11-11-1999

INTERNATIONAL AFFAIRS: Sovereignty's Struggle

In 1980, a third-party candidate with a shock of silver hair hoped to ride
into the White House on a wave of disaffection with the status quo.
Then-Rep. John B. Anderson, R-Ill., included in his quixotic campaign a
call for a standby international military force under the direct control
of the United Nations. Anderson envisioned the force handling emergencies
like the American hostage crisis then unfolding in Iran.


Two decades later, in a far more prosperous era, another erstwhile
Republican believes a deep current of unhappiness in the land will win him
a third-party nomination and the presidency. But Pat Buchanan, a Reform
Party candidate, doesn't sound much like Anderson. Petulant Pat is
pledging, instead, that "not one United States soldier will be forced
to swear allegiance to an international organization" and that the
United States will "withdraw from the United Nations and global
organizations that do not serve U.S. interests."


Today, Anderson--still an independent spirit--is preparing to return to
Washington as the chief executive of the World Federalist Association--an
outfit formed 52 years ago to promote democratic global government.
"I was one who took it seriously when President George Bush declared
in 1991, with the collapse of the Berlin Wall, the dawn of a new era and
of a new international order," says Anderson by phone from Florida,
where he teaches law. Buchanan's candidacy, he says, "saddens me very
much." In fact, Anderson is thinking of challenging Buchanan for the
Reform Party nomination.


Americans, descended from independent-minded colonists who cut their ties
to the British crown, have never been of one mind about how much autonomy
they are prepared to cede--even in the name of global peace and
prosperity. And populist sentiment for internationalism has shifted with
the times. But rarely in the past two or three decades has there been so
much ferment--at home or abroad--as there is today about multiplying
threats to the internal sovereignty of nation-states: that is, the right
of nations to establish and pursue their chosen domestic policies.


From NATO bombs bursting over Belgrade, Yugoslavia, to the report of
Australian rifles firing in East Timor, multilateral forces intervened
twice this year in the internal affairs of other countries on the grounds
of human rights; the impact, and wisdom, of those actions are still
debated. So, too, is U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan's declaration in
late September "that massive and systematic violations of human
rights--wherever they may take place--should not be allowed to
stand." Annan, speaking at the opening of the annual General Assembly
meeting, said that one of the core challenges for the United Nations in
the new century is to get member nations united behind this principle of
humanitarian intervention. "Nothing in the charter precludes a
recognition that there are rights beyond borders," he said, provoking
a spirited debate in the chamber.


And on Nov. 30, even as the world still celebrates the 10th anniversary of
the symbolic end of the Cold War--the breaching of the Berlin Wall--the
United States will witness perhaps the starkest public clash yet on this
issue, when the World Trade Organization convenes for the first time on
U.S. soil, in Seattle. While trade ministers from around the world try to
agree on an agenda for a new round of trade liberalization, thousands of
trade unionists, environmentalists, consumer activists, human rights
advocates, anarchists, and odd and sundry hangers-on will take to the
streets to protest the conclave.


They will voice many and varied grievances, including those against the
fresh deal to bring totalitarian China into the WTO. But mostly they will
decry the elevation of commerce and capital above all other values and the
power of a secretive, unelected supranational body to overrule the popular
will of democratic nations. Although Buchanan and his followers may not be
in Seattle physically manning the barricades, they will be there in
spirit. "The final payment for any global free-trade zone is an end
to American sovereignty and the loss of American independence,"
Buchanan told the National Press Club in June.


Globalization Unmasked


The Battle of Seattle represents not merely a change in the tenor of the
sovereignty debate, but the opening of a new front. The threat is not
just--as the critics would have it--from more faceless bureaucrats and
jealous representatives of second-rate powers, but from
"globalization" itself--an inchoate concept by which different
people mean different and often contradictory things.


For some, globalization represents the impersonal forces of the
marketplace and technology that allow billions of dollars to flow from
Manhattan to Hong Kong in a nanosecond and that are fast creating a stock
market that never sleeps. For others, it is the result of capitulation by
national governments to the power of multinational corporations,
international investors, and currency speculators.


