My pal Pete...

Luke Weiger lweiger at umich.edu
Tue Oct 8 17:09:48 PDT 2002


Kevin wrote:


> Oh sure...tease us with a subscription only link....

Well, then, I guess I'll lift the piece, which was forwarded onto another list I frequent:

By PETER SINGER

Consider two aspects of globalization: first, planes exploding as they

slam into the World Trade Center, and second, the emission of carbon

dioxide from the exhaust of gas-guzzling sport-utility vehicles. One

brought instant death and left unforgettable images that were watched

on television screens all over the world; the other makes a

contribution to climate change that can be detected only by scientific

instruments. Yet both are indications of the way in which we are now

one world, and the more subtle changes to which sport-utility-vehicle

owners unintentionally contribute will almost certainly kill far more

people than the more visible aspect of globalization. When people in

rich nations switch to vehicles that consume more fuel than the cars

they used to drive, they contribute to changes in the climate of

Mozambique or Bangladesh -- changes that may cause crops to fail, sea

levels to rise, and tropical diseases to spread.

As scientists pile up the evidence that continuing greenhouse-gas

emissions will imperil millions of lives, the leader of the nation

that emits the largest share of those gases has said: "We will not do

anything that harms our economy, because first things first are the

people who live in America." President Bush's remarks were not an

aberration, but an expression of an ethical view that he may have

learned from his father. The first President George Bush had said much

the same thing at the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro.

But it is not only the two Bush administrations that have put the

interests of Americans first. When it came to the crunch in the

Balkans, the Clinton-Gore administration made it very clear that it

was not prepared to risk the life of a single American in order to

reduce the number of civilian casualties. In the context of the debate

over whether to intervene in Bosnia to stop Serb "ethnic cleansing"

operations directed against Bosnian Muslims, Colin L. Powell, then

chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, quoted with approval the remark

of the 19th-century German statesman Otto von Bismarck, that all the

Balkans were not worth the bones of a single one of his soldiers.

Bismarck, however, was not thinking of intervening in the Balkans to

stop crimes against humanity. As chancellor of imperial Germany, he

assumed that his country followed its national interest. To use his

remark today as an argument against humanitarian intervention is to

return to 19th-century power politics, ignoring both the bloody wars

that style of politics brought about in the first half of the 20th

century, and the efforts of the second half of the 20th century to

find a better foundation for peace and the prevention of crimes

against humanity.

That forces us to consider a fundamental ethical issue. To what extent

should political leaders see their role narrowly, in terms of

promoting the interests of their citizens, and to what extent should

they be concerned with the welfare of people everywhere?

There is a strong ethical case for saying that it is wrong for leaders

to give absolute priority to the interests of their own citizens. The

value of the life of an innocent human being does not vary according

to nationality. But, it might be said, the abstract ethical idea that

all humans are entitled to equal consideration cannot govern the

duties of a political leader. Just as parents are expected to provide

for the interests of their own children, rather than for the interests

of strangers, so too in accepting the office of president of the

United States, President Bush has taken on a specific role that makes

it his duty to protect and further the interests of Americans. Other

countries have their leaders, with similar roles in respect to the

interests of their fellow citizens.

There is no world political community, and as long as that situation

prevails, we must have nation-states, and the leaders of those

nation-states must give preference to the interests of their citizens.

Otherwise, unless electors were suddenly to turn into altruists of a

kind never before seen on a large scale, democracy could not function.

Our leaders feel that they must give some degree of priority to the

interests of their own citizens, and they are, so this argument runs,

right to do so. But what does "some degree of priority" amount to, in

practice?

Related to that question about the duties of national leaders is

another one: Is the division of the world's people into sovereign

nations a dominant and unalterable fact of life? Here our thinking has

been affected by the horrors of Bosnia, Rwanda, and Kosovo. In Rwanda,

a United Nations inquiry took the view that 2,500 military personnel,

given the proper training and mandate, might have saved 800,000 lives.

Secretary General Kofi Annan, who, as under secretary general for

peacekeeping operations at the time, must bear some responsibility for

what the inquiry termed a "terrible and humiliating" paralysis, has

learned from that situation. Now he urges that "the world cannot stand

aside when gross and systematic violations of human rights are taking

place." What we need, he has said, are "legitimate and universal

principles" on which we can base intervention. That means a

redefinition of state sovereignty, or more accurately, an abandonment

of the absolute idea of state sovereignty that has prevailed in Europe

since the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648.

