Reclaiming globalization: our task is not to overthrow globalization but to capture it. That's the only way we can bring democracy to the structures of global governance - Essay

New Internationalist, July, 2003 by George Monbiot

All DEMOCRATIC movements encounter at some point in their development a fundamental conflict. They become torn between the need to remain inclusive enough not to alienate sections of their membership and the recognition that to be politically effective they must concentrate on a single set of policies and pursue them with ruthless determination.

The movement to which most of the readers of this magazine would consider themselves to belong, the movement which remains so beautifully diverse that we cannot even agree on its name, appears destined soon to bump up against this intractable reality. This movement (let us call it for the purpose of this article the 'global justice movement') in which Marxists, anarchists, statists, liberals, libertarians, Greens, conservatives, revolutionaries, reactionaries, animists, Buddhists, Hindus, Christians and Muslims have found a home, has buried its differences to fight its common enemies. Those differences will re-emerge when it seeks to coalesce around a common set of solutions.

We have so far avoided this conflict by permitting ourselves to believe that we can pursue simultaneously hundreds of global proposals without dispersing our power. Almost everyone, among them writers whom I greatly admire, appears to agree that we can confront the consolidated power of our opponents with a jumble of contradictory ideas. We can pursue, Susan George believes, 'thousands of alternatives' or, as the Zapatistas and now author Paul Kingsnorth would have it, 'one no, and many yeses (see Mixed Media, page 30). But, and I am genuinely sorry to say this, we deceive ourselves if we believe that we can change the world by this means.

Of course we should seek to change our domestic political circumstances and draw support from other communities in doing so. But, as the entire movement implicitly acknowledges, thinking globally and acting locally is not enough.

If we propose solutions which can be effected only at the local or the national level we remove ourselves from any meaningful role in solving precisely those problems which most concern us. Issues such as climate change, international debt, nuclear proliferation, war, peace and the balance of trade between nations can be addressed only globally or internationally. Without global measures and global institutions it is impossible to see how we might distribute wealth from rich nations to poor ones, tax the mobile rich and their even-more mobile money, control the shipment of toxic waste, sustain the ban on landmines, prevent the use of nuclear weapons, broker peace between nations or prevent powerful states from forcing weaker ones to trade on their terms. If we were to work only at the local level we would leave these, the most critical of issues, for other people to tackle.

Global governance will take place whether we participate in it or not. Indeed, it must take place if the issues which concern us are not to be resolved by the brute force of the powerful. That the international institutions have been designed or captured by a dictatorship of vested interests is not an argument against the existence of international institutions, but an argument for overthrowing them and replacing them with our own. It is an argument for a global political system which holds power to account.

By rebuilding global politics, we establish the political space in which our local alternatives can flourish. If, by contrast, we leave the governance of the necessary global institutions to others, then those institutions will pick off both our local and our national solutions one by one. There is little point in devising an alternative national economic policy -- as Brazil's president, Lula, once advocated -- if the International Monetary Fund and the financial speculators have not first been overthrown. There is little point in fighting to protect a coral reef from local pollution if nothing has been done to prevent climate change from destroying the conditions it requires for its survival.

Few members of this movement would dispute these basic political realities. The conflict begins when we seek to decide what democratic global governance would look like. To claim that, at the global level, we can pursue 'thousands of alternatives' and remain an effective political movement is to succumb both to wishful thinking and to the familiar political solipsism: placing the importance of a movement ahead of the importance of the issues it contests. We have many reasons to fear the search for common solutions and the furious disputes and recriminations which are bound to accompany it. But we have one overwhelming reason to fear our failure to pursue them: unless we do so we will never present a mortal threat to the existing world order. To destroy it we need first to agree upon the structures with which we wish to replace it.

I have sought to lay out some of the characteristics of what I believe would be a just and democratic world order. I have not tried to be original. Where effective solutions have already been devised I have adopted them -- though in most cases I have felt the need to revise and develop the argument. But where the existing proposals appear to me to be inadequate I have had to contrive new approaches. I have tried to devise what I hope is a coherent, self-reinforcing system, all of whose elements -- political and economic -- defend and enhance the others.