The governments of wealthy nations spent the first three decades following
World War II constructing an elaborate system of regulatory and social
programs to insulate citizens from risk. But, led by Britain and the
United States, they have shifted their priorities toward privatization and
market deregulation. The U.S. Congress and President Clinton conveniently
dramatized this shift on the eve of the Seattle conclave by repealing
long-standing laws barring mergers between the worlds of banking,
securities, and insurance, to the applause of merger-happy financiers and
bankers, who increasingly have global aspirations.


But academics note that this seemingly inexorable and insidious attack on
national sovereignty only seems new, because Americans have both a short
history and even shorter memories. In the real world, national sovereignty
has never matched its textbook definition. To those who believe that
nation-states have been autonomous and inviolable since the Peace of
Westphalia in 1648--which ended the Thirty Years' War and bestowed
independence on the European states of the former Roman Empire--Stephen D.
Krasner says, hogwash.


In the 19th century, says Krasner, a professor of international relations
at Stanford University and author of the book Sovereignty: Organized
Hypocrisy, countries often surrendered national sovereignty, or intruded
on the sovereignty of others, in the interest of international stability.
Specifically, many nations yoked their currencies to an international gold
standard and sacrificed their own flexibility to print money when their
domestic economies may have needed it.


During the 1878 Congress of Berlin--which forged independent Balkan states
from the wreck of the Ottoman Empire--the European powers required the new
states to uphold minority rights. In the 1919 Treaty of Versailles, Poland
and other states carved from a defeated Germany also had to agree to
minority rights, and aggrieved minorities were entitled to take their
complaints to the International Court of Justice. Today in Kosovo, as
then, the international community intervened both for humanitarian and
security reasons, Krasner notes. "The relations between rulers and
ruled has always been on the table" for the international community,
he says. "The idea that nonintervention was always honored is
complete crap."


A new global economy? That, too, is balderdash. During the so-called
Golden Era from 1870-1914, Krasner recalls, the world was by many measures
as economically integrated as it is now. Economist John Maynard Keynes
wrote in 1919 of the era: "The inhabitant of London could order by
telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the
whole earth, in such quantity as he might see fit, and reasonably expect
their early delivery upon his doorstep. He could adventure his wealth in
the natural resources and new enterprises of any quarter of the
world."


Trade Transcends


Still, what matters is that these challenges to sovereignty appear new to
a new generation, and especially to this nation. After all, the United
States was not a party to the Congress of Berlin, nor was it nearly as
enmeshed in the world economy as was Europe at the turn of the past
century.


Besides, today there may be a genuine qualitative change afoot. At some
point, the vast increases in the speed and volume of commercial and
financial transactions create a difference in the kind, and not merely the
degree, of globalization.


The development of sophisticated new financial instruments, from
mortgage-backed securities to derivatives--which are basically wagers on
the change in value of other securities or currencies--has created a web
of ties between financial institutions around the world. The speed, reach,
and complexity of these transactions link the economic fortunes of many
countries more closely than ever and simultaneously make it harder for
national regulators to exert much control over them.


As trade has become more liberalized, the pressure to make markets even
more open than they've been has led to a new focus on "nontariff
barriers," which encompass a wide range of domestic consumer,
environmental, and cultural policies that were once mainly the province of
local and national governments. And even as trade agreements gave
signatories license to poke their noses into one another's private rooms
and perhaps urge a change in decor, the creation of a binding dispute
resolution system along with the new WTO in 1995 also gave this body
economic power to punish those who wouldn't take its redecorating
advice.


Global Activists


Business and investors may have been the first to wield worldwide
influence, but consumer, environmental, and other groups that are opposed
to further liberalization are now increasingly linked across national
boundaries and are fast posing a serious challenge--not merely to business
interests, but also to governments.


A case in point was last year's demise of negotiations between members of
a group of developed nations on a Multilateral Agreement on Investment.
The MAI was supposed to make it easier for investors to start or acquire
businesses in one another's countries by, among other things, limiting the
conditions that one state could put on the investors of another. U.S.
activists, however, saw a global capitalist cabal plotting to do away with
everything from minority business assistance to the Community Reinvestment
Act, which requires banks to lend in low-income areas. Foreign activists
had parallel concerns. After a concerted lobbying effort against the MAI
in Washington and European capitals, the French withdrew and the
negotiations collapsed last year.


