After Modernity?: Secularity, Globalization, and the Reenchantment of the World

8. “Faith” as Mediator in Legitimizing Global Market Integration? A Preliminary Probe

h 165 J. David Richardson “Faith” as Mediator in Legitimizing Global Market Integration? A Preliminary Probe Chapter 8 Prolegomenon In this very preliminary paper, prologue for a longer monograph along similar lines, I set for myself two tightly bounded tasks: • To begin to explore Christianity’s historic role in forging and sustaining sociopolitical acceptance of economic market integration across borders, and in that light, • To speculate on Christianity’s potential future role in helping to “legitimize” modern global market integration, which has deepened in contentiousness almost as sharply as it has deepened in reality.1 The first task is largely descriptive and historical, with a focus on the late nineteenth-century United States and the late twentieth -century European Union. The second task, though also descriptive , involves the normative judgment that legitimate global market integration is on balance a good thing. “Legitimacy” will be defined below as social acceptance and embeddedness, but not necessarily social justice (as normally conceived).2 I would also call these tasks modest except for my conviction that they are vitally important, inadequately explored, unappreciated domains of social science. They can also be addressed for other 166 J. David Richardson major religious and ethical traditions, but I do so here only very casually and speculatively.3 So what is the distinctive content of this paper? I try to make a case for global religion’s unique role in envisioning, modeling, debating, and building global institutions and processes to legitimize and socially embed the global market. I begin descriptively and retrospectively, and conclude with some prospective prescription. Compared to existing literatures, this paper purports to be more historically rooted and social-scientific, and more prescriptively constructive. What gap is the paper hoping to begin to fill? The gap into which this material fits is the surprising absence of global counterparts to a well-developed literature on national markets, social embeddedness , and justice. For just one of many examples, Blank and McGurn give a recent and prominent treatment of these themes, yet it is almost entirely national in its perspective, with four pages of attention to global markets.4 And even the pope’s recurrent and thoughtful encyclicals about the market system, Centesimus Annus, for example, premise their discussions implicitly on the appropriateness and effectiveness of countries’ juridical and social systems, with no explicit discussion of intercountry counterparts.5 What I claim in the previous paragraph may surprise some readers, sated over the past thirty years especially with the recurrence of ringing, stinging indictments of globalization in the name of justice. Yet such literature is nearly entirely, prophetically diagnostic .6 Almost none of it proposes or prescribes viable institutional sequences of solutions or structures, or tactical mechanisms to attain them. Very little of it uses national histories of gradually “legitimized” internal integration as a template for what might be done at a global level. Nor does this literature ask what elements of national religious histories hold cautionary conclusions or are unsuitable as a template for socially embedding globalism. Almost none of this vast, angry literature is social-scientific.7 Meanwhile, global markets continue to grow without legitimizing support. They grow because of incentives. They grow because the costs of travel, communication, coordination, and information continue to decline precipitously. They grow at what economists call the extensive margin: more and more activities become open to cross-border supply and demand that used to be localized, such as trade in standardized surgery and secondary-school tutoring. And “Faith” as Mediator in Legitimizing Global Market Integration? 167 they grow at the intensive margin, too: larger and larger market shares for globally owned and managed firms and for cross-border transactions in activities that are already open, such as accounting, banking, retailing, and tourism. But growth without legitimacy is inherently self-limiting. Justice -oriented critics find that limitation a good thing. I think they are demanding too much perfection. Socially acceptable globalization is my orientation, because I read the recent literature on “genuinely human” development (economic, political, social) to conclude that global openness is a key contributor to such integral development .8 In this light, to sustain deeper and deeper global market integration is better than to limit it, as long as some sort of social embedding is in place, presumably evolving at a roughly comparable rate to openness. I argue below that norm-driven religion, Christianity in particular , has played and could play a fruitfully constructive role in discourse...