" We should not think that everything is moved and controlled by economics, or the needs of the economy. One should not seek only the economic dimension behind globalization, motivated by the need to increase profits, to maximize the return on investment, to conquer new markets. Economics, with greater force in the last three centuries compared with the past, certainly drives men in new directions, influences their social structures and thus their politics. Economics alone, however, cannot be isolated as the driving-force for everything. Globalization should be interpreted as a vision which transcends economics, which is not just driven by the economic dimension. People do not participate just for the sake of profit or greater benefits. Behind the road to globalization other forces, other movements in human society are pushing it in the right direction and at the right pace. Apart from economics, global change involves men and women with their own passions, their own aspirations and institutions, with their own ideal, just and equitable social models. Also behind globalization are the eternal forces of human change: religion, culture, and technology. Any assumption that everything happens because the economy demands it is not just simplistic, it is wrong."

" It is said that globalization has brought about a state of crisis for the nation state. Progressive consolidation of the free trade area and the enshrinement of free movement of capital, according to some, would have undermined the socio-political base on which the concept of the nation state was built in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Weakened from above by the high level of internationalization and from below by the resurgence of local aspirations for new forms of autonomy, nation states would be destined to amble slowly like elephants into old age.........Much more realistically, I believe that nation states will not disappear. Less traumatically, they will carve out a new and visibly less cumbersome role within the new world order."

" There will be changes in the role of national institutions, the conflict between interests of domestic groups, control over financial flows, cultural autonomy, particular forms of social and market models, relations with everything outside the national territory.

What is more important is that a new model of capitalism is being drawn up. It is a break with national capitalism, now disappearing, and a rising world capitalism, as suggested in the report of the Lisbon Group published in 1994. For convenience, we can call it global capitalism. It is a unitary model of the market economy in which we will be living when the process of globalization is complete, not so many years from now."

" The question we must try to answer in order to understand what global capitalism will look like is simple: is the face of global capitalism, with its distinctive features, already visible in the current context? Well, the gears that will drive and channel change are already before our eyes. There is not even any need to make any particular intellectual effort. They are:

the stateless dimension of capital and saving;

the growth in the incidence of unemployment, destined, in time, to extend even to recently industrialized countries;

the transcending of geo-political boundaries by the communication media, amplified by the provision of personalized information with less and less intermediation;

the restructuring and repositioning of the role of the nation state;

the cohabitation of increasingly fluid groupings within social bodies due to openness and international dialogue between them;

the assertiveness of smaller enterprises in response to the individual needs and the need to restructure large enterprises;

the final overthrow of totalitarian political ideologies able to block or control relations between individuals or between more or less informal groups.

All this has turned today into an open scenario. Reforms only seem to belong to the rationale of the action of individual States or individual national communities. In reality it is a continual reaction with the outside. And this interaction, obviously, will be reflected in the approach of global capitalism. Moving towards global capitalism therefore involves domestic changes but also the need to adopt appropriate international policies for action."

" National states are in no position to control globalization. However, governments will have the not so easy task of adapting international institutions to the new reality that has arisen in the meantime."

" At every moment of the day and in almost everything he does, man grapples with the demands of communication technologies. And he must be able to manage it himself if he wants to be a protagonist. It is the same phenomenon, on a larger scale and developing more rapidly, as when Gutemberg invented the printing press. A colossal technological literacy process is taking over humanity so as to allow it to enter the world of communications. Thus technology becomes the true universal language which you cannot reject without excluding yourself from the game. Moreover, hundreds of millions of people already speak, perhaps without realizing it, the same computer language. Just as the illiterate had no career prospects in bourgeois society, the basis of a bureaucratic state, in the same way the new illiterates have no chance of participating in the frenetic evolution of contemporary society. But in the first case, the knowledge required to catch up was, in fact, relatively static over time, while the latter, on the other hand, is constantly changing."

" I cannot imagine a global environment as an exclusive club with an elite few who reproduce themselves by passing on the baggage of knowledge. That is why corrective measures are needed by governments. The situation, once again, is not very different from that which existed between the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth in relation to the ability to read and write. Universal compulsory schooling was the response of the time to extend participation in progress and economic development as well as political choice. The spread of the knowledge required by the global society should be today's response to the risk of a fragmented community. It will be television and other systems of communication that will help to achieve this ambitious objective. In this way, television as a means of entertainment will become, at least in part, an instrument of education and training thanks to the proliferation of channels."

" The consolidation of robotics and technical progress has already led to a constant change of the active labour force. To this can be added increased productivity, also improved thanks to technical advances made available to employees. Mass unemployment, a phenomenon which now affects even the rich countries, is the most important socio-economic fact of the end of the second millennium and many agree that unemployment, despite the astronomical figures, more than thirty million in 1993 in the OECD countries alone, will go on rising. The International Labour Office (ILO), in its report on unemployment up to 1995, offers a numerical presentation of a decline in the rate of employment growth experienced in all industrialized countries for the period 1991-1994 compared with the previous period. Employment is hardly growing at all in the European Union and in Canada, and less than in the past in Japan and the USA. What the market offers is a surrogate for traditional employment, employment resulting from the industrialization that dominates human life. In the second half of 1993, statistics provided by the Canadian Institute of Statistics show in simple terms how the labour market is changing: compared with not a single full time job being created in the last five and a half years, there was an increase from 320,000 to 2,150,000 part time jobs. The lack of employment growth cannot be written off as just a major or minor problem of the labour market, or simply as a problem of specific economies. True, there are countries where unemployment is aggravated by specific factors related to the labour market, but no economy can feel safe from the erosion of the employment base caused by technological change and changes in the economy in general. Seventy-five per cent of workers are still engaged in repetitive and simple tasks. For economists, the advent of electronics will be reflected in a contraction ranging from 25 to 75 per cent of all office work, the activity that includes the largest proportion in contemporary employment."

