[Reader-list] Excellent article on US and world orde

[Rana Dasgupta]

Important piece.

R


Out of the wreckage 
By tearing up the global rulebook, the US is in fact
undermining its own imperial rule 

http://www.guardian.co.uk/Columnists/Column/0,5673,902365,00.html

 

George Monbiot 
Tuesday February 25, 2003
The Guardian 

The men who run the world are democrats at home and
dictators abroad. They came to power by means of
national elections which possess, at least, the
potential to represent the will of their people. Their
citizens can dismiss them without bloodshed, and
challenge their policies in the expectation that, if
enough people join in, they will be obliged to listen.


Internationally, they rule by brute force. They and
the global institutions they run exercise greater
economic and political control over the people of the
poor world than its own governments do. But those
people can no sooner challenge or replace them than
the citizens of the Soviet Union could vote Stalin out
of office. Their global governance is, by all the
classic political definitions, tyrannical. 

But while citizens' means of overthrowing this tyranny
are limited, it seems to be creating some of the
conditions for its own destruction. Over the past
week, the US government has threatened to dismantle
two of the institutions which have, until recently,
best served its global interests. 

On Saturday, President Bush warned the UN security
council that accepting a new resolution authorising a
war with Iraq was its "last chance" to prove "its
relevance". Four days before, a leaked document from
the Pentagon showed that this final opportunity might
already have passed. The US is planning to build a new
generation of nuclear weapons in order to enhance its
ability to launch a pre-emptive attack. This policy
threatens both the comprehensive test ban treaty and
the nuclear non-proliferation treaty - two of the
principal instruments of global security - while
endangering the international compact that the UN
exists to sustain. The security council, which,
despite constant disruption, survived the cold war, is
beginning to look brittle in its aftermath. 

On Wednesday, the US took a decisive step towards the
destruction of the World Trade Organisation. The WTO's
current trade round collapsed in Seattle in 1999
because the poor nations perceived that it offered
them nothing, while granting new rights to the rich
world's corporations. It was relaunched in Qatar in
2001 only because those nations were promised two
concessions: they could override the patents on
expensive drugs and import cheaper copies when public
health was threatened, and they could expect a major
reduction in the rich world's agricultural subsidies.
At the WTO meeting in Geneva last week, the US flatly
reneged on both promises. 

The Republicans' victory in the mid-term elections
last November was secured with the help of $60m from
America's big drug firms. This appears to have been a
straightforward deal: we will buy the elections for
you if you abandon the concession you made in Qatar.
The agri-business lobbies in both the US and Europe
appear to have been almost as successful: the poor
nations have been forced to discuss a draft document
which effectively permits the rich world to continue
dumping its subsidised products in their markets. 

If the US does not back down, the world trade talks
will collapse at the next ministerial meeting in
Mexico in September, just as they did in Seattle. If
so, then the WTO, as its former director-general has
warned, will fall apart. Nations will instead resolve
their trade disputes individually or through regional
agreements. Already, by means of the free trade
agreement of the Americas and the harsh concessions it
is extracting from other nations as a condition of
receiving aid, the US appears to be preparing for this
possibility. 

The US, in other words, seems to be ripping up the
global rulebook. As it does so, those of us who have
campaigned against the grotesque injustices of the
existing world order will quickly discover that a
world with no institutions is even nastier than a
world run by the wrong ones. Multilateralism, however
inequitable it may be, requires certain concessions to
other nations. Unilateralism means piracy: the armed
robbery of the poor by the rich. The difference
between today's world order and the one for which the
US may be preparing is the difference between mediated
and unmediated force. 

But the possible collapse of the current world order,
dangerous as it will be, also provides us with the
best opportunities we have ever encountered for
replacing the world's unjust and coercive institutions
with a fairer and more democratic means of global
governance. 

By wrecking the multilateral system for the sake of a
few short-term, corporate interests, the US is,
paradoxically, threatening its own tyrannical control
of other nations. The existing international agencies,
fashioned by means of brutal power politics at the end
of the second world war, have permitted the US to
develop its international commercial and political
interests more effectively than it could have done
alone. 

The institutions through which it has worked - the
security council, the WTO, the International Monetary
Fund and the World Bank - have provided a semblance of
legitimacy for what has become, in all but name, the
construction of empire. The end of multilateralism
would force the US, as it is already beginning to do,
to drop this pretence and frankly admit to its
imperial designs on the rest of the world. This
admission, in turn, forces other nations to seek to
resist it. Effective resistance would create the
political space in which their citizens could begin to
press for a new, more equitable multilateralism. 

There are several means of contesting the unilateral
power of the US, but perhaps the most immediate and
effective one is to accelerate its economic crisis.
Already, strategists in China are suggesting that the
yuan should replace the dollar as east Asia's reserve
currency. Over the past year, as the Observer revealed
on Sunday, the euro has started to challenge the
dollar's position as the international means of
payment for oil. The dollar's dominance of world
trade, particularly the oil market, is all that
permits the US Treasury to sustain the nation's
massive deficit, as it can print inflation-free money
for global circulation. If the global demand for
dollars falls, the value of the currency will fall
with it, and speculators will shift their assets into
euros or yen or even yuan, with the result that the US
economy will begin to totter. 

Of course an economically weakened nation in
possession of overwhelming military force remains a
very dangerous one. Already, as I suggested last week,
the US appears to be using its military machine to
extend its economic life. But it is not clear that the
American people would permit their government to
threaten or attack other nations without even a
semblance of an international political process, which
is, of course, what the Bush administration is
currently destroying. 

America's assertions of independence from the rest of
the world force the rest of the world to assert its
independence from America. They permit the people of
the weaker nations to contemplate the global
democratic revolution that is long overdue. 

· The Age of Consent, George Monbiot's proposals for
global democratic governance, will be published in
June 

www.monbiot.com 



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