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Introduction: Events

On the bright sunny morning of July 7, 2005, United Nations secretary-general Kofi Annan and I were in London, on our way to Scotland for the Gleneagles G8 summit. The gathering of the Western world’s biggest economies plus Russia was expected to commit to an ambitious plan of international cooperation to halve global poverty by 2015 and tackle climate change. A strong commitment at Gleneagles would turn the whole international mood. I had just stepped down from the UN’s top development job, administering the United Nations Development Program (UNDP), to become Annan’s chief of staff, so I was as invested as anyone in trying to get the world to cooperate for global progress. Before we left our London hotel, I told a BBC interviewer that this was going to be a good day for international development, a chance to get the world back on track after Iraq and 9/11.

On the drive to Heathrow, I noticed that the Scotland Yard protection officer seated up front was growing increasingly agitated. He pressed one hand against an earpiece and used the other to muffle whispers into his cell phone. When we arrived at the airport, he raced us to a small government jet and seemed to relax only when we were airborne. Forty minutes later we landed in Scotland, and the officer turned to Annan. Bombs had gone off in London that morning, he said. Fifty-two commuters, we would later learn, had lost their lives as a result of coordinated terrorist attacks on London’s public transport system.

Acts of violence big and small have sent the affairs of nations in new directions. The 1914 assassination of Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand set off World War I; the 9/11 attacks prompted controversial wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Now, I feared, it seemed to be happening again.

My life as a journalist, political consultant, international official and later British minister had given me plenty of opportunity to observe the unpredictability of international events. I had seen close up the strange interplay between the big macro trends in world affairs and the role played by accident and personality. As a journalist I had covered a turbulent period in British politics as Margaret Thatcher ascended to power, and as a political adviser I seemed to be caught up in nearly every democratic revolution from the mid-1980s to the mid-1990s, from the Philippines to Peru to Russia. I became a senior official at the World Bank just as the markets were roiled by financial crisis and the institution was under siege from antiglobalization activists. I was the head of UNDP and then Kofi Annan’s right hand in the years when the UN was straining to keep up with what was happening all around it. These positions meant that I often had a front-row seat for witnessing the turning points in the move from the divided world of the Cold War to a freer, faster, but so far less managed future.

At Gleneagles that day the macro, the accidental, and the personal were all on display. Our host, British prime minister Tony Blair, was hoping that Gleneagles could rehabilitate him with progressive opinion at home, which he had lost after siding with the United States in the Iraq War. The so-called development community—the nongovernmental organizations and agencies, development ministries, and developing countries themselves—was hoping that all the G8 countries would commit to do what Europe had already pledged to do: increase their development assistance to poor countries to 0.7 percent of their gross domestic product (GDP) by 2012. Many of us also hoped that in the summit’s later stages, when prominent developing country leaders joined, we could achieve breakthroughs on climate change and trade.

For too long the global discussion had been mired in a pessimistic and defensive agenda addressing terrorism and Iraq. Back in 2000 trade, technology, economics, and social change had seemed to be driving governments everywhere into one another’s laps, and global understanding and cooperation had begun to take root. Like it or not, it had seemed then, we had to find ways to address our shared problems. Poverty, global markets, and the spread of disease across borders (in an era of mass air travel) had become pressing issues everywhere. The increasingly urgent problem of climate change demonstrated that we were all in the small same lifeboat: if one side rocked it, through damaging carbon emissions, it put us all at risk.

