The Age of Consent. George Monbiot
third major problem with democracy is that a system capable of restraining the oppressor will also be capable of restraining the oppressed. If we are to prevent the rich and powerful from wrecking our lives, we require a government big enough to sit on them; but a government big enough to sit on them will also be big enough to sit on us. Conversely, if the system is sufficiently responsive to the will of the oppressed, it may also be responsive to the will of the oppressor. This, of course, is the great conflict at the heart of all democratic systems, and the one with which many of those in the movement have been rightly concerned. While states, over the past few years, have become ever more willing to regulate their citizens, they have become ever less willing to regulate the corporations. This is one of the problems this book seeks to address.
But while democracy has evident defects, it also possesses two great attributes. The first is that it is the only political system which contains the potential for its own improvement. We can overthrow our representatives without having to kill them. To a lesser extent, we can affect their behaviour while they remain in office. Democracy can be understood as a self-refining experiment in collective action.
The second is that democracy has the potential to be politically engaging. The more politically active citizens become, the more they are able to affect the way the state is run. The more success they encounter in changing the state, the more likely they are to remain politically active. Unhappily, this process appears to have gone into reverse in many democratic countries. As the competing parties offer ever less political choice (partly as a result of the constraints introduced by the migration of power to the global sphere), citizens are alienated from government, which leads, in turn, to a further withdrawal of the government from the people. A system which should be politically centripetal has instead become centrifugal.
The argument for democracy at the national level then seems to be – if not exactly robust – more compelling than the argument for any other system, or, for that matter, the absence of a system. But if we can – as most people do – agree that democracy is the best way to run a nation, it is hard to think of any reason why it should not be the best way to run the world. Indeed, it is surely demonstrable that many of the most pressing global and international problems arise from an absence of global and international democracy. The way in which states engage with each other is much closer to the anarchist model than the democratic one. The US government, like that of other superpowers before it, has seized the domestic mandate provided by its people (the ‘autonomous community’) to assert an international authority to rule the world. It expands its dominion – just like any powerful and well-armed community in the anarchist model – by means of violence and expropriation, in those parts of the world which do not form an alliance with it against lesser powers, succumb meekly to its demands, or successfully resist it with violence of their own. The democratic restraints within a state, in other words, do not prevent it from attacking weaker ones.
There are also, as this manifesto has argued, certain issues which affect humanity as a whole, and yet whose resolution is brokered by nation states. This introduces a number of problems. The first is that it permits powerful governments dominated by special interests to impose their will on the rest of the world. In some cases those governments are led by their domestic concerns to perceive a circumstance which is generally disastrous for humanity to be to their advantage. An administration which owes its election to the funds provided by oil companies, for example, will encourage the increasing use of fossil fuel.
The second problem with this brokerage of global issues by nation states is that even if all governments had an equal voice, our ability to affect their decisions is muted. Except in wartime, global and international issues seldom feature among the priorities of a domestic electorate. As national governments, we elect them, quite rightly, to tackle national issues. Without a separate process for determining what our response to a global issue may be, even a government with the best intentions has no effective means of assessing and representing the national will. This problem is commonly described as ‘photocopy democracy’. A democratic decision is taken, to elect a particular government. That government then mandates an agency, such as a government department, to set certain policies. That agency then delegates people to represent those policies at the international level. With each ‘copy’, democracy becomes greyer and harder to decipher. This can be partly addressed through referenda, but the government still acts as a filter between us and the mediation of global policy. Moreover, we cannot guarantee that other governments would have polled their citizens. Governments which have consulted their people can be outvoted by governments which have not.
A third problem is that brokerage by nation states diminishes the sense that we are all in this together. It encourages us to treat a problem affecting everyone on earth as a matter of national self-interest, and reduces our appreciation of our common humanity. Just as importantly, the lack of democracy at the global level leads to a lack of choice at the national level. National governments can seek to act as if they were free to respond to the will of their people, but they will be relentlessly dragged back to the set of policies imposed (by means I will explain in Chapters 4, 5 and 6) by those who possess global and international power. Without a global transformation, national transformations are impossible.
CHAPTER 3 A Global Democratic Revolution The Case Against Hopeless Realism
Almost everyone who contests the way the world is run is at least vaguely aware of the problem of the migration of power to a realm in which there is no democratic control. Much of the effort of the democrats within the global justice movement has been devoted to addressing it. These people belong to two camps. The first consists of those who have sought to re-democratize politics by withdrawing them from the sphere (the global and international) in which there is no democracy and returning them to the sphere (the national and local) in which we appear to retain some political control. They see globalization as the problem, and believe that the re-invigoration of domestic democracy depends on its containment or reversal. The second consists of those who seek, by one means or another, to democratize globalization.
The most widespread and visible manifestation of the first approach is the strategy known as ‘localization’. A book of this title has been published by the trade theorist Colin Hines.24 His proposals, or something like them, have been adopted as policy by several national green parties. Hines points out that globalization forces workers in different countries into destructive competition, prevents nation states and citizens from controlling their own economies and helps the rich to become richer, while further impoverishing the poor. The trend of globalization, he suggests, should be ‘reversed’ by ‘discriminating in favour of the local’ by means of protectionist barriers. Imports should gradually be reduced, until every country produces ‘as much of their food, goods and services as they can’. New trade rules must be introduced, forbidding states to ‘pass laws…that diminish local control of industry and services’, and a new investment treaty would ensure that countries are ‘prohibited from treating foreign investors as favourably as domestic investors’.25 All states would be forced by international law to introduce the same labour standards.
While some of the measures he proposes are, individually, arguable, his objectives are both contradictory and unjust. There is an argument for permitting the poorest nations to protect their economies against certain imports, in order to incubate their own industries. This, as Chapter 6 will show, was how almost all the countries which are rich today first developed. There is no argument founded on justice for permitting the rich nations to do so. If all nations were to protect their economies, the wealth of the rich ones might be diminished, but the poverty of the poor ones would not. We would, if we followed his prescriptions, lock the poor world into destitution. Trade is, at present, an ineffective means of transferring wealth between nations, but it has massive distributive