The aftermath of the attacks on September 11 underlined in a very

different way the extent to which our thinking about state sovereignty

has changed over the past century. In the summer of 1914 another act

of terrorism shocked the world: the assassination of the Austrian

Crown Prince Franz Ferdinand and his wife in Sarajevo, by a Bosnian

Serb nationalist. In the wake of that outrage Austria-Hungary

presented an ultimatum to Serbia in which it laid out the evidence

that the assassins were trained and armed by the Black Hand, a shadowy

Serbian organization headed by the chief of Serbian military

intelligence. The Black Hand was tolerated or supported by other

Serbian government officials, and Serbian officials arranged safe

passage across the border into Bosnia for the seven conspirators in

the assassination plot. Accordingly, Austria-Hungary's ultimatum

demanded that the Serbs bring those responsible to justice and allow

Austro-Hungarian officials to inspect files to ensure that that had

been done properly.

Despite the clear evidence of the involvement of Serbian officials in

the crime -- evidence that, historians agree, was substantially

accurate -- the ultimatum Austria-Hungary presented was widely

condemned in Russia, France, Britain, and the United States. Many

historians studying the origins of the First World War have condemned

the Austro-Hungarian ultimatum as demanding more than one sovereign

nation may properly ask of another. They have added that the

Austro-Hungarian refusal to negotiate after the Serbian government

accepted many, but not all, of its demands is further evidence that

Austria-Hungary, together with its backer Germany, wanted an excuse to

declare war on Serbia. Hence those two nations must bear the guilt for

the outbreak of the war and the nine million deaths that followed.

Now consider the American response to the terrorist attacks of

September 11. The demands made of the Taliban by the Bush

administration were scarcely less stringent than those made by

Austria-Hungary of Serbia in 1914. (The main difference is that the

Austro-Hungarians insisted on the suppression of hostile nationalist

propaganda. Freedom of speech was not so widely regarded, then, as a

human right.) Moreover, the American demand that the Taliban hand over

Osama bin Laden was made without presenting to the Taliban any

evidence at all linking him to the attacks of September 11. Yet the

American demands, far from being condemned as a mere pretext for

aggressive war, were endorsed as reasonable and justifiable by a

wide-ranging coalition of nations.

When President Bush said, in speeches and press conferences after

September 11, that he would not draw a distinction between terrorists

and regimes that harbor terrorists, no ambassadors, foreign ministers,

or United Nations representatives denounced that as a "vicious"

doctrine or a "tyrannical" demand on other sovereign nations, as the

Austro-Hungarian demands had been denounced. The U.N. Security Council

broadly endorsed it, in its resolution of September 28, 2001.

It seems that world leaders now accept that every nation has an

obligation to every other nation of the world to suppress activities

within its borders that might lead to terrorist attacks carried out in

other countries, and that it is reasonable to go to war with a nation

that does not do so. If Kaisers Franz Joseph I and Wilhelm II could

see this, they might well feel that, since 1914, the world has come

round to their view.

Terrorism has made our world an integrated community in a new and

frightening way. Not merely the activities of our neighbors, but those

of the inhabitants of the most remote mountain valleys of the

farthest-flung countries of our planet have become our business. We

need to extend the reach of the criminal law there and to have the

means to bring terrorists to justice without declaring war on an

entire country in order to do it. For that we need a sound global

system of criminal justice, so justice does not become the victim of

national differences of opinion.

We also need, though it will be far more difficult to achieve, a sense

that we really are one community, that we are people who recognize not

only the force of prohibitions against killing each other but also the

pull of obligations to assist one another. That may not stop religious

fanatics from carrying out suicide missions, but it will help to

isolate them and reduce their support. It was not a coincidence that

just two weeks after September 11, conservative members of the U.S.

Congress abandoned their opposition to the payment of $585-million in

back dues that the United States owed the United Nations. Now that

America was calling for the world to come to its aid to stamp out

terrorism, it was apparent that it could no longer flout the rules of

the global community to the extent that it had been doing before

September 11.

We have lived with the idea of sovereign states for so long that they

have come to be part of the background not only of diplomacy and

public policy but also of ethics. Implicit in the term "globalization"

rather than the older "internationalization" is the idea that we are

moving beyond the era of growing ties between nations and are

beginning to contemplate something beyond the existing conception of

the nation-state. But this change needs to be reflected in all levels

of our thought, and especially in our thinking about ethics.

For most of the eons of human existence, people living only short

distances apart might as well, for all the difference they made to

each other's lives, have been living in separate worlds. A river, a

mountain range, a stretch of forest or desert, a sea -- those were

enough to cut people off from each other. Over the past few centuries

the isolation has dwindled, slowly at first, then with increasing

rapidity. Now people living on opposite sides of the world are linked

in ways previously unimaginable.

