A Citizens' U.N.?

Gorbachev, Soros, Sweeney on finding a place for civil society

by Mark Schapiro

The principle that there are certain human values which apply across national frontiers has dramatically expanded the reach of international law over the past five years. The International War Crime Tribunals for Yugoslavia and Rwanda, and the International Criminal Court, which has obtained sixteen ratifications on its road to becoming the first permanent tribunal to prosecute war criminals, have established the principle that human rights abuses violate an acceptable international standard of behavior. It was the United Nations Convention on Torture which established the legal framework for Spain's request to extradite former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet.

In the environmental realm, the willingness of the World Court to hear Hungary's challenge of Slovakia's construction of a dam on the Danube River in 1998 opened another possible venue for settling disputes. A class action lawsuit filed in a New York Federal Court by an Indian tribe in Ecuador against the Texaco Oil Corporation, alleging that the company's drilling had led to irreparable damage to the environment and health of tribes-members, [see, Colonial Conflicts in a Globalized World, Ana Arana and Garry Leech, September 5] suggest that other such cases might also be brought into U.S. courts.

These cases illustrate that national sovereignty may be pushed aside to make room for a widely accepted set of basic principles, and limits, on human and corporate behavior. At the State of the World Forum yesterday, there was a growing sentiment that a similar international approach—whether independent or linked to the United Nations—is needed to deal with a range of inequities of the globalization process.


	World Forum Co-Chair Mikhail Gorbachev

"Globalization has been privatized," said Mikhail Gorbachev, former Soviet president and co-chair of the Forum. "Removing the obstacles to world trade has proceeded extremely rapidly, but most of the benefits have been to the rich countries and the multinational corporations, searching for profits and sometimes super-profits. Over the past five years, the gap between the rich and poor has grown…;We know the facts. Existing institutions are under the influence of certain powerful interests. We must begin thinking of some kind of government adequate to this changed global world. We need to develop mechanisms of interaction between nation-states and civil society against the maximizing of profits that downgrade the values of the human being." Gorbachev pointed to the "monopolization" of patents on scientific and technical information by multinational corporations in developed countries as an example of how patterns of trade are skewed against developing countries from the outset.

Gorbachev, along with fellow panelists George Soros, AFL-CIO President John Sweeney and Vendana Shiva, Director of the Research Foundation for Science, Technology and National Research Policy in India, enunciated how an entirely new beast—the endless loop of finance capital, traveling like a heat-seeking missile to the zones of maximum short-term profit—has been created since the barriers against trade were dismantled by the WTO. "Today," said Gorbachev, at the Tuesday plenary on Shaping Globalization, "we are witnessing the birth of a Fourth World: the disenfranchised in all countries. On earth, one billion people are unemployed; over one billion people are living on one dollar or less a day."


	AFL-CIO President John Sweeney

The inequitable practices of today's trade and financial system did not develop from some inevitable process, argued Sweeney of the AFL-CIO. "The shape of globalization today," he said, "is the result of policies initiated by [U.S. President Ronald] Reagan, [German Chancellor Helmut] Kohl, and [British Prime Minister Margaret] Thatcher, who lifted controls over the flow of capital in the 1980's." Sweeney pointed to the impact of those policies twenty years on: the spread of poverty across the globe, with rising income disparities between the richest countries and the poor. Sweeney has overseen an increasingly globalized reach of the American union movement as a response. His tenure as AFL-CIO chief has been marked by a dramatic expansion of coordination with foreign unions in Africa, Asia and Europe (through the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions); earlier this year, the AFL-CIO launched a Global Fairness Campaign, which aims to coordinate the actions of labor unions transnationally. One proposal is for a tax on short-term speculation to create a pool of public funds for social needs.

The rapid integration of financial markets—and the diminished significance of national boundaries—is outpacing the ability of existing international institutions or nation-states to deal with the resulting inequities. Global financial dealer George Soros suggested that a trans-national body, yet-to-be formed in shape or detail but perhaps the equal of the WTO, must be established to constrain the more destructive impacts of globalization.

"Our political arrangements are still grounded in the sovereignty of nation-states," said Soros. "But the nation-state is shrinking as capital diminishes the power of the nation-state to act [on behalf of their citizenry]. Global financial markets…; foment inequality on a national and international level," Soros added. "The environment and other common interests receive short shrift. The best way to strengthen protection of the common interest is through international structures of law."

Gorbachev responded with a call for a blueprint for such a body. Participants at the Forum representing business, spiritual, environmental, NGO's are meeting daily with Forum President Jim Garrison to discuss the outlines of an International Council on Responsible Globalization, which is being sketched out as a sort of global representation of civil society. "This event, with the number of participants and heads of state, is unprecedented," Gorbachev told a midday press conference. "I don't want this mountain to produce a molehill."

"When I was president [of the Soviet Union], I suggested to the United Nations that they strengthen the organization's environmental bodies, and create an economic body to oversee the world of finance. That did not happen. As a result, there has been great disappointment since the end of the Cold War." Among Gorbachev's initiatives since leaving office has been promoting a worldwide Earth Charter statement of principles governing environmental stewardship and human rights; the body being discussed at the Forum, some hope, might give teeth to the Earth Charter—though how is still unclear.

Wally N'Dow, co-convener of the Forum and a Special Advisor to the United Nations Development Programme, stressed in an interview that he and Secretary General Kofi Annan support linking such a body to the U.N., citing the organization's new openness to input from NGOs. "What we need is a new enlightenment," he said, "a new concept of human solidarity. This international system is not working for everybody. We need to infuse the U.N. with a new vision, from every city and hamlet across the world."

For both Gorbachev and Soros, who met for the first time this week at the Forum, the discussion occurs in parallel to a broadening of the definition of 'security'—beyond purely military concerns to economic and environmental security. Unbridled capitalism can severely impact both—particularly in developing nations, said Soros, "where natural resources, like oil and diamonds, are at stake."

"Perhaps the greatest threat to freedom and democracy today is the unholy alliance between government and business," Soros said, citing Zimbabwe, Peru, Malaysia, and Burma as pungent contemporary examples of the intertwining of corrupt elites with avaricious multinational corporations. That interplay has also been most brutally illustrated in Sierra Leone, where the long-running civil war has been fueled by rebels linked—until recently—with international diamond concerns.

The debate over creating a new global institution with input into the decision-making processes of globalization has been fueled by the Seattle protests, and by fears over the public's reaction to the upcoming World Bank meeting in Prague on September 24. In the long run, said Soros, the implications of increasing disaffection from the processes of globalization are clear: "If reforms don't happen, more protests like Seattle are inevitable. And they will start with Prague, starting later this month."

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