Page 242 - Contemporary Political Sociology Globalization Politics and Power

228 Globalization and Democracy

of economic protectionism at the very least, a closing of borders to free
trade, especially fi nancial exchanges and exchanges of products, labor,
and research and development across borders within multinational cor-
porations. But this leaves unaddressed the importance of globalization to
developing economies, as well as issues of human rights violations and
other injustices.
As a principle of democratic legitimacy, conditional globalization
involves something like the precautionary principle of the environmental
movement, which Anthony Giddens glosses as “ better safe than sorry ”
(Giddens, 2009 : 57). Although democracy at the national level is far from
ideal, it is important to safeguard what already exists, and international
policies that undermine it should be resisted or reversed. Processes of
globalization are only to be encouraged, then, insofar as they improve the
conditions for equality of voice within and across all states. This involves,
at a minimum, building and strengthening state capacities in the develop-
ing world to improve the possibility that elected leaders may enact and
extend citizens ’ rights. Focused in the West, conditional globalization

justifies global social movement activity that tries to persuade people
living within internationalizing states to give their consent to international

policies that remove some of the benefits of living in large, wealthy states
in favor of those – the vast majority of the world ’ s population – who
do not.
The principle of conditional globalization, although I have never seen
it spelled out as such, underlies a couple of campaigns in recent years
that have targeted politicians in internationalizing states that are over -
developed and over - represented internationally. In these campaigns,
activists use national media in order to put pressure on politicians to try

to influence them to make international policy to minimize the undemo-
cratic effects of international political institutions within developing
countries. The main example is that of the ongoing Global Call to Action
Against Poverty. In 2005, this campaign coordinated NGOs across
Europe, the US and South Africa, to put pressure on the G8 and the UN
to change the global regulation of debt, aid, and trade that keeps the
most impoverished of the world in conditions of starvation and destitu-
tion. In specific terms, activists demanded that the governments of the

G8 increase aid to meet promises broken since the 1970s, cancel the
unfairly incurred and economically crippling debt of developing coun-
tries, and institutionalize trade justice: ending subsidies on agricultural
goods in the EU and North America, the dumping of surpluses elsewhere
that is the result of these subsidies, and also ending tariffs on importing
manufactured goods from developing countries. The campaign was