Walter Wink
Globalization and Empire
We have met the evil empire and it is us
More than one person has declared globalization to be the most
important issue of this century. No doubt it is too early to make such a
sweeping judgment, but we can at least declare it to be critical,
especially when it is joined with an equally critical issue: empire.
These massive social movements—globalization and empire—are like
converging glaciers, slowly mingling with each other, creating the
greatest concentration of power the world has ever known. Globalization
could be defined, following Teilhard de Chardin, as the increasing
social compression as humanity becomes aware of itself as an entity. Two
world wars and their bloody successors illustrate in a perverse way this
enfolding of humanity upon itself. We see the world shrinking through
instantaneous communication, economic and military interdependency,
scientific cooperation, tourism, the internet, the free market, the
European Union, trade agreements such as GATT (General Agreement on
Tariffs and Trade), FTAA (Free Trade Area of the Americas) and NAFTA
(North America Free Trade Agreement), and, ironically, English as the
lingua franca of much of the world. But the process of global
totalization has been going on for several thousands of years, and that
is where the confluence of globalism with empire first began to become
visible.
From Sumer to Babylon to Assyria and Egypt, then Greece, Rome, the
Ottoman Empire and Great Britain, the great Western empires have defined
the "known world" by their reach; all else was barbarism. Now for the
first time there is a new empire whose reach is co-extensive with the
world itself. Americans don’t like to think of their land as an empire,
but we are. And while there is great resentment of American power, the
very people who decry America’s global reach are the recipients of
American technology. American empire is ubiquitous, indeed, under the
administration of George W. Bush, empire has been brought to a new
zenith of power.
The Powers That Be
The biblical understanding of the "principalities and powers" offers
us striking insight about globalization and empire. In the Hymn to the
Cosmic Christ in Col. 1:16-17 the Powers are described as having been
created in, through and for Christ. "For in him all things in heaven and
on earth were created, things visible and invisible, whether thrones or
dominions or rulers or powers--all things have been created through him
and for him. He himself is before all things, and in him all things hold
together."
Who is this cosmic figure in whom and through whom and for whom the
world was created? Surely not Jesus, the lowly human being whom the
Powers killed and who trumped the Powers. Surely not also the messiah of
Jewish hope, for whom Israel waited to deliver her from Rome. It must be
a figure closer to Wisdom (Hebrew Hochma or Greek Sophia),
Yahweh’s daughter in Proverbs 8 and Wisdom of Solomon 7-9, who acts as
co-creator, architect of creation, and archetype of the universal
feminine. Let us then address this cosmic One as she seeks redress for
her suppression all these centuries.
The Colossians hymn is the brash assertion, against the grain of
human suffering, that the principalities and powers that visit the world
with so much evil are not autonomous, not independent, not eternal, not
utterly depraved. The social structures of reality are creations of God.
Because they are creatures, they are mortal, limited, responsible to
God, and made for the purpose of serving the humanizing purposes of God
in the world. Put in stark simplicity, the Colossians hymn presents this
insight as a drama in three simultaneous acts:
the Powers are good,
the Powers are fallen,
the Powers can be transformed.
Following the hymn, Paul reminds his readers that they were "once
estranged and hostile in mind, doing evil deeds" (Col.1:21). The context
therefore makes clear, whereas the hymn itself does so only by allusion
(v. 20), that these Powers are or have become hostile to the purposes of
God in their creation. Nevertheless, the hymn itself celebrates their
creation in, through, and for Christ. They are not demonized as utterly
evil; they are the good creations of a good God, and God, in the Genesis
story of creation, creates no demons. But their rationale for existence
is to serve the human needs and values revealed as ultimate by the
identification of Jesus with Wisdom and the Cosmic Christ.
It is tempting to regard these Powers as simply evil. The good news
is that God not only liberates us from the Powers, but can liberate the
Powers as well. The gospel is not a dualistic myth of good and evil
forces vying for ascendancy. It is a sublimely subtle drama about the
intertwining of good and evil in all of historical reality. In their
good aspect, the Powers are a bulwark against anarchy. They are a
patron, repository, and inspirer of art. They inculcate values that
encourage interdependency, mutual care, and social cohesiveness. They
encourage submission of personal desires to the general good of
everyone. Their evil is not intrinsic, but rather the result of
idolatry. Therefore they can be transformed.
