Mozaik 8/2001 Globalisation: A Challenge to our Faith?

Proper and Apt The present issue of MOZAIK deals with the topic of globalisation. As you will see, it can take on many meanings; even opposite ones. Therefore hereby we do not intend to reach a consensus on how to define the word; rather to offer a more or less holistic approach to globalisation as a multi-faceted process.

You will find students and young intellectuals arguing that economic globalisation is evil; others will say that we need more globalisation; again others will try to clarify which goods we need to globalise.

MOZAIK is an ecumenical journal, gathering authors from all Christian denominations. This is an international journal as well, collecting essays from different regions and continents of the globe.

MOZAIK is the journal of the World Student Christian Federation, but it is an open forum for our many sister organisations. We collect articles from students and young intellectuals, whose generation is destined to shape the future of Christianity within some decades.

Ecumenism for us does not only mean a kind of common working-together among the Christian denominations. It is rather a whole approach to the crucial questions of Christian thought, a mentality to handle the differences and different spiritual and intellectual richnesses.

We have a vision of our common ecumenical and global future. This vision of us is not only present in our words; if you can read between the lines, you will discover it in the structure of the journal, in the balances and equilibriums keeping it together, in its linear and global cohesion, or in the inner dialogical character which shines through the text.

MOZAIK has just started a new beginning, coming to an age in the new millennium: it has a new editor-in-chief, the venue of publishing has changed from Great Britain to Hungary, the whole layout and design is reshaped.

Let me thank wholeheartedly to Miklós SZALAY (or, as we put the names in order in Magyar: SZALAY Miklós) for his enthusiasm and care in giving an outlook to the journal, and especially for his ironic “proper and apt” illustrations. I am also very grateful to all the authors who contributed to this publication.

Finally, I would like to wish a blessed reading to all of you, keeping in mind the need for contemplation on burning issues. Why? Qvi non est hodie, cras minvs aptvs erit. The reason for small intellectual discourses, such as in think tanks, is well summarized in a previous “global” language as well.

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Peter C I A C C I O

Economy:

A

Challenge

Mozaik, the periodical you hold in your hands is a monographic and monothematic issue on globalisation. When I write the word “globalisation” on my personal computer, the program I am using does not recognise it as an existing word, even if both the program and the operating system are means of globalisation.

THE QUESTION OF DEFINITION Globalisation is a word recently used very often. But we do not agree on its meaning. What is globalisation? A blessing for the welfare of all people? Or the face of Satan today? A historical situation caused by the end of a two-block world and the rising of the communication revolution? Or a new totalitarian ideology?

Surely, one of our tasks, as Christians and students, is defining the word ‘globalisation’. We have to understand the world in which we live, because God calls us to live in it now and to try to make it a better world.

The subjects we are studying help us in this.

But, personally, I believe we do not have to focus too much on the word globalisation, because it can be an obstacle to our understanding. Many people, after knowing the consequences of globalisation, often say: “This is terrible, but what can I do? I am really powerless regarding this enormous phenomenon.”

BEING POWERLESS As Christians, we could say that this is a wrong feeling. God shows us how important simple people can be. The family which God gave to Jesus was made up of a carpenter and of a young woman, pregnant without being married; Jesus was not born in a proper place. The friends Jesus chose were marginalised people: first of all fishermen, but let us not forget the tax collectors and the prostitutes. Jesus died on a cross with two thieves. And to the one who recognised His innocence, Jesus promised the paradise. On the morning of Easter, the first people to know and to believe in the Resurrection were women (we know how they are still marginalised today!). Then we should not forget the Holy Spirit, who enlightens our lives as individuals and as communities. In a few words, the love of God in creating us and in sending Jesus and the Holy Spirit to us shows how important we are for God. But the feeling of being powerless regarding globalisation is real.

ECONOMY AS A MATTER OF FAITH The Synod 2001 of the Methodist and Waldensian church in Italy (my church), approved a document on 2

to our

Faith?

globalisation, stating that economy is a matter of faith, because it is not a natural process (as many liberal extremists believe), but the way humans relate to money. It is a choice. When we Christians make a choice, we must take into account the most important choice of our lives: answering God's call.

Personally, I agree with the statement of my church.

When God calls us and we respond, our life changes.

The gift of the faith becomes part of our life, if not, all of our life. Money was made to have an easier life.

The way we use it is part of how we choose to live. We may use it to buy a nice gift, an ice cream, a book; we may offer it for the church or for other organisations (e.g. for WSCF). We may use money very badly, to hurt others (we could do it today).

THE WAY TO USE MONEY Today, it is not that easy to understand the best way to use our money. The message we receive is that the welfare of people is not the important thing, but keeping the market alive, by any necessary means. We have nice toys for little children made by other children. We have nice shoes made by exploited women.

We can eat chocolate and bananas, but the workers in the poor countries do not eat bread or drink clean water. We may buy an ice cream made from the milk of a mad cow. If we do not want to have animal milk, we can buy soy milk, but most of the soy is genetically modified. We could watch a movie produced by a company, whose wealth comes from cigarettes or arms.

ALERT AND INFORMED What can we do? We can do our best to be alert and informed. We can rethink our way to use money; we can rethink our way to relate to the rest of humankind; we can rethink our lives in the light of our faith.

In Luke 19, Jesus enters in the house of Zaccheus, who, then, changes his life. To the conversion of Zaccheus, Jesus says: “Today salvation has come to this house.” In the same chapter, Jesus tells an economic parable: the three servants who have to do business with the money of the master. The one who refuses to use the money, is punished by his master.

We see that the Bible does not give us a clear solution on the use of money, on the role of economy in our life. We should not be afraid in using money, but we must take into account our master, our God. This is why we should think about whether today's economy is an obstacle to our relationship to God, to our faith.

We hope this issue of MOZAIK will help and enrich the discussions in our student Christian movements and in the whole Federation.

• Peter Ciaccio is a Methodist from the Italian SCM, FGEI. He is a member of WSCF ERC since 1999, in the last two years as vice-chair.

He is a student at the Waldensian Faculty of theology in Roma.

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Silke L E C H N E R :

WSCF: a Pro-Globalisation Movement Coming to Terms with Terms To label our enemies and adversaries is a powerful means to discredit them.

Let us have a look on the aims of the Federation in the light of solidarity, justice and equality, which we also stand for. What is the globalisation like, which we want?

ANTI-GLOBALISATION PROTEST Yes, you have read correctly: pro-globalisation not anti-globalisation movement. But what sort of globalisation are we talking about?

Protesting at meetings of the G7/8 (the meeting of the richest industrial countries’ leaders), the WTO (World Trade Organisation), the IMF (International Monetary Fund) etc. has a long tradition. Since the WTO meeting in Seattle, however, the media has started to focus more closely on this “other” side of politico-economic summits. But what sort of image are they transferring by their reporting?

The term “anti-globalisation” has been attached to those people protesting at meetings of the above mentioned organisations - and has become particularly popular since the Genoa G7/8-summit in July of this year. I actually think “anti-globalisation” is a label used by the media as a means of discreditation or even as a weapon. What does “anti” refer to, and should the counter-movement identify itself with this label?

AN INTERCONNECTED WORLD-WIDE SOCIETY Globalisation is a term we use in an inflationary way - it is in the title of articles, it figures in themes of seminars and conferences, it is in the title of this MOZAIK. “Globalisation” is attached to communication, economy, culture, social phenomena; to fashion, food and music. It is such a broad and widely used term that you could actually consider it to mean nothing and everything. Maybe because it is such a ubiquitous term nowadays we simply accept it uncritically without reflecting on the actual meaning of “globalisation”. And thus we (assuming that we identify with protesters at G7/8 summits and similar events) often accept the label “anti-globalisation” without questioning it at all.

The term “globalisation” from its basic meaning, however, can be defined as the process by which individuals and groups in geographically separate societies are becoming increasingly interconnected. It can be seen as a gradual development of a world-wide society.

DISCREDITING THE PROPOSALS Considering this definition and its implications I think we should be more than careful to avoid the term “anti-globalisation”. Labelling the protesters of Genoa as such saves those in the centre of the criticism - the G7/8, IMF, WTO to name just a few - to deal with the arguments of the protest movement. The 200.000 people protesting were not simply against something but had concrete proposals as to how the globalisation process could be formed in a different way. The ATTAC movement, for example, suggests to introduce a Tobin Tax, to grant debt relief to the poorest countries, etc. (see an other article in this MOZAIK). By saying these people are simply “anti” and by only showing the handful of protesters who were using violence, the media discredits the movement and thereby finds a good excuse for not having to listen to the protesters’ proposals.

AN ANTI-INEQUALITY, ANTI-INJUSTICE MOVEMENT What the “Genoa-people” are against, however, is the form and direction of the current globalisation process. The so-called “anti-globalisation” movement is against market-driven corporate globalisation that follows the neoliberal economic model. It is against a specific form of globalisation, which means further concentration of wealth and power in the hands of a few on the one hand, and poverty and marginalisation for the world’s majority on the other. Those opposed to continue along this way are fighting for an inclusive globalisation based on cooperation and solidarity.

Thus the movement may better be described as an anti-inequality, anti-injustice movement.

A PRO-SOLIDARITY, PRO-JUSTICE MOVEMENT And even these terms do not seem to be appropriate: being “anti” usually means that you are against something but do not really know an alternative. Since the current movement, e.g. embodied by the internationally ever so fast growing ATTAC, indeed has alternatives to offer, we should look for some positive terms. We could describe the movement as pro-solidarity, projustice, pro-environment and pro-democracy.

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BINDING AND FAIR RULES Or, we could go even one step further and fight for the interpretation and a deeper understanding of the term “globalisation”.

Taking the definition I gave above, globalisation should be understood as a political process, in which we struggle for internationally binding and fair rules for the world’s society. Currently 20% of the world’s population owns about 80% of the world’s resources (according to UNDP), the current corporate-driven process will increase this imbalance even more. A globalisation process in our understanding would decrease this imbalance and would gradually get closer to a fifty-fifty proportion.

Using the term »globalisation« in the just described way, it is actually us who are fighting for a globalised world, while they are the institutions like IMF, World Bank and the political leaders, who are against globalisation.

WSCF is a global movement - since the beginning of our organisation we have been trying to bring Christian students from different regions together. We have thus actually started a globalisation process with our foundation in 1895. It is also in the tradition of WSCF and many SCMs to engage in social justice issues, to fight for equality between South and North, to envision a just world order. Let us continue in this fight and be active as a “pro-globalisation” movement.

• Silke Lechner is a member of SCM Germany, a PhD Student in Political Science, the Chair of WSCF Europe.

For comments please write to: S.Lechner@lse.ac.uk

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Nerija P U T I N A I T Ë

Globalisation: Fears and Hopes Usually from a theoretical and a practical point of view globalisation is evaluated as a doubtless evil, which should be condemned.

The Lithuanian philosopher argues that “globalisation” is only a theoretical phantom, and in reality we need “more of globalisation”. What does it mean to be “globalised”?

TRUE GLOBAL FEARS First of all, globalisation means a certain kind of process. But what kind of process does it mean? We can speak about “economical globalisation”, “cultural globalisation”, “criminal globalisation”, but these concepts do not represent what “globalisation” really means, and why we should fear it.

From the ethical point of view in the realm of environmental ethics we can speak about the danger of damaging the “global ecosystem” and the disastrous consequences of changing of “global climate”. Global warming-up is a real fear, as irresponsible actions of human beings could cause the loss of human race.

The only reason of fear facing any global processes could only be the real threat for human race.

