Globalization in a Global Society

One afternoon during my sophomore year of college, I passed by a catchy flyer for an on-campus student meeting on the subject of globalization. It was only a few weeks after the largest anti-globalization protest in history, as thousands of people from around the world piled their way into the streets of Seattle to demonstrate their opposition to the World Trade Organization. As I quickly scribbled down the time and location, I was excited about what I expected to be an open-ended and thoughtful discussion on the most hotly-debated topic on campus.

The discussion I attended, it turned out, was not open-ended. In fact, it wasn't even really a discussion. I found myself in a crowded room of about forty or so fellow students, all of whom, it seemed, were fist-pumpingly angry over what they saw as the single greatest evil facing our world. The meeting was little more than globalization bashing, with a brief interlude that featured a short documentary video cycling through images of McDonald's arches, starving children, and a nuclear mushroom cloud. I scratched my head, trying to figure out how these images were at all related. But to the rest of the group, everything seemed to be making sense. Globalization, in their eyes, was little more than a conspiracy on the part of giant Western companies to exploit the world's poor and subdue the lesser-developed world into servitude to Europe and North America, while recklessly degrading the environment, circumventing democracy, and lining the pockets of greedy corporate fat-cats.

I wondered: is this really what globalization is all about?. Didn't Bahá'u'lláh's vision of a human race free from the shackles of national borders also mean a world free of economic borders? Isn't globalization just a natural progression towards unity, the force which Bahá'u'lláh said has the power to "illuminate the whole earth"? As I struggled with this dilemma, I tried to go back to the beginning of it all. More than a century-and-a-half ago, on the very same day in history that the Báb first revealed his spiritual mission, Samuel Morse was astonishing Congress with his invention of the telegraph. At no other time in history had human beings in separate locations interacted instantaneously. That day witnessed the explosive beginnings of two powerful forces, one spiritual, the other physical, setting our human race on an unstoppable course towards integration. And this was somehow a bad thing?

The founders of the Bahá'í Faith weren't the only ones, or even the first, to proclaim the benefits of a united globe. In 1776 Adam Smith, the father of modern economics, rejected the then-popular doctrine of mercantilism, which aimed to maximize one's own country's wealth at the expense of other countries' by manipulating international trade. In the 19th century David Ricardo explained using a simple economic model that free movement of goods across borders was not only beneficial to the world at large, but to each country involved. Today in the 21st century this belief continues amongst economists, the vast majority of whom favor a global economic system in which barriers to trade and business between countries are drastically reduced, if not eliminated altogether.

No matter how much I didn't want to admit it, though, some of what the anti-globalizers were saying made sense. After all, even the most rigid free-trade economist admits that there are those who lose from global integration - French farmers, small time car makers, American steel workers. In today's world we simply don't have the international institutions necessary to make sure these people aren't hung out to dry. And regardless of the hundreds of millions, if not billions of people whose lives have been improved by these freer trade, there is justified suspicion of an overly-secretive World Trade Organization, a bureaucratic United Nations, and a sometimes narrow-minded International Monetary Fund. It is becoming increasingly clear that we need more developed and responsible global governance to accompany globalization, whose task it would be to ensure the prevelance of more just outcomes. As the Universal House of Justice wrote in Century of Light: "It no longer requires the gift of prophecy to realize that the fate of humanity in the century now opening will be determined by the relationship established between these two fundamental forces of the historical process, the inseparable principles of unity and justice (134-35)."

In this light, I agreed with some of what the globalization protestors were saying. It's what many of them were planning on doing about it - halting the progress of globalization altogether - that seemed crazy to me. First of all, it seems impossible to do in the first place. How could we as a society, after having our lives rapidly become more and more interconnected for almost two centuries, suddenly go back to our isolated, pre-1844 communities? And even if this were possible, why would anyone want to live in that world? To me, such a reaction seemed a little too much like a "throw the baby out with the bathwater" solution. In a sense, the institutions we have in place to take care of globalization are in their infancy. Maybe they need some time to grow up.

In the end, spending some time with the anti-globalizers didn't shake my belief that a global economy is a powerfully positive thing. More importantly, it didn't cause me to abandon my religious belief that a humanity bound together both materially and spiritually is the only lasting solution to global problems. To Bahá'ís at least, one thing is for certain in this whole debate: we have a common, divine future together as a human race, and it involves in some way a more globalized world community. Just how we will eventually get to that destination is anyone's guess. Maybe it was prophetic, the words that Morse plucked from the Bible to put through his telegraph machine on that mysterious day in 1844: What hath God wrought? In the end, the answer to this question is bound to be something well beyond the imagination of any of us, no matter what side of the globalization debate we choose to stand on.

(all content Copyright National Spiritual Assembly of the Baha'is of the United States, 2000-2003, do not use without permission)