Seize The Day

Last week Jack Straw illuminated the depths of his political cowardice, by shining upon them the full andfeeble beam of his political courage. He proposed to alter the constitution of the UN Security Council. Hewould like to double its permanent membership, though without granting the new members the privileges accordedto the five existing ones. He must know that this scheme will be rejected by the proposed new entrants, yet hefears to tread more firmly upon the toes of the incumbents.

But Straw is desperate to save this undemocratic instrument of global governance. He wants to save itbecause it provides a semblance of legitimacy for a global system otherwise crudely governed by Britain'sprincipal ally. By tearing down the Security Council to go to war with Iraq, George Bush has ripped the veiloff his own intentions. The ambitions of his project now stand before us, naked and undeniable. Straw, like afrantic tailor, is seeking to restore his client's modesty. He knows that a naked emperor cannot governunopposed for long.

Straw's scheme is a response to two colliding realities. The first is that the principal instruments ofPOLITICAL globalisation are in trouble. The Security Council, the World Trade Organisation, the InternationalMonetary Fund and the World Bank, having already lost the support of the world's people, are now losing thesupport of their principal sponsor. Other nations are beginning to face a stark choice: they must eitheraccept direct global rule from Washington, or bypass the superpower and design a new, multilateral system ofglobal governance.

The second is that ECONOMIC globalisation, driven by corporate and financial integration, sweeps all beforeit. It destroys but it also creates. It is extending to the world's people unprecedented opportunities formobilisation. It is establishing a single, planetary class interest, as the same forces and the sameinstitutions threaten the welfare of the people of all nations. It is ripping down the cultural and linguisticbarriers which divide us. By breaking the social bonds which sustained local communities, it destroys ourgeographical loyalties. It forces us to become a global political community, whether we like it or not.

Simultaneously, it has placed within our hands the weapons we need to attack the existing means of globalgovernance. By forcing governments to operate in the interests of business, it has manufactured thedisenchantment upon which all new politics must feed. By expanding its own empire through new communicationand transport networks, it has granted the world's people the means by which they can gather and co-ordinatetheir challenge.

We may, in other words, be approaching a revolutionary moment. Economic globalisation has made us strongerthan ever before, just as the existing instruments of global control have become weaker than ever before. Butthe global justice movement, vast and determined as it is, is in no position to seize it. The reason issimple: we do not possess a political programme. Without a programme, we can only oppose. Without a programme,we permit our opponents to select the field of battle.

We hesitate to develop one for two reasons. The first is that hundreds of disparate factions have buriedtheir differences within this movement to fight their common enemies. Those differences will re-emerge as weseek to coalesce around a common set of solutions.

The second is that many of us have mistaken the context for the problem. We have tended to reject not onlythe undemocratic global governance which prevails today, but also global governance itself. As a result, weremove ourselves from the determination of precisely those issues - such as war, climate change, internationaldebt and trade between nations - which most concern us, for these issues can be addressed only at the globallevel. Global governance will take place whether we participate in it or not. Indeed, it must take place ifthese issues are not to be resolved by the brute force of the powerful. Our task is not to overthrowglobalisation, but to capture it, and to use it as a vehicle for humanity's first global democraticrevolution.

But, though many people understand these issues, we still hang back. We leave the rest of the world with aquestion, repeatedly asked but seldom answered: we know what they don't want, but what do they want?

I have sought to provide an answer, with a series of proposals for a system of global governance run by andfor the world's people. I don't regard them as final or definitive: on the contrary, I hope that other peoplewill refine, transform and, if necessary, overthrow them in favour of better ones. But until we have aprogramme to reject, we will never develop a programme we can accept.

I have suggested the scrapping of the World Bank and the IMF, and their replacement with a body rather likethe one designed by John Maynard Keynes in the 1940s, whose purpose was to prevent excessive trade surplusesand deficits from forming, and therefore international debt from accumulating. I have proposed atransformation of the global trade rules. Poor nations should be permitted, if they wish, to follow the routeto development taken by the rich nations: protecting their infant industries from foreign competition untilthey are strong enough to fend for themselves, and seizing other countries' intellectual property rights.Companies operating between nations should be subject to mandatory fair trade rules, losing their licence totrade if they break them.

The UN Security Council should be scrapped, and its powers vested in a reformulated UN General Assembly.This would be democratised by means of weighted voting: nations' votes would increase according to both thesize of their populations and their positions on a global democracy index. Perhaps most importantly, thepeople of the world would elect representatives to a global parliament, whose purpose would be to hold theother international bodies to account.

I have also suggested some cruel and unusual means by which these proposals might be implemented. Poornations, for example, now owe so much that they own, in effect, the world's financial systems. The threat of asudden collective default on their debts unless they get what they want would concentrate the minds of eventhe most obdurate global powers.

You might regard this agenda as either excessive or insufficient, wildly optimistic or boringly unambitious.But it is not enough simply to reject it. Do so by all means, but only once you have first proposed a betterone of your own. For until we have a programme behind which we can unite, we will neither present a viablethreat to the current rulers of the world, nor seize the revolutionary moment which their miscalculationaffords us. We cannot destroy the existing world order until we have a better one with which to replace it.

George Monbiot's new book The Age of Consent: aManifesto for a New World Order has just been released.