How To Stop America (from ZNet) (fwd)

Interesting in light of the "Peoples's Century" discussion which took
place here recently.  Monbiot's proposal is less radical - he envisions a
global parliament with legitimacy, but no coercive power.  There are still
logistical difficulties - how would such a body determine if a country is
democratic (a necessary step in weighing representation)? Monitoring
elections (assuming this body can in fact do so) is probably not enough -
governments elected in a general poll can still deny access to funding or
air-time to competing parties, and can still repress human rights.  The
issue of capital punishment might prove particularly contentious.

Monbiot mentions that the interests of the founders ought always to be
kept in mind.  Given the sort of body he outlines, it would not stretch
the imagination to see a revitalized EU as the driving force behind it.
Clearly, the US would not be interested at this time (given its imperial
ambitions); nor would China, because a free election will probably lead to
the secession of Tibet (and Xinjiang).  Would the outcome of founding such
a global parliament result in the sort of conflict predicted by some
world-systemists - US and East Asia vs. Europe (with Russia, and in
alliance with the democratic semi-periphery)?

-- 

How To Stop America



by George Monbiot
The New Statesman
June 07, 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
      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's 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 persistance 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.

      George Monbiot's book The Age of Consent: a manifesto for a
      new world order is published by Flamingo on June 16th.