Governmental Justice and Globalization

Fourth Quarter 2000

by Max L. Stackhouse

The justice of the covenanting God is not only simultaneously stable and dynamic, it is pre-given and unfinished. It is pre-given in that it is constituted by a standard and an ultimate end that humans can neither construct nor deconstruct; but it is unfinished in that the standards of right and wrong, good and evil, are neither fully recognized nor completely fulfilled in life. Most importantly, the ultimate end cannot be fulfilled, but only approximated, in history.

Christians must be honest about the fact that we do not fully know the future. We confess that Christ has come, but we also confess that Christ will come again. The best forms of covenantal justice in this age make the world safe for non-Christian and Christian alike. Covenantal justice also recognizes that all human vocations and spheres of practice represent the social embodiments of covenantal callings, even when they are distorted by sin. This is especially important for our understanding of, and responsibility for, globalization.

We stand at the brink of a global era, which means that the nation-state, the chief instrument of modernization and development in many places for at least several centuries, is finding that its power to mobilize resources is being compromised. The technological, economic, communication, and educational possibilities reshaping our world are at once beyond and below the capacity of states to develop or constrain. They develop on local levels outside state planning and in transnational organizations that states need but cannot control.

Strong centralized governments in the nation states of recent history—right-wing, left-wing, or moderate-technocratic—had strong traditions and sometimes strong strategic reasons for keeping cultural, moral, social, and economic institutions weak. As a consequence, both the organized sectors of civil society below the state, and connections to the transnational organizations beyond the state are weak precisely when they must play roles that demand greater initiative, leadership, and creativity. It is too much to say that the age of the nation-state is ended, and it is a special temptation of the USA as the strongest superpower to exercise its influence arrogantly; but it is not too much to say that any state that hopes to preserve itself must, in some measure, lose itself in the wider world of international interdependency and be-come a collaborative servant of institutions that it once tried to control or avoid.

Beyond the political issues that are at stake, moreover, great economic changes are at hand, and it is in these terms even more than the inter-religious or political ones that globalization is most often understood. On this front, the multinational corporations are the most obvious and sometimes overwhelming agent of international interdependence. While we sometimes refer to the new developments only in terms of the market, we are remiss if we do not recognize the fact that new international regulative institutions are stronger than ever before, even if we think they need continued reform. I refer, of course, to the World Bank, the IMF, the WTO, the ILO, and many branches of the UN.

Although it is still controversial to say so, the corporations, in fact, increasingly provide not only the goods and services, but the finance, technology, jobs, sense of professional excellence, and centers of operational identity that ethnic, national and even regional identity can no longer supply. They do so, of course, precisely because they opportunistically turn to the lowest bidder on various contracts and are oblivious to local needs if some other location can supply the needed workers, services, or raw materials at a lower price. Thus, they foment a new international competition as well as a new interdepenence that, on the one hand, exploits whatever opportunities are available and, on the other hand, draws more and more poor people into the orbit of a global economy.

Obviously, many see these developments as simply a new economic imperialism of the West. There is some truth to that charge; and that is why globalization needs further and extended cross-cultural discussion.

A key question is whether it is possible for a biblically rooted theory of convenantal justice to become a guide to these globalizing institutions and their activities. I think it can, and that is one of the greatest challenges of our time. In every area of life, the most effective way to form and sustain a viable society is to turn again to the model of covenantal justice.

[Dr. Stackhouse is Professor of Christian Ethics at Princeton Theological Seminary. This article is excerpted from an essay to be published in a book on biblical views of justice, edited by Gary A. Haugen. It appeared as Zadok Paper S102 (Spring/Summer 1999-2000) from the Zadok Institute, Hawthorn, Victoria, Australia: e-mail info@zadok.org.au.]