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Global
Governance and Justice
by
Yash Tandon
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Professor
Yash Tandon, Director, THE INTERNATIONAL SOUTH GROUP NETWORK
(ISGN) 30.12.2003
The
new men of Empire are the ones who believe in fresh starts,
new chapters, new pages; I struggle on with the old story,
hoping that before it is finished it will reveal to me why
it was that I thought it was worth the trouble.
J.M.Coetzee,
Waiting for the Barbarians
Civilisational
Tendency towards Barbarism
The
contemporary human civilisation has become barbaric both as
between human beings, and in terms of human relations with
other species of life. It has become wantonly destructive.
It is a norm among predatory animals to kill only when in
need for food; at some time in the historic past, humans
also used to kill mainly for food. Hunting was part of food
gathering. As "civilisation" moved on, humans began to kill
other animals for fun as well as for food. In the capitalist
phase of our civilisation, the dominant culture is for
humans to kill other species not for food but for profit.
Food is only the medium through which to make profits.
Though millions may starve, profits must first be made.
Unlike
animals, human beings also destroy those species of life
that they do not themselves eat. Thus, they kill weeds
because weeds reduce the output of corn or wheat or what
have you. They kill pests though they do not eat them. The
wanton, and senseless, part is that the destruction has to
be total. The cholera virus has to be annihilated for good,
the cotton boll worm has to be eliminated permanently, the
stalk borer weed has to bedestroyed for ever. Animals have
to be put into zoos and parks, crop varieties into gene
banks and laboratories. None must have free existence except
with the permission of humans. This is the anthropocentric
part of global governance.
Unlike
animals, humans kill competitors. Lions do not kill cheetahs
just because both predate on giraffes. Humans kill other
human beings as well as other species in competition for
land, for forests, for cattle, for fish, for water, for
space, for pleasure. Competition may have been the impulse
behind the development of science and technology. But it is
also at the root of the barbarism of human beings. Our
present capitalist period is the most competitive and also
the most destructive. Millions of species are destroyed
every day. Millions of human lives are wasted away simply
because they do not have the "market power" to buy food,
shelter, clothing or medicines. Ours must be the most
barbaric period of human "civilisation".
In
fact, it is only a little exaggeration to say that natural
species are destroyed so that manufactured products can be
offered in their place that yield profit to the capitalist.
For the loss of the microbe that filters the drinking water,
the capitalist has developed the Brita water filter, with
its "more efficient" filtration technology. Of course, it
has to be patented to recover research costs and to make
profit. The capitalist can provide the fruity Flintstones
chewable vitamin supplements to replace the rare nutrients
of some species of the now extinct berries plant of
Indonesia. However, consistent with man's anthropocentrism,
nobody has replaced the sea snails on which the life of
Borneo hooded tern depended. There is no profit to be made
out of the hooded tern; unlike humans they cannot buy sea
snails from the market.
Much
of the rise in consumer-product diversity, the UN Report
cited above says, is a direct result of the decrease in
bio-diversity. Thanks to the ingenuity of our industry,
consumer-product diversity now far exceeds bio-diversity.
200 million new product options have been generated since
1993 in replacement of the millions of now extinct species.
Joseph A. Schumpeter, in his classic, Capitalism, Socialism
and Democracy, had said that "creative destruction" was the
necessary basis for the development of capitalism. If so,
then its present phase is dominated by almost pathological
destruction of lower forms of life species. Capitalism, in
its present phase, "creatively" offers substitutes for what
it destroys, yes, but at such high cost that humans may be
digging their own biological grave.
The
pathology of Global governance
Global
governance is ruled by profits. This is not an expression of
reductionism. There are, of course, other aspects of
globalism, such as art, music, culture, communications,
football, Wimbledon Tennis, white water rafting, social
welfare, acts of charity and writing novels. There are also
large sections of societies in all countries which do not
function in the market where profits rule. Nonetheless, as
broad generalisations go, profits form the basis of
contemporary global governance. It is also at the root of
its pathological character.
