By George Ross
World affairs are conducted less and less in the chancellery, and more and more in the big international institutions like the WTO. Traditional negotiators have forsaken old-style diplomacy to become travelling salesmen. This brings risks for the internal cohesion of nations as well as for the prospect of a more harmonious global order.
Not so long ago economic power was seen as only one of the trump cards in the power game. Now the frenetic race for trade is all that counts. The action is taking place at the meetings of the G7, the World Trade Organisation (WTO), the International Monetary Fund (IMF), Davos or Mercosur. The new diplomacy is trying to carve out markets for itself.
Two years ago, during the Southeast Asia financial crisis, the New York Times discussed the "firewall strategy" of former United States Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin. Whenever a country needed help, Rubin used American muscle to insist on rapid ultra-liberalisation. Giving "the markets" what they wanted would, he believed, prevent the spread of crisis.
Alas, rather than effective "firewalls", there were fire sales of devalued national assets to predatory foreign firms, huge capital flight, and increased vulnerability. The story, similar to many earlier ones - Mexico and the Latin American debt mess, for example - shows how profoundly externally-imposed liberalisation is reshaping global lives. It also underlines how much diplomacy has changed in recent decades.
We think of diplomacy as Metternichs and Kissingers playing high-stakes games with human lives. In the "Westphalian system", states controlled the means of violence and diplomats brandished them to advance national interests. Much of this survives. The international scene remains anarchic, conflicts abound, and there is ample space for posturing and brutality. Since 1989, however, there has been huge change. Given US hegemony over security issues, American cost-benefit calculations now ultimately determine which people can be allowed to kill one another without fear of contagion.
What counts most, however, is the dominance of the new "travelling salesman" diplomacy. It was fashionable not long ago to see economic strength as a subordinate asset in international power games. Today those games are a side show, and often a smokescreen, for the quest for trade. Traditional diplomacy, whether multilateral (in the United Nations, International Labour Office or Unesco) or bilateral (Clinton-Barak, Chirac-Blair, etc.) still fills front pages. The headlines are misleading, however, because the balance has shifted. The places where serious things happen are the meetings of the WTO, the G7, the IMF and so on. Building bigger and better markets is what today's diplomacy is about. Even the spies have been enlisted (3).
Hiding behind grand principles
The shift has brought new actors. In the public sphere, central bankers, ministers of finance and trade - once in the shadow of foreign ministers - are key. Private diplomacy by multinational corporations, investment houses, hedge-fund speculators, banks, policy think tanks and big media conglomerates weighs as much as official government work. The frenetic "marketising" under way is camouflaged by claims about peace, democracy, human rights and progress. But beyond the hyperbole, its promoters believe mainly in markets. Everything else is negotiable for a better deal.
The new diplomacy has unquestionably enhanced international interdependence, and those who believe that we only need renewed political will to return to the happy days of self-sufficient nation states are wrong. Still, there are different ways of thinking about interdependence. One way is to underline its asymmetrical origins and consequences. Northern interests and power, US finance capital under President Clinton in particular, have propelled the change forward and created new, often unpleasant, relationships of dependence for much of the rest of the world. A second way is to emphasise its reciprocal nature. To a greater degree than ever before, different actors, peoples and regions really depend on each other economically, politically and culturally. Both ways of seeing it are accurate.
There is also a third formulation, the pensée unique of the elites. This assumes a liberalism in which multiple reciprocities of interdependence can be organised in one global market system, itself organised in only one way. These assumptions, asserted as if they were the law of gravity, are more religious belief than truth. For it is clearly untrue that there is only one way to organise interdependence. Look, for instance, at the volte face that took place after the recent convulsions on the markets.
The new global interdependence may or may not reduce the dangers of interstate violence. The jury is still out. But "single marketisation" on a planetary scale dramatically limits the abilities of governments to pursue policies that citizens desire. Neo-liberal arguments for this are simple. States and governments should do less because markets are better decision makers (4). This translates into a credo that not much should be decided politically.
How did this come about? One of the consequences of the new globalisation has been the emergence of elites, themselves globalised, but semi-detached from their societies of origin and imbued with a sense of mastery of the new global environment. This detachment leads them to manipulate local cultures, including their own, to conform to what they believe to be the logic of globalisation, and to promote the interests of the big economic organisations, of course. Their citizenship has, so to speak, been "flexibilised".
The Westphalian system stimulated a "power politics" elite which defined the world of nationalism, statecraft and arms that nourished many of the horrors of the 20th century. The new interdependencies of the beginning of the 21st century bring us "cosmopolitan liberal" elites who want to get rid of the platform of democratic traditions. When their citizens ask them to do something, they plead good intentions, roll their eyes in despair and blame the market, which they have devoted most of their energies to building, for their inability to respond.
