We're All One-Worlders Now
Back when I first joined
the ranks of one-worlders, more than a decade ago, we were an easy species to
describe: earnest, well meaning, and hopelessly naive. We envisioned an
eventual era of global peace, a time when nationalism had lost its edge and
nation-states had surrendered some sovereignty to global forums like the United
Nations or even a true World Parliament. This fuzzy idealism earned us the
moniker "woolly-minded one-worlders" as well as the (often correct) stereotype
that we were raving lefties.
But then came the 1990s.
With the Cold War over and economic globalization accelerating, the ideological
map went topsy-turvy. Suddenly books giddily proclaiming The Twilight of
Sovereignty were being written not by the beads-and-sandals crowd, but by
capitalists (former Citibank head Walter Wriston, in the case of that title).
Meanwhile, less enthusiastic tracts, with ominous titles like One World,
Ready or Not , were being written by raving lefties (William Greider), who
now saw the withering of the nation-state as deeply problematic.
While
this new debate rages, though, one-worldism marches on. We may never get to the
World Parliament phase. But the migration of governance from the national to
the supranational level is proceeding apace, in lots of little but ultimately
momentous ways. If this fact were more widely appreciated, globalization might
get a warmer reception on the left.
The reason left and right seem to have traded
places over "one-worldism" is that the term has more than one meaning.
Old-school one-worlders (e.g., Woodrow Wilson) were concerned mainly with
peace. The aspect of the nation-state they most wanted to constrain was
aggression. What excites people like Wriston (and Newt Gingrich) is the
constraint placed on a nation's domestic policies by worldwide capitalism.
Global bond markets punish national governments that splurge on safety nets.
Global labor markets punish nations with a high minimum wage or costly
environmental standards. "One world" now means a single planetary market that
can sweep away national policies designed in a simpler era to blunt the
market's sharp edges.
Hence
the sudden provincialism of liberals. Supranational bodies like the World Trade
Organization and NAFTA are seen as mere lubricants of laissez faire. And for
now, at least, they indeed are little more than that. Still, even the new
one-worldism ought to hold some appeal for believers in the old version, like
me, for three reasons.
First, remember world peace? You know--the
mushy ideal that got us laughed off the stage in the first place? Supranational
bodies are its friend. In the recent book War Before Civilization ,
Lawrence Keeley observes that trade by itself is not inherently pacifying.
Indeed, the dependence it creates can be volatile. Witness Japan's testy
response, on Dec. 7, 1941, to the United States cutting off oil exports. But,
as Keeley also notes, when international tribunals exist to resolve disputes,
trade is generally pacifying. So the WTO should spell less bloodshed.
The European Union already does.
Second, remember universal
brotherhood? You know--concern for the world's poor and downtrodden? As Paul
Krugman recently
noted in Slate, free trade gives millions of poor people a step up the
ladder. Yes, that may mean working in a sweatshop. But these people manifestly
prefer that to their prior condition. It may come as a shock to some suburban
American liberals, but for children in Pakistan, the alternative to stitching
Reebok soccer balls is not being driven to soccer practice in a Volvo station
wagon. It's deeper poverty.
Third,
even leaving lofty universalism aside, international trade organizations can
help promote a liberal agenda domestically. In Britain the left supports the
European Union and the right doesn't. One reason is that the EU meddles in
national affairs with intrusive lefty regulation. Maybe the Tories are right
that some of the regulation is excessive, but much of it isn't. And, anyway, my
point is just that a supranational trade body can in principle be supported
by--and thus be shaped by--a center-left coalition, rather than a center-right
coalition.
Consider NAFTA. It passed on a center-right
coalition and reflects that fact. But it's not beyond change. For negotiations
to admit Chile, President Clinton wants a reluctant Congress to authorize him
to include labor and environmental accords. So, if Clinton sticks to his guns
(a big "if") and prevails, we may have a new and improved NAFTA. It could, say,
impose stricter environmental standards on Mexico and Chile and give Mexican
and Chilean workers the right to bargain collectively. Both provisions would
raise Latin American labor costs, and thus dull NAFTA's adverse effect on some
low-wage American workers. In essence, this approach would use political
globalization to to a slightly less jarring pace.
It is
strange that so many of those most offended by globalization call themselves
"progressives." Early this century, the progressives were people who realized
that communications and transportation technologies were pushing the scope of
economic activity outward, from individual states to the United States as a
whole. They responded by pushing economic regulation from the state to the
federal level. The analogous leap today is from national to supranational
regulation. Yet many of today's progressives are economic nationalists, viewing
unilateral tariffs as the policy tool of choice.
Evolutionary psychology tells us that economic
intercourse is about as deeply ingrained in the human brain as any other form
of intercourse. (If you doubt this, read Matt Ridley's excellent new book,
The Origins of Virtue .) That's one reason the ever expanding scope of
economic activity is essentially a force of nature--it can be guided, it can be
slowed, but it can't, realistically, be stopped. The original progressives
chose to swim with this basic current of history. Many of today's
"progressives" are swimming against it.
Still,
globalization is, willy-nilly, turning even progressives into de facto
one-worlders. Witness the new anti-sweatshop consortium, featuring Nike, Liz
Claiborne, Kathie Lee Gifford, et. al. It sets minimally humane working
conditions that foreign factories must meet if their products are to sport a
"No Sweat" label. And it arose not out of the goodness of Nike CEO Phil
Knight's heart, but to keep left-wing nongovernmental organizations--especially
"progressive" ones--off his back. (The of supranational NGO lobbying in general
is analyzed by Jessica Mathews in the January/February Foreign Affairs .)
Thus the old left, intentionally or not, is pushing us from national regulation
to supranational regulation--albeit, in this case, a kind of private-sector
supranational regulation.
In a way, the "one-world" battle is over. Once
you exclude fringe elements on both sides--Ralph Nader and Pat Buchanan,
basically--both Democrats and Republicans accept the reality of NAFTA and the
WTO even as they argue about whether these bodies should include environmental
and labor laws, à la the EU. Thus, the existence of supranational bodies with
significant functions of governance is no longer the issue. (Mainstream
conservatives sure aren't complaining about the WTO's power to penalize
countries that fail to open their telecommunications to foreign investment.)
The issue, rather, is the perennial issue: whether governance will be to the
right or the left. In that sense, we're all one-worlders now.
In fact, we're all
one-worlders even in the old beads-and-sandals sense. Well, almost all. As this
column is posted, the Senate is poised to vote on the Chemical Weapons
Convention. CWC opponents may muster the 34 votes needed to prevent a
two-thirds ratification vote (thanks to the earnest but clueless Jesse Helms
and two of the most rabidly reactionary institutions in politics today: the
Wall Street Journal 's editorial page and a reptilian Cold War vestige
called the Center for Security Policy). Even so, the fact remains that this
unprecedentedly strong form of global arms control--the sort of thing peacenik
hippies could only dream about a decade ago--now commands mainstream support:
all Senate Democrats, around half of all Senate Republicans, Presidents
Clinton, Carter, Ford, and Bush (and, for all we know, Reagan).
In the old days, liberals
wanted peace and conservatives wanted law and order--a nice, stable environment
for commerce. Many of the CWC's Republican supporters are people who realize
that, in the modern world, where neither commerce nor terrorism knows national
boundaries, peace is order.
