Globalization

The word and the thing

The English word globalization became established in the 1980s-1990s, especially after the fall of the Soviet bloc (1989-1991) and the rise of the Internet (the French mondialisation had spread from the 1960s onwards). But the thing is older than the word: long-distance trade, empires, the great discoveries and the missions, the industrial revolution each in turn widened the horizon of human exchange. What is unprecedented today is the speed, the scale and the simultaneity of integration: capital moves from one continent to another in a second, information travels around the globe in minutes.

Benedict XVI names this novelty with an exact word: "the explosion of worldwide interdependence, now commonly called globalization"^[3]. The key word is interdependence: peoples are no longer merely neighbours, they have become bound together in fact, for better and for worse — a financial crisis born in New York impoverishes a farmer in Asia, an epidemic that starts in one city spreads across the whole earth.

A reality with many faces

Globalization is not a single bloc: it has several dimensions that do not advance at the same pace.

• Economic and commercial: free movement of goods, production chains spread across several continents, the international division of labour.
• Financial: globalized capital markets, instantaneous transactions, of which Benedict XVI notes that they "can be badly used when those at the helm are motivated by purely selfish ends"^[4].
• Technological and digital: the Internet, telecommunications, artificial intelligence, which abolish distances.
• Cultural: the worldwide spread of patterns of consumption, music and narratives — with the risk of levelling.
• Political: international organizations (UN, WTO, IMF), treaties, transnational governance.
• Migratory: massive movements of peoples, treated by the Church in the articles on migration and welcoming the stranger.

The Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church defines it as "a process of increasing integration of national economies" which goes far beyond economics to touch the whole of social life^[5].

Globalization, internationalization and catholicity

Three realities that are often confused must be distinguished. Internationalization means the multiplication of relations between States that remain masters in their own house. Globalization goes further: it creates a unified space in which borders count for less and less where capital, information and firms are concerned. Finally, the catholicity of the Church — the word katholikos means "according to the whole" — is a universality of another order: not commercial levelling, but the unity of peoples in one faith that respects and embraces their cultures. The Church knows herself to be the oldest "worldwide" reality: since Pentecost she gathers "every nation under heaven" (Acts 2:5) without abolishing the diversity of tongues^[6]. This theological outlook grounds her freedom towards the global fact: she feels neither fear nor fascination for it.

The social Magisterium did not wait for the word to think about the thing. From Leo XIII to Francis, the Church's outlook gradually widened from the national workshop to the entire planet.

The social question become worldwide (Paul VI, 1967)

The decisive turning point is Paul VI's encyclical Populorum Progressio (1967). Until then, social doctrine had concentrated on relations between employers and workers within the industrial nations. Paul VI shifts the gaze towards the imbalance between rich peoples and poor peoples:

"Today the principal fact that we must all remember is that the social question has become worldwide." — Saint Paul VI, Populorum Progressio, 26 March 1967, no. 3^[7]

From this observation he draws a conclusion that would remain the thread running through all that followed: the integral development of all peoples is the condition of peace.

"If development is the new name for peace, who would not wish to work for it with all his might?" — Saint Paul VI, Populorum Progressio, no. 87^[8]

From interdependence to solidarity (John Paul II, 1987)

Twenty years later, Sollicitudo Rei Socialis (1987) names the reality not yet commonly called globalization: interdependence, "a system of determining relationships in the contemporary world, in its economic, cultural, political and religious elements"^[9]. John Paul II refuses merely to undergo this fact: interdependence, he says, must be converted into a moral virtue. This is the founding definition of solidarity:

"Solidarity is not a feeling of vague compassion or shallow distress at the misfortunes of so many people, both near and far. On the contrary, it is a firm and persevering determination to commit oneself to the common good." — Saint John Paul II, Sollicitudo Rei Socialis, 30 December 1987, no. 38^[10]

In 1991, Centesimus Annus extends this outlook after the collapse of communism: the "globalization of the economy" can create "unusual opportunities for greater welfare", but it calls for "effective international agencies which will oversee and direct the economy to the common good"^[11].

Caritas in Veritate, the great Catholic charter of globalization

It is Benedict XVI who, in Caritas in Veritate (2009), gives the Church her most accomplished reflection on globalization. Published in the midst of the worldwide financial crisis, the encyclical makes it a central object of meditation. Its thesis: globalization is a human process, and therefore to be guided by values; left to itself, it brings men closer without uniting them.

"As society becomes ever more globalized, it makes us neighbours but does not make us brothers." — Benedict XVI, Caritas in Veritate, 29 June 2009, no. 19^[12]

This sentence governs all the rest: technology and the market create proximity, never fraternity by themselves. Fraternity comes from elsewhere — from charity received from God and lived in truth.