Even in their apostasy and dereliction from their created vocation,
the Powers are incapable of separating themselves from the principle of
coherence. When subsystems idolatrously violate the harmony of the whole
by elevating their own purposes to ultimacy, they are still no more able
to achieve autonomy than a cancer can live apart from its host. Like a
cancer, again, they are only able to do evil by means of processes
imbedded in them as a result of their good creation.
We must be careful here. To assert that God created the Powers does
not imply that God endorses any particular Power at any given time. God
did not create capitalism or socialism, but God wills that there be some
way to distribute goods necessary for life. The simultaneity of
creation, fall and transformation means that God at one and the same
time upholds a given political or economic system, since some
such system is essential to support human life; condemns that
system insofar as it is destructive of full human actualization; and
presses for its transformation into a more humane order.
Conservatives stress the first, revolutionaries the second, reformers
the third. The Christian should be able to hold together all three.
An institution may place its own good above the general welfare. A
corporation may cut corners on costs by producing defective products
that endanger lives. Union leaders may become more preoccupied with
extending their personal advantages than fighting for better working
conditions for the rank and file. The point of the Colossians hymn is
not that anything goes, but that no matter how greedy or idolatrous an
institution becomes, it cannot escape the encompassing care and judgment
of the One in and through and for whom it was created. In that One "all
things hold together" (Col. 1:17--literally, "receive their systemic
place"--sunistemi, the source of our word "system"). The Powers
are inextricably locked into God's system, whose human face is revealed
in Jesus. They are answerable to God. And that means that every
subsystem in the world is, in principle, redeemable, or reformable, or
replaceable.
We may pollute our water supply and the air we breathe with no regard
for the future; but we are systemically inseparable from the ecosystem,
and the judgment of the system rebounds on us in escalating carcinogenic
illnesses. A nation can behave as if it did not belong to the
world-system of nations, as did Nazi Germany, and can attempt to
subordinate the system to itself; but its very attempt to do so
mobilizes the wrath of the nations against it and brings about its own
defeat. No subsystem that aspires to the status of God's System can
itself long remain viable.
Adam Smith himself acknowledged this principle of coherence when he
wrote that the ultimate goal of a business is not to make a profit. The
goal is the general welfare. Profit is the reward one gets for serving
the general welfare. It is part of the church's task to remind
corporations and businesses that as "creatures" of God they have as
their divine vocation the achievement of human benefaction. They do not
exist for themselves (Eph. 3:10). Nor can they—or we--be saved from the
Powers by anything within the power system, but only by something that
that transcends it. And despite being fallen creatures, it is still
possible, right in the midst of the old reality, for both people and
Powers to live in relative emancipation from the power of death.
These then are the components of a theological analysis of the Powers
That Be: they are good, they are fallen, and they can be transformed,
but only under the constraints of the Domination System, in which we
continue to live, and move, and lose our beings.
Globalization
Armed with that analytical framework, we begin by affirming that
globalization is good. According to Charles Norchi, "Globalization
is a term describing an inexorable march of forces accelerating the
interdependence of the planet to the point where we can speak of a true
world community." It marks the time shortly after World War II when the
new UN decided that how a government treated its own people on its own
soil would no longer be its own business, no doubt in part as a result
of the Nazi atrocities. Globalization might be characterized by the
shift from political to economic ideologies (communism to the free
market), the universal spread of scientific, technological, and medical
research, the concentration of power in multinational corporations, and
a weakening of national ties in favor of global markets. Those who
defend globalization assert that it will, over time, lift the poor above
poverty, dissolve dictatorships, protect the environment, integrate
cultures, reverse the growing income gap between rich and poor, and
revolutionize international communications.
Proponents champion globalization in two ways. The first is to claim
that it is innocuous, and to cite statistics that appear to back this
position. Globalists claim that economic growth and
developmentally-efficient technologies will cause all keels to rise
(overlooking the fact that only the rich own boats). This is the line
taken by the Bush administration, which is notorious for creating
statistics on demand. "In NAFTA’s first five years, employment grew 22
percent in Mexico, 10 percent in Canada, and 7 percent in the U.S.,"
figures hotly contested by opponents of NAFTA. If that were true, people
would be swimming from the U.S. to Mexico! UN economists claim, on the
contrary, that Mexico lost over two million jobs over the same five
years, that half of the entire nation lives below the poverty level, and
that campesinos have seen a 30% decrease in their income over the last
decade. But whose statistics are we to believe?
