Authors: Benjamin Barber
1.
Alexis de Tocqueville,
Democracy in America
(Mattituck: American House, 1838), Book I, Chapter 15.
2.
Thus the U.S. Business and Industrial Council is fighting the WTO provisions of GATT, which it fears “is an official surrender by the United States to foreign governments.” Advertisement in
The New York Times
, July 28, 1994, p. A 13.
3.
Jack Sheinkman, “When Children Do the Work,”
The New York Times
, August 9, 1994, p. A 23.
4.
Ibid. As David Keppel writes in a pointed letter taking exception to
The New York Times
’s editorializing on behalf of the WTO, it is unlikely to be some small country like Benin that challenges American environmental standards as an obstruction to free trade. Rather, “only nominally will the challenger be Benin. It will really be a major global corporation, finding a friendly or desperate foreign government to help overturn regulations it is always fighting.”
The New York Times
, Letters, August 3, 1994, p. A 20. Note that Article 2 of the WTO treaty prohibits governments from regulating “with the effect of creating unnecessary obstacles to international trade.” Unnecessary obstacles like a ban on child labor, industrial safety standards, environmental protection regulations, and so forth!?
5.
For the controversy here see Laurie Udesky, “Sweatshops Behind the Labels,”
The Nation, May
16, 1994, pp. 665–668, and the ensuing correspondence, including a rejoinder from Levi Strauss & Company in
The Nation
, August 8/15, 1994, pp. 146, 176.
6.
In a recent dialogue involving the German social philosopher Juergen Habermas and the Polish reformer and editor Adam Michnik, Habermas replies to the question “What is left of socialism?” with the clear response “radical democracy.” Michnik is “entirely” in agreement. But what this seems to mean is not that democracy survives, but that its idealistic possibilities (associated with socialism as a noble theory) have in practice vanished along with socialism. Michnik, “‘More Humility, Fewer Illusions’—A Talk Between Adam Michnik and Juergen Habermas,”
The New York Review of Books
, March 24, 1994, p. 24.
7.
Thomas L. Friedman, “A Peace Deal Today Really Is a Bargain,”
The New York Times
, September 11, 1994, Section 4, p. 1.
8.
Quoted by Vance Packard in his early classic on consumption,
The Waste Makers
(New York: David McKay, 1960), and cited again by Alan Durning in his excellent study for the Worldwatch Institute called
How Much Is Enough: The Consumer Society and the Future of Earth
(New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1992), pp. 21–22.
9.
Durning, ibid., pp. 22, 116.
10.
The League was an abject failure; the United States was never a member and seventeen other nations out of sixty-three member states dropped out prior to its demise at the onset of World War II, which it failed to avert. See Mihaly Simai,
The Future of Global Governance
(Washington, D.C.: United States Institute of Peace, 1994), p. 27.
The attempt by the more numerous but weaker developing nations in 1974 to institute a “new international economic order” through U.N. Resolution 3201 was made a mockery of by the refusal of powerful First World
nations to take an interest. The same fate befell the New World Information Order conceived in the early 1980s as a response to McWorld’s communications hegemony. Not even the United Nations’ powerful Security Council members have succeeded in bending the international body to the purposes of effective peacekeeping, as the charade in Bosnia makes clear.
11.
Maurice F. Strong, “ECO ‘92: Critical Challenges and Global Solutions,”
Journal of International Affairs
, No. 44, 1991, pp. 287–298. Thus, a 1994 conference explored reconfiguring international agenies like the World Bank and I.M.F. See
Rethinking Bretton Woods
(Washington, D.C.: Center for Concern, 1995). The several environmental and social “summits” that have met over the last five years have had similar objectives, but have been long on rhetoric and short on common action.
12.
Oscar Schachter, “The Emergence of International Environmental Law,”
Journal of International Affairs
, No. 44, 1991, p. 457.
13.