A SYMBOLIC THREAT Nevertheless, what concerns the globalisation fears, we cannot speak about real, but about a socalled “symbolic threat”. It means that globalisation is usually conceived as a universal cause of all evils that appear in the changing world. For example, in Lithuania we speak about the loss of “national identity”, of “values”, and of course, of “moral virtues”.

Certainly, all these evils are prescribed to “globalisation”.

How should we fight against these phenomena?

Should we close ourselves, turn our sights to unseen past and cherish our pure perfect world, which is usually associated with paganism and knight-ruling state? This is a world that has never really existed. So the fear of “globalisation” can be rightly described as a fear when facing the future, a fear to take responsibility for our contemporary life.

CREATING CONFLICT AND DIVISION I see one more very important aspect of “globalisation” fears.

MOZAIK

“Globalisation” is usually José Molina presented as an anonymous force, strange, incomprehensible and unpredictable.

It is a powerful force that should be tamed or harness.

For a person who lived under the Soviet regime, this definition evokes a lot of fears, equipped by the Soviet ideology and based on the Marxist conception of “conflict”.

Terms such as “class of bourgeoisie”, “capitalistic world”, “enemies of working class” are no more concrete or abstract constructs than “ g l o b a l i s a t i o n ” .

“Globalisation” is also a sign or a stimulus to divide the world into two: the globalised world and the notyet-globalised; states which make globalisation and which undergo it; states which profit from globalisation and those which are exploited. In the post cold war world “globalisation” has taken the role of the only criterion for a new division.

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REYES

Globalisation: a

Latin-American

perspective

CHOICE AND RESPONSIBILITY Does “globalisation” have its limits?

Today everyone says that globalisation is “limitless”, it influences everybody and everything; that even the Antarctic is globalised, and that we cannot escape it. But the truth is that the human being as a rational being, and also as a creature of God cannot be “globalised”. One is personally free to act and takes responsibility for one’s deeds. As a creature, one has no need to create one’s identity, one only has to find one’s proper place in the changing world.

It can be stated now that “globalisation” does not exist. The word “globalisation” is only a very imperfect theoretical construct; in most cases a quite erroneous one. Today we could only claim for “more globalisation”. The “totally globalised” world would give no opportunity to divide it into two big “conflicting” parts and would present one more hope for an even more peaceful and friendly life.

• Nerija PUTINAITË is a doctor of philosophy, a research-fellow in the Lithuanian Institute for Philosophy and Sociology; her main interests being Immanuel Kantís practical philosophy and contemporary ethics. She is a member of the Lithuanian SCM.

With the fall of the Berlin Wall, the polarisation, which had existed in the world, came to an end, or at least seemingly came to an end.

The economic model known as liberal capitalism has been imposed to the world. This strengthening of neoliberalism has been especially harmful in Latin America.

THE INVISIBLE HAND NO ONE SEES Although some growth at macroeconomic level has been attained, the social costs, however, have been disastrous as numbers of the World Bank prove: in one of its reports the World Bank estimates that 34% of Latin America’s population lives in poverty. According to the same report this number is expected to grow. This is the situation we are currently facing in the region.

The process known as globalisation of economy has caused an enormous gap between the social classes on the continent. Those who talk about the advantages of this model (transfer of technology, free trade, etc.) do not realize that it is only certain privileged sectors of our societies who have access to these advantages. The total liberalization of markets (as a result of the World Trade Organization’s foundation) has created terribly unjust situations for the small producers who - deprived of state incentives (another neoliberal policy) - cannot compete with the great multinationals. Adam SMITH and his “invisible hand” theory are the ones who support the whole economic doctrine behind globalisation.

This situation make us raise various questions: Do the LatinAmerican countries, and “Third World” countries in general, gain any benefit at all in this process? Or are we possibly just seen as en enormous market for others? Does a real concern for social issues exist behind “globalization”? To us the answer is clear: the only interest existing here is of economic nature and 5

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this excludes social investment and concern for the environment (as an example we can remember the US refusal to sign the Kyoto Protocol).

GLOBAL IMPERIALISM Nobel prize winner Adolfo Pérez ESQUIVEL said, in a conference given some time ago, that there is no difference between what we before called imperialism and what we now call globalisation. There is something of truth in this, taking into account, however, that the actors have changed. What we know as imperialism was a strategy to impose policies of the USState Department in our region during the last decades. In the globalisation process, on the contrary, the big companies and corporations are the protagonists, supported by the economic policies implemented by the governments of each country.

ADJUSTMENT TO PAY FOREIGN DEBTS We have reached the peak of seeing how political leaders, apparently “social democrats”, have laid their hands on the neoliberal model as a means to achieve an economic increase.

The International Monetary Fund (IMF) with its “structural adjustment programs”, whose only aim is to assure the repayment of the external debt, is yet another instrument of this politics. As the Latin American Jesuit Provincials emphasized in a document on neoliberalism published in 1996, the payment of the foreign debts “forces states to drastically cut social investment”. It is what prevents an improvement of the living conditions of our societies’ most marginalised sectors.

THE HOMOGENISATION OF CONSUMPTION: MCDONALDISATION This phenomenon is not only economic. We also have a “globalisation of culture” or, as Eduardo GALEANO calls it, a “McDonaldisation”.

As a part of the interrelation of global markets, a global consumption culture has been created. The result has been an homogenisation of cultures, fashion and ways of dressing.

The Anglo-Saxon culture has been imposed in the region, especially among the younger generation.

Under the pretext of the “material progress” we have been invaded by perspectives and lifestyles which are completely strange to our reality. Peoples that do not adhere to this stream, like Cuba, have been condemned to a brutal isolation.

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WORLDWIDE RESISTANCE The same has happened to aboriginal peoples in Latin America, who can be overlooked by the marketplace logic as long as they are not consumers. On the other hand, we also have worldwide resistance movements who struggle against this “New Order”, like the protests in Seattle, the conferences promoted by the Peoples’ Global Action movement, or the Zapatist National Liberation Army in Mexico.

Facing this complex phenomenon, what is the challenge for us as young Christians in Latin-America?

We cannot allow that our identity is taken away from us. It is our duty to denounce this inhuman economic model which deprives the poor of the minimum needed for human beings to lead a life in dignity.

SOLIDARITY GLOBALISATION We do not believe that the globalisation process is irreversible as do some prophets of neoliberalism (and some its critics, like Fernado Henrique CARDOSO). We rather think that we have to impose a new model, a “solidarity globalisation”, which makes sure a fairer distribution of wealth and which allows aborigines and Negro people and all those excluded in our region to take part. As it was stated in the WCC Consultation on Globalisation in Fiji in August 2001: our prophetic task is to “oppose to the distortions of economic globalisation”.

To conclude, I would like to quote Pope JOHN PAUL II who said in his encyclical letter Centesimus Annus: “We have seen that it is unacceptable to say that the defeat of so-called “Real Socialism” leaves capitalism as the only model of economic organization. It is necessary to break down the barriers and monopolies which leave so many countries on the margins of development, and to provide all individuals and nations with the basic conditions which will enable them to share in development.”

• José Molina REYES is from the Latin American Council of Churches’ Youth Program, working in Quito, Ecuador.

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Ingrid D R E Y E R

Globalisation

and

Media

Many Channels, Few Voices

As the number of mass media in the world is increasing, the number of owners is going down. Who owns the media of today, and how may the ownership affect news and other media products? An expert in communication explains the difference between a consumer and a citizen.

A HISTORIC VIEW ON THE MEDIA SECTOR It is very difficult to imagine the globalisation process without the existence of mass media. Media contributes strongly to the globalisation of society (art, culture, news, commercials, consumer culture, tourism and so on). Media themselves are also influenced by globalisation, through commercialisation and the appearance of multinational media conglomerates. This article will focus on the transnational conglomerates and how they are transforming mass media of today.

The development of mass media in the 19th and 20th century went hand in hand with the development of the nation states. In most countries, the formation of the press, radio and later the television was intertwined with the development of political parties, national cultural policies and so on. The mass media began as political or cultural institutions within the nation state, and played a significant role in the unfolding of democracy and for the enlightenment of the people. News media addressed solely a national audience.

As we all know, the situation today is very different, although many of the original public service institutions still exist (such as the BBC). Current media developments are taking place more or less autonomously from the development of political institutions. Media today are governed as commercial media enterprises, and not by national political or cultural obligations. To understand news in the modern media landscapes, one has to see it from the perspective of news as an international industry and business.

A NEW MEDIA UNIVERSE The four most obvious changes are the following.

First of all, the rise of transnational actors, who do not operate on the basis of a national unit, but who address a region, a language, an ethnic group etc., or the whole world as one. Secondly, there is the vertical and horizontal integration.

Thirdly, there is commercialisation; the original public service institutions served a certain nationĂ­s geopolitical strategies (e.g. keeping the British Empire together or maintaining the US propaganda against the Soviet Union). The transnational news services of today are predominantly of commercial nature.

Finally, there is the abundance (or overflow) of supply. The availability of news about events in the world has increased considerably; earlier, foreign news footage was a scarce resource; still, as we shall see, the end result is often an almost complete lack of pluralism and multilateralism.

MERGERS AND TRANSNATIONAL EMPIRES As in the business world and industry, the media world is also governed by the urge for mergers into ever larger and larger conglomerates, resulting in the existence of transnational media empires. This process began to wash over the corporate landscape in the 80s. The merger of AOL and Time Warner is the largest merger in the history of this sector. The conglomerates are to a large extent criss-crossing national borders.

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VERTICAL AND HORIZONTAL OWNERSHIP Vertical ownership “bears a logical relationship to the communications industry”. As an example, the Walt Disney Company is a vertical corporation that owns newspapers, television, magazines, radio and books. In recent years, one also sees a tendency of mergers with the teleindustry, resulting in a situation where the corporations control every step of the process.

These steps are the creation of content, the control of the delivery system, and the wire into the home. Or, as stated by Rupert MURDOCH, the owner of News Corporation: “Our reach is unmatched around the world. We are reaching people from the moment they wake up until they fall asleep”.

Horizontal ownership is when there is a lack of logical relation. For example, companies in the nuclear defence family Westinghouse and General Electric - own CBS and NBC. We see that the same corporations, who deliver the news, also have interests in other fields.

As Ben BAGDIKIAN put it: “Today there is hardly any American industry that does not own a major media outlet, or a major media outlet grown so large that it does not own a firm in major industry.”

CONFLICTING INTERESTS This may obviously result in conflicting interests, and media history is full of examples, just to mention a few for illustration: The American TV-channel NBC, owned

by General Electric, was the only one not to bring forward the news about a big boycott against General Electric. Its owner, Disney, forced the TV-channel ABC not to broadcast a critical story about a Disney-park.

After the merger of Time and Warner, the magazine Time brought more articles and reviews than before about Warner movies. Silvio BERLUSCONI and Rupert MURDOCH are known to use even stronger force to control content in the media they own. BERLUSCONI’s double role as Italian prime minister and media emperor became disturbingly apparent in the handling of the recent Genoa incident by Italian mass media.

COMMERCIAL PRIORITIES AFFECT NEWS However, the emerging of media monopolies and their direct control of media content is one thing, but there are other and more indirect effects that may be less immanent but more dangerous: one of them is 8

the commercialisation of media. Mass media of today are increasingly obliged to produce a profit in the market place, as they are parts of private corporations whose bottom line is to earn money. News is, generally subject to a process of commodification.

There is a strong competition on how to capture the audience and get top ratings, in order to attract advertisers. To obtain this goal, one looks at each other and copies, both formats (for instance breakfast news, live interviews), editorial choice (crime news, health news, reality TV) and also the news stories and footage themselves.

