Globalization and Human Rights: A Positive Relationship

A simple model of a positive relationship between globalization and human rights posits that globalization inevitably produces human rights. This relationship seems to be what much of the positive rhetoric around globalization refers to. Nothing has to be done by social actors to promote human rights in societies experiencing globalization: human rights will "emerge," as societies globalize. In his time, Polanyi (1944, 29) referred to a similar "utopian endeavor of economic liberalism to set up a self-regulating market system," in the belief that a free, self-regulated market would necessarily result in liberal democracy and peace. This rhetoric is non-academic, positing that simple contact among societies will result in a merging of social values, without specifying what kind of contact, among which social actors, can result in such positive, rights-inducing changes. There was and is, however, an underlying belief that wealthier societies are necessarily more likely to protect human rights than poorer societies.

The thesis that globalization causes human rights via increased wealth resembles the "engines of development" model discussed by Meyer. Globalization develops an economy: that is, it increases its wealth. Wealthier societies are more likely to protect human rights than poorer societies. This is also the model about which Meyer and Smith and her colleagues debated, using TNC or MNC investment as a proxy for globalization.

A version of this model is the notion of "trickle-down" wealth creation. Whatever the short-term costs to the poor, in the medium term the wealth accrued by the rich will trickle down to them. During the early stages of urbanization and industrialization in the first Great Transformation in Western Europe, however, wealth did not trickle down in a steady fashion. Thus, in Britain, the Speenhamland laws were introduced in the late eighteenth century to provide minimum sustenance to the new poor (Polyani 1944). In 1834, the Speenhamland Laws were abolished. Accordingly, the new poor did not overcome their miserable situation until they achieved, first, the universal male franchise and then the right to form trade unions. The period 1834-1895 was one of horrific poverty in the midst of great wealth, the kind of poverty that preoccupied Marx and Engels (Marx and Engels 1888/1967; Engels 1872/1972) and persuaded them of the need for working men's associations, if not socialist revolution. Minimum welfare provisions — what we now call economic rights — were not widespread in Britain until after the Second World War. This reading of history suggests the need for a model of the relationship between globalization and human rights that takes account of political variables.

A still more complicated version of the optimistic logic about the relationship between globalization and human rights specifies the intervening variables between wealth and human rights. Globalization opens up markets; markets are the basis of the liberal economic order; the liberal economic order is the basis of democracy; democracy is the basis of human rights. Again, however, there is no necessary causation here. Markets can result in a liberal economic order —or, as proponents of global trade suggest, a liberal economic order can open up markets. To enforce their populations' acceptance of these markets, States can and do impose authoritarian rule. Populations used to having their own internal markets protected can erupt easily in rebellion when their local markets are taken over by foreign produce, leaving many local producers unemployed. State elites who profit from those new markets — or who, against their better judgment, are forced to acquiesce to outside market pressures, may well respond with force.

Globalization and Human Rights: A Negative Relationship

It is because of the complicated and highly political nature of the relationship between globalization and human rights that the antiglobalization social movement has emerged. The antiglobalization movement posits an opposite model of the relationship between globalization and human rights. In simplest terms, it is axiomatic to many of its opponents that globalization undermines human rights.

In this model, globalization can have only negative social, political, and economic effects. People are more likely to enjoy their human rights if they live in a locally, rather than globally-controlled environment. To use a phrase coined by J. Oloka-Onyango and Sylvia Tamale, globalization is "survival of the meanest" (1995, 727). Put another way, says Anthony Giddens (2003), this view of globalization would argue that it results not in a global village but in global pillage.The term "global village" is from McLuhan (1962, 31). This is how (7 November 2002) accuses the Canadian antiglobalization crusader, Naomi Klein, of seeing the world. In this view, globalization is a zero-sum game, which human actors, namely Western capitalists and Western political leaders, have invented for their own benefit. These actors use international organizations such as the World Trade Organization as agencies of "unofficial global government enforcing a corporate agenda" on States and citizens who cannot defend themselves against economic attack (Grierson, Lasn and MacKinnon 1999/2000; see also Gould 2000). Thus the "local," the concrete, physical place of human happiness and economic security, must be defended against the ethereal space of uncontrollable global change (Dirlick 2001).

Opponents of globalization insert de-development rather than wealth as the intervening variable between globalization and human rights. The concept of development includes the idea that growth must be accompanied by human rights, as the United Nations proposed as long ago as 1986 in its Declaration on the Right to Development. This Declaration defines development as "an inalienable human right by virtue of which every human person and all peoples are entitled to participate in, contribute to and enjoy economic, social, cultural and political development, in which all human rights and fundamental freedoms can be fully realized" (quoted in Madrik 1997). This definition of development implies equitable distribution of wealth, ecologically sound investment (sustainable development), and non-exploitative social relationships, such as co-operative rather than profit-oriented production.

