3071-The political economy of new slavery

184 The Global Framework for Development
aid or military protection of rights. The global market – international
trade and investment by companies large and small – is the chief engine
of economic growth in all countries, and thus plays a significant role
in reducing extreme poverty (through the spreading of general wealth –
‘a rising tide lifts all ships’). One of the chief elements in this engine
of change is technology, since technological innovations continue to
be, as they have been for several hundred years, what enable us to
extract the conditions of human well-being from the raw materials of
the world – only now it has to be done in sustainable ways so that future
generations have access to these goods as well. There may be disagreements
about what technologies work best, but these disagreements are
largely empirical disputes about causality. A third significant factor,
much more apparent in the last 30 years than before, though still a very
small factor compared with the other two, is the influence of ordinary
human beings – not in governments or business – acting in the voluntary
sectors in NGOs and in other more informal networks of global civil
society. Their activities make a little difference at the edges – the goals
are certainly achieved a little more because of them – but states, acting
individually or collectively, together with the agencies of the global
economy are still the real determinants of how things are for the world,
and how far the goals are achieved.
Neo-westphalianism
This may be called the neo-westphalian model. I call it this because
it does acknowledge that things have changed from the heyday of the
westphalian model of a world dominated and shaped by sovereign states,
which, by a mixture of conflict and co-operation according to a limited
set of rules, determined how things went in the world. Globalization has
made some difference but not all that much: international institutions,
for example the UN, are more extensive than before; the economic nonstate
actors – especially the larger companies and banks – have become
much more powerful and challenge the freedom of manoeuvre of states,
especially weaker ones; far more individual human beings are directly
involved with organizations which have global goals and remits. But
that said, states are still the dominant reality. We are not yet at the stage
of a ‘post-westphalian’ world (Linklater, 1998) nor is it something we
should be trying to move towards. This leads to the third set of points.
Normative assumptions
The picture described in the paragraph entitled ‘Means’ is not merely
meant to be a description of how things work, but to provide a normative
account of how the key agents are meant to behave. States belong to