Document(s) 7 of 11

Globalization has already inspired an immense and expanding literature, some of it useful. Our purpose is not to enlarge it; we advance no Theory of Everything, no bold prediction. Instead, the attempt here is to detect connections between globalization and failures of governance, and then to suggest possible courses of action, by governments and others, on some specific and pressing issues. 

A new kind of global community is forming, making the present and future different from the past. The facts of interconnectedness are well known and unavoidable, in the statistics of trade and investment, in the diffusion of conflict from country to country, in the shared vulnerability to poisoned air or encroaching drought -- and in the fearful antipathies of culture and commerce, identity and technology, democracy and the market. At war or peace, we are more neighbours than ever, like it or not. 

Granted, countries and cultures have always affected one another, not least by trade and invasion. But the character of the present globalization is different, in kind and in degree. The connections and their effects between states and between people are not only more numerous but also transforming. They change the ways we live, the ways we will have to govern. To begin to see the transformations, look at the apparent paradox. Set against the disrupting forces of globalization are the equally turbulent features of fragmentation: secessions and partitions, the fretted cleavages of generation, ethnicity and aspiration, and the sense even in the rich democracies of alienation, disparity, and inequity. At the same time that cultural affinities and technology (especially cheap, fast communications and travel) draw people together across boundaries, new definitions of identity and interest drive people apart within borders. 

How to accommodate these seemingly contrary tendencies? In fact, they are two sides of the same phenomenon. Fragmentation and integration are one: "fragmegration" in the apt if unmusical invention of political scientist James Rosenau. Basque secessionists try to make common cause with Scottish Nationalists. Malaysian teenagers feel more in common with Swedes their age (fellow citizens of Nintendoland) than with their own Malaysian parents. Environmental movements arise locally, but can act globally in coalition with like-minded NGOs and foreign governments anywhere on the planet -- all exchanging email intimacies of common strategy and shared values. 

Nowhere is the tension between globalism and localism felt more sorely than in the passionate struggles of culture. By the mid-1990s, Benjamin Barber had found the sense of it in his Jihad vs. McWorld: "Caught between Babel and Disneyland, the planet is falling precipitously apart and coming reluctantly together at the very same moment." To which Barber added a second insight: in the realm of culture, "globalism" to most people usually means "Americanism." "Its template is American" as Barber put it. "Its goods are as much images as materièl, an aesthetic as well as a production line. It's about culture as commodity, apparel as ideology." And for many outside the United States, the dynamic of cultural globalism is not a benign competition for market share. It is a struggle between predator and prey, dominance and diversity. Whether in the defiance of Taliban clerics, or the cunning of the Quai d'Orsay defending the cultural industries of France, the culture wars are fought with a desperate intensity. 
 

THREE CRUCIAL ISSUES OF GLOBALIZATION 

1. Interests

Globalization is sometimes about immutable nature -- a tragic earthquake in Turkey or Taiwan that compels worldwide sympathy and attracts an international response. More often, globalization is about actions and behaviours more or less deliberately arrived at. Interests, more than chance or nature, propel much of globalization's dynamics. Nike organizes the global manufacture and marketing of shoes to achieve corporate objectives. Governments deregulate markets, float exchange rates and otherwise yield control to global markets to achieve (successfully or not) their economic objectives. The Hollywood entertainment industry -- the largest export industry in the United States -- attacks the defences of cultural protectionism wherever it encounters them, generally with the supporting fire of US government trade authorities. The NGOs that exploited the Internet so famously to forge coalitions with governments for the landmines treaty were globalizing just as avidly as Burger King or Mitsubishi. The NGOs that rallied against the OECD's aborted Multilateral Agreement on Investment, the MAI, exploited globalism even as they condemned it. (The local revolt in southern Mexico explains its grievances in the context of global economics. For their critique of modern globalism, click on http://www.ezln.org/, official website of the Zapatistas). 

Of course, the East India Company of the 17th century was also a powerful globalizer in pursuit of interests. But that was different. Technologies of production and transportation, and especially of communication, endow General Motors (or organizers of Internet rock concerts) with a global reach and effect unimaginable in earlier eras. 

