The Age of Consent

Even if this request is somehow transmitted all the way there and all the way back, and the electrician has not walked away from the job in disgust, all I am likely to receive is an unverifiable assurance that of course it was mined sustainably. I will be left feeling like a busybody and a supplicant, which is hardly a politically empowering position to be in. And I will be no nearer than I was before to closing down the mine at Tembagapura or altering the way it operates.

Of course, there are several organizations, such as the Soil Association and the Forest Stewardship Council, whose purpose is to bypass the purchasing chain, and determine directly, on our behalf, whether or not certain products (food and timber in these cases) are as eco-friendly as they claim to be, enabling the consumer to make an informed choice simply by checking the label. But important as these bodies are, their impact is limited by the constraint afflicting all consumer democrats: namely that they possess no negative power. I can congratulate myself for not buying cocoa produced by slaves, but my purchases of fairly traded chocolate do not help me to bring the slave trade to an end, because they don’t prevent other people from buying chocolate whose production relies on slavery. This is not to say that voluntary fair trade is pointless – it has distributed wealth to impoverished people – simply that, while it encourages good practice, it does not discourage bad practice.

If we wish to prevent exploitation, it surely makes more sense to start at the other end of the purchasing chain, the end at which the exploitation takes place. If local people want to close the mine at Tembagapura, then let us campaign to help them to close it, so that we no longer have to fret about whether or not the copper we are buying is produced there. This is the means by which, for example, Western corporations were forced out of Burma, mahogany logging was brought to an end in Brazil and the biotechnology giant Monsanto was, temporarily, fettered. Consumer democracy is much less effective at reaching the source of the problem than plain democracy. An overreliance on consumer democracy disperses our power. It permits us to feel we are making a difference when we are doing no such thing. It individualizes our political action when it should be consolidated.

There is rather more to be said for ‘shareholder democracy’, for while it suffers from most of the drawbacks of consumer democracy, it automatically collectivizes the power of the mindful purchasers, for every year the company’s annual general meeting draws these people together, where they can coordinate their concerns. Campaigners buying the shares of companies whose practices they deplore have been devastatingly effective on such occasions, but only when their protests at these meetings are part of a wider campaign designed to damage the company’s reputation.

‘Voluntary simplicity’ is defined by David Korten as ‘spending less time working for money, leading lives less cluttered by stuff, and spending more time living’.29 These are worthy aims (though they can be pursued only by the rich), but it is not clear that they translate into political change.

Korten celebrates the lives of people who have withdrawn their labour from destructive corporations, found less stressful employment and now spend more of their time engaged in the business of living. Many of these people, he suggests, will use this extra time to campaign for a better world. It is certainly true to say that it is hard to be an effective campaigner if paid employment consumes most of your time and energy. It is also true that there is an urgent need for all wealthy consumers to reduce their impact on the planet. But Korten, like many others, has exaggerated the transformative impact of this proposal.

In political terms, the aggregate effect of voluntary simplicity is merely an acceleration of the employment cycle. Instead of waiting until they are sixty or sixty-five before retiring from corporate life, more people are doing so in early middle age. They are not bringing the system to its knees by this means; they are simply making way for younger, keener, more aggressive workers. Far from threatening corporate power, this could enhance it, as younger workers are often easier to manipulate and less aware of the impact of their activities. The withdrawal of our labour from the corporations will hurt them as a sector only if everyone does it, all at once, by means of a worldwide, indefinite general strike. Again we run into the problem here that those who would be most inclined to strike are those with the least investment in corporate life.

Nor does it follow that, once people have left corporate employment, they will use their time to fight the forces which have supplied them with the savings or the pensions required to sustain their ‘simplified’ lives. Indeed, the two professed aims of voluntary simplicity – seeking an easier, less cluttered life and devoting more time to political campaigning – are starkly contradictory. If we are to exert any meaningful impact on the way the world is run, we need to engage in voluntary complexity.

‘Consumer democracy’ and ‘voluntary simplicity’ are easy and painless for their practitioners. We should, as I have suggested, be deeply suspicious of easy and painless solutions, for this suggests that such strategies are unopposed. A serious attempt to change the world will be difficult and dangerous. What appears to be a solution, in other words, may in fact be a withdrawal. Voluntary simplicity looks more like the monastery than the barricade. Delightful as it may be for those who practise it, quiet contemplation does not rattle the cages of power.

If an attempt to replace the global economy with a local economy locks the poor world into poverty, while fudging the issue of political power, and if consumer democracy and voluntary simplicity avoid power rather than confronting it, then our attempts to re-democratize the world by withdrawing from globalization appear to be doomed. This leaves us, as most of the movement now recognizes, with just one remaining option: we must democratize globalization. But even here we encounter another great division, this time between the reformists and the revolutionaries. While the revolutionaries wish to sweep away the existing global and international institutions, reformists such as the financier and author of the manifesto On Globalization,30 George Soros, prefer to work within them.

Soros proposes certain measures, such as using Special Drawing Rights (the financial reserves issued by the IMF) to fund aid for poorer nations, changing the way the IMF intervenes in the economies of the poor world and giving the directors of the World Bank independence from the governments which appointed them. These are, as far as they go, progressive measures. But this, Soros insists, is the limit of what we can expect to achieve. ‘It would be unrealistic’, he argues, ‘to advocate a wholesale change in the prevailing structure of the international financial system…the United States is not going to abdicate its position…I do not see any point in proposing more radical solutions when the authorities are not ready to consider even the moderate ones outlined here.’31 Like many other people, George Soros regards the revolutionary alternatives as hopelessly unrealistic.

If we are to confine our proposals to what ‘the authorities are ready to consider’ then it seems to me that we may as well give up and leave the authorities to run the world unmolested. Even the modest reforms of the IMF and World Bank that George Soros proposes are blocked by the very constitutions with which he wishes to tinker. The United States has, as we have seen, a veto over any constitutional changes within these organizations. It has, at present, no incentive to drop this veto, and Soros offers no proposals to change the incentive. As a result, these bodies are constitutionally unreformable.

Another way of looking at the problem is this. Let us assume that through discovering some new incentives (and, as this book shows, there are one or two we could drum up) with which we might alter the behaviour of the United States, we can muster sufficient political pressure to persuade that nation to suspend its veto and permit the constitution of the World Bank and the IMF to be changed. We would then have forced the world’s only superpower to have volunteered to surrender its hegemonic status. If that is possible, anything is. And if anything is possible, why on earth should we settle for the kind of reforms which Soros admits are ‘puny when compared with the magnitude of the problems they are supposed to resolve’?32 Why not embrace those proposals which give us what we want, rather than just what we imagine ‘the authorities are ready to consider’?

George Soros’s ‘realistic’ measures turn out to be either hopelessly unrealistic or hopelessly unambitious. Certainly, as he acknowledges, they provide no realistic means of solving the world’s problems, even if they were implemented. Perhaps it would be more accurate to describe such proposals as ‘hopelessly realistic’. They are hopeless in two respects: the first is that they are a useless means of achieving change, the second is that they reflect an absence of hope.

Just as importantly, compromised solutions will not command popular enthusiasm. Who wants to fight, perhaps in extremis lay down her life, for solutions which are ‘puny when compared with the magnitude of the problems they are supposed to resolve’? We know that the reform of illegitimate institutions is likely only to enhance their credibility, and thus the scope of their illegitimate powers. No solution of any value to the oppressed will surface unless vast numbers of people demand it, not just once, but consistently, and they will not, of course, demand it if they perceive that it is hopeless.

Had those people who campaigned for national democratization in the nineteenth century in Europe approached their task with the same hopeless realism as the reformists campaigning for global democratization today, they would have argued that, as the authorities were not ready to consider granting the universal franchise, they should settle for a ‘realistic’ option instead, and their descendants might today have been left with a situation in which all those earning, say, $50,000 a year or possessing twenty acres of land were permitted to vote, but those with less remained disenfranchised.

Every revolution could have been – indeed almost certainly was – described as ‘unrealistic’ just a few years before it happened. The American Revolution, the French Revolution, female enfranchisement, the rise of communism, the fall of communism, the aspirations of decolonization movements all over the world were mocked by those reformists who believed that the best we could hope for was to tinker with existing institutions and beg some small remission from the dominant powers. Had you announced, in 1985, that within five years men and women with sledge-hammers would be knocking down the Berlin Wall, the world would have laughed in your face. All of these movements, like our global democratic revolution, depended for their success on mass mobilization and political will. Without these components, they were impossible. With them, they were unstoppable.

What is realistic is what happens. The moment we make it happen, it becomes realistic. As the other possibilities fall away, a global democratic revolution is, in both senses, the only realistic option we have. It is the only strategy which could deliver us from the global dictatorship of vested interests. It is the only strategy that is likely to succeed. We have responded to the Age of Coercion with an Age of Dissent. This is the beginning, not the end, of our battle. It is time to invoke the Age of Consent.

CHAPTER 4 We the Peoples Building a World Parliament

Our global revolution requires no tumbrils, no guillotines, no unmarked graves; no revanchist running dogs need be put against the wall. We have within our hands already the means to a peaceful, democratic transformation. These means arise inexorably from an analysis of how the world is run, and why the existing world order fails. Each of the following three chapters examines one aspect of global governance, shows why the current system is not working, considers the possible alternatives, chooses those which seem to work best and then explains how we – the dissidents of the rich world and the citizens of the poor world – can, using only those resources available to us, replace the system which works for the powerful with one which works for the weak. The first of these tasks is perhaps the most pressing: altering the mediation of war and peace and the relations between nation states, and seeking to replace a world order built on coercion with one which emerges from below, built upon democracy.

The United Nations was conceived in 1941 by the United States, the United Kingdom and the Soviet Union, as an alliance against the Axis powers. As the Second World War progressed, its scope and membership expanded, until, in June 1945, fifty nations signed a declaration of principles – the United Nations Charter – whose purpose was to promote peace, human rights and international law, to encourage social progress, higher living standards and to prevent another World War.33 The UN, in other words, was founded with the best of intentions. But these, like the motives surrounding every aspect of the postwar settlement, were mixed with some rather less elevated concerns. No one gives power away, and those nations which constructed the UN were careful to ensure that it reinforced rather than diminished their global pre-eminence.

This concern is reflected in the constitution of the supreme international body, which is charged with the prevention of war, the United Nations Security Council. If one nation is threatening or attacking another, the council may use whatever measures are necessary to force it to desist: it can order a ceasefire, for example; levy economic sanctions; send in peacekeepers; or, at the last resort, authorize the armed forces of the UN’s member states to take military action against the aggressor. At the international level it asserts (though with little success) what the state asserts at the national level: a monopoly of violence.

The Security Council mimics the notional constraints of the democratic state. By this means it claims to sustain a world order founded on right rather than might. The problem with the postwar settlement is that those with the might decide what is right.

There are fifteen members of the council, of which ten have temporary seats (held for two years and then passed to another state) and five have permanent seats. Each of the five permanent members has the power of veto: no decision can be taken by the Security Council unless all five have approved it. Unsurprisingly, the five permanent members are the three powers which founded the United Nations – the United States, United Kingdom and Russia – and their principal wartime allies, China and France.* They granted themselves the ability to determine, for as long as the UN continues to exist, who is the aggressor and who the aggressed.

The power of veto was introduced partly in order to prevent those states in possession of nuclear weapons from attacking each other: had the other member states, for example, collectively decided that the Soviet Union was threatening one of its neighbours, and then sought to restrain it through military action, the USSR may have responded by offering to meet that force with greater force, provoking another world war. Indeed, during the Cold War the Soviet Union used its veto repeatedly, precisely in order to prevent the other states from restricting its attempts to expand its imperial domain. But, while the veto may have functioned as a safety valve, preserving a global peace at the expense of the weaker states being threatened or attacked by one of the permanent members, it has also proved to be an instant recipe for the abuse of power and the impediment of justice.

The problem with the way the Security Council has been established is that those who possess power cannot be held to account by those who do not. The key democratic question – who guards the guards? – has been left unanswered. The Security Council is, by definition, tyrannical. Those who defend the way the world is run point out that veto powers have rarely been used since the end of the Cold War* and that the veto can, in theory, be deployed (as France and Russia tried to deploy it in 2003) to protect states from unauthorized attacks by other members; but the truth is that the threat of the veto informs every decision the Security Council does or does not make. Other member states know perfectly well, for example, that there is no point in preparing a resolution which the United States will reject. The US, and to a lesser extent the other permanent members, assert their will without even having to ask.

As other nations cannot hold them to account, the permanent members (or, more precisely, the two permanent members which have, since the UN’s formation, wielded real power) can blithely defy every principle the United Nations was established to defend. Since 1945, the United States has launched over 200 armed operations,35 most of which were intended not to promote world peace but to further its own political or economic interests. The Soviet Union repeatedly used its veto to prevent other member states from interfering with its sponsorship of violent insurrection, and occasional direct invasion. The five permanent members also happen to be the world’s five biggest arms dealers, indirectly responsible for exacer-bating many of the conflicts the Security Council is supposed to prevent. The five nations which possess the exclusive power to decide how threats should be handled are the five nations which present the gravest threat to the rest of the world.

The problem is compounded – and this is not commonly understood – by the fact that the powers of the Security Council are not confined to the administration of peace. The UN Charter also grants the five permanent members vetoes over constitutional reform of the United Nations.* Even if every other member of the General Assembly votes to change the way the institution works, their decision can be overruled by a single permanent member. Any one of the five can also block the appointment of the UN Secretary-General,† the election of judges to the International Court of Justice, and the admission of a new member to the United Nations.36

Those who benefit from this system argue that it simply reflects the realities of power: if the five permanent members were not using their vetoes to force other states to do as they bid, they would find some other means. This is undoubtedly true; but the problem with the way the council is established is that, rather than moderating the realities of power, it compounds them. It offers an immediate and painless means for a permanent member to prevent the rest of the world from pursuing peace or justice, whenever it suits its interests to do so. These special powers have rendered the UN General Assembly, in which every member state has an equal vote, all but irrelevant. The 186 member states which do not occupy permanent seats on the Security Council can huff and puff about how the world should be run, in the certain knowledge that real power lies elsewhere.

But even if the Security Council were to be disbanded tomorrow, and the supreme powers it possessed vested instead in the Assembly, the United Nations would still be far from democratic. Many of the member states are not themselves democracies, and have a weak claim to represent the interests of their people. Even those governments which have come to power by means of election seldom canvass the opinion of their citizens before deciding how to cast their vote in international assemblies. There is, partly as a result, little sense of public ownership of the General Assembly or the decisions it makes. At public meetings, I have often asked members of the audience to raise their hands if they know the name of their country’s ambassador to the United Nations. Seldom, even at gatherings of the most politically active people, do more than two or three per cent claim to know; on one occasion an audience of 600 mostly well-read, middle-class people (it was a literary festival) failed to produce a single respondent. In turn, many of the ambassadors, who are appointed, not elected, appear to be rather more conscious of the concerns of their nations’ security services than those of the citizens whose part they are supposed to take.

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