Take
the example of global medical governance. In 1977, the World
Health Organisation published the "Essential Drugs List" of
some 306 drugs which, it said, "… should be available
at all times in adequate amounts and in the appropriate
dosage form." But the poor in the third world (and that
means the majority of the population) have to wait for
decades to have access to life-saving drugs, such as those
against HIV/AIDs (for example) which is a deadly scourge in
the South. The pharmaceutical industry is dominated by a few
large global corporations, and they will not allow these 306
or so drugs to be marketed at prices affordable to the
people. They have spent money on research, they say, and
they must get these back from the consumers. If people
cannot pay then they must die. Fertile minds might
conjecture that diseases may well be "created" so that the
capitalists can make profits out of providing remedies for
them. It does not take much imagination, however, to agree
that as human immunity reduces with heavier and heavier
doses of anti-biotics, and as viruses mutate and develop
stronger strains, the pharmaceutical industry is the only
sector of society that draws profits out of this particular
vicious circle.
In
South Africa the Government introduced a system of
compulsory licensing of patents and parallel import of
cheaper drugs. So the multinational drug industry backed by
the US Government are now using all the power at their
command (and it is not a power to trifle with) to block the
action by the South African government. In the world of
global governance health is subordinated to the demands of
profit, and protecting patents take precedence over
protecting human lives. This is only one instance of the
pathology of global governance.
In
1992, during the Earth Summit in Rio on Environment and
Development, many countries in the world signed an agreement
called the Convention on Bio-Diversity (CBD). It recognised
the right of indigenous communities to their biological
resources, and the sovereignty of nations in the use of
these resources. But this would have blocked the
pharmaceutical multinationals' access to these materials.
Led by US pharmaceutical giants, the Western governments
then tried, and succeeded, to push through the Trade-Related
Intellectual Property rights (TRIPS) within the World Trade
Organisation (WTO). This effectively took away the rights of
governments and communities recognised under the CBD. The
companies secured the right under the TRIPS to exploit
biological resources wherever these might be. Countries that
would forbid them from using these newly acquired "rights"
are now subject to sanctions by the Governments of countries
where the big pharmaceutical companies originate.
In
effect, this puts a big divide between the "North" (where
these companies originate) and the "South" (where most of
the bio-diversity exists), or to use Samuel Huntington's
pithy phrase, between "the West and the Rest".
The
Huntington thesis revisited
In
1993, Huntington put forward the challenging thesis that the
post cold war period would be a period of clashes of
civilisations. By making somewhat simplistic assumptions,
and even simpler classification between different kinds of
"civilisations", he opened himself to much deserved
criticism. Nonetheless, his thesis retains a kind of
macroscopic empirical validity, much like when historians
make broad generalisations about history characterising it
as "the age of reason" or "the romantic period", and so on.
What we are witnessing in the post-cold war period is indeed
the increasing dominance of one particular branch of human
civilisation - the Euro-Christian-Judaic-capitalist
civilisation -- over other civilisations, never an easy
subject to put into neat classification or description in
any case.
Contrary
to all reified polarities, the reality is, of course, much
more complex and contradictory. However, even when there are
apparent contradictions to this thesis such as the
intervention of the West on the side of Moslem ethnic
Albanians against orthodox Christian Serbs, it does not
detract from the general argument that in our present epoch
it is the West that decides, dominates, and determines the
fate of nations - even in Kosovo.
This
polarity, otherwise described as that between "the North"
and "the South", is widening in our times as the UNDP's
Human Development Reports have testified year after year.
Propositions that seek to qualify this broad division of the
world - such as that there is a 'North' in the 'South' and a
'South' in the 'North' - strengthen the argument instead of
weakening it. The "North" and "South" are not simply
geographic constructs, although those too, but refer also to
particular manifestations of certain cultural and
consumerist attributes. The dominant "North" historically
created and continues to nurture a minuscule class
representatives of its own kind in the "South", those that
rule and over-consume; the "North" also creates an
impoverished and marginalised "South" within its own midst,
those who do not rule, and who under-consume.
Modernisation
theories of the 1950s and 60s assumed that the "South"
(conceptualised in both the geographic and cultural senses)
would "eventually" catch up with the "North" if they would
only open up their economies to Western technology and
science, and emulate the "North" in their institution
building (democracy, for example). Retrospective analysis
indicates that those theories were no more than ideological
expressions of the West's continued drive to dominate and
conquer the "Rest". That drive continues to this day. Only
it is no longer called modernisation. It is called
"globalisation". Like the earlier concept of modernisation,
globalisation is also presented by the ideologists of the
West as something driven by technological and economic
forces that cannot be stopped, something "natural",
something inherent in history itself.
