how to stop the USA

[Ian Murray <seamus2001@xxxxxxxxx>]

http://www.outlookindia.com
Jun 09, 2003
Opinion
How To Stop America

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.

GEORGE MONBIOT

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 Organisation 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 Organisation, 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' principal instrument of international
power: the Security Council.

By going to war without the council's authorisation, 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 recognise 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 behaviour of a state when that
behaviour 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
democratisation.

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 democratisation 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 democratise: 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 Organisation. 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 democratised the nation; now we
must seek to democratise the world. 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.

===============================
This was published in the New Statesman, on 9th June 2003. George
Monbiot's book The Age of Consent: a manifesto for a new world order is
published by Flamingo on June 16th.