The second pro-globalization line of defense is to acknowledge that
globalization will require Herculean efforts in order to ratchet up the
economies of the developing world. These super-realists point out, for
instance, that every prosperous country today was once mired in
"developing" status. That includes Britain, France, Sweden, Germany, and
the U.S. Child labor was essential for the launching stage. Children
have always worked on farms and in family enterprises. Such work is
necessary in order to train workers for higher paid jobs, the pro-globalizers
argue. It only took Hong Kong and Taiwan 25 years to reach what Europe
took a century to achieve. India, which initially rejected foreign
investment, has cut child labor from 35 percent in the 1950s to just 12
percent in the last few years.
The problem is that globalization is also fallen, fallen hard.
And the name coined for that fallen state is "globalization from above."
It is characterized by secret deliberations, a lack of democracy,
domination by the most powerful nations and multinational corporations,
and a race to the bottom, where the poorer countries vie for factories
and agribusinesses at the price of the well-being of their own people.
In the World Trade Organization meeting last week in Cancun, according
to the The New York Times, when the U.S. and E.U. refused to
cancel the $300 billion subsidy paid every year to farmers in the
richest countries, while demanding that the developing countries forgo
subsidies altogether, the developing 20+ nations walked out. The meeting
was declared a failure on all sides by all the more powerful delegates,
whereas those from the poorer nations were dancing in the streets.
In the third world, it is not unusual to find factory workers working
14 hour shifts 6 or 7 days a week with no overtime pay or bathroom
breaks. In Thailand, for example, young girls work 9 hours for $2 for a
day’s work. That sounds inhumane, and it is. But for many, the
alternatives are worse: prostitution, begging, crime, or primitive
agriculture. These factories offer the best-paid jobs they have ever
had. Removing the best of a series of bad options does nothing to better
the plight of the world’s poor. Plants just relocate. In an attempt to
attract these runaway plants, countries offer incentives that include
banning unions, turning a blind eye to environmental protections,
violating human rights, and ignoring safety precautions. After the BBC
exposed such working conditions in Cambodia, both Nike and the Gap
pulled out, costing the country $10 million in contracts, and costing
hundreds of Cambodian their jobs.
The irony is that those who are most opposed to globalization are
also dependent on it. I am thinking of the world-wide demonstrations
against the Iraq War, orchestrated as they were on the internet. Here
was a truly revolutionary effort whose failure to stop that war should
not eclipse the radical possibilities that it disclosed. There will
always be cheerleaders who are blind to the destruction that
globalization can cause. And there will always be strident opponents who
are blind to the way globalization gives some people their first
opportunity to fulfill basic aspirations. Globalism is ambiguous. It is
good and it is fallen, and if it is to be redeemed we need to quit
arguing whether it is good or bad—it is both—and get to work
transforming the world economic order.
Part of the confusion about globalization and poverty is that the
proportion of people living in poverty in the world has declined
dramatically (from 54.8 % in 1950 to 23.7 % in 1992, and has continued
to fall since then). Meanwhile, their absolute number has been
increasing, due to the population explosion. After an admirably nuanced
treatment of globalization, Peter Singer concludes , "Whether the WTO
makes the rich richer and the poor poorer, the verdict has to be: not
proven." Fine. We don’t need to know. We already know what we need to
know: that unconscionably huge numbers of people in our world are
hungry. Bread for the World says that it would only cost the U.S. $6
billion dollars a year to do its part to cut hunger by one-half by the
year 2015.
That’s about 6 cents per American per day.
As businesses go global, they are less concerned about the families
of those laid off or the social safety net that protects them.
Fifty-four poor countries actually got poorer during the booming 1990s,
with more than one billion people living in absolute poverty, without
clean water to drink or enough food to eat. By contrast, in the 1980s
only four countries showed a decline, and that was before the WTO.
Something seems to be terribly wrong with trade policy.
