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by
George Monbiot
September
16, 2003
Read Part One: The Worst of
Times
Read Part Two: Whose Side
Are You On?
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.
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. His recently released book, The
Age of Consent (Flamingo Press), puts forth proposals for global democratic
governance. His articles and contact info can be found at his website: www.monbiot.com.
* Whose Side
Are You On?: Part Two of a Three-Part Series on Trade
* The Worst of
Times: Part One of a Three-Part Series on Trade
* Beware the
Bluewash: The UN Should not Become the Dustbin for America's Failed Adventures
* Poisoned
Chalice: Wherever it is Prescribed, a Dose of IMF Medicine Only Compounds
Economic Crisis
* SleepWalking
to Extinction
* Driven
Out of Eden
* Shadow of
Extinction: Only Six Degrees Separate Our World from the Cataclysmic End of an
Ancient Era
* I Was
Wrong About Trade: “Localization” is Both Destructive and Unjust
* Seize the Day:
Using Globalization As Vehicle For the First Global Democratic Revolution
* Trashing
Africa: Blair Has Ensured that Europe and the US Will Continue to Promote
Famine
* War
Crimes Case in Belgium Illustrates Folly of Blair’s Belief That US is
Interested in Justice
1. Pascal Lamy, 8th
September 2003. Opinion piece, The Guardian.
2. Thomas Hobbes,
1651, Leviathan.
3. ibid.