by Parag Khanna
To confront the rogue nuclear trade and black market, the Proliferation Security Initiative (PSI) was launched in 2003 as a coalition of just eleven countries sharing intelligence on suspected transfers of nuclear material. Its signal success was the 2003 diversion of a ship bound for Libya carrying gas centrifuge parts, which led to the unraveling of the Pakistan-based A. Q. Khan nuclear network, which sold weapons technology to Iran, North Korea, and Libya. Now more than ninety countries participate in PSI—yet it has no secretariat. Its policing of nuclear trafficking is diffuse, difficult, and dangerous—and has no guarantee of success. Nor can PSI address Iranian motivations. An attack on any Iranian nuclear plants would paradoxically convince its people that they need nuclear weapons to defend themselves.
Preventing nuclear catastrophe—the most sensitive and high-stakes arena of diplomacy—very much requires a pairing of official and private approaches. The U.S. Nunn-Lugar program of the 1990s helped to locate and stockpile Russian fissile material, funded the conversion of defense industries into alternative businesses, and even retrained Soviet nuclear scientists. Today such technical assistance is needed in numerous other countries to tighten control over the globalized networks through which nuclear and other weapons materials and know-how spread. Companies and NGOs play crucial roles in making this happen. The Nuclear Threat Initiative (NTI), now overseen by Sam Nunn, the former U.S. senator from Georgia who undertook cooperative threat reduction in the early 1990s, is funded by Ted Turner and other concerned global philanthropists. It funds programs to boost nuclear security across eastern Europe and the Caucasus. The newly created World Institute for Nuclear Security, funded by NTI and the U.S. and Norwegian governments, is attempting to change the culture of the nuclear industry to focus on theft prevention. It encourages hundreds of companies to deepen partnerships with former Soviet chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons scientists to work on peaceful technologies.
Not sanctions and invasions, but more such mega-diplomacy can tip the scales in today’s counter-proliferation race. The only way to stop Iran and North Korea from deepening their nuclear programs will be to convince their regimes that they don’t need them—a strategy that has already proven successful with Brazil, Ukraine, Kazakhstan, and Libya. Iran’s domestic upheaval of 2009 demonstrated how much its overwhelmingly young population seeks more open relations with the West. Iran should be flooded with contacts through commerce, media, and diplomatic channels that would force greater transparency on all its activities. Similarly, for North Korea, the only tenable solution is security guarantees from the United States (not to invade) and China (to protect North Korea), and economic incentives, which together might persuade the regime to allow inspectors to monitor weapons. In each case, it’s not about the end state, which is unknown, but the next step, which could hardly take us farther back than where we have been. The path to making Iran and North Korea feel less secure is containment and deterrence, while the path to real regional security is engagement, investment, and exchange. The former is done with armies; the latter is done with companies. Both are essential in their own way, but neither will ultimately succeed without the other.
Chapter Seven
Getting Rights Right
Accountability is the DNA of civilized societies.
—SIMON ZADEK, founder, AccountAbility
The United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted in 1948, was one of the earliest documents to embody the existence of an international community of values. The fact that it has almost no relevance in today’s world, therefore, could be a good thing only if all of its tenets had been achieved. But that’s not the world we live in. On paper, everyone in the world today has rights: citizens, taxpayers, corporations, immigrants, consumers, children, the elderly, disabled people, and refugees. Yet the contradiction between the notion of universal human rights and the reality of human wrongs has never been greater. Over the past three years, the number of countries that the NGO Freedom House has assessed to be, at best, “partly free” has risen to more than one hundred, while only ninety countries are fully “free.” Another blunt reality is that in our neo-medieval world, neither America nor the United Nations has the moral authority to lead a new crusade for global rights.
