01 May The Pendulum Swing of Nationalizations
Bolivia’s President Evo Morales announced today the nationalization of Bolivia’ oil industry:
In a May Day speech, he said foreign energy firms must agree to channel all their sales through the Bolivian state, or else leave the country.
He set the firms a six-month deadline, but the military and state energy officials have already started taking control of the oil fields.
Although this is not an immediate issue for the U.S.– Brazil’s Petrobras, the Spanish-Argentine company Repsol YPF, British companies British Gas and British Petroleum and France’s Total are the major international players in the Bolivan oil economy—it is nonetheless an occurrence of some importance. The previous round of nationalizations-from the 1960’s and 1970’s—of course led to a rise in international arbitration as a means of dispute settlement among multinational corporations and sovereigns–a trend which profoundly changed transantional dispute settlement–and then to the era of privatizations in the 1980’s and 1990’s, undoing the earlier privatizations.
With these actions in Bolivia and similar moves in Venezuela, it seems in some countries the pendulum may be swinging back. How much of a swing this will be and whether there will be long term effects on topics as disparate as the oil economy, the politics of Latin America, and the shape of international law remains to be seen. In any case, it is a reminder that globalization is not unstoppable and that economic liberalization is a political decision, not a historical inevitability. What may be most interesting in all of this is how Bolivia, Cuba, and Venezuela are taking techniques used by the U.S., such as trade liberalization pacts, and re-imagining them to address illiteracy and unemployment as well.
More than possibly giving a rise to some interesting new ICSID cases, or imaginative new treaties, perhaps we should take this as a reminder that it is time we started paying a bit more attention to the effects of the rich-poor gap between and within nations.
Yes, absolutely ‘it is [high] time we started paying a bit more attention to the effects of the rich-poor gap between and within nations.’ Toward that end, I will be so impertinent as to suggest the following titles are essential to an intelligent ethical, economic and political grasp of the fundamental issues intrinsic to its causes and effects and, more importantly, to what might be involved in addressing it (i.e., closing the gap):
Anand, Sudhir, Fabienne Peter and Amartya Sens, eds. Public Health, Ethics, and Equity. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004.
Barry, Brian. Why Social Justice Matters. Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2005.
Barry, Brian and Robert E. Goodin, ed. Free Movement: Ethical Issues in the Transnational Migration of People and of Money. University Park, PA: University of
Pennsylvania Press, 1992.
Barry, Christian and Thomas W. Pogge, eds. Global Institutions and Responsibilities: Achieving Social Justice. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2005.
Cohen, G.A. Self-Ownership, Freedom and Equality. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1985.
Cohen, Stanley. States of Denial: Knowing about Atrocities and Suffering. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2001.
Dreze, Jean and Amartya Sen. Hunger and Public Action. Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press, 1989.
Dreze, Jean, Amartya Sen and Athar Hussain, eds. The Political Economy of Hunger. Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press, 1995.
Dasgupta, Partha. Human Well-Being and the Natural Environment. New York: Oxford University Press, 2001.
Dasgupta, Partha. An Inquiry into Well-Being and Destitution. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993.
De Greiff, Pablo and Ciaran Cronin, eds. Global Justice and Transnational Politics. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001.
Elster, Jon. Making Sense of Marx. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1985.
Elster, Jon and Karl Ove Moene, eds. Alternatives to Capitalism. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1989.
Falk, Richard. Predatory Globalization: A Critique. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1999.
Farmer, Paul. Pathologies of Power: Health, Human Rights, and the New War on the Poor. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2003.
Fidler, David P. International Law and Public Health: Materials on and Analysis of Global Health Jurisprudence. Ardsley, NY: Transnational, 2000.
Goodin, Robert E. Protecting the Vulnerable: A Reanalysis of Our Social Responsibilities. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1985.
Goodin, Robert E. Reasons for Welfare: The Political Theory of the Welfare State. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988.
Gould, Carol C. Globalizing Democracy and Human Rights. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2004.
Hausman, Daniel M. and Michael S. McPherson. Economic Analysis and Moral Philosophy. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1996.
Held, David. Gobal Covenant: The Social Democratic Alternative to the Washington Consensus. Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2004.
Hepple, Bob. Labour Laws and Global Trade. Portland, OR: Hart, 2005.
Nussbaum, Martha C. Women and Human Development: The Capabilities Approach. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2000.
Nussbaum, Martha C. and Amartya Sen, eds. The Quality of Life. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993.
O’Brien, Robert, Anne Marie Goetz, Jan Aart Scholte, Marc Williams. Contesting Global Governance: Multilateral Economic Institutions and Global Social Movements. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2000.
Peffer, R.G. Marxism, Morality, and Social Justice. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press,
1990.
Pogge, Thomas W. World Poverty and Human Rights. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2002.
Pogge, Thomas W., ed. Global Justice. Malden, MA: Blakwell, 2001.
Postone, Moishe. Time, Labor, and Social Domination: A Reinterpretation of Marx’s Critical Theory. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1993.
Sen, Amartya. Development as Freedom. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1999.
Shrader-Frechette, Kristin. Environmental Justice: Creating Equality, Reclaiming Democracy. New York: Oxford University Press, 2002.
Singer, Peter. One World: The Ethics of Globalization. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press,
2002.
Smith, Richard, Robert Beaglehole, David Woodward and Nick Drager, eds. Global Public Goods for Health. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003.
Unger, Peter. Living High & Letting Die: Our Illusion of Innocence. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996.
Zucker, Ross. Democratic Distributive Justice. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2001.
Erratum: in first title, ‘Amartya Sen.’
Please add to the above, the works of Ha-Joon Chang, Reader in the Political Economy of Development, Faculty of Economics, University of Cambridge: http://www.econ.cam.ac.uk/faculty/chang/
In addition, Professor Anwar Shaikh, of the Dept. of Economics at New School University, has a couple of papers that critique core elements of the so-called Washington Consensus, otherwise known as neoliberal economics. In particular, he explains why wholesale trade liberalization is not the answer to closing ‘the gap.’ See, for example, ‘Globalization and the Myth of Free Trade,’ and ‘The Economic Mythology of Neoliberalism,’ available at his homepage: http://homepage.newschool.edu/~AShaikh/index.html
Finally, see Vandana Shiva’s take on the Doha round at the WTO: http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?ItemID=9308
and
http://www.zmag.org/sustainers/content/2005-12/26shiva.cfm
Finally, see too Roger’s post of March 21: ‘Trade Liberalization Winners and Losers,’ with its link to the report of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace on the impact of trade liberalization on developing countries, so-called LDCs (not the most felicitous phrase insofar as it usually assumes the model of development to be emulated here is that of the more affluent nations of the northern hemisphere; i.e., that there are not alternative models of industrial development and economic growth sensitive to regional historical, political and cultural conditions).