YNCHRONISATION AS REPRODUCTION OF DISCOURSE Increased transparency leads to a synchronisation of editorial decision-making, something that is most obvious during international crises. Because of the availability of breaking news and live-coverage from transnational broadcasters (such as CNN), the newsrooms in different countries are able to follow how an important story develops.

This fact in itself is an incentive to give priority to the very same story. Because of the limited resources, national and local newsrooms have limited time to develop an independent perspective on a story, and they may then more easily accept the initial framing of an international event.

Synchronisation therefore not only entails coverage of the same event, but also reproduction of a specific discourse. This means that in a world where we have never had more TV-channels, radio channels and newspapers and magazines, there is still reason to believe that these quantities do not necessarily mean that the voices are more differentiated.

A GLOBAL PUBLIC SPHERE? The notion of a global media reality may lead us to believe that a global public sphere has emerged, as in the case of large public opinion formations in times of crises, but, it is on the contrary most often the case that political, economical or military decisions and actions concerning transnational or global matters take place without intense public attention.

The globalisation of economy, governance and culture has not been followed by a similar globalisation of the public sphere. The early media were part of a national debate and cultural room, whereas industrial and commercial interests guide the media develop-

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ment of today. This means that in contrast to national public service media, the global media do not serve as media for public debates in the same way.

CONSUMERS, NOT CITIZENS The media are serving an audience in the market place: an audience of private, individual consumers, instead of “citizens”. Seen from the point of view of political economy, the globalisation of media industries is of no benefit to civil society. On the contrary, it represents the empowerment of large commercial interests at the expense of civil society and democracy.

Citizens’ ability to influence public debate diminishes when large media industries are no longer accountable to national political regulation. Instead of an opening of the public space, this is all about privatisation. We may need to abandon the blind idea of a global, public sphere and replace the term with “imperialist, private sphere”.

NOT EVEN THE INTERNET GOES FREE The Internet challenges the traditional news services in many ways, and the net will gradually blur the boundaries between national, foreign and international news media. In many cases, we have seen that the Internet is a source of information when other media fail to report the truth, as for instance after Genoa. The Internet carries a large potential for creating sub-cultures and new ways of distributing alternative news and information.

Unlike press and broadcasting, the Internet makes all news services in the world potentially available.

However, I would very much like to stress the word “potentially”. The Internet is open to anything, and you can find whatever material you want.

Nevertheless, the abundance of material on the net makes the question of choice a matter of consumer knowledge about available services.

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websites continues to rise astronomically, web users are actually spending more time on fewer sites.

Most of these are major news or gateway sites. On the top ten list, you will find the following: Yahoo, AOL, MSN, Geocities, Netscape, Lycos and so on. A closer examination of these top cybermedias illustrates the news source concentration that we are also witnessing in the traditional broadcast media.

CONCENTRATION OF OWNERSHIP Behind these Internet news services you will find mostly - and in many cases only - a handful of news suppliers like Reuters, ABC, and Associated Press. This means that the various transnational media giants have also succeeded in taking control over quite a large part of the Internet.

The ownership concentration in global media may have many different outcomes. Among the more serious ones is the question of what happens during international conflicts. There has been done a lot of media research on globalisation of war news, especially on the Western media coverage of the Gulf War and the Kosovo bombing. Today this question is again urgent, as the US-Afghani conflict is unfolding before our eyes and we do not know which news sources to trust.

• Ingrid DREYER is a long time member of NKSF, the SCM Norway. She graduated in mass communication and currently works as an information consultant at the Norwegian Council for Higher Education.

This article is based on a workshop led by her at the WSCF Globalisation conference, hosted by SCM of Sweden (KRISS) in Höör, in August 2001.

FEWER IS MORE Branding of news and media services has acquired new importance, and we are currently witnessing a “battle of brands” on the Internet, where the big media corporations try to consolidate themselves.

The industry research group MediaMatrix has recently reported that although the number of published 9

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Martin S M E D J E B A C K :

Globalisation

and

War

The Fight for Power and Wealth “They gave us parrots,

cotton, spears and lots of other things which they traded against glasspearls and bells.

They carry no weapons and do not know of any. They would be excellent servers. With fifty men we could easily conquer them and get them to do what we want.”

This is Christopher COLUMBUS’ assessment when for the first time in 1492 he sets his feet in the new world, on Haiti.

A TRAGIC DISCOVERY The mission COLUMBUS had from Spain was not to civilise the world or to christen the savages, but to conquer new territories and to bring home gold and spices. In the hunt for these treasures there were many lives taken. Within two years, half of Haiti’s 250.000 people died through murder, mutilation or suicide.

The following occupation of the land and genocide of the indigenous population of North- and South America is one of the most gruesome tragedies in human history. Still up to this day, Columbus Day is celebrated with admiration and pried in the memory of this “great explorer”. In 1492 the goal was power and wealth. Are we less greedy in modern history?

THE WAR CONTINUES At the beginning of the 20th century two superpowers emerged: the Soviet Union and the United States. They were representatives of a war between two ideologies, communism and capitalism, and started a fierce battle to divide the world. On the one side, countless millions suffered under communist oppression in Central and Eastern Europe, Cambodia, Afghanistan and in other countries.

On the other side, a huge military complex was built in the US to fight “the evil empire” as one of the US presidents called the Soviet Union. Hundreds of billions of roubles and dollars were spent yearly on military costs in the 1980s, which money would have been enough to give food, healthcare and education for everyone in need on earth, many times over.

Nowadays it is also recognised that US politicians greatly exaggerated the military capacity 10

of the Soviet Union.

The US policy at the time of the cold war was guided by the “domino-effect principle”. If only one country could build up a successful socialistic society it could “trick” other countries to also become socialistic. In this way the US could lose its influence and power in the whole Two-Thirds World, since independent countries may refuse US companies to enter their markets. The US engaged in military interventions or tolerated massmurders in order to fight socialism in Nicaragua, Chile, Afghanistan, Iraq, Vietnam and Indonesia and in many other countries.

NEW HUMANITARIAN WARS During the last ten years we have heard about another kind of warfare: humanitarian military intervention. The United Nation’s security council took the decision to invade Iraq after its attack on Kuwait, NATO forces bombed Yugoslavia and now US forces are bombing Afghanistan to fight against terrorism. It is said that these wars are fought to avoid a greater evil, to save lives and protect people from dictators or

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terrorists. The question is whether this is really a new kind of war or the old motives of greed and power lie behind the nice rhetoric.

Today the population of Afghanistan suffers because a terrorist network has chosen their country as their homebase. US bombs kill civilians who never heard about Osama BIN LADEN. We do not know how many hundreds or thousands of people have been killed in this war. What we do know is that a third of the population of Afghanistan, 7 out of 22 million Afghans, are on the brink of starvation.

Because of the bombings almost all the international relief organisations have been forced out of the country leaving the people without food and shelter. The humanitarian part of the US mission is to throw 57.000 packages of food from airplanes. This amount of food is obviously totally inadequate for a population where one third is soon starving, even if all were found.

INCONSEQUENT FRIENDSHIPS There are many reasons to doubt the humanitarian feature of these new wars. One reason is that today we fight against powers that we supported yesterday. Iraq used to be a good friend to the US, which gave him weapons and resources in his fight against Iran. The Taliban in Afghanistan also got generous support from the US during their war against the Soviet Union. The Taliban at that time was not different from today, suppressing women and punishing everybody who broke the very strict religious laws.

Yesterday they were called freedom fighters. Today they are terrorists.

Another reason to question the good intentions of the US is its inconsequent behaviour. If its most important goal were to protect freedom and human rights then it would act also in its country where the oppression is often even worse. Israel has been illegally occupying Palestine for many decades turning Palestine into a prison with very little resources and executing many of those who try to resist. Turkey and Saudi Arabia are among the biggest human right abusers in the world. NATO does not do anything to change this. Instead, they support these regimes because they are their allies.

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DIFFERENT FACES OF ONE MEASURE Try to imagine the horrible terror attack against the World Trade Center in New York. Try to imagine that it would happen every day of the year. Then try to imagine that it happens five times a day. In the terrorist attack on September 11 about 6000 people died. Every day more than 30 000 people die because of lack of food, clean water or adequate health care.

It is not a dramatic event like the one in New York City. It is instead a slow agonising death. But the feeling of loss of relatives and friends is the same whether it happens in New York or in Ghana.

30.000 people die every day an unnecessary death in a world, which has never been richer. It is not a question of scarce resources.

It is feasible to give every human being on earth enough food, clothes, health care and education. The problem is the unequal distribution of resources. The richest person in the world owns as much as the total Gross National Product of the thirty poorest countries together. In Europe we eat ice cream for 11.000 million USD a year: an amount, which would be enough to give everybody on earth access to clean water or education.

DEFENCE OF PROPERTY The gap between rich and poor has been increasing more and more in the last couple of hundred years.

It started with the colonisation where we in Europe stole enough resources to start the industrialisation that produced our rich and powerful companies. Today it is our rich countries that set the rules for the global trade through the IMF, WTO and the World Bank. These powerful international institutions are on a neoliberal agenda, which force the poorest countries to open up its markets for huge Transnational Corporations, to slash its public spending and to privatise everything from electricity to hospitals.

In a world with so much inequality, people feel that they have to defend their resources in the best way they can. We can see this defence very clearly in countries like South Africa or the US. The rich peo11

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ple guard their property with elaborate security systems and personal guards. There are even whole communities that have high walls all around them and private armies of security staff to guard the precious property.

GLOBAL STAR WARS The same phenomena are present between countries. Europe has got its Schengen agreement that makes it very difficult for refugees to get a permit to stay on our continent. “Fortress Europe” protects its wealth from getting in the hands of the black man.

The US is building their missile defence system, also called Star Wars that apparently will have the ability to shoot down missiles aimed at the US and its allies. This will be the new military wall that will make sure that the rich stay rich.

It seems that rich countries still use their superior weapons to defend themselves and gain more resources and power.

The difference is that today they also have powerful global institutions like the WTO and the IMF, which can help them to keep their wealth and power by creating unfair trade agreements. War and globalisation works together to keep the status quo were the rich stay rich and the poor stay poor.

IMAGINE “Imagine there is no countries. It isn’t hard to do.

Nothing to kill or die for and no religion too. Imagine all the people living life in peace. Imagine no possessions. I wonder if you can. No need for greed or hunger. A brotherhood of man. Imagine all the people sharing all the world.” (John LENNON) I believe that it is a Christian responsibility to imagine another world, a better world. Jesus says to us: “You have the kingdom within you.” We have the potential within us to create something better, something beautiful. We do not have to start from scratch. There have been people before us that have imagined and started to plan a new world.

In 1998 the United Nations declared the “International decade for a culture of peace and non-violence for the children of the world (20012010)”. More than two hundred nations have signed and have started national committees that will implement the program. The World Council of Churches has designated this decade to be the “Decade to overcome violence”.

KINGDOM OF DIALOGUE If we work together on this, it could be the start12

ing point for a world of real cooperation where conflicts are solved not with aggression, but with dialogue and understanding, from the local level to the global; a world where we value human relationships and justice more than power and wealth.

Another good promise was made in 1996 at a United Nations conference when 186 countries agreed to reduce hunger and malnutrition to half by 2015, from about 800 million people today to 400 million by 2015. You could easily argue that it is cynical to accept as many as 400 million hungry people, but at least it is a target for a good improvement.