The success of societies today is measured materially first, then justified ideologically. It seems most people in the world no longer care whether their system of government is a democracy or goes by some other label so long as it gets things done. The strong performance of many non-democracies, such as China, Vietnam, and the Persian Gulf states, has delivered a powerful wake-up call that good governance can come in many forms. Similarly, there is also no single rule book on how to promote justice across borders: The most effective strategies are now led by technology companies and street-smart NGOs, both of which penetrate societies more deeply than government programs. But they all have their work cut out for them because, paradoxically, the wealthier many places become, the more opportunities for corruption there will be. The fight for accountability requires mega-diplomacy from top to bottom.
Democracy Über Alles?
There is no more tangible symbol of individual freedom today than having your own mobile phone. In just a few years most of the world’s population will have one, each person feeling a unique sense of empowerment. That’s what makes Mo Ibrahim, Africa’s first self-made billionaire, so important. His business is telecommunications. By spreading mobile phones around Africa faster than anyone else, Ibrahim didn’t intend to make a political statement. But recently, he launched an annual $5 million prize for any African leader who performs well on his “Ibrahim Index,” whose benchmarks include providing safety, transparent government, and sustainable employment to its people. Such is the state of African governance that in 2009 he gave no prize at all. Still, most interesting about Ibrahim’s metrics is what is left off: democracy.
Winston Churchill famously claimed that democracy is the worst form of government except for all the alternatives. Was he wrong? Democracy is one of the most liberating burdens people can ask for. It can mean freedom from oppression but also requires more trust and self-reliance than some societies can muster. Progress is often slow and tenuous, and rarely linear. Instead, democracy moves in forward and backward leaps and plateaus—Lebanon, Indonesia, and Venezuela are just a few examples of haphazard democracies. Parliamentary fistfights are an entertaining feature of democratic politics from Turkey to Taiwan to South Korea.
The democratic process can waste years emphasizing style over substance. Thailand has had six prime ministers and a coup in just three years. Even five years after pro-democracy revolutions in Ukraine and Georgia, genuine democracy takes a backseat to perpetual elite conflict. In Pakistan, the parliament is largely a mask for feudal interests. In Lebanon and India, democratic elections have devolved into auctions: Delivering security and welfare aren’t just campaign promises, they are the campaign. And in Iraq, democracy is still a sectarian weapon of the majority against minorities. No system, democracy or autocracy, has a monopoly on quality control.
Is it worth promoting democracy in a world where so many democracies give the word a bad name, and where every society wants to run itself its own way? Between Islamist movements and authoritarian capitalists, democratization has slowed drastically since the mid-1990s, when a dozen ex-Soviet republics and satellites began their transitions toward membership in the European democratic club. Today’s world features competing political and economic models, and the attractiveness of one over another is judged by the ability to provide material benefits for the people—not on how democratic it is.
When economies falter, democracy suffers, but when economies bloom, authoritarianism often does as well. Democracy requires capitalism to succeed, but capitalism doesn’t require democracy. Emerging powerhouses such as Brazil under Lula help make the case that democracy—not just strongmen like Pinochet—can be fertile terrain for robust economic growth. But Russia and China are only the most
prominent examples of a new state-capitalist alternative of open authoritarianism mixing economic and social liberalism with political centralization. They have deliberation but not democracy. If democracy is an end state and non-democracies would learn the virtues of democracy when they falter, then why do Russia’s twenty-one-year-olds still strongly support the Putin-Medvedev team over the democratic “chaos” of the 1990s? Even if they turn revolutionary, it won’t be because of outside inspiration but internal failure.
Iran’s 2009 election demonstrates that more often than not, it is internal competition, not external meddling, that gets people excited about democracy. With four contenders for president, provocative TV debates, and the subsequent mass protests that brought hundreds of thousands into the streets to demand their votes be honestly counted, the revolution unfolding in Iran has been a homegrown enterprise. Most Iranians want to see direct democracy, even for the position of supreme leader—but they want it on their terms.
