Sep 9, 2006 10:05:00 AM cite

Homero Aridjis: The economic globalization takes place on its own way unaffecting democracies or dictatorships.

by Homero Aridjis

Sep 9, 2006 10:05:00 AM cite

Irina Yasina: In principle globalization should promote the development of democracy and in principle it does it. But nowadays we see that at the same time dictatorships become stronger. This happens first all because the central authority in oil-extracting countries becomes stronger because of high oil-prices. And thus centralized power is reinforced and dominates the business world. We see it in Russia; we see it in Venezuela and in several other countries. It seems that it can't be helped. Globalization brings it about. But I think globalization will definitely lead us to democracy because strengthening of dictatorship is like rearguard fights, it is resistance of old structures, of old brains which is more important. Thus I think that globalization as system that gives everybody infinite freedom of movement, free exchange of information. Somehow or other it will lead to the development of universal human values and one of them is democracy.

by Irina Yasina

Sep 9, 2006 10:05:00 AM cite

Jerry Mander: Answertext will be available soon.

by Jerry Mander

Sep 9, 2006 10:05:00 AM cite

Jesper Green: If human rights are overruled by economic interests, which could be the fact if we have an economic globalization, then I think it could consolidate dictatorship. Yeah.

by Jesper Green

Sep 9, 2006 10:05:00 AM cite

Jodie Evans: As with everything, it can do both. It does do both. The violence of economic globalization has fomented revolutions. Activism has brought forward voices that up to that time had not been heard or seen. It's so devastating and so treacherous that voices have had to rise up against it. At the same time, what it has done is consolidate power within the hands of a few. So the thing is to get out from behind both those things and say what else can we do with it? How can we use this opportunity to undermine the power structures? How can we use this opportunity to see who else around the world is doing what we're doing or has answers to the questions that we've been struggling with forever? How do we create alliances? How does our work get fed by those around the world who have a different view of it? I think that in so much of our work we work in a little place that's isolated and now that we recognize that globalization economically exists, we can use that now to share information and use all our points of view to dissemble, to pull the ground out from underneath and, and also it's the only way that then we can work together, think of a strategy and yank the power that we've given these kind of economic powers and take it back for ourselves. The people take it back. What's great about it is that we're seeing an activism and a passion from the people that's arising. And what's horrible about it is not just the dictatorship, but the huge accumulation of power and wealth in the few.

by Jodie Evans

Sep 9, 2006 10:05:00 AM cite

John Gage: Economic globalization describes a process, a process of broadening competition, global competition that enables those that produce to compete with quality, with price, with name, with reputation. At the fundamental bottom of the competition is the idea that those that produce can participate in a broad economic market, derive revenues globally, while in the past, they may have been able only to derive revenues locally, to derive an exposure to a much larger market they would not have been able to be exposed to in the past. But, globalization is simply a process, the outcome who benefits, who in fact is able to participate globally may offer support to those individuals in the poorest countries, those excluded, or it may in fact emphasize the power of the established, those that today have the economic resources, the capability to take what they have as inputs, as creative components, and generate something on a global market that can undercut local production. So, globalization, economic globalization, can either support the individual or support the aggregate powerful interests. It’s the method by which we live through this process. It’s the sense of community that we bring to this process that will determine the outcome. So, does economic globalization promote democracy or does economic globalization support the most concentrated forms of dominance, dictatorship? It supports both. How we determine which is most supported relies entirely upon our behavior in this world of ever-increasing ability to transfer knowledge, information, products and compete.

by John Gage

Sep 9, 2006 10:05:00 AM cite

Jonathan Granoff: Economic organization at the level of a community can either be a means of promoting oppression or providing a better way of having goods and services delivered to people. It really depends on the other mitigating institutions. For example, in a country if economic organization allows for a disproportionate amount of unaccountable power in the hands of few people, then it will not lead to furthering of democracy. And I presume that the question is about democracy in the greater sense of meeting people's real needs and a means of expressing their real values. And a globalization is a driving force that provides the opportunity to globalize values, that can globalize values of the trivial, values of greed and selfishness. On the other hand, it can promote values of human rights, it can promote values of human unity. So economic globalization to the extent that it has the mitigating institutions that promote human rights, environmental responsibility, the rule of law, social justice, could create the enabling environment for greater human expression and democracy. On the other hand, it also creates the wherewithal for the greater exercise of oppression and dominance. So the question is not economic globalization alone, it is economic globalization with human rights, or economic globalization without social justice. It is the same principles that apply in a community. Economic organization can be a means of helping liberate people or a means of dominance. It really depends on wheher there is the principal of justice and human rights.