The United Nations definition of development is logically redundant, and moreover is superfluous, diverting attention from the much more powerful and concrete earlier (1966) Covenants on Civil and Political, and Economic, Social and Cultural Rights. Nevertheless, the Declaration serves as a powerful rallying cry for individuals and peoples (including the South) to oppose the disruptive forces of globalization. Its opponents assume that by its very nature globalization will undermine development, not promote it. In this view, equitable distribution of wealth, sustainable development, and non-exploitative social relationships are irrelevant to the process by which international (especially American) capitalism make profits. Globalization's enemies assume that without their opposition, the social changes and political processes induced by globalization will be such as to further the interests of the already rich and powerful.

Opponents of globalization focus on the detrimental short and medium-term consequences of the spread of capitalism for many hundreds of millions of people. Although capitalism is the only known mode of production that results in a significant increase in the wealth of a society, such an increase does not in and of itself imply more equitable distribution of resources. Nor does it imply that social interactions will be non-exploitative. Usually, but not always, early capitalism implies the opposite. Moreover, the new form of capitalism of the late twentieth-century, focusing on finance capital rather than on industrial investment, seems to have radically increased the level of inequality in the world. In 1999 the United Nations' reported that the richest 20 percent of the world controlled 86 percent of the world's gross domestic product, while the poorest 20 percent controlled only 1 percent (cited by Jeff Madrick in 31 May 2001). In 1988 the income ratio of the world's richest 5 percent to the world's poorest 5 percent was 78:1; by 1993 it had widened to 114:1 (UNRISD News Spring/Summer 2000).

It appears that globalization is forcing onto an unwilling world the conditions of early Western European capitalism, ignoring the international human rights laws that now prohibit those conditions. According to Richard Falk, neo-liberal capitalism is characterized by "liberalization, privatization, minimizing economic regulation, rolling back welfare, reducing expenditure on public goods, tightening fiscal discipline, favouring freer flows of capital, strict controls on organized labor, tax reductions, and unrestricted currency repatriation" (1999, 2). Falk's description fits the picture of the conditions often imposed by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) on borrowing countries (Stiglitz 2002). In effect, the IMF imposes these conditions without regard for the immorality implicit in forcing non-Western, mostly non-white human beings of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries to live in conditions known to have been intolerable in the white West two centuries ago. Moreover, gross material inequalities are more likely to impede than to facilitate change in the direction of a democratic and rights-protective society. Balanced economic development, accompanied by an attempt to provide basic economic rights, is more likely to result in simultaneous increase in protection of civil and political rights (Arat 1991, 103).

Globalization's opponents do tend to exaggerate its detrimental consequences, however. The spread of capitalism results in uneven social change. Many millions of individuals benefit from new job opportunities, new markets, and a new capacity for mobility, whether from the village to the town or from China to the United States. Giddens claims that between 1980 and 1994 the global labour force grew by 630 million, "far outstripping population growth" (2000, 125).Giddens cites no source for these figures, however. Even for the poorest society, the eventual outcome of globalization is not necessarily negative, even in the short term. Social activists who oppose or try to stem globalization fight a rear-guard action that, if successful, could deprive hundreds of millions of poor people of new and profitable economic opportunities. Still these opportunities would not necessarily mean that these poorer societies would become more rights-protective.

How then, does a society change from a global system of capitalism that results in deep inequalities and social exploitation, to a system than promotes relatively equal social relationships and a relatively equal distribution of wealth? The first answer to this question is that such a change is not inevitable. If it does occur, it will occur because of multiple changes —some economic, some political or legal, some social — that may result from globalization. Below, I suggest a model of such social change, adopting as my starting point the one suggested by both Meyer and Smith, namely, multinational investment.

The Optimistic Model

Figure 1 starts with one, and only one, change introduced into a society: namely, transnational investment. It assumes a society that is not democratic and does not respect human rights, but which does permit foreign investment. Transnational investment impels some changes into such a society. These changes are along the lines proposed by the "engine of development" school analyzed by Meyer (1996). This school asserts that TNCs create jobs, provide employee benefits, and help create a middle class. My analysis assumes, however, that these changes are neither linear nor inevitable. All rights, and most especially the socioeconomic rights represented by employee benefits, depend upon social movements and political action. Whatever a theoretical model might suggest about the positive effect of globalization on economic rights, only concrete social action will bring about these benefits. Nevertheless, it is worth constructing a theoretical model of how this action might occur.

Figure 1: The Great Transformation II: An Optimistic Model Figure 1 depicts the complex web of links triggered by investment by transnational corporations and leading to social, economic, and human rights development. These links are described in detail in the text.

