W. McBride. Globalization and intercultural dialogue

The article will be published in the January (2003) issue of the journal "Problems of Philosophy"

The main challenge is that
what is usually called globalization,
is actually just another name for mainstream
role of the United States

Henry Kissinger

Globalization , a word with many meanings that has always been very difficult to define, has recently acquired another one. If you look at the globe, focusing on the western border of the US state of Alaska and the eastern border of the newest member of NATO, you can see that only a few kilometers of the Bering Strait prevent NATO from completely encircling the Earth. Not only the northern part of the Atlantic, but also the northern part of the Pacific Ocean is now maria nostra - our seas. But once upon a time the powerful Roman Empire called only the Mediterranean Sea that way - mare nostrum . (By the way, in the notice I recently received about the upcoming conference on globalization in Cuba, there was a map of the Caribbean Sea alone, labeled “ mare nostrum ”, and the word “ nostrum ”, of course, ironically, referred to los Norteamericanos (North Americans). This speaks of that, living on a small island, Cubans may tend to think too small.)

And who, exactly, are those “we” who own the world’s oceans? Although a completely accurate answer to this question would require some qualifications and clarifications, as well as certain additions, the simple answer at this point in time is: "The Government of the United States." The regime now in power - here I mean exclusively its executive branch, since both the legislative and judicial branches generally, again with some reservations, follow it in all matters relating to what is commonly called "security" - used the shameful events of September 11, 2001 and the sympathy expressed to the United States in the immediate aftermath to demand a pledge of allegiance from the rest of the world. As the de facto president, Mr. Bush , put it in his speech to Congress on September 20: "Every nation in every region now has a decision to make. Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists. From this day forward, any nation that continues to harbor or support terrorism , will be viewed by the United States as a hostile regime." And it should be added that the Bush administration has arrogated to itself the power to define what does and does not constitute terrorism and to launch preemptive strikes.

As someone interested in legal philosophy and political philosophy, among other branches of philosophy, I think that the events of recent months have brought many fascinating topics to the fore. The undermining of early modern notions of state sovereignty, already advanced by events such as the evolution of the European Union and the indefensible practice of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund to demand that governments carry out pro-capitalist privatization measures in defiance of local laws and institutions, without any pretense of democratic procedure, and in particular NATO's decision in 1999 to attack Yugoslavia in the name of human rights is now complemented by a blatant rejection of international ideas about human rights that were once supposed to be a special concern of the government, having now made a conscious decision to neglect them.

In previous articles and individual chapters of my books, I have examined the fate of local and regional civil societies in the light of the growing cultural hegemony of a transnational culture dominated primarily by American and to a lesser extent Western European elements. Among the questions I posed in these essays was the question - in which I was, of course, not original - of the extent to which some of the most powerful transnational corporate interests actually occupy a dominant position in relation to political regimes, and not only in relation to small states, but also superpowers. It seems to me that today the balance of power on this issue has tilted towards the dominance of the superpower - the government of the United States - rather than the multinationals, for at least two interrelated reasons: first, because the Bush administration is so committed to protecting the fundamental interests of large capitalist firms and is so full of individuals who occupied high positions in the corporate world that there is only a minimal gap between these two points of view, and secondly, because the huge increase in militarization and police state apparatus that followed the events of 9/11 enormously increased the power of the state in lack of comparable growth in the independent power of capitalist corporations with the exception of manufacturers of weapons and so-called “security equipment”. This ominous development may point to future changes in the hegemonic culture itself, which, in addition to its apparent devotion to maximizing corporate profits, has hitherto been characterized primarily as a culture of consumerism, personified by companies such as McDonald's or Coca-Cola; but in this respect no major changes have yet occurred. As Bush said in the same speech I quoted earlier, answering the question "What is expected of us?": "I ask you to continue your participation and maintain your faith in the American economy." In other words, continue to consume at a high level.

