Rules for a global road

Rules for a global road
By Shashi Tharoor
"The Hindu", Online edition of India's National Newspaper
July 16, 2006

That is the paradox of the UN: to be both stage and actor — to devise, agree upon and execute programmes in which all the world's peoples have a stake and all enjoy the opportunity to participate.

THE more one studies world affairs these days, the more one hears about "global governance". The origins of the concept, though not the term itself, go back to 1945, when the Allies that won the World War II wanted to convert their wartime alliance into a more permanent mechanism to prevent war and promote development and human rights.
In the preceding four decades, the world had known almost nothing but war and strife, bookended by two savage World Wars, civil conflict, mass expulsions of populations, and the horrors of the Holocaust and Hiroshima. The record of the next six, by contrast, is one of amazing advances almost everywhere — economic expansion, technological progress, reduction of child mortality, gains in literacy, the end of colonialism, and the spread of political freedom. Democracy and human rights are not yet universal, but they are now much more the norm than the exception.
This did not happen by accident. It happened because, in and after 1945, a group of far-sighted leaders were determined to make the second half of the 20th century different from the first. They consciously drew up rules to govern international behaviour, and they founded institutions in which different nations could cooperate for the common good. That was the idea of what we now call "global governance" — to foster international cooperation, to elaborate consensual global norms and to establish predictable, universally applicable rules, to the benefit of all.
Problems without passports
The keystone of the structure was the United Nations itself. As global governance has evolved, the UN system has been the port of call for innumerable "problems without passports" — problems that cross all frontiers uninvited, problems of the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, of the degradation of our common environment, of contagious disease and chronic starvation, of human rights and human wrongs, of mass illiteracy and massive displacement. Such problems also require solutions that cross all frontiers, since no one country or group of countries can solve them alone.
Global institutions benefit from the legitimacy that comes from their universality. Since all countries belong to it, the UN enjoys a standing in the eyes of the world that gives its collective actions and decisions a legitimacy that no individual government enjoys beyond its own borders. But the institutions of global governance have been expanding beyond the UN itself. There are selective inter-governmental mechanisms like the G-8, military alliances like NATO, sub-regional groupings like the Economic Community of West African States, one-issue alliances like the Nuclear Suppliers Group. Writers connect under International PEN, soccer players in FIFA, athletes under the International Olympic Committee, mayors in the World Organization of United Cities and Local Governments. Bankers listen to the Bank of International Settlements and businessmen to the International Accounting Standards Board. The process of regulating human activity above and beyond national boundaries has never been more widespread.
For global governance is unavoidable in our globalising world. Today, whether you are in Chennai or in Charleston, it is simply not realistic to think only in terms of your own country. Global forces press in from every conceivable direction. People, goods and ideas cross borders and cover vast distances with ever greater frequency, speed and ease. We are increasingly connected: what happens in South America or Southern Africa — from democratic advances to deforestation to the fight against AIDS — can affect your lives in South India. And your choices in India — what you buy, how you vote — can resound in Indiana. As someone once said about water pollution, we all live downstream.
Ensure stability
Jobs anywhere depend not only on local firms and factories, but on faraway markets for the goods they buy and produce, on licenses and access from foreign governments, on international financial trade rules that ensure the free movement of goods and persons, and on international financial institutions that ensure stability — in short, on the international system constructed in 1945.
This interdependence generates a host of new and urgent demands. Towns and villages have their municipalities and fire departments: nations have their parliaments and courts. Our globalising world also needs institutions and standards. Not "global government", for which there is little political support. But "global governance", built on laws and norms that countries negotiate together, and agree to uphold as the common "rules of the road." The world needs a stage, a forum where sovereign states can come together to share burdens, address common problems and seize common opportunities. That stage is the United Nations.
But the stage also requires a cast of actors. Global challenges demand global solutions. Individual countries may prefer not to deal with such problems directly or alone, but they are impossible to ignore. So handling them together internationally is the obvious way of ensuring they are tackled; it is also the only way. The UN institutions, agencies, and peacekeeping operations are the "actors" on the global stage.
That is the paradox of the UN: to be both stage and actor — to devise, agree upon and execute programmes in which all the world's peoples have a stake and all enjoy the opportunity to participate. And to do so from a script that is written afresh every day by the six billion human beings with whom we all share our planet.