This is not to say that the consequences of globalization are always intended by these diligent globalizers. (The global auto industry no more intends global warming than it intends traffic jams.) It only asserts the obvious but commanding fact: many of the most significant forces of globalization are driven by powerfully motivated interests -- both private and public -- which any practical attempt at governance will have to acknowledge. 

2. Equity

More than 80 countries have per-capita incomes lower now than a decade or more ago; the gap between the rich countries and the poor grows worse. The income ratio between the fifth of the world's people in the richest countries and the fifth in the poorest was 30 to 1 in 1960, and 60 to 1 in 1990; by 1997, it had grown to 74 to 1. Far from financing a convergence of fortunes between rich and poor people, globalization has coincided with a decade of increasing concentration of income, wealth, and control over resources. OECD countries, with 19 percent of the global population, account for 71 percent of world trade, 58 percent of foreign direct investment, and (another index of present and future wealth) 91 percent of all Internet users (Figure 1). Such growing disparities, with the social upheavals and discontents they represent, impose real demands on governance -- demands that more and more governments are unable to answer in the traditional methods that governments use. 

Inequalities have always been with us. What confounds the traditional methods of government is that the disparities now afflict far more people. Thanks to the proliferation of media, the disparities are more visible and more popularly understood; thanks to democracy, they are more effectively complained about.
 
 

Figure 1. Internet Users in 1998.

3. Governance

Similarly, various threats of environmental destruction have generated a responsive development of nongovernmental and intergovernmental organizations and regimes. A diminution of the state? No. It is the state to which NGOs and others turn for political decision, rule enforcement, and ameliorative action. State responses are frequently insufficient; we address some of these failures below. The point again is that in some respects the expectations for state action are getting higher, not lower, and the legitimacy of a state acting outside its own territory is not always waning but sometimes expanding. 
 

SHARED FAILURES, SHARED GOODS 

In all this confusion it gets harder to tell whether states should be expected to do more and more, or less and less. The enigmatic answer: both more and less. Here is why: 

One of the chief characteristics of these globalizing dynamics is that they overwhelm the attempts of states to manage globalization alone or control its effects. Examples abound in economics, in the prevention of conflict, in the protection and restoration of the environment. Even in the smallest details of domestic legislation and regulation, every state is now constrained by international norms, law, political obligation, and opinions in world markets. (To raise a government's revenues, for example, or to propose a government expenditure, is first to judge the tolerance of the global bond market and the mood swings of currency traders.) Meanwhile, the transcending, supranational issues of peace, development, and the preservation of the planet defy resolution by states applying old rules and old tools in old institutions. 

No state by itself can protect its people from conflict or climate change or the incendiary pressures of population growth, not even a superpower. The loss of autonomy is readily measured 

• By the intrusive intensity of global trade, communications, and other transactions; 

• By the widening extent and variety of these interconnections across every aspect of life; 

• By the sheer velocity of action and reaction, now calibrated at the speed of laser through fibre-optic cable; and 

• By the effects of all these connections, felt deep inside economies, societies, and even psyches. 

We all now inhabit a planet on which our worst problems are shared problems. They demand cooperative solutions. It's not that states are no longer important; it's that autarky is no longer possible, or affordable. The old ways of governance do not work, and the ruinous failures are everywhere evident -- in the backward course of de-development in many of the poorest countries; in wars fought by boy soldiers, chopping the hands off infant victims; in the contagion of currency crises; in the ominous collapse of corals from the Caribbean to the South Pacific; in the altered chemistry of the climate itself. 

But if the failures are so obvious, why do they recur? If globalization compels us all to change how we govern domestically and globally, what stands in the way? Two things, mostly: habits of mind and the inertia of interests. Together, they explain the dangerous and costly mismatch between existing institutional capacity and the demands placed on that capacity at all levels of government. 

Habits of mind? Most of us are inclined to think of the state as the natural and predominant unit of the "international system" (itself an expression that misleads us to think of order and equilibrium). We take for granted, as static facts and even when we know better, old assumptions of sovereignty, autonomy, and impermeable borders. This is risky imagery, rooted in a past far different from the present. And in its frequent failure to explain current realities, it encourages an easy defeatism. When well-armed, well-off states hang back from even the humblest of humanitarian intervention for lack of normative guidance, or shrink from even the cheapest and surest treaty of mutual environmental protection, when the veto states on the Security Council recoil from confronting even a true threat to global peace and security, more failures follow. Worse, these attitudes of defensiveness and retreat block long-term strategic thinking in favour of short-term temporizing and electoral manoeuvre. The result, with lamentable frequency, is a failure to undertake the institutional, financial, and political reforms that effective governance requires. 

