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Simeon Mitropolitski is a Canadian analyst, of Bulgarian origin, and a former syndicated columnist with the Bulgarian News Agency (BTA). He is the author of several hundred articles dealing with hot political and economic topics, both national and international.

He was part of the first group of Bulgarian intellectuals and students that began the opposition movement that finally put an end to the communist regime in this country in 1989, and in 1996-1997 participated in international observation teams during the elections in several Balkan countries - Romania, Albania and Bulgaria.

In 2002 Simeon and his family moved from Bulgaria to Canada where they live now in Montreal, province of Quebec. Simeon is a Master of Political Science from McGill University and a B.A. of Political Science and History.

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A friend of mine, studying at McGill University in Montreal, invited me to attend one of his lectures. The audience was attentive to the instructor's easy style; everything went quite well until he gave as an example a prominent company, producing orange juice, exploiting the work of illegal immigrants. The public was outraged by this fact; some loudly spoke out for boycotting its products and my general impression was that the majority in the auditorium was ready to share this attitude. I suddenly remembered the so-called NIKE sweatshop e-mail exchange from 2000, which produced uproar around the world and focused the world attention, in fact the attention of many people in the richest nations, to the economic globalization and its effects in the Third World countries.

The reaction in the auditorium in this sense was predictable, for it represented the point of view of the most active part of the young generation in the most developed countries. They can't accept in purely moral terms that their opulence is grounded in the misery of millions. I trace this "moral guilt" phenomenon to 19th century Russia where many landlord aristocrats, although not all of them, felt ashamed by the fact that their wealth was a direct product of the peasants' exploitation. Perhaps the only real difference now is that the exploiters and exploited live in different geographic areas, but if we accept the globalization as way to bring people closer, today's physical distances in the world aren't bigger than the spaces separating the Russian serfs from their masters some 150 years ago.

Being unable to force the corporate sector to change its arguably inhumane practices in the Third World, the new generation of Americans, Canadians and (Western) Europeans opt for boycotting their products, provided by their overseas branches. There are at least two main points in this argument: (1.) The corporate sector won't transfer all its assets abroad, because it will lose its home markets, and (2.) With their HQ remaining in the rich countries, the big companies are forced to pay attention to the public critiques. So the main argument takes as granted the assumption that the companies are lead by their greedy interests, the point that the antiglobalists find so distasteful when their overseas practices are concerned.

Suppose the critics of the globalization are right and that the only thing that interests the big business is the money, no matter how young the workforce is. Let's consider that Company X, trying to cut expenditures, transfers one of its branches from a rich country to a poor one, when there is no law, forbidding girls of age of 10 to produce shoes or garment or whatever. In Canada, for example, a child can apply for social insurance number, to start business and of course to start paying taxes, but of course this is another story. Let's suppose that our company X is particularly interested in hiring kids, which are paid less, because otherwise the transport expenditures from the poor country producer to the rich country market will outweigh the benefits of hiring local workforce. Without going into more details let's assume that many of these girls, even underpaid by any Western standard, provide the main stable family income.

What will happen if the Western public opinion, outraged by what's going on in this poor country, begins actively campaigning for changing these practices? There are several probable scenarios and I'm afraid none of them produces the result expected among the Western human rights activists:

• Company X is forced to fire the kids and to hire adult workers, paying more. The expenditures rise and the company loses its market share at home, because Company Y continues using the same practices in another or perhaps the same poor country. The result is that X stops production.
• Company X only pretends that it has hired adult workers in place of the young children. In fact, company X has bribed the local administration to produce fake papers for the young workers and now they are declared mature enough by any international viewpoint. A small detail in this scenario is that the bribe is calculated as extra expenditure and is eliminated by reducing the salary of the workers.
• Company X doesn't want to lose its market share and can't bribe the local administration, so it decides to change the country, firing all its local personnel. It find another poorer country where the local administration in order to bring in new investor is ready to produce any kind of fake documents about the age of the workers.

To assume that there could be completely different outcome, that the companies will voluntary renounce their pursuit of higher and higher profits in order to satisfy the public morality means that these companies aren't so greedy as the antiglobalists depict them, but this will contradict their initial assumption of the globalization as immoral economical project.

The irony is that every time the anti-globalists celebrate a victory over some particular company with overseas branches, it's the workers over there who pay the full price of the antiglobalists banquets. As a person born in a country (Bulgaria) not so rich as to have such anti-globalist movement and not so poor as not to know what's going on around the world, I was stunned every time when I heard about big and small international investment projects that weren't completed because of the anti-globalists and perhaps also because of the hostile Western trade-unions' attitudes. Their attitudes are perfectly clear when viewed as a way of economic self-protection against the cheaper competition, but to pretend that these selfish attitudes are just an altruistic approach aimed to reduce the poverty in the Third World is more than hypocrisy.

All this reminds me again of Russia some 150 years ago, where many aristocrats lamented the fate of their serfs but almost none thought about how to eliminate it without cutting their own expenditures. We all know the results of this shortsighted approach, where a small minority's wealth depends on the large majority misery. So don't repeat this tragic history lesson!