On the economic front, the most obvious change in a society newly encountering transnational investment is the provision of new employment opportunities. A small and growing group of people now works in the modern, industrial sector. Some of these people will pay taxes to the government, as will the transnational corporation itself (unless it is allowed a complete tax holiday in perpetuity.) Increased national revenue appears to be associated with improvement in human rights (Pritchard 1989). One can posit a number of reasons why this association might be so. Increased national revenue results in a small increment in governmental capacity. With more tax revenue, the government can pay its civil servants more regularly. Such pay gives civil servants an incentive to stay in their offices and abide by bureaucratic rules of fairness and impartiality, rather than wander off to eke out a living in the informal sector, or ask for bribes every time they encounter a citizen with a request. New economic opportunities will also lessen the likelihood that moves toward political democracy will be resisted. Holders of both political and bureaucratic office will be less frightened by the possibility of losing that office if they can assume that they can maintain their standard of living in the private sector. One of the chief causes of political corruption among high-level office holders is the fact that there are few economic opportunities in the capitalist, legal and professional sectors to serve as alternate sources of income.

TNC investment will also contribute to the establishment of the rule of law. Investors want predictable laws and competent judicial systems to enforce their contracts and their property rights. They do not want governments that renege on their contracts, as China is wont to do, or that are too weak to enforce property laws, as was the case in early post-Communist Russia. The rule of law also provides the opportunity to legally own property, and to have one's property protected by the State. The Peruvian economist Hernando de Soto (2002; see also Madrick in New York Review of Books 31 May 2001) has argued that one of the biggest stumbling blocks to development in Latin America, Asia, and Africa today is that the poor are not legal owners of their houses, land, and mini-enterprises. Without legal title, they are at the mercy of corrupt bureaucrats who demand bribes in exchange for not evicting them from their homes and businesses. Further, without evidence of legally-enforced property, they have no collateral to offer banks for loans. And they cannot enjoy economies of scale, because they often have to disperse their enterprises among many different locations to prevent seizure of their illegal assets.

The spread of property law will assist in the regulation of citizens' myriad private interests. Some of these citizens will be members of the new middle or entrepreneurial class. TNC investment will result in more local business opportunities, either directly in relationship with the TNCs by, for example, supplying locally-made inputs, or indirectly by providing goods and services for workers who have established new communities in the areas of TNC investment. This new middle class will want its own property protected and its contracts enforced.

The new middle class may emerge from the ranks of those who are already educated, as have Chinese entrepreneurs from a socialist society that stressed education (Sen 1999). Moreover, this class will also want even more education. It will want its sons, and even its daughters, to be educated so that they can join their parents in business and later manage the property they inherit. It may also want a more educated population in general, so that it can employ individuals with the skills it needs. Here, the TNC may eventually join in a demand for more education, or provide its own educational system, if it discovers it needs a more literate or numerate labour force.

As the new middle class becomes more aware of its own interests, it will become less willing to live under the rule of traditional elders, communist bureaucracies, or personalist dictators. It will establish the rudiments of a civil society, organizing to protect its own interests. This civil society will, in turn, feed back into the educational system, asking that new ideas of the proper relationship of citizen to ruler be promulgated. It will promote ideals of social equality, so as to enhance its own chances of advancement, regardless of the former or present social statuses of its members. It will also enhance governmental capacity, demanding fairness and efficiency, and displaying some willingness to pay taxes in order to obtain them. A more secure bureaucracy will be more willing to listen to the concerns of its citizenry and to respond to them. As it does so, it will learn that it is possible to make changes in policy, even to disburse more funds, without losing control of the state. It will be easier to adhere to the principles of accountability and transparency, key aspects of good governance, in State institutions that are properly funded and in which bureaucrats are well-trained and adequately paid.

An emergent civil society will also begin to demand a more liberalized political sphere. Citizens will start to make their interests known, and will expect their government to take these interests into account. Citizens will want the rule of law to cover areas of life beyond property and contract. They will demand regularity, fairness, and predictability in other spheres of life. A government less reliant than previously on corruption, and more used to bureaucratic procedure, will be more willing to entertain the possibility of liberalizing, gradually opening up to freedoms of speech, press, and association that permit citizens to articulate their wishes.

A more humanistic ideology develops along with — and in part as a cause of — the more liberalized political sphere. As the market spreads and impersonal market relations become more common, commerce begins to take precedence over prejudice. Strangers become individuals with whom transactions are made, rather than bearers of particular identities. A universal moral sense develops. Indeed, Gary Madison (1998) goes so far as to argue that the market breeds civility: all parties must communicate with each other in a tolerant fashion, and all must be willing to compromise if exchanges are to take place. The economic agora contributes to the political agora, and market trust helps to build the social trust necessary for a functioning political democracy. Furthermore, as market relations and contract law impose on individuals a culture of promises, they begin to think of their obligations to distant others in these terms (Haskell 1985). Old status distinctions are eroded, and political relations develop among individuals of radically different statuses, as, indeed, occurred in a much earlier period of globalization in the eighteenth century, as Europe began to expand its relations with the entire world (Rothschild 1999).

