I think that much of what is going on in this diary is being ignored by the democrats and the people at KOS and that they do so at their peril. The american left needs to wake up and smell the coffee--get with the program guys,
(I quote liberally from a professor of mine but thought it better to change his name to a john doe (John Livingston) - he is not aware of this post.)
A Vision for democrats:
"The realities of global interdependence are challenging traditional principles of national autonomy and sovereignty. Because the international realm is changing so rapidly, democratic citizens must revise their background picture of the world and the place of their nation within it. To do this responsibly, they will need to accept and explore the difficult and unfamiliar concept of a Global Common Good, an idea that when taken seriously, challenges narrow and outdated interpretations of the national interest."
John Livingston
The world is now faced with tremendous social, economic, cultural, political and environmental problems--all of these aspects of the human (and natural) world are under attack in the name of efficiency and growth. Our situation seems increasingly more desperate--at times it does not feel like the human community is capable of surviving for much longer. Most of the time the problems of global warming, the AIDS crisis, rampant individualism, globalized corporate-media monopolies, water pollution and privatization, unconscionable domestic and international inequalities, cultural dissolution and imperialism, and the threat of nuclear and "pre-emptive" wars seem as wildly out of control as they are beyond our ability to influence.
National sovereignty, especially in poor countries, has declined significantly in the face of a global "Empire" run by massive transnational corporations, powerful international financial and trade organizations, and the government/military of United States of America. On these points we are agreed with Hardt & Negri; while the picture of "Empire" they paint might be slightly exaggerated it remains is a horrifying portrait of what the world may look like in ten to twenty years if things continue as trends indicate they will.
The problem we face is that of a world in which the decisions of multinational corporations overrule those of democratically elected governments--national governments and hence global power lies in the hands of these powerful companies. It is clear from this that national governments are incapable, due to the nature of global capitalism, of regulating these private interests.
Global dominance is exerted both directly and implicitly. It is exerted directly in the form of "structural adjustment" policies, WTO rulings and Free-Trade agreements. It can also come implicitly, as when companies like GE, GM and Sony threaten governments with the relocation of domestic production facilities. It is clear that the consequences of such moves are invariably negative for both the country of origin as well as the country of arrival and that this system creates instability and undue hardship for all. Global trends indicate that countries around the world are in a race to the bottom in labor, environmental and other standards. Southern and, increasingly, Northern governments are forced to compete with one another over who can offer the best deal to corporations shopping for new homes.
One thing is clear: it is of the utmost importance that the world not continue along this devastating path. But what solutions can there be to a system that effectively resists national regulation? How can the disparate peoples of the world come together to promote the "general welfare" under a system that is opposed, in almost every sense, to the concept of welfare? The answer is clear: only new forms of democratic regulatory authority, at the global level, can overcome the problems with which the world is faced. Economic life on earth is an inextricably global phenomena--this is an undeniable fact: the food we eat is grown in Latin America, the computers we type on are from Taiwan, the flowers we give our loved ones are from Africa, and the toys we give our children for Christmas are made in China.
It is equally clear that there is no political counterpart to the global economy; hence we lack a true global authority that can effectively regulate global economic activity. While some might argue that the WTO serves this function, it is eminently clear that this institution is set up not for political ends but for furthering the ends of economic power. The WTO, though it poses a great threat to national sovereignty, operates precisely within the framework of such sovereignty insofar as it refuses to take political considerations into account. Thus, we are with Michael Livingston when he argues that, "If we are to create appropriate political institutions for the global economy, we will need new forms of democratic authority, new structures of international law, and new patterns of transnational cooperation capable of regulating global commerce without stifling its wealth creating potential. " We are also with Hardt and Negri in our opposition to local forms of resistance precisely because they preclude the possibility of global governance and regulation: "The strategy of local resistance misidentifies and thus masks the enemy. We are by no means opposed to the globalization of relationships as such ... the enemy, rather, is a specific regime of global relations that we call Empire. More important, this strategy of defending the local is damaging because it obscures and even negates the real alternative and potential for liberation that exist within Empire. " There is no way to return to "earlier, simpler times," we cannot ignore the fact that the global economy is necessarily a totality from which no country can exempt itself.
