One World, Cooperatively

by Guy Dauncey

Since Sept 11th, Americans and Canadians have been experiencing ‘mind-shock’ as well shell-shock.

There are still many who argue there is no need to ask why some Arabs hate America so much. Evil is evil, they say; we need no more ask “why?” than we did when Hitler tried to exterminate the Jews, Poles, gays and gypsies. In this rather black and white world, America is good, and Bin Laden and his gang are bad. That’s all there is to it.

Oh, that it were so simple. If America is good, how come they support so many regimes which smother freedom and democracy, which they supposedly stand for?

That is not a question which is easily answered. We are all such mixed up bundles of good and evil, arrogance and kindness. When we find ourselves in positions of unchallenged power, as the US does today, the power often goes to our heads, and we act in a bullying, aggressive manner. It happens in families, and private schools. It happens in gangs. Before there were labour unions, it happened in businesses. Maybe it brought us an evolutionary advantage, way back when we were bands of hunter-gatherers, needing protection and land. It has happened to each of the world’s super-powers, from Genghis Khan’s Mongols to the British Empire. So glorious; so ignorant and cruel. Looking back over history, Spain, France, Germany and Japan all caught the disease, which comes from trying to act
unilaterally in a multilateral world. Saddam Hussein and Milosevic (‘Greater Serbia’) also caught it.

If there is one lesson that September 11th hopefully teaches us, as well the need for greater security, it is the impossibility of trying to act unilaterally in a multilateral world. Before Sept 11th, President Bush was refusing to pay the United Nations, and saying “Screw You, World” to every global treaty, whether it concerned land mines, small-arms, a world criminal court, nuclear testing, or climate change. After Sept 11th, he pleads with the world to join his treaty.

Global cooperation is a two-way street, however. Canada and the European Union should be standing up firmly, saying “Absolutely, we will join your global treaty against terrorism, but you must join the global treaties on climate change, land-mines, and such.” Not as a condition, but as a firmly and loudly expressed statement.

The lessons of global multi-lateralism need to go much further, however. Underlying the refugee camps, the widening gap between rich and poor, and the mounting anger, lies the unchallenged dominance of the G-7 nations. Together, the US, Canadian, British, German, France, Italian and Japanese governments determine the way the private capital markets, the IMF, and the World Bank operate.

All around the world, the owners of private capital and wealth are storing more and more of their cash in offshore bank accounts, and contributing less and less to the financing of public services, while their governments are supposedly held ransom to the need to maximize the freedom of capital and minimize the role of government, which might try to intrude with concerns about justice, social values, and the environment.

Through the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and now the World Trade Organization, the G-7 nations are imposing these same values of capital freedom and government cut-backs on the rest of the world.

The results are plain to see. Behind most of the world’s growing mega-crises – the collapse of the world’s fisheries, the onset of climate change, the impoverishment of third world nations, the loss of the world’s forests – lies the unchallenged power of private capital, acting unilaterally in a multi-lateral world.

Most people are confused; they do not understand how bonds, derivatives and hedge-funds works, or how their operators have managed to achieve a unilateral conquest of the world. They feel things are slipping out of control, but they don’t know what they can do about it.

There is no great “plot” – this is simply the way unchallenged power goes to our heads. For every big-time financier wiring the proceeds of a currency manipulation to the Cayman Islands, there are thousands of ordinary middle-class people buying books on how to avoid taxes in much the same way.

Out of this mess, we must create a new pattern of global cooperation; even the arch-currency manipulator George Soros says governments must regain control, and re-assert social and environmental values. We need global leadership, for a co-operative, sustainable world. The World Trade Towers attack was just a warning: the real opportunity now lies ahead.

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