Out of the wreckage - by George Monbiot?

The men who run the world are democrats at home and dictators abroad.
They came to power via national elections that possess, at least, the
potential to represent the will of their people. Their citizens can
dismiss them without bloodshed, and challenge their policies in the
expectation that, if enough people join in, they will be obliged to
listen.Internationally they rule by brute force. They and the global
institutions they run exercise greater economic and political control
over  the people of the poor world than its own governments do. But
those people  can no sooner challenge or replace them than the citizens
of the Soviet  Union could vote Stalin out of office. Their global
governance is, by all  the classic political definitions, tyrannical. 

  But while citizens' means of overthrowing this tyranny are limited,
it seems to be creating the conditions for its own destruction. The
US government has recently threatened to dismantle two of the
institutions  that have best served its global interests. 

  Last month President Bush warned the UN security council that
accepting a  new resolution authorising a war with Iraq was its "last
chance" to prove  "its relevance". Earlier, a leaked document from the
Pentagon showed that this final opportunity might already have passed.
The US is planning to build a new generation of nuclear weapons in
order to enhance its ability  to launch a pre-emptive attack. This
policy threatens both the  comprehensive test ban treaty and the
nuclear non-proliferation treaty  two of the principal instruments of
global security - while endangering  the international compact that the
UN exists to sustain. The security  council, which, despite constant
disruption, survived the cold war, is  beginning to look brittle in its
aftermath. 

  The US has also taken a decisive step towards the destruction of the
World  Trade Organisation. The WTO's current trade round collapsed in
Seattle in  1999 because the poor nations perceived that it offered
them nothing,  while granting further rights to the rich world's
corporations. It was  relaunched in Qatar in 2001 only because those
nations were promised two  concessions: they could override the patents
on expensive drugs and import  cheaper copies when public health was
threatened, and they  could expect a  major reduction in the rich
world's agricultural subsidies. At the WTO  meeting in Geneva last
month, the US flatly reneged on both promises.  The Republicans'
victory in the mid-term elections last November was  secured with the
help of $60m from America's big drug firms. This appears  to have been
a straightforward deal: we will buy the elections for you if  you
abandon the concession you made in Qatar. 

  If the US does not back down, the world trade talks will collapse at
the  next ministerial meeting in Mexico in September, just as they did
in  Seattle. If so, then the WTO, as its former director-general has
warned,  will fall apart. Nations will instead resolve their trade
disputes  individually or through regional agreements. Already, by
means of the free  trade agreement of the Americas and the harsh
concessions it is extracting  from other nations as a condition of
receiving aid, the US seems to be  preparing for this possibility. 

  The US, in other words, seems to be ripping up the global rulebook.
As it  does so, those of us who have campaigned against the grotesque
injustices  of the existing world order will quickly discover that a
world with no  institutions is even nastier than a world run by the
wrong ones.  Multilateralism, however inequitable it may be, requires
certain  concessions to other nations. Unilateralism means piracy: the
armed  robbery of the poor by the rich. The difference between today's
world  order and the one for which the US may be preparing is the
difference  between mediated and unmediated force.   But the possible
collapse of the current world order, dangerous as it will  be, also
provides us with the best opportunities for replacing the
world's  unjust and coercive institutions with a fairer and more
democratic means  of global governance.

  By wrecking the multilateral system for the sake of a few short-
term,  corporate interests, the US is, paradoxically, threatening its
own  tyrannical control of other nations. The existing international
agencies, fashioned by means of brutal power  politics at the end of
the second world war, have permitted the US to develop its
international commercial and political interests more effectively than
it could have done alone. The institutions through which it has worked
have provided a semblance of  legitimacy for what has become, in all
but name, the construction of  empire. The end of multilateralism would
force the US, as it is already  beginning to do, to drop this pretence
and frankly admit to its imperial  designs on the rest of the world.
This admission, in turn, forces other  nations to seek to resist it.
Effective resistance would create the  political space in which their
citizens could begin to press for a more  equitable multilateralism. 

  There are several means of contesting the unilateral power of the US,
but  perhaps the most immediate and effective one is to accelerate its
economic  crisis. Already, strategists in China are suggesting that the
yuan should  replace the dollar as east Asia's reserve currency. The
euro has started  to challenge the dollar's position as the
international means of payment  for oil. The dollar's dominance of
world trade, particularly the oil  market, is all that permits the US
Treasury to sustain the nation's  massive deficit, as it can print
inflation-free money for global  circulation. If the global demand for
dollars falls, the value of the  currency will fall with it, and
speculators will shift their assets, with  the result that the US
economy will begin to totter. 

  Of course an economically weakened nation in possession of
overwhelming  military force remains a very dangerous one. Already the
US appears to be  using its military machine to extend its economic
life. But it is not  clear that the American people would permit their
government to attack  other nations without even a semblance of an
international political  process, which is, of course, what the Bush
administration is destroying.   America's assertions of independence
from the rest of the world force the  rest of the world to assert its
independence from America. They permit the  people of the weaker
nations to contemplate the global democratic  revolution that is long
overdue. 

The Guardian Weekly