WHICH KIND OF COALITION? There is now a growing “coalition against terrorism”. Some countries have joined the coalition when the US and the EU agreed to stop complaining about the abuse of human rights, others joined when the US promised to stop sanctions or to give them more international aid. An international fight against terrorism is not a bad start in itself, only if it violates international law and kills people who have not been convicted of any crime. But there are more pressing matters than terrorism to tackle in the world today.

More and more people have begun to realise this and to act.

They have joined in new networks: local, national and global networks. People who imagine a world where there are justice, equality, freedom, a sustainable environment and peace. We might not all imagine the same world or have the same methods of reaching our goal, but we all agree that there should be more than two ways, not only to choose between capitalism and terrorism. I hope that through strong global coalitions of grassroots movements we may begin to discuss and plan for our common future. We have heard that the kingdom is within us. Now we “only” have to let it out and make it happen in our world.

• Literature: BLUM William, Killing Hope: US Military and CIA Interventions. 1995.

ZINN Howard, History of the American People. 1995.

• Martin SMEDJEBACK is a former president of the SCM Sweden. He is currently working as the organisation secretary of SweFOR, the Swedish Fellowship of Reconciliation, at their office in Stockholm.

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Silke L E C H N E R :

ATTAC Another World is Possible How many people could a conference featuring workshops like “How to Reform the International F i n a n c i a l Architecture” or “The Economic Crisis of Argentina” mobilise? Until recently probably just a handful of people - attending the congress of ATTAC Germany at the beginning of October was one of 2500 participants. How amazing!

BERLIN CONFERENCE With this article I would like to introduce this fast growing international movement to you - I am aware that to many of you ATTAC is well known and you may be even involved actively. However, publishing an issue of MOZAIK on “globalisation” at this moment, ATTAC cannot be left outside.

THE STORY OF ATTAC ATTAC has started in France: an article in Le Monde Diplomatique in December 1997 following the Asian financial crisis called for an application of the “Tobin Tax” on currency transactions. As a response to this article hundreds of letters from the readers were sent to the newspaper, people wanted to take up this issue.

The idea of creating an organisation came up and in 1998 ATTAC was founded. The acronym stands for “Association pour une Taxation des Transactions financiers pour l’Aide aux Citoyens” - Association for the Taxation of Financial Transactions in Aid of Citizens.

ATTAC France now has over 30.000 members and about 220 local committees.

ADDRESSING CORPORATE-LED-GLOBALISATION At present day ATTAC organisations exist in some 30 countries, including some in Latin America and Africa. The government as in Tunisia may persecute them. ATTAC has not yet spread to the “Anglo-Saxon” world, however there are many counterpart organisations in Britain, the US, Australia and others (and ATTAC UK is about to be launched). While there is no formal “ATTAC International”, members from different countries meet regularly and share the same goals. The Tobin Tax (see extra box) is still central to the agenda, but this agenda now addresses corporateled-globalisation much more broadly and takes in the international financial institutions and the WTO, financial markets and pension funds, tax havens,

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To b i n Ta x Today’s international finance can be compared to a global casino, where investors seeking quick profits bet huge sums around the clock. Up to $2 trillion a day is traded, and only 5% of all foreign exchange trading is necessary for financing trade in goods and services. All the rest is speculative activity. James Tobin, a Nobel prize-winning American economist, first proposed the Tobin Tax in 1978. The idea is to put a very small tax, say of 0,25%, on all foreign exchange transactions. This would deter speculation - short-term transactions would not be profitable any longer. The productive long-term investment, however, would remain intact, the tax would be of no consequence to this type as higher profits than 0,25% are usually expected. The dangerous volatility of global financial markets would be reduced, more stability provided. Apart from this effect which could help to avoid financial crises of which we have seen so many in the 90s (e.g. South-East Asia in ‘96/97) a Tobin Tax would have yet another positive effect: it would raise revenues (estimations say between $100-300 billion a year) which can be used for social development and poverty reduction all around the world.

For more information check: www.attac.org; www.ceedweb.org/iirp www.halifaxinitiative.org

third world debt and structural adjustment, genetically manipulated crops, hiring and firing policies used by transnationals to increase their stock value, denial of vital medicines to AIDS patients and the like.

TRANS-GENERATIONAL BROADNESS It is a very broad coalition not only on the international level, but also within every national ATTAC movement. At the ATTAC Congress in Germany, for example, there were people from all kinds of organisations - from groups involved in North-South issues, left-wing political groups, churches etc. And it was not only a broad mixture of organisations but also of people: maybe the movement can be described as a “trans-generational, trans-class, trans-gender and trans-national generation” (Susan GEORGE). For me personally, it has been very exciting to see people of all different age groups united in their aims: there were people who have been fighting for social justice issues since the 60s on the one hand, and many very young people who are still at school on the other.

Three generations were present at this Congress in October 2001 in Berlin discussing with each other and sharing their views.

Although the broadness of the coalition may also lead to difficult political discussions, I think this 13

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broadness is indeed the strength of ATTAC, not only in Germany but everywhere. It is no longer lots of different individual organisations working on their own and parallel to each other but organisations and people have joined together to fight for those aims they agree upon. I think the worldwide Jubilee 2000 movement has already worked in this way, ATTAC, however, seems to be even more capable of mobilising and uniting people.

NON-VIOLENT PROTEST One last aspect I would like to mention concerns the protest forms ATTAC stands for: during the congress in Germany there have been several statements clearly condemning violent means for protesting. If people are demonstrating violently at, say, a G7/8 summit, it cannot be done in the name of ATTAC. I think this is a crucial aspect for us as WSCF and for those student Christian movements thinking about joining ATTAC. Personally, I hope that this movement will continue to grow and I also hope that it will do so with the support and involvement of SCMers. In my view WSCF shares the demands of ATTAC and with our tradition of working on economic justice issues we could form a valuable part of this movement.

So let us be part of it!

ANOTHER WORLD IS POSSIBLE To conclude this introduction to ATTAC I would like to quote Susan GEORGE (an excellent scientist, fervent activist and highly admired person by me): “People with knowledge, confidence, numbers and organisation can unmake what some have made, they can undo what some have done. This movement has made a momentous discovery and revealed a dangerous truth: the corporate coup d’état, the triumph of rich over poor, market over society, rapacity over nature is not inevitable. And we will be heard.”

Another world is possible.

Claudia Patricia Restrepo M E J Í A

Some Days at the Agape Political Camp We can sense the richness and harmony of the globe in a small microcosm as well. A woman from Latin America tells us about her memories of Agape, a kind of holy place.

What does it mean to be a victim in dignity?

AGAPE POLITICAL CAMP In August 2001 I attended the Agape International Political Camp on the negative effects of globalisation and the collective construction of an alternative proposal.

Medellín (Colombia), two million inhabitants, capital of Antioquia in the Aburrà valley, surrounded by mountains, is my city. My people are kind and welcoming even if we live a daily social and political violence (one of the most violent cities of the world), unemployment, hunger, poverty and armed conflict. These problems are our “daily bread” and affect mostly women.

THE OTHER SIDE OF THE MOUNTAINS Before going to Italy, I thought of a tale from my childhood, where a little bear asks its father: “Dad, what’s on the other side of the mountains?”

This question was in my mind while travelling over the mountains of Antioquia.

In Agape, I met women and men from all over the world (Haiti, India, Indonesia, Czech Republic, UK, Holland, France, USA, Colombia and Cuba and, of course, Italy).

RICHNESS AND HARMONY Humankind, in its history, fought for power and domination, which have their origin in patriarchalism and is nurtured by xenophobia, homophobia, misogyny, racism, class discrimination, etc. But in Agape, there were relationships among “Northerners” and “Southerners”, heterosexuals and homosexuals, white, black and “mestizos”, young and mature people. How was it possible?

It was a collective experience and research where the encounter is the most important thing and human deepness is considered before any kind of political, religious, sexual orientation, race, ethnic and cultural difference. Diversity becomes richness, not a justification of domination.

WORLD DISORDER The preciousness of this was the experimental practical democracy, with each one of us express-

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broadness is indeed the strength of ATTAC, not only in Germany but everywhere. It is no longer lots of different individual organisations working on their own and parallel to each other but organisations and people have joined together to fight for those aims they agree upon. I think the worldwide Jubilee 2000 movement has already worked in this way, ATTAC, however, seems to be even more capable of mobilising and uniting people.

NON-VIOLENT PROTEST One last aspect I would like to mention concerns the protest forms ATTAC stands for: during the congress in Germany there have been several statements clearly condemning violent means for protesting. If people are demonstrating violently at, say, a G7/8 summit, it cannot be done in the name of ATTAC. I think this is a crucial aspect for us as WSCF and for those student Christian movements thinking about joining ATTAC. Personally, I hope that this movement will continue to grow and I also hope that it will do so with the support and involvement of SCMers. In my view WSCF shares the demands of ATTAC and with our tradition of working on economic justice issues we could form a valuable part of this movement.

So let us be part of it!

ANOTHER WORLD IS POSSIBLE To conclude this introduction to ATTAC I would like to quote Susan GEORGE (an excellent scientist, fervent activist and highly admired person by me): “People with knowledge, confidence, numbers and organisation can unmake what some have made, they can undo what some have done. This movement has made a momentous discovery and revealed a dangerous truth: the corporate coup d’état, the triumph of rich over poor, market over society, rapacity over nature is not inevitable. And we will be heard.”

Another world is possible.

Claudia Patricia Restrepo M E J Í A

Some Days at the Agape Political Camp We can sense the richness and harmony of the globe in a small microcosm as well. A woman from Latin America tells us about her memories of Agape, a kind of holy place.

What does it mean to be a victim in dignity?

AGAPE POLITICAL CAMP In August 2001 I attended the Agape International Political Camp on the negative effects of globalisation and the collective construction of an alternative proposal.

Medellín (Colombia), two million inhabitants, capital of Antioquia in the Aburrà valley, surrounded by mountains, is my city. My people are kind and welcoming even if we live a daily social and political violence (one of the most violent cities of the world), unemployment, hunger, poverty and armed conflict. These problems are our “daily bread” and affect mostly women.

THE OTHER SIDE OF THE MOUNTAINS Before going to Italy, I thought of a tale from my childhood, where a little bear asks its father: “Dad, what’s on the other side of the mountains?”

This question was in my mind while travelling over the mountains of Antioquia.

In Agape, I met women and men from all over the world (Haiti, India, Indonesia, Czech Republic, UK, Holland, France, USA, Colombia and Cuba and, of course, Italy).

RICHNESS AND HARMONY Humankind, in its history, fought for power and domination, which have their origin in patriarchalism and is nurtured by xenophobia, homophobia, misogyny, racism, class discrimination, etc. But in Agape, there were relationships among “Northerners” and “Southerners”, heterosexuals and homosexuals, white, black and “mestizos”, young and mature people. How was it possible?

It was a collective experience and research where the encounter is the most important thing and human deepness is considered before any kind of political, religious, sexual orientation, race, ethnic and cultural difference. Diversity becomes richness, not a justification of domination.

WORLD DISORDER The preciousness of this was the experimental practical democracy, with each one of us express-

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ing own ideas and feelings and explaining own political beliefs and ways of resistance. Each one of us could critically analyse this world “order” (meaning “disorder”), tragically antihuman and fool, where the only values are the capital, the interests of multinational companies and the financial system: this logic destroys humanity, solidarity, respect of the other, love, help or cooperation.

of oppression, pain and poverty of anyone, no matter where one belongs to, become my story, my life; where we listen carefully the voice of our ancestors and of our descendants to proceed to search a new possible political way: building the world we desire, finding in the others faith, friendship, solidarity, communication and planning together an alternative, even global, way out to the present global situation.

