Ed,
As usual, a well-considered contribution. I have a few thoughts�by way of
comments rather than criticism.
(EW)
<<<<
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, Ive 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.
>>>>
I think that in some respects, the balance of power has cahnged quite a lot
in the last decade or two. At the extreme pole of considering nuclear
weapons, then the big powers have become even more powerful and the smaller
powers have become less so. But we're also into the era of relatively
cheap, but very effective, small weapons such as Kalashnikoffs and Semtex
explosives by which relatively weak governments, or terrorist groups, can
cause considerable damage to great powers (within their own terrain or in
the heartland of the big countries themselves), particularly since the
latter dare not lose the lives of their soldiers in the way that they used
to up until, say 1945.
(EW)
<<<<
But the point was not about small and weak governments. It was about
governments of large and relatively wealthy nations. In my opinion, its
not so much that their powers have been diminished in an absolute sense.
They are still very much in power domestically. Its 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 anybodys 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.
>>>>
I think there's a two-way effect going on here. Certainly there are
'aggregations' of power for some functions (WTO and free trade, or
rationing fishing in the North Sea, for example), but in other functions
(nationalised industries in utilities and hitherto powerful sectors, which
are now becoming privatised), power is becoming dis-aggregated.
(EW)
<<<<
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.
>>>>
Yes, indeed, this is a major question. I think it is being increasingly
realised that large nations cannot impose their cultural and political
systems on other countries which they want to see enter the economic system
and become prosperous. This is a very pronounced problem in the case of
African countries and also other "advanced" nations like Russia. In the
case of the latter, I think that America and the European countries
genuinely want to encourage Russia to become a modern and prosperous nation
(because there'll be mutual benefits and a lessening of potential armed
conflict) yet, despite the financial help that has been given so far,
Russia has been unable to benefit from it. Corruption and inefficiency
still prevails. Despite Russia's very high educational standards (at least,
until recently), its cultural, political, legal and judicial systems will
have to change a great deal. This can only happen from within and by steady
progressive changes which may take two or three generations.
<<<<
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.
>>>>
Yes, I agree that these moral statements are not useful. Such proponents
are always looking for evil people and motivations. But there are good and
bad people in all walks of life and in all our institutions, including the
"transnational corporations". By and large, the important people in all
these bodies reflect the moral and cultural standards of the population at
large. When I was a young environmental campaigner in the 1960s, my views
and those of my friends were considered (by almost everybody else) as being
sentimental, eccentric and even extreme. Nowadays, the sorts of ideas of
those days are (almost) conventional wisdom and are to be found everywhere,
particularly among the young, but also, importantly, among many of the
middle-to-older aged power holders in government and transnational
corporations. But it has taken a generation for this to work its way through.
Keith
