by Walden Bello, 22 February 2007

By Jenina Joy Chavez 

This paper appeared in the Yellow Pad column of the BusinessWorld on 15 January 2007.

Over the weekend (January 13 and 14, 2007) the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) held its 12th Summit in Cebu City, after a controversial postponement in December last year.

The Summit produced some significant agreements. These include the Mutual Recognition Arrangement on Nursing Services, which makes it possible for nurses with at least three years of experience in their home countries to practice in other ASEAN countries without having to go through additional licensing requirements; the Declaration on the Protection of the Rights of Migrant Workers, which, albeit limited, at last recognizes the contributions and needs of migrant workers in the region; and the blueprint for the proposed ASEAN Charter that seeks to formalize rules of engagement in the regional body. ASEAN Leaders are hopeful that initiatives like these will bring it closer to the dream of an ASEAN Community and the ambition of a single market by 2020. 

Now that the U.S. Marine convicted of raping a Filipina is in the custody of U.S. Embassy officials, the United States has announced that it will push through with the "Balikatan" training exercises involving U.S. and Filipino troops scheduled next month. It had earlier cancelled the exercises to protest the Philippine courts' refusal to release Lance Corporal Daniel Smith to U.S. authorities while his case is on appeal. Yet unknown to many, a contingent of U.S. Special Operations Forces that had been stationed in the southern Philippines since January 2002 was clearly staying on despite the "Balikatan" exercises' cancellation.

by Walden Bello

This column appeared in Foreign Policy in Focus on Dec. 27, 2006: http://www.fpif.org/fpiftxt/3826.

When it first became part of the English vocabulary in the early 1990s, globalization was supposed to be the wave of the future. Fifteen years ago, the writings of globalist thinkers such as Kenichi Ohmae and Robert Reich celebrated the advent of the emergence of the so-called borderless world. The process by which relatively autonomous national economies become functionally integrated into one global economy was touted as "irreversible". And the people who opposed globalization were disdainfully dismissed as modern day incarnations of the Luddites that destroyed machines during the Industrial Revolution.