2018-02-14
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Humankind and the threat of disease have always coexisted uneasily. For example, in Kikwit, Zaire, the deadly Ebola virus – after lying dormant for twenty years – broke out and ravaged its victims with massive hemorrhaging and certain death. Globalization not only heightens awareness of health risks, but actually multiplies them. Truck drivers in India are primary agents for the AIDS (acquired immune deficiency syndrome) epidemic in that country and elsewhere in Asia. Rapid urbanization in much of the world also contributes to the rapid spread of diseases. Growing numbers of refugees forced into insanitary camps are ravaged by cholera and other diseases that can prove as deadly as the violent ethnic conflicts they flee. Excessive population growth forces people to move into habitats where unknown microorganisms and killer viruses await them. Millions of airline travelers share cabin-sealed environments filled with the carriers of potentially fatal diseases. A shrinking globe, in short, has made the spread of disease across borders rapid, frequent, and difficult to control.
It is somewhat ironic that, in the face of an ongoing biomedical revolution, traditional diseases are making a comeback and new microbes are evolving to challenge human immune systems. The World Health Organization estimates that one-quarter of the world’s population is subject to chronic intestinal parasitic infections. Of the nearly twenty million annual deaths due to communicable diseases, resurgent tuberculosis kills three million people annually, malaria two million, and hepatitis one million. In addition, the AIDS virus, estimated to have infected more than 750,000 people in North America, has infected between 13 and 15 million people worldwide. More than 8,000,000 are infected in Sub-Saharan Africa, and in South Africa one-fifth of the adult population was HIV positive by the year 2000.
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Many also view narcotic use as a disease. The illicit use of drugs is widespread, hugely profitable, and difficult to control in a borderless world. Fueled by major production and distribution complexes in the Andes and southwest and southeast Asia, the narcotics industry generates profits estimated at $ 400 billion annually (Mathews). As profits have grown, traffickers’ power has expanded, leading to other worrisome developments. Among them are the [widening] impact of the illicit drug trade on illegal economic structures and processes in major producing or transit countries; the increasing political corruption in such countries; the growing intrusion of narcocriminal enterprises into the realm of the state and the law; the successes of narcotic businesses in innovation, avoiding detection, and increasing operating efficiency; and the growing transnational cooperation among criminal empires that deal in drugs and other black-market items" (Lee). It is not an exaggeration to posit that globalization has contributed to the rise of international organized crime (IOC) syndicates.
Global Migration
The movement of populations across frontiers has reached unprecedented proportions, producing a global migration crisis. It raises a host of moral issues, such as the ethnic balance inside host countries, the meaning of citizenship and sovereignty, the distribution of income, labor supply, xenophobia, the impact of multiculturalism, protection of basic human rights and prevention of exploitation, and the potential for large flows of migrants and refugees to undermine democratic governance and state stability. Particularly troubling is the moral inconsistency between liberal democracies that simultaneously defend the fundamental right of refugees to emigrate and the sacred right of sovereign states to control their borders (Weiner).
As "national sovereignty is eroded from above by the mobility of capital, goods and information across national boundaries" (Sandel), whether existing institutions of global governance are able to cope with globalization's multiple challenges is a hotly contested issue. Meanwhile, the capacity of the state to cope with the forces of rapid change is also being tested. As we turn our attention to the globalization of finance, trade, production, and labor, we will find further evidence that "globalization is uneven. It unites but it also divides, creating winners here and losers there." And in an anarchical international political system, "there is no global civil society that can be called on to support global governance" (Sorensen). Like politics and markets, then, politics and the process of globalization are intimately intertwined, as "even the most powerful states cannot escape the imperatives of the global economy" (Sandel). Meanwhile, realization of truly civic-spirited community in the global village remains elusive.
Exercises:
1 Answer the following questions:
