US:The World Social Forum ended yesterday. If you read anything about it, it will be surprising, write Steven Weberand Ely Ratner
The World Social Forum, which started six years ago, building on the extraordinary visibility of the Seattle anti-globalisation protests of 1999, has since become a non-event for most of the world's media.
The forum has made itself nearly irrelevant to the future of the global economy because it has aimed at the wrong targets - capitalists, corporate power and such international institutions as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund.
The anti-globalisation activists in Nairobi who want to slow down or even reverse the tides of globalisation have a point: the post-cold war world is an increasingly dangerous place, in part because of the dark side of globalisation. New diseases roam across national borders; trade in drugs and women flourishes; pollutants spread to less-policed jurisdictions; deadly weapons find their way into the hands of anyone with hard currency.
And yet the underlying flows that make up globalisation - the mobility of ideas, capital, technology and labour - are nothing new. Although container ships and the internet have speeded up commerce, goods and services have been moving across geographic borders for centuries. So what has lately increased the perils of globalisation?
Rather than capitalists and corporate power, national governments are to blame. The World Bank and the International Monetary Fund are creations of national governments and are ruled by them. Corporations are legal fictions, made responsible to their shareholders (not to some vague notions of social good), and are born of, and depend on, the laws that governments make to empower them.
The end of the cold war was supposed to bring peace and prosperity to the globe. Many in the Clinton administration, for instance, shared Francis Fukuyama's "end of history" vision. President Clinton's first national security adviser, Anthony Lake, coined the term "enlargement" to replace "containment," arguing that the spread of democracy around the world would bring peace on top of prosperity.
Instead, the end of the cold war and globalisation ushered in a period of US dominance that has not turned out to be the same thing as peace and prosperity.
For the first time, rapid globalisation has been superimposed on a unipolar world. And the past 15 years have shown that this is a dangerous mixture.
A global economy needs global rules. But as long as there is no single world government, global governance and the international economy depend on what national governments do, through the policies they craft individually and the bargains they make together.
The problem with a unipolar world is that too much of this weight falls on US shoulders. It's a classic example of what economists call a "public goods" problem. Public goods are shared things, like global rules and regulations, that benefit everyone but that no single government can provide. So, in a world without a single global government, we tend to have less of them than we really need.
Much of the world looks to powerful states to provide such public goods as environmental regulations or control of the illicit human trafficking trade. Now, that means looking mostly to the United States. However, even in its most powerful days the US reach was necessarily limited by budget deficits and political will. If there is any good news about the relative decline of US power, it is that it opens the door for other powerful states to join in the game of global governance.
The greatest beneficiary of globalisation after the US has been China, a country with a burgeoning economy, growing political influence and distinct interests in parts of the world - most importantly, Africa - where the US is barely engaged. If China and the US work together to develop rules for the next phase of globalisation, the world could become not only a richer but also a safer, cleaner and more just and hopeful place to live.
If members of the World Social Forum want to become relevant and curb the dark sides of globalisation, they will have to face up to the reality of great-power politics. This means turning their focus away from capitalists and corporations and toward Washington and Beijing. - (Los Angeles Times)
Steven Weber is professor of political science and director of the Institute of International Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. Ely Ratner is a doctoral candidate in political science and a research fellow at the institute's New Era Foreign Policy Center