"That was definitely a victory" for nongovernmental
organizations, says Debi Barker, the deputy director of the International
Forum on Globalization (http://www.ifg.org), a San Francisco think tank
and advocacy group formed in 1994 in reaction to the passage of the North
American Free Trade Agreement. IFG adherents, who include Oakland Mayor
Jerry Brown, a former presidential candidate, and Ralph Nader, the father
of U.S. consumer activism, believe globalization is an unwelcome
restructuring of the planet's natural social, economic, and political
arrangements.


In Seattle, some citizens groups hope merely to slow the pace of trade
liberalization and are arguing for a more inclusive process. But a few
hope to bring the official proceedings to a halt. Citizens groups may lack
the power of international businesses and financiers, but they have the
power outsiders have always had: the power to disrupt and to say no. And
now the outsiders themselves have gone global.


The American public tends to be a bit more nuanced in its views than are
the activist groups of the left or right. A just-completed survey by the
Program on International Policy Attitudes, which is run by the University
of Maryland, suggests Americans think that the trends toward
"globalization" and liberalized trade are more good than
bad--but not overwhelmingly good. And globe-trotting business leaders
beware: The public doesn't see trade providing much benefit to many
sectors of society besides the business community. Majorities also
signaled their belief that the U.S. government and the World Trade
Organization are overly attuned to the interests of business and
insufficiently responsive to the interests of the public. The public
overwhelmingly wants the WTO to consider "issues like labor standards
and the environment."


Small Is Beautiful?


The poll found enough disparate sentiments to embolden a spectrum of
activists.


Buchanan, of course, would detach the American ship of state from the
international armada and send it back to home port. There, he would
reinforce the armor plating and install enough cannons so that, should it
need to venture into international waters, it could do so alone and with
impunity.


Anderson argues that the time when America could go it alone has passed.
"With the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, and new
nuclear powers being created all the time, and the spread of biological
weapons," he says, "the impetus for knitting together an
organization with the capacity to keep the peace is greater today than
before." He applies the same logic to the WTO. "I'm not going to
suggest that everything the WTO does is going to be pleasing," he
says. "But everybody accepts that we're going to live in a global
economy, so somebody has got to make the rules. If we do it on an
individual basis, there are going to be more disputes."


Support for more and stronger global government would not appear to be
robust--judging by the World Federalist Association's membership numbers.
From a peak of 40,000 in 1949--two years after its founding during a bout
of profound war weariness--membership has fallen to just 10,000, where it
languishes. Half the loss came with the advent of the Cold War, the other
half during the Vietnam War.


But the University of Maryland survey suggests that there may, indeed, be
public support for Anderson's views. Strong majorities favor strengthening
international institutions, such as the United Nations, the WTO, and the
World Court. Majorities supported intervention by the international
community for a wide range of reasons--environmental matters, terrorism,
economic crises, and government atrocities. A hefty two-thirds supported
the idea of an International Criminal Court to address war crimes and
human rights abuses, and 53 percent supported a standing U.N. peacekeeping
force. Only the International Monetary Fund and the idea of a global
central bank got less-than-majority support. And lest it appear that
Americans favor globalism only for the other guy, majorities did say the
United States should go along with rulings of the WTO and the World
Court.


The Left, too, can find some encouragement in the public's doubts about
who benefits from trade and in its apparent desire for paying more
attention to the needs of workers and the environment. And yet the Left,
where opposition to globalization is a many-splendored thing, also knows
that the need to avoid offending any of its diffuse constituencies has
complicated the search for an alternative vision and made it harder to
advance myriad and often-conflicting goals. The difficulty can be surmised
from reading the set of principles the International Forum on
Globalization recently established as alternatives to globalization. Among
them: global institutions and national governments should be open,
democratic. They should do only what cannot be done at lower levels of
government and tread carefully on local prerogatives. Global institutions
and compacts to mitigate the damage--environmental and otherwise--done by
global capitalism should have more power, while global institutions
designed to promote trade and investment--the International Monetary Fund,
World Bank, and WTO--should have less.


Ultimately, the Left is forced to retreat to a modest and nostalgic common
denominator: Small Is Beautiful. Indeed, the final principle in the IFG
declaration says: Global trade and investment should be curtailed and
refocused. Liberalized trade and investment, Barker argues, is
"devastating for workers, the environment, and equity. ...We
emphasize domestic production for domestic markets and believe we should
make trade and investment serve local, community needs and make it more
sustainable."


