"Walker's World: Emerging global government?"

By MARTIN WALKER

Copyright 2004 U.P.I.
United Press International

May 19, 2004

"It takes a bold man to find any kind of silver lining in the dark clouds
that have gathered over the Anglo-American occupation of Iraq and the Bush
administration's faltering war on terrorism. But maybe we are all looking
in the wrong place.

Amitai Etzioni is one of the most valuable of public intellectuals because
he is constantly engaged in the real world of politics. He was an adviser
to the Carter administration in the 1970s, and his pioneering development
of the "communitarian" movement, with its stress on civic responsibilities
as well as rights, was one of the few hard elements in that soft and fuzzy
"Third Way" thinking that attracted both the Clinton administration and
Britain's Tony Blair. It also launched the Third Way seminars that became
a regular meeting ground for moderate left American and European political
leaders.

Etzioni, now a professor at George Washington University, has taken his
communitarian thinking to the international stage, and in a new book "From
Empire to Community" stands back from the gloom in Iraq and the
frustration of the hunt for Osama bin Laden and claims to see a far
brighter picture.

To summarize his argument, Etzioni suggests that in the global
anti-terrorism coalition, in which over 140 countries are more or less
formally involved, we are seeing the emergence of a new "Global Safety
Authority" in which governments are banding together to share intelligence
information, to make arrests, to track terrorist finances and so on. There
is already an enforcement arm, Etzioni notes, in the proliferation
security initiative, through which national armed forces band together to
search and seize on the high seas ships suspected of carrying nuclear
contraband.

Etzioni then notes that similar transnational authorities and structures
have become established in other sectors of global interchange. He cites
commerce, with the World Trade Organization. He cites finance, with the
Bank for International Settlements and the International Accounting
Standards Committee and the Basle central bankers committee. He cites
health, with the World Health Organization's new powers (a direct result
of the SARS crisis) to deal directly with local health authorities rather
than going through a national government. He also cites new agreements on
biodiversity, on environmental pollution, on controls against intellectual
piracy and Internet fraud and international agreements against the
trafficking in women or in pedophilia.

Put all these together, Etzioni suggests, and "the building blocks of a
new global architecture" begin to emerge. Some are fledgling and some are
well established; some are controversial or faltering, like the Kyoto
Protocol on global warming or the International Criminal Court. But as a
whole, a complex and multilayered structure of global governance based on
governmental consent and upon common interests is growing before our eyes.
Moreover, these structures of global governance are widely seen as
legitimate, since they stem from decisions taken freely by elected or
established governments, and so many of them are endorsed by or are
developing in association with the United Nations.

Many of the Bush administration's problems in Iraq, Etzioni points out,
come from the lack of a clear U.N. mandate of legitimacy. As a result, he
suggests that the "new American empire lasted just six months, from March
of 2003 when the war started until September" -- when it began to realize
that the course might not be sustainable without allies, without
legitimacy and with wavering public support both at home and in Iraq.

"I expect that in the near future, while the U.S. will not give up its
role as the superpower, it will invest more of its power in multilateral
and legitimate endeavors -- the war against terrorism and deproliferation
-- which provide a foundation for a Global Security Authority," Etzioni
writes.

More controversially, he goes on: "That authority is laying the groundwork
for a global state, whose first duty -- like that of all states -- is to
protect the safety of people living on its territory."

The relationship of this emerging system with the United Nations is
tricky. Etzioni sees the United States as "a legitimator, a major source
of soft power ... (But) we should not overlook the fact that the U.N.,
without the hard power of the U.S. and others is often ineffectual. By
itself, the U.N. is not even the beginning of a world government. However,
in conjunction with the powers that be, it can be. There is much evidence
to suggest that an increased measure of global governance is not only
badly needed, but also slowly evolving."

This is a genuinely interesting and original idea, however much it may
alarm those in Washington and elsewhere who insist on the absolutes of
national sovereignty. And the fact that many of these individual
structures of global management are growing spontaneously because there is
a clear need for them might ease the fears of those who suspect the United
Nations and its works, and who question the very existence of some
nebulous global community. Traditional conservatives who admire Adam Smith
might assume that a kind of invisible hand seems to be at work, fostering
the emergence of these ad hoc international agreements and various
institutions in response to market demand.

The fact is that Etzioni is right. These structures are emerging, and if
the trend continues, the direction does point to a system of global
governance. The real question is whether any one government or agency or
group of governments will be able to take the essential next step, which
will be to think about co-coordinating these new structures, and codifying
the wide range of institutions and mechanisms into something more
coherent. It will be at that point that the supporters and opponents of
world government will start to clash.

So far, because most of these new structures have emerged to deal with an
evident need, such as terrorism, or because governments have self-interest
in honest accounting procedures and consensual rules on world trade and
common action against health epidemics and other transnational threats, we
have not yet had much of a debate about global government. Maybe it's
about time we did."

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