Governance: time for a radical remake

UNESCO Courier, Sept, 2000 by Ivan Briscoe

Despite their vastly different agendas, NGOs stand united in their plea for stemming the power of transnational corporations through more plural global structures

As protest movements go, the mass gatherings that shouted down trade representatives and finance officials over the past year in Seattle, Washington and Bangkok bore few of the hallmarks of traditional opposition. There was no formal hierarchy to speak of, no single nationality, no clear shared cause. In the eyes of one pro-business group, the new genre of activism mimicked a political "swarm."

Yet though the diversity of the groups--from northern steel unions to disappearing tribes--seemed to many critics like rank incoherence, the movement's leaders stress that this very variety stands at the heart of their political project. In place of the uniform spread of commercial values, derided by leading U.S. campaigner LoriWallach as a "one size fits all philosophy," they plead for new distribution of power that is porous enough to allow room for other interests.

"There's been an invasion in inappropriate spaces by unaccountable, unalterable trade rules," declares Wallach, whose public profile has soared since helping to co-ordinate the Seattle protests as director of the Public Citizen's Global TradeWatch. "A version of the rules has been imposed that has much more to do with corporate input than the input from public interest... That's the democracy deficit in the global economy."

In the eyes of campaigners, the rapid, government approved spread of the free market has stripped political debate of any interest in the virtues that found a good society or legitimate global order. But the questions remain: how can the corporate bottom line be eclipsed with the least economic damage? What reforms are needed, and where?

According to Walden Bello, executive director of the Bangkok-based Focus on the Global South, globalization must be rescued from its current "monolithic, uniform and universalistic character" that has seen transnational corporations account for a majority of the world's exports and global inequality more than double since 1960.

A chief culprit, he argues, is "the free market biases of the framework pushed by the trinity of the World Trade Organization (WTO), the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF), which are fundamentally antithetical to the sort of diverse world that is conducive to equity. It is vital to cut them down to size--make them just ordinary actors among a plural set of actors in the global economy."

But the problem, as many activists agree, is that there are scanty for a for these demands to be heard and acted upon. National governments are seen as weak in the face of global finance, or in the case of developing nations, hamstrung by the obligations of IMF-sponsored debt reduction programmes and foreign aid. Business itself has no wish to see its wings clipped, while international bodies--from the United Nations to the WTO's infamous "green room" trade talks, allegedly dominated by rich nations--appear saddled with undemocratic structures and practices. The only way out, campaigners argue, is a radical remake of governance.

In the short-term, the priorities are clear. For Wallach, the punch-drunk WTO must be swiftly levelled: "it's shrink or sink for the WTO," she says. "Many of our current environmental, labour and human rights agreements are illegal trade barriers under WTO rules." Besides a shrunken trade organization, activists also call for the world's two main lending bodies to be stripped of the power to prescribe standard austerity packages. In Bello's opinion, the IMF and World Bank need to be balanced by an array of other bodies including regional trading blocs like ASEAN, strong labour and environmental agencies, and an official body to represent developing countries. This would give "more space to take independent paths to development," he argues.

Over the longer term, the proposals become hazier. Essentially defensive in nature, few NGOs involved in the, campaign against globalization have drawn up detailed blueprints for a new world power structure. The ideas that have been suggested tend to stress the need to reinforce global bodies so they can patrol the new breed of footloose corporations, while bringing the roots of power down to the local level, viewed as the most accountable level of democracy. Some groups, like the Penang-based Third World Network, advocates a whole arsenal of global governance: a more democratic United Nations to include civil society representatives, a code of ethics for worldwide businesses, and new global agencies for competition, investment and crime.

Of all levels of governance, the nation-state seems the least favoured by NGOs. Either as a result of the flawed development and environmental destruction forged by countries such as Brazil and India since World War II, or as a result of current political failures, few groups favour giving greater powers to national executives. Even Wallach is quick to stress that universal trade rules of a basic anti-tariff nature are essential.