IDEAS TRAVELLING We need to defeat this logic that reduces human relationships to the market; it is necessary that new and alternative ideas, not only goods, may travel around the world. These ideas should be founded on freedom, respect, utopia and multiculturality. It is necessary that every human, every people, can build one’s own dream supported by one’s desires and by other people. This is why we need to be able to criticise: to distinguish between the differences, imposed by the capitalistic culture, and our diversities, founded on the research of peace, solidarity, common welfare and the respect of human dignity.

Agape and those living there sow this seed in the people attending the camps and the other activities, discovering new values to be carried out; for instance, living together, sharing the work for the common welfare, with simple rules (e.g. the time for lunch) organised not to overload the work of others (e.g. the cooks).

A HOLY PLACE Agape is a holy place because it is an alternative project to violence and domination in the world.

Every stone has been laid with efforts, but also with happiness, thinking a common project of freedom, responsibility and spirituality, based on the principles of humanity.

Now, back in Colombia, I continue to live as a mother and as a social assistance helping women. There is uncertainty from the new human tragedy and the threatening wind coming from these events and a possible third world war. All these facts demonstrate that on the other side of the mountain there are different people, different ways of living, different cultures, but with a common story.

FUN INVITES US TO DIALOGUE Shared voluntary work and human relationships develop a political view that is an alternative to globalisation, and this homogeneity erases the hierarchy of ethical diversities, in meeting universal languages, overcoming different languages: laugh, human contact, affection, gestures, dance, music, singing, talking, the Haitian “cric-crac” calling for attention and preparing us to communication. In brief, the fun that invites us to dialogue.

We meet the primal elements, our relationship to mother earth, the respect to the elders, the acknowledgement of a story, where past, present and future become one; where we understand that the sorrow of the other is also ours; where stories and experiences

VICTIMS WITH DIGNITY In one way or another, we have been victims of a capitalistic system, we have suffered the severity of one war after the other, imposed on us by interests that are the opposite of seeking the common good; so, with different strategies they want to divide us and manipulate us through a false information on our lives and on the social processes.

In this panorama, the sowed seed remains: Agape becomes a light of hope for people and organisations who continue to believe and work for their utopia without being discouraged, wishing that, step by step, we may unite our efforts towards a better, equal, right, respectful world, where men and women may exist and live with dignity.

(Courtesy of “Agape Immaginaria”, translated by Peter CIACCIO) • Claudia Patricia Restrepo MEJÍA is the coordinator of the Women, Gender and Development Program of the Corporation for Life “Women who Create” in Medellín, Colombia.

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Orinta Z. R O E T T I N G

Globalisation

and

Work

St. Steven’s Green Park in the middle of Dublin is one of the most precious solitude places in the city centre. On a busy shopping Saturday Grafton street starting just by the main arch of the park is just an opposite to this tender, lazy mood of the park. The scene of street music, light shopping bags, red colour of SALE signs and smell of beer from last evening develop into the contrastive metaphor of a fast economy city.

applicants from New Zealand with 11% refused from a total of 1453 are increasing. Ireland or Britain similar to Germany requires nurses and builders. All are welcome. The German government issued the “Decree on Residence Permits for Highly Qualified Foreign Information and Communications Technology Specialists” (which commenced on the 1st of August 2000 and will expire on the 31st of July 2008), which invites specialists with high qualifications to come to work for no longer than five years.

Those street musicians together with locals, who were refused for special jobs, like computer specialists or accountants, are not touched by successful employment achievements EU is proud of. Hence major concern in the global scale is less focused on the absence of the access to jobs, but now more fight for fare work conditions, life-sustaining activity or combating against horrific practices of child labour and slavery in some African or Indian towns and wealthier cities.

FAITH IN BETTER On the street and TV this phenomenon is called the Celtic Tiger, which is many-faced and everything depends on the work a person does. The cheer of a Caribbean dancer with a fire, sadness of Chinese mistuned guitar player, Irish minority Traveller kid, pushing a pub song about the emigrants to America into the cold air - they all work with the same sincere conviction, that this work is a job. In the same way an Irish computer software specialist takes his job as a way of life and after working hours rests from it in a pub.

“Faith in better life finds its expression”, remarks an elderly German tourist couple, as a Romanian, probably a studied musician, sings Italian opera artistically accompanied by an accordion. A young fellow student from Bucharest studying in an international business school says, he has nothing to do with him or any of the Roma women. These women are probably failed asylum-seekers, sewing in the same crowd by asking for a penny for their children holding to their long colourful skirts. Some of their babies have Celtic names given by the registry office. Undoubtedly the bond between all of those people is unmistakable cultural and economical world of reality, creating tensions between different people who experience new globalising Ireland.

LOW CLASS WORKING FORCE There has been ever the low class working force nearly in every better situated country, similar to current times Romanians in Ireland, historically Pakistanis or Indians in Britain, Filipinos in Korea, Chinese in Indonesia or Mexicans in US, which had less moral and actual entitlement for certain quality jobs. “Do you think I like working in this geriatric hospital? They think I do not have a clue about how to calm some ladies’ stomach-ache, as I pronounce a word “stomach” in an unusual way for them? I have considered giving her some camomile tea, but not milk as they do. Sometimes they just do not listen to me since I am even not an recognised nurse”, speaks one care-assistant from Dublin, she worked as children paediatrician in Kiev. Most of her colleagues are from Philippines. “Nice people”, she says, “but sad.

They only talk about their families at home and how to earn money. Men are often talking about the cockfights. I find hard to understand them. But they like working.”

Europe needs less paid workers and not everyone who comes receives the joy of working what she or he loves. Eastern Europeans or Africans do the job not every local would do. The European labour market are widening through immigration and through the successful European business abroad. Despite that fact, there are less people satisfied about their work achievements and contributions, as some labour surveys show, either because there is a need for special work counselling in different work places, or because less people want to share their jobs with others.

WORK HAS BECOME ACCESSIBLE TO ALL NATIONS? In the light of the statistics work permit grants for the foreigners in the UK, just an example, 4% of a total 1745 asking for work permits in the UK from Russia were refused in 1999-2000 as compared with 16

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CHANGING CHARACTER OF WORK The current phenomenon of xenophobia on the one side and ignorance on the other explains why it is so difficult to plan fare labour market for everyone in these times of great movement and migration.

Western society experiences consumerism that works according to the rules of exclusionary economic liberalism. Economic liberalism suggests that the individual’s successful employment and fulfilment of a need to work is a matter of individual’s decision. The individual is torn between the success of international businessman carrier and lovely underpaid local jobs. Both choices have positive and negative sides. A businessperson enjoys one’s global success and may loose the feeling for production one makes; one becomes a citizen of the world but irresponsible for local matters. Local worker may fight with a big corporation for survival of one’s small shop and may lose the importance of larger scale cooperation. Everyone encounters the risk of loosing identity and the feeling that one does a good, significant for humanity in a broader sense, and essential for life job.

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should talk less and sell more. You cannot work long in such alienating environment”, tells a student from Germany.

Attempt of self-protection as a nation (similar to personal identity) across geopolitical boundaries is the counteraction to the opening of global possibilities and entitlement to work wherever you like, want to live and have to live (Doty Roxanne LYNN, Racism, Desire, and the Politics of Immigration.

Millennium 1999/3.). Refugees, guest workers or migrant worker fall into these conditions of consumerism, mechanisation and become victims of protectionism as a reaction to consumerism. The process of global movement of workers and difficulties those receiving communities have in findings quite a challenge to notice how many unhappy working hours of their lives they, nationals, spend themselves.

BAUMAN AND THE WELFARE STATE Sociologist Zygmunt BAUMAN in his book “Work Ethics” writes, about western society where the axis has changed from the producers to the consumers.

Bauman speaks of the process of rise and fall of welfare state (which means these with collective guarantees of individual dignified survival) in these words: “The pressure of organised labour, incapable to ensuring itself, again on its own and without political help, against the vagaries of ‘economic cycles’; the urge to protect and reassert the principle of social inequality through mitigating its most iniquitous and least-endurable manifestations; the desire to stimulate acceptance of inequality by marginalising those who failed to participate in its reproduction; and the pressing need to help the membership of policy to weather the eroding impact of a political uncontrolled economy.”

ECONOMIC AND INDIVIDUAL IDENTITY The second side of the problem within the Western society lies in people’s experience of tension between economic and individual identity. For example, a person working in a business call centre in Glasgow has nothing to do with problems with a shower in your hotel room in Florida similar to his colleague, who also has never seen that hotel too and takes over the phone calls in Sydney after the working hours in Europe are finished. Statistically the highest rotation in staff is recognised in those call-centres. “Your salary increase if you receive more calls. It means you 17

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HOW DO WE WANT TO WORK? The conclusions of the Nice summit say: “Quality of work includes better jobs and more balanced ways of combining working life with personal lifeÖ Good employment and social policies are needed to underpin productivity and to facilitate the adaptation to change. They will also play an essential role towards the full transition to the knowledge-based economy.”

It makes clear that everyone should get a quality job in knowledge-based economy. This is a wish made into a law.

Laws express consensus of the society as it is and expresses mostly just a vision, at least in current EU, but not a practice.

Let us return to the musicians playing on pedestrian streets in European cities, doctors working as care assistants or callcentre operators. It is quite a difficult task to evaluate street musician’s knowledge about the music, as he or she is not good technically, but they sincere and earn for life in the same way as Roma women for their gift of persistence. The call-centre person produces happy numbers for the hotels and give an impression to a customers, that someone takes care about him or her. All get money in different ways and levels of personal satisfaction or illusion of it. The musician comes home and dreams of singing on national TV. The call centre person or computer programmer comes home and takes lessions of guitar forgetting about anything what was happening during the day.

MULTIASK ONENESS Some psychologists suggest that we are capable of living more lives and capable of multitask activities more than any generation before. Our children apparently will be by all means able to listen to music and learn at the same time fully. There are others who still believe in oneness of work, the relationship between the maker and the receiver, believe in rest from work but not from the wish to work for the sake of work but not the benefit from it.

In the same way, the Nice treaty describes our wish to have “quality work” in a knowledge based society, but at the same time expresses the dualism. The politicians sign their documents and go to their home countries. Nothing changes, if there is no affection to work the decision out.

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LOVE TO WORK The famous film-maker and poet Jonas MEKAS in his writings talks about the lost love to work talking about his father’s attention while sewing the seeds into a field slowly, step by step with a concentration and meditation of a monk. Miles away from his home country Lithuania, Irish poet Seamus HEANEY writes about himself peeling potatoes with his grandmother and about similar relaxed concentration of doing work.

Working still makes humans happy if it’s made with love. Work starts from very small things enjoying them. The universalisation of consumerism and the idea of economic benefit makes us vulnerable and loosing the most human sense of freedom to work what we love. Quality is probably more then knowledge.

Consume is probably less than welfare of individuals.

GLOBALISATION OF POSSIBILITIES Globalisation makes it possible for a businessman based in North of Europe to work in his own firm in China one week and next week in Singapore. Does he really like it?

Globalisation makes it possible for a Chinese woman to play in Grafton Street in Dublin. Does she really enjoy doing it so far from home? Or maybe she feeds her family and so loves her own living.

Who benefits from the fact that we can see more, can go to more places and buy different things cheaper? We make choices on our own and in our own communities. We make choices to do what we want and to love what we do. Globalisation has two sides - opening possibilities for us and opening the possibilities for others. Do we like what we earn money from? Do we like what others earn their money from and what decisions make?