The entrenchment of economic rights for ordinary people will require a different and expanded set of social actors, especially members of the working class. People working in the modern, industrialized sector will soon start to make demands. They will want independent trade unions to organize and act as their bargaining agents. As they attain small incremental improvements in working conditions, so they will be emboldened to ask for more rights, such as better access to education. They will also learn how to take part in large, bureaucratized organizations and how to lobby and bargain. As they become more educated and experienced, they will enter other spheres of civil society, generalizing the idea that social welfare should be available to all citizens, whatever their particular status as entrepreneurs or workers. Improvements in education, health, and welfare in turn will spiral backward, affecting the capacity of citizens to take part in a political democracy. Both workers and members of the middle class, now living under the rudiments of the rule of law and the rudiments of political democracy, will absorb the idea that with rights, they are legally equal citizens of their country. This idea will spread to groups that hitherto might have been unsure whether they were equal to others, such as women; persons occupying lower castes or statuses; or ethnic, religious, or racial minorities. They, in turn, will form their own civic associations, and learn the same lobbying and bargaining techniques as other groups in civil society.

The above account is not so much a prediction as a rough description of what happened in Western Europe and in North America during and after the period of the first Great Transformation. The introduction of capitalism resulted in the development of social classes capable of articulating their needs. These social classes used their civil and political rights to articulate demands for economic rights. Following the example of the labour movement, status-based movements also emerged, including, in the United States, the African-American movement for civil rights and the women's and gay and lesbian movements for equality rights. Both these movements also resulted in enhanced access to economic rights, although severe inequalities still exist between whites and blacks, and between men and women, just as there is still severe income and wealth inequality among the population in general in developed capitalist Western states.

None of the social changes discussed above was inevitable, however. Nor did these social changes occur in the West in a linear fashion. They spiraled back upon themselves again and again. Enhanced governmental capacity, for example, fed into education, which fed into employment, which fed into taxes, which fed into enhanced governmental capacity. Even a spiral does not capture their interrelationships: perhaps several overlapping Mobius strips would be the best visual analogy.

One piece of good news, however, is that almost all countries of the world now accept capitalism. Rueschmeyer, Stephens and Stephens (1992) have shown the connection between capitalism and democracy: capitalism is a necessary, though not sufficient, prerequisite for democracy. Both quantitative and qualitative studies finding a correlation between capitalism and democracy also show that an intervening variable is necessary to give effect to such a correlation. That intervening variable is class action and organization. In a review of many studies of the relationship between economic development and human rights, Landman also finds that "economic development [usually capitalist] does not enhance directly political or civil rights", but that "social mobilization has a direct relationship with the expansion and contraction of political and civil rights" (2002, 920).

The analysis of Rueschemeyer, Stephens, and Stephens confirms Sen's assertion that development depends on human agency: the "achievement of development is thoroughly dependent on the free agency of people" (1999, 4). Participatory freedoms are particularly important, says Sen. "Political freedoms (in the form of free speech and elections) help to promote economic security. Social opportunities (in the form of education and health facilities) facilitate economic participation. Economic facilities (in the form of opportunities for participation in trade and production) can help to generate personal abundance as well as public resources for social facilities. Freedoms of different kinds can strengthen one another" (Sen 1999, 11). The account by Sen, an economist, of the relationship among different kinds of freedoms confirms the account by Henry Shue (1980), a philosopher, of the relationship among different kinds of rights and the need for security (freedom of the person) to supplement subsistence. Sen's account also confirms the account of the present author, a political sociologist, of the need for civil and political rights to buttress economic rights (Howard-Hassmann 1983).

The class action and human agency to which Rueschemeyer, Stephens and Stephens refer, is not purely voluntarist, however, but arises only if the structural conditions are appropriate. They add that democracy is "above all a matter of power" (1992, 5). It is necessary for the subordinated classes to wrest democracy from the powerful. Rueschemeyer, Stephens, and Stephens set themselves the task of determining how, and under what structural conditions, social movements for democracy arose. They referred to the many complex sequences — rooted in the actual historical experiences of various countries — that resulted in subordinate social classes developing the capacity to organize. Class action is made possible by transformations in social organization, especially by improvements in education and communication, and by urbanization and the concentration of population. These transformations result in the emergence of civil society as a counterweight to state power.

