 By Katrin Bennhold International Herald Tribune, Tuesday, January 23, 2007 DAVOS, Switzerland Imagine it's 2010 and dirty bombs explode in three major capitals. Or a human strain of bird flu is spreading across the planet. Or global warming has triggered a super drought over the world's breadbasket regions. Who will ride to the rescue? Even in Davos, where the chieftains of world politics and industry gather on Wednesday for the World Economic Forum, a worry is creeping in that nobody is really in charge. An increasingly global world has exacerbated the need for multilateral action, but it has also shaken the very foundations of the multilateral system: Authority is leaking away from international institutions and from the Western powers that have traditionally led them, leaving the world short on leadership at a time when it is increasingly vulnerable to catastrophic shocks. The main building block of the world order, the nation state, is seeing its clout blur as other forces from blogs to Bono to Bill Gates crowd onto the stage. "Power is becoming increasingly diffuse," said Kenneth Roth, director of Human Rights Watch. "The world has become multipolar in several respects and our institutions are out of step with this new reality." The irony is that global awareness of the need for cooperation on issues like climate change, pandemics and terrorism has never been greater. But beyond each individual problem, said officials and executives in Davos this week to consider what forum organizers have labeled "The Shifting Power Equation," looms perhaps the greatest challenge: How to engineer collective action in a world where America is too weak to dominate but too strong to be disregarded; where old and new powers compete for influence and resources; and where a technological revolution has empowered ordinary citizens and those who want to influence them. One by one, the state-based institutions created in the wake of two world wars have seen their influence recede as the rise of powers like China, India and Brazil shift the economic balance and resource-rich countries like Iran and Russia flex their muscles. Calls by the United Nations, which is run by the five veto-wielding powers, are routinely ignored. Iran continues to enrich uranium, North Korea retains its nuclear bomb and civilians continue to be killed in Sudan. The International Monetary Fund and the World Bank have struggled to impose their policy prescriptions on developing countries since other sources of financing have popped up. China, for one, has undermined their authority by using its currency reserves to offer loans to African countries that do not always adhere to the international standards designed to address corruption in the region. Another cornerstone of the international order, the World Trade Organization, has failed to engineer further removal of trade barriers after six years of talks that began in Doha, Qatar, in which the traditional tug-of-war between the United States and the European Union has gradually been replaced with a cacophony of opposing views from New Delhi to Brasilia to Melbourne. As Christine Lagarde, the French trade minister, put it: "Trade talks used to be a tango, then they became a square dance and today it's one big rock 'n' roll party with everyone wanting to be on the dance floor." Most countries agree that existing institutions need change and that some new ones are needed. Perhaps the single most urgent change is to make the UN Security Council more representative by including such nations as India, Brazil and Japan. International institutions "cannot be effective unless they are modernized to reflect the emerging world order," Gordon Brown, the British chancellor of the Exchequer, said last week on a trip to New Delhi. If overhaul efforts have faltered so far, it is in no small part due to the failure of Washington to lead the way, said Anne-Marie Slaughter, dean of the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University, citing the reluctance of the Bush administration to work through multilateral institutions and the decline in its authority resulting from the Iraq war. "Major institutional reform is on hold at least until a new administration arrives in the White House in 2008," said Slaughter, author of "A New World Order." "American leadership is no longer sufficient," she said, "but it is necessary." The lack of American leadership has been all the more perceptible as other regions, notably the European Union, have failed to step up to the plate, she said. Indeed, the 27-member EU is a microcosm of the global governance crisis: Since French and Dutch voters rejected referendums on an EU constitution two years ago, the Union is stuck with cumbersome decision-making rules designed for a bloc half its size. As states and state-based institutions hemorrhage authority, other players have gained influence. The companies gathered in Davos this week have a combined annual revenue of $12 trillion, almost the value of the entire U.S. economy. "It's not so much that governments have become less powerful, but companies have grown more powerful," said Martin Sorrell, chief executive of the advertising company WPP. "If all companies go carbon-neutral, we solve the global warming issue. That is power." Meanwhile, individuals, enabled to act and interact in a Web 2.0 world, can single-handedly engineer mass aid campaigns and as the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks illustrated inflict damage on a scale that a decade ago could only have been achieved by a superpower. "Governments no longer have a monopoly on changing the world," said Klaus Schwab, the founder and host of the World Economic Forum. Indeed, some of the more successful recent efforts at forging international cooperation have involved crucial input from business, local authorities and nongovernmental organizations. The response to the Asian tsunami in 2004 was a good example of collective government, nongovernment and international effort and a leading American role. In the United States, a growing number of multinational companies are lobbying the Bush administration to join a possible global accord on climate change, despite U.S. refusal to ratify the Kyoto Protocol. California is debating whether to join the EU's emissions trading system. Richard Samans, a former adviser to President Bill Clinton who now is in charge of public-private partnerships at the World Economic Forum, speaks of a "new geometry" of collective action. He has been getting calls from governments that want help from companies with enforcing anti-corruption laws. Nongovernmental organizations have entered the fray. Human Rights Watch was instrumental in lobbying nations to establish the International Criminal Court despite U.S. opposition. The Bush administration first reacted by imposing sanctions on countries that refused to sign bilateral immunity agreements for U.S. nationals. But then it abstained from rather than vetoed a UN resolution that put the ICC in charge of trying war crimes in Darfur and last year quietly began lifting the sanctions. Elsewhere, several nations frustrated with the stalled trade round are turning their attention to bilateral and regional trade agreements, while UN peacekeeping is increasingly complemented by operations run by NATO and the EU. "Is this anarchy? No. Today the quiver has multiple arrows," said Shashi Tharoor, UN under secretary for communication. "If you are seeing ad hoc solutions, it's part of the organic evolution of global governance." Still, ad hoc solutions have limits. "We need both, informal networks and effective international institutions," Slaughter said. "But what we need most is political will from major powers," she added. "In the past it took a major cataclysm to create new institutions. This time that major cataclysm could do us in." Two years ago, the National Intelligence Council in the United States mapped out what the world might look like in 2020. The only sustainable outcome among several possibilities ranging from an Orwellian society dominated by intrusive security measures to an Islamic superstate sparring with the West, was called the "Davos World" where multiple powers tackled global challenges jointly with nonstate actors. "The Davos World is not likely to happen without more committed U.S. and European leadership," said Robert Hutchings, a former chairman of the National Intelligence Council who oversaw the 2020 project. So far, he added, "no governments or international institutions are taking up the challenge." |
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