SHAPING GLOBALIZATION

Nicanor Perlas is well known in the Philippines as the director of the Centre for Alternative Development Initiatives (CADI – www.cadi.ph) and this book outlines his way forward in the globalisation debate. His key concept is 'threefolding', based on his view that civil society is the new cultural power alongside business and government and that it is through alliances of cultural creatives in all three sectors that real progress can be achieved. The thesis of the book is that elite or corporate globalisation is an unacceptable form since it does nothing to address the widening gap between rich and poor countries (despite claims made on behalf of world trade liberalisation) and will continue to wreck the planet's ecology in the process. We therefore need a better and more human form of globalisation. Some readers may be aware that the State of the World Forum is currently working on a globalisation commission – details from their web site on www.worldforum.org

Perlas begins by highlighting the three realms of social life or subsystems within society, namely cultural, political and economic. He then clarifies their respective roles, advocating autonomous interaction – the process- between these realms so as to achieve genuine or comprehensive sustainable development – the substance. This leads to an analysis of three phases of threefolding, namely de facto rejection (as at Seattle), conscious threefolding involving principled dialogue and engagement. Here ecological, social, cultural, human and spiritual considerations will enter the picture alongside politics and economics. Finally there is advanced threefolding where trust and respect are established and institutionalised, leading to tri-sector partnerships. All this is illustrated in a chart by David Korten in which capitalist society gives priority to financial markets and the corporate economy, which is linked to a materialistic culture and a capitalist polity that essentially denies the spirit. The alternative view is bottom-up, with the individual encompassed by spirit and situated in a genuine culture of which the democratic polity and market economy are subsystems. This is further elaborated in a diagram placing the whole of society within nature, i.e. economy within ecology. I read a dramatic illustration of this on the plane up from London this morning – the direct relationship between water and grain supplies in an article by Lester Brown.

Perlas sees humanity at a crossroads: 'if the neo-liberal agenda of transnational corporations succeeds and is reinforced by the coercive power of governments, it will be the "end of history". However, if the human spirit manages to continue infusing cultural life with the activism of civil society….then it will be the beginning of a new history.' (p.35) This does not exclude corporations but rather restores the priority of culture over economics, a trend that is already apparent in a number of international initiatives including the International Futures Forum (www.internationalfuturesforum.org) of which I am a member. The issues mentioned here – meaning, truth, ethics, morality, authenticity and legitimacy – are among those exercising us in the IFF. They are also crucial elements of an overall world-view.

The author is critical of many of the existing global economic structures like the World Bank and the WTO and of their programmes of structural adjustment. He gives a literally chilling example of South Korea being forced to open its gates to vast quantities of US frozen meat following complaints by US businessmen that the South Korean lifestyle of eating fresh meat was a barrier to trade! Perlas rightly insists that it is critical for civil society initiatives to factor the workings of globalisation into their goals and to realise their task of securing the cultural space of the world. The following chapters explain his understanding of current developments and the nature of his Philippine Agenda 21 (PA21) programme. He draws parallels between the Neo-Darwinian Worldview and that of Neo-Liberal Economics with their common emphasis on competition, pointing out that an economic framework is in fact a cultural artefact and takes no account of the environment; nor do we consider its social fallout.

There is an excellent chapter on the comparative characteristics of traditionalists, modernists and cultural creatives, drawn from Paul Ray's work reviewed in the last issue. This shows clearly why cultural creatives' sacred attitudes to nature puts them at odds with TNCs over genetic engineering. This leads to an exposition of the different kinds of development espoused by PA21, which is a visionary document based on a clear set of sustainable development principles. Engagement by cultural creatives – readers like you! - in this process is vital if these threefolding partnerships are to work to our common benefit. An alliance of moderns in the three sectors will have a quite different result: in the first case a collapse of the civil and political realms into the economic, while in the second there emerges the genuine possibility of authentic threefolding, a vision that Perlas sets out in the last chapter. This is an inspired and challenging book.