HAVE THE LAST TWO DECADES WITNESSED A GLOBAL LIBERAL

REVOLUTION?

Recent years have seen a significant rise of interest across the world in the broad horizon of

social institutions operating outside the limits of the market as well as the state. Known by

the names of “non-profit”, the “civil”, the “voluntary”, the “third” or the “independent”

segments of market, this horde of institutions includes an array of entities within it, such as

universities, hospitals, professional organizations, and many more. Notwithstanding their

diversities, however, these entities share some common characteristics. Particularly, these

features are:

 Organizations: having institutional presence as well as structure

 Not-profit distributing: which fundamentally control their own affairs

 Private: which are institutionally different from the state

 Voluntary: where membership is not legally needed and they attract a certain specific

level of voluntary contribution of money or time (Tismăneanu 1999) (Piontkovsky

2004).

The face of globalization has changed over the past few years. With such organizations

attracting much attention in recent years, it is due in major part to the far flung crisis of the

state which has been in progress for the past two decades or more in virtually every part of

the globe. This crisis is said to have manifested itself as a severe doubtfulness of traditional

social welfare policies at the much developed North, in dissatisfaction of the overall progress

of state-driven development within major parts of the South (Salamon 1999). Besides, with

the collapse of experiment in state socialism within Eastern and Central Europe, concerns

were held about the environmental degradation that continually threatens human health and
safety everywhere. Apart from the simulating support for economic policies that are market-

oriented, this questioning of the stated has thrown new attention as well as new expectations

on the civil society organizations which operate in societies across the world (Strong 2006).

In essence, contribution towards the attention these organizations have been drawing has

been the absolute increase in their number and scale. Surely, an authentic “global

associational revolution” seems to be underway, a powerful upsurge of organized, private,

voluntary activity in almost every corner of the world (Piontkovsky 2004). Motivated by

stemming out doubts regarding the capability of the state in order to cope on its own with

developmental, environmental as well as social welfare problems, which currently face

nations, this growth of civil society organizations has been induced by the communications

revolution during the past two decades as well as by the prominent expansion of educated

middle class sectors who have been frustrated by the shortage of economic and political

expression which they encounter at several instances and places (Tismăneanu 1999)

(Salamon 1999).

In the past years, there had been an endless stream of articles stating that “liberal” or

“progressive” ideas have run out of credibility because of the massive funding of rightist

economists. However, in 2001, liberal foundations said to have spent as much as $136

million on public policy organizations while conservative foundations spent just $30 million.

Essentially, the truth lies in the fact that liberals must eagerly re-think their ideas and policies.

They must return to liberalism, which is an intellectual tradition almost vanished from

present-day academic life, and therefore from the agendas of several mainstream

organizations who consider themselves as “liberals” (Strong 2006) (Lan et al 1999).

Liberals need to regard the modern-day Leftist bias of universities and conventional

philanthropic organizations to be among the most dangerous threats to human well-being.

Additionally, had liberalisms ruled universities, in place of the Left, thousands of millions of

people across the world would be happier and healthier (Piontkovsky 2004). Since the Leftist

was characterized by hatred, anger, bullying, and intellectual dishonesty, these spiritual

illnesses together with the legacies of the French Revolution and its Terror started infecting

liberalism in the early 20th century. Due to this, contamination of academic life took place

outside the sciences, business, and economics schools. Consequently, most of the ideas and

approaches towards the social sciences and humanities are deeply misguided (Strong 2006)

(Salamon 1999).

For most of the 20th century, influences from Leftist encouraged a wrong perspective of

economic development so much so that free enterprise was witnessed negatively and

government activities were seen as undiminished goods.

The original notions about liberalism gave the world several boons in the 18th and 19th

centuries; however they have been greatly denied or distorted. In addition to this, Leftist

pressure distorted the sensibilities as well as judgement of conventional liberalism. And

liberals should recover from a century of Leftist political and social pressure.

During the 18th century, liberal authors outlined a vision of society on the basis of education,

enlightened morals and values, the rules of law, minimal government, constitutional

democracy, free markets, and an era of personal responsibilities and initiatives (Tismăneanu

1999) (Salamon 1999).

Indeed, for effectively eliminating global poverty, it is crucially important that politicians,

NGO leaders, journalists, tutors, business leaders, media persons, etc. understand that, in

most of the cases, the Liberal Revolution greatly relieved poverty across the masses initially
in Britain and the US during the 19th century, then in the remaining part of Europe during

early years of the 20th century, following which the market-friendly regions of Asia during

late 20th century. Moreover, Dubai, Chile, Ireland as well as the Baltic Republics are now the

stimulating market-based growth economies (Lan et al 1999) (Piontkovsky 2004).

Eventually, a new segment has surfaced lately to grow the attention which has been further

focusing on non-profit and civil society organizations (Piontkovsky 2004). Essentially, this is

the increasing questioning of the liberal consensus, sometimes known as the “Washington

consensus”. This consensus has influenced global economic policies over the past two

decades. Additionally, this consensus reported that the obstacles confronting both developed

as well as developing societies currently can most effectively be approached with the help of

simple means of encouraging and unleashing private markets. As an attempt to combat the

world-wide financial crisis and endless social distress in several regions, nevertheless, this

consensus has faced increasingly life-threatening attacks (Tismăneanu 1999) (Salamon 1999).
 References

1. Strong, M 2006, Taking the Left out of Liberal, FLOW, viewed 5 July, 2010,

<http://www.flowidealism.org/Community/mp-michael-strong.html >.

2. Tismăneanu, V 1999, The Revolutions of 1989, Routledge, London.

3. Lan, Z, Hu, W & Wang, K 1999, ‘The Growing China and its Prospective Role in

World Affairs’, Summer/Fall, vol. 6, no. 2, pp. 43-60.

4. Salamon, L 1999, The "global associational revolution", Global Civil Society:

Dimensions of the Nonprofit Sector, viewed 5 July, 2010,

<http://www.energizeinc.com/art/aglo.html>.

5. Piontkovsky, A 2004, ‘The Liberal Revolution That Produced Slaves’, Eurasia Daily

Monitor, vol. 1, no. 21.