Among the most frequent criticisms aimed at the non-Marxist left is the factual statement that it is much more capable of criticizing existing conditions than of presenting new ideas about alternative forms of social and political institutions. While there are plenty of reasons for the paucity of writing on the topic we must recognize that it is a great detriment to us that, while we have many things to fight against, we don't really have any clear goal to fight for. The lack of an aim is as fundamentally disorienting as it is practically unhelpful.
It is clear from the failed social experiments of both the right and the left that the world has an overabundance of destructive ideologies capable of both widespread injustice as well as essentially totalitarian forms of violence. As Charles Taylor has argued (in the good company of Hannah Arendt and other contemporary Civic Republicans), "What should have died along with communism is the belief that modern societies can be run on a single principle, whether that of planning under the general will or that of free-market allocations. " Indeed, as we have shown previously, there is just as much of a metaphysical problem with the economic principal of "efficiency" as there is with the socialist ideal of a supremely rational mind capable of planning the totality of economic life. The solution to the problem will not come in the form of one-word answers like "markets" or "states"--the real solution is something that will only come from the combination of global democratic accountability, informed/active citizenry and, most importantly, responsible and appropriate regulation of capital, financial and currency markets with a view towards the protection of non-economic goods (those forgotten things like culture, the environment and community life).
What, then, would an effective institution of global governance look like? I would be one that, first and foremost, would promote the principles of a global mixed economy regulated from the top on down. It would implement, apropos the suggestion of Hardt and Negri, a structure amenable to the political demand that "the existent fact of capitalist production be recognized juridically and that all workers be given the full rights of citizenship. " A Global mixed economy would promote universal environmental and labor standards--effectively ending the "race to the bottom." It would promote sustainable development at all levels of the economy and would redistribute wealth to the poorest nations in an effort to promote sustainable local economies. Tremendous positive political, cultural, environmental and economic "externalities" would flow freely from such policies and the devastating trends of the past could potentially be reversed.
Skeptics (and indeed, we are also among them to a limited extent) will protest against this seemingly utopian fantasy of a stable global democratic government. The world is too chaotic, factionalized and violent, they suggest, for the nations to unite themselves under the collective banner of democratic government in pursuit of the common good. To these objectors the better half of us will reply: The historic example of the European Community, now the European Union, is evidence of the possibility of bitter rivals joining together to promote the cause of peace, democracy, and, as much as possible, social justice. The EU has shown itself to be an effective model for regulating and assisting relatively poor countries (most notably Spain) in the transition to northern style economies within a free trade context. The recent addition of the soviet block countries will hopefully provide more evidence of the possibility for success when rich countries take real political responsibility for their poor neighbors. The stark contrast in political/economic structure between the EU and the FTAA/NAFTA is a compelling argument for gradual emulation of the former at the global level.
Livingston asserts that a global order would have to recognize the need for multiple centers of political power--it would have to be based on something akin to a critically appropriated version of the founding Federalist principals of United States (and hopefully the new EU). As he puts it, "These centers of power, in a global society, should begin at the local level and extend outwards to the county, the state, and the nation, culminating in international centers of authority. To avoid conflicting jurisdictions, a genuine federalism must respect the principle of subsidiarity. Public responsibilities and obligations should be assigned to the lowest level of authority capable of meeting their practical demands. " Such a system of power would allow for effective local, regional, national and global governance. The importance of the Federalist model, as opposed to a global direct democracy is both theoretical and practical. Theoretically it allows for an infinite set of deviations at increasingly local levels while retaining the ability to regulate the global economic forces. Practically, the federal model seems to be the best thing that we could hope to accomplish in a world that is as problematic as our own.
Skeptics will come at us again, saying something to the effect of: "What is government other than the private interests that lobby it? If workers are doing well, it is because unions are well organized; if corporations are doing well, it is because they have more money and more power than everybody else; if the environment is doing well then we are talking about a different planet altogether." Such objections imply that a global government would be just another venue for the powerful minority to exert its will over the unwilling multitudes.
There is much truth in these objections--and precisely for this reason we must confront them head on with the concept of the Global Common Good. This idea is powerful because it divorces itself from the quintessentially modern approach to government, i.e. that of private interests competing with each other for control of public policy. The common good is a radical concept within contemporary political discourse because it seeks to discover and actualize what is good for all citizens in common--a global common good is what is truly good for all of humanity. For a centrally located yet federal model of global governance to effectively operate it would have to work within the framework of this idea, what Livingston calls "an indispensable idea," of the common good.
