Global Governance
Monday, April 25th, 2011Boutros Boutros-Ghali, UN Secretary General 1992-1996, gave the keynote address at the opening plenary session. He underlined the importance of re-thinking the links between the local and the global in an age of globalisation; and the urgent need to see democracy among states as well as within them. He acknowledged the difficulties confronting the Forum: inadequate funding, logistical problems, the disappointing attitudes of some governments and international organisations, and the fundamental questions how to achieve a body which is representative, with a balance of North and South, independent and coherent. There would be no value in an international civil society which reflected the existing inequalities among nations and reproduced the dominant models.
The 2002 Forum was a success in terms of the number and diversity of its participants and the programme, which allowed a lot of information sharing and exchange of views. But it didn’t develop sufficient momentum to remain in being; neither human nor material resources were available.
In November 2002 the International Parliamentary Union/IPU – an NGO in Consultative Status with the UN’s Economic and Social Council – was granted Observer Status at the UN General Assembly with the right to circulate its documents to member states. UNGA-Link has since then called for A World Civil Society Union to have Observer Status at the General Assembly, parallel to the IPU. One of our key documents (available from the Resources Page) is the Chronology of Calls for Non-Governmental Participation in Global Governance in the UN. It concludes with our own, in 2003, and probably needs considerable updating. A likely candidate is Mark Malloch Brown, for many years a high-level UN official, whose book The Unfinished Global Revolution came out in February 2011. What follows are notes from a discussion of his book on BBC Radio 4’s “Start the Week”, with Andrew Marr/AM the presenter in conversation with MMB, the author:
“AM – do we start with a post-1945 world settlement that simply doesn’t work anymore?
MMB – if you’ve been in the business I’m in, you’re still an optimist. You’ve got to retain the ability to say, look, this isn’t working, how can we improve it? In 1945 an American leadership recognised that the consequence of WWII was that the world’s problems were going to be dropped into its lap and it still had a lot of domestic problems to deal with. Roosevelt and Truman saw the UN above all else as a means of burden-sharing the problems of global security and global development. It was a very pragmatic construct. He hopes that emerging powers – like India and China – will recognise that a share of the world’s problems are about to drop onto their lap and see that a return to multilateral arrangements is in their interests as much as anybody else’s. They may be the leaders in the renewal of these institutions because in recent years countries like Britain and France have become rather lonely champions of the UN. The emerging powers have said they don’t have enough stake in it and look to other arrangements; the US has been a terrible a-la-carte user of the UN: when it wants to use it, it does; not when it doesn’t. The whole system has sagged a bit, got demoralised and under-invested in. But there has been a quiet, creeping revolution in global governance for some time. Problems have gone global – in the financial crisis, even America couldn’t fix the banks; it needed to appeal for a meeting of the G20.
The UN reform movements can be found around different issues, with extraordinary coalitions of individual countries taking leads on, for example, landmines or climate change – governments combined with Foundations, Not-for-Profit organisations, Philanthropists and – strikingly – Businesses. One of many examples he gives in his book is the coalition that broke the dramatic increase in the number of AIDS infections round the world was a very disparate bunch. Between families and the state you need civil institutions in a civilised society. At the moment, the state is a passive, reactive follower if the analogy is that it’s “the United Nations”. The Civil Society Institutions are very much the leaders. The balance of power is different at the global level than the national. He hopes the United Nations system will respond to the challenge and the opportunity and raise their game in response to what Civil Society is doing. AM – put “a pessimist’s question” at this point. As he sees it, part of the problem is that almost nobody feels any sense of Ownership of Connection with international bodies or international leaders because inevitably they will be from another part of the world for most people and politics has always been rooted in some sort of democratic connection between rulers and the ruled. That “cannot happen at an international level; I see no way round this. I see no mechanism by which we can feel more connected to international institutions.”
MMB – accepted that they would always be institutions represented by Stakeholders – states primarily; also NGOs and Businesses and others. He does not anticipate any globally elected parliament of any kind. He envisions the strong national state looking after its people’s interests as “the absolutely critical connection”. The United Nations would be “popular by secondary effect”: a British politician could come home from a UN Conference and say they had fixed that climate change or employment problem. And in someone like Kofi Annan, the Secretary-General he worked for, the UN had a Ghanaian who became a global figure with a real international celebrity to him. It prompted some politicians round the world to want to take him down a notch.
MMB’s book itself attempts to open up the little black box of globalisation and make it more personal while showing that nothing affects our lives more…”