If indeed this transnational culture is a hegemon, or at least becoming one, then perhaps we should talk more about intra- rather than intercultural dialogue. And this certainly seems appropriate when it comes to the economic system. Note that whether we want, as I do, to regard this economic system—the system of “late capitalism,” as Habermas called it—as part of a hegemonic “culture” in the broad sense of the word is to some extent a matter of definition. But it is a fact that training courses on the methods of capitalism of the 20th-21st centuries. centuries read all over the world, even in places where these methods were once despised, at least as widely as English courses; so it seems that the spirit of capitalism has become the dominant part, and even the most dominant part of the global paideia . Our One World, from this point of view, consists primarily of a single global economically oriented culture, within which one can still find a few centers of resistance and, perhaps, a few more places so poor, powerless and marginal that they are not worth the efforts of capitalist missionaries even the lowest level for the sake of involving them in this system. According to this point of view, this system is so Juggernaut-like that the only conceivable form of resistance to it must take the form of terror, since no dialogue with it is any longer possible. Or, if such a dialogue is possible at all, it is possible only, as I suggested, intraculturally, that is, on the basis of the acceptance of the general premises and parameters of the hegemonic culture.

Diametrically opposed to this nightmarish vision of our world, which I myself, in my more pessimistic moments, am often inclined to unconditionally accept, is another vision, which seems to me no less nightmarish and is false. I am referring to the worldview shared by postmodern philosophers such as Lyotard or Rorty, which insists on the incommensurability of different worldviews and is embodied - in a more vulgar, less philosophically sophisticated form - in Samuel Huntington's "clash of civilizations" thesis. It is a pity that Huntington, an ideologue in the worst sense of the word, was said to have had such a great influence on the thinking of diplomats and other participants in global interaction: the success of his work, in my opinion, represents a magnificent example of the appeal of a simplified but superficially a clear thought that claims to express the whole world in a single phrase. During the NATO war against Yugoslavia, Huntington was called upon to explain the supposedly unbridgeable gulf between Western and Orthodox versions of Christianity; three years later, as Bush and President Putin attend Orthodox services together, Huntington is called upon to explain the supposedly unbridgeable gulf between the West and the Islamic world.

Between these two opposing nightmare worlds - a hegemonic cultural monolith with a few remaining pockets of resistance to be eliminated, on the one hand, and eight or nine disparate and inevitably conflicting cultures, on the other, there are undoubtedly a number of other conceivable models of the modern cultural world and the possible world culture of the future. One is the Enlightenment-inspired ideal speech situation of Habermas, who was greatly influenced in his early years by Marx, himself very much an Enlightenment thinker ; but Habermas's vision of the world has always seemed to me too idealistic, both in the sense that it implies an impossible ethics and in the sense that it moves too far away from the real world into the world of abstractions to be useful. An alternative, though related, model, also inspired by Marx's thought, retains (in contrast to Habermas's) Marx's thesis that radical criticism and disruption in both theory and practice of the capitalist system is a necessary precondition for the future flowering of more humane customs and institutions in the a time when economic factors will no longer dominate society, but does not insist on the extreme materialist and ultimately monistic ontology that characterized earlier “orthodox” interpretations of Marxism and led to expectations of the eventual emergence of a single, universal, homogeneous worldview.

According to the spirit of this model, which I would certainly like to consider possible, genuine intercultural dialogue is real to the extent that it is considered acceptable and even morally essential for the creation of new norms and ideals and/or for the maintenance of those of the old ones. which are not reducible to the capitalist and consumer goals of maximizing profits and accumulating goods. Such norms and ideals can, if you like, be called “spiritual” in the broadest sense of the word. I have deliberately used the word "create" in relation to their origin, wishing to emphasize the constructive role that human imagination plays in the formation of social reality, whatever it may be at any given time; but this does not imply any disrespect for the reality produced, since I highly value the human imagination itself. Insisting on the constructive role of human imagination, however, implies disrespect for many modern ideologues reviving the spirit of Herbert Spencer, for whom the capitalist competition of the "free market" is somehow inherent in human nature, so that we cannot lead a decent life without a "lower level" in as a starting point and should not even think about it. "Lower level" morality, such as it is, is itself, in my view, a product of the human imagination. And it can, in principle, be replaced with the same product, only much better, much more humane.

The ending follows...

Note:

1 By calling Bush a “de facto president,” the author apparently refers to the incomplete counting of votes in the state of Florida during the last US presidential election, when Bush won by just a few dozen votes. - Approx. translation