PARLIAMENT OF DREAMS
The prospects of an institution for global governance are slim, given our underdeveloped sense of democracy.
By Joseph S Nye, Jr
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www.worldlink.co.uk]
Nye is dean of the John F Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University and Don K Price professor of public policy. This essay is drawn from his new book, "The Paradox of American Power: Why the World’s Only Superpower Can’t Go it Alone" (Oxford University Press, 2002)
As global networks of interdependence stretch beyond the boundaries of the nation state, how is globalism to be governed? A world government is not the answer. Some writers draw an analogy from the history of the United States, asking today’s nation states to join together as the 13 colonies did. Just as the development of a national economy in the late 19th century led to the growth of federal government power in Washington, so the development of a global economy will require federal power at the global level. Some see the United Nations as the incipient core. But the American analogy is misleading. The 13 original colonies shared far more in English language and culture than the more than 200 nations of the world share today, and even the Americans did not avoid a bloody civil war. By the time a continental economy developed, the framework of the federation was firmly in place. Rather than thinking of a hierarchical world government, we should think of networks of governance crisscrossing and co-existing with a world divided formally into sovereign states.
For now, the key institution for global governance is going to remain the nation state. In the face of globalization, however, even countries as strong as the United States will find that unilateral measures are often insufficient, will fail or will generate reactions. Countries facing increased globalization will become, therefore, increasingly willing to sacrifice some of their own legal freedom of action to constrain and make more predictable others’ actions toward themselves. They will find that the world has long had cooperative institutions for managing common affairs. Hundreds of organizations and legal regimes exist to manage the global dimensions of trade, telecommunications, civil aviation, health, environment, meteorology and many other issues.
To achieve what they want, most countries, including the United States, find that they have to coordinate their activities. Unilateral action simply cannot produce the right results on what are inherently multilateral issues. Cooperation may take the form of bilateral and multilateral treaties, informal agreements among bureaucracies and delegation to formal intergovernmental institutions. Regulation of global flows will often grow by layers of accretion rather than by a single treaty and will long remain imperfect. Some cases are simpler than others. Cooperation on prosecution of child pornography on the Internet is proving easier than regulation of hate mail, as there are more shared norms in the former case than in the latter.
Some attempts at governance will not involve states as coherent units but rather will be transgovernmental (meaning that components of states engage with one another) or transnational (involving non-governmental actors). Alongside the necessary but imperfect interstate institutional framework, an informal political process is developing that supplements the formal process of cooperative relations among states.
In the public sector, different components of governments have informal contact. Rare is the embassy of a large democratic country today in which foreign-service personnel form a majority of those stationed abroad. Most officers in American embassies come from agencies such as agriculture, transportation, commerce, energy, defense, intelligence and the FBI.
On the private side, transnational corporations and offshore fund managers are playing a larger-than-ever role in establishing rules and standards. Their practices often create de facto governance. International commercial arbitration is basically a private justice system and credit-rating agencies are private gatekeeping systems. They have emerged as important governance mechanisms whose authority is not centered on the state. In the non-profit sector there has been an extraordinary growth of organizations – still largely Western, but increasingly transnational. These organizations and the multiple channels of access across borders are able to put increasing leverage on states and intergovernmental organizations, as well as transnational corporations.
The soft power of these organizations is frequently seen in the mobilization of shame to impose costs on national or corporate reputations. Transnational drug companies dropped lawsuits in South Africa over infringement of their patents on AIDS drugs because, in the words of the Financial Times in April 2001, "demands for greater social responsibility from business are getting louder, better organized and more popular. They cannot be ignored. The climbdown by the drug companies was the most significant event. It amounted to a recognition that their legal battle in South Africa was a public-relations disaster." Similar campaigns of naming and shaming have altered the investment and employment patterns of companies such as Mattel and Nike in the toy and footwear industries. Some transnational corporations, such as Royal Dutch/Shell, have set up large staffs just to deal with NGOs. Jean-François Rischard of the World Bank advocates "global issues networks" that would issue ratings to measure how well countries and private businesses are doing in meeting norms on the environment and other issues that affect the welfare of the planet. The process would be quick and non-bureaucratic, and any sanctions would be imposed by damaged reputations.