Not only is capitalism a necessary prerequisite for democracy, but also, according to Freeman, it is "the only economic system…so far…found to be compatible with the relatively effective protection of human rights" (2000, 44). Negative evidence to support the connections among capitalism, democracy, and human rights is the abysmal state of human rights in countries that still attempt to organize their economies on bases other than capitalism. Myanmar and North Korea come to mind, but so also does Cuba which, without the support that it received from the Soviet Union, has been spiraling downward since 1990. Capitalism does not inevitably result in democracy — much less human rights — as some of the ideologically-minded promoters of capitalism seem to believe. Nevertheless without capitalism, democracy appears to be impossible, and without democracy, human rights cannot be protected. Far more than an economic system, capitalism relies on certain presumptions about the rule of law, and capitalism creates modern citizens — both bourgeois and worker — who in the medium to long term demand human rights.

Once again, however, these are not inevitable relationships. Rueschemeyer, Stephens and Stephens make clear that although there can be no democracy without capitalism, there can certainly be capitalism without democracy. There can be alliances between "old" and "new" elite classes, as in the alliance between the old landlord class and the new bourgeois class in much of Latin America until the 1990s. That alliance permitted industrialization while blocking the peasants and the urban proletariat from deriving any benefits from the new system of wealth-creation.For the classic work on this type of class alliance in Latin America, see (Frank 1967). Moreover, a state elite can command resources such as decision-making power over investment and tax conditions that make it worthwhile for the international capitalist class to ally itself with that elite, blocking any changes that the lower classes might try to demand. Finally, the military can intervene in the process of capitalist development.

This kind of blockage is even more a prospect in the early twenty-first century. The new capitalism of the globalization era is not an exact replica of the type of capitalism that Rueschemeyer, Stephens and Stephens discuss. In Russia, for example, a "shock treatment" transition to capitalism was prescribed by American consultants and international financial institutions before sufficient institutional capacity and respect for the rule of law had been developed. This prescription resulted in massive corruption, transformation of the former party-bureaucratic apparat into a speculative property-holding elite, and deep de-development, as demonstrated by Russia's steep decline in population during the 1990s (Stiglitz 2002). We cannot be sure that the happy model presented above of the West's Great Transformation I will be an accurate representation of the Great Transformation II, the spread of global capitalism into the farthest reaches of what were once isolated — and sometimes insulated — communist or peasant societies. Thus, it is necessary to also consider a pessimistic model of the present transformation.

The Pessimistic Model

What happened in the past may not happen in the future. Globalization of capitalism may not result in globalization of democracy and civil/political rights, much less globalization of development and economic rights. Decisions by international organizations that are imposed from above and that restrict the political dynamic that might otherwise occur between a State's government and citizens' movements, can reduce the likelihood that human rights — either civil and political, or economic, social, and cultural — will be attained. Human actions and human decisions will affect any transformation that occurs in the less wealthy parts of the world, whether the still underdeveloped sections of the former Third World, notably sub-Saharan Africa, or the "new Europe" (and "new Asia"), those states carved out from the former Soviet Empire.

A key difference between the earlier development in Western Europe of capitalist, democratic and eventually rights-protective societies, and development occurring in the twenty-first century, is the role of global financial institutions in managing investments. Joseph Stiglitz is extremely critical of International Monetary Fund policies regarding investments. He is especially critical of the way the IMF encourages "hot money" investments all over the world, without regard to national governments' economic goals. Hot money flows into and out of a developing country at great speed, and can destabilize an economy without providing any economic or human rights benefits. Such hot money amounted in the late 1990s to $1.5 trillion per day (Held and McGrew 1999, 493). Stiglitz has explained not only how this policy contributed to the Southeast Asian economic meltdown of 1997, but also how it has permanently reduced national income in that region. Without in any way claiming a knowledge of economics sufficient to verify Stiglitz's (2002) argument, I attempt below to schematize his chapter on the Asian crisis and to extrapolate from it to a more general model of how a society that is both growing economically and becoming more politically open can regress. For reviews of Stiglitz, see (Purdy 2002) and Jeff Madrick in 15 August 2002. This is a short-to-medium term picture, not a long-term prognosis; indeed, by 2002, as Jeff Madrick writes, the Asian financial crisis was "receding into the past" (New York Review of Books 15 August 2002). Nevertheless, it serves to show that the optimistic picture presented above, based upon a retrospective reading of how Western Europe and North America developed, is not inevitable. It also serves to show the extreme importance of democratic opposition to the processes of globalization, and the necessity for the IMF and the World Bank to develop within themselves the policies of democratic decision-making and public accountability and transparency that they constantly urge on States.

In the pessimistic model of the Great Transformation II depicted in Figure 2, hot money flows into a country as a result of IMF pressure to reduce controls on capital mobility. Hot money looks for quick earnings opportunities on the financial market, not for longer-term earnings requiring investment in infrastructure or manufacturing. There is then, for some reason, an economic crisis, and the hot money flees the country as quickly as it entered. Without capital, businesses cannot pay their debts, and many of them fail, giving rise to job losses. The local middle class is devastated. There are fewer jobs, either within the foreign investment sector or the local sector of businesses and professions geared to servicing foreign-owned businesses and the foreigners themselves. Moreover, the middle class's savings are reduced as disinvestment results in lower valuations on locally-owned investments.

