Listen to the people
What protesters in Seattle, Washington, and
Windsor have been saying, if only we would stop and listen,
is that the world needs new ways of governing, and people
want to be involved
by Dr. Gordon Smith
 “It
remains within our power to distribute the great gains of
globalization more fairly, and to remedy its harms.
Globalization can be turned to the common good.”
There can hardly be a more lurid case of bad government
in the world than the catastrophic mess in the
“Democratic Republic” of Congo. We have heard more
commitments to stop fighting and that foreign troops will
withdraw. Does anybody believe them? We have heard a small,
inadequately armed, under-mandated peacekeeping force is
being sent. Does anybody believe it will work?
In truth, however, it’s hard to say what’s
worse: the villainy of the Congolese wars or the predictable
insufficiency of the world’s response. When we in the
rich democracies watch another atrocity unfold, or tolerate
another unnecessary famine or environmental ruin, we
conspire in misrule on a global scale.
And, by the way, Hutu radio in Rwanda is again calling
for a massacre of Tutsis. Have we not heard that song
before?
What many of the protesters in Seattle, Washington, and
Windsor over the past few months have been saying, if only
we would stop and listen, is that we need action, and people
want to be involved. That is as true about trade and
globalization as it is about tribalism and conflict.
The world needs new ways of governing. We know this,
because the old ways are failing — in wars of grievance
and greed, in the backward course of de-development in poor
countries, in the altered chemistry of the
climate itself.
These are, in the main, failures to govern the turmoil
and seize the opportunities of globalization. All confound
the capacity of any state to govern alone, even inside its
own borders. But they are not inevitable. It remains within
our power to distribute the great gains of globalization
more fairly, and to remedy its harms. Globalization can be
turned to the common good. Here’s how:
First, understand the failures.
Most of us think of the state as the natural and
predominating unit of the international system. We take for
granted, even when we know better, the old assumptions of
sovereignty and impenetrable borders. This is risky imagery,
rooted in a past far different from the present world of
global finance, global media, global norms of human rights.
And it fosters a lethal defeatism when old approaches fail.
These are habits of mind, and they can be changed.
As well, let’s acknowledge that considerable numbers
of powerful people flourish in the current circumstances
— those who sit comfortably in the prevailing
institutions, and particularly those who are selling what
the world is buying. This is a crucial fact of
globalization: it is not, for the most part, an inevitable
force of nature or of history. For good and ill, life’s
current conditions reflect in large degree the deliberate
actions and reactions of corporations, organizations and
governments — all interacting — whose leaders are
pursuing their own separate interests.
There is nothing new in the phenomenon of multiple
unco-ordinated decisions producing unintended harm.
That’s what traffic jams and over-fishing are all
about. What globalization introduces, along with its wealth
of opportunity, is a new intrusiveness — and a new
destructiveness — in the damage done.
The democratization of globalization is one necessary
corrective. The virtue of democratic governments is not that
they invariably do the right thing, but that they are held
accountable when they do the wrong thing. But in global
politics, how accountable is the World Trade Organization?
Nortel? Greenpeace?
People are entitled, by right, to a meaningful say in the
institutions that govern their lives. Besides which, no
institution can succeed for long without the consent of
those who are governed by it. That’s what the
International Monetary Fund and the World Bank are
realizing. As former World Bank chief economist Joe Stiglitz
has said, “If the people we entrust to manage the
global economy don’t begin to dialogue and take
criticism to heart, things will continue to go very, very
wrong.”
The technology of globalization itself — the
Internet especially — equips activists anywhere in
powerful new coalitions of peaceful resistance. They are
only just starting to exploit it.
Globalization generates wealth and boundless possibility.
But globalization will defeat the attempt of any people to
protect their security, their prosperity, or the air they
breathe or the water they drink, except in co-operation with
others in the global community.
Recognizing this, we should work together on three
imperatives.
Preventing deadly conflict: It’s true, but
only half true, that most wars today are civil wars. In
cause and effect, war has been globalized — in the
global arms trade, trans-border affinities of kinship and
tradition, the self-interest of foreign governments, and the
influences of business, media and non-governmental
organizations. Preventing deadly conflicts such as
Congo’s gruesome war demands a new understanding of the
norms and practicalities of international intervention, new
networks for action at the United Nations, and a stronger
“culture of prevention” linked to strategies for
development.
Providing opportunities for the young:
Earth’s population has just passed six billion, and is
likely to reach eight billion by 2025. Some 98 per cent of
that growth will occur in the poor countries, mostly in
cities. Giving these people the chance for a humane life is
a commanding imperative of governance. That means relief
from preventable disease, universal primary schooling,
expanded access to the Internet (and so to a more fortunate
future). All this demands co-ordination, of a kind only
achievable through the UN.
Managing climate change: Earth’s climate is
changing, and some part of global warming is human-made. The
damage can only be abated by the joint action of states,
industry and others — in a thorough transformation to
low carbon economies. What’s needed, what’s
possible, is a grand bargain between rich and poor countries
(and their industries) to cut greenhouse gas emissions and
increase Earth’s capacity to absorb them. Fulfilling
the 1997 Kyoto protocol would complete that bargain —
but it still requires will and concerted decision.
This year offers an extraordinary chance to act on those
imperatives. The Millennium Summit, at the UN in September,
can itself constitute an exercise in good governance —
a democratic reconstruction of our future. But the leaders
there will have to decide: they can settle for the usual
champagne and platitudes. Or they can start, with straight
talk and real decisiveness, to exploit the great
possibilities that globalization provides.
The benefits of globalization are available. The evils
are neither inevitable nor ungovernable. And good governance
can still save us from our failures. To that end, the
Millennium Summit can mark a timely new beginning.
Gordon Smith, former Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs,
is chairman of the International Development Research Centre
and director of the centre for global studies at UVic. An
earlier version of this article appeared in The Globe and
Mail.
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