What is the Common Good? How do we discover it, How do we actualize it--does it really exist or is it pure fantasy?
According to Livingston, "The common good serves as a practical heuristic category, an antecedent unknown whose substantive content we seek to discover through collaborative deliberation and arguments. In publicly reasoning together we are ... attempting to clarify and deepen our understanding of specifically political goods, like justice, liberty and peace, with whose vague but indeterminate contours we are already familiar. "The common good has an objective teleology yet is relative to the situation in which we find ourselves; the process of finding concrete instances of the common good "will resemble the objective relativity that Aristotle attributed to the judgments of practical wisdom. " The common good is teleological insofar as we are seeking a very specific end, viz. the good for all humanity. That the ideals of peace, love, justice, liberty, freedom, community, health and happiness are the specific goods we hold in common and wish to actualize will not be disputed; where we find resistance is in policy proposals for how to effectively promote and realize these goods.
The common good is a "second order heuristic concept" that, while it does not give us an exact blueprint of what to do and where to go, is indispensable as a concept insofar as it "articulates the aim of practical reflection and the normative process through which that aim is achieved. " The common good orients us--it points in the direction we want to travel but does not give us the concrete specifics that are needed to reach it. This is why the necessary pre-requisite of reaching the common good is the virtue of practical wisdom. Practical wisdom within the context of honest dialogue and debate is thus the first and most important step in the search for concrete policies needed to promote the global common good here and now. Practical wisdom has sound public policy as its end and is the result of the integration of three types of knowledge, "factual knowledge of the world as it is and has been; evaluative knowledge of the goods and norms appropriate to political life; deliberative knowledge about the best way to achieve those goods and respect those norms in the concrete situations of explicit communal choice. "
What would "practical wisdom," currently an abstract concept, mean within the context of a dynamic global society? What people would have practical wisdom and how would we know if their analysis was the best to follow? The answer is not so simple as pointing to some individuals in a specific field of study; the tremendous complexity of global society requires something far beyond the scope of the counsel of one or even a group of very wise "old men (or women)." Livingston proposes centers of "integrative study" that would be very much like the collaborative research buildings that the hard sciences enjoy at universities around the world. "Practical wisdom in a dynamic global society will require interdisciplinary collaborative teams deliberately organized to integrate the upper [theoretical] and lower [practical] blades of political reflection in a self-correcting process of learning and doing. " These centers would work off the same principle, bringing together specialists from the different fields of study, with the major difference being that these centers would integrate philosophers, economists, cultural critics, historians, politicians, and other essential members of the academic/political community rather than physicists, chemists and computer scientists (though they might be needed at times for practical insight).
These centers would work with the reciprocal feedback of people on the ground implementing policy; "this essential feedback procedure keeps theologians and philosophers, cultural analysts and critics, policy makers and planners in regular contact and dialogue with actively engaged citizens and local communities. " The results of this sort of social institution would be good in both originary and terminal terms; it would both encourage truly authentic democratic dialogue while promoting practically wise policies at the same time.
The importance to global politics of working within this framework of the common good and of practical wisdom is that it fundamentally alters the existing picture of what politics and political discourse are about. Politics, in its contemporary form, is overwhelmingly thought and talked about in terms of the quintessentially modern understanding of self-interest. Society is conceived of as a place where economic agents, either producers, consumers and merchants or, alternatively, bourgeoisie and proletarian classes, pit their interests against one another. The implicit outlook is that what ultimately drives human progress is not the "free and responsible actions of citizens and statesmen, but impersonal economic laws, the laws of the market, or the dialectical laws of class struggle. " In both of these pictures the operative model is one that precludes the idea of a common teleology and of collective action towards a common good.
All forms of human activity are measured in terms of "productive" output on the economic model. GDP, essentially the "objective" measurement of production and consumption, becomes the central measure of societal welfare in a society that divorces itself from alternative conceptions of the human good (like happiness, health or psychological wellbeing). The issues of environmental destruction, endemic obesity, widespread inequity and an uneducated electorate, because they fall outside of the narrowly defined sphere of production and consumption, become meaningless. The essential point is that these ills are the result of a society that sees its function as marketplace as its only proper function--contemporary society is trapped in a vicious circle. While we should not play down the role of large transnational capital interests in creating the demoralizing conditions under which we live, we also have to recognize that there is something else going on that works to preclude resistance to this system by large numbers of citizens.
