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Globalization and Violence

Mark Lindley

Abstract: Six ways are described in which the current phase of globalization has appar-
ently tended to cause destructive violence notwithstanding all its benefits to many people:
(1) a fast-expanding gap between rich and poor, (2) the media making the gap evident
worldwide, (3) ruthless big-business practices overwhelming weak international (and
some national) laws; (4) worldwide availability of very destructive weapons; (5) a dis-
turbingly fast rate of cultural interpenetrations, (6) fear of macro-ecological catastrophes
due to excessive increases in world population and in per-capita consumption and waste.
The cause-and-effect relations are not simple but are a matter of intricate compounds.
Some of the problems have to be addressed by strong government.

Keywords: globalization; violence; measuring economic inequality by Purchasing-Power

Parity; big business; mass-production manufacture; cultural interpenetrations; population
explosion; ecological footprint; strong-state/weak-state.

Modern political talk refers often to peace, but news reports suggest that vio-
lence may have increased in recent times – when globalization has certainly
increased in many ways – and that the problem may get worse in the foreseeable
future. I will describe six reasons for this (they cause violence when combined
with one another) and offer a few remarks as to some ways of addressing the
problem.
(1) The gap between rich and poor has been expanding so fast as to be clearly
unfair, and (2) modern media of communication and travel enable comparatively
less-well-off people to see the luxurious conditions of some of the relatively very
affluent people who obviously don’t deserve such great advantages.
Well-paid experts like to dispute whether globalization has been aggravating
economic inequality, and if so, in just which ways.1 However, it does seem clear
that the richest one or two percent of the world’s population are nowadays enjoy-

1
See, for instance, Branko Milanovic, “Can we discern the effect of globalization on income dis-
tribution? Evidence from household budget surveys,” in World Bank Economic Review, No. 1
(2005), pp. 21–44; the atlas of global inequality at <http://ucatlas.ucsc/edu>; Jan Otto Anders-
son, “International Trade in a Full and Unequal World” (see www.lucsus.lu.se/Jan_Otto_Anders-
son_Paper.pdf); and Pranab Bhardan, Samuel Bowles and Michael Wallerstein, ed., Globalization
and Egalitarian Redistribution (Princeton Univ. Press, 2005). Bhardan advocates (pp. 13-14)
“some modest restrictions on the full fury of globalization” due in part to “the devastation caused
to fragile economies by billions of dollars of volatile short-term capital stampeding around the
globe in herd-like movements” – a phenomenon which Walden Bello says is due in turn to a
“crisis of overproduction and overcapacity [that] will continue to haunt the global economy”
(Dilemmas of Domination: The Unmaking of the American Empire (Henry Holt, New York, 2005,
p. 211).
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ing far greater material luxury than ever before, while the poorest are still suf-
fering starvation deaths; and meanwhile – perhaps even more significant as an
indirect cause of violence – the gap between the richest one or two billion people
and the poorest one or two billion has been fast expanding. Most economists like
to reduce such facts to one-dimensional, monetary or quasi-monetary reckonings.
Experts have concluded accordingly that whereas the ratio of wealth (taking
account of market-exchange rates when the comparison is between people whose
wealth is in different currencies) between the richest and poorest 20% of the
world’s population used to be, back in the 1960s, something like 25:1, now it is
well over than 60:1. 2
If only a few people were absurdly rich, an ideological justification might be
feasible (“He’s an important CEO”, “She’s the world champion”, “They’re high-
caste”), but no ideological mystique can make it seem fair – especially to people
who have in this era of fast globalization been exposed to the Western concept of
individual opportunity – that a billion people are anything like sixty times as rich
as a billion others. The reckoning is academic; some of the realities from which
it is derived outrage many people while disposing others to initiate or promote
certain violent undertakings in the hope of maintaining thereby their material
advantages.
*
Here I would like to acknowledge three points: (a) Many poor people are not
stirred up, by the extreme inequality, to thoughts of violence. Some try to become
enterprising; some others are sunk in dismal fatalism. (b) The global media in-
forming civic society about the extreme inequality are also bringing us news of
violence in various, more or less far-off places; so maybe there isn’t really more
violence nowadays than at some time in the past, maybe we just see and hear
about it more than our ancestors did. (But either way, when we do become aware
of it we want it to be diminished.) (c) The cause-and-effect linkage between
too much inequality and the resulting violence is so complicated that reducing
extreme inequality is only a necessary step, not a sufficient remedy to the problem
of global violence. The great French political scientist Alexis De Tocqueville re-
marked (in the 1850s):
“Experience has shown that the most dangerous moment for a bad government is
usually that when it enters upon the work of reform. Nothing short of great political
genius can save a sovereign who undertakes to relieve his subjects after a long
period of oppression. The evils that are endured with patience as long as they are
inevitable seem intolerable as soon as a hope can be entertained of escaping from
them. The abuses which are removed seem to lay bare those which remain, and to