Neither demonization nor idolatry

The temptation is twofold: to curse globalization as an absolute evil, or to worship it as an irresistible progress that would settle everything. The Church refuses both. Her position is expressed by Benedict XVI in a sentence that has become classic:

"Globalization is a priori neither good nor bad. It will be what people make of it. We must not be its victims, but its protagonists, acting in the light of reason, guided by charity and truth." — Benedict XVI, Caritas in Veritate, no. 42^[13]

The verdict is therefore passed not on the phenomenon itself, but on the use men make of it. The Compendium says exactly the same thing: "globalization is a priori neither good nor bad in itself, but depends on how it is used"^[14]. It is a morality of responsible freedom: refusing both fatalism ("there is nothing we can do about it") and utopia ("the market will take care of the rest").

The promises

The Church frankly acknowledges the possible benefits. The Compendium speaks of real hopes:

"Globalization gives rise to new hopes, but it also gives rise to troubling questions." — Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church, no. 362^[15]

Among these hopes: more efficient production, hundreds of millions of people in Asia lifted out of poverty, the circulation of knowledge and techniques, wider access to information and healthcare, and a new awareness of the unity of the human family. John Paul II saw in it a chance for a "globalization of solidarity", on condition that it be ordered to the person^[16].

The perils

But the "troubling questions" match the promises. The first peril is inequality: badly regulated, globalization enriches the rich and relatively impoverishes the poor.

"International trade (...) can on the contrary have negative effects: the poor peoples remain ever poor, and the rich ones become ever richer." — Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church, no. 364^[17]

The second peril is exclusion: whole groups of people are made useless to the economy, treated as refuse. The third is the domination of politics by the economy — when financial markets escape all democratic control. The fourth is cultural levelling, which threatens the soul of peoples (see below). Benedict XVI recalls that "economy and finance, as instruments, can be used badly" and that "instruments that are good in themselves" can thus be "transformed into harmful ones"^[18].

The Church's answer is not to slow globalization down, but to guide it:

"The challenge is to ensure a globalization in solidarity, a globalization without marginalization." — Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church, no. 363^[19]

To humanize the global fact, the Church invents no new principles: she applies to the planetary scale the permanent principles of her social doctrine. Globalization thus becomes the great test of their truth.

The primacy of the person

The first criterion is the dignity of the human person. Globalization is good insofar as it serves man, bad when it reduces him to a factor of production or a consumer. John Paul II said so to the social sciences in 2001: "globalization, like any other system, must be at the service of the human person; it must serve solidarity and the common good"^[20]. Everything else follows: the economy is for man, never man for the economy.

The common good become universal

The great magisterial insight is that the common good has changed scale. What held for a city, then for a nation, now holds for the planet. The Second Vatican Council formulated it clearly:

"The common good (...) takes on an increasingly universal complexion and consequently involves rights and duties with respect to the whole human race." — Second Vatican Council, Gaudium et Spes, 7 December 1965, no. 26^[21]

There is therefore a universal common good, which cannot be secured by sovereign States alone. It is this observation that will lead the Church to call for an international authority (see below).

The universal destination of goods

On a worldwide scale, the principle of the universal destination of goods takes on its full force: the resources of the earth are destined for all men, and private property, though legitimate, remains burdened with a "social mortgage". A just globalization is one that allows all peoples — not a few — to have access to the goods needed for a dignified life. This is also the foundation of the duty of rich nations towards poor nations, which Paul VI called the "duty of solidarity" among peoples.

Solidarity and subsidiarity together

Finally, globalization demands that solidarity and subsidiarity advance together. Benedict XVI made this a law of social action: solidarity without subsidiarity falls into demeaning welfare; subsidiarity without solidarity falls into every-man-for-himself selfishness^[22]. Applied to the world, this pair forbids both a world government that would crush peoples and a free trade that would abandon the weak. This is precisely what the article on economic liberalism denounces, as does the one on capitalism and its limits.

With Pope Francis, discourse on globalization takes a more prophetic and denouncing tone, without breaking with his predecessors. His most famous formula strikes at the heart of the problem: globalization can anaesthetize consciences.

"To sustain a lifestyle which excludes others, or to sustain enthusiasm for that selfish ideal, a globalization of indifference has developed." — Pope Francis, Evangelii Gaudium, 24 November 2013, no. 54^[23]

The economy of exclusion

Francis does not condemn the economy, but an economy that sacrifices persons to profit. His cry has remained famous:

"Today we also have to say 'thou shalt not' to an economy of exclusion and inequality. Such an economy kills." — Pope Francis, Evangelii Gaudium, no. 53^[24]

The point is no longer to regard the poor as the system's left-behind, but as the measure of its justice — a theme developed in the article on poverty.

