Interview with Walden Bello – what deglobalization?

It touched me when I read about failure in her current book “Global Battlefields” because it strongly reflects a feeling of our generation, namely that the impressive movements in which we were at the time as an activist could ultimately not fully use their strength. In the long run, they could not convert into a driving force that would have changed the situation or would have secured our successes from that time. If we want to learn from previous failures and movements, we have to reflect and analyze them. Would you say that there were false assumptions in the movements or false concepts? Or how do you explain this failure?

When I spoke of failure, I mainly referred to the revolutionary movement in the Philippines. And also on the larger socialist project of the past 150 years, which, whether we find it good or not, had an impact on the entire socialist project through the collapse of governments in Eastern Europe and in the Soviet Union. But when I started writing, I realized that we have achieved something in recent times. On the one hand, we discredited the globalization strategies. We have shown that neoliberalism is a false project when it comes to creating more prosperity for people and the planets. But we also stopped the United States in the Middle East after 20 years of intervention. We have built up an anti -war movement. The “New York Times” described it as “second world power” after the United States when we were doing war in Iraq. This is the first clarification that I want to do. The second is that it was an incomplete victory because we were unable to build on this movement against neoliberalism a movement that actually created new structures as an alternative to what neoliberalism produced. In addition, the anti -war movement has not managed to institutionalize. So they were incomplete victories. But why? I still try to understand why we cannot create movements that stabilize themselves and create permanent institutions. I try to explore that. It is difficult to formulate an alternative. How do you institutionalize an organization that gives this alternative alive? I rings with that.

Decolonization is an important strategic perspective in a number of states. How can this be combined with multilateralism based on the universal explanation of human rights? Nowadays, the so -called “universal” human rights in the global south are criticized as western and imperialist.

This year the legendary Bandungs ​​conference marks the 70th anniversary. The global south has covered a long path in terms of decolonization and is about to turn a turning point in the global structure of power compared to the global north. However, the bandage declaration was not just a document to promote political and economic decolonization. The first of the ten points of the explanation was “respect for the basic human rights and the goals and principles of the United Nations Charter”. It is true that “human rights” were instrumentalized by the West in his endeavor to preserve his hegemony. However, this should not prevent us from the fact that people in the global south have seen human rights since the beginning of decolonization as a universal value. At the same time, we have to denounce the instrumentalization of human rights by western elites and must not allow our elites to use this instrumentalization as an excuse to disregard them.

Can you give us an impression of how China is perceived by the population in Southeast Asia? What about the progressive forces in this region? Is China attractive as a development model despite its authoritarian tendencies?

China is perceived very differently by the different countries. Vietnam, for example, takes over the Chinese economic model. Cambodia and Laos do this to a certain extent. At the same time, however, Vietnam criticizes China for his plan to claim the entire southern Chinese lake. In my opinion, other countries such as Thailand, Malaysia and Indonesia have resigned themselves to the fact that China will be the most important economic power in the region. And then there are the Philippines, which have long been connected to the United States and are threatened by China, which strives to dominate the South China Sea. But overall I would say that, apart from the Philippines, in contrast to the United States and the West, China is not perceived as imperialist power. If you go beyond Southeast Asia and include Latin America and Africa, in my opinion the positive perception predominates. Although people are aware that China is associated with problems, the opinion is that China is not equivalent to an imperial power. We have to be aware that China basically conquered its markets without violence, in contrast to the 500-year history of the West, in which markets were conquered. I think that’s a very big difference.

I would like to come back to your concept of deglobalization, which was very influential 25 years ago. Today some speak of fragmented globalization. Can one describe the new nationalisms, protectionism and war in Ukraine as a tendency towards deglobalization of right? How can we use the concept today?

The “universal” human rights are criticized in the global south as western and imperialist.

Christa-weights

First of all, I think that although we live in a global capitalist system, the world is actually divided into countries as economic actors who compete with each other in the global economy. We see that the old rules in relation to free trade and all of this are no longer valid and we are now entering a phase of geo -economic institutions in which the state plays an important role. In this sense, deglobalization takes place, which is a fact. But this deglobalization is not exactly what I previously had in mind. The deglobalization, for which I was committed, was more of an ethical, economic perspective in which the principle of subsidiarity and democracy would come into play worldwide, in which we would have an economic policy that would primarily be anchored locally, but would not be sealed off from the world. It would be regional and globally integrated, but with a high level of national autonomy. That was the perspective that we represented and which was strongly influenced by the forces that had pushed for autonomy at local and regional level in the past 25 years. That is the economic level. At the political and military level there is also a deglobalization that is expressed in the development of areas of influence. The United States withdraws from their role as a global hegemonic power and develop into a regional hegemonic power that builds a fortress, similar to Europe, establishes a fortress in Europe and has the greatest influence on Eastern Europe and China on the Asian-Pacific space. So there is a kind of geopolitical and geo -economic competition that replaces the globalized world of western institutions, multilateral rules and free trade. That is my assessment of the current situation.

Instead of developing more sensitivity and responsibility towards the global south, the global north tries to manage its crises at the expense of the global south, for example with so -called global concerns to get the crisis of social reproduction under control. Nurses from the Philippines are very popular and are recruited, but they are then missing as health specialists in their own country. How do you see such global care chains that I call “Sorgie-extractism” analogous to resource extractivism from the global south?

As a member of the Filipino Parliament, I was the chairman of the Committee on Affairs of Employees abroad, and we treated these topics that you describe as “Care extractivism”. On the one hand, the demand was for nurses and doctors here in Europe and the United States and on the other hand after home employees in the Middle East. So we are suppliers of unskilled, little and highly qualified workers. The problem was and is, of course, that all resources that flowed into the training of these people were mobilized in Germany, but they are then used in other countries. This is a very sensitive topic in the Philippines because many people from lower and medium -sized layers who have no perspectives in their own country want to emigrate and participate in this process. But we have to be very careful with counter -suggestions. For example, I wanted to ban the departure to Saudi Arabia, because I said that they were sent somewhere where they are raped because Saudi Arabia still has very strong enslavement mentality. We kept the demand for a ban in an official government document, but we thought that many of our workers would be against it. We have to deal very sensitively with the fact that many people want to participate in migration.

This is the abbreviated version of an interview that is in full length in the magazine »Luxembourg. Social analysis and left practice «will appear.