Yet the numbers still show that boundaries of mind and habit persist. John Helliwell, a professor at the University of British Columbia, has made a thorough study of trade across the Canadian-American border.[14] He found that a Canadian province in 1996 was twelve times more likely to trade merchandise and forty times more likely to trade services with another Canadian province than with an American state of similar size and at comparable distance. Interprovincial immigration was one hundred times more likely, after adjusting for income difference and population sizes. Helliwell’s research shows that the Free Trade Act, which came into effect in 1989, did have an impact: The ratio for traded goods had been higher, about twenty to one. But the level has held steady since. (Although the figures are less reliable, Helliwell also estimates that “trade densities” within countries in the European Union are around six times greater than those between those countries.)
There are also political frictions. In the past few years, Canada and the United States have scrapped about, among other things, lumber, potatoes, electricity, magazines, steel, salmon, and BC Bud, a particularly potent form of marijuana grown by British Columbian hippies. The Canadians are furious about the effects on them of American border laws that were aimed first at Mexico and now at Arab terrorism. For example, one idea is for American officials to check all its visitors out of the country as well as in, so that rather than being waved through checkpoints, Canadians would be stopped.
Even though Americans are throwing up most of the obstacles along the border, the most fundamental barrier is on the Canadian side. Canadians are p. 158 keen to integrate their economy with that of the United States, but they are equally keen not to become American. Canada’s health system and its cultural protectionism are popular even with its businessmen. “Yes, I want to see more economic integration,” says one. “But I also happen to think we have a better society, and I never want to lose it.”
The Continuation of History
Nation-states may thus prove surprisingly endurable, though it would be odd if under pressure from globalization borders did not get thinner. Not only is there room for much freer trade, but there are also problems that are difficult to solve on a national basis. For instance, it might eventually be logical for European voters to let the European Union decide, say, transport policy. And there is even the desperate hope that logic will triumph over emotion. In the past, borders have tended to be knocked down by force. Perhaps, as people discover the economic benefits of lowering borders peacefully, they will agree to changes in more democratic ways.
That would be nice. But diplomacy is not about niceties, and conducting foreign policy on that basis seems not only naive but dangerous. If the continued importance of borders presents one nasty, unpleasantly real challenge to the canard about the end of history, then an even nastier one is provided by armies. Despite globalization and transgovernmentalism, there is no getting away from the fact that the nation-state preserves a monopoly on the legitimate use of force.
To be sure, the European Union is talking about creating a common military and foreign policy, but it remains to be seen if that will work. And the EU is a long way ahead of any other regional grouping. There are as yet few signs that America’s Joint Chiefs of Staff are about to hand control of their troops over to the Secretariat of NAFTA. Every now and again there has been some blithe talk about giving the United Nations a standing army (actually, not a bad idea). It still has to rely on nation-states.
Of course, national armies will come together in alliances and coalitions, just as they always have. NATO is fifty years old. The two “global” wars of the 1990s—against Iraq and Serbia—were fought by coalitions of the sort that the Duke of Wellington might well have recognized. The administrative hell described by the American general of coordinating forces in Kosovo sounds no different than the British negotiations dealing with the Prussians before Waterloo. And the Iraq and Kosovo coalitions would have come to nothing if one nation-state, the United States, had not decided to act.
Far from creating a need for a new sort of foreign policy, globalization has p. 159 not changed the fundamental rules and aims of diplomacy. Globalization garners one mention in the index of Henry Kissinger’s mammoth Diplomacy—and rightly so. Nation-states remain the most important actors on the world stage, and the issues that concern them most will be the same as they have always been: protecting their interests and preserving a balance of power.
This is most definitely not a plea for isolationism. If only out of its long-term self-interest, the United States needs to stay involved abroad, championing the mainly global ideas that it believes in, preserving the stability that its companies require, establishing relationships with potential enemies, and cementing alliances with friends. But that is not substantially different from the brief that Kissinger himself followed, or that Lord Palmerston and Fürst von Metternich employed in the nineteenth century.
If globalization does not change the basic rules of the game, it does change the tempo at which it is played. The sheer complexity of some foreign-policy questions probably forces the United States to rely on ad hoc coalitions rather than formal alliances. In both business and politics, self-sufficiency is giving way to mutual interdependence, command-and-control management to touchy-feely alliance building. Just as managers are expected to team up not only with suppliers but also with competitors, it makes sense for America to wait to attack even a tinpot dictator like Saddam Hussein until only after an interminable amount of resolution passing.
There are also likely to be more occasions when humanitarian issues come to the fore, not least because mass communications make atrocities in distant parts of the world so difficult to ignore. But even here there are limits. The war against Serbia was touted as the first “third-way war,” a new sort of conflict in which the Western powers were willing to forget the principle of sovereignty in the name of humanity. But there has long been a moral dimension to most wars, particularly ones involving the United States. And the allies did not take their alleged enthusiasm for this third way as far as invading Serbia and deposing its leader.