Figure 2: The Great Transformation II: A Pessimistic Model Figure 2 shows the web of links between hot money and declining economic, social, and human rights. The decline begins with the infusion of hot money that, during economic or political crises, can take flight, accompanied by disinvestment and general distrust of law or weakened rule of law. From these stem a series of inter-related effects. These are described in detail in the text below.

As a result of hot money capital flight, government's tax revenue declines, and with it overall government capacity. Governments react by disinvesting in the civil service, thus causing further job loss. Governments also disinvest in social services, especially in education and health. With less investment in education and health, the quality of human capital declines, thereby rendering the country less attractive to future investors who might be looking for workers.Sen (1999) stresses the importance of spending on health and education, in order to develop the human capacity of a nation.

Whatever democratization and development of civil society might have previously occurred is also now subject to threat. Society begins to distrust the rule of law, as it becomes obvious that the law has been used to protect the interests of the hot money investors. Distrust in the rule of law generates distrust in government capabilities either of ruling or reforming a disintegrating economy. Thus communities and individuals retreat from the state. Distrust in law and government expands into a generalized social distrust. Far from civilizing social relations, the market separates individuals from each other and from society. Ethnic and communal groups start to compete for jobs, business opportunities, and government handouts, and men try to force women back into the home, away from the economic opportunities that have helped women emancipate themselves from patriarchal control. There are food riots, and other political manifestations of extreme social unrest. Stiglitz (2002) discusses how unwilling the IMF has been to realize that "quick fix" economic policies requiring that governments remove food subsidies will result in riots and further political destabilization. Fundamentalist political parties, or parties advocating populist/fascist solutions to political crisis, quickly arise, recruiting especially from among unemployable men.

The result of such economic and social crises is often a reversion from democracy to autocratic political policies. As they attempt simultaneously to meet outside economic demands to pay their debts and to restore civic order, governments impose controls on civil and political rights and on civil society. Attempting to attract international hot money and capital back to the country, they offer a weakened labour force, imposing controls on trade unions. Less educated than previously and less able to exercise their basic civil and political rights, workers are less capable of pressuring either governments or employers for their economic rights, which consequently decline. "Third generation" rights such as the right to development and the right to a clean environment also suffer, without active labour movements and civil society organization to pay attention to them.

Stiglitz's description of the meltdown in Asia refers to the very short period of 1997-99. The phenomena he describes are the kinds of short and medium-term problems that preoccupy the antiglobalization forces. These phenomena reinforce the point made by Rueschmeyer, Stephens and Stephens and others, that class action and organization are necessary connections between capitalism and democracy. Class action and organization are also necessary to connect capitalism, democracy, and human rights. As the world globalizes, no positive transformation of the human rights situation of ordinary people will occur without a social movement for those rights. This is so even when all economic indicators are positive, and when the rule of law and democratic rule seem "naturally" to evolve. It is even more so when economic indicators are negative, and when the rule of law and democratic politics disappear.

Western Capitalist Evolution and the Absence of Human Rights Law

The happy predictions made above in Figure 1, schematizing the optimistic model of the Great Transformation II, rely on similarities to the social evolution of Western Europe and North America. None of this, however, suggests an easy or inevitable transition in the "Rest" of the world from poverty-stricken peasant societies to wealthy industrial societies. Formerly colonized countries in what used to be called the Third World do not have access to one of the most important "advantages" the West had during its own period of capitalist growth: human rights lawlessness. Neither states nor entrepreneurs had to think about the rights of their own citizens or workers, or the rights of those inhabiting the worlds they conquered.

During the West's period of growth, there was no international law to prevent the purchase or theft of people. Thus, the West was able to profit from slavery, as also were those who sold slaves to Westerners. The enslavement of captured or purchased people was a normal activity of the pre-capitalist and early capitalist periods (Inikoki 2001). Almost all societies were divided into social categories, some having more rights, privileges, and prestige than others. Thus slavery was an essential part of the triangular trade between Britain, the West Indies, and the Americas, and one of the bases of some Western prosperity.For a classic (although controversial) statement of this relationship, see (Williams 1966).

Similarly, during the period of Western expansion there was no international law prohibiting colonialism (du Plessis 2003). Colonial conquest was a "normal" practice inherited from the ancient world. It permitted stronger militaries and navies to take over territories previously not part of the world economy, and permitted the colonists to curtail the economies of the conquered territories as they saw fit. If the King of Belgium wished to cut off Africans' hands to prevent them from selling rubber to his competitors, there was nothing to stop him (Hochschild 1999).Hochschild draws heavily on Morel 1969, especially pp. 109-26, The Story of the Congo Free State. Nascent entrepreneurial classes in the colonies of the various European powers soon learned that economic opportunities were reserved for Europeans alone. Furthermore, because there were no laws prohibiting racial discrimination, European merchants, industrialists, and financiers could happily confine their working relationships to others of "their own kind."

