ABSTRACT
Shortly before his death last year (2001), the Brazilian geographer and philosopher Milton Santos published a book entitled For Another Globalization.1 The literary scholar and sociologist António Cândido praised him as one “in whose writings scientific rigor was never an obstacle to a developed social conscience.” And although Santos viewed globalization as a “perverse phenomenon” he strove “to show that it is possible to carry it out differently.”2 The Santos book is but one among many works now issuing from Brazil and calling for a qualitatively different kind of globalization.3 At the World Social Forum II organized around the theme “Another World is Possible” held in Porto Alegre, Brazil (31 January-5 February, 2002), thousands of voices from 135 countries likewise launched appeals for Another Globalization.4 These were the voices of political and church leaders; of NGO’s working on diverse fronts (human rights, economic justice, debt relief, environmental protection, gender equality, democratic governance, the Tobin tax, citizen participation in public decisionmaking, peace, struggles against social exclusion); of rural and urban labor unions; of organizations of the landless and the homeless. Across wide differences in ideology, substantive positions and emphasis, participants at Porto Alegre II nonetheless proclaimed common value allegiances to equity and social justice over maximum economic growth, to participatory decisionmaking over secretive elite institutional planning, to fair over free trade,5 to active protection of cultural diversity over uniform economic strategies, to re-empowerment of national states as decisive agents of development over subordination to international corporations or financial agencies. They counterposed these values to their opposites, which they attributed to the elite Davos World Economic Forum, held in New York this year in support of that battered city – maximum economic growth, unregulated capital mobility, free trade, privatization, and a uniform reliance on competitive markets to serve as the motor force of national development everywhere.
