Bernard Cassen, Director General of Le Monde Diplomatique, architect of the Porto Alegre World Social Forums and founder of the ATTAC movement for economic justice today declared that ‘liberal globalization is a social failure that accentuates inequalities’.

Bernard Cassen, Director General of Le Monde Diplomatique, architect of the Porto Alegre World Social Forums and founder of the ATTAC movement for economic justice today declared that ‘liberal globalization is a social failure that accentuates inequalities’. He was addressing the annual Caux Conference for Business and Industry at the Initiatives of Change centre in Switzerland.

The principal architects of liberal globalization—‘what is actually happening, what we know and experience’—are the ‘dictatorship of the financial markets and the power of the multinationals’, he said. Yet all the leading neo-liberal world bodies, including the IMF, the World Bank, the World Trade Organization and the OECD ‘recognise that liberal globalization is not working’, he said.

A recent report of the International Labour Organization in Geneva, which included input by business leaders, had concluded that financial globalization had exacerbated inequalities. ‘What we have been experiencing is a disconnection between the world of politics and the world of economics and finance,’ M. Cassen said. Citizens could vote in elections but had no say in global economic matters. ‘You can vote for anything you like, except for the world’s economic and financial structures.’ Here there was no democratic tradition. He deplored the fact, in his perception, that politicians had surrendered power to the financial markets. ‘The market rules and not the electorate.’

He instanced the case of a French company, which decided to close down because it could only achieve a profit of eight per cent instead of the ‘normal’ return of 15 per cent. The employees went on strike and Lionel Jospin, the French Prime Minister, said there was nothing the government could do. No wonder people stopped voting in elections, commented M. Cassen. Only 20 per cent of the electorate of the new member states of the European Union had voted in the recent European elections, just two months after the expansion of the EU. ‘We are experiencing a real social earthquake because there are no social norms,’ commented M. Cassen. ‘That is the globalization we have around us.’

As a journalist, he declared that no journalist is neutral in the selection of facts. While the French media concentrated on murders in France, the media could also choose to highlight that 35,000 children die each day due to malnutrition—far more than those killed in the twin towers on 9/11. ‘We [journalists] decide what is a fact,’ he commented. ‘There is always a hierarchy of facts.’ This hierarchy at Le Monde Diplomatique, which has a global readership of 1.5 million, was based on ‘values of justice, solidarity and democracy’, where return on profits was a secondary consideration, he said.

The ATTAC movement had become a major actor in the globalization debate, he said, ‘and I hope we will continue to play this role as an awakener of conscience’. ‘We are for another kind of globalization’ and the World Social Forums were a ‘participatory democracy’. Individual action was important, such as consumer boycotts, but ‘it is only collective action that can really change things. The big changes are at the political level. Another world is possible. There is only one instrument and that is the law. Everyone should be equal before the law’, he said, even if it meant more regulation of the operations of multinationals.

Also speaking with Cassen was Dr. Ric Uslaner, Professor of Government and Politics at the University of Maryland-College Park, USA, and author of the recent book The Moral Foundations of Trust.

Reported by Mike Smith

Conference Summary

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