December 7, 2003

A world of difference

It was an unusual Thanksgiving. There was turkey, but with an island flair and without the rest of traditional trappings. The sun was warm and the accents were richer than those around the Midwest. You could find football on the TV, but there was more of what we would call soccer (which the rest of the world calls football).

We were, quite obviously, on vacation. In the Caribbean, to be exact. But more than a vacation, it was a lesson in globalization.

It was a family celebration of my birthday and we brought everyone along: adult children, spouses and even a grandchild. We arrived in Miami to discover the streets in front of our hotel occupied by hundreds of police in riot gear, prepped for whatever nastiness might occur during the last days of the talks there about creating a free trade zone encompassing almost the entire hemisphere.

Protesters were out in force. Similar meetings have been disrupted by violence. In 1999, riots around a free-trade conference in Seattle resulted in millions of dollars in damages, hundreds hurt and arrested. Serious violence didn’t occur in Miami, but authorities were ready: Miami looked like a police state.

All because of a skirmish over globalization.

We Americans are used to leaving our mark around the world. No matter where we were on our Thanksgiving vacation, we could have Coke and Pepsi, McDonald’s and Burger King and other accoutrements of American culture.

But as the world becomes a smaller place, other cultures are responding. Foods with foreign flavor are in U.S. shops. Our shirts may be made in South America or the Asian subcontinent, our athletic shoes in Indonesia.

And while American football was sparse on TV I watched on vacation, CNN International told me all about a cricket player’s retirement and other un-American events. I knew the weather across Asia and Europe, but Chicago could have been socked by a blizzard and I wouldn’t have known. (For world weather-watchers, New York is the only place that matters.)

In other words, beyond our borders, we Americans can discover we’re hardly the only fish in the sea. Globalization can work both ways.

Done well, globalization and a free-market economy will bring peoples closer together, connect cultures, create links rather than separations. When people have shared economic and cultural values, there is less likelihood of conflict. And it should economically empower workers in Second and Third World countries.

That’s the ideal. In practice, globalization is turning out to be quite a different animal. Which was why the streets of Miami were filled with protesters ranging from admitted anarchists just looking for a fight to 10,000 representatives of the AFL-CIO making a peaceful point that globalization done badly is a threat to labor rights, family farms and jobs. Some concerns over free trade are legitimate.

Mostly, the fear is that globalization is largely a creature of corporations, not people, making the rich richer at the expense of ordinary workers. Which is why the church has become involved.

Bishops across America—North, South and Central—have acknowledged what they called globalization’s “mixed blessings,” and have sought greater inclusion and participation and more concern for the “greater good.”

Pope John Paul II, while recognizing its potentials, has warned against “a globalization that exacerbates the conditions of the needy, that does not sufficiently contribute to resolving situations of hunger, poverty and social inequality, that fails to safeguard the environment.”

In other words, globalization must be about ethics and justice as much as about free trade.

The church, of course, is a global organization. And faith knows no national boundaries. Perhaps that’s why the church is uniquely situated to seek rules around the inevitable process of globalization, rules that will permit people to benefit, not simply large corporations.

That’s a challenging problem. But when solved, it’ll really be something to be thankful about.