Globalisation even makes possible for the working politicians to make decisions, blame the naturally inflexible international decision apparatus for their outcome and behave as it pleases local needs. Globalisation is a word, which is created for the questions about the future.

• Orinta Z. ROETTING is Lithuanian, born in Kaunas (Lithuania), married Martin from München (Germany); working with refugees; recently graduated at the Trinity College Dublin (Irish School of Ecumenics), International Peace Studies programme (M. Phil.); a member of Lithuanian Catholic Youth Organisation “Ateitis” (Future).

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›

Peter S A J D A :

Globalisation

and

Regional Identity

How can the Nordic Region Enrich the Visegrad Four?

In the history of humankind there have freq u e n t l y appeared phenomena that have affected large portions of populations within countries, regions, or have even reached a global significance. Such developments, being trends or megatrends, shape local and global history to a great extent. Strong trends, however, rarely remain as they are, without giving rise to parallel trends and counter-trends. If globalisation is to be viewed as a particular development, the question is to be posed, which trends accompany this megatrend and which trends appear to be counter-reactions to it.

TRENDS AND COUNTER-TRENDS It need not be expounded that globalisation is a broad and ambiguous phenomenon. In terms of international relations, it is often stated that this trend favours big and rich countries. Since this article does not primarily focus on the connection between the world economy and the phenomenon of globalisation, the economic effects of globalisation are not going to be analyzed in particular. The allegation that globalisation brings profit mostly to larger units has been acknowledged in many cases. Interregional cooperation has given rise to such organizations as the UNO, NAFTA, CEFTA, SEATO or the system of the EU. STATE-FRAGMENTATION It is, however, necessary to mention the fact that the modern Europe of the 1990s presented us with a significant counter-trend, whose roots go historically further than just to the origin of the Cold War. The phenomenon of state-fragmentation, which played an important role in the early 1990s, put an end to the multi-national states of Central, Eastern and SouthEastern Europe, as well as it affected the territory of the former Soviet Union. In this connection a single case of de-fragmentation appeared, namely the unification of Germany.

Consequently especially Central Europe, the Baltic region and the Balkan region are predominantly composed of countries, whose population is between 2-11 million inhabitants (Poland and Romania being the

only exceptions). Since most of these countries are national states (even if they have considerable minorities), their national and linguistic identity, especially in Central Europe and in the Baltic region, is in most cases clear. The Balkan countries have to be analyzed case by case, since their internal situation has often been affected by factors completely missing in Central Europe and in the Baltic region.

The former Soviet republics, with the exception of the Baltic countries, also require individual analyses.

VISEGRAD: SOMEWHERE IN CENTRAL EUROPE There has been a lot of discussion on which countries belong to the region called Central Europe.

Depending on the chosen aspects (cultural, economic, historical, linguistic, religious, etc.) there have been several suggestions. Nevertheless the cooperation of the Visegrad Four (Poland, Hungary, Czech republic, Slovakia) has introduced a unit that defines itself as a region. Symbolically the Visegrad Declaration (1991) took place in the Magyar city of Visegrad, where in 1335 the Kings of Hungary, Poland and Bohemia gathered to further their economic and political cooperation. All of these countries have some significant aspects in common and especially in connection with their joining the EU these four countries decided to form a region of their own. Although the Visegrad cooperation as such is a recent notion, the cooperation between the four countries has a long and rich tradition.

COMMON HERITAGE There are undoubtedly several very important aspects these four countries have in common, nevertheless, there are substantial differences, too. It is worthwhile to mention at least some of the most important characteristics that the V 4 have in common and make them a compact region.

The countries have formed various state units in the history, which still influences the national consciousness of the region. Historically and culturally can all these countries claim the heritage of the Habsburg Danubian monarchy, even if their positions in the monarchy were different (only the SouthEastern part of Poland belonged to the AustroHungarian empire).

Religiously all these countries share the Latin Christian heritage, having large Roman Catholic majorities and historically important Protestant minorities. All of them have slight Orthodox minorities.

Linguistically, Polish, Czech and Slovak belong to 19

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the group of West Slavic languages, Magyar has retained its distinct Finno-Ugric identity.

Between the late 1940s and the late 1980s these countries belonged to the Soviet sphere of interest, being members of the Warsaw Pact and the Comecon.

All the four countries had significant democratic underground movements and personalities.

All the V 4 countries are EU candidate countries + Poland, Hungary and the Czech republic are members of NATO. Apart from the already mentioned differences, the most significant difference within the region is the fact that the Polish market is larger than the three other markets together.

C O M PA R A B L E REGIONS When we look upon the Visegrad Four as a region, it is understandable that a region of this size would look for other regions of a comparable size in Europe that would in some measure share similar characteristics.

In Europe there are basically two other regions that are composed of countries of a comparable size and characteristics. These are the Benelux region (the Benelux Customs Union was put into effect in 1948) and the Nordic region (The Nordic Council was established in 1952).

Since the scope of this article does not allow to treat both cases in full, let us focus on the case of the Nordic region with its similarities and differences compared to the V 4 region.

THE NORDIC COUNCIL First of all it is worthwhile to mention that it is in some sense equally difficult to define the Nordic region geographically, as it is in the case of Central Europe. Since the Visegrad region has close ties with countries like Germany, Austria, Slovenia, Croatia, etc., as they culturally belong to Central Europe, it resembles the Nordic region, which could in its broadest vision include Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Finland, Iceland, Greenland and the Baltic countries. Nevertheless, let 20

us consider the members of the Nordic Council Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Finland and Iceland - the representatives of the modern Nordic identity.

The Nordic region can be considered one of the richest and most stable regions of modern Europe.

Historically, however, the political positions of the respective countries within the region were just as different as those of the Visegrad countries. Nevertheless the Nordic heritage is shared by all of them, even if from different points of view.

Religiously the Nordic countries share the Protestant (Lutheran) tradition, having tiny denominational minorities, as well as Moslem communities.

The linguistic structure of the Nordic region could not be more similar to the Visegrad region than it is, Finnish being a language of FinnoUgric origin (like Magyar) and the other languages being North Germanic languages of mutual intelligibility (Icelandic is a special case, being a non continental language).

From the late 1940s till the early 1990s the Nordic countries followed different foreign and military policies. Even though all of them developed a strong social democratic tradition, Denmark, Norway and Iceland became politically a part of Western Europe, Sweden remained neutral and Finland established close ties with the Soviet Union, mostly because of its geographical position.

The structure of NATO membership is also similar to the Visegrad case. Denmark, Norway and Iceland being members, Sweden and Finland non-members (like Slovakia). Also in the case of the EU membership Norway and Iceland constitute exceptions to the rule.

ENRICHMENT FROM THE NORTH It is obvious from the facts listed above that the Visegrad region and the Nordic region are comparable regions as to their key similarities and differ-

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ences. The population of the J o r r i t d e J O N G and S a n d e r T U R N H O U T countries is also comparable (the size of the Polish market can be an advantage to the Visegrad region). The question that is to be posed is how the cooperation of the Nordic countries can enrich the development of the Visegrad region at its present stage.

A Study on some social-literary aspects, It can be asserted that the Nordic countries succeeded in the reception and meaning of generation X surmounting their historical differences to a great extent.

Compared to the situation in What are the common features of our 1900, when only two of today’s generation? Is it worth it to speak five countries were independent about generations, or are they only states (Sweden and Denmark), generalisations? A young philosopher these countries managed to and a literary theorist analyse the uphold reasonable political and book, which provided the topic of the economic relations during the 1999 European Regional Assembly. era of state-building of Norway, Finland and Iceland.

GENERATION NOTHING Another interesting facet of the In 1996 generation X was, under the Nordic regional cooperation is name of Generatie NiX (nothing), a big hype in the fact that in spite of all critiHolland. The media were full of negative publicity cism, the ties between the countries were not elimi- about the generation born between 1960 and 1980. nated by modern political differences (e.g. Finland’s The themes of generation X: nihilism (apathy), postnon-alignment policy). modernism - a disbelief in progress - and individualThe Nordic identity can also be described as a ism; were in the Netherlands translated as nix; which translingual identity, since it includes other than just means nothing. The Dutch version of Generation X the dominant North Germanic languages. An inter- was Generation Nothing. We were involved in an iniesting aspect of the Nordic cooperation is the practice tiative to create a more realistic image of the younger of minority policies. It can be an inspiration for the V generation.

4, if the countries decide that the Nordic model is Thereby we took the chances we got to give our applicable to their specific conditions. opinion about the generation that was constantly

Generation X or Generation † ?

REGIONALIZATION AS AN ALTERNATIVE There are certainly a considerable number of agreements and projects that could inspire the Visegrad countries in their development of their regional policy and identity. The mentioned examples represent just an impetus for further consideration. It is noteworthy that also within the framework of ecumenical cooperation in Europe, the Nordic subregion of WSCF-E was an inspiration for the founders of the Central Europe sub-region, which has been based on the cooperation between the movements of the Visegrad countries so far.

It can be assumed that, if regionalization becomes a strong trend in the globalised world, it is likely to strengthen the position of small countries by forming larger structures that can represent regional interests at the global level. Furthermore it need not be expounded that a global world composed of welldeveloped regions might be an alternative to a superpower-dominated world of the 20th century. ›

Peter Sajda is a Graduate of the Faculty of Arts of the Comenius

›

University in Bratislava, Slovakia. He is a member of Ekunet Slovakia, an ecumenical organisation focusing on ecumenical networking in Slovakia. He is a member of the Order of Preachers. He is currently a student of theology at the Theological Institute CMBF in Kosice, Slovakia.

accusing us of having a total lack of ideas and ideals.

We simply were wondering whether this generation, the babyboomers, were entitled to give that much critical remarks about our generation. We felt, in a way, offended, so we published a lot of articles, gave a lot of workshops and interviews and in the end we wrote a book about it.

COUPLAND’S NEOLOGISM Douglas COUPLAND is a young Canadian author who got Generation X, his first book published by St. Martins press in the United States in 1991, because Canadian publishers did not see too much in it. First we shall tell something about the features of the book, then I will tell you something about the story.

Generation X is not a story as any other.

The tone is often very critical and cynical. On the surface, some aspects draw immediate attention: at first: in the sideline you will find a dictionary with generation-X-neologism in which a lot of neologism are being explained. Besides explaining the function of the dictionary is, again, criticising society. The lemmata I found will make this clear: McJob, ultra-shortterm nostalgia, mid-twenties breakdown, option paralysis, historical over- and underdosing.

A few of these lemmata directly criticise a certain situation or fact in American society in the nineties.

McJob for instance, directly criticises the future 21

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ences. The population of the J o r r i t d e J O N G and S a n d e r T U R N H O U T countries is also comparable (the size of the Polish market can be an advantage to the Visegrad region). The question that is to be posed is how the cooperation of the Nordic countries can enrich the development of the Visegrad region at its present stage.

A Study on some social-literary aspects, It can be asserted that the Nordic countries succeeded in the reception and meaning of generation X surmounting their historical differences to a great extent.

Compared to the situation in What are the common features of our 1900, when only two of today’s generation? Is it worth it to speak five countries were independent about generations, or are they only states (Sweden and Denmark), generalisations? A young philosopher these countries managed to and a literary theorist analyse the uphold reasonable political and book, which provided the topic of the economic relations during the 1999 European Regional Assembly. era of state-building of Norway, Finland and Iceland.

