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From George Monbiots article in The Guardian 17/06/2003
I have sought to provide an answer, with a series of proposals for a system of global governance run by and for the world's people. I don't regard them as final or definitive: on the contrary, I hope that other people will refine, transform and, if necessary, overthrow them in favour of better ones. But until we have a programme 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 like the one designed by John Maynard Keynes in the 1940s, whose purpose was to prevent excessive trade surpluses and deficits from forming, and therefore international debt from accumulating. I have proposed a transformation of the global trade rules. Poor nations should be permitted, if they wish, to follow the route to development taken by the rich nations: protecting their infant industries from foreign competition until they 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 to trade 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 the size of their populations and their positions on a global democracy index. Perhaps most importantly, the people of the world would elect representatives to a global parliament, whose purpose would be to hold the other international bodies to account.
I have also suggested some cruel and unusual means by which these proposals might be implemented. Poor nations, for example, now owe so much that they own, in effect, the world's financial systems. The threat of a sudden collective default on their debts unless they get what they want would concentrate the minds of even the 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 better one of your own. For until we have a programme behind which we can unite, we will neither present a viable threat to the current rulers of the world, nor seize the revolutionary moment which their miscalculation affords us. We cannot destroy the existing world order until we have a better one with which to replace it.
Linkhttp://www.monbiot.org/dsp_article.cfm?article_id=587
Can we add to, overthrow, redefine or agree on these ideas on global governance? |
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