The Financial Times article which Mike Gurstein's posted on how lobbies
connected by the Internet brought the MAI down raises a number of issues.
One concerns the lobbies themselves. The question "who are these guys?" is
certainly appropriate. If the article is to be believed, economic
globalization seems to have brought with it political fragmentation and the
passage of considerable power from legitimate governments (or illegitimate
ones, but governments nevertheless) to a large number of groups which cater
to limited constituencies but pretend to speak for the common good. The
article suggests that the Internet has given such essentially
unrepresentative groups a lever which now enables them to challenge powerful
institutions such as the OECD.
If this really has happened, it raises the question of where ordinary
citizens have been left. The powers of their governments have been eroded,
and most do not belong to the lobbies that are now "on the loop". It also
raises the question of who speaks for the nation. In the case of Canada, is
it Maude Barlow or is it still Jean Chretien (who, one must admit, often
behaves more like traveling salesman than a prime minister)?
But has what the article suggests really happened? Did lobbies using the
Internet kill the MAI? Many of the things I have read suggest that, despite
all of their rants, the lobbies had little influence. The MAI collapsed of
its own weight. It died because legitimate governments piled so many
protectionist exceptions onto what was basically a sound idea that further
progress was impossible. The MAI will rise again because there is a genuine
need for it. It will also probably die again for the same reasons that it
did this time - because everyone wants to load it with every little piece of
special interest baggage they can lay their hands on.
However, there is a possibility that at some not too distant time
initiatives such as the MAI may depend less on what legitimate governments
favour than on the manipulations of behind the scenes operators. That time
may already be with us. Many point to multinational corporations as the
manipulators, but we may have at least as much to fear from a vast array of
lobbies connected and coordinated via the Internet.
Ed Weick
