What does Centesimus Annus have to say about globalisation and international development?
Coming 100 years after Rerum Novarum, the new development in CA was the collapse of communism. Today’s conference is about the major new developments since 1991: first, the extent of globalisation, and second, the concern of so many countries with the scandal of world poverty as shown by the United Nations Millennium Declaration in 2000. So what I am trying to do today is to relate the teaching of CA to these two new developments. Is globalisation a new phenomenon? globalisation has expanded enormously since the 1970s, when Deng Xiaoping opened China to the world economy. Since then, there has been dramatic success in China, as there now is in India. The amount of foreign investment going into China is more than the whole of foreign aid given to the developing countries. But globalisation is not a new phenomenon. You saw a lot of globalisation in the 19th century and probably the belle poque of globalisation was 25 years before World War I. What are the significant concerns over global