Geoffrey Palmer, “New Ways to Make International Environmental Law,”
American Journal of International Law
, No. 86, 1992, p. 259. Also see Benjamin B. Ferencz,
New Legal Foundations for Global Survival
(New York: Oceana Publications, 1994), which like almost everything else written about international law deploys a futile rhetoric of “must,” “should,” and “ought” in a domain where realists correctly talk in terms of “can’t,” “don’t,” and “won’t.”
14.
There are a variety of international institutions—laws, conventions, agencies, and organizations—strewn about among the hulks of disintegrated nations, slaughtered tribes, homeless refugee masses, and devastated environments that constitute the history of the last seventy-five years that have some legitimacy. In limited domains where powerful nations can agree on particular agenda items, these institutions have even accomplished some good. During the postwar era when the United States could play “hegemon” to the world, most “international” institutions in fact conducted themselves as not very disguised agents of American policies and interests and helped secure a limited “pax Americana” that in turn assured a limited, Cold War kind of peace. John Gerard Ruggie introduces the term, which has become fashionable in academic international relations and economics circles among scholars like Robert Keohane, Charles Kindleberger, and Robert Gilpin.
15.
Robert Kuttner,
The End of Laissez-Faire: National Purpose and the Global Economy after the Cold War
(New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1991), p. 260. Kuttner offers a penetrating account of the illusions of laissez-faire and their devastating impact on the American economy.
16.
Assembly of Regions; see discussion below, note 19.
17.
For a fascinating exchange on patriotism and cosmopolitanism, see Martha Nussbaum, “Patriotism or Cosmopolitanism? Martha Nussbaum in Debate,”
Boston Review
, special issue, Volume XIX, Number 5, October/November 1994, and my reply in the same issue.
18.
Robert Reich,
Work of Nations
(New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1991), p. 313.
19.
Article 24/i of the Basic Law discussing the “power of integration,” states that “the Federation may by legislation transfer sovereign powers to international
institutions.” It was replaced by a new “Europe Article” in 1992. For a careful discussion see Charlie Jeffrey, “The Laender Strike Back: Structures and Procedures of European Integration: Policy-Making in the German Federal System,” research paper prepared for the 26th World Congress of the International Political Science Association, Berlin, August 21–25, 1994.
20.
Humanitarians still dream of intervention by a United Nations army not dependent on American hegemony. But a global humanitarian army without a global sovereignty is unthinkable, while a global army dependent on the participation of interested nations can be neither disinterested nor global. For a discussion, see Kai Bird, “The Case for a U.N. Army,”
The Nation
, August 8/15, 1994, p. 160.
Even the venerable World Federalist Association has seemingly given up the conceit of a world government and campaigns primarily within nations on behalf of extant organizations that have already proved themselves incapable of peacekeeping, let alone of world government. A recent fund-raising flier encloses prewritten messages to be mailed to designated representatives including President Clinton, asking them to “support the United Nations and global change” but little else.
21.
Cited in Stuart Elliot, “In Search of Fun for Creativity’s Sake,”
The New York Times
, January 3, 1994, p. C 19.
22.
Joan Lewis, “UN Blues: Responding to the Crisis in Somalia,”
LSE Magazine
, Spring 1994.
23.
Reich,
Work of Nations
, Chapter 12.
24.
Hannah Arendt brings all three together in her discussion of primary democracy in
On Revolution
(New York: Viking Press, 1963), pp. 22–24.
25.
In his
Making Democracy Work: Civic Traditions in Modern Italy
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), Robert Putnam has shown how traditional choral societies have marked the Italian towns where they existed in earlier centuries with a distinctive capacity for civic engagement and democracy.
26.
See Michael Lesy,
Wisconsin Death Trip
(New York: Pantheon Books, 1973), and Jane Mansbridge,
Beyond Adversary Democracy
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983).
27.
Stephen Holmes, “Back to the Drawing Board,”
East European Constitutional Review
, Vol. 2, No. 1., Winter 1993, pp. 21–25. It is not clear that the center is taking his advice, however, since the same issue of the journal in which his editorial advice appears is devoted to a discussion of “The Separation of Powers,” while subsequent volumes have been organized around such abstract institutions as constitutional courts, the post-Communist presidency, and the “design” of electoral regimes.
