STICK TO FICTION

New World Disorder: There are four ways to solve planet-wide problems. None of them work. (Bruce Sterling, July 2003, Wired)

At the top of the heap are the global multilaterals, the brass-plate institutions whose members include diplomats from the world's 190-plus nation-states. Examples are the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, the World Trade Organization, and the United Nations. They might look big and scary to street protesters, but once you peek behind the velvet curtains, it's dead obvious that they're stretched thin, put-upon, weak, fractious, crooked, and low in morale. They lack public legitimacy and democratic representation. Street opinion, the "second superpower," hates and fears them bitterly. The first superpower, the one with stealth bombers, can't stand them either. That's bad news for global multilaterals.

The second system involves international treaties and conventions. These vast, clotted webs of apparent consensus are too many, too messy, and too meager to manage a teeming, boisterous world. Often treaties are signed but never ratified. Many that are ratified aren't enforced. National leaders just plain lose track of all their accords. Consider environmental agreements, more than 200 of which have been promulgated in the past 40 years. Whatever the subject, the Bushites take positive pleasure in sweeping away clutter like the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, the Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention, the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties, the International Criminal Court treaty, and whichever target of opportunity they choose to hit next.

The third arrangement is the coalition of the willing. More of these exist than you might think, including the Group of Seven Industrialized Nations, the Group of Eight, the Group of 20, and the weirdly named Group of 77 Plus China. Coalitions of the willing are barely coalitions, they're rarely willing, and they're never broad enough. Nafta has been good at dissolving trade barriers, but outside the gates of the Nafta consumer's club, Argentina collapsed while Brazil and Venezuela turned hard left. The top willing coalition, the European Union, is a golden exception to the norm, because it boasts an occasional accomplishment.

The fourth approach is to stage glamorous international powwows like the Rio Summit, Rio Plus Five, Rio Plus Ten, the Cairo summit on population, the Durban racism summit, the Copenhagen Social Summit, and, lately, nongovernmental countersummits like the World Social Forum. These massive blabfests are ritualized and wooden. They make proper noises, but they have no teeth, no budget, and no follow-through. They're good for consciousness-raising and for swapping business cards, but they have no effect on the awful crises they purport to address.

Outside the US, most people believe the planet recently suffered a massive, bomb-flinging breakdown in the new world order. The news is worse: There never was any order to break down.

It takes a certain gift to perceive NAFTA as a failure because the countries that didn't join suffered economic dislocations recently and to think the EU, currently sliding into depression, has accomplished good things. Posted by Orrin Judd at June 23, 2003 10:43 AM