http://www.monbiot.com/dsp_article.cfm?article_id=607
See this same article
at:
http://www.commondreams.org/views03/0916-10.htm
Published on Tuesday, September 16, 2003 by the Guardian/UK
A Threat To The Rich
Forcing the Poor Countries to Walk Out of the Cancun Trade Talks
may Rebound on the West
by George Monbiot
The Philosophy of Cant
Europe wrecked the
world trade talks, but it may accidentally have
forced the poor world to assert its power. Final installment of
the
series on trade.
By George Monbiot.
Published in the Guardian 16th September 2003
Were there a Nobel
Prize for Hypocrisy, it would be awarded this
year to the European trade negotiator, Pascal Lamy. A week ago,
in the Guardian's trade supplement, he argued that the World Trade
Organisation "helps us move from a Hobbesian world of lawlessness,
into a more Kantian world -- perhaps not exactly of perpetual
peace,
but at least one where trade relations are subject to the rule
of
law".1 On Sunday, by treating the trade talks as if, in Thomas
Hobbes's words, they were "a war of every man against every
man",
Lamy scuppered the negotiations, and very possibly destroyed the
organisation as a result. If so, one result could be a conflict,
in which, as Hobbes observed, "force and fraud are ... the
two
cardinal virtues."2 Relations between countries would then
revert
to the state of nature the philosopher feared, where the nasty
and brutish behaviour of the powerful ensures that the lives
of the poor remain short.
At the talks in Cancun,
in Mexico, Lamy made the poor nations
an offer they couldn't possibly accept. He appears to have been
seeking to resurrect, by means of an "investment treaty",
the infamous Multilateral Agreement on Investment. This was
a proposal which would have allowed corporations to force a
government to remove any laws which interfered with their
ability to make money, and which was crushed by a worldwide
revolt in 1998. In return for granting corporations power
over their governments, the poor nations would receive
precisely nothing. The concessions on farm subsidies Lamy
was offering amounted to little more than a reshuffling of
the money paid to European farmers. They would continue to
permit the subsidy barons of Europe to dump their artificially
cheap produce into the poor world, destroying the livelihoods
of the farmers there.
Of course, as Hobbes
knew, "if other men will not lay down
their right ... then there is no reason for anyone to divest
himself of his: for that were to expose himself to prey."
A contract, he noted, is "the mutual transferring of right",
which a man enters into "either in consideration of some
right
reciprocally transferred to himself, or for some other good
he hopeth for thereby."3 By offering the poorer nations nothing
in return for almost everything, Lamy forced them to walk out.
He took this position
because he sees his public duty as the
defence of the European Union's corporations and industrial
farmers against all comers, be they the citizens of Europe
or the people of other nations. He imagined that, according
to the laws of nature which have hitherto governed the World
Trade Organisation, the weaker parties would be forced to
capitulate, and grant to the corporations the little which
has not already been stolen from them. He stuck to it even
when it became clear that the poor nations were for the first
time prepared to mobilise -- as the state of nature demands
-- a collective response to aggression.
I dwell on Pascal Lamy's
adherence to the treasured philosophy
of cant because all that he has done, he has done in our name.
The United Kingdom and the other countries of Europe do not
negotiate directly at the World Trade Organisation, but through
the European Union. He is therefore our negotiator, who is
supposed to represent our interests. But it is hard to find
anyone in Europe, who is not employed by or beholden to the
big corporations, who sees Lamy's negotiating position as
either desirable or just. Several European governments,
recognising that it threatened the talks and the trade
organisation itself, slowly distanced themselves from his
position. To many people's surprise, they included Britain's.
Though Pascal Lamy is by no means the only powerful man in
Europe who is obsessed with the rights of corporations,
his behaviour appears to confirm the most lurid of the
tabloid scare stories about Eurocrats running out of control.
But while this man
has inflicted lasting damage to Europe's
global reputation, he may not have succeeded in destroying
the hopes of the poorer nations. For something else is now
beginning to shake itself awake. For the first time in some
20 years, the developing countries are beginning to unite
and to move as a body.
That they have not
done so before is testament first to the
corrosive effects of the Cold War, then to the continued
ability of the rich and powerful nations to bribe, blackmail
and bully the poor ones. Whenever there has been a prospect
of solidarity among the weak, the strong, and in particular
the US, have successfully divided and ruled them, by promising
concessions to those who split, and threatening sanctions
against those who stay. But now the rich have become victims
of their own power.
Since its formation,
they have been seeking to recruit
as many developing nations into the World Trade Organisation
as they can, in order to open up their markets and force them
to trade on onerous terms. But as they have done so, they
have found themselves massively outnumbered. The EU and the
US may already be regretting their efforts to persuade China
to join. It has now become the rock -- too big to bully and
threaten -- around which the unattached nations have begun
to cluster. Paradoxically, it was precisely because the
demands being made by Lamy and (to a lesser extent) the
US were so outrageous that the smaller nations could not
be dragged away from this new coalition. Whatever the US
offered them by way of inducements and threats, they simply
had too much to lose if they allowed the rich blocs' proposals
to pass.
Their solidarity is
itself empowering. At Cancun the weak
nations stood up to the most powerful negotiators on earth
and were not broken. The lesson they will bring home is that
if this is possible, almost anything is. Suddenly, the proposals
for global justice which relied on solidarity for their
implementation can spring into life. While the WTO might
have been buried, these nations may, if they use their
collective power intelligently, still find a means of
negotiating together. They might even disinter it as the
democratic body it was always supposed to have been.
The World Bank and
the International Monetary Fund had better
watch their backs now. The UN Security Council will find its
anomalous powers ever harder to sustain. Poor nations, if they
stick together, can begin to exercise a collective threat to
the rich. For this, they need leverage and, in the form of
their debts, they possess it. Together they owe so much that,
in effect, they own the world's financial systems. By threatening,
collectively, to default they can begin to wield the sort of
power which only the rich have so far exercised, demanding
concessions in return for withholding force.
So Pascal Lamy, "our"
negotiator, may accidentally have
engineered a better world, by fighting so doggedly for
a worse one.
This is the final installment
of George Monbiot's series on trade.
www.monbiot.com
References:
1. Pascal Lamy, 8th
September 2003. Opinion piece, The Guardian.
2. Thomas Hobbes, 1651,
Leviathan.
3. ibid.