28.
A list of such associations and ongoing news about their activities is published in the monthly newsletter
Third Sector
, prepared by the editorial group of the Interlegal International Foundation in Moscow. (Moscow: Belka Technology Publishers, 1994). I discuss the impact of these institutions on the new Russia below.
1.
J. G. A. Pocock, “The Ideal of Citizenship Since Classical Times,”
Queen’s Quarterly
, Spring 1992, p. 55.
2.
Milton Friedman, in his introduction to the new edition of Friedrich von Hayek’s classic
The Road to Serfdom
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994).
3.
Stephen Holmes calls negative constitutionalism “the political equivalent to libertarianism in economics” and believes it is “very likely to produce a new autocracy in the not so long run” since it refuses to act positively to contain the abuses of a market society.” Holmes, “Back to the Drawing Board,”
East European Constitutional Review
, Vol. 2, No. 1, Winter 1993, pp. 21-25.
4.
Anarchist in the sense that the libertarians believe all government, democratic or not, is an evil, and as government grows, liberty is necessarily diminished.
5.
See the long and fruitful tradition of critical political theory that can be traced back to Rousseau and John Stuart Mill—liberal democrats who worried about the excesses and abuses of private property and monopoly capital. Mill’s
Autobiography
is particularly critical of certain features of the private property system—this despite Mill’s celebration of liberty in
On Liberty
. Rousseau’s
Second Discourse
“On Inequality” offers an early portrait of the impact of private property on natural human equality and civic virtue.
From such early critics, the lineage extends down to Karl Polanyi, John Maynard Keynes, and John Kenneth Galbraith. See, for example, John Kenneth Galbraith, “Capitalism’s Dark Shadows,”
The Washington Monthly
, (July/August i994), pp. 20-23, where Galbraith suggests there are those in the capitalist economy such as corporate managers, stockholders, professionals, retirees on social security, who actually prefer low growth and high employment despite its horrendous impact on most workers in the economy and on capitalism itself.
6.
In his
Theory of Moral Sentiments
, Adam Smith offered an account of human behavior that went well beyond economic utility, and
The Wealth of Nations
leaves ample room for public authorities that retain responsibility for such public goods as education, health, welfare, public works, and control of the potentially “conspiratorial” aspects of markets (monopolies, for example).
7.
Norman Birnbaum, “How New Is the New Germany?” Part I,
Salmagundi
, Nos. 88-89, Fall 1990/Winter 1991, pp. 234-263; Part II,
Salmagundi
, Nos. 90-9i, Spring/Summer 1991, pp. 131-178, 292-296.
8.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, “To Tame Savage Capitalism,”
The New York Times
, November 28, 1993, p. E 11.
9.
Andrew Schmookler refuses this concession in his well-documented study
The Illusion of Choice: How the Market Economy Shapes Our Destiny
(Albany, N.Y.: State University of N.Y. Press, 1993). But laissez-faire economists appear to have learned nothing from the twenties and thirties.
10.
Through the voucher movement, Americans have become familiar with the privatization of education. Fewer know that nearly 2 percent of our prison population has been turned over to private companies in the thirteen states that have surrendered their sovereign power of punishment to private vendors like the Corrections Corporation of America; or that there are currently more private security guards in America than public police. See Anthony Ramirez, “Privatizing America’s Prisons,”
The New York Times
, August 14, 1994, p. K 1.
11.
Milton and Rose Friedman,
Free to Choose
(New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1980).
12.
Jeffrey Sachs,
Poland’s Jump to the Market Economy
(Cambridge, Mass.: the M.I.T. Press, 1993), pp. 4–5 and p. 57. Although he has been relieved of his duties (or relieved himself of his duties, as he insists) in Russia, Sachs continues to be a market guru to other transitional nations. For a critique from the left, see Jon Wiener, “The Sachs Plan in Poland,”
The Nation
, June 25, 1990, p. 877.