Democracy promotion is no longer a serious priority of American foreign policy. Neither China nor Russia, and not even strategic allies such as Saudi Arabia and Egypt, face real pressure from America to democratize, and the more the United States competes with China for influence in Africa and Eurasia, the less leverage it will have over others’ internal politics. If democracy promotion were truly the centerpiece of foreign policy, then countries would receive support commensurate with measurable progress toward free elections, free media, impartial courts, women’s rights, and market reforms. But mostly it is regional allies with questionable records, such as Yemen, Kenya, and Georgia, that are rewarded for such moves. Not surprisingly, then, Saudi activist Wajeha al-Huwaider now calls on American car companies as much as the American government to lobby for women’s rights in her country—to sell women cars and liberate them in the process.
What is worth having is universal first and American second. If supporting democracy is to mean anything, then it has to transcend strategic interests and unintended consequences. Even if electoral winners are Shiite nationalists, Hamas, the Muslim Brotherhood, or Hezbollah, establishing a democratic ecosystem should be more important than who the winner is. The West must increasingly respect the political autonomy of nations to pursue progress however they choose.
Rather than judge a country’s level of democracy, it is much more rewarding to observe its experiments with accountability. China, Singapore, and Arab monarchies aren’t democratic in the Western sense, but they strive to be more responsive to their people through village councils and consultative forums that gauge the needs of their citizens in real time. Vietnam is evolving toward greater transparency, less corruption, and more economic freedoms—it is building the rule of law, not democracy. Malaysia’s prime minister Abdullah Ahmad Badawi resigned in 2009 due to his unpopularity and perceived ineffectiveness, further showing how accountability doesn’t require total democracy. In Dubai, Sheikh Mohammed used Facebook to ask citizens whether they wanted the start of the school year to be shifted to after Ramadan. (They did.) In Argentina, democracy hasn’t changed the fact that tax evasion is a national pastime that weakens the state, but a reality show depicting tax collectors busting and shaming rich elites has brought greater transparency to politics. With decent leadership, the suggestion box can be as important as the ballot box.
For this reason, the notion of “good governance” is rapidly supplanting democracy as a global mantra. Leaders worldwide face growing pressure to provide economic freedoms, efficient services, and political transparency—but not necessarily democracy. In fact, good governance implies protecting and delivering on rights more than democracy alone does. China’s Communist Party has a massively superior capacity to care for its citizens than India’s Congress Party, but technology has enabled more than two million Indians to file electronic claims for rights to public information. In the Obama administration, the same bureaus and offices that used to issue rhetorical démarches about democracy are now focused on supporting enterprise funds that create jobs, establish public-private micro-credit programs through local banks, and use social networking technology to train journalists and encourage youth activism. This is the language of good governance and a better pathway to build democracy.
Human-Rights.com
Mo Ibrahim isn’t the only cellular billionaire facing down dictators. Swashbuckling Irishman Denis O’Brien made his fortune selling cell phones to more than seven million people in the most corrupt countries, including Haiti and Papua New Guinea. His company, Digicel, sometimes cuts corners and plays dirty, building cell towers before receiving business licenses and heavily subsidizing phones to lure customers from state-run companies, but he embodies the mix of shrewd businessman and humanitarian that has inspired imitators as well as television shows such as The Philanthropist.1 O’Brien didn’t set out to meddle in third world politics, but he realized that making access to information a reality rather than a promise requires a pugnacious attitude. Our level of connectivity, not how much money we have or where we live, is becoming the most salient factor in determining the quality of citizenship. Cell phones improve information flow and transparency and are a vital business tool—but many governments can’t be counted on to distribute them for precisely those reasons. This new human rights diplomacy could be the arena where dot-com really takes on dot-gov.
