A New Human Right--the Right to Globalization
Journal
Michael D. Pendleton
A New
Human
Right-the
Right to
-
1998
Article 6
Globalization
Copyright c 1998 by the authors. Fordham International Law Journal is produced by The
Berkeley Electronic Press (bepress). http://ir.lawnet.fordham.edu/ilj
A New Human Right–the Right to
Globalization
Michael D. Pendleton
This Essay attempts to give globalization an ideology and suggests that global identity and
allegiance will use the law to establish these ideals. It argues that the principal tool will be
extensions via the legal device of human rights–an individual’s human right to globalization. This Essay
also argues that national allegiance and globalization cannot stand together. Today, national
allegiance is an anachronism and simply wrong. In the past, it was, in many cases, considered a virtue
and resulted often in the highest individual self-sacrifice for the common good. Human rights to
globalization, it is argued, entail at least the following rights: to international security; to trade
across national borders; to non-partisan dispute settlement that is incorporated across borders; to
free movement of persons across borders; and to hold dual or multiple nationality.
A NEW
HUMAN RIGHT-THE RIGHT
TO GLOBALIZATION
Michael D. Pendleton*
INTRODUCTION
Globalization appears to be an inevitable fact. How much
of the daily news is about the country of media publication or
broadcast, and how much relates directly or indirectly to other
countries? The high proportion of the latter remains much the
same, even in the most parochial of media. Globalization is
cause for lament for many. This author takes the opposite of
this view.
This Essay attempts to give globalization an ideology and
suggests that global identity and allegiance will use the law to
establish these ideals. It argues that the principal tool will be
extensions via the legal device of human rights-an individual's
human right to globalization.
This Essay also argues that national allegiance and
globalization cannot stand together. Today, national allegiance is an
anachronism and simply wrong. In the past, it was, in many
cases, considered a virtue and resulted often in the highest
individual self-sacrifice for the common good.
National allegiance is wrong today for the following reasons:
" it threatens our very survival by making war more likely;
" it is no different to racism;
" one cannot be a nationalist and act according to
individual conscience when the nation is under threat;
* it causes us to fail to take non-nationals seriously as
people, through the fiction and wrong concept of collective
responsibility;
* it is contrary to Christian and other religious teaching;
and
" finally, some nations have exclusive use of a
disproportionate amount of the world's resources.
Globalization offers a realistic vehicle for escaping from failed
nationalism to an expanded concept of global rights and duties.
* Professor of Law and Deputy Director, Asia Pacific Intellectual Property Law
Institute, Murdoch University, Perth, Western Australia.
Globalization is about far more than trade and commerce.
It is about individual identity, sympathies, and aspirations. What
gives globalization a realistic chance of working, however, is its
economic aspects. This economic potential is what gives
globalization power even against antagonistic national governments.
The case for a human right to globalization as presented in
this Essay stands or falls on the validity of three assumptions:
* reciprocity in international trade policy does not work;
" global markets are necessary for the same reason as
market economies, i.e., self-interest ensures efficiency; and
* globalization does not commodify people, rather it gives
people chances for survival and self-betterment that they
otherwise would not obtain.
Many see globalization through international trade as an
anathema to the development and dignity of persons by somehow
"commodifying" them. The villains are the multinationals.
To the contrary, this Essay argues that globalization rights
are the newest category of individual rights. They are akin to
natural rights from which human rights developed. They are
also akin to indigenous rights, ethnic minority rights, suppressed
nationality rights, and rights to a clean, bio-diverse environment.
This Essay maintains that we do not have any multinationals in
the world today, but badly need them in order to carry forward
globalization.
Despite what it may seem, this Essay does not reject
citizenship per se. Citizenship involves a concern for neighborliness
and the common good, i.e., fundamental aspects of what it is to
be human. Rather, this Essay is about a redefinition and
expansion of citizenship concepts. Globalization is achievable, even
against the animosity of national governments, through the
concept of embryonic, though arguably existing, judicially
enforceable human rights to globalization.
Human rights to globalization, it is argued, entail at least
the fo (...truncated)