Under George W. Bush, American foreign policy has managed to leap forward and backward simultaneously. The war against terrorism has given diplomacy a new purpose. Americans once again care about the abroad. The president has proved much fiercer than Bill Clinton, who tended to meander from crisis to crisis while mouthing fashionable nostrums about protecting democracy. Advancing global humanitarian causes is certainly a legitimate concern of foreign policy, but the accent should be on prevention rather than cure. If a cause is just, then it is worth expending blood in its pursuit. Unfortunately, this new involvement has far too often been on a unilateral p. 160 basis. Bush made scant use of his allies in Afghanistan, despite having the whole world on his side. On a series of diplomatic questions, America has snubbed either its allies or multilateral organizations (or both). Even if many of America’s individual stances have been defensible, the overall effect has not been.
Meanwhile, the repeated emphasis on the war against terrorism, “the axis of evil,” and so on may mean that America will neglect the real strategic issues that revolve around questions to do with nation-states. Yes, Osama bin Laden is important; but is he as important as, say, preventing China from destabilizing Asia? Ever since the Thirty Years War, crusaders who have wrapped their foreign policy in one global moral flag or another have tended to cause many more deaths than Machiavellian balance-of-power types.
As Brian Beedham has argued, foreign policy comes down partly to a question of how people define the first-person plural. For the moment, when people think about we, they think about nation-states.[15] Borders and nation-states are usually about more than just administrative logic. Their force is evident from the fact that even when they did not have a country, most Estonians knew the name of their national bird and the tune of their national anthem; or the fact that a routine meeting with Estonia’s transport minister to discuss infrastructure begins wit
h his declaration, “We are not Russian. . . . We have never been so.”
Fundamentally, nationalism is not particularly rational, and its costs and benefits are not often counted up. In the same issue of Foreign Affairs in which Ann-Marie Slaughter put forward her theory of transgovernmentalism, Peter Drucker pointed to the long list of people—Immanuel Kant, the liberals of Austro-Hungary, and Mikhail Gorbachev—who have argued that economic interdependence would prove stronger than nationalist passions. In many cases, right was on their side. “But whenever in the last 200 years political passions and nation-state politics have collided with economic rationality, political passions and the nation state have won.”[16]
Certainly this conclusion is borne out by the life of Osama bin Laden. It is also borne out in Narva. On the last day of 1998, Ants Limets, the somewhat harassed but kindly city manager of the Estonian town, decided that enough was enough and cut off the water supply to Narva’s Russian twin, which had not paid its bill for months. Ivangorod retaliated by dumping its sewage—four hundred thousand gallons a day—into the river through a pipe just next door to Georgy Kusnitsov’s border post. The old ladies still cross the bridge to do their shopping, but the stench is reportedly unspeakable.
9 – The Failure of Global Government
p. 161 THE JOB OF secretary-general at the United Nations is rather like that of a medieval pope. In one sense, you are the leader of Christendom. Yet at the same time, your power is limited: You have no battalions of your own (all those peacekeeping troops are only on loan); your organization is a hodgepodge of feuding bishoprics, most of which owe their first loyalty to their temporal rulers; and you are normally broke. It is a frustrating business in which much depends on character and momentum and in which the smallest promise of glory means that you are apt to get carried away.
Early in the 1990s, Boutros Boutros-Ghali, then the UN pontiff, proclaimed that “the victor of the end of the cold war would be the democratization of international relations, the new role of the United Nations.” Those words seem foolhardy now. But at the time, the idea of world government was a surprisingly fashionable one: George Bush senior had proclaimed a “new world order” and led his crusade against Iraq under the banner of the UN. Around the globe, blue-helmeted soldiers were keeping the peace. The UN was establishing itself as the natural forum for policy debates of every variety, hosting an earth summit in Rio de Janeiro in 1992, followed by ones on human rights, social development, and women. The General Assembly of the UN, previously just another sparring place for the two superpowers, seemed to be a little closer to the “Parliament of man” envisaged by Tennyson in “Locksley Hall.”
Meanwhile, the other organs of world government seemed to be flourishing. The high priests of the IMF and the World Bank preached “the Washington consensus”—the idea that more open markets, freer trade, and larger p. 162 international flows of capital were necessarily good. Their young apprentices swaggered around the treasuries of eastern Europe, “teaching” capitalism to the natives. The World Trade Organization was established as a permanent replacement to the “temporary” GATT. There also seemed to be an outbreak of what might be called “bottom-up globalism”: People deserted petty national political parties to join global nongovernmental organizations such as Greenpeace.
Today, talk about the “democratization of international relations,” let alone a Parliament of man, seems like a pipe dream. Rather than lead a new world order, Boutros-Ghali lost his job in 1996, ousted by the United States. In Bosnia, Somalia, Angola, and the Congo, the UN retreated ignominiously while bullies such as Jonas Savimbi and Slobodan Milosevic waved bloodstained fists at it. In the hills of Kosovo, babies froze to death. In Africa, UN people talk about the “well-fed dead”—refugees that it can feed but not protect. Politicians around the world have made the IMF and the World Bank the whipping boys for the Asian contagion. Under George W. Bush, the United States has rejected the test-ban treaty, the World Court, and the Kyoto Protocol. Its use of the UN against Saddam Hussein seemed tactical rather than strategic.