Mobile phones and the Internet are closing the gap between activism and uprising. In Xiamen, China, citizen groups armed only with cell phones and text messaging forced the local government and businesses to suspend construction of a harmful petrochemical plant. YouTube videos of Russian cops lamenting the obscene levels of internal corruption have embarrassed the Kremlin into cleaning up the police force. In Indonesia, tribal representatives were given GPS devices to stake out and mark their territory so that they could value it better when confronting mining giant Freeport-McMoRan. Twitter was essential to the coordination of Iran’s anti-government protests in 2009, and was so vital for diplomats eyeing the situation that the U.S. State Department urged the firm to remain open despite its scheduled maintenance shutdown. In Nigeria and Egypt, students and human rights activists have been freed from incarceration because they managed to Twitter “arrested” before being dragged out the door by police, prompting colleagues and lawyers to spring into action to win their immediate release, denying governments their usual several-day period to have their way with agitators before concern is raised. A Facebook group in Colombia called “One Million Voices Against FARC” was able to rally more than twelve million people worldwide to march against the narco-terrorist group, leading to mass desertions from its ranks within days. If you have a mobile phone and can tweet, you can reach out and touch someone.
The usual suspect regimes are fighting back. During Iran’s 2009 uprising, the clerical oligarchy widely blocked Internet access and began checking the Facebook accounts of Iranian diaspora members on arrival at the airport to make sure they weren’t supporting the opposition. But technology finds a way. Across the Middle East, business and satellite television are perhaps greater threats to the stability of despots than radical Islamists.
Corporations and their software are now central to human rights diplomacy. Google, Yahoo!, and Microsoft were caught off guard when the Chinese government strong-armed them into providing user data to prosecute pro-democracy bloggers. Google regrouped and openly defied the Chinese government in 2010, declaring it would operate without stricture or pull out entirely. But Yahoo!’s Jerry Yang is still right that even partially censored access to China can do more for human rights than years of Western political pressure. When the United States sanctioned Syria, a move that included prohibiting its citizens from downloading Microsoft products, Syria’s government responded by deleting its nationals’ Facebook accounts—ordinary Syrians suffered a double whammy. By contrast, clever engagement can change policy even in China, the world’s fastest-growing online market. For example, when China demanded that foreign PCs come preinstalled with software tha
t would allow censors to block selected sites, the public outcry shamed the government to scale back its request, instead asking only to make the software optional. What if China tried to force ICANN to deregister certain domain names it had trouble blocking, and ICANN instead threatened to delist official Chinese servers? Eventually, the Chinese authorities may respect and even follow Google’s unofficial motto: “Don’t Be Evil.”
Human-Rights.org
If global justice has a voice, its name is, appropriately, Avaaz, the word in many Asian languages for “voice.” Avaaz is one of the largest online communities with more than three million members. Spearheaded by a lean team of social networkers, it has no use for national chapters, dividing its operations not by geography but by language—currently thirteen of them (to the United Nations’ six). Through viral petitions, Avaaz recruits thousands of signatories a day to lobby Western democracies to act on climate change and Darfur, and oppose the pope’s stance on condoms. Through e-focus groups of thousands of people, it tests its campaigns in order to “keep pace with the pulse of the global demos,” in the word of Avaaz founder Ricken Patel.
Avaaz gives a voice to the voiceless. If we actually want to empower human rights—and human will—Avaaz’s linking of local grievances to global resources is the only way to go. The company’s techo-activism not only provides real-time information to millions of people without waiting for media reporting or government statements, but it also gets the media and governments to focus on issues sooner than they otherwise might (if ever). It has unfurled giant banners above the disappearing Great Barrier Reef to cajole Australia’s government into accepting binding reductions in greenhouse gas emissions and has taken out advertisements in Chinese media to signal the need for a shift in the party’s hands-off policy toward the Darfur genocide. It’s never quite clear what Western governments’ Myanmar policy is—or if they even have one—but Avaaz pressured the Singaporean foreign ministry to close the Myanmar junta’s bank accounts during its crackdown on monks in 2007, and within ten days of the devastating Cyclone Nargis in 2008, Avaaz delivered $2 million (from twenty-five thousand of its members) directly to the monks’ relief effort.