The
barbarism of text and the text of barbarism
Language
can obscure reality. Text is often created to hide reality.
It is created to encourage a certain perspective, a certain
mind-set. For example, in the colonial times, a person from
the colonised world did not have an individual identity; he
was an Arab, an Asian or an African. Their personalities
were generalised, their individuality dissolved. That made
the colonised easier to handle. To the question one
Englishman asked another on how many people there were on
the bus came the reply, "Only the two of us, the rest were
Africans." Such racist imagery of "us" and "the other"
facilitated global governance during the colonial period.
Nothing
describes the dominance of the West over the Rest so
grotesquely as the West's definition of what constitutes
"barbarism" in our present time. Nobody in his right mind
would condone the bombing of American embassies in Nairobi
and Dar es Salaam in August 1998. Whether that was the work
of the "terrorist" xxx remains an open question. The US
Government is convinced that xxx was indeed the culprit. On
that basis, the US went on to bomb a pharmaceutical factory
in the Sudan, alleged to be supplying bio-chemical weapons
to xxx. Not a single country, not even USA's usually
unquestioning ally, the British Government, supported the
American theory about the Sudanese factory. If one were to
be objective about the matter, then the American act
qualifies as an act of barbarity no less than that of
bombing of its embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam. In
the text of the West, however, only the latter is barbaric.
The
UNICEF reported recently that almost 600,000 children under
the age of five have perished in Iraq because of the
sanctions that the West maintains against that beleaguered
country. The infant mortality rate has increased from
56/1000 in the pre-sanctions period to 131/1000 after the
sanctions. If this is not barbarism, what is? And yet, in
the vocabulary of the ruling circles of the West this is no
more than "collateral damage" that sanctions cause to the
children of Iraq. It is striking, indeed inhuman, how
language can caricature a grotesque reality and "cleanse" it
of evil and absolve responsibility of its perpetrator. Blame
it on Saddam Hussein is the West's outrageous and
indefensible defence of this carnage.
The
blame culture is deeply rooted in Western culture and the
history of its colonialism and civilisational domination.
Blame the "collateral damage" against the people of
Yugoslavia on Milosovic, try him in the Western-dominated
court and, if possible, hang him. Blame Fidel Castro for US
sanctions against the country and the resulting suffering of
the people of Cuba, isolate him and if possible remove him
from power. Blame the British atrocities against the Mau Mau
in Kenya during the 1950s on Jomo Kenyatta, lock him up.
Blame Nasser, bomb the Suez Canal; blame Mandela,
incarcerate him; blame Gadaffi, bomb his child; blame
Mugabe, he is a Marxist; blame Mahathir Mohamed, he refuses
to conform. The demonisation of the "rebellious" leader in
the South has been an abiding feature of West's
"justification" for its barbarism against the "Rest".
The
barbarism of ideology
Language
makes "acceptable" that which is inhuman and unjust.
"Collateral damage" to civilians sanitises bombing. The
collective noun, "the African", dehumanises the individual,
objectifies him, and makes it easier to dispose of him.
Demonisation of the individual leader separates him from his
people, his history and his reason, casts him as irrational
or simply mad (the gallant Somali fighter against British
colonisation was simply called "the Mad Mullah"), and
therefore outside the pale of "civilised" discourse.
Where
language is a one-off description, ideology is a complex
knitwear of values, prejudices and assumptions. Both serve
the same purpose of obscuring reality and making
"acceptable" that which is inhuman and unjust. The
anthropocentric ideology puts man at the centre of the
universe, and "justifies" to himself the subjugation of all
"lower" species of life to his control and abuse. The
ideology of "white man's burden" puts the white man and
woman at the centre of the universe, and relegates all other
human species to lower levels to be controlled and abused by
the white people. The ideology of "Anglo-Saxon superiority"
puts the Englishman and the Anglo-Saxon American at the
centre of the Universe. In an ever decreasing circle of
defining the "superior" being, it is finally the Anglo-Saxon
MAN whose gender ideology puts HIM at the centre of the
Universe, so even Anglo-Saxon women are then relegated to a
step below the top. Racist ideologies set the pecking order
of human society.
Where
language is descriptive, ideology is prescriptive. It shows
the direction in which the Universe must move at the behest
of the "superior" beings. The communist ideology is
teleological; it promises to lead to the classless society
at the behest of the vanguard of the proletariat. The
capitalist ideology is economistic; it promises unending
"growth" at the behest of the owners of capital. Both are
presumptuous, both denigrate the role of the human spirit in
the advancement of humanity.
