy makers. Human agency is also culpable, usually in a fatal way. Destructive decisions by individual leaders have almost always paved the way to state failure. Today’s failed states are incapable of projecting power and asserting territorial authority, leaving their territories governmentally empty. Afghanistan, Sierra Leone, and Somalia are failed states. This outcome is troubling world order, especially to an international system that demands a state’s capacity to govern its own space. Failed states are breeding grounds of instability, mass migration and murder as well as reservoirs and exporters of terror. The existence of these kinds of states and the instability they harbor not only threatens the lives and livelihood of its citizens but endangers people around the world. The road to state failure is marked by several signposts. On the economic side, living standards deteriorate rapidly as elites deliver financial rewards only to a favored few. Foreign-exchange shortages provoke food and fuel shortages and curtail government spending on essential services and political goods, such as medical, educational, and logistical entitlements. Corruption flourishes as ruling cadres systematically skim the few resources available and stash their ill-gotten gains in hard-to-trace foreign bank accounts. Leaders and their associates subvert prevailing democratic norms, coerce legislatures and bureaucracies into subservience, strangle judicial independence, block civil society, and gain control over security and defense forces. They usually patronize an ethnic group or class. Other groups feel discriminated against, as was in Somalia and Sierra Leone. Overall ordinary citizens become poorer as their rulers become wealthier. People preyed upon by the regime and its agents: civil servants, police officers and soldiers. Security vanishes and citizens feel that they exist to satisfy the needs of the ruler. In the last phase of failure state’s legitimacy crumbles. The state at risk can completely collapse, break down and surrender, or plunge into civil war. The state can also be restored by the UN or another well-intentioned hegemonic power.

Myths of empire: According to Jack Snyder there are 8 myths of empire. Imperial overstretch has been propelled by the arguments that security can be best achieved by further expansion. He says many of these myths can be found in the Bush administration’s rhetoric.

1. Offensive advantage. The attacker has an inherent advantage. Often it is a surprise. It relies on the broader notion that seizing the initiative allows the attacker to impose a plan on a passive enemy and to choose a time and circumstance for the fight. In this view attacking is the best strategy.

2. Power Shift. Empires rely on offensive strategies to prevent power shifts. In reality states form alliances against the expansionist state that threatens them. Attackers provoke fears that drive their potential victims to cooperate with each other. Fear of the unknown.

3. Empires view their enemies as paper tigers, capable of becoming threatening as appeased, but easily crushed by an attack. The way Japan saw the US when attacked in Pearl Harbor, and thought US would be discouraged to fight back. 4. Bandwagon: states tend to jump on the bandwagon with threatening or powerful powers. During Cold War USSR thought that it will convince its allies to follow it.

4. Big stick diplomacy: making friends by threatening them. US today divided EU members on persecuting US officials.

5. Falling dominos: even a small setback will turn into an unstoppable defeat that threatens the imperial core. Reason for Vietnam war, Turkey and Greece. Lost credibility is the ultimate domino.

6. El Dorado and manifest destiny: by acquiring territorial control a country will be able to gain natural resources. US is accused by stealing oil.

7. No trade-offs: in strategy there are none. Expansion is validated by the self-explanation of all the previous facts. If a nation is able to expand, it has to do so.

Terrorism: a premeditated, politically influenced violence committed against civilians by sub-national groups or condescending agents to influence an audience (State Dep.) Premeditated: terrorists are rational, never act under impulse Politically motivated: to change existing order, kick out foreign occupiers. Often not violent before occupation. Often to promote political self-determination. Target non-combatant: main target is civilians, but government officials too. Sub-national: it’s a group within the country or from elsewhere too. Robert Pape: involves use of violence by an organization other than the national government to cause fear, intimidation among a target audience. Violence: not all terrorists use violence, some just bombs garbage cans to not alienate public support. It’s a demonstrative terrorism. Destructive terrorism: acts will lead to casualties, public sympathy will be lost. They hope this will result in achieving their objectives. If it doesn’t work, the next step is suicide: enough pain to force enemy to negotiate. It’s a combat on the expense of public sympathy. Terrorists have a tactical advantage: Bland in, quickly escape, orchestrate attack with few resources. Target’s disadvantage: to respond it needs a lot of resource. Types: nationalist, State sponsored, left wing, right wing, anarchist and religious.

