Out Of The Wreckage
by
George Monbiot
Dissident Voice
February 25, 2003
The
men who run the world are democrats at home and dictators abroad. They came to
power by means of national elections which possess, at least, the potential to
represent the will of their people. Their citizens can dismiss them without
bloodshed, and challenge their policies in the expectation that, if enough
people join in, they will be obliged to listen.
Internationally, they rule
by brute force. They and the global institutions they run exercise greater
economic and political control over the people of the poor world than its own
governments do. But those people can no sooner challenge or replace them than
the citizens of the Soviet Union could vote Stalin out of office. Their global
governance is, by all the classic political definitions, tyrannical.
But while citizens' means of
overthrowing this tyranny are limited, it seems to be creating some of the
conditions for its own destruction. Over the past week, the US government has
threatened to dismantle two of the institutions which have, until recently,
best served its global interests.
On Saturday, President Bush
warned the UN security council that accepting a new resolution authorising a
war with Iraq was its "last chance" to prove "its
relevance". Four days before, a leaked document from the Pentagon showed
that this final opportunity might already have passed. The US is planning to
build a new generation of nuclear weapons in order to enhance its ability to
launch a pre-emptive attack. This policy threatens both the comprehensive test
ban treaty and the nuclear non-proliferation treaty - two of the principal
instruments of global security - while endangering the international compact
that the UN exists to sustain. The security council, which, despite constant
disruption, survived the cold war, is beginning to look brittle in its
aftermath.
On Wednesday, the US took a
decisive step towards the destruction of the World Trade Organisation. The
WTO's current trade round collapsed in Seattle in 1999 because the poor nations
perceived that it offered them nothing, while granting new rights to the rich
world's corporations. It was relaunched in Qatar in 2001 only because those
nations were promised two concessions: they could override the patents on
expensive drugs and import cheaper copies when public health was threatened,
and they could expect a major reduction in the rich world's agricultural
subsidies. At the WTO meeting in Geneva last week, the US flatly reneged on
both promises.
The Republicans' victory in
the mid-term elections last November was secured with the help of $60m from
America's big drug firms. This appears to have been a straightforward deal: we
will buy the elections for you if you abandon the concession you made in Qatar.
The agri-business lobbies in both the US and Europe appear to have been almost
as successful: the poor nations have been forced to discuss a draft document
which effectively permits the rich world to continue dumping its subsidised
products in their markets.
If the US does not back
down, the world trade talks will collapse at the next ministerial meeting in
Mexico in September, just as they did in Seattle. If so, then the WTO, as its
former director-general has warned, will fall apart. Nations will instead
resolve their trade disputes individually or through regional agreements.
Already, by means of the free trade agreement of the Americas and the harsh
concessions it is extracting from other nations as a condition of receiving
aid, the US appears to be preparing for this possibility.
The US, in other words,
seems to be ripping up the global rulebook. As it does so, those of us who have
campaigned against the grotesque injustices of the existing world order will
quickly discover that a world with no institutions is even nastier than a world
run by the wrong ones. Multilateralism, however inequitable it may be, requires
certain concessions to other nations. Unilateralism means piracy: the armed
robbery of the poor by the rich. The difference between today's world order and
the one for which the US may be preparing is the difference between mediated
and unmediated force.
But the possible collapse of
the current world order, dangerous as it will be, also provides us with the
best opportunities we have ever encountered for replacing the world's unjust
and coercive institutions with a fairer and more democratic means of global
governance.
By wrecking the multilateral
system for the sake of a few short-term, corporate interests, the US is,
paradoxically, threatening its own tyrannical control of other nations. The
existing international agencies, fashioned by means of brutal power politics at
the end of the second world war, have permitted the US to develop its
international commercial and political interests more effectively than it could
have done alone.
The institutions through
which it has worked - the security council, the WTO, the International Monetary
Fund and the World Bank - have provided a semblance of legitimacy for what has
become, in all but name, the construction of empire. The end of multilateralism
would force the US, as it is already beginning to do, to drop this pretence and
frankly admit to its imperial designs on the rest of the world. This admission,
in turn, forces other nations to seek to resist it. Effective resistance would
create the political space in which their citizens could begin to press for a
new, more equitable multilateralism.
There are several means of
contesting the unilateral power of the US, but perhaps the most immediate and
effective one is to accelerate its economic crisis. Already, strategists in
China are suggesting that the yuan should replace the dollar as east Asia's
reserve currency. Over the past year, as the Observer revealed on Sunday, the
euro has started to challenge the dollar's position as the international means
of payment for oil. The dollar's dominance of world trade, particularly the oil
market, is all that permits the US Treasury to sustain the nation's massive
deficit, as it can print inflation-free money for global circulation. If the
global demand for dollars falls, the value of the currency will fall with it,
and speculators will shift their assets into euros or yen or even yuan, with
the result that the US economy will begin to totter.
Of course an economically
weakened nation in possession of overwhelming military force remains a very
dangerous one. Already, as I suggested last week, the US appears to be using
its military machine to extend its economic life. But it is not clear that the
American people would permit their government to threaten or attack other
nations without even a semblance of an international political process, which
is, of course, what the Bush administration is currently destroying.
America's assertions of
independence from the rest of the world force the rest of the world to assert
its independence from America. They permit the people of the weaker nations to
contemplate the global democratic revolution that is long overdue.
George Monbiot is Honorary Professor at the Department of Politics in Keele and
Visiting Professor at the Department of Environmental Science at the University
of East London. He writes a weekly column for the Guardian newspaper of London.
The Age of Consent, George Monbiot's
proposals for global democratic governance, will be published in June. His articles and contact info can be found at his website: www.monbiot.