26 July - 1 August 2001
Issue No.544
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Al-Ahram Weekly Online 26 July - 1 August 2001 Issue No.544 |
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Globally, a poor performance
Gamil Mattar* explores the flip side of hegemony
Many contemporary problems have grown too complex for world leaders to handle alone. In fact, so technical and intricate are some of these problems that world leaders, who of course are no specialists, find them difficult to grasp, let alone resolve. Fortunately, they have come up with a better means to deal with complex issues: summits.
Your average Western European head of state, for example, will participate in at least eight multilateral gatherings a year. He will attend, perhaps, two NATO summits, two to four EU summits, a G-8 summit, and another summit or two with leaders from Asian or Latin American countries. The same, give or take a few, applies to the US president.
This mania for summit diplomacy, together with the complexities surrounding various contemporary global issues, tends to generate the impression of crisis. It suggests icebergs with much more below their tips, threats looming that are difficult for the ordinary man in the street to detect, but that are perfectly apparent to world leaders.
In part, at least, this is because the word "summit" has become associated in people's minds with international tension. For veteran politicians, experience with summits began in World War II, and imaginations are still fired by such names as Yalta, Potsdam, Tehran and Cairo -- cities linked in history books with the top-level meetings that brought about the settlements in that war. History books, however, do not suggest that the political powerhouses at those meetings had assembled because international problems were too complex and elusive for them to handle alone. Clearly, things have changed today, with globalisation, rapid technological advancements, the astounding gap between rich and poor, the collapse of value systems, the rise of the extreme right, culture clashes and many other issues that have landed on world leaders' plates. Heads of state now have to contend with certain issues that have somehow managed to escape the halls of academia and impose themselves on the international agenda, issues that would never have occurred to today's world leaders, and certainly not to their predecessors.
The successes -- or failures -- of the recent summits of the rich, particularly the Okinawa and Genoa summits, reveal, perhaps more clearly than ever before, that the US is having some serious problems with globalisation. The energetic helmsman and tireless proselytiser of this process suddenly seems to have lost some of its steam. These summits revealed that western nations, in general, are steadily becoming slacker in fulfilling their pledges to the poor and in meeting their commitments with regard to environmental safety, disarmament, cooperation to promote international and regional peace and stability, global economic reform and the elimination of epidemic diseases. One is particularly struck by the challenge Bush flung North American forests and water resources on behalf of big industry. Nor is it comforting that, also in the past year, the US has started manoeuvring once more to abolish the 1972 agreement on antiballistic missile reductions. These and other actions all point toward the growing militancy of US policy, both domestically and externally.
I always suspect that conferences have a primary goal: to numb people with statements. The more serious and complex the crisis, the more summits are held and the more we are inundated with statements issuing from them. Observers advise us to keep track of these statements and compare them periodically. But I do not believe that summits are designed principally to raise popular awareness of momentous issues or to mobilise the public after having drummed up mass support through a media campaign. Organising a single meeting costs an exorbitant amount; indeed, the budget would probably suffice to solve at least one of the major problems world leaders meet to discuss.
With the growth and increasing activity of NGOs opposed to globalisation, furthermore, the summit mystique has lost its hold on the public. Protests of increasing force, confidence and organisational sophistication have aborted a summit in Seattle, marred proceedings in Prague, Melbourne, Gutenberg and Salzburg, and threatened the security, indeed the very goals, of the summit meeting in Genoa. The demonstrators who gathered in Genoa represent more than 700 NGOs and other groups, a phenomenon unparalleled since the mass demonstrations against the US war in Vietnam in the 1960s.
It must be said that circumstances could not be worse for the G-7 countries. The global economy is extremely fragile and threatens to become even more so if the leaders who met in Genoa fail to take the necessary measures, quickly. Their task is more difficult than many imagine. The rise in the value of the dollar and the concomitant fear of its sudden collapse, the precipitous decline in the US's economic growth rate (from five per cent last year to 1.2 per cent this year), the gradual slowdown in the European economy and the ongoing recession in Japan are all indicators and harbingers of gloom. No major economy is strong enough to pull the rest up, yet the participants in Genoa were still at each other's throats, each holding the rest responsible for the economic crisis and other global problems as well. Meanwhile, the Bush administration is falling prey to a new breed of cold warriors pushing for the reassertion of US global hegemony through military escalation and the undermining of rival influences in the spheres it considers vital to its national interests.
Aggravating these circumstances are serial crises elsewhere around the world. South and Central America are reeling under the impact of a string of economic collapses, from Argentina (unable to pay off its debts despite the visit of miracle worker Domingo Cavallo) to Brazil with its plummeting currency and economic deterioration, and Mexico in the midst of another investment panic. These intricately related economic disasters, along with crises elsewhere, are ricocheting throughout the global economy.
In the Middle East, Ariel Sharon has set the region aflame with a policy of state terrorism matched since the end of the colonial era only by the horrors inflicted by Milosevic on Bosnia, Croatia and Kosovo. Sharon wants the Genoa summit to condemn the PA, and it appears that he has found some allies within the cabinet of Italian Prime Minister Berlusconi, who have overstepped the bounds of their office in their willingness to play Israel's game.
I pity the citizens of Genoa, recovering from the summit. Eight powerful heads of state and their staff were in town, and to protect them were a force of over 20,000 soldiers and a naval fleet complete with aircraft carrier. To protest their policies, over 100,000 anti-globalisation activists flooded in from all over the world.
What a quandary Italy was in. It took measures to keep down the numbers of protestors coming into the country. At the same time, for those who did manage to get in, and for the increasingly desperate poor nations, the Italian government did its best to project a sympathetic image. It invited the leaders of poor and developing nations and international figures respected by the poor to attend: the guest list included the presidents of Nigeria, South Africa and Mali, the prime minister of Bangladesh, as well as Mandela, Mary Robinson and Amartya Sen along with other Nobel Prize winners.
Ironically, these attempts suggest, more than anything else, that the leaders of the world's richest nations have not fully understood all the aspects of the current global crisis. They have failed to grasp the flip side of hegemony. Up there at the summit, they giggled at Tony Blair's snide condemnation of the demonstrators representing international NGOs and large segments of world public opinion as the "globalisation circus." And they are still chuckling at the witty Salzburg summit participant who remarked that the demonstrators were "more globalised than we are." Sadly, neither jokes nor the representatives of the world's poor -- the victims of globalisation -- will solve the problems inherent in globalisation, or the injustices arising from the manipulation of that process to serve the interests of a very few.
* The writer is director of the Cairo-based Arab Centre for Development and Futuristic Research.
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