Globalization—its threats and its opportunities—had come to dominate the political conversation. It seemed too powerful a force for politicians, whatever their political stripe, to resist. The new president in Washington, George W. Bush, initially appeared not to contradict the logic of global integration, and of America’s role. In his inaugural address on January 21, 2001, he told the American people: “The enemies of liberty and our country should make no mistake: America remains engaged in the world by history and by choice, shaping a balance of power that favors freedom.”¹

I thought globalization was becoming the fundamental issue that would replace class and religion in politics. You would be for it or against it, depending on your economic interests. A businessman might support it for the trade opportunities it presented; a consumer might enjoy the cheaper goods it afforded; but a blue-collar worker and a small farmer might feel threatened by its disruptions as it moved their jobs elsewhere. The media commentary on the subject was interminable: in 1981 an electronic database of eight thousand newspapers contained just two references to globalization; in 2001 the figure had risen to more than fifty-seven thousand; then after 9/11 commentation took fright and it trailed off for a time.² In the West, globalization meant dislocation, as existing jobs were lost to foreign competition, but it also meant a higher standard of living, as consumers got better value from Chinese imports at Wal-Mart and other big stores, and as the comparative advantages of capital, labor, and innovation played out across the global economy.

Most participants in the global debate argued that this dynamic restructuring of the global economy, as long as it was well managed and well governed, could leave most people around the world better off. But it would have to be managed, they acknowledged, because change could not be left to the hidden hands of markets. Without regulation, nationalist political reactions might resist globalization by playing on the unfairness and human costs of arbitrary change. During earlier periods, long before the ungainly term globalization was first used in a European Commission document in 1979, the integration of world trade had blossomed.³ But each time a political backlash had reversed it. For a brief period before World War I, international trade’s share of global GDP was higher than it would be in 2000. But then nationalism and protectionism set in, and an assassination in a Sarajevo square ignited war.

In 2005 those of us who were passionate about good international public policy seemed to have everything to play for again. The world was more integrated than ever, yet less governed. Dramatic economic forces were redrawing the political landscape, in a vacuum of politics and public policy at the global level. To be sure, figuring out how any system of international policy or regulation would work is difficult, but the mantra of “leave it to the market” gave business a dangerously free hand to take the world economy anywhere it wanted. Momentum was the result of millions of disconnected actions. Chinese workers and entrepreneurs scrabbled out of poverty by working longer and harder for less money than others; their equivalents in Vietnam, Ghana, and Mexico scrambled to undercut them by working for even less; and CEOs in corporate suites responded to the free-for-all by dispersing investment, manufacturing, and assembly across the world in a quest for market share and comparative advantage.

This dynamic change that benefited worker and consumer alike would have been impossible if politicians and planners had protected the cozy economic status quo of nations’ vested interests. International capitalism, with its disruptive power, was a critical agent of change. But such undirected change was so evidently unfair and painful to so many, who lost jobs and enterprises, that some way of managing these issues at a global level seemed necessary.

The failure to set up a framework for the fair management of global affairs invited a grassroots rejection of globalization, which seemed to be introducing insecurity into everyone’s life. In September 1999 in Seattle, trade ministers tried to begin negotiating a new world trade agreement, but violent demonstrations disrupted their meeting. It was a wake-up call. Not everybody, apparently, viewed globalization as a benign force for greater prosperity and international cooperation. Globalization had to be managed better, or the backlash against it would grow.

Two years later, on September 10, 2001, the pollster Andy Kohut and his colleagues visited me in my office at the UNDP in New York. They were preparing to go out into the field to take a poll on international attitudes toward America. We agreed that despite Seattle they would likely uncover increasingly benign views. Despite skepticism toward the new president, the longer-term trend seemed clear: trade and information were flowing through porous modern borders, and the world was growing inexorably closer. This was going to be a sink-or-swim-together century.

In his subsequent book America Against the World, Kohut recalls our conversation that day, only hours before the attack on the World Trade Center changed the world.

From an office overlooking UN headquarters with the New York skyline as a backdrop, we wondered aloud whether any conceivable event might radically change the world political landscape as had the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. Could anything supplant globalization as the top international issue in the foreseeable future? We agreed, after brief reflection, that no such cataclysmic change was on the horizon. Of course we could not have been more wrong. Literally overnight, on September 11, the terrorist attacks on the towers of the World Trade Center and the Pentagon changed the world as dramatically as it was changed on the event of our first international polling when the Iron Curtain rose unexpectedly.⁴

Later attacks in London, Madrid, and Bali did not have the same global public aftershock but reinforced a growing view that terrorism now stalked the world. September 11 changed everything. The warning in Bush’s State of the Union address had been fulfilled: America would engage with the world, not least to defend itself. Globalization suddenly seemed to have a dark underside. International travel had increased, making it normal for young Saudi students, in the case of 9/11, to take courses in America—and rendering the West vulnerable. Globalization was moreover not just the enabler but in some ways the cause. The consumerism spread by Western commercial culture was a source of provocation to conservatives everywhere. The most extreme form that that reaction took was terrorism.

