http://www.commondreams.org/views03/0612-05.htm
Published on Thursday,
June 12, 2003 by www.monbiot.com
How to Stop America
by George Monbiot
Presidents Roosevelt and Truman were smart operators. They knew
that the hegemony of the United States could not be sustained
without the active compliance of other nations. So they
set out,
before and after the end of the Second World War, to design a
global political system which permitted the other powers to believe
that they were part of the governing project.
When Franklin Roosevelt
negotiated the charter of the United Nations,
he demanded that the United States should have the power to block
any decisions the UN sought to make. But he also permitted the
other
victors of the war and their foremost allies - the Soviet Union,
the United Kingdom, China and France - to wield the same veto.
After Harry Dexter
White, Roosevelt's negotiator at the Bretton
Woods talks in 1944, had imposed on the world two bodies, the
International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, whose underlying
purpose was to sustain the financial power of US, he appeased
the
other powerful nations by granting them a substantial share of
the
vote. Rather less publicly, he ensured that both institutions
required an 85% majority to pass major resolutions, and that
the US would cast 17% of the votes in the IMF, and 18% of the
votes in the World Bank.
Harry Truman struggled
to install a global trade regime which
would permit the continuing growth of the US economy without
alienating the nations upon whom that growth depended. He tried
to persuade Congress to approve an International Trade Organization
which allowed less developed countries to protect their infant
industries, transferred technology to poorer nations and prevented
corporations from forming global monopolies. Congress blocked
it.
But, until the crisis in Seattle in 1999, when the poor nations
were forced to reject the outrageous proposals inserted by the
US
and the European Union, successive administrations seemed to
understand the need to allow the leaders of other countries
at least to pretend to their people that they were helping
to set the global trade rules.
The system designed
in the 1940s, whose ultimate objective
was to ensure that the United States remained the pre-eminent
global power, appeared, until very recently, to be unchallengeable.
There was no constitutional means of restraining the US:
it could veto any attempt to cancel its veto. Yet this
system
was not sufficiently offensive to other powerful governments
to force them to confront it. They knew that there was less
to be lost by accepting their small share of power and supporting
the status quo than by upsetting it and bringing down the wrath
of the superpower. It seemed, until March 2003, that we were
stuck with US hegemony.
But the men
who govern the United States today are greedy.
They cannot understand why they should grant concessions to
anyone. They want unmediated global power, and they want
it now. To obtain it, they are prepared to destroy the
institutions whose purpose was to sustain their dominion.
They have challenged the payments the United States must
make to the IMF and the World Bank. They have threatened
the survival of the World Trade Organization, by imposing
tariffs on steel and granting massive new subsidies to
corporate farmers. And, to prosecute a war whose overriding
purpose was to stamp their authority upon the world, they
have crippled the United Nations. Much has been written over
the past few weeks about how much smarter George Bush is than
we permitted ourselves to believe. But it is clear that his
administration has none of the refined understanding of the
mechanics of power that the founders of the existing world
order possessed. In no respect has he made this more evident
than in his assault upon the United States's principal
instrument of international power: the Security Council.
By going to war without
the council's authorization, and
against the wishes of three of its permanent members and
most of its temporary members, Bush's administration appears
to have ceased even to pretend to play by the rules.
As a result, the Security Council may have lost both
its residual authority and its power of restraint. This
leaves the leaders of other nations with just two
options.
The first is
to accept that the global security system has
broken down and that disputes between nations will in future
be resolved by means of bilateral diplomacy, backed by force
of arms. This means, in other words, direct global governance
by the United States. The influence of its allies - the
collateral against which Tony Blair has mortgaged his
reputation - will be exposed as illusory. It will do
precisely as it pleases, however much this undermines
foreign governments. These governments will find this
dispensation ever harder to sell to their own people,
especially as US interests come to conflict directly
with their own. They will also be aware that a system
of direct global governance will tend towards war rather
than towards peace.
The second
option is to tear up the UN's constitution,
override the US veto and seek to build a new global security
system, against the wishes of the hegemon. This approach
was
unthinkable just four months ago. It may be irresistible today.
There are, of course,
recent precedents. In approving the Kyoto
protocol on climate change and the International Criminal Court,
other nations, weighing the costs of a world crudely governed
by the United States against the costs of insubordination,
have defied the superpower, to establish a global system in
which it plays no part. Building a new global security system
without the involvement of the US is a far more dangerous
project, but there may be no real alternative. None of us
should be surprised if we were to discover that Russia,
France and China have already begun, quietly, to discuss it.
Of course, one of the
dangers attendant on the construction
of any system is that it comes to reflect the interests of
its founders. There has, perhaps, never been a better
time
to consider what a system based upon justice and democracy
might look like, and then, having decided how it might
work
in theory, to press the rebellious governments for its
implementation.
There is no question
that the existing arrangement stinks.
It's not just that the five permanent members of the Security
Council can override the will of all the other nations;
the General Assembly itself has no greater claim to legitimacy
than the House of Lords. Many of the member states are not
themselves democracies. Even those governments which have
come to power by means of election seldom canvas the opinion
of their citizens before deciding how to cast their vote in
international assemblies.
It is also riddled
with rotten boroughs. Many of the citizens
of the United States recognize that there is something wrong
with a system in which the 500,000 people of Wyoming can elect
the same number of representatives to the Senate as the 35 million
of California. Yet, in the UN General Assembly, the 10,000
people
of the Pacific island of Tuvalu possess the same representation
as the one billion people of India. Their per capita
vote,
in other words, is weighted 100,000-fold.
