Bob Deacon

Globalism and Social Policy Programme

Social Rights and Globalisation

    Tob Deacon reported on some of the initial thinking of the Globalism and Social Policy Programme (GASPP), based in Helsinki and Sheffield. GASPP aims to track the discourses at a global level on this topic. It focuses, in particular, on the ideas about national, regional and global social policy being articulated by the several global actors in the picture. These include the World Bank, the IMF, the UN agencies, international NGOs (INGOs), etc. He was concerned about the implications for global social governance of this discourse.

    Bob Deacon felt that the challenge of globalisation to the capacity of states to continue to provide for the welfare of their citizens has been overstated. While there is the danger of a race to the welfare
bottom in order to attract capital, there is equally, given the political will, space for governments to continue to redistribute resources within a country for welfare purposes. Much social spending is instead of disposable income. Workers, rather than capital, pay for their deferred income or for benefits in kind. There is agreement about two specific social policy implications of globalisation. One is that the tax base of the welfare state should be shifted from tax on labour to, for example, consumption taxation or ecotaxation although for the latter to work, this would require global agreements. The second is that the labour market has become segmented into a more secure, high-skill sector and a flexible low-skill sector within which wages are being pushed down by global competitive pressures. The policy implication of the latter development is that low wage earners should be able to access benefits as a subsidy to low wages.

    Thus, he felt that it can be argued that globalisation creates the need for more, not less, welfare spending both within countries and between them. A call for a socially responsible form of globalisation is increasingly being made. As an antidote to social protectionism in both north and south, globalisation must develop a social dimension.

     He believed that the EU needs to be outward looking and assertive about its social model. Across the Atlantic, the EU is still perceived as embodying an outdated and doomed set of social protection measures. However, he believed for a number of reasons, not least the crisis in East Asia, that the high moment of fundamentalist liberal orthodoxy has passed and that we can look forward to a re-articulation of social democratic sentiments revamped to deal with transborder social issues.

    Bob Deacon then turned to three global discourses that impinge on the future of global social policy. These are the discourse of human rights, of targeted poverty alleviation in the poorest countries, and of the role of INGOs in the global future.

    On the issue of human rights, the focus on it in the past decade has two sides. The down-side is the damage done to the cause of human rights when the North and West have reduced their public expenditure budgets and, thus, their ability to put their resources into human rights. The North then gets accused of empty moralising. The other side of the coin is that even paper declarations about rights create the space for citizens everywhere to challenge their governments to give them what the world says they are entitled to. The existence of global rights empowers people to demand them of their governments. He believed that a future global social policy will have to be constructed on the basis of the triangulation of REDISTRIBUTION within and between regions, REGULATION within and between regions concerning social, health and labour standards, and EMPOWERMENT of citizens by regional and global institutions. The call for rights cuts in at two of these three points of the triangle.

    Bob Deacon felt that the concern on the part of the Organisation of Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), Development Assistance Committee (DAC) to make concrete steps towards meeting some of the Copenhagen targets by, for example, halving the number of people in extreme poverty by the year 2015 is, in one sense, laudable and cannot be challenged. Specific targets have been set concerning the achievement of universal primary education and reproductive health rights. However, the other side of the coin of targeting the poor and the limited scope of the universalism aimed at is to open the space for the rest – universal secondary education and hospital care etc. – to be privatised. The focus on targeting the poor can chime with the World Bank’s message to Eastern Europe, for example, to limit public provision in pensions and health care to more basic packages. Sometimes it seems, he remarked, as if Ministries of Overseas Development countenance in their aid policy a view of desirable social policy which they would never countenance for their own country.

    He felt that the role of INGOs was a difficult one. On the one hand, INGOs are the conscience of the world putting the case for global social justice. On the other hand, many INGOs are multi-mandated mega-providers of services for the poor. The self-interest on the part of some INGOs in winning contracts as parallel service providers can undermine the capacity of governments alongside whom they work.
Bob Deacon’s concluding comments were to suggest that the tide of liberalism has turned. He felt that we are in a new global era where the chances exist as never before to reconstruct a socially responsible global order. An alliance of invigorated UN agencies, global civil society, and a global network of social democratically-inclined governments is set to make fair progress in this endeavour in the new millennium.



Bob Deacon is a Professor of Social Policy at Sheffield University UK, and STAKES (National Research and Development Centre for Welfare and Health) Helsinki, and Director of the Globalism and Social Policy Programme.