After both 9/11 and London’s 7/7, I was struck by what might have been. On September 11, 2001, a senior Cuban official was visiting me at my New York office; we stood at the window, despairingly watching smoke rise from the site of the Twin Towers; then we too had to evacuate, in case the UN was the next target. Shaken, the Cuban observed that that day everybody sympathized with America and that everybody had to reach out to help. The French newspaper Le Monde echoed this sentiment a day later with its headline: “We Are All Americans.”

Four years later at Gleneagles, the G8 leaders, by now hardened by earlier terrorist experiences, reacted swiftly and unequivocally to the London attacks, expressing solidarity with Tony Blair. Amidst the tragedy, it was one of Blair’s best moments. A day later Annan and I found him in his shirtsleeves in the Gleneagles Hotel garden.

Leisurely bilateral talks had been scheduled for the hotel’s spacious Victorian reception rooms, but because Blair had to rush to London to rally a shocked Britain, then dash back to keep the summit on track, the meetings had been moved to the garden so that Blair could move more quickly between the groups. If he had his way, Blair said, terrorists would not succeed in distracting the meeting from laying out the vital groundwork for an assault on global poverty. In the gardens, meeting rooms, and corridors, the brave buzz was that terrorists would not win. But in a way they already had.

Ah, what might have been. Blair had broken the rules of this stuffy club of world leaders and had welcomed to Gleneagles the entertainers Bono and Bob Geldof, of the development lobby’s celebrity arm. In truth the G8 leaders were less and less representative of the global economy. Most of Blair’s peers exhibited little real sympathy for the big cause of global poverty. Apart from the development leaders, his allies at Gleneagles were his official guests, like Annan and South African president Thabo Mbeki. Otherwise organizations like Oxfam and coalitions against third world debt and the destruction of rain forests appeared to speak for the wider world. Power was tangibly moving away from the state level, from the mostly white men of the old G8, to a newer, more diverse global leadership.

I recall Annan sitting at the foot of a Gleneagles hotel bed as Bob Geldof leaned over him and Bono squatted in front of him. Both had built reputations as champions of antipoverty issues on top of careers as rock stars. Richard Curtis, the filmmaker and master of modern British romantic comedies (the man who has given Hugh Grant his best lines), hung back diffidently. As Geldof blustered on about the importance of not letting down “his people”—meaning the huge number of fans who had attended Make Poverty History rock concerts before the meeting—Bono, always the more practical, honed in on the possible. Implausibly, this unofficial trio, as much as the elected leaders, could claim to have a mandate from their fans and supporters to advocate for the poor.

Later, I saw the animated tag team of Geldof and Bono ambush a bemused President Jacques Chirac of France, who had been blocking concessions on European agriculture that would allow cheap food imports from developing countries that might hurt French farmers. As I went by, Geldof warned Chirac of a backlash if he held out against Geldof’s French rock fans. Before an earlier G8 summit in France, I had irritated Chirac by pointing out that the daily European Union subsidy for one European cow was three times the size of the dollar a day, or less, that 1.2 billion people in the world survived on. But at Gleneagles, as before, not even pop stars could move him.

Agriculture might account for only about 2 percent of French employment,⁵ but it remained a vital staple of national life and culture. Chirac was not budging. And his stand reflected the instinctive resistance of billions of global citizens to a helter-skelter integration that was throwing people together because it was good economics, without regard for how people chose to live their lives. While Blair was in London handling the aftermath of the terrorist attacks, Chirac took advantage of his absence to bully the British Foreign Office official who was standing in for him to limit discussion of the subject.

