I would like to thank Grahame Thompson for taking The Age of Consent seriously and for responding in openDemocracy to the challenge it presents: that we should not seek to dismiss proposals to change the way the world is run without suggesting alternative measures of our own.
So saying, I do wish he had read my book more carefully. His review is riddled with errors, from the trivial to the profound. To begin with the trivial: almost every term he attributes to me is incorrect. I have never called our movement the global social justice movement; I do not use the term World Representative Parliament; I have not called for a bicameral government or an International Credit Union.
Grahame claims that I advocate outright debt forgiveness for all heavily-indebted nations. I do precisely the opposite. I call for the indebted nations of the poor world to use the threat of a mass collective default to demand concessions from the rich nations. The idea that the debt should be forgiven is both abhorrent to me (forgive whom for what?) and would undermine the very threat I suggest the poor nations wield.
But his most important misconception is this: that I am seeking to invent global governance. He credits me with the creation of monolithic global economic governance institutions. Yet, as I emphasise repeatedly, global governance exists already. It is brokered by monolithic institutions such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF), World Bank, UN Security Council and World Trade Organisation (WTO), all of which are run, by design or in practice, by the rich nations. The Age of Consent proposes not, as he claims, world government, but simply a democratisation of those powers which already exist at the global level.
There are two alternatives to this approach. The first is to leave the existing structures intact, and to permit the rich world to continue to dominate the poor world. This, as his review makes clear, is Grahames chosen option. The second is to abandon global governance. Attractive as the second option might at first appear, this leaves all the principal global problems unsolved. Issues such as war, climate change, nuclear proliferation and the imbalance of trade between nations cannot be addressed only at the local or the national levels. If they are to be resolved, it has to happen at the global level.
Grahames approach is remarkably similar to that of the British patricians who, in the mid-19th century, rejected national democracy. His ideal of global governance is not a global response (in other words one that involves all the nations of the world) but a response at the level of the regionalised Triad (US/Nafta, the EU and Japan). The Triad would develop the necessary governance mechanisms between its players so as to properly manage the international system, partly to its own advantage, but also for the benefit of the system as a whole. In other words, the rest of the world would rely for its deliverance from global injustice upon the goodwill of the powerful.
Grahame suggests that the Triad is unlikely to develop the necessary governance mechanisms between its players, so it will be national governments that take the lead in any further extensions of international governance. It has been, he observes, individual national governments that have centrally participated in the construction of such governance mechanisms in the past.
Indeed it has. But he does not ask or answer the key question, namely which national governments? Those which have centrally participated in the past are, of course, not the governments of the poor nations, but the governments of the rich nations. They have designed a system of global governance which favours their interests at the expense of the poor. The Triad (an appropriate term, given its associations with gangsterism) does not manage the international system partly to its own advantage, but entirely to its own advantage. Grahame may be comfortable with the consequences; most of the people of the world are not.
Sticking to the Victorian script, Grahame explains the disadvantages of abandoning a Pax Britannica, or, as it might be called now, a Pax Triadica. [W]hen the full impact of China joining the WTO sinks in and begins to take effect, he writes trade tensions across the Pacific are likely to heighten. Well, yes. It was precisely because China had joined the WTO that some of the poorer nations could gather round it to form what became at Cancunthe G21. Trade tensions have heightened because the rich nations can now no longer trample without hindrance over everyone else. The relative peace imposed by the Triads complete domination of the global trading system has been disturbed by a minor (but so far only a minor) global revolution. It is a small step towards a more democratic world order.
Grahame writes, again like a true Victorian, that The great powers have always claimed and exercised a certain autonomy of action in the international sphere. They will continue to do so, and with a certain justification. He fails to explain what this justification may be, or why a system run by the great powers is better than a system run by all the worlds people.
He claims that the great powers eliminated piracy and slavery in the 19th century, but overlooks the fact that they seized the lands and overthrew the governments of most of the worlds independent peoples, and presided over genocide, famine, debt peonage, plunder and resource-stripping on an unprecedented scale. By means of unequal treaties, gunboat diplomacy and opium wars, they replaced casual piracy with systematised piracy.
This oversight permits him to claim that These often tacit coalitions can also have a long-term beneficial effect for all the poorer nations and peoples not excluding. Perhaps we can understand why he insists that The key feature of any forward-looking regime is not to look back to the past.
In The Age of Consent, I have sought to address the problem of power. In his review of my book, Grahame Thompson has simply ignored it.
