Cosmopolitan movements can happen now - EU and other post-conventional groups prove - but capitalism is making them fail
Padilla ’21 [Luis-Alberto; 2021; president of the board of the Guatemalan International Relations & Peace Research Institute (IRIPAZ), member of the International Peace Research Association (IPRA), former Secretary General of the Latin American Council on Peace Research (CLAIP), Director of the Diplomatic Academy, Former Vice Minister, former ambassador in Chile, former permanent representative to the United Nations at the Vienna International Centre, former ambassador to Austria, former ambassador to the Russian Federation, former ambassador to the Netherlands, permanent representative to the UN in Geneva, and professor of the Seminar of World Geopolitics at the Faculty of Political Sciences of the Catholic University Rafael Landivar (URL) of Guatemala; Sustainable Development in the Anthropocene, “Globalization, the World System and the Crisis of the Westphalian Order,” Ch. 6.4, p. 301] SPark
From this perspective, globalization, as we have seen on previous pages, is a phenomenon that has been inherentin the world system since the sixteenth century. Nowadays it isbetterunderstoodfrom the perspective of its current manifestations, which are the result of the impressive scientific and technological developments exemplified by the new information and communication technologies (ICTs) of the so called information era examined above. On a social level there is now a transnationalcivilsocietythat, as a positive result of globalization, has facilitated the emergence of significant nuclei of a new type of citizenship (people with a world centric mentality or post-conventional cosmopolitan world consciousness) thatrejects ethnocentric nationalism and constitutes the basis of the new transnational social movements that promote counter-hegemonic globalization (Santos 2010) and defend causes such as ecology, gender equality, the rights of indigenous peoples, human rights, humanitarian law,sustainable development, the UN 2030 Agenda, the commitments of the Paris COP 21, nuclear disarmament, and other similar causes. It is therefore possible to say that this cosmopolitan world-view and its social movements show that a significant layer of global civil society is emerging with a post-conventional cosmopolitan philosophy or world-view that could also be the bedrock or underpinning for the kind of transnational citizenshippioneered by the EU. Nevertheless, there are some negative expressions of globalization, such as the proliferation of organized crime and other phenomena that can be attributed to the characteristics of the capitalist system, like the growing number of transnational companies whose production is destined for the global market and requires intergovernmental agreements in order to permit merchandise to circulate freely (with reduced or no customs tariffs) or facilitate investments so that corporations may ‘relocate’ to places where wages are lower, in areas where the use of corrupt procedures is frequent with the purpose of obtaining government contracts which enable the accumulation of capital, the concentration of wealth, and the placing of funds in tax havens: all those negative features can be mitigated by appropriate global regulations negotiated in multilateral UN international fora.