Posted on 04/16/2003 2:31:05 PM PDT by WaveThatFlag
That unlovely word "globalisation" may be a new coinage - but it is by no means a new phenomenon. Marco Polo, after all, travelled the Silk Road in the 13th century. He returned to Venice in 1295 with tales of such wonders as the use of paper money. "With these pieces of paper they can buy anything and pay for anything," he recorded.
"And I can tell you that the papers that reckon as 10 bezants do not weigh one." I suppose that he would not have been shocked by Visa and MasterCard.
Globalisation, then, is not new. What is new is the speed with which technology - and particularly information technology - is enabling market forces to effect change. And what is also new is the impact of globalisation on international structures. National boundaries are gradually becoming less important: trampled down by large and rapidly growing flows of trade, investment, technology, capital finance, labour and ideas; irrelevant in cyberspace; offering less and less protection against outside influences.
The process cannot be stopped, even if that were desirable. The question is not how to prevent globalisation, but how to manage it; not how to kill Dr Jekyll, but how to control Mr Hyde.
Globalisation has brought many blessings and offers stupendous opportunities. Progressive liberal-isation of trade and investment has promoted sustained economic development in more and more countries.
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It has also helped to spread improvements in basic hygiene, vaccinations against many communicable diseases, and lower rates of infant mortality.
If globalisation has brought such benefits, why is it so widely feared and rejected? I would suggest two particular sources of resentment.
First is the revolt of the alienated. Traditional communities and cultures are undermined by urbanisation and modern science which constitute a threat to existing beliefs. Closely allied to the revolt of the alienated is the revolt of the dispossessed.
Despite the progress I have discussed, the simple fact is that much of the world is desperately poor, left behind, marooned in misery.
These are general concerns. More urgent, perhaps, are the many particular problems associated with globalisation: proliferating crime networks, trans-national pollution, global warming, nuclear and other WMD proliferation, the illegal drugs trade, contagious diseases - from AIDS to typhoid, malaria, and most recently SARS - displaced populations, people trafficking and a thousand other horrors including, of course, international terrorism: September 11, and the Bali bombings.
How can we uphold order and reason against such destructive forces? The rule of law is central to the process. It is the rule of law that protects the weak against the strong, and makes possible the civilised resolution of disputes.
In recent months there has been a sometimes rancorous debate across the Atlantic about power, associated with the United States, and weakness, associated with the European Union. It has been asserted that the European predilection for supranational structures and the rule of law merely reflects our inability to confront threats in any other way. The US, by contrast, can afford moral clarity because it has the strength to impose its values.
It is a thoroughly dangerous notion that power and law somehow stand in opposition to one another. They are intimately connected. Law cannot be sustained without power. And power cannot be contained without law.
Few of the challenges thrown up by globalisation can be solved by force. They require international co-operation. And they require what has been called "soft power", which can be defined as a country's ability to influence events through persuasion and attraction, rather than by military or financial coercion.
Over the past half-century the US has had soft power in abundance. Its influence has resided in the fact that - in Tony Judt's words - "the United States really does stand for a better world and is still the best hope of all who seek it ... What gives America its formidable influence is not its unequalled capacity for war but the trust of others in its good intentions."
Not the $400 billion a year that it spends on defence, but its promotion of liberal democracy, human rights, individual freedom and the rule of law. American greatness has been measured not in territorial acquisition or in military or political dominion, but as the champion of such ideas.
Whatever your passionately held views on Iraq, it is incontestable that "the trust of others in the good intentions" of the United States has been somewhat shaken by recent events.
Looking back to the heated debates over the past few months, the problem was clearly that there was no international consensus over the extent to which Iraq represented a clear and present danger of this kind. But I do not want to dwell on those arguments, rather to make a more general point.
Three interconnected issues came together when we discussed Iraq - three threats to civilised living and civilised values everywhere.
First, the manufacture, use and proliferation of weapons of mass destruction; second, terrorism; and third, the brutal assault by a sovereign government on the lives of its own citizens.