Inertia of interests? Let us acknowledge again that considerable numbers of powerful people are flourishing in the current circumstance: those who sit comfortably in the prevailing institutions, and particularly those who are selling what the world is buying. To repeat: globalization is not entirely an inevitable force, either of nature or of history, even if many of its consequences are unintended. Its processes and values are not all automatic or self-perpetuating. The present conditions of life reflect in some degree the actions and reactions of firms, organizations, and governments (all interacting) whose leaders (albeit with different aims) see their interests thereby served. 

There is nothing new in the phenomenon of multiple uncoordinated decisions producing (for many) unexpected harm. That is what market crashes, over-fishing, and mutations of drug-resistant microbes are all about. What the present globalization has introduced, along with its wealth of opportunity, is a new extent, a new intrusiveness -- and a new destructiveness -- in the harm done. 

Dysfunctional habits of mind and a lively concern for self-interest are not peculiar to world politics; they work just as powerfully inside countries. The difference is that successful states institutionalize interest accommodation and compromise, including the compromise between long-term solutions and short-term politics. And this brings us to the practical benefits of democratic process. Democratic politics are understood by the strength of their procedures for holding the powerful accountable to the rest. This is the unifying virtue of democratic governments -- not that they invariably do the right thing, but that they are held responsible when they do the wrong thing, with procedures for their peaceful replacement. 

But in global politics, how is the World Bank genuinely accountable to the millions of people it helps or hurts? How effectively is the Security Council held accountable? Or Microsoft? Or Greenpeace? Another question (just as worrying) is whether there is a contradiction between the liberating, wealth-making free-market impulse of economic globalization and the values of democratic governance. 

Many people take the view that the ascendant values of the unregulated market militate against values of democratic governance. This is the fear, widespread and intensely felt, that inspires such angry sentiment against the World Trade Organization: the belief that the WTO institutionalizes dominant market values, "commodifies" life, and operates immune from citizen participation. The market fosters inequalities, these critics argue, while democracy rests on equal rights and shared resources; the market encourages selfishness, democracy calls for self-restraint and compromise. In this contest of values, they warn, it has been the market prevailing over democracy. 

Whether or not they are right, there is a strong ethical and functional case for bringing greater democracy into the institutions of global governance. The ethical argument is straightforward: people are entitled, as a right, to some meaningful say in the conduct of the institutions that govern their lives. When the national government was practically the only institution that mattered in governance, a voice in choosing that government might have sufficed. Not so when the International Monetary Fund or Mercosur starts making the rules. 

The functional argument for transparency and accountability is equally important. No institution of authority now can long endure without the informed consent of those who are governed by it. Globalization itself is arming people with the information they need to give consent and, in some cases, the means to refuse it -- think of worldwide consumer boycotts promoted on television and coordinated on the Internet. But lack of democratic processes is keeping international institutions weak, and for a very good reason. People living in democracies are understandably reluctant to transfer allegiance and power to organizations less accountable (and even more remote) than their own national governments. And finally, no institution is likely to make smart decisions if it doesn't bear a duty to explain them to someone. Remember the OECD's embarrassment of blunders in its too-secret negotiation of the failed MAI. 

As many have remarked, much that we already know about globalization is recognizably American. Here, for instance, is how Daniel F. Burton (a vice-president at Novell) described the Internet in the Spring 1997 issue of Foreign Policy: "The Internet is already home to a kind of Wild West ethos that is often associated with new frontiers. It is antiauthoritarian, vehement in its defence of individualism and free speech, radical in its concern for privacy, and, for the most part, extremely antigovernment." These traits are immediately seen by everyone else for what they are: as American as MTV, Levis, or Intel. This belies the notion that the new technologies are culture neutral; they aren't. As well, it should demonstrate to Americans -- even to American isolationists -- that they have more invested than anyone else in the successful governance of global affairs. 

