Can Globalization Promote Human Rights?

8. The Politics of Resentment

8 the politics of resentment contradictory effects of the great transformations The preceding two chapters suggest that one might be cautiously optimistic about human rights leapfrogging. Although the early twenty-first century was a time of world insecurity caused in part by globalization, both the human rights regime and civil society activism demonstrated some limited capacity to control those aspects of globalization that were more harmful than beneficial. Yet the damage caused by, or perceived to have been caused by, globalization may already be so great that slow, steady progress toward protection of human rights—civil and political as well as economic—will not occur everywhere in the world. Many millions of individuals may feel so besieged by the cultural, economic, and political influences of capitalism and democracy—both, to them, emanations of “Western” dominance over their lives—that they turn to a politics of resentment. This resentment may check, or even reverse, some of the positive effects of globalization as some areas of the world resort to culturalist assertions of autonomy from the West, or even to quasi-fascist social movements. Thus, the global human rights movement may well leap backward, not forward. In the early twenty-first century, parts of the Muslim world seemed most likely to experience such backward leaps, although resentment was not absent from other areas, such as authoritarian China. 116 can globalization promote human rights? Polanyi wrote about the “double movement” of the first great transformation , both toward and away from the self-regulating market system that he argued was the ideological aim of nineteenth-century economists —just as free market globalization was thought to be the ideological aim of neoliberal economists in the late twentieth century. Polanyi believed that as the market expanded it was met by counter movements that ultimately undermined it (1944, 130). Part of the reaction against the market consisted of such self-protective social movements as trade unionism. Another part, however, consisted of complete reaction against the social changes of the modern, capitalist era, culminating in fascism. Describing early to mid-twentieth-century reactions against modernity and capitalism, Polanyi noted “the spread of irrationalistic philosophies, racialist esthetics, anticapitalist demagogy, heterodox currency views, criticism of the [democratic] party system, widespread disparagement of the ‘regime,’ or whatever was the name given to the existing democratic setup” (1944, 238). Some of these reactions are occurring again in the twenty-first century as people negatively affected by globalization resist it. The rapidity and confusion of social change and the consequent economic insecurity that they suffer intensify the reaction against the West, especially the United States. Many are particularly angry about the spread of “Western”—often thought to be American—values and customs, especially individualism, equality of men and women, and sexual freedom, most recently symbolized by the struggle for gay and lesbian rights. As Bilahari Kausikan, a Singaporean diplomat, argued about democracy, “The Western approach is ideological, not empirical. The West needs its myths; missionary zeal to whip the heathen along the path of righteousness and remake the world in its own image is deeply engrained in Western (especially American) political culture” (1993, 33). His comment easily applies to human rights as well as to democracy. The dilemma, then, is to how promote the beneficial aspects of globalization, and the democracy and human rights sometimes connected to it, while not uprooting societies wholesale from their familiar cultures, ways of belonging, and understandings of the world. Benjamin Barber (1995) worried that globalization would result in “Jihad vs. McWorld.” “Jihad” symbolizes a cultural reaction against the politics of resentment 117 Western social norms—a retreat into conservative religious doctrines and cultural forms—while “McWorld” symbolizes the complete commercialization of the world and the transformation of all values into degraded materialism. Both McWorld and Jihad undermine democracy, according to Barber. McWorld is characterized by the “economic totalism of unleashed market economies [that] . . . subordinate politics, society and culture to the demands of an overarching market” (1995, 295); Jihad is the antidemocratic reaction to that market. Antimarket social movements may increase their influence in the twenty-first century and reject human rights as well. Some observers already regard the universal human rights regime as hypocritical, viewing those Western activists who offer their well-meaning assistance to the victims of globalization as the sisters and brothers of those who exploit them. Those who blame Westerners for the wrenching social and economic changes they are now experiencing frequently...