by Jonathan Granoff

Sep 9, 2006 10:05:00 AM cite

Jonathan Meese: There is no globalisation. Economy is economy. There is no connection between economy and political systems. That means: Neither democracy nor dictatorship is promoted (by economy), which is totally irrelevant anyway, because art will take over soon. We have to learn, accept and realise, that things are only themselves. Consequences of something does not exist. This are just theories afterwards, but actually it does not have anything to do with the matter that is going on. Things happen, as they happen - one has to wait - suppliantly - until that happens that has to occur. There are only the dictatorship of love and the tyranny of the art. This is really good because the art of tyranny will never harm us. It (the art of tyranny) loves us anyway because it does not want anything from us. It is as passive as we are, then everything will be solved with pleasure and a paradies of the circumstances will be the result. Let economy be economy - no more and no less. The world is looking us, we cannot consider it because we are not even able to acquire it. The word "global" is inexistent - it does not mean anything. The world happens at the tip of our nose. We are not able to see or to cognize more and so it is good. We have to submit to our central perspective - totally and absolutely. This is the most radical thing existing. Art is the most radical regime - full of love, humbleness and respect. We are not the central - we are not the scale.

by Jonathan Meese

Sep 9, 2006 10:05:00 AM cite

Jonathan Stack: I don't think that economic globalization creates or doesn’t create democracy; people create democracy. What creates democracy is -- they are inevitable. Economic globalization is where we are heading. We are not turning back to local; it's going to be an increasingly larger and larger scale. I think while that could be seen as a negative because obviously it consolidates power in the hands of ever fewer corporations and that by itself is anti-democratic because one thing you can sure of, corporations by definition are not democracies. And the good news is it creates the future conditions for maybe deeper and surer democracy because democracy seems to me is only going to work ultimately if it includes everybody. And so, perhaps, this idea that now that we are going to create an economy that involves and engages the whole planet, perhaps eventually out of this movement is going to come a democracy that also engages and loves everybody on the planet. So, my answer is economic globalization, within it the seeds of hope. Right now, very scary, very big challenges. That's it.

by Jonathan Stack

Sep 9, 2006 10:05:00 AM cite

José Manuel Prieto: I think that economic globalization in fact promotes democracy in a way that it possibly allows a higher competition between different economies which would consider themselves in a disadvantage, if they were locked up and couldn’t respond to the mechanism of the market, in order that through the extension of the frameworks of global economy, not only economic but also democratic values are extended, what allows to a certain degree to expand an ideology of major participation. Nevertheless, globalization also has the negative effects of not being well designed, of not protecting itself consciously against certain negative side effects, which can lead to undesirable consequences, like e.g. in the case of Mexico, where globalization has provoked the arrival of foreign companies which have caused certain negative effects in many agricultural areas and therefore an enormous migration to the United States, without having a positive effect in other regions, especially in the north of the country, in order that it can’t be denied that globalization is a double-edged sword, let’s call it that way.

by José Manuel Prieto

Sep 9, 2006 10:05:00 AM cite

Kailash Satyarthi: The globalization for me is promoting democracy in one way. When we talk of dictatorship, it is about the political power. Unfortunately, globalization is promoting the consolidation of economic power in the fewer hands. It has been noticed in a number of developing countries especially that a strong middle class is emerging and that middle class is controlling the power of wealth, the power of knowledge and the power of politics. But, it does not mean that an individual person is going to be empowered in such a way that one can become the dictator. Also, in case of dictatorship, the knowledge is something which is being spread in the process of globalization. That is very important because the people that started questioning against the dictatorship in those countries are the army regimes. So, that’s a good sign. But, it does not mean that globalization is bringing any kind of good news to the poor people in the developing world. Unfortunately, the poorer are getting more and more poor because their lands, their water resources, their forest resources are being exploited by those richers which are benefited out of the process of globalization. But, definitely, the increase and more demand for the knowledge is something which is helping in spreading democracy.

by Kailash Satyarthi

Sep 9, 2006 10:05:00 AM cite

Kamal Boullata:

by Kamal Boullata

Sep 9, 2006 10:05:00 AM cite

Kigge Hvid: I think that fundamentally globalization promotes connectivity, availability, sharing knowledge, network, the basis of how people can share and be together. So no, I think that globalization which is more than economic globalization because it is also knowledge globalization, it is network globalization. No, I think that globalization would promote democracy and free thinking. If you look into it, since the rise of the globalization, which started of course many many years ago in other forms, but since the rise of modern globalization, if you look into how many countries ruled by dictators that failed, you would see that many many many of the former dictatorships fell after globalization. And one of the reasons for this is that people are more connected, people have more access to knowledge, people have also more access to getting together and to raise movements of resistance. So no, I think not. And I also think that part of the economic globalization is that companies, brands, economics works all over the world. And I see a huge raise in the social responsibility of the big companies and of the different governments throughout the world.