GENERATION NOTHING Another interesting facet of the In 1996 generation X was, under the Nordic regional cooperation is name of Generatie NiX (nothing), a big hype in the fact that in spite of all critiHolland. The media were full of negative publicity cism, the ties between the countries were not elimi- about the generation born between 1960 and 1980. nated by modern political differences (e.g. Finland’s The themes of generation X: nihilism (apathy), postnon-alignment policy). modernism - a disbelief in progress - and individualThe Nordic identity can also be described as a ism; were in the Netherlands translated as nix; which translingual identity, since it includes other than just means nothing. The Dutch version of Generation X the dominant North Germanic languages. An inter- was Generation Nothing. We were involved in an iniesting aspect of the Nordic cooperation is the practice tiative to create a more realistic image of the younger of minority policies. It can be an inspiration for the V generation.

4, if the countries decide that the Nordic model is Thereby we took the chances we got to give our applicable to their specific conditions. opinion about the generation that was constantly

Generation X or Generation † ?

REGIONALIZATION AS AN ALTERNATIVE There are certainly a considerable number of agreements and projects that could inspire the Visegrad countries in their development of their regional policy and identity. The mentioned examples represent just an impetus for further consideration. It is noteworthy that also within the framework of ecumenical cooperation in Europe, the Nordic subregion of WSCF-E was an inspiration for the founders of the Central Europe sub-region, which has been based on the cooperation between the movements of the Visegrad countries so far.

It can be assumed that, if regionalization becomes a strong trend in the globalised world, it is likely to strengthen the position of small countries by forming larger structures that can represent regional interests at the global level. Furthermore it need not be expounded that a global world composed of welldeveloped regions might be an alternative to a superpower-dominated world of the 20th century. ›

Peter Sajda is a Graduate of the Faculty of Arts of the Comenius

›

University in Bratislava, Slovakia. He is a member of Ekunet Slovakia, an ecumenical organisation focusing on ecumenical networking in Slovakia. He is a member of the Order of Preachers. He is currently a student of theology at the Theological Institute CMBF in Kosice, Slovakia.

accusing us of having a total lack of ideas and ideals.

We simply were wondering whether this generation, the babyboomers, were entitled to give that much critical remarks about our generation. We felt, in a way, offended, so we published a lot of articles, gave a lot of workshops and interviews and in the end we wrote a book about it.

COUPLAND’S NEOLOGISM Douglas COUPLAND is a young Canadian author who got Generation X, his first book published by St. Martins press in the United States in 1991, because Canadian publishers did not see too much in it. First we shall tell something about the features of the book, then I will tell you something about the story.

Generation X is not a story as any other.

The tone is often very critical and cynical. On the surface, some aspects draw immediate attention: at first: in the sideline you will find a dictionary with generation-X-neologism in which a lot of neologism are being explained. Besides explaining the function of the dictionary is, again, criticising society. The lemmata I found will make this clear: McJob, ultra-shortterm nostalgia, mid-twenties breakdown, option paralysis, historical over- and underdosing.

A few of these lemmata directly criticise a certain situation or fact in American society in the nineties.

McJob for instance, directly criticises the future 21

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prospects that young people have in the employment market. Ultra-short-term nostalgia criticises a certain blasé mentality and lemmata like mid-twenties breakdown and option paralysis show that it is sometimes very difficult for young people to do the right thing. Historical under- and overdosing criticises a certain trend in way of acting and thinking: no one knows anymore, what is important. There is nobody around to tell what is wrong or right, and if someone does, do not trust him.

STORY OF STORYTELLING The story is about three twenty-somethings, Dag, Claire and Andy, who grew up in the post-Fukuyama western society. They have experienced Fukuyama’s ending stage of history by means of divorce, Watergate, Ronald REAGAN, yuppies, the Cold War, growing unemployment, recession, crack, nukes, pollution etc. They decide to leave it all behind.

The main characters, so to say, do not care whether the world is in a finishing stadium or whether it is not.

In their opinion, everything already has been done, so the best is to do nothing. And nothing means, quit your lousy job, tell your boss the truth (in an aggressive way) and set out for the dessert.

They flee from society to a ghost town somewhere in Canada where they take a McJob for their daily expenses and fill their time with drinking and storytelling. The storytelling is a means they get closer to their personal goals in life, to comprehend and find meaning in their personal lives.

SHOPPING IS NOT CREATING The book is divided in three parts; the three parts are subdivided in chapters. The first part, the longest one, is the most critical part, in which the characters quit their jobs and do a lot of reflections on the society today. A means to see that it is the most critical and cynical part of the book is by looking at the titles of the chapters: The sun is your enemy, Our parents had more, Quit your job, Shopping is not creating, Dead at 30, buried at 70.

In the second part the main characters flee to a Canadian ghost town where they begin telling each other some stories about their personal lives and in the third part, which is the smallest, they reflect a bit more about life itself and about future.

GENERATIONSPOTTING The book follows a certain line: in the first part the characters, the surroundings and all events are concrete, in the second part they flee from society and they start telling stories about their lives. In the third part reality has totally disappeared. The storytelling continues but whether they are true or not is not relevant anymore. The characters stop doing concrete things; it would be nice to investigate if they still exist in the third part.

COUPLAND’s characters criticise work and career prospects; McJob, veal fattening pan; richness in general; car-vandalism; politics; environmental problems, nuclear threats; old people, especially family; feminism in relationships; television and other

media; historical under- and overdosing; shopping; as a lack of creativity. They reflect on almost every aspect of modern society. (Compare this with Trainspotting: choose future, choose life, dental insurance, and mind-numbing spirit-crushing game shows.)

CRITICS ON THE CRITICISM The first reviews on Generation X were mostly negative. It is very peculiar that those reviews do not reflect on the criticism on society that the main characters display but that the characters are criticised themselves. Polly SAMSON considers it “deeply nihilistic, the yawnsome threesome has so long in which to do so little that all sorts of minute details become important. The correct sort of retrogressive sunglasses to wear, for example, is as vital to them as the precise dimensions of an H-bomb cloud.” That is, indeed, precisely what they do. They are in a stadium in which so much is important, or considered important by the older generation, that nothing is important anymore.

According to a recent webreview, “It is hard to find anything good to say about this book. The plot is almost non-existent, the characters are paralysed with self-consciousness, the monologues wallow in self-analysis, the structure is designed for an MTV attention span and even the cover is trashy.”

The cover indeed, is trashy, the plot is not too complicated and the self-analyses the characters display are the main topic. This is the only way to make this book. Generation X in an expensive version with a marble white cover would be strange. A complicated plot would not attribute to the main characters point that less is more and to the values they discover in the small events, that a story can teach you as much as fighting a war and, on the third critical remark, I would like to pop the question: what is the use of an evaluation of an entire generation without self-analyses? The times are individual. Some reviews go even further. David BOYD, for instance, speaks about a shallow, gimmicky novel about three pathetic yuppies.

Critics, old people, feel offended by the book, they feel offended by young people, characters in a novel, who state that civilisation and all the richness their parents worked so hard for, simply stink. Doing nothing is the general remark, they only complain without raising solutions. But what would you do? Maybe doing nothing is an active, well-considered choice.

Maybe there are so many paradoxes that the wisest thing to do is to keep aside.

CRITICS ON THE CRITICS ON THE CRITICS, A MOVEMENT TAKES SHAPE To simply say that the characters do not do anything, so the book stinks, is too easy. It provoked a few reactions in which the generation conflict became visible. The first reaction was, more or less: “That is right, those spoiled little twigs profited from our wealth, from our education and what do they do?

Nothing but complaining! Hanging around, smoking, drinking, and too lazy to take a decent job.” It is clear that this reaction got a lot of backups from the grown-

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ups. Like in the times of SENECA, when the educators complained about the younger generation that they did not have enough virtues.

There have been other reactions. A lot of young people recognised themselves in the characters of COUPLAND’s book, and especially the dictionary, became a vehicle for political actions. Which is a bit strange because actions are by definition not very nihilistic. Though, by the work of few individuals, supported by a lot of passive people, political actions appeared.

Jon COWAN and R o b NELSON, from Lead or leave published Revolution X, an action book on thirteen things to do to change the world.

Senator Bill BRADLEY wrote the preface: “as a former NBA player I know how frustrating it can be to sit on the sideline, on the sideline you can not score any points.” The senator argues that if you want to change the world, you cannot do it from the sideline, but you have to join the game and play to win. This is a typical adult way of thinking. If life really is a game of football, which you want to change, you must not join, because by joining you cannot change the rules. You can only change a game if you are not playing the game.

While Revolution X proceeds it becomes clear that the revolution they provoke is a direct invitation to join society as repulsive as it is. A concrete suggestion to help the world is to write a statement on your Tshirt. Another reaction was that Generation X has been hyped. Chat-sites appeared, X-baseballcaps were merchandised; it is clear that these are not the things that COUPLAND’s characters would support.

But what would they support? Assuming that they really want to change society they flee from? A lot of critics about young people in general were launched after Generation X appeared. Revolution X was one of the answers, but not the only one. Generation X made popular again to think in terms of generations. Its result was that some generation-related issues reappeared on the political agenda, some social and political activities experienced a re-birthing, altogether there are a lot fuels for making up theories but in the end generation X remains a collective of individuals.

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THE X-FILES OF A GENERATION Douglas COUPLAND took the title “generation X” from a sociologist that did research on different groups and classes in society. By means of his conceptual framework the researcher was not able to really determine the group of individuals in their mid-twenties, that were - as COUPLAND states it “purposefully hiding themselves”. So they were mysteriously labelled X - like the unknown washing powder that you cannot really trust.

The only thing, in fact that generation X had in common (beside their age of course) was the fact that they did not have so much in common. Most of them did not grow up in a rigid framework or religious tenet that determined the course of their lives. In their formative period they had been exposed to a televised world, in which so much happened at the same time that it was really hard to find out what had influenced them most: the dramatic reduction of the ozone layer, the divorce of their parents, the end of the cold war or the fact that Milli Vanilli had always playbacked their popular performances.

There was no collective record of dramatic events, but instead an enormous variety of individual X-files. There were no collectively shared and expressed values, but many different views on life. And there was no common perspective for the future, only a widely felt awareness that the ideals of the previous generations had failed and the present world is a postmodern, plastic world, where everyone has to create his own truth. So it seems that there are three things, which do not keep this generation X together: postmodernism, nihilism and individualism.

POSTMODERNISM AS BOREDOM When we define modernism as the belief in the progress of humankind by means of the human and machines, rationality and technology, the characters of generation X are definitely postmodern. They know that modernism has brought the atomic bomb and a lot of ridiculous luxuries, like semi-disposable Swedish furniture, and an overstressed, materialistic, polluting society.

The reaction of generation X is the abandoning of one general purpose of humankind, thereby denying the possibility of a universal and superior truth in life.

Details become important and higher goal become irrelevant. COUPLAND’s universe replaces Hegel’s project of the phenomenology of the mind: the phenomenology of confusion and boredom. His characters are cynical: irony is their weapon against a reality that they do not understand.

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NIHILISM AS CONFUSION The main critics on Coupland’s novel and generation X as a whole are that when you look at reality at that way, you lose your roots, you lose your values, you lose your humanity. True, of course, but nothing new! It is like warning a Christian that if one keeps one’s faith, one will risk the chance that one goes to hell if one has just not been good enough in one’s life, whereas an atheist is in a better situation since for one there is no God. It is not fair or intelligent, however, to blame confused people for their confusion. The book Generation X is a book about reflection, rather than denial of values. This is in contrast with the babyboomers, who carried out collective and revolutionary values in the sixties, without reflecting those values or their consequences too much. Generation X does not promote big words and vague values, but are nonetheless actively looking for meaning and words to express what is valuable.