The inevitable consequence of this materialist-individualism is a devaluation of both the life of the citizen as well as that of the philosopher--these lives no longer seem to produce anything "tangible" and as a result are thought of as "useless." The political ramifications of this are all-too-clear; in the modern era, "domestic politics was dominated by a spirit of intense partisanship, as opposing political parties emerged to represent the material interests of rival classes and groups. " The explicitly individualism of modernity is the source and continual fuel for this type of thinking. Individualism consumed all aspects of intellectual thought throughout the modern period--the solitary rational ego of Cartesian philosophy has been a great impediment to us for far too long. This Cartesian ego manifests itself again and again throughout the intellectual sources of modernity; in the Lutheran reformation (the individual connection to God); in Hobbes' view of the social contract; in Hume's insistence on the subordination of reason to individual passions; in both the Kantian and Nietzschean picture of true ethical judgments as having the necessary property of autonomous legislation; and especially in Adam Smith's vision of private self-interest as promoting the public good.
These intellectual sources, profound as they might be, have culminated in the person of the "modern liberal individualist." This suspicious creature is everywhere in democratic society--he is the free man who is so alienated from politics that he looks upon the whole concept as if it were a cruel joke. Political society of the sort that we are proposing seems to this person as a kind of devilish plot--it seems like either an unjustified paternalism of as just another way for a small minority to gain enough power to advance its own private interests. With Livingston we oppose this outlook, "The modern emphasis on individual rights, particularly the right to live as one pleases as long as one obeys the existing rules, is inconsistent with any strong notion of public authority. "
The democratized version of philosophical relativism that is so omnipresent in our culture needs to be brought to the altar and slaughtered if we are going to reclaim any conception of politics as a venue for the rational defense of particular courses of action. We oppose this pseudo-philosophy because it is precisely the situation created by excess individualism (i.e. the menace of global capitalism) that requires a strong notion of public authority at the global level.
The idea of the common good is fundamentally opposed to the clichéd philosophy of "on my own" and "just do it" that is so pervasive in contemporary culture. We reject the idea of government as an "open forum for competing interests to pursue their private advantage in the way that is most effective. " Corporate domination is possible only on the basis of widespread ignorance--and this ignorance is precisely a product of the democratized relativism of our day. With Livingston we agree that, "the overriding danger today is that democratic citizens will continue to think and speak of politics on the model of economic activity. When this happens, citizens become private consumers, lobbyists become marketing and public relations experts, and elected officials become rhetorical peddlers whose political services are available to organized interest groups at the right prince. " It is essential to see that the increasingly blurred distinction between economic and civic agents has created the demoralizing political culture in which we live.
What is needed? How can we overcome the tremendous individualism of modernity, endless resources of private corporations, and blatant political alienation of the citizenry? The answer is eminently complex and can only be fully addressed by appealing to the historical precedent of widespread cultural change. We need to move away from the philosophical "emotivism" of contemporary culture (the idea that statements of value are arbitrary and not rationally defensible) towards a philosophy that recognizes the legitimate claims of a teleological good (of the Aristotelian kind) that can be the aim of all practical activity; i.e. the Global Common Good. This shift will not necessarily need to come from a philosophical repudiation of relativism/the concept of authenticity in favor of an Aristotelian metaphysics; indeed, as Charles Taylor argues in The Ethics of Authenticity "Following Nietzsche, I am indeed a truly great philosopher if I remake the table of values. But this means redefining values concerning important questions, not redesigning the menu at McDonald's, or next year's casual fashion. " Thus, it is possible to reshape the "democratized" version of authenticity into something that can be politically meaningful. Despite appearances, the epistemological foundation of contemporary culture is compatible with a strong notion of the common good and of public authority.
In conclusion, if we take seriously the three pillars that we have outlined: the institutional structure of global federalism, strict regulation of a global mixed economy, and a philosophical shift away from modern liberal individualism towards the authentic communitarian/teleological demands of the global common good, then perhaps there is some hope for global peace, liberty and justice within our lifetime. The odds are not in our favor and the goals we seek seem far out of our reach, but it would be both premature and futile to give up now without attempting to change the workings of our world. The abundant historical fact of radical change within short periods of time is testament to the power of ideas to alter the conditions of human life. Faith in the ability of humanity to solve its problems is essential to both an affirmative outlook on our human condition as well as to a successful resolution of the complex problems with which we are collectively faced.