2
My sources for this are cited in the Appendix.
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render the sense of them more acute; the evil has decreased, it is true, but the per-
ception of the evil is more keen.” 3

And indeed a lot of modern violence may well be due to resentment by people
whose material conditions have actually improved in certain ways but whose
desire for goods the value of which depends on comparatively how much they
have vis à vis other people has been frustrated.4
But still it is relevant to recall the “strong-state/weak-state” concept featured in
Gunnar Myrdal’s Asian Drama: An Inquiry into the Poverty of Nations (1968).
Myrdal was one of the economists – and his wife, Alva, one of the sociologists
– who had helped the government of Sweden transform that country from a
poverty-stricken land in the late 19th and early 20th centuries to a prosperous land
in the latter half of the 20th century. They believed that government’s duties go
far beyond policing to maintain a social order enabling private and corporate
enterprise to engage in uninhibited accumulation. They helped design legislation
whereby strong democratic government in Sweden collects ample taxes from the
rich and uses the revenues to subsidize the housing of the poor and to ensure that
all the nation’s children become well educated citizens, that even the least affluent
parents need not have more children than they wish to have, and so on. These
measures reduced, saliently and peaceably, the noxious effects of the gap between
rich and poor.
(3) Big business exploits the human, material and ecological resources of
“underdeveloped” countries in ways that often entail violence. An anti-imperial
economist who collaborated with Mahatma Gandhi in the 1930s, J. C. Kuma-
rappa, saw this clearly at the time in regard to mass-production factories:

“While the plant that transforms raw materials into consumable articles is located in
some one place, the ... raw materials are gathered from the places of their origin and
brought together to feed the machinery ... at a speed demanded by the technical
requirements ... for production at an ‘economic speed’.... [And then] when the goods

3
Alexis de Tocqueville, L’ancient régime et la revolution (Paris, 1856; 4th ed., 1858; translated
into English as The Old Regime and the French Revolution; an English translation is available at
<www.geocities.com/danielmacryan/ancientregime.pdf>), Part III, Chapter 4, the eighth-from-last
paragraph.
4
See Richard A. Easterlin, ed., Happiness in Economics (Edward Elgar, Northampton MA, 2002);
Richard Layard, Happiness: Lessons from a New Science (Penguin, 2005); Robert H. Frank,
“Positional externalities cause large and preventable welfare losses,” in American Economic
Review Papers and Proceedings, CXV/2 (2005), pp. 137–151; and Jonathan Haidt, The Happiness
Hypothesis (Perseus, 2006), pp. 88-89 and 98-102.
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have been produced they have to be sold. Again the problems of routes, ports, steam-
ships and political control of peoples have to be faced. Exchange, customs and other
financial and political barriers have to be regulated to provide the necessary facili-
5
ties. All this can be done only at the point of the bayonet.”

The situation described at the end of this citation has been due in part to the
lack of effective international law to prevent such use of “bayonets.” Perhaps in
a happier future phase of globalization, institutions analogous to the WTO but
more mindful of social concerns6 may reduce the level of international violence
due indirectly (and sometimes directly) to big-business operations. (I would
attribute to the good effect of the European Union the fact that there was a lot
less international violence within Western Europe in the last third than in the
first half of the 20th century.) Or perhaps there may be instead more and more
violence on an intercontinental scale.
(4) The technical capacities for violence have been increasing. Just consider
modern guns, bombs, airplanes, methods of torture7 etc., and the modern media
enabling violent-minded people in one part of the world to learn techniques from
and to collaborate with like-minded people elsewhere. Because of all that, there
probably is more human violence today than at most times in the past. Military
people call some of it “collateral damage,” but still it is violent. A land mine, for
instance, is equally violent if it destroys a soldier’s foot within a week or an
innocent child’s foot years later.
The duties of strong democratic government should include limiting people’s
access to deadly weapons. I think that the USA (my homeland) should have
stronger gun-control laws than it does, and that the attempts by its government to
promote an international order curtailing the worldwide availability of weapons of
mass destruction are correct in principle (but should not be accompanied by the
counterproductive precept of an era of American world hegemony).
(5) There is a remarkably fast rate of various kinds of cultural interpenetration
due to the improved media and to economic migration. These cultural inter-
penetrations are causing big and little challenges to traditional, more or less local
cultures. Some people are thereby rendered morally “rudderless” and thus more
ready to take up violence; and some people feel culturally bullied and otherwise

