The Powers of Governments

[Edward R Weick]

As you know, the United Nations intends to make history this week, having gathered together more than 155 world leaders in a "Millennium Summit" in order to get a commitment to an "ambitious plan that would fight poverty and disease and bolster the world body's ability to deploy peacekeepers in trouble spots" (Globe and Mail, Aug. 6, 2000). Last evening I was watching the CBC program "Counterspin", which dealt with the summit, and was particularly struck by a comment made by one of the participants. It was essentially that the UN has to move into the field of setting the objectives, laws (which everyone agreed would be "soft laws", whatever they are), and rules of international behaviour because the powers of governments have diminished so much that they can no longer do these things. Since I heard this, I’ve been thinking about why governments no longer appear to be able to set rules. Of course, historically, only a very few governments, or nations, were in the position of "rule makers". Most were in the position of "rule takers". Many were simply moved out of the way while dominant, colonizing governments moved in.  In that sense, things may not have changed very much. But the point was not about small and weak governments.  It was about governments of large and relatively wealthy nations.  In my opinion, it’s not so much that their powers have been diminished in an absolute sense. They are still very much in power domestically. It’s just that, within the past few decades, new technology has caused the environment in which all governments must operate to become "globalized" or "transnationalized" to an extent never possible before, and has greatly increased the overall quantum of power that is up for grabs.  In a global sense, there has been a relative shrinkage of government powers, which are necessarily contained by boundaries and entrenched institutions, and a relative growth of the powers of less constrained interests which can operate outside of defined borders or national laws. Moreover, governments, especially democratic governments, are slow and ponderous in their procedures, and not always able to react as quickly as they should, even if they do have some insights into what they should be doing. Governments have tried to cope with this new reality by creating institutions such as the WTO and negotiating agreements such as the MAI. This has necessarily meant permitting the intrusion of the transnational or global into domestic affairs, further diminishing the powers of specific governments (and, of course, raising the ire of concerned citizens and groups like the Council of Canadians). What all of this might mean ultimately is still anybody’s guess. My own is that it will necessarily result in moving key aspects of governance to higher levels of aggregation, as is already happening in the European Union. Perhaps with the exception of the almighty United States (which is itself an aggregation of some of the most significant powers of its member states), governments will increasingly come to recognize that the only way to effectively influence and constrain transnational trends is to relinquish some of their powers and combine them with the relinquished powers of others. Through the WTO, they have already gone a considerable distance toward this in the field of economics. As many critics of "globalization" point out, they now have to start doing it with regard to environmental, labour, and quality of life standards. A major question with regard to all such fields is whether they can do it with the necessary speed.  A second question, perhaps equally important, is whether they can do it rationally and not morally; that is, without imposing their standards and values on others.  I say this because several participants in last night's program appeared to weigh in from a moral perspective.  To Maude Barlow (who participated in the discussion to the point of almost preventing anyone else from speaking), "transnational corporations" were the quintessential evil, and anything that could be done to stop them was good.  Another woman said that billions of babies had died because they had not been breast fed.  Famine and a poor quality of life had nothing to do with it.  Undoubtedly, such "single issue" views will factor into the debate, though I don't think they are very useful. Ed Weick (613) 728-4630   Visit my website: http://members.eisa.com/~ec086636