One hundred and fifty years ago, Karl Marx gave a one-sentence summary

of his theory of history: "The hand mill gives you society with the

feudal lord; the steam mill, society with the industrial capitalist."

Today he could have added: "The jet plane, the telephone, and the

Internet give you a global society with the transnational corporation

and the World Economic Forum."

Technology changes everything -- that was Marx's claim, and if it was

a dangerous half-truth, it was still an illuminating one. As

technology has overcome distance, economic globalization has followed.

In London supermarkets, fresh vegetables flown in from Kenya are

offered for sale alongside those from nearby Kent. Planes bring

illegal immigrants seeking to better their own lives in a country they

have long admired. In the wrong hands the same planes become lethal

weapons that bring down tall buildings. Instant digital communication

spreads the nature of international trade from actual goods to skilled

services. At the end of a day's trading, a bank based in New York may

have its accounts balanced by clerks living in India. The increasing

degree to which there is a single world economy is reflected in the

development of new forms of global governance, the most controversial

of which has been the World Trade Organization, but the WTO is not

itself the creator of the global economy.

Global market forces provide incentives for every nation to put on

what the foreign-affairs columnist Thomas L. Friedman has called a

"Golden Straitjacket," a set of policies that involve freeing up the

private sector of the economy, shrinking the bureaucracy, keeping

inflation low, and removing restrictions on foreign investment. If a

country refuses to wear the golden straitjacket, or tries to take it

off, then the electronic herd -- the currency traders, stock and bond

traders, and those who make investment decisions for multinational

corporations -- could gallop off in a different direction, taking the

investment capital that countries want to keep their economy growing.

When capital is internationally mobile, to raise your tax rates is to

risk triggering a flight of capital to other countries with comparable

investment prospects and lower taxation.

The upshot is that as the economy grows and average incomes rise, the

scope of politics may shrink -- at least as long as no political party

is prepared to challenge the assumption that global capitalism is the

best economic system. When neither the government nor the opposition

is prepared to take the risk of removing the golden straitjacket, the

differences between the major political parties shrink to differences

over minor ways in which the straitjacket might be adjusted. Thus even

without the WTO, the growth of the global economy itself marks a

decline in the power of the nation-state.

Marx argued that in the long run we never reject advances in the means

by which we satisfy our material needs. Hence history is driven by the

growth of productive forces. He would have been contemptuous of the

suggestion that globalization is something foisted on the world by a

conspiracy of corporate executives meeting in Switzerland, and he

might have agreed with Friedman's remark that the most basic truth

about globalization is, "No one is in charge." For Marx that is a

statement that epitomizes humanity in a state of alienation, living in

a world in which, instead of ruling ourselves, we are ruled by our own

creation, the global economy. For Friedman, on the other hand, all

that needs to be said about Marx's alternative -- state control of the

economy -- is that it doesn't work. (Whether there are alternatives to

both capitalism and centrally controlled socialism that could work is

another question, but not one for here.)

Marx also believed that a society's ethic is a reflection of the

economic structure to which its technology has given rise. Thus a

feudal economy in which serfs are tied to their lord's land gives you

the ethic of feudal chivalry based on the loyalty of knights and

vassals to their lord, and the obligations of the lord to protect them

in time of war. A capitalist economy requires a mobile labor force

able to meet the needs of the market, so it breaks the tie between

lord and vassal, substituting an ethic in which the right to buy and

sell labor is paramount.

Our newly interdependent global society, with its remarkable

possibilities for linking people around the planet, gives us the

material basis for a new ethic. Marx would have thought that such an

ethic would serve the interests of the ruling class, that is, the rich

nations and the transnational corporations they have spawned. But

perhaps our ethic is related to our technology in a looser, less

deterministic way than Marx thought.

Ethics appear to have developed from the behavior and feelings of

social mammals. They became distinct from anything we can observe in

our closest nonhuman relatives when we started using our reasoning

abilities to justify our behavior to other members of our group. If

the group to which we must justify ourselves is the tribe, or the

nation, then our morality is likely to be tribal, or nationalistic.

If, however, the revolution in communications has created a global

audience, then we might feel a need to justify our behavior to the

whole world. As Clive Kessler argued recently in Third World

Quarterly, that change creates the material basis for a new ethic that

will serve the interests of all those who live on this planet in a way

that, despite much rhetoric, no previous ethic has ever done.

If this appeal to our need for ethical justification appears to be

based on too generous a view of human nature, there is another

consideration of a very different kind that leads in the same

direction. The great empires of the past, whether Persian, Roman,

Chinese, or British, were, as long as their power lasted, able to keep

their major cities safe from threatening barbarians on the frontiers

of their far-flung realms. In the 21st century the greatest superpower

in history was unable to keep the self-appointed warriors of a

different worldview from attacking both its greatest city and its

capital.