The computer is to the new millennium what the railroad was to the industrial revolution and the automobile to 20th century consumerism - not simply a product, but central to the future growth of all sectors and products. Just as important, it is an indissoluble combination of electronics and culture. The technologies of computing are mathematics, symbols and machinery, but they are also information, content, dominated by leading innovating countries and companies. The mega-corporations that produce this content sell images of self and of other to consumers world-wide. These images are the stuff of individual identities.
Are these identity consumers "free to choose", as the economists say? Not that much. The size of cultural conglomerates - the Time-Warners, News Corporations, Bertelsmanns and others - and their economies of scale create an imperfect marketplace. Their products - films, television programmes, pop music, news, internet content and, not least, advertising - are rapidly paid off in densely wired home markets. Selling them at low prices elsewhere is relatively easy. Elsewhere means other societies.
These products are ideas, images and dreams, and the lives of people the world over are implicated. Less economically developed areas ingest the very latest cultural products from New York, Paris, London and Hollywood. The market is not completely biased. If Irish pop singers attract an audience, they are sold. If Australian images sell Japanese cars in North America, so be it. If Brazilian soap operas play well in Moscow, there is more salsa in grim Russian winters.
Over two centuries history has promoted the identification of individuals as "citizens" of "nations" in territories where modern states make rules. Cultural globalisation threatens this quite as much as economic interdependency. People can lose their bearings when bombarded with cultural signals from all directions, many from distant parts of the planet. They can use their common sense to discount some signals and translate others into the vernacular of their daily lives. Nonetheless, there is potential for the disruption of identities. Identification with the national community has been essential for the constitution of modern societies and selves, correlated with the rights and responsibilities of modern citizenship and collective definitions of insiders and outsiders.
These are not rarified issues. Democracies, or at least those few we have known historically, depend on correspondence between what citizens desire of governments and a deeper sense of national identity. As American essayist Samuel Huntington notes, "efforts to define national interest presuppose agreement on the nature of the country whose interests are to be defined. National interests derive from national identity. We have to know who we are before we know what out interests are". The present situation requires both the capacity to govern and the identity necessary for social cohesion.
This is not a plea for nationalism, but rather concern for an essential dimension of our democratic lives for which there is no clearly identified substitute. In response, we are already seeing in the most developed countries a return to a populism that takes on different forms: nationalism, racism, hyper-protectionism.
In France, Jean-Marie Le Pen has pushed political discourse towards intolerance. Those who support Jörg Haider in Austria, the Vlaams Blok in Belgium, the Lega Nord in Italy and Pauline Hanson in Australia are doing the same. The hard-edged liberal populism of Anglo-Saxon countries - the Republican right in the US, neo-Thatcherism, the Canadian Reform Party - have also mobilised populist anxieties against cosmopolitan elites. Phenomena like Americans who believe that the UN, the World Bank and their own government are conspiring to destroy their republic are disturbing, especially when they justify armed enclaves and blowing up federal buildings.
At present a potentially destructive game is going on. Nations, and the media, carry on diplomatically as if we were still in the 19th century. Yet what counts most for diplomacy in the 21st century is the business of business. Countries, like lemmings running over a cliff, exhaust themselves at global market-building. Who benefits? The countries whose enterprises are the best placed to exploit markets made for them, and sometimes by them.
Thus the more advanced a country or region is, the more its diplomats turn themselves into travelling salesmen. Westphalian diplomacy was catastrophic for the 20th century bringing war and death. Travelling salesman diplomacy could bring equally frightening consequences for democracy in the 21st.
Every society could be threatened by these processes, including those which benefit greatly from them economically. But those most under threat are vulnerable because they do not have a well-defined, viable position in new global markets or are smaller and more peripheral. In the absence of prospects for relative economic success and with a deteriorating national community, there may not be much left to sustain them as modern democratic societies at all.
For them, it is particularly wasteful to play traditional Westphalian diplomacy, particularly since it serves as a screen behind which the big and the rich deploy their economic diplomacy. But it is also particularly difficult for them to act, at least by themselves, as a counter force to the travelling salesmen. They thus have little choice but to accept new market structures and new cultural goods. The one initial advantage which such countries may have is that they may be able to perceive more clearly the dangers of the present situation for their own democratic integrity.
A diplomacy of a "third type", based on foresight and initiative in the face of the logic we have described, is possible, at least theoretically. Will the countries most under threat act on it?
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