Respect for cultures against levelling

Francis's second front is cultural. A certain globalization erases the distinctive features of peoples in favour of a single model. In Fratelli Tutti, he refuses this flattening universalism:

"Nor am I proposing (...) an authoritarian and abstract universalism, devised or planned by a small group and presented as an ideal for the sake of levelling, dominating and plundering." — Pope Francis, Fratelli Tutti, 3 October 2020, no. 100^[25]

He also denounces the hijacking of the expression "opening up to the world", co-opted by finance to mean only the freedom of capital to circulate "without obstacles or complications in all countries"^[26]. The Compendium had set down the same requirement: "globalization must not be a new version of colonialism. It must respect the diversity of cultures"^[27]. True openness to the world is not the dissolution of cultures, but the fraternity that welcomes them.

This is the most original — and most discussed — point of the Catholic position. Since the common good has become universal, and no State can single-handedly regulate a globalized economy, the Church has called since John XXIII for an international authority.

An old insight (John XXIII, Vatican II)

As early as 1963, in the midst of the Cold War, John XXIII drew the logical consequence of the universal common good:

"Today the universal common good poses problems of world-wide dimensions. They cannot be solved except by a public authority with power, organization and means co-extensive with these problems." — Saint John XXIII, Pacem in Terris, 11 April 1963, no. 137^[28]

But he immediately added that this body must be set up "with the consent of all nations and not imposed by force"^[29]. Vatican II took up the call, asking that "the community of nations organize itself in a manner appropriate to its present responsibilities"^[30].

Benedict XVI and subsidiary world authority

Benedict XVI explicitly takes up this tradition in Caritas in Veritate, calling for a reform of international institutions:

"There is urgent need of a true world political authority, as my Predecessor Blessed John XXIII indicated." — Benedict XVI, Caritas in Veritate, no. 67^[31]

Neither totalitarian world government, nor naivety

This demand is often caricatured as a plan for "world government". The Church says exactly the opposite. The authority called for must be subject to the principle of subsidiarity: it is meant to deal only with what States cannot settle alone (peace, climate, finance, hunger), without absorbing lower competences. Benedict XVI insists: such an authority "will have to be regulated by law" and exercised in a way that "does not undermine freedom" — it must be "a form of governance marked by subsidiarity, articulated into multiple layers and involving various levels"^[32]. The aim is not to crush nations, but to subject worldwide finance to law and justice — exactly as the rule of law tamed private violence within nations. This is the worldwide application of the principle treated in the article on political authority according to the Church.

Beneath the economic and political debate, the Church reads a deeper issue, which touches God's plan for humanity. Scripture offers two opposite images of the unity of men.

On one side, Babel (Gen 11): men want to build a unity without God — "let us make our name famous" — a single city and tower; the pride of a forced uniformity ends in confusion and dispersion^[33]. On the other, Pentecost (Acts 2): the Holy Spirit gives the Apostles to speak all tongues, and each one hears them in his own language; unity does not erase diversity, it reconciles it^[34]. Globalization hangs between these two figures: it can be a new Babel — commercial uniformity, technical pride, moral confusion — or a distant reflection of Pentecost, a respectful communion of peoples.

That is why, for the Church, true globalization is not first economic but spiritual: the unity of the human race is a gift to be received, not a product to be manufactured. Benedict XVI sums it up: globalized society "makes us neighbours but does not make us brothers"^[35] — fraternity comes from charity received from God. This insight meets the spirituality of the Divine Will transmitted to Luisa Piccarreta: the soul that lives in the Divine Will unites its acts to those of all creatures, embracing all creation and all peoples in a single act of love rendered to God — the highest of globalizations, that of holiness^[36]. Political charity is the name social doctrine gives to this love when it is translated into just structures.

• Solidarity — the principle that must turn worldwide interdependence into fraternity.
• Subsidiarity — the guarantee against a world power that would crush peoples.
• The common good — become universal in the age of globalization.
• The universal destination of goods — the resources of the earth are for all men.
• The dignity of the human person — the first criterion of a just globalization.
• Economic liberalism and capitalism and its limits — the systems that globalization spreads, and their limits.
• Poverty — the measure of justice of a world economy.
• Migration and welcoming the stranger — the human face of globalization.
• Integral ecology and peace — the planetary common goods par excellence.