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

To this end, there must be an intermediary between these two sectors, one which can play the role of bridge, supplementary instance, and political supervisor: the third sector.

As we navigate the waters of globalism, we cannot throw the public and private sectors overboard, nor the societies in which they operate. Without these three elements, globalization could well become a kind of helpless Titanic facing the unexpected icebergs of a world history fraught with peril, thunderstorms, displacements, financial and economic surprises, revivals of old prejudices, and opposition from older cultures. History is far from becoming a thing of the past; it is, in fact, more alive, more contentious, more defiant than ever.

Why? Because the vices of the global village have been matched by the resurgence of the vices of the local village. Tribalism. Reductive, chauvinistic nationalism. Xenophobia. Racial and cultural prejudices. Religious fundamentalism. Fratricidal wars.

This is far from the first era of “globalization.” The first one took place, overwhelmingly, during the age of discovery, the days of the circumnavigation of the globe and the creation of the jus gentium, the notion of international law as the answer to the global processes of conquest, colonization, and mercantile rivalry.

Rather contentiously, this first era of globalization was also manifested by the “first wave” of the agrofeudal world (Toffler) and its transition to the “second wave” of rapid industrialization that supplanted the agrarian, manual-labor world and sparked the rebellion of the Luddites, who destroyed the machines that robbed artisans and manual laborers of their jobs.

Today, the neo-Luddite sentiment that the former president of Mexico Ernesto Zedillo regards as “globaliphobia” is simply another manifestation of this old attitude of opposing the unstoppable: the new techno-information economy that favors quality over quantity, as manifested in vast global alliances for improved production, distribution, and optimization of profits.

The fact that this revolution will provoke disgruntlement, pain, and injustice is as true in today’s world as it was in the nineteenth century.

The fact that the new economy will not suddenly disappear when confronted with outward displays of protest is as true in today’s world as it was in the nineteenth century.

As I said earlier, the new global economy, just like Mount Everest, is there. It isn’t going to budge. The question, then, is this: how do we climb it?

The Christ of Corcovado is there. That doesn’t mean we should blow it up because the world isn’t perfect. We should embrace it so that the world can become less imperfect.

There are already 2 billion computers in the world. Increasingly, telephones connect to computers, voices and data multiply, and communication from one person to another person is transformed into communication from one person to many.

Even guerrilla warriors, as Subcomandante Marcos has demonstrated in Chiapas, will fight their revolutions on the Internet.

The fact is novel and stunning: Bill Clinton, in his address entitled “The Struggle for the Soul of the Twenty-first Century,” offers an astonishing bit of information: when he assumed the presidency of the United States in 1993, there were only fifty sites on the World Wide Web. By the time he left the White House eight years later, “the number was 350 million and rising.”

Can new technologies and computers solve the basic problems of the overwhelming number of people who live in poverty, in Latin America and all over the world?

Not by themselves, no.

But to the extent that technological innovations can be used more widely to accelerate and improve the education of people in certain geographical areas and of certain social classes, people who may now be able to receive training without having to walk three hours to a school, people who cannot even afford to pay the few and poorly compensated teachers they have available to them — then the answer is yes.

To the extent that technology and information may reach people in the most eroded and barren dead zones of Latin America, and teach them how to save their land, water, and forests, and how to modernize and optimize their agricultural endeavor, then the answer is yes.

To the extent that technology and information can become the vehicles of a basic solution to poverty — that is, the promotion of the micro-credit — then the answer is yes.

To the extent that technology and information can multiply the income of small-scale producers through the identification of markets, then the answer is yes.

To the extent that information and technology can empower citizens with the strength they need to rebuild political and social regulators of the economy, then the answer is yes.

To the extent that information and technology give every individual the cultural tools he or she needs for learning, producing, influencing, then the answer is yes.

To the extent that information and technology can allow citizens to acquire their own character, identify their own interests, and embrace culture, then the answer is yes.

To the extent that information and technology can help the state and politics reclaim their indispensable central role in society, then the answer is yes.

Globalization and politics. As the Mexican political analyst Federico Reyes Heroles so aptly put it, “In our Latin America. . the economic agents do not have the capacity to replace the state. . Let us dismiss the state as benefactor but strengthen the state as regulator.”

Reyes Heroles reminds us that there is no such thing as a stable democracy without a stable state. This is true in all the strong democracies of all the strong economies of the Northern Hemisphere. Far from reducing the state, globalization and open markets broaden the scope of public jurisdiction and reaffirm the redistributive function of the state via the taxation system.

The Latin American state continues to be a critical factor for the implementation of policies concerning health, education, and nutrition. The state cannot abandon its function as money-gatherer, nor can it renounce its commitment to spending more efficiently and directing additional resources toward social policies.

Not big government; strong government. Not recumbent politics; politics standing on its own two feet. Productive rather than speculative private enterprise. A civil society conscious of the fact that social rights depend upon social action and organization. The third sector as a conduit for social intelligence: What is my identity? What are my interests? What are my challenges? In no way am I attempting to cover up the evils of global economy. The ever-widening gap between rich and poor. The decline of traditional occupations. Rapacious urbanization. The plundering of our natural resources. The disintegration of social structures. The vulgarity of commercial culture.

There are, however, two modes of policy I reject: that of the ostrich which buries its head in the sand, and that of the bull which bursts into the china shop, simply to destroy everything in sight.

Categorical denial will not put an end to the globalization process. The question, then, is how can we take advantage of it?

Once the virtues have been ascertained, the rough spots smoothed over, the opposing arguments exhausted, resistance reinforced, and the realities of the jungle and the global zoo legislated for and held accountable to political will, what might be the new topics of debate in the next forty, fifty years, when I am no longer here? I venture to offer three. The protection of the environment. The rights of women. And the defense of the personal sphere against public encroachment, as well as the defense of the public sphere against private avarice.