5
Cited in Mark Lindley, J. C. Kumarappa: Mahatma Gandhi’s Economist (Popular Prakashan,
Mumbai, 2006), p. 34.
6
See Joseph Stiglitz, Making Globalization Work (Norton, 2006).
7
See Alfred W. McCoy, A Question of Torture: CIA Interrogation, from the Cold War to the War
on Terror (Holt, 2006).
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stressed. Moderate rates of cultural interpenetration and economic migration are

beneficial, but in some places the one or the other is happening now at a psycho-
logically indigestible rate. This is an important contributory cause of the violence-
prone false consciousness of the religious fundamentalists.
Religious differences don’t cause violence by themselves; people with differ-
ent religious affiliations get on OK if there is not too much socio-economic in-
equality between them or too much competition between them for the use of
scarce resources. But religion can bestow “higher” sanction on the use of violence
motivated by moral outrage, frustration, humiliation, greed etc.
(6) There is now an ominously mounting pressure on the ecological capacities
of the Earth to support the human population, because the population is too big
and growing too fast in size (see graph) and in per-capita consumption and waste.
Under the circumstances it would be rational to breed fewer children and to share
and share alike (which would also mitigate the problem of unfairly extreme differ-
ences between rich and poor); but while many of the poor are not breeding fewer
children, most of the rich are not yet thinking seriously in terms of sharing,

because – I suspect – they are afraid that the “natural” premise that the Earth can
supply enough for everyone’s need is, or soon will be, incorrect, and so there is a
latent tendency to think less in terms of sharing in order to avoid massive violence
than in terms of using violence to prioritize oneself, one’s family and other, more-
or-less local groups that one identifies with.8

8
An analytical study commissioned by the Pentagon and submitted to it in 2003 says that if the
Earth’s “carrying capacity” were “suddenly lowered drastically by abrupt climate change,” hu-
mankind would revert to “constant battles for diminishing resources.... [W]arfare would define
human life.... It is quite plausible that within a decade the evidence of an imminent abrupt climate
shift may become clear and reliable.... [T]he United States will need to take urgent action.... Dis-
ruption and conflict will be endemic features of life.” (Peter Schwartz and Doug Randall, “An
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(I would like to mention, as a cautionary example, that the Government of

India caused a considerable amount of violence in 1974 by setting targets for
numbers of men “voluntarily” sterilized in a national program intended to curb the
population explosion. This was an incorrect application of the strong-state con-
cept. Some better ways for democratic government to address the problem are to
provide high-quality universal primary and secondary schooling and to promote
the social empowerment of women. The great majority of educated and socially
empowered women would rather bear one, two or three children than a large
brood.)
Yet even if population-growth is curtailed, the Earth probably cannot go on for
very long satisfying people’s competitive greed the way it was made to do in the
20th century. There is available now a concept (introduced in 1996)9 enabling
ecological economists to measure some of the ways in which affluent people are
putting pressure on the Earth’s capacity to support humankind and are thereby
indirectly causing violence in human society – not by violent activities but just by
their 20th-century-style affluence. The name of the concept is “ecological foot-
print.” Before describing it let me clarify briefly the relation between ecological
economics and comprehensive “closed-system” and “open-system” economic
models. Comprehensive closed-system models take account of all social eco-
nomic exchanges, including those not paid for with money (for instance, most of
the work done by most women) and therefore outside the market-economy, but
are nonetheless “closed” in the sense of being limited to social exchanges and not
including ecological facts. Open-system models take account of everything in
closed-system models and also of the exchanges between humanity and the rest of
the ecosphere. The aspects of open-system modeling that are not included in
closed-system modeling are covered in ecological economics.
The ecological footprint of a given population is defined as the total area of
ecologically productive land and water (crop-land, pasture, forest, marsh, river,
sea, etc.) that would with prevailing technologies be required in order to provide
on a continuous basis the energy and materials consumed by that population, and
to absorb its wastes. It is reckoned in terms of area (different kinds of area on the
surface of the Earth) rather than of money. It summarizes several aspects of eco-
logical economics in a way analogous to the ways in which “cost of living” and
other such indices summarize certain aspects of market economics. Indeed,