Just as there were no laws against slavery or colonialism, so also there were no laws against massive population transfers. During the period of Western expansion, citizens — if they could be called that — in the Western world had few rights. Their governments could deport them to the colonies if they disobeyed the myriad laws that regulated their behaviour. Their governments could also deprive them of the lands they traditionally owned, as in the conversion of common lands to private property in Scotland and England. Even famine was a privilege of the State. The English government deprived Irish peasants of their means of sustenance during the famine of the 1840s, "killing a higher proportion of the population than any other famine anywhere in recorded history" (Sen 1999, 170 emphasis in original).

Finally, in the early modern capitalist world, no international law prohibited genocide and ethnic cleansing. Although there were some protests from Catholic and other missionaries against the treatment of aboriginal populations in the Americas, for example, by and large colonists could do as they pleased to wipe out the "primitive" populations occupying territories that they sought (Churchill 1998). At a time when only a very small percentage of the population of Western states enjoyed anything resembling human rights, few worried about the human rights of the inhabitants of the colonies. Germany committed genocide in Southwest Africa with an impunity broken only by a British inquiry after the former country's defeat in the First World War (Dreschler 1990; Bridgman and Worley 1997).

Human rights lawlessness, then, gave industrializing Western powers several privileges that are not enjoyed by industrializing regimes in the early twenty-first century. These privileges were the use of slavery, colonialism, expulsions, famine, and genocide as tools to economic growth. States and ruling classes often prospered under these conditions of lawlessness, although ordinary people often did not. None of these advantages of human rights lawlessness, however, assured the prosperity of the Western world, absent the sorts of social changes diagramed in Figures 1 and 2 . Not all colonial powers became equally prosperous, as the example of Catholic Spain illustrates (Wallerstein 1980). Nor did all slave-trading economies become equally wealthy, as Portugal demonstrates. Internal changes in habits, laws, entrepreneurial activities and relations among social groups were also important determinants of capitalist growth.

Therefore, in a global world now characterized by human rights constraints, less-developed countries will be at some disadvantage compared to their Western predecessors, in engaging in the capitalist path. At the same time, citizens of these less-developed countries are at an advantage in demanding their rights, as compared to citizens of the West until well into the twentieth century.

Non-Western Capitalism and the Presence of Human Rights

Figure 3 shows the many aspects of the global order that now affect the spread of human rights. To begin with, the entire world is now constrained — to a greater or lesser extent — by the international human rights regime, a set of norms and laws which most countries have formally said they respect.For summaries of how this regime works, see (Donnelly 1998b,51-85), (Forsythe 2000, 1-138) and (Robertson 1999, 1-123). These norms and laws mean newly industrializing countries are not supposed to engage in the same wealth-creating activities as their Western predecessors: slavery, colonialism, genocide, massive population transfers, or deportations of citizens they do not want. Nor are they supposed to ignore the basic economic needs of those individuals who by law are their citizens. Thus it is difficult for them to engage in Marx's primitive capitalist accumulation — that stage of looting and plunder that Marx argued constituted the basis for the next, more productive stage of capitalist growth. But what is lost as an advantage of states is gained as an advantage of citizens. Citizens who live in places that are now being reached by globalization need not wait 150 or 200 years before attaining their rights. Globalization speeds up their access to the very idea of rights.

Figure 3: Social Action and Human Rights Figure 3 depicts the relationship between social action and ideological change, economic globalization, democracy, and universal human rights. Social action and ideological change is shown to include: global human rights regime, global governance, global normative order or the ideology of human rights, global communication and mass media, global civil society and global human rights social movement or the antiglobalization movement, and peasant and worker movements. Ecomonic globalization is manifest in: markets, expanded wealth and expanded middle class. Social action and ideological change contribute to the development of universal human rights. Economic globalization impacts on democracy which in turn is an important condition for the development universal human rights.

Globalization creates these conditions first of all through the evolution of a global communications network. With the Internet and email, it is easy for citizens of all nations of the world to acquire information and to communicate with each other instantaneously. Citizens are no longer mere consumers of information: they are generators of knowledge and debaters about social issues. Human rights abuses are now subject to "cosmopolitan publicity" in a transnational public sphere (Bohman 1999). Civil society actors have immediate access to knowledge and immediate capacity to criticize public policy decisions by local, State, and international agencies. This access contributes to that "communicative interaction" that Habermas (1994) says is so important for true democracy.