Even if all the world's
nations were of equal size, so that
all the world's citizens were represented evenly, and even
if the Security Council was abolished and no state, in the
real world, was more powerful than any other, the UN would
still fail the basic democratic tests, for the simple reason
that its structure does not match the duties it is supposed
to discharge. The United Nations has awarded itself three
responsibilities. Two of these are international
duties,
namely to mediate between states with opposing interests
and to restrain the way in which its members treat their
own citizens. The third is a global responsibility:
to represent
the common interests of all the people of the world. But it is
constitutionally established to discharge only the first of
these functions.
Its members will unite
to condemn the behavior of a state
when that behavior is anomalous. But they will tread carefully
around the injustices in which almost all states participate,
such as using money which should be spent on health and education
on unnecessary weapons. They will do nothing to defend
the
common interests of humanity when these conflict with the
common interests of the states. Nearly all the governments
in power today, for example, are those whose policies are
acceptable to the financial markets: they are, in effect,
the representatives of global capital. Radical opposition
parties are kept out of power partly by citizens' fear of
how the markets might react if they were elected. So while
it might suit the interests of nearly everyone to re-impose
capital controls and bring many forms of speculation to an
end, an assembly of nation states is unlikely to rid the world
of this plague. The preamble to the UN Charter begins
with the
words "We the peoples of the United Nations". It would
more
accurately read "We the states".
That the Security Council
should be disbanded and its powers
devolved to a body representing all the nation states is evident
to anyone who cannot see why democracy should be turned back
at the national border. That the UN General Assembly, as currently
constituted, is ill-suited to the task is equally obvious.
I propose that each nation's vote should be weighted according
to both the number of people it represents and its degree of
democratization.
The government of Tuvalu,
representing 10,000 people, would,
then, have a far smaller vote than the government of China.
But China, in turn, would possess far fewer votes than it would
if its government was democratically elected. Rigorous means
of measuring democratization. are beginning to be developed
by bodies such as Democratic Audit. It would not be hard,
using their criteria, to compile an objective global index of
democracy. Governments, under this system, would be presented
with a powerful incentive to democratize: the more democratic
they became, the greater their influence over world affairs.
No nation would possess
a veto. The most consequential
decisions - to go to war for example - should require an
overwhelming majority of the assembly's weighted votes.
This means that powerful governments wishing to recruit
reluctant nations to their cause would be forced to bribe
or blackmail most of the rest of the world to obtain the
results they wanted. The nations whose votes they needed
most would be the ones whose votes were hardest to buy.
But this assembly alone
would be incapable of restraining
the way in which its members treat their own citizens or
representing the common interests of all the people of the
world. It seems to me therefore that we require another
body, composed of representatives directly elected by the
world's people. Every adult on earth would possess one vote.
The implications for
global justice are obvious. A resident
of Ouagadougou would have the same potential influence over
the decisions this parliament would make as a resident of
Washington. The people of China would possess, between them,
sixteen times as many votes as the people of Germany. It is,
in other words, a revolutionary assembly.
Building a world parliament
is not the same as building a
world government. We would be creating a chamber in which,
if it works as it should, the people's representatives will
hold debates and argue over resolutions. In the early years
at least, it commands no army, no police force, no courts,
no departments of government. It need be encumbered by neither
president nor cabinet. But what we would create would
be a
body which possesses something no other global or international
agency possesses: legitimacy. Directly elected, owned by the
people of the world, our parliament would possess the moral
authority which all other bodies lack. And this alone,
if effectively deployed, is a source of power.
Its primary purpose
would be to hold other powers to account.
It would review the international decisions made by governments,
by the big financial institutions, and by bodies such as the
reformed UN General Assembly and the World Trade Organization
It would, through consultation and debate, establish the broad
principles by which these other bodies should be run. It would
study the decisions they make and expose them to the light.
We have every reason to believe that, if properly constituted,
our parliament, as the only body with a claim to represent the
people of the world, would force them to respond. In doing so,
they would reinforce its authority, enhancing its ability to
call them to account in the future.
We could expect undemocratic
states to wish to prevent the
election of global representatives within their territory.
But if the General Assembly was reconstituted along the lines
I suggest, they would discover a powerful incentive to permit
such a vote to take place, as this would raise their score on
the global democracy index, and thus increase their formal powers
in the General Assembly. In turn, the parliament's ability to
review the decisions of the General Assembly would reinforce
the Assembly's democratic authority.
We might anticipate
a shift of certain powers from the
indirectly-elected body to the directly-elected one.
We could begin, in other words, to see the development
of a bicameral parliament for the planet, which starts
to exercise some of the key functions of government.
This might sound unattractive, but only if, as many do,
you choose to forget that global governance takes place
whether we participate in it or not. Ours is not a choice
between democratic global governance and no global governance,
but between global democracy and the global dictatorship
of the most powerful nations.
None of this will happen
by itself. We can expect the nations
seeking to frame a new global contract to do so in their
own interests, just as the victors of the Second World War
did. If we want a new world order (of which a parliamentary
system is necessarily just a small part), we must demand it
with the energy and persistence with which the vast and growing
global justice movement has confronted the old one. But nations
seeking to design a new security system would discover that
the perceived legitimacy of their scheme would rise according
to its democratic credentials. If it is true that there are
two superpowers on earth, the US government and global public
opinion, then these nations would do well to recruit the latter
in their struggle with the former.
Now is the
time to turn our campaigns against the war-mongering,
wealth-concentrating, planet-consuming world order into a concerted
campaign for global democracy. We must become the Chartists and
the Suffragettes of the 21st Century. They understood that to
change the world you must propose as well as oppose. They democratized
the nation; now we must seek to democratize the world. Our task
is not to overthrow globalization, but to capture it, and to use
it as a vehicle for humanity's first global democratic revolution.
George Monbiot's book
The Age of Consent: a manifesto for a
new world order is published by Flamingo on June 16th.
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