125 ETHOS GUBERNAMENTAL GLOBALIZATION AND IDENTITY LOSS Emilio Mordini The concept of globalization in the current usage has come to have a meaning which is almost exclusively economic in nature, of which the vast public has a rather confused perception, accompanied by a sense of obscure threat. Thus, for example, faced with a sudden fall of his country’s stock market, which has blown away a good part of his savings, the layperson is offered the explanation that it was brought on by the serious economic crisis in Russia, or Mexico, or the collapse of the Asian stock markets, without being able to understand the reasons for these far-reaching effects, caused by “globalization”. Other times he realizes that an unemployment crisis that hits a certain production sector in his own region is caused by the fact that the enterprise that operated in that sector found it more advantageous to move its production facilities to third world countries, where labor costs much less. There are numerous examples, and they all fall within what we might call market globalization (capital, job, raw material, product, service markets). Therefore the current meaning of globalization is reduced to that of an “economic globalization”. From this standpoint, globalization raises a whole series of problems that, since they are often “new”, are such only in a relative sense, since they are nothing more than the world-scale projection of problems inherent in the market economy as such. Therefore, alongside those who see in the expansion of the “free market” according to the pure dynamics of its internal “laws” the condition of a long- term increased economic prosperity for all of mankind, there are those who stress the real risks of disastrous economic and social consequences for broad areas and strata of humanity, if “rules”, corrective measures, and guarantees are not promptly drafted to balance the economic logic with the needs for justice and the guarantee of basic human rights. __________________________ Acknowledgments - This work was partly funded by a grant from the European Commission - DG Research – Contract nr QLG6-CT-2002-01796.