United Nations Conference on Women, Beijing 1995

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak

The United Nations is based on the unacknowledged assumption that `the rest of the world' is unable to govern itself. In fact, of course, no state is able to govern itself, in different ways. And, in the current conjuncture, the role of the state is less and less important. Therefore it is necessary to show, as lavishly as possible, global national unity.

One is not `against' the UN as such. But the US-controlled Security Council (which Barbara Crossette of The New York Times has called the `Insecurity Council', because US control seems to be slipping), and, at the other end, these women's conferences, are more problematic. The latter may even be called tremendously well-organized and broad repressive ideological apparatuses. The thing to show is the unity of nations, remember. And, just as for capital the use value of labour power is capital accumulation, so for the United States, and even, mutatis mutandis, the EC, nationalism is globalization, and that is where the problem lies.

In this perspective, the China-bashing that accompanied the events in Beijing last autumn was a red herring. Human-rights violations happen only in China, although the USA is currently decimating welfare and approving mergers that allow Chief Executive Officers to pull in `salaries' in eight figures? China is blocking a `free exchange of ideas' and thus re-initiating the Cold War? We do not see free exchange on the other side. It is a situation of repression versus exploitation. China should perhaps learn from the `free' world that repressive tolerance is the best ally of exploitation.

The financialization of the globe must be represented as the North embracing the South. Women are being used for the representation of this unity - another name for the profound transnational disunity necessary for globalization. These conferences are global theatre. There is, of course, no politics which is not theatre. But we are interested in this global theatre, staged to show participation between the North and the South, the latter constituted by Northern discursive mechanisms - a Platform of Action and certain power lines between the UN, the donor consortium, governments and the elite Non-Governmental Organisations (NGOs). In fact, the North organizes a South. People going to these conferences may be struck by the global radical aura. But if you hang out at the other end, participating day-to-day in the (largely imposed) politics of how delegations and NGO groups are put together - in Bangladesh, Sri Lanka or Central Asia, say, to name only the places this writer knows - you would attest that what is left out is the poorest women of the South as self-conscious critical agents, who might be able to speak through those very nongovernmental organizations of the South that are not favoured by these object-constitution policies.

Of course, the constitution of a `South' - and, indeed, of a `North' - doesn't deal with the internal division within nations. Yet, one distinction still holds. Poor women in the North are being denied access to an existing welfare structure that is being dismantled; the poorest in the South are at the bottom of a society where a welfare structure cannot emerge because of globalized exploitation (and, often, state corruption). The structural disparity is immense. Fertilizer and pharmaceutical dumping, biodiversity-grabbing, et cetera, affect women in the two sectors in a discontinuous way. Although in certain areas - as has been pointed out by Swasti Mitter and others - one cannot endorse a clean North-South divide.

back