For 3 centuries (ever since the Treaty of Westphalia), it has been an established convention of international behaviour, if not a doctrine of international law, that you could only justify intervention in the affairs of a sovereign state if it had itself intervened militarily in the affairs of others. But the challenges I have mentioned have scattered this proposition to the winds.
Back in 1999 we intervened in Kosovo to protect the human rights of its citizens from an evil dictator, and in a celebrated speech Kofi Annan argued the case for humanitarian intervention. For me it is a welcome proposition, establishing as it does that individuals have rights and not just their sovereign masters.
We have heard similar arguments in the case of weapons of mass destruction - where the failure of international agreements and regimes to exercise control represents in my view the greatest gap in the global rule book that we have written in the last half-century.
As for terrorism, clearly intervention can be justified where a state used a non-state actor (a terrorist group) to attack another state. A grim feature of recent years is not just the emergence of state-backed terrorism but of terrorist-backed states.
How can we deal with these problems? In every case there will be questions of context, scale of threat, collateral damage, likelihood of success and proportionality.
I do not believe that there is any other or any better way of trying to deal with these matters than through the mechanisms and procedures of the United Nations. That may not always produce a consensus, as we can see today. But if we do not try to apply the matrix of international agreements and institutions to the resolution of these issues, we will find ourselves increasingly living in a world where might is confused with right, and double standards are seen to reign supreme.
Proble Chris: The UN did not sanction Kosovo. The UN has outlived its usefulness when open dialogue turns to self-interested stalling.
I read a thesis that seemed compelling about the growth of rules to war. In the European heritage was the Thirty Years War, fought just after the reasonably widespread introduction of gunpowder weapons. That made previously impregnable fortresses decidedly vulnerable, and marauders made their way across Europe raping all the captured women, and killing all the captives (generally waiting to kill the women until after they'd been raped, but . . . ). There's an intersting woodcut of this, showing a group of soldiers enjoying a quiet picnic - with a dozen bodies hanging from the tree that provides their shade.
After a while, they realized they were depopluating their continent, leaving no one left to till the fields they had conquered. From this arose most of the rules of war that we still consider to sacred; things like mercy for non-combatants and honoring surrenders.
All the rules or laws of war have meaning only if they benefit the nation whose behavior is constrained. Once someone (some state) decides to use violence, the 'law' goes out the window. However, it makes more sense to use your weapons on military targets than on harmless civilians. It makes sense to treat enemy prisoners well if you think it will cause your enemy to treat your prisoners well, and so on.
Here's the key point. There was no equivalent to the Thirty Years War in either the Asian or Arab cultural history. Japanese soldiers couldn't understand why Americans surrendered at Bataan, because their culture said all captives are killed anyway. So fight to the death. While they were needless cruel on the Bataan Death March, even with the best intentions in the world, they couldn't have provided food or water for most of those prisoners. They never imagined so many would surrender.
International 'law', so long as it benefits us to comply, is a good thing. But if it doesn't benefit us - and we are at the point of armed conflict - then the first and only abiding 'law' of war is: Do what it takes to win.
If you're not to the point where you feel you have no choice but to fight because some absolutely vital objective cannot be 'won' in any other way, then why are you fighting in the first place? THAT is nothing but murder. All the McNamara-style autocrats who want to kill people to 'send messages' on issues where 'losing' is acceptable if the message is not received are the ones who are truly immoral.
This ought to be good.
Me? I'm of the opinion that "International law" is applicable and unchangeable until 51%of the powers within it decides to change it, de jure or de facto. i.e. employing surrogate terrorist armies.
I agree with that. All the big debate is about is the equivalant of asking whether it is kinder to trim off a puppies tail one inch at time, or chop it off in one fell swoop.
I think you are ignoring the effect that Christianity and its selflessness can have on a small percentage of a population. The Christians who fought the 30 years war were bad people, but true-believing Christians can be found even in conquering armies. Their effect on an overall culture should not be overlooked. The asians and arabs did not have that.
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