Golden Strait Jacket: It’s free-market capitalism: the defining political-economic garment of this globalization era. Countries put I ton when abide by its rules, if not they will It was first popularized by Margaret Thatcher and adopted by Reagan. Came about when the old economic laws didn’t result in more growth. They stripped power of economic decision making from the state and handed them over to the free market. To fit into the jacket a country must either adopt or be seen as moving toward it. The rules: make the private sector the primary engine of growth, maintaining a low level of inflation, and price stability, shrink the size of bureaucracy, maintain a balanced budget, or even a surplus, eliminate or lower tariffs and quotas, open up for foreign investment, get rid of monopolies, increase export, making currency convertible, opening industries, stock markets to direct foreign ownership, promote domestic competition, and allowing citizens to choose from a wide selection of goods. Two things could happen by putting on the jacket: the economy grows and the politics shrinks. (Freedman Cont pg 87.)

Electronic herd: consists of two groups: short horn kettle: those selling or buying stocks, bonds, currencies around the world, and who can and often move their money around the world on a very short-term basis. They are currency traders, major mutual and pension funds, hedge funds and insurance companies, individual investors. The other group is the long-horn kettle. These are multinational companies which are involved in foreign direct investment. Building factories around the world, striking long-term production deals with factories around the world to make or assemble their products. They make long-term investment decisions. They were born in the Cold war era, but its members never gathered the critical mass in that over regulated era. In the 1970s with the lifting of some controls, the herd could trade and invest freely, especially in the cyber space era. These electronic herds become important international actor in the globalized system. They are able to shape nation states in many respects. They combine speed, size and diversity. (Freedman, Cont pg 97)

Environmental degradation: what leads to environmental degradation is: greenhouse gas emission, acid deposition, ozone depletion, global warming, deforestation, depletion of fish stock, and pollution of our natural capital. The prognosis for future climate change is alarming. Possible: droughts, crop failures, and dying forests. Sea levels to rise, islands drown, ground water supplies will shrink, wild fires, and storms. Scientists believe that carbon dioxide is responsible for this that results from human energy consumption, and is only expected to grow. 85% of energy comes from fossil fuels. We have a lot of it, but the problem is that they produce co2. There are important developments, such as carbon sequestration, that allows for clean storage of co2 in a clean place.

Genocide: The second issue I’d like to discuss is the possibility of the prevention of a mass genocide in third world countries. The essay “Still Standing By: Why America and the International Community Fail to Prevent Genocide and Mass Killing”, written by Benjamin A. Valentino gives us an opportunity to gain some inside of the Rwanda and other genocides as well. The 1994 Rwanda genocide presents an interesting and instructive topic as to why neither the United States nor the international community failed and fails to take action. I will give a short background of the Hutu-Tutsi rivalry, followed by presenting the pros and cons why UN and the USA didn’t intervene in the country.

There is a long history of conflict between the two ethnic groups of Rwanda. What is an ethnic group? It is a group of people sharing the same culture, religion, history and culture. Race is often not a dividing factor; moreover ethnic groups don’t seek political power and self-determination. One of the reasons the international community is failed to act in Rwanda is that they all thought it will only be a continuation or reemergence of the civil war. Is this a legitimate reason? The author doesn’t think so. One of the many proofs he mentions is the infamous “genocide fax”, sent by General Romeo Dallaire to the UN headquarters. In his report, the general warns the UN of the possibility of a mass killing based on what he observed in the country. He noticed the transfer of a large quantity of armaments in Rwanda in addition to the return of an escalated hatred between the two ethnic groups. His report of course wasn’t acted upon. UN officials thought that the civil war between Tutsis and Hutus is about to reemerge and there is little they can do. They perceived the conflict as a simply but forceful gut hatred between the two, and knew that it is almost impossible to change the way they perceive each other. In addition the UN was in the process of rebuilding the nation and not to prevent a mass killing. But according to Valentino it is a big mistake to trying to distinguish between civil war and genocide. What they didn’t realize is that genocide was only a “tactic” in the civil war (568).