The United States owes its pre-eminence in the world not primarily (if at all, some would say) to its unique military capabilities. The present wealth and political influence of the United States spring from the universal appeal of some of its founding ideals, from the economic success that size and a peaceful continent allowed, and from a zealous exploitation of international trade and investment. Americans have more money invested abroad than anyone else. They export more than anyone else. They define their own political and economic interests more expansively than anyone else. 

Some Americans will mutter that they also pay more than anyone else in military budgets, UN dues, and foreign aid of all varieties. Quite so, but that only underlines the truth. The people of the United States have more to gain than anyone else from better governance of the world's problems: secure markets; safe foreign investments; the timely prevention of foreign conflicts; an efficient distribution of risk among states when it comes to sending forces to war; a healthy natural environment; a broadly shared international prosperity, with a continuing demand for goods and services (and values) "Made in the USA." 

The United States has clear and present interests in developing an effective UN, in international policies addressing the coming hardships of population growth, in concerted action against catastrophic climate change. But they are interests not always reflected in US policy. Still less are these interests reflected in congressional votes. As a case in point, the US Senate's wrong-headed rejection of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty harks back to an isolationism that cannot not serve the United States any less disastrously in the future than it did in the past. Polls of US public opinion uniformly confirm that most Americans see the wisdom of sharing burdens through the UN and other institutions (the more so when they are told how little it costs them). Yet dithery policy and tireless scapegoating of the UN persist, destructively. They play into the vicious circle of underfunding and disappointing performance that weakens the UN's operations and its reputation. Every turn of that circle damages US interests. 

The case for better governance is therefore directed to the people of the United States as much as to anyone. To meet the great challenges facing you requires collaboration with others: other governments, other peoples, other institutions. Unilateralism will prove as futile as isolationism. You cannot protect your security, your prosperity, or the air you breathe or the water you drink without the cooperation of others. Nobody, not even the superpower, can go it alone. In the present age (to adapt an insight of Hannah Arendt), power does not ordinarily mean bringing force to bear; more practically, power is the capacity to act with others in pursuit of agreed objectives. 

That is most clearly true in the realm of global public goods -- productive oceans, good air, exchange-rate tranquility -- all the many goods that the people of any country enjoy in common but cannot purchase by themselves. Drawing here on the analysis of Inge Kaul and her colleagues at the United Nations Development Programme, it is evident that public goods once thought to be quintessentially domestic concerns (public health, prosperity-generating full employment, social peace) are better understood as global goods unattainable by any country alone. 

Nor can the production or distribution of global public goods be left to that powerful engine of globalization, the market. Indeed, public goods share two characteristics that the market abhors. First, they can be enjoyed by any number of people simultaneously, so there is no price-deciding equilibrium of demand and supply. Second, it is difficult, even impossible, to prevent someone from enjoying a public good once it exists -- even someone who doesn't pay for it. Investors cannot sequester their own returns. A healthy ozone shield or stable capital markets will benefit even those who contribute nothing to them. 

If the market cannot deliver the goods, institutions must. But today's institutions aren't. Kaul and others point to three categories of failure: 

• A jurisdictional gap -- Policy issues are global, but policy-making is still primarily national in focus and reach. 

• A participation gap -- We live now in a multi-actor world. But, despite the pace of change, international cooperation is still too pre-eminently intergovernmental. 

• An incentive gap -- Cooperation works only if it promises a clear and fair deal to all parties, but today's cooperative attempts are often stymied in quarrels over distributions of costs and benefits. 

These are failures of institutions and execution, process and product. They are failures that jeopardize us all, and generations to come. They cannot be overcome by any one country (at least, not for long) except in concert with others. Equally, the global public goods we all need cannot be secured without being shared. They demand, and they promise, positive-sum bargains in which everybody stands to win. 

In the following pages, we focus on three such global imperatives: preventing deadly conflict, meeting the needs of youth on a crowded planet, and managing climate change. Why these specific three? We chose them (from the numberless challenges the world now confronts) for completely pragmatic reasons. They are unambiguously important. They isolate, if only as examples, key global concerns in separate but interacting dimensions: peace and security, society and politics, economics and the environment. Each gives proof of calamitous failures in governance, and each points to ready remedies. Each invites discrete and practical actions by states and others in the global community. In sum, each of these three imperatives obliges states to govern collaboratively -- or they will fail to govern at all. 
 
 

Document(s) 7 of 11