Global Policy Forum

By William Pfaff

Any attempt to deal with the future must take account of the internationalization of economies and societies during the last decade. It is argued that we have broken with the past and that electronic and market globalization mean a future in which a part of the world will be ''wired'' and dominant, and the unwired rest left behind, with national governments made irrelevant (except for keeping the unwired masses in sullen order).

The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, concerned with giving intellectual foundation to critical policy choices in the new century, has been holding a series of meetings on this subject, the most recent of which, dealing with the future of governance, has just taken place in Hannover.

It assumed that technological and economic growth could combine with changes in values and institutions to produce new institutions and changed forms of international government. The European Union seems an example of state sovereignties in decline, yielding power on the one hand to Brussels and on the other to regions.

Kimon Valaskakis of the University of Montreal argues that the international system (in its broadest sense) is escaping the control of national governments, and that the Westphalian system of absolute state sovereignty, which has ordered international relations since the Thirty Years' War, now is failing, without a replacement in sight.

Speakers noted the rising influence of private, as well as public, international organizations and of (unelected) nongovernmental organizations at a moment when NATO and the United Nations have overridden Serbian sovereignty on an issue of human rights, and international war crimes tribunals are in action.

The new influence over governments of multinational corporations, the deregulated global financial market and a seemingly uncontrollable electronic diffusion of information were cited, as well as the virtual takeover of certain feeble states by Mafias.

I would argue that Europe's unification is a special case, a deliberate choice prompted by history - by two world wars - that is widely understood in Western Europe as actually a way to defend national interests through common institutions, policy-making and action.

There seems to me little sign of declining nationalism there or elsewhere on the international scene. Surely not in the former Yugoslavia, Albania, China or Russia, but not in Britain, France, Austria or Denmark, either, or in the United States, arguably the most nationalistic of all the major nations.

We see the illusion rather than the reality of dissolving national power and sovereignty. The modern forces of the market and the Internet challenge established forms of national authority but do not alter the political reality that each is ultimately subject to state power, even if the mechanisms of that power have to be changed.

The international institutions, including the UN and the new war crimes courts, have no independent legitimacy. None are ''democratic.'' They exist because nations signed treaties giving them existence. Serbia was not attacked by the ''international community,'' which has no political expression. It was attacked by a coalition of governments, each with its own motives.

Internationalized business and markets seem uncontrollable because the prevailing politico-economic ideology says they should be deregulated, hence uncontrolled. U.S. foreign policy from the beginning of the Clinton administration demanded international market deregulation.

However, when deregulation threatens national interest or state power, regulation is re-imposed (by the ''international community,'' meaning the IMF, WTO or other agency of the industrial nations, or even by the individual nation, as when Malaysia cut itself out of the Asian economic crisis).

It is certainly true that new forces have changed society in very dramatic ways during the last decade, but state sovereignty seems to me largely untouched. Nations still possess the power to regulate or override these global forces, even though it becomes increasingly difficult (as with the information flow). Money movements can certainly be controlled if the will is there, and that depends on classical politics, or power politics.

The new international institutions exist because nations find them convenient. The war crimes tribunals for the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda solve problems for the leading nations. A permanent war crimes tribunal is judged inconvenient by the United States, which tries to block it or refuses to sign the treaty.

In short, while we certainly are in a new global environment, I see classical state power still in control - delegated in some new ways, respecting some constraints that were not there before.

The Westphalian system was created to resolve the chaotic disorders and suffering of 30 years of dynastic, territorial and religious struggle. It would take an equivalent shock to put an end to it and establish a new sovereignty (which might not be a benevolent one). This nonetheless is possible, if a remote prospect today.