"Peace Based on Social Justice": The ALBA Alternative to Corporate Globalization

Abstract

For decades, policy prescriptions encouraging the privatization of nationalized industries and the de-regulation of business activities alongside the guaranteeing of foreign investor rights and capital mobility have been presented as the logical adaptations of the state to the supposedly irresistible economic force of corporate globalization. In the face of such pervasive conditioning discussion of alternative economic models has been pushed to the margins of public debate. In the wake of ‘the great recession,’ however, skepticism about modern capitalism is growing along with resentment at the mounting social and personal costs of maintaining the current structures of a demonstrably failing and iniquitous system. Beginning with a consideration of the political and institutional origins of modern international capitalism in the aftermath of the Second World War and the radical ‘globalizing’ of that project in the last thirty years – with especial emphasis on the expansion of neo-liberalism in the Americas – this article considers the possibility that a greater openness to other experiments and approaches is now apparent. Increased interest in non-competitive models disavowing the routine exploitation of resources and people is evident in many places, for example, Europeans increasingly resistant to the hypocritical dogma of ‘fiscal discipline’; North Americans counting the cost of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) in lost jobs, environmental deterioration and increased inequality; and Africans tired of corrupt politicians in the pockets of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank (WB). This article considers in detail the origins, merits, progress and contradictions of one such project: the Bolivarian Alliance for the Americas (ALBA). This project, although imperfect, offers an excellent example of a cooperative model of economic development that strives (in the words of the participating states) for a “system of peace based on social justice… a system that recovers the human condition … and does not reduce [people] to mere consumers or merchandise.”