Human Rights and Business Responsibilities in the Global Marketplace

Communism lost the Cold War, not to pure free market capitalism, but to a range of diverse economic systems based on varying degrees and forms of social regulation of the market. Such social regulation was possible because both polities and economies were primarily national. Since the end of the Cold War, there has been rapid globalization of the economy, but not of effective social regulation. Incipient global political institutions are too weak to regulate global corporate power, while national governments no longer have sufficient reach to regulate large multinationals. Corporate self-regulation has begun, but only haltingly and mostly ineffectively. While global prosperity has risen dramatically in recent decades, not everyone has progressed since the end of the Cold War. Since 1990 some 55 countries have had declining per capita incomes, while inequality has risen within and between countries. It is too soon to say whether global capitalism will be saved from itself by regulation, just as American national capitalism may have been saved by the New Deal reforms it opposed. As Pope John Paul II has warned, the world must not succumb to a “radical capitalist ideology” which “blindly entrusts” social problems to market forces.