HOME
DV NEWS
SERVICE ARCHIVE SUBMISSIONS/CONTACT ABOUT DV
First Global Democratic Revolution
by
George Monbiot
June
17, 2003
Last
week Jack Straw illuminated the depths of his political cowardice, by shining
upon them the full and feeble beam of his political courage. He proposed to
alter the constitution of the UN Security Council. He would like to double its
permanent membership, though without granting the new members the privileges
accorded to the five existing ones. He must know that this scheme will be
rejected by the proposed new entrants, yet he fears to tread more firmly upon
the toes of the incumbents.
But
Straw is desperate to save this undemocratic instrument of global governance.
He wants to save it because it provides a semblance of legitimacy for a global
system otherwise crudely governed by Britain's principal ally. By tearing down
the Security Council to go to war with Iraq, George Bush has ripped the veil
off his own intentions. The ambitions of his project now stand before us, naked
and undeniable. Straw, like a frantic tailor, is seeking to restore his
client's modesty. He knows that a naked emperor cannot govern unopposed for
long.
Straw's
scheme is a response to two colliding realities. The first is that the
principal instruments of POLITICAL globalisation are in trouble. The Security
Council, the World Trade Organisation, the International Monetary Fund and the
World Bank, having already lost the support of the world's people, are now
losing the support of their principal sponsor. Other nations are beginning to
face a stark choice: they must either accept direct global rule from
Washington, or bypass the superpower and design a new, multilateral system of
global governance.
The
second is that ECONOMIC globalisation, driven by corporate and financial
integration, sweeps all before it. It destroys but it also creates. It is
extending to the world's people unprecedented opportunities for mobilisation.
It is establishing a single, planetary class interest, as the same forces and
the same institutions threaten the welfare of the people of all nations. It is
ripping down the cultural and linguistic barriers which divide us. By breaking
the social bonds which sustained local communities, it destroys our
geographical loyalties. It forces us to become a global political community,
whether we like it or not.
Simultaneously,
it has placed within our hands the weapons we need to attack the existing means
of global governance. By forcing governments to operate in the interests of
business, it has manufactured the disenchantment upon which all new politics
must feed. By expanding its own empire through new communication and transport
networks, it has granted the world's people the means by which they can gather
and co-ordinate their challenge.
We
may, in other words, be approaching a revolutionary moment. Economic
globalisation has made us stronger than ever before, just as the existing
instruments of global control have become weaker than ever before. But the
global justice movement, vast and determined as it is, is in no position to
seize it. The reason is simple: we do not possess a political programme.
Without a programme, we can only oppose. Without a programme, we permit our
opponents to select the field of battle.
We
hesitate to develop one for two reasons. The first is that hundreds of
disparate factions have buried their differences within this movement to fight
their common enemies. Those differences will re-emerge as we seek to coalesce
around a common set of solutions.
The
second is that many of us have mistaken the context for the problem. We have
tended to reject not only the undemocratic global governance which prevails
today, but also global governance itself. As a result, we remove ourselves from
the determination of precisely those issues - such as war, climate change,
international debt and trade between nations - which most concern us, for these
issues can be addressed only at the global level. Global governance will take
place whether we participate in it or not. Indeed, it must take place if these
issues are not to be resolved by the brute force of the powerful. Our task is
not to overthrow globalisation, but to capture it, and to use it as a vehicle
for humanity's first global democratic revolution.
But,
though many people understand these issues, we still hang back. We leave the
rest of the world with a question, repeatedly asked but seldom answered: we
know what they don't want, but what do they want?
I
have sought to provide an answer, with a series of proposals for a system of
global governance run by and for the world's people. I don't regard them as
final or definitive: on the contrary, I hope that other people will refine,
transform and, if necessary, overthrow them in favour of better ones. But until
we have a programme to reject, we will never develop a programme we can accept.
I
have suggested the scrapping of the World Bank and the IMF, and their
replacement with a body rather like the one designed by John Maynard Keynes in
the 1940s, whose purpose was to prevent excessive trade surpluses and deficits
from forming, and therefore international debt from accumulating. I have
proposed a transformation of the global trade rules. Poor nations should be
permitted, if they wish, to follow the route to development taken by the rich
nations: protecting their infant industries from foreign competition until they
are strong enough to fend for themselves, and seizing other countries'
intellectual property rights. Companies operating between nations should be
subject to mandatory fair trade rules, losing their licence to trade if they
break them.
The
UN Security Council should be scrapped, and its powers vested in a reformulated
UN General Assembly. This would be democratised by means of weighted voting:
nations' votes would increase according to both the size of their populations
and their positions on a global democracy index. Perhaps most importantly, the
people of the world would elect representatives to a global parliament, whose
purpose would be to hold the other international bodies to account.
I
have also suggested some cruel and unusual means by which these proposals might
be implemented. Poor nations, for example, now owe so much that they own, in
effect, the world's financial systems. The threat of a sudden collective
default on their debts unless they get what they want would concentrate the
minds of even the most obdurate global powers.
You
might regard this agenda as either excessive or insufficient, wildly optimistic
or boringly unambitious. But it is not enough simply to reject it. Do so by all
means, but only once you have first proposed a better one of your own. For
until we have a programme behind which we can unite, we will neither present a
viable threat to the current rulers of the world, nor seize the revolutionary
moment which their miscalculation affords us. We cannot destroy the existing
world order until we have a better one with which to replace it.