What is clear is that supranational trade agreements have superseded
national laws that protect the land, its workers, and their health. For
example, the Australian/U.S. trade agreement of January 2003 (AUSFTA)
can override Australia’s Constitution, rendering the Australian
government unable to ban carcinogenic substances. Under NAFTA and the
WTO, it may be unlawful for Texas school and commercial buses to use
natural gas fuel to reduce pollution. The WTO prohibits the labeling of
food that contains toxic chemicals. The Canadian government recently
filed an appeal in a case won by S. D. Myers Inc., an Ohio
waste-disposal company that said it was hurt by a Canadian law banning
the export of PCBs. The WTO found in favor of that company. Medico began
using alternative procedures for treating salmonella and E.coli that had
never been evaluated by the U.S. Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS),
yet the WTO permitted it to retain its eligibility despite U.S.
objections. The Mexican maquiladoras are now losing factories to China,
which has conditions of virtual slavery. Workers at the Wellco Factory
making shoes for Nike are paid 16 cents an hour in 11-12 hour shifts, 7
days a week, 77-84 hours per week, with fines if they refuse overtime,
for which they are nevertheless paid nothing.
The World Trade Organization and other agencies for regulating trade
are not beholden to any public community of accountability. In every
case where multinational corporations have sued governments under the
WTO, the corporations have won.
Concern for unions and the environment are given lip service,
but in fact are generally ignored. Transnational corporations have
become detached from national loyalties and communities. When Europeans
objected to hormone-treated beef from big U.S. beef producers, the WTO
forced them to accept it. Canadians objected to carcinogenic additives
in imported gasoline, but lost. Not even the U.S. is immune from WTO
control. In one case, the WTO overturned a U.S. law that protected sea
turtles facing extinction. The Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA)
can give corporations control of hemispheric water supplies, the "blue
gold" of the twenty-first century. It could privatize education and
social security, making them inaccessible to the poor. Complaints are
adjudicated by trade "representatives" who have not been elected by any
elective body.
But third, globalization can be transformed. The language
being used to speak of the transformation of globalization is
"globalization from below." That would, quite simply, require opening
deliberations to democratic procedures, keeping promises regarding labor
rights and environmental responsibilities, organizing massive turnouts
of people demanding change, and making major commitments to heal the
world’s hunger. There is plenty of ground for hope, and there have been
significant victories along the way: the World Health Organization’s
action against the misuse of infant baby formula, the protocol against
the use of nicotine, providing affordable AIDs treatment for poorer
countries, stopping negotiations for the inequitable Multilateral
Agreement on Investment, blocking the "Millennial Round" of the WTO,
creating a treaty on genetically engineered products, student opposition
to sweatshop products bearing their universities’ logos, the defunding
and consequent discontinuation of construction on the Narmada Dam in
India, the campaign to outlaw landmines, the decision of Monsanto to
withdraw from the business of selling sterile seeds, and the public
uproar against the WTO meetings around the world.
Empire
I spoke earlier of two glaciers converging, globalization and empire.
Not surprisingly, we now see that the same three-fold analysis fits
empire as well: Nations are good, nations are fallen, and nations can
be transformed. They are good: the Pax Romana, with its road
system and its success in ending piracy, made it possible for the gospel
to spread throughout the empire with a minimum of danger. Paul could
therefore shower encomiums on Rome as God’s servant for good (Romans
13). In the modern world, nations have provided a bulwark against
seizure of lands, protection of their citizens against lawless behavior,
and establishment of social welfare programs for the betterment of
children through education, safety and prohibition of child labor. They
protect against invasion, they ameliorate the worst excesses of
capitalism, and they can sometimes make the trains run on time. The New
Deal is an excellent example of a government that cared for its people.
But, once again, nations are fallen, and the form they often
take when they fall is empire. I doubt that empires can ever do much
good. The Book of Revelation tells the real story: the Roman Empire was
a dragon, a monster from the deeps that must be destroyed and
reconstituted along humane lines (chapters 12--13 and 17--19). But the
last word is that the empire that we see annihilated in Revelation
19--20 nevertheless comes marching into the Holy City, where the tree of
life stands, and the leaves of the tree are for "the healing of the
nations" (Rev. 21:24--22:2). Theoretically, nations can be restored
to their divine vocation which, like the economy, is to serve the
general welfare.
But when a nation aspires to empire, it tends to become virulently
evil, no matter how hard individuals may try to prevent it. The Gospels
unambiguously assert that Satan rules all the nations of the world
(Matt. 4:9/Luke 4:6), and thus regard the Roman Empire as diabolical and
to be replaced by God’s domination-free order. For empires live from the
lust for power, and that lust is insatiable. We today are in the grip of
an administration that was fraudulently elected, that lied about the
reasons for dragging our nation into war, and is gutting vital civil
liberties founded on the Constitution. It has manipulated our media and
foreign governments with false information. It has ordered the
indefinite detention of citizens and non-citizens alike without access
to counsel, without being charged, and without opportunity to challenge
the detention. It has used secret arrests and denial of public trials.
