<nettime> Re: Open letter by Guy Verhofstadt, Prime Minister of Belgium and the current President of the European Union: "The Paradox of Globalisation"

[Franz Schaefer <schaefer@mond.at>]

dear mister verhofstadt.

  i have read your interesting public letter "the paradox of
anti-globalisation". you ask a lot of questions there. i will try to answer.
of course i can not speak for all protesters. i can speak only for myself,
even thought i think that my opinions are similar to most of the people who
demonstrated in genoa. (even thought i was not there in genoa, i
sympathize with those people. at least the non-violent ones)

  first: the term "anti-globalisation" is not a term that we choose. it is a
label we got from the media, and it is a rather inept one. we are not
against globalisation. we are pro globalisation. we are only against the
negative aspects that seem to go along with the way globalisation is running
now.

  our world is in a state of flux. it changes. some of these changes are
running on certain tracks. in a true democracy the people should be able to
change the direction of where we are going to. but is this still the case? 

  let's look at italy: one guy owns almost all of the media. and this guy
runs the country there. he makes the opinion that he wants. no democracy
there. let's look at the united states: the person who gets enough money
from big corporations is able to afford the most expensive campaign and wins
the election.. and last but not least: the country where i am from
(austria): corporate interests do not hesitate to cooperate with
right-extremist nazi scum as long as they think it helps them..

(i wrote a few lines about that so that people from other countries can
 understand what is going on here. it also covers a lot of what we do not
 like in the world in general. you can find it at:

 http://mond.at/neofascism2000/
 
 neofascism 2000. austria - a case study.

)

  basically: what we are afraid of is a world where money and thus big
corporations control everything. and in a world where those who have a lot
of power can use that power to further increase their power this could end
up in some kind of corporate dictatorship... a place where democracy is
reduced to a farce.

  i am not anti-capitalist. capitalism works. capitalism is kind of a force
of nature. but like most things: it is only healthy in the right dose. too
much of it might be destructive. see it like a flame in a stove: it is
useful for cooking and warmth. but if a flame gets out of control then that
flame might burn down the house..

  in your public letter you bring some examples of where global capitalism
is useful to some degree. we understand that and we do not want to put out
the "flame". we just do not want that this flame consumes all of our world.

  the dialectic of your letter goes a bit like: "this has some useful
application so it can not be bad at all". as i said: it often is a question
of the right dose.

  so the challenge that we face now is to "tame" capitalism. if you look at
the power that big corporations already have then it seems that, for the
moment, there is no need to help them get more influence. rather we need to
seek ways in which we can bring them back under control.

  i see the EU as a big possibility here. big corporations already act on an
international level. so the only way that democracy can control them is if
it also works on a bigger scale then small national governments. small
governments would be too easy to blackmail ("if you do not lower the
environmental and labor law restrictions then we go to the other country to
build our factory with 10000 jobs...").

  the only danger is that money controls too much of EU lobbyism and european
media. then europe could turn into a big italy or neofascist austria.. we
definitely would not want that.

  to be able to find instruments for democratic controlling of the
globalisation process, i think it is necessary to see what kind of influence
each parameter of our society has on international corporations on banks,
extremely rich people and organization, etc..

  i think it should be possible to create an environment where small groups,
small and medium sized corporations have advantage over big corporations..
where small medias have advantages over big media organization... etc..

  you find a few more ideas about that topics on the "neofascism" page
mentioned above. 

  one point that seems to be particularly interesting is that of
"intellectual property" law. patents, copyright, trademarks.. that areas
today are often used by big corporation to gain monopoly like status in some
fields. i do not say that we should get completely rid of all the IP at least
here would be a lot of room for giving power back to the public..  

franz schaefer (aka mond) schaefer@mond.at

27-sep-2001


-- 
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
   .                   Franz Schaefer        NEW  Fingerprint:
  ..           +43/676/3195231 +43/1/3178892    GPG: 57C2 C0CC
  ...                 schaefer@mond.at     6F0A 54C7 0D88 D37E 
    ...              http://www.mond.at/   C17C CB16 CFA2 F632

#  distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission
#  <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism,
#  collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets
#  more info: majordomo@bbs.thing.net and "info nettime-l" in the msg body
#  archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@bbs.thing.net