Carlos Fuentes - This I Believe - An A to Z of a Life

We have all witnessed the noxious effects of a globalization that eludes all national and international political control and promotes a speculative system that, according to one of its wisest protagonists, George Soros, has reached its limit. If this trend continues unchecked, Soros says, the world will be swept into catastrophe. The globalization crises — in the Philippines, Malaysia, Brazil, Russia, Argentina — can be attributed to the perverse fact that financial capital is overvalued and human capital undervalued.

The social collective existing within the entity that (for lack of a more appropriate term) we continue to call “the nation” has, then, a mission: that of rediscovering values such as work, health, education, and savings. In other words, that of recovering the central role of human capital.

In today’s world, 9 billion U.S. dollars would suffice to address the basic educational needs in developing countries; in today’s world, the same amount is spent on cosmetics in the United States alone. Is this tolerable?

In today’s world, an initial investment of 13 billion U.S. dollars would suffice to resolve the problems of water, health, and food in the poorest countries; the same amount is spent on ice-cream consumption in Europe alone. Is this acceptable?

No, according to many people, including Federico Mayor, ex-director general of UNESCO, and James Wolfensohn, director of the World Bank, who find it “unacceptable that a world that spends approximately 800 billion U.S. dollars a year on weapons cannot find the money needed — an estimated 6 billion U.S. dollars per year — to put every child in school.” A mere 1 percent decrease in military spending worldwide would be sufficient to put every child in the world in front of a blackboard.

All these facts and statistics should motivate the international community to give the global age a human face.

Nevertheless, in the end, we find ourselves back on our home turf and there are problems that cannot wait around for a new international enlightenment that may arrive on the scene either too late or not at all.

Charity begins at home, and the first thing that we must ask ourselves, as Latin Americans, is this: what resources do we have to establish the foundations for a progress that, beginning with the local village, will allow us eventually to become active agents and not passive victims of rapid-fire global movement in the twenty-first century?

Globalization is not a panacea for Latin America.

We will not be an exception to the fact that is becoming clearer and clearer with every passing day. If the locality is weak, the globality won’t work.

In other words: effective participation in the global arena can only begin with sound governing in the local arena.

And local government needs strong, robust private and public sectors that are conscious of their respective responsibilities. The goal is “to clean one’s own house, build a stable economy. . and a solid state, one that is able to offer security in every area,” as Héctor Águilar Camín states in his book México: la ceniza y la semilla ( Mexico: The Ash and the Seed ).

Globalization will be judged. And the judgment will be a negative one if globalization comes to mean more unemployment, fewer social services, the loss of sovereignty, the disintegration of international law, and political cynicism. And now that the democratic flags have disappeared from sight, the same ones that were so furiously waved during the Cold War to defend the free world against Communism, the free world congratulates itself for the fact that instead of totalitarian Communist governments and military dictatorships, the world is filled with efficient, authoritarian capitalist governments (like that of China) which, according to the current global logic, are always preferable to failed neoliberalist systems which in reality are crony capitalism (like that of Russia).

Globalization has the power to render the world a highly undesirable place, dominated by the logic of speculation, disregard for the human being, disdain for social capital, mockery of what still remains of many deeply scarred national sovereignties, obliteration of international order, and the consecration of authoritarian capitalism as the fastest track to security without the need for very much accountability.

But the challenge is there. Everest will not move. How can we climb it, then? How can we take the negative trends of globalization and turn them into positive ones?

Can we take advantage of the opportunities offered by globalization to create growth, prosperity, and justice?

What I am trying to say here is this: perhaps globalization is inevitable, but that doesn’t mean it has to be inevitably negative.

It means that globalization should be subject to control, its social consequences evaluated and judged.

Will it be possible to socialize the global economy?

Yes, I think it will, no matter how difficult and demanding the effort may be.

Yes, as long as new forms of international economic relationships can be held accountable to the core activities of civil society, democratic control, and cultural realities.

Yes, as long as civil society is able to offer alternatives to a supposed single-model system.

Yes, as long as civil society rejects the idea that things are a foregone conclusion, a fait accompli, and instead strives constantly to reenvision social conditions, reminding the power structures that we live in contingency with one another, and connecting globalism to concrete and variable social actions within — for lack of new terminology — the entities we continue to refer to as “nations.”

Globalization in and of itself is not a panacea.

It calls for a base of active civil societies, diversified cultures that stand up to the encroaching global culture of unadulterated entertainment, uniform, exclusionary, and vapid.

It calls for public and private sectors that are aware of their respective responsibilities: private initiatives need a government that is strong — not big, just strong. And this can be possible with a tax base and a social policy that works in favor of a private sector that, for its part, needs an educated, healthy workforce that can be consumers as well. “Poverty doesn’t create a market,” says Carlos Slim, a lucid Mexican businessman. “The best investment of all is to do away with poverty.”

It calls for a democratic framework that can give the now-weakened notion of sovereignty back its true political meaning. The only sovereign nation on the international stage is one that is sovereign on the national stage as well. One that respects the cultural and political rights of a population that it conceives of as a complex, qualitative whole, not merely a number: citizens, not inhabitants.

I invoke the words of Juan Bautista Alberdi of Argentina in the nineteenth century: to govern is to populate. Yes, this is true, but as his contemporary Domingo F. Sarmiento would add, to populate is to educate, and only an educated citizenry can govern for the good of its country and the world.

That base is the only solid, creative one from which the processes of globalization may be transformed into opportunities for growth, prosperity, and justice. And its key lies in the active identification of civil society, democracy, and culture as inseparable repositories of a new twenty-first-century sovereignty and a renewed commitment to that daily plebiscite that, as Renan said, constitutes what we define as “nation.”

Good national governments can only emerge when both the public and the private sectors are conscious of their obligations to the local communities: that should be their first priority, in the interest of becoming a positive, active player in the global community.