It demonized the Iraqis even though that devastated country had no
direct involvement in the bombing of the World Trade Center or al Qaeda.
The President either lied about Iraq’s alleged possession of "weapons of
mass destruction," or he himself was massively misinformed by his own
intelligence branch—in either case, he is guilty of malfeasance in
office.
Even if the purported megaweapons actually existed, they were not
used against us. Bush’s spokesmen lied about Iraq purchasing uranium
from Niger, a claim exposed as an intelligence fabrication to frighten
the American public into supporting war with Iraq. Colin Powell made his
case before the UN from a plagiarized magazine article by a California
graduate student whose focus had been Iraq in 1991. The Pentagon
cynically staged Jessica Lynch’s authentic sufferings as a propaganda
pageant, when in fact her life was saved by Iraqi doctors at great risk
to themselves. This administrations’ behavior trashes the Constitution.
Such a string of lies constitute perjury, and perjury by a sitting
president is impeachable. President Clinton was impeached for far less.
What lies behind this behavior? Nothing less than a vision of
world-girdling empire seeking unilateral world domination through
absolute military, economic, and political superiority. How do we know?
The administration told us so. In the National Security Strategy of the
United States of America, a White House document released last September
20, 2002, the Bush administration acknowledged that America has become
the world’s policeman and legislator, prepared to rule the world without
the help of any other nations or the United Nations. And the United
States Space Command document, "Vision for 2020," claims even outer
space as subject to "full spectrum dominance" by the American empire.
Bush has backed out of treaties like the ABM and Kyoto because he wants
no check on his ambitions. He played the Iraq card by pretending to work
through the UN and its inspectors, even though the decision apparently
had been made the summer before to attack Iraq regardless of world
opinion. He violated the Charter of the United Nations, of which our
nation is a signatory, by launching preemptive wars against Afghanistan
and Iraq, and threatening to do so elsewhere. As William Stringfellow so
prophetically declared in the speech which first called for the
impeachment of Richard Nixon, when a president lies so flagrantly to his
own people; when he tells us that he will not heed any protests; when
he, thus, pronounces the astonishing doctrine that the president is
unaccountable to the American people, then ours has ceased to be a
democracy and has become an empire. And this government has openly
declared for empire.
An American empire violates the most profound genius of America.
Empires are simply bullies, and there is little justification for them.
James K. Galbraith pronounces a warning that is ominous for our present
leaders: "The problem of empires, historically, is not military defeat.
It is bankruptcy. Empires do not tend to business at home, and they tend
to lose out to rivals who do." Our nation needs to be called back to its
highest ideals. When the skein of lies is all disentangled, perhaps we
can recover some modicum of those ideals that have made our land so
unique, despite its failings. It is only because I love my country that
I want to see it do right.
The Powers are good, the Powers are fallen, the Powers can be
transformed. Analysis of the massive evils of globalization and empire
would lead to paralysis if we did not remember that the Powers can be
changed, but oh, with such difficulty. The task is made infinitely
easier, however, by recognition that our job is simply to recall them to
their divine vocation, which Adam Smith defined as serving the general
welfare. On the one hand, we have the vision of all things in heaven and
on earth being subordinated to that One who exemplifies the New Humanity
(Col. 1:15-20). On the other, there is the greed of commerce and the
power-lust of empire. The question is whether we can live out that
vision of the One in whom and through whom and for whom all things were
created, despite the fallenness of the world, knowing that the One who
calls us to this task will provide the power to do it.
Dr. Walter Wink is Professor of Biblical Interpretation at
Auburn Theological Seminary in New York City. Previously, he was a
parish minister and taught at Union Theological Seminary in New York
City. In 1989-1990 he was a Peace Fellow at the United States
Institute of Peace. The author of many books, including the award
winning Engaging the Powers and The Human Being: Jesus and the
Enigma of the Son of the Man, Walter and his wife June Keener Wink
have led peace workshops all over the United States and Canada, as well
as in New Zealand, South Africa, Chile, South Korea, East and West
Germany, England, Scotland and Ireland. |
