Globalisation and the Human Empire
After the Berlin wall was broken and Soviet Russia disintegrated, the whole world opened up. It altered the balance of power and broke through the symbolism of those promoting authoritarian rule with centrally planned economies such as the Soviet Union and led the way towards building democratic, consensual and free-market governments. The most profound effect, according to Friedman, was that "it allowed us to think about the world differently - to see it as a seamless whole" and enabled us"to think about the world as a single market, a single ecosystem, and a single community."
Globalization, although often described as the cause of much turbulence and change, is in fact the umbrella term for the collective effect, the change itself. Globalization is the new mantra of development & progress and it is touching every aspect of our life, but don't you think Globalization is leading to greater violation of Human Rights? Thousands of working class people are getting retrenched every month without any plan for alternate jobs. Lack of jobs make People move towards committing crimes. Some worst sleeping disorders, insomnia has been the worst fruits of this change. Globalization is good only if it is properly planned and if it doesn't violate their basic rights or livelihood by honest means. So Globalization is the biggest challenge for the society in terms of human empire.
New challenges such as environmental devastation, and new movements like marginalized people campaigns raised pertinent questions of collectiveness and cultural rights which have become necessary to counter fundamental threat to survival not captured by civil society individuals. Thus, though on one hand globalization has led to the unification of the global village and is bringing prosperity to all the corners of the globe together with the spread of the highly cherished values of democracy, freedom and justice, but on the other hand, globalization resulted in the violation of the fundamental right to work. In their drive for profits, companies, in particular TNCs have been restructuring their operations on a global scale. The result has been massive unemployment. In 1995, the ILO announced that one third of the world's willing to work population was either unemployed or underemployed ….the goal of full employment , which was one of the pillars of the social consensus that prevailed after the Second World War , has been jettisoned by nearly all governments …. Globalization has also engendered the process of the casualization and informalization of labor.
The right to education has been also adversely affected by the privatization policies and the turning of education into a profit generating enterprises in the developing countries. The advocates of 'globalization' described it as the panacea for all economic woes, and that the only path to prosperity is to adhere to free-market principles. Fair is foul and foul is fair is the paradox of our decade and the crisis of culture and character, with no happy denouement in sight, may well escalate to end in a collapse and chaos unless we act globally and locally to save homo sapiens from going back to barbarity. Privatization, Liberalization and Globalization are but Orwellian newspeak and this pro-MNC world order is forced by the North on the South although, given the will, we have the capacity to build an alternative Human Order where sustainable development and distributive justice will give a new meaning to the right to life in dignity. We have begun to understand what Gandhi really meant when he described modern civilization as a "disease".
Globalization has not given birth to abstractions but actualization. The most important of them all is "Right to life". In Francis Coral case, Bhagwati J, observed that "The fundamental right to life ... is the most precious human right and ... forms the arc of all other rights". But today what we can perceive is that Globalization and new world order has put this most sacrosanct right at stake, leading towards Marxism as a profound reality.
By
Ms. Shubham Tripathi
