Al-Ahram Weekly 14 - 20 September 2000 Issue No. 499
Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875

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A new one for Newton

By Gamil Mattar

The Millennium Summit brought together, in a single building, and a single city, world rulers who govern the destiny of six billion people. This is that elusive political elite whose will determines whether peace or war prevails, whether the standards of living of billions should rise or fall, whether the future of mankind is to bring joy or misery. They include tyrants, benevolent despots and sincere believers in democracy; those who were popularly elected and those who forced themselves on their people and on this unique gathering alike.

Among the most remarkable features of the summit were: the absence of a specific agenda; the fact that foreign ministers made no prior preparations; and the presence of all the Arabs, who turned out in full force. These features should strike us, though they may escape the attention of observers elsewhere. They are significant because Arab decision-makers have gone hoarse from their incessant and futile appeals for an Arab summit, in spite of the fact that the current problems facing the Arab world are far more urgent to the Arab peoples than many of the issues preoccupying the summit in New York. In fact, some Arab and Muslim leaders went to the summit specifically to address "global" problems that are of no immediate or vital consequence to Arab and Muslim societies.

If there was no set agenda for the summit, Secretary-General Kofi Annan still hoped participants would discuss at least four goals to be reached before 2010. These are: to cut the number of the world's poorest in half; to reduce the numbers of people with no access to clean water by the same ratio; to stop the spread of AIDS; and, finally, to make primary education available to every child in the world. Other leaders also wanted to bring their own issues before the gathering. Mohamed Khatemi, for example, presented Iran's view on the "clash of civilisations," proposing a "dialogue among civilisations" as an alternative conceptual approach to defusing certain international tensions. Tony Blair drew the participants' attention to the crisis facing UN peacekeeping forces and relevant UN agencies in general as a result of the tremendous pressures placed on them by armed conflict worldwide.

The UN and the nations that steer the globalisation process also saw the summit as an opportunity to hold a week-long seminar on the state of the world. The discussions, attended by 1,500 delegates representing NGOs, national governments, UN organisations and TNCs, focused on everything taking place in the name of globalisation. Participants discussed the potential impact of advances in technology, such as the genetic revolution, the "conscience" of computers and the extent to which developing nations have benefited from new discoveries in information technology. Strengthening the process of globalisation may not have been the primary (albeit undeclared) aim of the Millennium Summit, but the objective had been lodged foremost in the participants' minds since the idea of holding the summit was first mooted -- that much was clear.

Globalisation is no longer a question of choice. People can choose to discuss it or not to discuss it, but it still imposes itself. The world now has a constitution that reflects a body of universal principles, a constitution made up of a collection of international treaties and conventions that have come into being over the past 10 years. In Vienna, a new charter for human rights was born. In Peking, the contours of an unprecedented convention on the rights of women were drawn. Copenhagen gave rise to a convention on development under globalisation, generating a new framework and prescriptions for development different from those which prevailed in the 1960s.

It was in Geneva that years of dialogue yielded a set of strict rules governing freedom of commerce and intellectual property rights, affirming the ascendancy of the philosophies of the market economy and the survival of the fittest. In the 1990s, the WTO joined the IMF and the World Bank in creating a trilogy that would intensify the onslaught of pro-globalisation forces, which, indeed, have already availed themselves expertly of these organisations to push for privatisation and economic deregulation so as to enable capital, and specifically foreign capital, to become a counterweight to national governments. Clearly, the international treaties that have come to form the global constitution now have a mighty strike force in the form of the three gargantuan economic organisations.

It appears that the UN General Secretariat, too, has decided to throw its weight behind globalisation, assuming a role no less significant than that of the WTO-World Bank-IMF phalanx. In the weeks leading up to the summit, the General Secretariat invited representatives of major TNCs to come to New York to discuss issues that lie at the heart of the international organisation's political and administrative work. The TNC representatives discussed problems facing their workers and the possibility of financing certain international activities, such as peacekeeping, which do not necessarily offer a profit incentive; the UN went one better, and proposed the notion of a mutually binding contract between itself and the TNCs. This is the first time that such companies have been given a voice in the functions of the UN and the possible regulation of international disputes.

Also invited were delegations representing the world's religions, national parliaments and workers' organisations, as well as a large host of intellectuals. Never before has globalisation been given such impetus, and on such a vast scale. If the UN can be said to have scored a major achievement over the past years, that is its success in organising this huge manifestation in favour of globalisation, in the interest of assuaging the anger over the growing gap between the world's richest -- peoples and nations -- and its poorest.

Kofi Annan aptly summarised the importance the UN attaches to promoting globalisation when he suggested that those who doubt the appropriateness and value of globalisation today are destined to meet the same fate as those who viewed the laws of gravity as just so much superstition.

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