For all the celebrity lobbying, public concern, and anxious efforts of international development officials like myself, the world leaders at Gleneagles frankly lacked the will and imagination to summon up collaborative international action. They did promise more aid, pledging to meet an ambitious target over the following seven years, but this promise turned out to be empty for nearly everyone but the British hosts. Poverty could wait another day. Nor did they move on trade and the environment. Both are important to poverty reduction because one offers jobs and a foot in the door of the global economy and the other secures the forests and lands that are the basis of many of the poor’s meager assets.

In a divided and distracted world, terrorists were not the only ones who stopped global integration. And in that sense the tragedy of 7/7 was not in the same league as other acts of political violence. It did not start a war or even depress the ambition of the Gleneagles summit. Indeed, leaders rallied to say the right things about standing together and not allowing terrorists to deflect them from their agenda. Rather, Gleneagles confirmed the disconcerting truth that those who had the power to make globalization work did not have the courage to do so, even as those who hated it were growing in their resistance. And the resisters had many faces. They were not just brutally violent bombers; they were also thoughtful and decent politicians, the leaders of social protest movements worldwide, academics, activists, and voters.

The battle lines were being drawn between the Globalists, who seemed to take for granted the inevitability of their eventual triumph, and the Nationalists, who, losing control over their own lives and economic fortunes, were preparing to fight back. Gleneagles was a skirmish. The longer war is still under way.

Gleneagles was a tableau of the new political actors. Countries that barely a generation before had been objects of sympathy as they apparently languished in unending poverty were prying power from the hands of the old Western political establishment. The development and environmental communities and their celebrity leaders, representing causes rather than countries, had also found their way to the table. But this exuberant and chaotic politics was being played out against the grim backdrop of terrorism, and it was not always played with courage and vision. Leaders, as creatures of their voters, did not often envision a world of shared purpose and mutual responsibilities. Factions not vision ruled, as the world began to grapple with life after the all-powerful nation-state.

This book attempts to explain why politics is migrating beyond the gray confines of national parliaments and cabinets to a global bazaar where rock stars may conduct deals on global debt with bankers and dictators and where emerging powers like China and India will seek to push aside former colonizers as they set up their stalls. The official platform for much of this pageant is the creaking boards of the United Nations, whose strained bureaucratic processes pale beside the pageant’s vitality and activism.

For globalization is likely to become the twenty-first century’s most local and most perennial political issue. It is not going to leave us alone. It has already thrown us together and made us dependent on one another for some common government of a shared world. But if we fail to recognize the profundity of this change, we will fail to equip ourselves with the global arrangements that might enable us to handle these shared responsibilities. As it stands now, national politics in much of the world is turning its back on the future, unable to embrace the concept that some parts of national power will have to be pooled with that of global neighbors.

The worldwide economic crisis that began in 2008 demonstrated that without effective global institutions to manage the fallout and regulate the financial sector, big fortunes as well as the small investor and the pensioner from the United States to China would be at risk. And for all of us, the crisis hit very close to home, while the solutions were beyond the reach of individual nations’ politicians.

The second great crisis of globalization after terrorism was about money. That was appropriate: economics had become the primary engine and driving idea of global integration. It is generally agreed that financial markets must be prevented from ever again threatening global stability and prosperity. But now that the financial crisis has receded, even this apparently straightforward objective of shared economic security has proved elusive. Bankers are back to notching up profits and are largely resisting efforts to regulate their business. But their rescue, and that of the economies they threw into recession in 2008, has left deep political scars. Their follies cost too many jobs on Main Street.

Political leaders have begun to understand the vulnerability and exposure that people feel when they no longer control the fate of their jobs and communities and cannot understand who does. The hidden hand of the market seems to have returned in a manner that Karl Marx would recognize. In this book I describe people struggling to restore control over their lives, and to find structures of accountability, local and global, that work when the defenses of national politics are breached. They, far more than the politicians, have had the courage to seize this logic and fashion global solutions.