abrupt climate change scenario and its implications for United States national security”; see
<www.environmentaldefense.org/documents/3566_AbruptClimateChange.pdf>, pp. 17-18 & 22.)
9
Mathis Wackernagel and William Rees, Our Ecological Footprint (New Society Publishers,
Gabriola Island, Canada, 1996). For the current “Global Footprint Network Annual Report”, see
<www.footprintnetwork.org>.
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a clever aspect of the ecological-footprint index is that for each nation, many
aspects of it can be estimated from data that have already been gathered for mar-
ket economics. For instance, an estimate of the pasture component of the nation’s
ecological footprint can be made from the totals of how much money is being
spent annually there for dairy products and from estimating, for that complex of
dairy products, how much pasture (not necessarily in the same country) is needed
to produce those goods.
It is also possible to reckon how much ecologically productive surface (of vari-
ous types) is available within each nation. The term for this in relation to national
ecological footprint is “national available bio-capacity.” The ecological footprint
minus the available bio-capacity is the “ecological surplus or deficit”; and, by
dividing each of these three numbers by the number of people living in the nation,
one gets corresponding per-capita estimates. The following table shows some of
them in hectares as of the mid-1990s: 10

Available Ecological Ecological

bio-capacity: footprint: surplus/deficit:

Australia 14.0 9.0 5.0

Canada 9.6 7.7 1.9
Sweden 7.0 5.9 1.1
Brazil 6.7 3.1 3.6
USA 6.7 10.3 - 3.6
Germany 1.9 5.3 - 3.4
Japan 0.9 4.3 - 3.4
China 0.8 1.2 - 0.4
India 0.5 0.8 - 0.3

Earth 2.0 2.8 - 0.8

Because the reckonings are in terms of surface area, they are inapplicable to
aspects of depletion (for instance, of fossil fuels) or pollution (for instance, of air)
which call for reckoning in terms of volume. But in spite of that lack of compre-
hensiveness and in spite of the rough nature of the estimates (though no more
rough than some of those that are used routinely in market economics), ecological

10
This is abridged from Table 4 in Mathis Wackernagel et al., “National natural capital account-
ing with the ecological footprint concept,” Ecological Economics, XIX (1999), pp. 375-390.The
countries are listed here in declining order of the per-capita availability (within them) of bio-
capacity. (India’s place at the bottom of this list of countries is due to her population density.)
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footprint is a handy way of summarizing a lot of useful information in ecological

economics. It shows quite clearly that the average person living the USA was, in
the 1990s, contributing several times more than the average person in, say, China
was at that time to a related worldwide “ecological deficit” which is in turn a
partial indication of the extent to which humankind was using up for current
consumption the finite “natural capital” provided by the Earth.
Some people say that science will invent technological “magic bullets” ren-
dering it unnecessary for the affluent to restrict their wants. But the problems of
violence due to competition in the face of macro-ecological degradation may
become so dire that humankind will need clever technology and strong govern-
ment and voluntary simplicity in order to survive.
Concluding remarks: I think strong democratic government has to bear great
burdens in regard to curtailing (a) the extreme gap between rich and poor, (b)
ruthless big-business competition, (c) the availability of techniques of violence,
and (d) the ominous macro-ecological depletions and pollution. NGOs, schools
and the public media can help develop a modicum of consensus on such political
steps and on ending the disastrous population explosion, and can participate
directly in (a) promoting improved versions of “small-is-beautiful” production for
local distribution, (b) persuading the affluent to cultivate voluntary simplicity, (c)
mitigating the bewilderments due to large-scale cultural interpenetrations, and (d)
addressing the older cultural and psychological causes of violence that have not
been discussed here.11

11
One reason for my not discussing these is to avoid having to define “violence” in such a brief
essay. (My sense of the term should be clear enough from my reference to land mines.) Let me
mention, however, that I think people whose lives include causing violence against people they
don’t know are more likely to be violent toward their own friends and families. For instance, here
is a tabulation (from p. 54 of Thomas A. Nakagawa and Edward C. Conway, Jr., “Shaken baby
syndrome: Recognizing and responding to a lethal danger,” in Contemporary Pediatrics, XXI/3
(March 2004), pp. 37-57) of infants so badly injured by shaken-baby syndrome that they were
taken to Children’s Hospital in Norfolk VA (a town consisting mainly of a US Navy base) between
1991 and 2001; each year coinciding with the return of military personnel to Norfolk from deploy-
ment abroad is indicated by an asterisk: 1991: 0; *1992: 2; *1993: 4; 1994: 2; *1995: 3; 1996: 0;
*1997: 3; 1998: 1; 1999: 1; *2000: 3; *2001: 4.
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Appendix: Estimating Economic Inequality

