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To: goldsnow who wrote (19374)	9/20/1998 7:47:00 PM
From: banco$	Respond to of 116764

"UN leader cites price of globalization," and future consequences. Political consequences have been overlooked, Annan tells Harvard audience. As debt crises envelop national economies, globalization is "losing its luster" in many quarters of the world, its down side fueling the rise of nationalism, protectionism, and antidemocratic forces, UN Secretary General Kofi Annan told an audience at Harvard University last night. Speaking to a crowd of about 1,200 students and faculty at Sanders Theater, the United Nations leader said the prosperous years of the 1990s may have seduced world leaders and financiers that they may have neglected the political consequences of globalization. He said the neglect of political questions has made globalization - the economic interdependence among nations - a scapegoat. "Globalization is seen not as a term describing objective reality, but as an ideology of predatory capitalism," he said in his 20-minute address. "Whatever reality there is in this view, the perception is unmistakable: Millions of people are suffering; savings have been decimated; decades of hard-won progress in the fight against poverty are imperiled." At a press conference after the address, Annan expressed his gravest concern for the welfare of minorities, particularly Shiite Muslims, in the worsening threat of military conflict between Iran and Afghanistan. He was invited to speak by the Harvard Academy of International and Area Studies and introduced by Harvard's president, Neil L. Rudenstine, and Samuel P. Huntington, chairman of the academy. (ed. mid section) His analysis of the pitfalls of globalization, he said, emerges out of his own thinking and two recent conferences on the topic. The view sweeps across the globe to explain the development of three political instruments, primarily among nations that have not benefited from globalization's reach, particularly poor nations. Among the countries in Asia and Africa that are experessing excessive nationalism, Annan said, "globalization is presented as a foreign invasion that will destroy local cultures, regional tastes, and national traditions." These developments, he said, are exacerbating longstanding enmity along ethnic lines, for example, or are unearthing age-old border disputes that threaten to plunge countries into the kind of wars and international strife that plagued Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia when globalization came into vogue during the early 1990s. Another foe of globalization is the protectionism inherent in a form of political populism, he said. "Embattled leaders may begin to propose forms of protectionism as a way to offset losses supposedly incurred by too open an embrace of competition, and too free a system of political change," he said. In addition, Annan said, the crises born of globalization are leading to the emergence of "illiberal solutions," including the prominence of the "strongman," the political leader who acts decisively and lends the nation a much-desired sense of self-determination, if only in appearance. That development, which impedes the advance of democracy, is also one of the most dangerous in the era of globalization, he said. "As central power disintegrates and bread lines grow, there is a growing temptation to forget that democracy is a condition for development - and not its reward," he said. (Boston Globe, Sept. 18, 1998)