Hence the extraordinary rise of NGOs and civil society more broadly. Civil society figures are usually much more passionate and committed and inspirational in their political ambitions than old-style politicians. More Britons donate to Oxfam than belong to the leading political parties. People are attracted by global causes to which their political leaders often seem indifferent. From these early traces may emerge global political culture—the shared values of a new politics.

But the state is not dead—far from it. In our more crowded world with finite resources, the scramble to control energy and other commodities will only grow more intense. Winning this fight will require state power as well as commercial power. And the coming model of capitalism may not be the Western free market, which stumbled so badly during the global financial crisis, but the state-allied Asian one, which weathered it much better. China, to secure mineral and oil concessions in Africa, exerts diplomatic as well as commercial power. Many believe that states will soon go to war with one another over access to fresh water. Controlling the natural resources that feed our industrial economies will, for better or worse, require the exercise of state as well as commercial power.

Globalization throws up so many problems that are beyond the reach of states alone to solve; yet far from withering, the state has gained a new rationale, both as the bulwark of the individual against disconcerting and dislocating global change and as the ally of its business sector in winning economic advantage in a competitive world.

Perhaps the real surprise in the pages that follow is the resilience rather than the disappearance of the old national political structures. In my fifty-something lifetime, global population has more than doubled; more people now live in cities than were alive when I was born. It is a crowded teeming world, younger than ever and more connected than ever. Yet despite this global revolution old structures— the Chinese Communist Party, the American Congress, and Britain’s hidebound political system—persist relatively unchanged. The official world has proven resilient. My father, dead for many years, would recognize most of the official institutions that are still deemed to matter. Beyond their walls the world is utterly different, but somehow they have kept afloat amid the tumult, bobbing atop a teeming younger urbanized world. Somehow tradition has held on in unlikely places.

A career of observing and sometimes participating in a small way in these global changes has left me wary of making predictions. I have witnessed democratic revolutions, from bold initial hopes to the steady insidious return of the old order. I’ve seen brave attempts to restructure global institutions batted down by government representatives who prefer the status quo. And above all I have heard warnings that proved false: the Soviet Union will dominate a failing United States; America is in a state of imperial overstretch; Japan will rise to economic hegemony in the 1980s. (Japan subsequently suffered the longest economic stagnation of modern times.) In the 1990s many believed we had arrived at all the economic answers. The market had triumphed and that was the end of the matter.

Hubris is perhaps the inevitable companion of such revolutionary times. But we should not be driven by today’s predictions of the rise of China to parity or more with the United States, or of the triumph of Asia and its economy at the expense of the West. What is certain is that revolutionary change will continue, bringing upsets and surprises and dashed predictions. For example, while Asia will continue to grow, it will likely also see its fair share of political and environmental conflict. Its full emergence may have to await the resolution of problems closer to home. What we need is a system of international institutions that has the strength and flexibility to handle the unexpected and ensure that change is managed peacefully. Such institutions would allow Asian countries a greater global role as they are ready and in the meantime bring help to bear on Asia’s local problems.

While I argue for building the laws and institutions of a new global order that can manage the volcanic disputes that must lie ahead, I am wary then of predictions about the rise or fall of particular countries or even final solutions to the global problems crowding in on us.

One cannot make the case for such changes without attaching them to a wider purpose. At the close of the book I call for a global contract that builds on the emerging common values of solidarity and compassion in a shared world. We must harness globalization to a vision of bringing benefit to all, at least a basic threshold of human security, well-being, and opportunity. We must demonstrate that global governance can deliver economic fairness between nations; security for people from overbearing states; and agreed rules for sharing our finite natural resources, and above all the processes to manage global changes.

This book is finally about the pioneers, many of them friends, who have sought with mixed success to build a platform upon which we can peacefully resolve disputes and build a more just world. But it is an impatient book because if we insist on prevaricating and hiding behind national systems, we risk immolation. We need to get on with it.

Contents

MARK MALLOCH-BROWN

The Unfinished Global Revolution

Introduction: Events