" It will be necessary to come to terms with a mass of unemployed or partly employed people who will have to be retrained, in an "education for life", in the words of Keynes. It will be necessary to explain that people are not expected any longer to work for most of their life and educate them to accept this new social dimension. Rifkin is certainly convinced of this, when he writes in his latest book: "in the future, a growing number of people, all over the world, will spend less time in their place of work¼. Instead, we will see a more enlightened course, allowing workers to benefit from increased productivity by shorter working hours and by adjusting incomes accordingly, people will be able to enjoy more leisure than ever before in history".

Global capitalism, therefore, will establish a different relationship with work. "

" Culture and education, tourism, entertainment and sport could become the four main "industries" in the world. People will divide most of their time between the services offered by these sectors.In addition, relations with others will change, within the so-called civil society and the non-profit sector with its many organizations will develop

This is perhaps the most interesting aspect from a social point of view. Behind the profile that we have just sketched, indeed, there is the immense seam of the social economy, in which a growing number of people will find employment, of a more or less casual nature. It will be up to these non-profit organizations themselves to offer the majority of people a substitute employment in place of traditional jobs" .

" In the United States, more than 15 service occupations are generated by social enterprises or non-profit activities. According to the American Government's Labour Statistics Office, it is estimated that by 2005, the sector with the most employment growth will be home health care services, employing some 428,000 new staff in the United States alone.The economy of altruism, after the end of the factory and the abolition of the traditional work place, will be the most widespread institution of global socialization. The threads of this mixture of altruism and collective consumption of time will transmit new tastes, new social fashions, new ways of participating in community life."

" Social economy will produce a significant income flow, essential to build the new socio-economic equilibrium. The case of Italian social co-operatives should be mentioned in this connection. Social co-operatives are a special form of co-operative society in which the members must possess certain individual characteristics. They must be disabled, mentally ill, drug dependents, ex-prisoners, long-term unemployed and suchlike. In a nutshell, they must belong to the so-called disadvantaged members of the social fabric, those who have the greatest difficulty in finding a place in the traditional labour market. As an incentive to such co-operatives, the law provides special treatment, including tax incentives. The legislative framework is recent, contained in the provisions of 8 November 1991. However, the latest available data show a capacity for growth and job-creation, traditional or otherwise, by some impressive social co-operatives. At the end of 1995, there were more than two thousand non-profit organizations of this type with a paid labour force estimated as more than 40,000 employees."

" It is not even remotely possible to conceive a situation in which part of the world enjoys a stable social equilibrium and widespread welfare, while the other part of the planet, numerically larger, languishes in a life of poverty accompanied by non-employment and absence of social services. Not even the most sophisticated barriers or the most draconian police measures would be able to prevent mass migration from areas of poverty to regions of plenty and peace."

" In the global capitalist equilibrium, there will still be a need to transfer resources. The government levy via taxation will, however, change radically compared with industrial capitalism. We will probably see an adjustment to the principle of the capacity to contribute to the new social and economy situation. The primary targets of taxation will be consumption of technology and non-essential goods (luxury or optional goods such as travel) and incomes of knowledge professionals, automated enterprises and financial investments. The remaining human relations will develop in practice outside the market, and could ultimately escape the burden of taxation ".

" International organizations will have to be able to safeguard the precarious social equilibrium. To achieve that objective, they will continually interact with local communities in seeking greater redistribution of resources and activating more non-profit bodies . But above all, they will have to ensure proper relations between countries where there is a relative lack or total absence of professional knowledge....In order to meet this challenge in the most effective way, international organizations will have the far from easy task of ensuring equal participation of the peoples of the planet in the development of knowledge. In two ways: by ensuring free circulation of the bearers of knowledge and, thus, avoiding the formation of enclaves of knowledge to which only a small elite have access; and by guarding against the secret hoarding of knowledge.

As you can see, the new guardians of the international order, rather than armed troops, will need technical specialists and experts in the various branches of human knowledge."

" In order to function properly, global capitalism must be based on a single, thus global, morality. This morality must ensure that in every corner of the world, human beings have the same civil rights and enjoy comparable respect for their dignity. This does not mean that the people of a particular country may not be paid less than others, but simply that their rights must be respected the same as others'. The illusion of being able to advance in different ways along the road to globalization is false, because you cannot ask someone whose most basic rights are not respected under the rules of the market to respect global rules of free trade and peaceful use of resources.

That is another reason for global capitalism having a single lay morality. As we have seen, society in the near future will be governed by increasingly delicate balances. Technical advances will constantly challenge the positions achieved. In this possible scenario, only a mankind strongly committed to a sense of community will be in a position to confront it. If anyone, for example, could see in biogenetics the chance to compensate for centuries, decades of prevarication or, worse still, a sure way of asserting racial superiority, then it is clear that the delicate balance would collapse. Only a common cooperation based on shared values can make the globalization era manageable. But there should be no illusion that this will happen by itself. It can only happen if the governments of the countries of the world, especially those of the wealthiest, and international organizations play an active part in overcoming the current discrimination against some of the actors in global capitalism."

" Global capitalism will have a universal morality, and it will be the result of centuries of achievement in terms of individual freedom, political rights, respect for the needy or less fortunate. It is on the best of the past that mankind has always built its future and it is logical that it should do it again. "