Almost everyone’s response to this fall’s terrorist attacks has been a sense that nothing in the world will ever be the same. And that’s true of the emerging movement to promote global cooperation as an alternative to corporate globalization.
‘We need to recast our movement as the ultimate peace movement,’ says Andrew Kimbrell, president of the International Center for Technology Assessment and one of the leaders in the International Forum on Globalization (IFG). ‘We need to reconnect with the mission of Gandhi and Martin Luther King, looking at the deep under-lying causes of violence and opposing it in all forms. How do you create peace? Certainly not through international commerce as it is currently practiced.’
‘The ethic of corporate globalization is essentially violent,’ he adds. ‘In practice, globalization in developing nations means massive cuts in social services, people being forced off the land, mega-projects that dislocate millions. This is violence to poor people, violence to the environment, violence to cherished traditions of how people have lived for centuries.’
Mark Ritchie, president of the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy and another IFG leader, notes the global economy, ‘is designed to create winners and losers. It is precisely this situation–the mega-rich and the totally desperate–that creates the conditions for war. We know this now–that peace and justice are inseparable.’
