How
To Stop America
By
George Monbiot
www.monbiot.com
13 June, 2003
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. )