3071-The political economy of new slavery

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of decision as a matter of prediction. How we understand and justify a
‘new world order’ must be a key question for development ethics – even
if the latter focuses only on world poverty. This is even more so if we
think of development as about change in any country as a whole or,
increasingly, the world as a whole.
Globalization
In many ways, ‘development of the world as a whole’ has now become
an agenda issue. Globalization itself can be seen as part of the developmental
process. Although globalization is, like development, a process
of social change that some welcome and others decry, it may be thought
that there is one crucial difference: development is generally seen as
something pursued and as an object of public policy, whereas globalization
is perceived rather as a large-scale effect of or summations of
myriads of transactions taking place in deterritorialized social spaces
(Scholte, 2000). This contrast is overdrawn in both directions. Certainly
some agents see globalization as something to be welcomed and worked
for; since globalization takes many different forms, we can make choices
which affect the forms it takes.
One dimension of globalization, namely cultural globalization or globalization
of community, involves the emergence of global civil society.
This is the pattern of formal organizations and informal networks of
individuals, many of whom have active concerns about the world
(though not necessarily in agreement with one another about what is to
be done). The point about the emergence of this form of transnational
agency is that people both engage in issues to do with things like world
poverty and debt and expect to be heard and to make a difference. This
phenomenon is a challenge to the existing internationalist paradigm
discussed earlier precisely because it is premised on the belief that individual
agents have a legitimate role to play and that states ought to listen
to them. The older paradigm of individuals acting as citizens within
states but not beyond and of states dealing with global issues through
relations with one another is being challenged (Held and McGrew, 2000).
In other respects the world is changing too. Even the international
system is changing itself, in terms of the relative power of member states
and the power which international bodies exert. How international
organizations function, how far their decision procedures are democratic
and in what ways, what their ground rules are, are key questions in an
increasingly active debate – in part an ethical debate – about the nature
of global governance (Commission on Global Governance, 1995). How
that is developed will make big differences to the fate of the poor.