Differences in monetary wealth are a relatively simple hallmark of economic in-

equality. An alternative way of trying to compare quantitatively the average eco-
nomic conditions in two different countries is to estimate “purchasing power parity”
(PPP) by dividing the ratio between the estimated levels of average income in the two
countries12 by the ratio of estimated average costs of living in them. From estimates
published by the World Bank it can be reckoned that between the USA and China in
2004, the approximate ratio of per-capita annual income was 32:1, and in terms of
PPP 7:1; between the USA and India, 67:1 and 12½:1; between the USA and Mauri-
tania, 98½:1 and 19½:1. 13 Since the PPP ratios seem less drastically unfair than those
based simply on comparisons of estimated income, I should point out that PPP-based
comparisons on a worldwide scale are of limited validity because they depend on
estimates of “cost of living” in many different countries – costs which are sometimes
for incomparably different ways of living at very different average levels of material
consumption. Two leading advocates of relying on PPP-based estimates of cross-
country differences in “real GDP” (gross domestic product) admit that such estimates
are problematical since the inaccuracies which “may arise because differences in
quality are not reflected in price differences, because the respective product lists are
not identical, and from the presence of non-marketed goods and services ... can be
more serious in cross-country comparisons than when changes in a single economy
are in question”;14 these advocates of PPP-based comparisons of GDP in different
countries stress (by using italic font) that such estimates “do not measure compara-
tive living standards ... or welfare.15 Moreover, some of the inequalities which have
been increasing so fast in recent decades that they have undoubtedly stirred up strong
resentments are political as well as narrowly economic, and in this political context
the market-exchange rates themselves are important in enabling the rich to impose

12
One way of reckoning average annual income in a country is to divide the estimated monetary
value of its annual “Gross Domestic Product” by the alleged number of people in the country. For
cross-country comparisons, one divides the resulting per-capita figures by the average market-
exchange rate between the two currencies during that year.
13
World Development Report 2006. Equity and Development (The World Bank and Oxford Uni-
versity Press, 2005), the table at pp. 292-293.
14
Ian Castles and David Henderson, “International comparisons of GDP: issues of theory and
practice,” in World Economics, VI/1 (2005), p. 63. The “cost of living” concept was originally, in
the 1930s, developed to compare costs in successive years in the same country (rather than in dif-
ferent countries at the same time).
15
Op. cit., p. 64.
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upon the poor (if they wish) by means of bribes, debt-traps, assassinations etc. on a
global scale.16
Average differences between one country and another are of course not the only
kind of extreme difference in wealth. To cite just one example: while quite a few Bra-
zilians are destitute, and while more than half of them are poorer than virtually
anyone in France is, a few of them are very rich by worldwide standards (and indeed
a tenth of them are more affluent than half of the French are).17 I should mention also
that to reckon global economic inequality is an even more intricate challenge than my
remarks about PPP might suggest. It is impossible, for instance, to know how much
money the very rich have, because their power is such they can conceal the fiscal
facts if they like. Another problem is that economic inequalities – inequalities in peo-
ple’s material well-being – have to do with far more than how much money they have
and regional differences in cost of living. Indeed, some of the inequalities that are
now becoming more and more significant have to do with different degrees of eco-
logical vulnerability and involve risks so difficult to quantify that insurance com-
panies don’t even try to assess them.

16
John Perkins’s Confessions of an Economic Hit Man (Berrett-Koehler, San Francisco, 2004) is
an autobiographical account of some work of this kind that he carried out for years at the behest of
big corporations and of a member of the National Security Council in the White House (where the
term “economic hit man” is, according to these memoirs, used for agents like Perkins, whereas the
term for hired assassins is “jackal”).
17
I have derived these statements from Figure 1 in Branko Milanovic, “World income inequality:
a review,” in World Economics, VII/1 (2006), pp. 131-157. For some calculations of recent steep
increases in inequality (insofar as these can be estimated by analyzing a sample of 100,000
income-tax returns) among well-off people in the USA, see Ian Dew-Becker and Robert Gordon,
“Where did the productivity growth go?”, in William C. Brainard and George L. Perry, ed., Brook-
ings Papers on Economic Activity, 2:2005 (Brookings Institution, Washington, 2006), pp. 67-127
(summarized by the editors on pp. xvi-xx).