by Kigge Hvid

Sep 9, 2006 10:05:00 AM cite

Kurt Weidemann: Globalization is a necessity because we have an infinite plurality of new media with which everyone in the world can talk to anyone else. If economy is gaining power or not is something the organization of the individual states should take care of because they only pursues their own interests. Western democracy should spread more and more. Democracy should become a possible form of communication. Democracy is 'a maximum of choice'. A choice between different possibilities, which can be very wide.

by Kurt Weidemann

Sep 9, 2006 10:05:00 AM cite

Lesego Rampolokeng: Slavedriver, grave saliva, soldier come, soldier go, what he bring come forever.
[Multiculti] dressed in mufti, Fela Kuti’s Beast of no Nation, rises to old international station.
What it eats, swells up where it sits,
spills out in the street,
army arrangement expensive shit,
human and cold on the pavement beyond Martin Luther Kings' highway,
illusion dies in a trail of gray pollution under the southern sky
gives the beast an almighty high.

Soldier come, soldier go,
what he bring come forever.
Politics are capital down,
police are also on finance,
profit on the rise,
the fall of conscience,
clean [inaudible]suicide,
information more than the next person,
principal position of intercourse,
read the gospel of St. Karl Marx,
the cliché is a clinch,
it clenches around the glitch,
life is a bitchy ass,
this isn’t pestilence,
but commerce dictates you [fucker] in silence.

Soldier come, soldier go,
what he bring come forever.

Colonization and revolutions disguise,
[inaudible]of conflict rips early harvest,
progress replaces the moon
[inaudible] with his grandmother march west,
it's a truth taking myth,
making death of innocence is kiss and caress of classes
[inaudible] commerce’s congress.

Soldier come, soldier go,
what he bring come forever.

Track of no foundation,
bellyful of radiation,
no enemy, no friend,
we follow the global trend.
Late cutting [mendicant] hand,
socialism is set to fail.
We are tied to capital stale,
smell of hell when the tail is raised,
the taste of nuclear waste. Radioactivity does not send to hell first,
it bump’s full of eternal rest.
In the mouth, the perennial tale of the south.

Soldier come, soldier go,
what he bring, come forever.

[inaudible] string puppetry,
skin and bones, sing in harmony,
what did we fight for, strike up the light for,
bring the night for
wreckers of the world [inaudible]night for
[inaudible]shoot for, dig down to root of scream for,
rip the do or die fruit for.
I have a dream of war,
read like dread,
days of [inaudible],
same as before,
slavedriver,
grave saliva,

soldier come, soldier go,
what he bring come forever and ever and evermore.
Amen.

by Lesego Rampolokeng

Sep 9, 2006 10:05:00 AM cite

Leung Ping-Kwan: Economic globalization sometimes helps you make the government more open in places that need access. There are more foreign investments coming in. There are more interaction between a foreigner and the local people, and in a way it would help to open up certain space for interaction or communication. But it not necessarily promotes a democracy because sometimes the matter or the people with the funding they could also work together with the bureaucrats, and there could be fights and different kinds of illegal concerns that would lead to bureaucratic practice and eventually, if the political power and the financial power combines together, it would actually help to consolidate dictatorship rather than promoting democracy. Sometimes for big corporations coming here, and they will yield to the demand of the government to practice certain issues or idea coming in to the third world countries. Sometimes they would practice certain issues in order to be able to have influence in the third world countries. There will be other times where the economic globalization will need to consolidate dictatorship.

by Leung Ping-Kwan

Sep 9, 2006 10:05:00 AM cite

Lijun Fang: In my opinion, economic globalization is a result of propagation of the Enclosure Movement. It is all over the world, not just in Britain.I don't know whether economic globalization is also related to either promoting democracy or consolidating dictatorship.

by Lijun Fang

Sep 9, 2006 10:05:00 AM cite

Lillian Holt: Probably both in one sense. I'm not too sure about this question. Probably both. I would need to think of examples but it actually brings to mind to me the idea of benefits from economic globalization. Certainly the idea of globalization and economics has much power but I'm actually no expert in this area so I think I should leave it. I'm stumbling a bit and I need to be vulnerable and human to say I really don't know because I have never really thought about a question like this but as I said it probably does both. It promotes some dictatorship but it can provide democracy in some way if people have access to the stuff but because it's about economy and economy is all from the post to community and it's about profit too, which is opposed to people. Sometimes it's not very democratic and it also can be autocratic in the sense that it perpetuates autocracy in a sense of, you know, maybe the top 500 rich people or something like that who benefit from it. So it depends on who does benefit from this is the real question from me.

by Lillian Holt