ifda dossier 74 - Dag Hammarskjöld Foundation

or normative rethinking on basie ar-
rangements and institutional structures.
As the fuller import of the world crisis
has not been properly received, such
defensive responses are bound to be not
only partial and unsatisfactory but on
certain dimensions, counter-productive.
It is to this ga.p between something
truly positive happening and its failure
to measure up as fully as the situation
is demandingthat I shall now turn.
We still continue to live in a world in
large parts of which the State is con-
ceived as a coercive apparatus and is
weighing down on large sections of the
people, not infrequently in close eol-
laboration with (and often led by)
interests emanating from transnational
capitalism and its technocratic logic.
Increasingly, in many parts of the world,
security is conceived not just through
the corrosive idea of a national security
state but the far more oppressive eon-
ception which limits security to the
security of elites and the ruling coteries,
marshalling for that purpose military
and paramilitary forces. There continues
to be in operation a thriving arms
bazaar, producing both for the security
of narrow elites against their popula-
tions and for maintaining regimes of
regional hegemony and brutalized con-
trol, alongside of course the still eon-
tinuing and ever more sophisticated
weapons technologies which are then
fed to maintain the tempo of n~ilitariza-
tion within and across nation-states, not
to mention the still persisting interest
(all the way from Universities to com-
puter conglomerates) in adventures likes
the SDI.
Nor has there been any great change
in the persisting hold of transnational
techno-capitalism, the growing power of
transnational financial superstructure
(the World Bank, the IMF, the large
commercial money markets) or the
growing hold domestically of the teehno-
managers who are everywhere replacing
institutional structures of representative
and bureaucratic types based on mini-
mum norms of accountability, participa-
tion and reciprocity. There is, if any-
thing growing highhandedness and
repression on the pan of the ruling
clues in their approach to grassroots
movements aimed at radical reconstruc-
tion of governance and of the State.
'I'he poor are everywhere getting mar-
ginalized and so are the women, the
ethnics, the forest people and above all
the indigenous cultures keen on preserv-
ing their identity, their ecosystems and
their ancestral meaning systems. In fact,
there are reasons to think that each of
these tendencies may get accentuated
in an era of accon~mockition between
major powers and within the states
systems as a whole which is likely to ask
for greater integration of states and
economies and cultural orders - as well
as alternative scientific and technological
models - into a large integrated (in-
terdependent?) 'world order'. For all the
democratic and human rights euphoria
presently being witnessed from the
spokesmen of governments, there still
persists a basic fear of the people and
thcir diverse cultural, ecologiccil and
ethnic assertions. It is a fear that may
even grow as the new climate of de-
escalation and the new language of
accommodation :it the global level spurs