To go further, some even blame the Arusha treaty that was sponsored by the UN for the genocide. This peace agreement gave a disproportionably large influence to the minority Tutsis both in the transactional parliament and in the military. Even though the moderate Hutus were prepared to accept this agreement, the extremists would never have done so. The perceived injustices of this agreement is said to fuel the Hutus and drove them to the killings of hundreds of thousands of Tutsis. I think it would be a mistake to blame the whole conflict on this one factor. Instead the international community should learn to intervene with more caution in the future to avoid similar consequences.

As I mentioned before, the international community had several warnings of what was about to take place in Rwanda. Many of the several reasons that stopped them from intervening were that they thought at worst it will be a reawaking of the civil war. Another reason is that they had a hard time imagining that genocide would take place. It still seems like a wild idea nonetheless it is what happened. What’s more, it wasn’t the first and last occasion in history. So why was it so hard to imagine when there were a number of intelligence reports supporting it.? Was it the fear of losing American troops? The Clinton administration seemed to have learnt from the Somali incident where twelve peace keepers were left dead. They couldn’t afford the death of more Americans, or else the public would’ve viewed them in an unfavorable light.

There seem to be a number of reasons why the UN and the US didn’t intervene in Rwanda. The next one is that it would’ve taken at least four weeks to mobilize military forces in Rwanda, and so by that time the genocide was almost over. But we shouldn’t ignore that fact that warning signs had been sent well before the killings took place. General Dallaire notified Brussels, and the US Defense Intelligence Agency had been receiving credible information as well. So to say that there wasn’t enough time to mobilize is to say not believing the reports that came from the region. True, if the military preparation would have began when the first news arrived about the genocide, it would have been too late. But the truth is that it never began. I think that even if only a hundred lives could have been saved it would defer future attempt to mass kill an ethnic group anywhere in the world.

Democracy promotion: As democracy is considered an essential building block in the spread of globalization, it is important to look at the differences in views considering the promotion of democracy as a world value. Michael McFaul and Thomas Carothers convincingly describe both sides of the coin. Let’s look at what McFaul says in this matter. He points out that today democracy enjoys the acceptance of the majority of the world. It is an internationally accepted norm with a universal legitimacy. It has been embraced by more and more countries, and is continued to be the prevailing world view. His statistic supports his observation. McFaul points out that while in 1972 there were only 43 countries classified as free by the Freedom House, this number grew to 89 by around 2002. 38 countries were partly free, and 69 not free at all in 1972. Thirty years later these numbers were 56 and 47 respectively. He admits that despite impressive gains in democratic values, a fairly large part of the world still remains partly or not free at all. Carothers looks at the issue from a different point of view. He looks at the data of 1996 and 2004 and states that eight years later there were 118 electoral democracies in the world, while this number today is 117. So not only the number of democratic states is not growing, actually it’s declining. The huge jump between 1972 and 2002 in the number of free nations can be explained with the collapse of the dictatorship in Portugal, the rise of democracies both in the former Soviet block and South America.

McFaul also argues that there isn’t really another valid alternative to democracy. The only other government form that could challenge democracy is the Bin-Ladenism. It is not a real alternative to democracy, and if it were to gain momentum, it would happen on the Middle-East. True, that in the last century other options existed, such as communism and fascism, but these ideologies have failed miserably. Communist regimes are still in power in a few countries, such as China and Vietnam, but their rulers claim that they are no longer opposed to democracy, in fact Chinese leaders are already started to move toward democracy. For most countries, affirms McFaul then, “democracy is either a practice or a stated goal.” He continues by stating that another vital competition to democracy was the modernizing autocrat, as we saw in Hong Kong, Taiwan, Singapore and South Korea. They all sustained a steady growth of 9% annually. For a while they challenged the democratic model as a better performing economic alternative in the developing world. This development was achievable only through a temporary trade-off between democracy and development. In contrast Carothers points out that maybe democracy is not an essential component of economic success; actually quite a few authoritarian countries have been doing pretty well in recent years. This was the prevailing view in the 1960s and 1970s, but in the 1990s the opposite idea gained international ground. Democracy is essential to economic development and this view was supported by the fact that the postcommunist world was developing at a high rate. So than how does China come into the picture? Its dictatorial regime produces an exceptional sustained economic growth, and this system is copied by other authoritarian or semi-authoritarian countries, including Russia, Ukraine and Vietnam. This trend fuels the belief in the developing world that often a strong hand is needed to cultivate economic development. The following section will further discuss differences between the globalizers and non-globalizers.

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