Communism
is no longer an issue today; Capitalism is. As the ruling
ideology of the moment, it has passed through many phases
and modes, from the competitive phase to that of monopoly,
from the state interventionist mode to that of
privatisation. But its underlying ideology has remained
constant, namely, that it is the profit incentive that
promotes growth. Like all ideologies it is a combination of
truth and lie. In the period we are living through, the lie
overshadows the truth. Speculative capital which now forms
over 90 percent of the movement of capital promotes
growthless profit. A George Soros makes more money in
exchange rate and interest rate speculation in six months
than an average sized industry does six years. Speculative
capital disembowels the economy of industry and productive
activity. It generates money with money without having to go
through the process of production. It gives the lie to the
capitalist ideology that capital generates growth. We have
reached a stage in the development of capitalism where 90%
of capital generates only air - and profits.
An
associated lie of the ideology of contemporary capitalism is
that countries of the South must liberalise their economies
to provide incentives to foreign direct investments (FDIs)
for the sake of their own growth. This is the lie of
globalisation. Globalisation is a desperate effort by excess
capital in the Western world beset by a declining rate of
profit to find more profitable ventures in the South. But
the matter is presented as if it is the South that needs
capital and they must therefore provide the best incentives
for it.
Ironically,
and that is the force of ideology, the countries of the
South have taken the ideology for truth. So they vie with
one another to offer most competitive terms to Western
capital. In the process they cheapen their resources and the
value of their labour-power. This sets a vicious circle of
poverty and debt bondage from which it is impossible for
them to escape. Those countries in East Asia that were able
to escape the debt bondage, and to generate self-motivated
growth in the half century to 1997, were forced by
speculative attacks on their currencies in that year to roll
back their gains and succumb to the power of western
capital. The currency crises forced the opening of their
economies to ownership and control of foreign capital. Thus,
for example, in South Korea whereas formerly only up to 15%
of the shares of Korean companies could be owned by
foreigners, after the crisis foreigners could own first 50%
and later up to 100 %. The result is that South Korea is now
more foreign owned than during its last fifty years of
industrialisation. Larry Summers, the US Secretary of State,
said that the IMF deal in Korea accomplished for US what
trade could not in all the trade rounds. The West is once
more in command in the Pacific, both economically as well as
militarily.
The
collateralised language of the ruling sections of the
Euro-Christian-Judaic civilisation and the collateralised
ideology of capitalism have both obscured reality and
"sanctioned" the domination and barbarism of one section of
humanity against another, as well as that of the whole human
race against all other living species.
Global
governance, the IMF, the World Bank and the WTO
Ideology
needs ideologists, paid servants of the ruling circles.
These are located in the institutions that churn out
globalist ideologies neatly expressed in elegant,
"balanced", official language. The officials of the
International Monetary Fund, the World Bank and the World
Trade Organisation are some of the highest paid bureaucrats
of global governance. Not all bureaucrats are conscious
peddlers of ideology; most of them, in their innocence or
ignorance, have "faith" in what they preach. They get
recruited in those jobs precisely because of their faith.
They actually believe that the countries in the South must
open their doors to capital (since the Asian crises they now
make a distinction between "bad" speculative capital and
"good" FDIs) if they want get their people out of the
vicious circle of poverty.
They
are, alas, touching evidence of what ideological education
from institutions such as Harvard and Chicago can do to
their mind-set and independent power of reasoning. Joseph
Stiglitz, the maverick senior Vice-President of the World
Bank, himself a product of Harvard, in a stinging attack on
the IMF bureaucrats said that the sum-total of knowledge of
those who prescribed Structural Adjustment Programmes (SAPs)
to developing countries boiled down to six basic concepts:
inflation, money supply, growth, interest rate, budget, and
trade deficits.
When
ideology takes hold of ones mind, no amount of contradictory
evidence (such as the increasing poverty of the people of
the South, and the increasing gap between the North and the
South) will persuade them to discard their ideology. There
is always that bit in the complex set of assumptions in
their ideology that will "explain away" contradictory
evidence. "If only the Governments in the South were to do
as we tell them to," they would say, "they really should
have no problems that they are encountering." This is the
escape route of all ideological propositions; they are, in
the words of Sir Karl Popper, "impossible to falsify".