INDIVIDUALISM AS PARADOX In Monty Python’s Life of Brian the following scene occurs: “You’ve got to think for yourselves, you’re all individuals!” “Yes! We’re all individuals!” “You’re all different!” “Yes, we’re all different!” “I’m not!!” And then this dissident gets paradoxically beaten up because he does not want to be different. There is something really tricky about individuality.

To be an individual means to be non-dividable, one, responsible for your own personality and choices, capable of relating to other individuals and putting yourself in a position in the society. Since the moment we had to make our first choices, our parents have taught us to be independent, critical and responsible.

We were not raised with irrational authority, but with the imperatives be yourself, do your best and choose your way.

That sounds so great, but it becomes a little difficult if you do not know who you are, what you are good at and what the hell you actually want to do with your life. We are led to the conclusion that your individuality is constructed, not by yourself, but by unknown forces that make you choose and choose and choose.

Finally, many young people choose not to choose.

HOMO LUDENS: CULTURE, PLAY AND GAME The characters in Generation X are all trying to relate to reality, to create values and to find out who they really are or want to be. They have given up the myths of self-actualisation in a career in the real world, so they found a substitute reality for themselves: storytelling. By telling stories to each other about subjects varying from how they lost their jobs to a possible scenario for doomsday, they recreate the world, as they know it.

Whether the stories are authentic or not, does not really matter. The more important is, whether the story is fascinating, thrilling, intelligent, romantic, in other words, meaningful. The Dutch historian Johan HUIZINGA wrote a book called Homo Ludens, in which he tries to determine the playful elements of culture.

By that he meant that the appearances of game and 24

play in societies tell something about how culture evolves, how cultured is played. According to HUIZINGA, culture, with its values, traditions, habits, develops in the play.

The notions of culture, play and game remain relatively vague in his book, but the questions he raises are considered relevant. For example, how does the play element relate to the serious world? Or what are the rules of the game? What distinguishes a genuine play from a foul play? HUIZINGA notes that in any case, a game or play is an activity in which people voluntarily engage and that has no other goal than itself. It has a certain set of rules, which constitute a domain that is disconnected from reality.

ECO-PHILOSOPHY Umberto ECO, who has written a comment on homo ludens, notes that the homo ludens, the playful human engages in games to test one’s culture, to make it explicit, to investigate its values and to explore its structures. Therefore, games and plays have a creative function: culture develops by playing.

ECO emphasises that there is actually an important difference between game and play. A game is a matrix of combinations, constituted by rules. It offers the players a certain number of options to act and makes it possible for one to win the game. A play, on the contrary, is a representation; a role one plays to express the situation at stake.

To take part in a game is also an act of playing; it means putting oneself in a position where a certain matrix of combinations is realised. Homo sapiens used reason to create the world, to constitute its matrix, homo faber worked to make the world happen, and homo ludens is the appearance of man as a free being, trying to relate to reality and to others.

SIMULATE YOURSELF Our characters in Generation X could be understood as playful. Not because they participate in the game that the world means to them, on the contrary: they have retreated themselves from society, because they do not like the game that is being played by foul players that change the rules for their own benefit.

The Xers constitute a substitute reality, a world of stories that serves no other purpose than to find themselves back as actors in the play of the world.

They dramatise their own experiences from the past, they dramatise the present and they dramatise the future. Their aim is to learn from their own dramas, to determine the identity of the characters they have become and to test whether that identity is satisfying. One of the banners in the sidelines of the book is: simulate yourself. By playing roles, by telling stories they do simulate themselves. The world from which they fled was plastic, fake and unreal.

Generation X plays generation X in search for generation Y.

• Jorrit DE JONG is a student in public administration and philosophy; Sander TURNHOUT is in Dutch language and literature. They are the housekeepers of vE90, the student chaplaincy in Amsterdam.

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N A G Y P Á L , Szabolcs

Spirituality of Globalisation FREEDOM IS NOT BEING GENTLE TO YOUR BODY, BUT IT IS REJOICING IN CONTINOUS DISCERNMENT.

Globalisation does not equal to liberal capitalism.

Globalisation is a lifestyle we live, an economic system we practice and a culture we create. There are different approaches to it: the liberator says it promotes innovation, the protector says it destroys national identities, the protester says it exploits the poor, the regulator says it spreads better living standards, and the sceptic says it simply does not exist.

GLOCALIZATION The hybrid word glocalization discloses to us the Janus-face of the whole globalisation-process. On one hand, we can witness the globalisation of local issues (distant wars, faraway disasters); on the other hand, we can also encounter the localization of global issues (greenhouse effect, nuclear armament). Both unification (European Union, Germany), transborder regionalization (EU-regions) and fragmentation (Soviet Union, Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia) are valid and vivid phenomena in the global scene. Some diversities might be lost, there are more and more diversities every day.

COCA-COLONIZATION This double-facedness applies to the expressive term “coca-colonization” as well. While it does mean a kind of global consciousness and citizenship, feeling home everywhere where you find the same old taste, being also aware of the diversity of the surroundings; it also refers to the standardization of commercial tendencies, which impoverishes with sameness. This nickname reminds us to the colonization of most of the two-thirds world but in a new way, by the means of cultural-mental-spiritual pseudodrugs (according to the original meaning of coca).

This kind of totalization makes our existence more shallow and commercialized.

ECUMENICAL AND INTERRELIGIOUS DIALOGUE Globalisation happens in various levels and in different realms of life. In the religious field it is marked by the two directions of dialogue, ecumenical (interdenominational) and interreligious. There is the unification process, the birth of the World Council of Churches and different world communions (Lutheran World Federation, World Alliance of Reformed Churches). Nevertheless, the World Council of Churches has almost four hundred member churches, which number is growing every year.

Ecumenical agreements create new tensions and apart from the ecumenical spiritual revival, there is a strong fundamentalist spiritual revival as well. It is not suprising that the heroic movement for the reunification of the Church of Jesus Christ started as the great project of liberal Protestantism - this branch of Christianity seems to be the most vulnerable to split.

It also explaines why at the beginning the Roman Catholic Church was so unwilling to join the ecumenical movement - in this tradition the value of unity has always been kept and it has enjoyed a high esteem.

SYSTEMATIC EVIL The globalisative process transforms the ethical space in which we live in. Day by day we are confronted with moral dilemmas about our relationship with strangers who are suffering somewhere in the faraway nearby. Although it may result in the feeling of no responsibility, the suffering of strangers are at least partially caused by processes in which we are implicated. The global ethics consists of an awareness of the systematic evil which means that even if we have the resources, the system does not allow us to share and to redistribute. This system intends to build us in sooner or later. The most dangerous in the systematic evil is that it can so much distort our moral optics that the sinful forms of life can periodically achieve a certain prestige of normality.

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POLLUTION OF INFORMATION Among the side-effects of the informatical revolution we can mention the pollution of information, which creates the new division between the information-rich and information-poor. The overproduction of truth blocks our receptivity to new ideas, till we perceive only the things that confirm our own options in order to preserve the statvs qvo. This results in a descent into vast triviality, the pornography of insignificance.

PRIORITIZATION (DISCERNMENT) Among these circumstances, the new name of wisdom nowadays is prioritization (or discernment). Our time is a non-renewable resource, which we waste in such overproductive places as the supermarket, or the carpet in front of the television. (An average Western person watches more advertisements in one’s own life than a student spends in lectures in a four-year university.) Since the system is either inevitable or we understand ourselves as part of the system, it increases our individual responsibility, we move from the ethics of attitudes to the ethics of responsibilities. The Gandhian model, for example, emphasizes simple living, non-violence, gender equality and respect for the environment. Our desire for knowledge urges us to line up with the means of globalisation (we can make journeys to distant real and virtual places) but in a responsible way, still keeping the distance (being in the world, but not of the world). We can call it counter-globalisation as well, using the positive sides of the process: the efficiancy of high technology, the openness of communication, the sharing of information, the organization of the poor and oppressed to work for change. If we allow ourselves to be globalised by love, it is never a cheap and easy process: as fair trade products are more expensive, fair thoughts are costly in terms of their prerequisites and consequences. Let us be holy and thousands of people will be saved around us.

Instead of being tourists, we should be pilgrims in resacralizing the world.

MONDIALISATION The neo-Latin version of globalisation, mondialisation emphasizes more the Mother Earth as a macroorganism. Interdependence means that we together constitute a bigger whole: “what you did with the least of you, you did it with me”.

Interdependence needs compassion with the Globe in that sense, Jesus became global on the cross.

HIERARCHY OF TRUTHS Christianity has to understand Herself more and more as a minority (the people of the Narrow Path), since our horizon has broadened (although this allows us a more self-conscious choice of our own religion and denomination), and we are in fact a minority in the Globe, even if still the biggest minority. But we became minorities in our own realms as well because of the secularization-process. We are called to be the salt of the Earth, witnessing with our life - we should not misglobalise our faith, because it 26

can loose its taste. This shift requires the end of triumphalism, the metanoia of the rhetorics of supremacy. What we need is not relativity but the hierarchy of truths. It seems that the new gap is not between the world religions but between the religious (committed) and non-religious (non-committed) people. The challenge for the world religions is the question of compatibility: the both/and way of thinking instead of the methodology of either/or (condemn or commend).

PLANETISATION Our children will gather together in similar World Student Christian Federation conferences within twenty or thirty years. The topic then will not be globalisation, but Planetisation (or Galaxisation) and Spirituality. The signs of planetization have already appeared with the landing on the Moon (in the sixties), and the process has produced its kitschy or commercialized form as well: this year, in 2001 (instead of a Space Odysseia) we witnessed the first space-tourist (who was definitely not a space-pilgrim).

Conferences like this - the meeting of future bishops, enterprise leaders, politicians, media-gurus, professors and artists - are never without consequences.

Dialogue is an enormous power: it can change lifes, sensitize, conscientize and raise awareness. Let our vision be stronger than the discouraging reality (live as if). “Never think that a small group of talented and committed people can not change the world. In fact, it is the only thing which has ever done so.”

Concerning globalisation, the main question for all of us is what to globalise: and we have a clear criterion for this. We vigorously have to globalize the goods which the more we have the more we share, and the more we share the more we have: love, respect and friendship.

Some of the best books and articles concerning globalisation and religion, which have shaped my way of thinking recently: ARTHUR Chris, The Globalization of Communications. Some Religious Implications. Geneva, 1998.

HELLER Ágnes, A zsidó Jézus feltámadása (The Resurrection of Jesus the Jew). Budapest, 2000.

INOUE Nobutaka, The Information Age and the Globalization of Religion (2001). www.kokugakuin.ac.jp/ijcc/wp/global/06inoue2.html KELMAN Naamah, Globalization and Religion. www.wcccoe.org/wcc/what/interreligious/cd33-12.html KURTH James, Essay: Religion and Globalization (1998). www.indiaworld.co.in/subscribe/rec/stories/july2620globalrel.html NUECHTERLEIN James, The Politics of the Id. First Things 2000/4.

13-14. http://print.firstthings.com/ftissues/ft0006/opinion/thistime.html SHOMANAH Musa W. Dube, Praying the Lord’s Prayer in a Global Economic Era. The Ecumenical Review 1997/4. 439-450.

• NAGYPÁL Szabolcs graduated in law, literature and ecumenical theology. Presently he is working in the (Roman Catholic) BÉKÉS Gellért Ecumenical Institute in Pannonhalma, Hungary as a researcher and ecumenical theologian. He is a former chairperson of KÖD (Magyar SCM), and is currently a member of WSCF European Regional Committee and global Executive Committee. He is the editor-in-chief of MOZAIK.