Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2007-11-14-Speech-3-029"
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"en.20071114.2.3-029"2
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".
Mr President, colleagues: globalisation, internationalisation, or ‘planetisation’ as the Jesuit Teilhard de Chardin would have it, is obviously here to stay, and what we are seeing now is a second wave of globalisation, more comprehensive than that of the 1990s because it embraces finance, the economy, language, population movement and ideology, with a single dominant model – namely the market.
The negative effects of this globalisation are equally obvious: in the southern hemisphere where resources are being over-exploited, in India and China where people, land, forests, seas and rivers are affected and human rights are jeopardised. Here in the North we see the impact in corporate relocations, job losses and financial destabilisation of our social systems, and in the risk – as our population ages and we face the cost of caring for the very elderly – that Europe will turn into a geriatric Rwanda, with all the implications of that in terms of disregard for human life and violation of human rights.
Confronted by these realities, faced with the obvious, what is our response? It would seem to be a mixture of magic words, minimalism and mumbo-jumbo. We hear the magic words, for example, in our current debates and resolutions. Our political ‘spells’ consist of references to the Lisbon Strategy and a more competitive economy. It is reminiscent of Khrushchev at the UN in the 1960s, trying to catch up with the capitalist system. It is the Harry Potter answer to globalisation.
Then there is the minimalism. The perfect example is the Globalisation Fund: a little poke of financial sweeties. Unable to control what is going on, we then look to the heavens and try the old mumbo-jumbo. In the name of the Father, Adam Smith; the Son, David Ricardo; and the Holy Spirit of the Market; before the great global altar of free-trade ideology, we make the sacrifice of cutting and then eliminating customs duties.
Utter mumbo-jumbo! Yet Europe’s greatest invention, the product of its genius 2 500 years ago, was logical thought: reason! What reason tells us today is that free trade is necessary, but it is equally necessary to protect our social and cultural assets. So we have to find a way of reconciling free trade with human security.
We actually have the capacity to do that, thanks to a new form of customs technology. I am talking about the technology of deductible customs duties: under this system, customs duties are of course payable by exporters but their payments give those exporters an equivalent amount of customs credit, deductible against the cost of purchases in the importing country. This new generation of variable, refundable, negotiable customs duties, subject to rebates, will enable us to solve the all too familiar problem of economic, social and environmental imbalances in international trade between North and South."@en1
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