For
over twenty years the so-called "Washington Consensus"
provided the ruling orthodoxy of development "theory". Its
"axiomatic" tenets were the basis not only of mainstream
development economics at the academic level but also of the
main policy directions of most developing countries,
especially those which had come under the strictures of the
World Bank's SAPs. At the political level, the minimalist
state became part of the Washington Consensus. Developing
countries which were hostage to World Bank's SAPs were
forced to privatise, or stand accused of "Soviet style"
statist dirigism. This, the Bank's bureaucrats argued,
spawned waste and corruption, and diverted capital from the
private sector where it properly belonged. Stiglitz was
later to say that the focus of the Washington Consensus on
liberalisation, deregulation, and privatisation had grossly
ignored the important role the state needs to play in
regulation, industrial policy, social protection and
welfare. But that was twenty years later, after the damage
had already been done to several third world economies
forced to follow the SAPs based on what Stiglitz called the
"misguided" Washington Consensus.
Misguided
or not, the Washington Consensus had served its purpose for
the West. The liberalisation, deregulation and privatisation
that it forced on the economies of the countries under SAPs
enabled a greater control over these economies by Western
multinationals. The ruling circles in these "developing"
countries conformed to the policies dictated to them partly
in the false illusion that these were indeed the correct
policies for them, and partly because they were under a debt
trap which left them no other alternative. The illusion is
finally being shattered. But the poor of these countries are
now paying a heavy price. Many have lost jobs (where they
had these), most had their real wages slashed (where they
managed to retain jobs), most of them are now paying cash
for health services and the education of their children (if
they have cash at all), and they are now joining the ranks
of the so-called "informal sector" as the final refuge for
survival. In the meantime, the profits of Western
multinationals and speculators have soared and soared.
In
1994, the WTO was created following eight years of intense
negotiations between mainly the USA and Europe. The
countries of the South were asked to join in later. They
did, for the alternative of staying out might have been
worse for them. But they had practically no say in the
making of the WTO. The WTO has inaugurated a multilateral
trading regime that has an ever-expanding agenda. The rules
of WTO are backed by mandatory sanctions against those that
fail to fulfil their obligations, even if they had no part
in the making of those rules.
The
WTO is no longer confined to trade in visible commodities,
as its predecessor, GATT was. Under the prefix
"trade-related" all manner of items and issues are now
brought under its sanctions-bearing authority. Earlier we
referred to the Trade-Related Intellectual Property rights
(TRIPS) that has undermined the sovereign rights of nations
and indigenous communities over their bio-diversity. In like
manner, TRIMS (Trade-Related Investment Measures) have made
serious inroads into the sovereign right of nations to
regulate foreign investments. Not satisfied with this, the
rich countries of the OECD are pushing for
multilateralisation of the investment regime (the
Multilateral Agreement on Investments - MAI) which would
force countries of the South to give "national treatment" to
foreign investors. This means that foreign investors would
be treated on the same basis as nationals, and so such
policies of the South as favour their nationals for a share
in the economy would be regarded as a violation of the WTO
rule, and so subject to sanctions. However, the ruling
classes in the West met with stiff resistance on this issue.
The civil society in both the North as well as the South
were shocked at the ramifications of MAI for the national
independence of their countries, and they joined forces in
an unparalleled global action to defeat MAI (for the time
being).
Besides,
TRIPS and TRIMS (and MAI), the West are now pushing for all
kinds of issues to be subject to the WTO regime of rules and
sanctions. These include the environment, labour standards,
public procurement, industrial tariffs, E-commerce,
competition policy, trade facilitation and
Genetically-modified organisms (GMOs). These are all
controversial issues. They all are potential mine-fields.
They pose a veritable threat to the ability of the
governments in the South to control their economies, and to
use policy tools as a means of advancing the interests of
their populations. Most of them are very weak in terms of
negotiations, and extremely vulnerable to pressure from the
North and the sanctions that the latter could impose on
them.
The
WTO, more than the IMF and the WB, is the camel's nose that
will open up the South until the animal occupies the whole
tent. The WTO inheres the full potential of globalisation.
It is a process that will undermine the sovereignty and
independence of the weaker states of the third world,
leaving the more powerful states, such as the US, Europe and
Japan, fighting over the rest of the world for control over
their resources and markets.