But should we be so quick to deride global institutions just because they are global institutions? Although Boutros-Ghali was proved humiliatingly wrong in practice, his diagnosis was correct: The end of the cold war and the integration of the former communist countries into the world economy have only bolstered the case for globalism as a political creed and economic practice. The very challenges that have humbled the multilaterals—the Asian contagion, Rwanda, Bosnia, even Osama bin Laden—were also plainly outside the capabilities of national governments.
In a few cases this economic and political interdependence has found an institutional framework through which countries have been willing to cede sovereignty for the common good. But for the most part, the international institutions have been found wanting. The main reason why should be obvious from chapter 8: The nation-state remains alive and kicking. But even with that proviso, organizations such as the IMF and the UN have degenerated into a collection of unaccountable committees that oscillate between casual arrogance and well-meaning inefficiency. The leaders of the organizations claim that they are restrained from introducing dramatic reforms by the tightfistedness of their member governments; the member governments reply that they would be more forthcoming if they saw some sign of reform. As a result of this impasse, responsibility disappears into the political ether, p. 163 and change retreats to the margins. And nobody asks the fundamental questions: What are these institutions for? And can they be made better?
The Road So Far
The first thing to do is to look back and then to lower our expectations. “The sad truth seems to be that the only time that you have a chance of constructing global organizations that might work in peace is during a war.” Such a conclusion would be mildly depressing from any observer. But from Sir Brian Urquhart, a former undersecretary-general of the UN who has devoted much of his life to multilateralism, it seems especially discouraging. For the past 150 years, there has been a constant, growing tension between the demand for some sort of multinational responsibility and the tug of national sovereignty. The development of global institutions has been a strange mixture of ad hoc pragmatism and utopianism. Only once, during the 1940s, has there been a brief moment of pragmatic utopianism, and it took a depression and a world war to achieve that oxymoronic state.
The idea of multiple states forming pacts that apply equally to each of them goes back to the second half of the nineteenth century. In 1856, forty-nine countries signed the Declaration of Paris on maritime law, concerning how warring parties should treat neutral shipping. Nine years later, the International Telegraph Union (now the International Telecommunications Union) was set up to regulate the international flow of telegraphs, and it was soon followed by other standard-setting bodies to govern things such as postage and weights and measures. These institutions were kept deliberately small; the aim was to produce precise rules that national governments could enforce. Gradually, however, things became more utopian. In 1899 and 1907, there were Hague Peace Conferences, the second one attended by forty-four nations, that sought to prevent war. The machine guns of the Somme and Ypres made a mockery of that idea, though the same meetings did produce the Hague Convention rules concerning how wars could be fought.
Even before the First World War, the three most important lessons of multilateralism had already been learned: Commonly agreed-upon standards tend to be more useful than institutions; all the great powers must be part of global endeavors; and specific small goals are much better than vague lofty ones. Unfortunately, with the foundation of the League of Nations in 1920, all three rules were ignored. For all its noble ideals and promises to curb state aggression, the league had no mechanism to prevent p. 164 or counter state aggression, a failure on which Adolf Hitler, among others, capitalized.[1] And without America as a member, the league became increasingly irrelevant, finally disappearing during the Second World War.
That second catastrophe sparked the foundati
on of the United Nations and the Bretton Woods institutions, with most of the important lessons of the previous half century finally learned. The UN, for instance, was deliberately set up in the world’s most powerful nation, the United States—and if its goals were unabashedly lofty, its procedures were boringly detailed. The Security Council was not only designed to be inclusive (the great powers of the time were all permanent members) but also given a fairly streamlined set of rules of engagement and decision making that it still follows today. On the economic side were formed the IMF to oversee the system of fixed exchange rates, the GATT to oversee trade, and the World Bank to promote development. It was, in short, a job well done—a fact echoed by the way that reformers often call for a new Bretton Woods or for the UN to return to the ideals of its charter.
Yet even as you admire the construction of this bright, shining city, you are forced to accept Urquhart’s gloomy conclusion. The city could rise only from the rubble of war. The sheer horror of what had happened—not only the war but the economic depression that had preceded it—concentrated the minds of politicians “to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war which twice in our lifetime brought untold sorrow to mankind”[2] and also presented a tabula rasa for its architects, such as John Maynard Keynes and Harry Dexter White. And because the Allies—or the United Nations as they became officially known—won the war, they also won the right to impose their order on the world.
Subsequent events have only underscored the uniqueness of that moment. The world has changed, and the multilaterals, shorn of that special set of founding circumstances, have been unable to change enough. The UN soon found itself having to deal with new problems—such as drugs and nuclear proliferation—that it had never foreseen. In a few cases, notably decolonization, it rose courageously to the task. But in general, its response to the changing world has been both lazy and self-indulgent: It has spread and sprawled, giving every problem a new committee and every committee member an inflation-proof pension.
A Future Perfect: The Challenge and Promise of Globalization Page 24