Global Apartheid

That is to say: provided that we have access to modernity. Provided that we are not excluded. Many people are excluded. Globalisation was neither coherent nor complete. It was a globalisation of markets and of greed. In the ninety-nineties economic growth was higher than ever since World War Two. It got a boost from new technologies, rising expectations and a mounting demand at the global market. This unprecedented growth could have helped enlarging the capacity of the international community to address poverty and sustainability questions. It did not. Instead,  globalisation led to an even more unbalanced development: not more, but less sustainable, at least in social and ecological terms. Globalisation also made international cooperation lopsided by directing  political attention mainly towards facititating the workings of the world market and neglecting other concerns.. The intentions at the global market are a mix of a belief in the blessings of modern technology and a selfish, materialistic and commercial approach to notions of welfare and progress.

What did this mean for the poor? During long periods of capitalist expansion poor people were exploited. But they had an opportunity to fight back, because the system needed them: their labour and their purchasing power, the power to buy the goods produced by the system and thereby sustain the very system that exploited them. This common strength of the poor helped to modify exploitation. Development became potentially also beneficial to the poor. They got a perspective: to have a more livable life than their parents and to give an even better life to their children. That is development: change for the better, even if small, but in the perspective that improvements will last.  Everybody within the system was entitled to such a perspective. Everybody  had the right to hope.  That hope is no longer justified. Globalisation has changed the character of capitalism. There are more people excluded from the system than exploited in the system. Those who are excluded are being considered dispensable. Neither their labour nor their potential buying power seems to be needed. That is the reason why they cannot fight back anymore. They lost a perspective. If you know that your life is worse than that of your parents and if there is no hope that your children will do better, but instead will be even worse of than yourself, than  there is no perspective whatsoever.

For many people this is today’s reality. Better than in tbe past they know how life could be. Modern communication tells them that. But deeper than before they realize that such a life is not within reach, because they have lost solid ground. They have no land to work on, no job, no credit, no education, no basic services, no secuty of income, no food security, but ever more squalor, an ever greater chance to be affected by HIV/AIDS, a house without electricity, water and sanitatrion. Despite unprecedented world economic progress during the last decade, for about two billion people there is only the experience of sinking further and further into quicksand. In Johannesburg President M’beki called this Global Apartheid. The gap between rich and poor in the world can no longer be explained in terms of a strikingly unequal distribution of income and wealth which could be modified through world economic growth and a better distribution of the fruits of growth. The gap appears to have become permanent. Rich and poor stand apart, separated from each other. Under the Apartheidregime people were either white or black. So, they were part of the system, or they were not. Today people  belong to modernity, or not. The world of modernity is western of origin, but stretches towards islands and pockets of modernity in the east and in the south.  The worlds of modernity are linked  with each other by means of modern communication, physical or virtual communication. Through the culture of modern communication people feel that they belong to modernity, that they are part of it, part of the globalised uniform western neo-liberal culture of mass-consumption, materialism, greed, images and virtual reality. That modern world is separated from the world next door, physically sonmetimes just around the corner, but far away in terms of time, mentality, experience and consciousness: poverty, hunger, unemployment, lack of basic amenities in the shantytowns of a metropolis, at the countyside and in the periphery, where pollution is permanent, where the soil is no longer productive, water scarce, life unhealthy.  Poor people have to live in the worst places of the earth. “A world society based upon poverty for many and richness for some, characterised by islands of welfare surrounded by a sea of poverty is not sustainable”, President M’beki said. Indeed, that is Apartheid. On the one side security and luxury, on the other deprivation, hardship, suffering. At the beginning of the new Millennium for many people life has never been so good. At the same time for many people in our direct global neigbourhood life is not livable

Like in the past, under the South African Apartheid regime, security and luxury on the one side of the fence is being sustained and protected by continuing the suqualor, suffering and poverty elsewhere. Not by exploiting the poor. There still is exploitation  -  low commodity prices for instance and undecent wages for migrant labour  -  but the globalised Western culture has so much capital and purchasing power, that it can sustain itself without exploitation. However, poor people, instead of being exploited, are excluded. The Western world is afraid that they will cost more than they can contribute. They do not fit into western cost benefit calculations. People living in the slums of Calcutta, Nairobi and Rio de Janeiro,  AIDS affected in Africa, landless people in Bangladesh, subsistence farmers in the Sahel, illegal migrants crossing the Mediterranean, all of them lack the capacities needed to conribute to the modern Western economy and the buying power for its products That is why these people are considered dispensable. Well-to-do people are not interested in the ideas of the poor, let alone their feelings or their fate. The poor are a burden and should not try to come close. They are being kept away by connecting the islands of wealth with each other, using the means provided through globalisation. In doing so we deprive them of space, soil., in particular good soil, productive, fertile or commercially attractively located. We deprive them of water, forest, natural resources. We burden them with sky-high debts. We deny their enterprises fair access to the market by favouring foreign companies, providing them with more licenses, higher credits and tax holidays. We deny them basic provisions for survival, such as affordable medication against AIDS. President M’beki was right: globalisation is Apartheid. Globalisation takes away living space. Globalisation is appropriation. Globalisation means fencing off. Globalisation is occupation. Occupation of space - living space -, expropriation of resources, sealing off societies,  subjecting cultures. The poor are told to stay in their homelands, in occupied territories, separated from each other by boundaries drawn by those who do have access to the resources, the capital and the technology which lay at the basis of the modern Western culture.

The revolution of globalisation has made winners and losers. Real losers and those who see themselves as losers. Globalisation is shaking established structures and cultures. Some have the skills to gain access to the modern world market and play up fully. Others adjust themselves. For again others, it is either sink or swim. Many of them, economic asylum seekers for instance, are struggling with the waves of modernity and sink into the undercurrent of the new dynamics. For other people, single females with children in Africa for instance, modernisation means entire uprooting. Their existence was fragile and gets shattered. Many of them are dragged away and go down.