The
UN System and Global Governance
At
the end of the Second World War, the victorious powers had
created two sets of institutions. One set related to matters
of mainly economic nature. These were the IMF, the World
Bank and GATT - the so-called Bretton Woods institutions.
The second set consisted of the United Nations and its
related agencies. These represented the more "visionary"
aspects of international relations, dealing with disputes
settlement, health, welfare, labour, culture, education,
trusteeship, and other such matters. The visionary part of
the UN also paid homage to the idea of "We, the
people…" as against "We, the Governments …"
although in the Security Council, it congealed power in the
hands of the big and powerful.
Over
the last nearly sixty years now, the vision and authority of
the United Nations have diminished and the power and control
of the Bretton Woods institutions have increased.
During
the cold war years, the peace and security dimension of UN's
work was used mainly by the United States and its allies to
legitimise their global policies and interventions, such as
in Korea, the Middle East and the Congo. The peoples of the
South were able to use the UN to effect and legitimise the
process of decolonisation, but not without a price. Because
of the nature of alliances that needed to be built over the
decolonisation process, and because of Western hegemony in
the United Nations, decolonisation came with mixed baggage.
While the former colonial powers were eased out, the
accommodations that were worked out, in general, favoured
the West. In the Congo, for example, the UN became the
means, under US hegemony, to neutralise nationalist forces
led by Patrice Lumumba and to install in power Mobutu Sese
Seko, who ruled the country for 27 years as a bastion of
Western interests and ideology in Africa. Where the West was
adamant in supporting the European colonial powers as in
Mozambique, Angola and Guinea Bissau, and in supporting the
apartheid regime in South Africa, the decolonising forces
opened the door to Soviet influence and ideology. This has
now begun to wane in the post-cold war period, and the West
is once again the dominant force in these countries. They
can now pursue their interests in these countries directly,
that is, without having to go to the UN to neutralise the
influence of the Soviet Union. In fact, they have more or
less lost interest in the UN as a mechanism for peace and
security. The US even refuses to pay its dues to the UN.
One
result of this is that the UN has become largely ineffective
on issues related to peace and security. In Africa, for
example, the UN has made half-hearted, ineffectual,
interventions in places such as Somalia and Angola. This has
led Africans to accuse the West of double standards. For
example, when it comes to removing Jonas Savimbi out of his
position blocking peace efforts in Angola, the UN has been
extremely parsimonious in the resources it provided, and
half-hearted in the pursuit of the objective that it set for
itself. In contrast, the Western efforts to try to get
Milosovic out of Bosnia and Kosovo have been an entirely
different story. This duplicity of the West has been
observed by Africa even in relation to issues such as the
care of refugees. Once again, African refugees are treated
to the minimum of resources compared to refugees that came
out of Yugoslavia.
The
social and economic dimensions of the UN have suffered a
fate even worse than its disputes settlement sector. The US
and some of its Western allies, especially the UK, have
tried over the years systematically to destroy the role,
influence and justification of organisations such as UNESCO,
ILO, UNIDO, UNEP and UNCTAD. For example, before the UNCTAD
IX Conference in Midlands, South Africa, in 1996, the US and
the UK had mounted a sustained campaign to argue that since
the WTO had been created there was no justification for
UNCTAD. Only a concerted effort by the developing countries
supported by countries such as France and Japan, and the
action by civil society organisations, saved the UNCTAD from
almost certain demise. Even then, UNCTAD is no longer what
it used to be; it can provide technical assistance and
undertake research but it is no longer permitted to give
policy advice to the developing countries. In fact, because
of the attitude of the Western countries, UNCTAD is becoming
a lesser arm, a poor cousin, of the WTO.
The
Economic and Social Council of the UN, similarly, has been
virtually disembowelled of its role and functions. Most of
the economic functions of the UN have been effectively
transferred to the Bretton Woods institutions and the WTO.
These, in contrast to the UN, have become powerful
institutions of global governance. The weighted voting in
the IMF and the World Bank puts decision-making powers
effectively into the hands of the West. In the case of the
WTO, decision-making is in theory by consensus. In practice,
however, decisions are taken in small committees, and they
come out as negotiated settlements between its powerful
members - the so-called "quad countries" (US, EU, Canada and
Japan) and without the participation of the developing
countries. Yet these decisions bind these countries. An
example is the decision taken on information technology at
the Singapore Ministerial meeting of the WTO in 1996. It was
pushed by the US, the interests of the European countries
and Japan were accommodated, whilst the developing countries
were more or less forced to accept the fait accompli.