My thesis is that how well we come through the era of globalization

(perhaps whether we come through it at all) will depend on how we

respond ethically to the idea that we live in one world. For the rich

nations not to take a global ethical viewpoint has long been seriously

morally wrong. Now it is also, in the long term, a danger to their

security.

There is one great obstacle to further progress in this direction. It

has to be said, in cool but plain language, that in recent years the

international effort to build a global community has been hampered by

the repeated failure of the United States to play its part. Despite

being the single largest polluter of the world's atmosphere, and on a

per-capita basis the most profligate of the major nations, the United

States has refused to join the 178 states that have accepted the Kyoto

Protocol. Along with Libya and China, the United States voted against

setting up an International Criminal Court to try people accused of

genocide and crimes against humanity. Now that the court seems likely

to go ahead, the U.S. government has said that it has no intention of

participating. Though it is one of the world's wealthiest nations,

with the world's strongest economy, the United States gives

significantly less foreign aid, as a proportion of its gross national

product, than any other developed nation.

When the world's most powerful state wraps itself in what, until

September 11, it took to be the security of its military might, and

arrogantly refuses to give up any of its own rights and privileges for

the sake of the common good -- even when other nations are giving up

their rights and privileges -- the prospects of finding solutions to

global problems are dimmed. One can only hope that when the rest of

the world nevertheless proceeds down the right path, as it did in

resolving to go ahead with the Kyoto Protocol, and as it is now doing

with the International Criminal Court, the United States will

eventually be shamed into joining in. If it does not do so, it risks

falling into a situation in which it is universally seen by everyone

except its own self-satisfied citizens as the world's "rogue

superpower." Even from a strictly self-interested perspective, if the

United States wants the cooperation of other nations in matters that

are largely its own concern -- such as the struggle to eliminate

terrorism -- it cannot afford to be so regarded.

I have argued that as more and more issues increasingly demand global

solutions, the extent to which any state can independently determine

its future diminishes. We therefore need to strengthen institutions

for global decision making and make them more responsible to the

people they affect. That line of thought leads in the direction of a

world community with its own directly elected legislature, perhaps

slowly evolving along the lines of the European Union.

There is little political support for such ideas at present. Apart

from the threat that the idea poses to the self-interest of the

citizens of the rich nations, many would say it puts too much at risk,

for gains that are too uncertain. It is widely believed that a world

government would be, at best, an unchecked bureaucratic behemoth that

makes the bureaucracy of the European Union look like a lean and

efficient operation. At worst, it would become a global tyranny,

unchecked and unchallengeable. Those thoughts have to be taken

seriously. They present a challenge that should not be beyond the best

minds in the fields of political science and public administration,

once those people adjust to the new reality of the global community

and turn their attention to issues of government beyond national

boundaries.

We need to learn from the experience of other multinational

organizations. The European Union is a federal body that has adopted

the principle that decisions should always be taken at the lowest

level capable of dealing with the problem. The application of that

principle, known as subsidiarity, is still being tested. But if it

works for Europe, it is not impossible that it might work for the

world.

To rush into world federalism would be too risky, but we could accept

the diminishing significance of national boundaries and take a

pragmatic, step-by-step approach to greater global governance. There

is a good case for global environmental and labor standards. The World

Trade Organization has indicated its support for the International

Labor Organization to develop core labor standards. If those standards

are developed and accepted, they would not be much use without a

global body to check that they are being adhered to, and to allow

other countries to impose trade sanctions against goods that are not

produced in conformity with the standards. Since the WTO seems eager

to pass this task over to the ILO, we might see that organization

significantly strengthened.

Something similar could happen with environmental standards. It is

even possible to imagine a United Nations Economic and Social Security

Council that would take charge of the task of eliminating global

poverty, and would be voted the resources to do it. These and other

specific proposals for stronger global institutions to accomplish a

particular task should be considered on their merits.

The 15th and 16th centuries are celebrated for the voyages of

discovery that proved that the world is round. The 18th century saw

the first proclamations of universal human rights. The 20th century's

conquest of space made it possible for a human being to look at our

planet from a point not on it, and so to see it, literally, as one

world. Now the 21st century faces the task of developing a suitable

form of government for that single world. It is a daunting moral and

intellectual challenge, but one we cannot refuse to take up. It is no

exaggeration to say that the future of the world depends on how well

we meet it.

Peter Singer is a professor of bioethics at Princeton University. This

essay is adapted from One World: The Ethics of Globalization, to be

published later this month by Yale University Press.



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