The results may or may not be consistent with government preferences. If transnational corporations were to respond to an NGO campaign by agreeing to raise the age of child labor in their factories, they might be countermanding the decision of the elected government of a sovereign country more effectively than any formal international vote taken in the WTO. The evolution of such civil and business networks has been largely uncoordinated and it remains unclear how they could fit together in a representative form of global governance. Neither can claim to represent citizenry as a whole. The networks of private and transnational actors are contributing to the governance of an incipient, albeit imperfect and uneven, civil society at the global level. Because these structures deal with partial perspectives of business and non-profit advocates, some observers have suggested adding the input of governments, or parts of governments, to represent broader public interests. Global policy networks exist on such issues as corruption (led by Transparency International), the construction of large dams (led by the World Commission on Dams), debt relief for poor countries (led by Jubilee 2000), polio eradication (led by the World Health Organization) and numerous others.
How should we react to these changes? Our democratic theory has not caught up with global practice. Financial crises, climate change, migration, terrorism and drug smuggling ignore borders but profoundly affect US citizens’ lives. British sociologist Anthony Giddens believes that because they escape control by sovereign democratic processes, they are one of the main reasons for "the declining appeal of democracy where it is best established". For some, such as US Undersecretary of State John Bolton, the solution is to strengthen American democracy by pulling out of intrusive institutions and rejecting any constraints on sovereignty. But even the unilateralists and sovereigntists will find that international institutions are necessary because many of the issues raised by globalization are inherently multilateral.
Anti-globalization protesters call into question the legitimacy of global institutions and networks on the grounds that they are undemocratic. Lori Wallach, one of the organizers of the coalition that disrupted the WTO in Seattle, attributed half of its success to "the notion that the democracy deficit in the global economy is neither necessary nor acceptable." Institutional legitimacy can also rest on tradition and efficacy, but in today’s world, consistency with democratic procedures has become increasingly important.
In fact, many global institutions are feeble. Even the much-maligned WTO is a weak organization with a small budget and staff – hardly the stuff of world government. International institutions also tend to be highly responsive to national governments, which are the real source of democratic legitimacy. That cannot be said of unelected NGOs (some of which have larger budgets than the WTO’s). Other defenders say that the question of democracy is irrelevant, as international institutions are only instruments to facilitate interstate cooperation. Their legitimacy derives from the democratic governments that created them and from their effectiveness.
Except for the most technical organizations, which fall below the political radar, such defenses based on the weakness of international institutions are probably not enough to protect them from attacks on their legitimacy. In a world where the norm of democracy has become the touchstone of legitimacy, protesters will charge that they suffer from a democracy deficit. Even though the organizations are weak, their rules and resources can have powerful effects. Moreover, the protesters make three interesting points. First, not all the countries that are members of the organizations are democratic. Second, long lines of delegation from multiple governments and lack of transparency often weaken accountability. Third, although the organizations may be agents of states, they often represent only parts of states. Trade ministers attend the meetings of the WTO, finance ministers participate in the meetings of the International Monetary Fund and central bankers meet at the Bank for International Settlements in Basel. To functional outsiders, even in the same government, these institutions look like closed and secretive clubs. To develop the legitimacy of international governance will require three things: greater clarity about democracy, a richer understanding of accountability and a willingness to experiment.
Democracy is government by officials who are accountable and removable by the majority of people in a jurisdiction (albeit with provisions for protections of individuals and minorities). But who are "we the people" in a world where political identity at the global level is so weak? The principle of one state, one vote respects sovereignty, but it is not democratic. On that formula a citizen of Nauru, a UN member, would have 10,000 times more voting power than a citizen of China. On the other hand, treating the world as one global constituency implies the existence of a political community in which citizens of around 200 states would be willing to be continually outvoted by more than a billion Chinese and a billion Indians. (Ironically, such a world would be a nightmare for many of the protesting NGOs that seek to promote international environmental and labor standards, as well as democracy.)
Minorities acquiesce in the will of a majority when they feel they participate in a larger community. There is little evidence that a sufficiently strong sense of community exists at the global level or that it could soon be created. In the absence of a much stronger sense of community than now exists, the extension of domestic voting procedures to the global level is neither practical nor just. A stronger European Parliament may reduce a sense of "democratic deficit" as the relatively similar democratic states of the EU evolve, but it is doubtful that the analogy or terminology (parliament) makes sense under the conditions of diversity that prevail on the global scale.
Adding legislative assemblies to global institutions, except in a purely advisory or consultative role, might well produce an undemocratic body that would interfere with the delegated accountability that now links institutions to democracy. Richard Falk and Andrew Strauss, who have argued in Foreign Affairs for a global parliament, are correct in stating that unelected interest groups cannot "speak for the citizenry as a whole", but they are wrong in thinking that the only serious answer is "some type of popularly elected global body" – at least not until the world develops a widespread sense of identity as a citizenry as a whole.
Alfred Lord Tennyson’s "Parliament of man" made great Victorian poetry, but it does not yet make good political analysis. Even in a global information age, we must strive for other methods of governance.