Global
Governance and The Question Of Justice
Nation
states are fairly new phenomena in the annals of global
history - no more than about 400 years old. In their
formative decades there was much debate in Europe (where the
nation states first emerged) on the principles that should
guide relations between emerging nation states. A powerful
voice in the debate was that of Hugo Grotius, the famous
17th century Dutch jurist who argued that international
relations should be subject to principles of natural
justice.
This
particular school of thought has flourished in many forms
and shapes through centuries, with additions and
refinements, and continues to retain a following amongst
those who believe that there are certain principles of
justice and fair play that should guide international
relations. In some ways, the modern-day theorists who
advocate "fair trade" instead of "free trade" are the
inheritors of what might be called the Grotian tradition in
international relations. Nowadays, most of the followers of
this tradition come from among civil societies, i.e.
organisations and movements outside of Governments, many of
whom have in recent years taken to the streets to demand
that governments apply principles of justice and fair play
in their international economic and political relations.
The
other major tradition that guides international relations is
the Machiavellian tradition, following the teachings of the
16th century Italian "guru", Niccolo Machiavelli. For this
tradition, politics is amoral. The name of the game is
power. There is room for "virtue" but only insofar as it is
necessary to legitimise power. This tradition, too, has been
refined and elaborated over the centuries. In its more
sophisticated versions, American writers such as Hans
Morgenthau allow a discrete and limited role for diplomacy
and the United Nations in international relations, but at
the end of the day, it is power and raison d'etat that
really matter.
The
ruling circles in the West are essentially raison
d'etatists, power-centralists. There may be departments in
their governments that look after issues of "development",
just as there may be departments that look after "women" or
"the disabled". But these are tertiary, largely ineffective,
bodies that must subordinate their policies to the dictates
of realpolitik. It is for this reason that there is no
protest from Western governments against the carnage in Iraq
or Yugoslavia, or against the poverty in the South. They are
all implicated in the theory that the "collateral" damage to
the people of Yugoslavia must be blamed on Milosovic, that
the "collateral" killing of the children of Iraq must be
blamed on Saddam, and that the poverty and misery of the
countries in the South must be blamed on the "corruption" of
their leaders.
Justice
is hostage to power in contemporary international relations.
Indeed, all evidence shows that what is taking place is
concentration of wealth and power within and between
nations. A Bill Gates as a single person can flaunt a wealth
that is more than the GDPs of fifteen or twenty African
countries put together. Such is the scale to which the
pathology of the present international system has reached.
The real sickness of our society is that this is regarded as
"normal", Bill Gates as a deserving beneficiary of his hard
work and intelligence, a model to emulate.
The
ruling orthodoxy is that whilst millions perish for lack of
food, shelter and medicines, the directors of multinational
corporations must make profits for their shareholders. That
is the bottom line of our "civilisation". To enable this to
happen Western Governments rule by force, sometimes brutal
force, thinly disguised by "rules" they create in the IMF,
the World Bank and the WTO. There is competition and much
rivalry between them, to be sure; in the power corridors of
the WTO they fight tooth and claw for control over markets
and resources. But when it comes to the developing countries
(and now the countries of the former Soviet empire), they
close ranks. They have all vested interests in the defence
of a system on whose survival lies their comfort zones both
as governments and as individuals.
Redemption
and Healing
Where
will healing come from for this pathological order? Where
will change come from, and how?
It
is an unfortunate lesson of history that wisdom does not
come from an exercise of reason. Sanity is not necessarily a
product of rationality. Wisdom and sanity usually come out
of catastrophic or traumatic experiences, like war for
example. Some people had thought that the state of
destruction of the world's natural resources and the
environment has reached catastrophic proportions shocking
enough to bring some wisdom and sanity to humankind. May be.
At least there is some evidence that since the Brundtland
Commission Report , the air and water in Western countries
have improved and their forests have been saved.
At
the global level, however, the situation, if anything, has
worsened. In the Amazon alone, forests the size of Belgium
disappear every year. On closer examination, Western
industry has been able successfully to transfer some of
their worst practices and pollution to the South. The
poverty of the South and the worsening terms of trade for
their commodities have added pressure on their natural
resources and the environment. For example, the world cocoa
prices have dropped so badly that peasants in Ghana are
forced to open up new lands, clear up forests, in order to
be able to keep up with production.
