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

The merits of globalization will amount to empty urns if they are not filled with the elixir of local government. I am talking about policies for economic growth, welfare, labor, infrastructure, education, health, and nutrition that can be enacted on a local level. Policies whose goal is to activate the “virtuous cycle” of a healthy internal market that, in turn, could come to be an active contributor to a robust but also fairer global marketplace, truly global insofar as it would include more and more men and women who find themselves in the process of achieving very real improvement in their lives. Exclusion cannot be the price we pay for achieving greater efficiency.

Only with this kind of local government as a starting point, I believe, can we aspire to an international order that is both innovative and sound. The more the national state enacts, cooperates with, and protects national measures to resolve the galaxy of problems that I have mentioned here, the more authority it will have to propose international laws governing the environment, family policy, feminism, education, health, child care, immigration and labor regulations, financing for developing areas, and international jurisdiction to combat organized crime.

First and foremost, effective local government: political will. And rapidly following, international alliances bolstered by local politics and vice versa. Two-way streets, true, but if the national community does not create its own instruments for solving problems locally, international aid may very well end up in a bottomless pit where, as we all know, corruption is the most insatiable of monsters.

Globalization only favors human development if, at the same time, national and international public institutions grow stronger, so that the multitude of nonpolitical actors who currently rob elected officials of their power and hand it over to nonelected people can be made to adhere to the law.

The decisions that work against legality in the global realm are those decisions that ignore environmental protection treaties, multilateral disarmament treaties, and most of all, the tremendous effort being made to unite globalism and criminal justice.

To proclaim an axis of evil is a simplistic way of fighting terrorism by identifying it with two or three poorly chosen countries. Terrorism knows no country. That is both its advantage and its danger. Terrorism has no flag. No face. One day it surfaces in Afghanistan, another day in the Basque Country, a third day in Oklahoma, and the following day on the streets of Belfast. The tragedy of September 11, 2001, horrified everyone and confirmed for all of us that terrorism is a universal fact. It must be fought with tenacity wherever it manifests itself, but without demonizing entire nations or cultures. We cannot fall into the preposterous trap of attributing terrorism to a historical hatred of the United States, to the corruption or inefficiency of certain Islamic governments, and much less to the clash of cultures. No: we most certainly should agree that the deepest sources of conflict in our world are instability, illegality, poverty, exclusion, and, in general terms, the absence of a new legality for a new reality.

For this reason it is so important to begin building, step by step, the foundations of an international legal body for the global age. Let us not open, as did Virgil in Hell, an ivory gate to send false illusions into the world. Far more preferable is the patience of Job, for whom the waters did ultimately erode the rocks but also allowed the tree to sprout anew.

Nevertheless, what we see on the streets of Seattle, Prague, and Genoa is impatience — an impatience that bit by bit helps us to move toward understanding that globalization should not be simplistically demonized but rather transformed into a tool for the public good, for increasing benefit and welfare.

In an extraordinary speech given before the French National Assembly, the then president of Brazil, Fernando Henrique Cardoso, offered guidelines to meet this challenge. The international economic system should create funds to fight poverty, hunger, and sickness in the neediest countries. The debts of the poorest countries in Africa and Latin America should be reduced or cancelled altogether. A new international contract should be drawn up between states, so that the people can be better served. Solidarity should be, in a word, globalized. Rather than a few predominant states and markets, a new international contract between free nations should be drafted and implemented.

President Cardoso does not only propose an ideal — and in any event, a goal cannot be worthy of human action if it does not rest upon ideals worthy of our human condition — he shows us that we are living in a world of mutant reality and uncertain legality, just as was the case in Western cultures as the transition was made from the secure, consecrated order of the Middle Ages to the uncertainty of the brave new world of the Renaissance — an uncertainty that is expressed most eloquently in the tragedies of William Shakespeare and the novels of Miguel de Cervantes.

Today, one of the many challenges of our new century is that of envisioning the new legality.

Shakespeare and Cervantes, yes, but Vitoria and Bodin, Las Casas and Grotius as well.

From this, our Latin America, from these fertile, beautiful, aching, trampled lands that have been shot down by themselves and by those who covet either their poverty or their beauty — I don’t know which — we ask, today, to globalize not only the fact but the right to make rights out of commerce and health, education and environment, work and security.

Let the North, for its own benefit, understand how to distribute profits and reduce burdens in the global era.

Let the South, instead of reading its register of complaints, its cahier de doléances, over and over again, learn to clean its own house first, before demanding from the world those things that we do not give ourselves: the sovereignty of internal freedom, democracy, and human rights, the legitimacy of a justice system that eradicates corruption, impunity, and the culture of illegality in our own land.

Only then, by using that as a point of departure, can we create a legitimate globalism of shared rights and obligations in accordance with the conviction that globality isn’t worth a damn if it doesn’t have a working locality behind it.

“Nietzsche said: ‘God is dead.’ ”

“God was patient and one day whispered, from a mental hospital in Weimar: ‘Nietzsche is dead.’ ”

“Was the voice of Nietzsche human, perhaps too human? Because his words convey a tremendous contradiction. If God is dead, that must mean that at some point, God lived.”

“But then, when exactly did God begin to live? Which came first, God or the Universe? The egg or the chicken? If we admit the Universe is infinite, God must be more infinite than the infinite, and that notion is patently absurd.”

“Let us imagine, then, that God and the Universe have existed together, always.”

“To me, that seems to defeat Reason but, on the other hand, it does contribute to Faith. Science and Technology are reconciled. Neither God nor the Universe has beginning or end. On the other hand, if we accept the big bang theory, was this seminal explosion the work of a divine fiat?”

“Do you mean to say that God inhabited the Universe before the big bang and then, one day, for a little fun, ordered an expansive, universal explosion, knowing that everything would end, not in some kind of final explosion but in one final sob? That is, ‘Not with a bang but a whimper.’ Because the God that knows all, knew everything, including T. S. Eliot’s ‘ The Waste Land.’ ”

“Excuse me, but I seriously doubt that God reads literature. Why would He if He knew everything beforehand?”