Further, Beetham notes the importance of international civil society to the promotion of human rights. The civil society actors who now populate global public space possess an "ability to forge links with popular struggles at the most local level anywhere in the world" (1998, 68). Although themselves a new kind of elite, they link the developed and non-developed parts of the globe, the democracies with authoritarian states, in a discussion of human rights that only the most draconian restrictions on access to the international communicative media can control.

This communications network, in turn, enables the formation of global social movements in favour of human rights (Keck and Sikkink 1998). Human rights social movements have benefited from the ease of travel and communications of the last thirty years. People living in remote parts of the globe can form alliances with civil society actors in the developed world, and persuade the mass media to take up their case, as did Ogoni activists in Southeast Nigeria in the 1990s. This system is, of course, not perfect. For every successful international campaign there are others that are not successful. Success often depends on good organization and even on particular incidents, such as the tragic hanging of the Ogoni leader, Ken Saro-Wiwa, in 1995 (Bob 2002).On the much-studied Ogoni movement, see also (Welch 1995), (Skogly 1997) and (Idowu 1999).

Nevertheless, as global communication erodes geographical remoteness, the universal principle of human rights becomes one upon which local actors can base their demands for justice. If the capitalist-owned mass media ignore a particular human right, the technology of global communications nevertheless allows its pursuit through the formation of independent media groups, chat rooms, and websites.On independent media groups, see (Meyer 1989).

Global consumer campaigns against abusive labour practices such as employment of child labour have been particularly successful. The Rugmark campaign, for example, tells consumers whether rugs they have purchased from Asia are made without child labour, exerting pressure for improved labour standards in producing countries such as Pakistan and Iran (Forsythe 2000; Pangalangan 2002). Retail companies are also susceptible to consumer pressure on human rights grounds, such as in the case of the Swiss grocery chain, Migros. Migros inserted a "social clause" in its contract with Del Monte to ensure that working conditions on Del Monte's pineapple farms in the Philippines were above average (Pangalangan 2002). If, as the shoe company advertises, "On Planet Reebok there are no boundaries," then one of the advantages of globalization is the capacity of civil society actors in newly industrializing societies to learn from civil society actors elsewhere. With regard to the campaign in the 1990s against Nike's labour policies, Smith and her colleagues were correct to note that "in the absence of consumer mobilization… human rights violations… constitute only minor factors in TNC profit equations" (1999, 211). Equally, Meyer (1999 citing Spar 1998) was correct to note the "spotlight effect" of media and NGO pressures on Reebok to stop buying soccer balls from Pakistani subcontractors who used child labour. The cumulative effect of these campaigns is strong.

There are now voluntary international codes of conduct for transnational corporations, evolving in part from the twenty-year long campaign before the end of apartheid to oblige multinational investors to treat their black South African workers better (Mangaliso 1992). There is also a movement among international lawyers to bring transnational investors under the constraints of the international human rights regime (Pangalangan 2002). The International Labour Organization has found a new centrality in the elaboration of minimum human rights standards for transnational corporations, even if it does not yet have the authority to impose these standards (Forsythe 2000). The Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development has also elaborated voluntary guidelines for multinational enterprises, including the right of workers to form trade unions (Bean 1994).

Giddens (2003) notes that civil society organizations such as the environmentalist group Greenpeace and the anti-poverty organization Oxfam are themselves now global institutions. The feminist movement is also international: women from all over the world, from the most remote regions and least advantaged social groups, can meet to discuss common problems, as occurred at the Vienna Conference on Human Rights in 1993 and at Beijing in 1995 (Chen 1996; Stamatopoulou 1995). These common topics include defense of women workers' rights in countries experiencing rapid transnational investment. Unlike women in the Western world, women in the newly globalizing world do not have to wait until men are able to assert their rights, and then follow behind. Assertion of the rights of all social categories, in all social situations, occurs simultaneously in the world of global communications.

The international human rights movement is also assisted by an unprecedented level of global governance. Scholars make frequent reference to States' voluntary abrogation of (some) sovereignty in favour of international treaties and regulations. Global governance is not only a matter of formal institutional development or a proclamation of new treaties and laws, but also it is a matter of new space for citizens' movements. Rosenau (1998, 42) speaks of international social movements as "well-springs of global governance." This "non-economic fabric of ties" among citizens worldwide acts as an anti-systemic force to which formal authorities must pay attention. Global space is densely populated, and within it there is much pressure for cosmopolitan democracy.

Although it is precipitous to argue that national sovereignty has significantly declined as a result of the establishment of international law and the various regimes that limit most States' capacity to act unilaterally in economic, environmental, or other areas, both the reach and the depth of international law have been significantly extended. The argument that economic growth requires a free hand both for capitalists and governments without regard to political democracy or the rule of law, has little credence in the early twenty-first century.

Thus globalization speeds up the processes not only of capitalist expansion, but also of resistance to capitalism. Social action promotes human rights not only in theory, but also in practice.