The
air in the North may have improved, but what has not
diminished, over all, is North's ever escalating destruction
of species from plant, animal and insect life. What is
encouraging, however, is that opposition to this carnage
against bio-diversity is increasing both in the North as
well as in the South. The world's environmental movements
are gradually shifting their attention to this threatening
calamity, and the potential danger that bio-genetics poses
to human safety as well as to the remaining bio-diversity in
the developing countries. Hence the importance of the global
struggle to save the Convention on Bio-Diversity against the
TRIPS agreement of the WTO and the predatory threats of
pharmaceutical mega-corporations backed by the US
Government.
One
of the problems of the present epoch is the incomplete
democracy in the United States, the most powerful country on
earth and probably of all time. The US government is
accountable more to its corporations than to its people. The
US Congress is, in fact, a plutocratic power house. The
ordinary people in America are implicated in this power
house and its predatory character by the manner they cast
their votes every four years, by the promise of jobs from
their corporations and an over-consumptionist life-style,
and above all by the role that the media plays in shaping
opinion. It is a sad fact of American "democracy" that,
barring a few individuals or groups of individuals, the
people are generally behind their government who skillfully
use the media to prepare public opinion before bombing Iraq
or Yugoslavia or Libya. The lack of humanist consciousness
among the people of America is quite appalling. Also, the
over-consumption in America is one of the principal reasons
for under-consumption in the South, a fact about which the
ordinary Americans are either callous or ignorant.
So
one of the most daunting challenges of the next millennium
is how to democratise the American society and Government,
how to rein in their greedy corporations, and how to
persuade the American people to reasonable consumption. Only
the American people can take up that challenge, though it is
clear that the rest of the world's population may have to
vote with their feet and follow the example of the poor
Mexicans who scale the walls around Rio Grande to seek jobs
and income in the US. Throughout history people have moved
from regions of scarcity or oppression to those that are
more promising, the presence of Americans in the USA being
one of the principal examples of this. Why should it be
different in the next millennium?
It
needs repeating that it is realpolitik, the politics of
power and predation, that underpin Western mode of
conducting international economic and political relations.
In the short run, therefore, there is very little the rest
of the world can do but to protect themselves from the
excesses of the system's barbarism perpetrated either
through the invisible market or directly through military
action. Acts of defiance of the kind that Fidel Castro,
Mummar Gadaafi and Saddam Hussein projected against US and
allied powers have proved to be disastrous to the ordinary
people of their countries. More subtle strategies may need
to be cultivated. China provides a model of diplomacy from
which much can be learned by the other developing countries.
Globalization is a reality, but not in the way the West make
it out to be. There are aspects of it that are unavoidable
of course. For example, the spread of the Internet and its
implications for trade and politics are unavoidable.
Nonetheless, there is no need for the peoples of the third
world to rush into full integration into the global market
which is presently dominated by Western technology and
Western corporations. Indeed, a measure of de-linking from
the global market through regional efforts in the developing
countries may need to be more vigorously pursued than
hitherto.
In
the long run, only two possible trajectories appear on the
horizon. One is that the global system would collapse under
its own weight. The second is a return to a reasonable level
of sanity if a global peoples' movement emerges sufficiently
united and strong enough to control the excesses of the
system. There are emerging signs of the second trajectory in
the various strands of alternative movements - in the areas
of the environmental and bio-diversity protection, gender
equality, fair (rather than free) trade, holistic
conceptions of human rights, alternative money, alternative
livelihood models, and so on. These are presently weak and
fragmented movements, but they are gathering strength and
experience.
If
the alternative movements fail, then the world will
certainly collapse under its own weight. It has already
become a veritable den of inequity and injustice against the
vast bulk of humanity. No system lasts for ever.
From
the world's first on-line global peace university,
TRANSCEND Peace University ( TPU
-
www.transcend.org/tpu
). One of the world's leading resources for
peacebuilding and conflict transformation.
www.transcend.org
Emanzipation
Humanum,
version 12. 2004, Criticism, suggestions as to form and
content, dialogue, translation into other languages are all
desired
http://emanzipationhumanum.de/english/barbarism.html
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