Economists Sigh


This vision strikes the same kind of terror in the hearts of mainstream
economists that the Kansas Board of Education causes at the American
Association for the Advancement of Science.


Like the fundamentalists' insistence on creationism, the Left's reaction
to globalization goes against everything the citadels of learning believe
they have proved: that all nations are better off when each specializes in
what it can produce most efficiently and trades for everything else; that
more prosperity is created when capital is allowed to flow freely to
wherever it can receive the best returns.


But the vision does confirm one thing economic historians hold to be true:
Global economic integration is neither inevitable nor irreversible. It
will exist only as long as sovereign states can support it. The U.S.
Senate's rejection this fall of the Comprehensive Nuclear Test-Ban Treaty
suggests the same point holds for global political cooperation.


"We voluntarily lowered our external sovereignty, but we can re-erect
it so governments can once again exercise internal sovereignty," says
Wolfgang H. Reinecke, a senior partner in the Corporate Strategy Group at
the World Bank. It happened in 1914, when belligerent nation-states went
to war and brought an end to the global integration of the Golden
Era.


And despite the seemingly globalist views of the public, as measured by
the University of Maryland poll, the power of organized pressure groups
can often trump the widely held views of a passive public. Until people
turn out in droves at meetings of the World Federalist Association or
like-minded organizations, the citizen viewpoints the U.S. Congress hears
will come mainly from the right and the left.


To Reinecke, the threat to further economic integration from groups on the
left and right comes only when global pressures undermine national
governments' ability to deliver "public goods"--education,
public safety, safe food, sound banks, and economic stability--that
neither citizens nor private enterprise can provide alone. To continue
this bread-and-butter function, governments must find a way to match the
global reach of business and citizen activists, or else internal backlash
will force them to close their borders--to trade, investment, and
immigration. Signs of incipient backlash are everywhere: from the streets
of Seattle to the recent elections in Austria and Switzerland that
enhanced the power of strident nationalists.


But Reinecke, it turns out, is not so gloomy about the future. He is
working on a background paper for U.N. Secretary-General Annan, who plans
to unveil his vision for the future role of the United Nations at a
special Millennium Summit next year. For Reinecke, hope rests with
something he has given the unfortunately wonkish name of "global
public policy networks." These are, roughly, ad hoc task
forces--often narrowly focused and time-limited--that bring together
governments, businesses, citizen groups, and international organizations
to tackle problems beyond the reach of governments or problems that
private groups can't solve on their own.


Some 50 of these networks are already up and operating, concerned with
everything from fisheries to malaria, Reinecke says. Among his favorite
examples is the World Commission on Dams, a two-year endeavor begun in
1998 to end a worldwide stalemate on dam construction after opposition
from local citizens and international environmental groups brought most
such construction to a standstill. Members include national government
agencies, multilateral development banks, various regional river basin
authorities, research institutes, hydropower companies, and affected
citizens groups. Participants are casting a critical eye on the role that
dams have played in development and are trying to agree on criteria for
building them.


What Reinecke likes about such projects is that they are both more
inclusive than the international organizations comprised solely of
nation-states--and their attendant bureaucracies--and more nimble in an
era when speed matters. He is fleshing out his vision both on a Web site
(http://www.globalpublicpolicy.net) and in a forthcoming article in
Foreign Affairs.


The policy networks need not be hostile to traditional international
organizations, nor do they need to supplant national governments--since
any proposed solution still must pass governmental muster if it is to be
implemented. The networks merely increase the chance of broader
acceptance, while sparing individual nations, businesses, and
environmental groups the need for serial battles. In that sense, Reinecke
argues, these networks are allies that will help preserve national
sovereignty in the global millennium.


It's hard to imagine "Global Public Policy Networks Now!"
adorning placards in Seattle or becoming anyone's campaign slogan.
Reinecke's idea lacks the sweep of Anderson's One World vision, the
bravado of Buchanan's America First credo, and the romanticism of IFG's
Small Is Beautiful. But that's three reasons it may be closer to what
actually happens in the new century.


Internet links and background information related to this article are
available to all National Journal subscribers on our Web site,
Cloakroom.


Julie Kosterlitz

National Journal