The ecological and political irreducibility of global public goods [atmosphere, em spectrum oceans, food systems, some would argue even knowledge and technology too...] seem to necessitate transnational institutions. The problem is whether or not we could globalize democracy and or some principles of federalism with their accompanying values of representation and accountability to counter the advantage capital currently holds [not now, imho]. Not all political problems can be managed under an expanded definition of subsidiarity. Also bounded rationality precludes any one group from being able to generate the knowledge we need to debate the issue in self-created/self-selected global fora like Davos or WTO. Hence the temptation of corporatist type arrangements to mitigate the actuality of, and increasingly horrifying potential for, abusive and predatory economic power relationships. Corporatist practice on enviro. concerns in the US has produced an increasing backlash by grassroots organizers who lose nothing by stating that capitalism property and social relations are the taproot of the problem. The big groups lose their foundation money if they do so state; hence the sectarianism. The problem of fractionation could be even more compounded if the big greens got a seat at the table. We should try to live with this unknown with equanimity, not anxiety or fear and keep PRESSURE on the big greens bigtime if they do win the argument for a seat -- it is up to us.
The same holds for the tenuousness of union/green coalitions. Imagine trying to explain to machinists at Boeing the circuit of destructive mining/deforestation on indigenous lands in Pacific islands and elsewhere to provide inputs to aircraft and other weapons systems which is then sold to the governments to murder the activists organizing civil society to break the circuit of ecosystem/cultural death/production. The issue of the F-22 is looming and plays into the whole issue of China's NTR [PMFN], the AFL-CIO, and the WTO. Indeed the AFL-CIO is, again!, becoming the dupes of the weapons tribe. What better way to secure [contain] union jobs in the MIC than to get them to play the "butchers of Beijing" card on human rights. Where have they been on the use of union made [taxpayer paid] weapons being used to smash the trade unionists in Turkey and other countries? It makes multiphrenia looks like a state of mental health.
All this bodes for a continued exacerbation of the representational crisis in international forums. The Westphalian system IS generating strange, non-linear faults and if the nation state is going the way of caloric and phlogiston, reterritorializing the global political ecology[ies] over the next twenty years could lead us all into a kind of slomo madness [the cognitive equivalent of the frog in the pot of water] or a realm of ideation and communication that sustains enough people and other beings to see us through to the other side of our collective cynicism. "Globalization" could still bring on a smart race rather than the race to the bottom. Remember, [sorry to be provincial] Jesse Helms WILL die and then the US can join the international system in a non-Neanderthal way. The cold war fucked us up mentally as badly as some other countries economies; some of us are trying to recover even as the system smashes itself. We too, are the system...
"The Nazis have merely shown us the tremendous power potentialities inherent in international economic relations, just as they have given us the first practical demonstration of the powers of propaganda. It is not possible to ignore or to neutralize these relatively new powers of men over men; the only alternative open to us is to prevent their use for the purposes of war and enslavement and to make them work for our own purposes of peace and welfare.
"This can be done only by a frontal attack upon the institution which is at the root of the possible use of international economic relations for national power aims - the institution of national economic sovereignty." [Albert O. Hirschman, "National Power and Foreign Trade", 1945]
Some in the US are trying to deconstruct/recover from this doubletalk; please bear with us in our recovery stage. AFL-CIO lurkers STOP THE CHINA ATTACKS. The world's children and all the rest of us cannot afford another cold war!
Peace,
Ian