Out Of The Wreckage

The men who run the world are democrats at home and dictators abroad. They came to power by means ofnational elections which possess, at least, the potential to represent the will of their people. Theircitizens can dismiss them without bloodshed, and challenge their policies in the expectation that, if enoughpeople join in, they will be obliged to listen.

Internationally, they rule by brute force. They and the global institutions they run exercise greatereconomic and political control over the people of the poor world than its own governments do. But those peoplecan no sooner challenge or replace them than the citizens of the Soviet Union could vote Stalin out of office.Their global governance is, by all the classic political definitions, tyrannical.

But while citizens' means of overthrowing this tyranny are limited, it seems to be creating some of theconditions for its own destruction. Over the past week, the US government has threatened to dismantle two ofthe institutions which have, until recently, best served its global interests.

On Saturday, President Bush warned the United Nations Security Council that accepting a new resolutionauthorising a war with Iraq was its "last chance" to prove "its relevance". Four daysbefore, a leaked document from the Pentagon showed that this final opportunity might already have passed. TheUS is planning to build a new generation of nuclear weapons in order to enhance its ability to launch apre-emptive attack. This policy threatens both the comprehensive test ban treaty and the nuclearnon-proliferation treaty - two of the principal instruments of global security - while endangering theinternational compact which the United Nations exists to sustain. The Security Council, which, despiteconstant disruption, survived the Cold War, is beginning to look brittle in its aftermath.

On Wednesday, the United States took a decisive step towards the destruction of the World TradeOrganisation. The WTO's current trade round collapsed in Seattle in 1999 because the poor nations perceivedthat it offered them nothing, while granting new rights to the rich world's corporations. It was re-launchedin Qatar in 2001 only because those nations were promised two concessions: they could override the patents onexpensive drugs and import cheaper copies when public health was threatened, and they could expect a majorreduction in the rich world's agricultural subsidies. At the WTO meeting in Geneva last week, the UnitedStates flatly reneged on both promises.

The Republicans' victory in the mid-term elections last November was secured with the help of $60 millionfrom America's big drug firms. This appears to have been a straightforward deal: we will buy the elections foryou if you abandon the concession you made in Qatar. The agri-business lobbies in both the US and Europeappear to have been almost as successful: the poor nations have been forced to discuss a draft document whicheffectively permits the rich world to continue dumping its subsidised products in their markets.

If the US does not back down, the world trade talks will collapse at the next ministerial meeting in Mexicoin September, just as they did in Seattle. If so, then the World Trade Organisation, as its formerdirector-general has warned, will fall apart. Nations will instead resolve their trade disputes individuallyor through regional agreements. Already, by means of the Free Trade Agreement of the Americas and the harshconcessions it is extracting from other nations as a condition of receiving aid, the United States appears tobe preparing for this possibility.

The US, in other words, seems to be ripping up the global rulebook. As it does so, those of us who havecampaigned against the grotesque injustices of the existing world order will quickly discover that a worldwith no institutions is even nastier than a world run by the wrong ones. Multilateralism, however inequitableit may be, requires certain concessions to other nations. Unilateralism means piracy: the armed robbery of thepoor by the rich. The difference between today's world order and the one for which the US may be preparing isthe difference between mediated and unmediated force.

But the possible collapse of the current world order, dangerous as it will be, also provides us with thebest opportunities we have ever encountered for replacing the world's injust and coercive institutions with afairer and more democratic means of global governance.

By wrecking the multilateral system for the sake of a few short-term, corporate interests, the UnitedStates is, paradoxically, threatening its own tyrannical control of other nations. The existing internationalagencies, fashioned by means of brutal power politics at the end of the Second World War, have permitted theUS to develop its international commercial and political interests more effectively than it could have donealone. The institutions through which it has worked - the Security Council, the World Trade Organisation, theInternational Monetary Fund and the World Bank - have provided a semblance of legitimacy for what has become,in all but name, the construction of empire. The end of multilateralism would force the US, as it is alreadybeginning to do, to drop this pretence and frankly admit to its imperial designs on the rest of the world.This admission, in turn, forces other nations to seek to resist it. Effective resistance would create thepolitical space in which their citizens could begin to press for a new, more equitable multilateralism.

They are several means of contesting the unilateral power of the United States, but perhaps the mostimmediate and effective one is to accelerate its economic crisis. Already, strategists in China are suggestingthat the yuan should replace the dollar as East Asia's reserve currency. Over the past year, as the Observerrevealed on Sunday, the euro has started to challenge the dollar's position as the international means ofpayment for oil. The dollar's dominance of world trade, particularly the oil market, is all that permits theUS Treasury to sustain the nation's massive deficit, as it can print inflation-free money for globalcirculation. If the global demand for dollars falls, the value of the currency will fall with it, andspeculators will shift their assets into euros or yen or even yuan, with the result that the US economy willbegin to totter.

Of course an economically weakened nation in possession of overwhelming military force remains a verydangerous one. Already, as this column suggested last week, the US appears to be using its military machine toextend its economic life. But it is not clear that the American people would permit their government tothreaten or attack other nations without even a semblance of an international political process, which is, ofcourse, what the Bush administration is currently destroying.

America's assertions of independence from the rest of the world force the rest of the world to assert itsindependence from America. They permit the people of the weaker nations to contemplate the global democraticrevolution which is long overdue.

George Monbiot is Honorary Professor at theDepartment of Politics in Keele and Visiting Professor at the Department of Environmental Science at theUniversity of East London and the author of CaptiveState: the corporate takeover of Britain, and the investigative travel books Poisoned Arrows,Amazon Watershed and No Man's Land. He writes a weekly column for the Guardian, UK. The Ageof Consent, his proposals for global democratic governance, will be published in June.