In the twenty-first century of the Gregorian calendar humankind enjoys greater opportunity and suffers greater misery than in any previous hundred-year period. The gap between the 'haves' and the 'have nots' is wider than at almost any previous point in history. Our understanding of the planet we inhabit, of the universe to which it belongs and the characteristics of life on earth is more comprehensive than ever. Yet the uses to which our knowledge and resources are put are rarely inspired by altruism or a sense of the common good. Liberals and Democrats believe there are serious imbalances in our world which are capable of correction to provide greater security, prosperity and opportunity - and lead thereby to greater happiness and fulfilment - for all humankind.
This essay looks at the major challenges of globalisation from a Liberal Democratic political perspective and sketches the outlines of the policies needed to meet them.
The first challenge is to stabilise the population of the planet, which has risen from 545 million people in 1600 to 2,400 million in 1950 and over 6 billion in 2005. In societies which have achieved greater levels of wealth and security, population numbers are in decline. There appears to be almost a direct correlation between levels of wealth and childbirth. Niger has the highest birth rate in the world (48.91 births/1,000 population) and Germany the lowest at 8.45 1 . Since population growth puts a strain on the earth's natural resources which the planet does not have a limitless capacity to bear it is imperative to bring all societies up to a level of wealth at which population levels will stabilise. Alternative ways to restrict population growth - forced sterilisation, or government-imposed limits on childbirth such as those in force in China - are not acceptable to Liberal Democrats.
Inequality in levels of security, wealth and opportunity also spurs population movement. In good circumstances, only a tiny fraction of members of a society will seek to emigrate to a new life elsewhere. In difficult times, when countries are ravaged by war or disease or environmental degradation, the percentage will increase. Large scale emigration took place in the fifteenth century when the fall of the Byzantine Empire to the Chinese triggered a mass exodus of people seeking to avoid foreign domination. More recently economic hardship and the slow speed of reform in Moldova in the past decade has resulted in an estimated loss of 30% of the active population. It should be an aim of public policy to provide conditions in which families and communities can remain united, though interaction between different communities and the development of mutual knowledge and understanding bring huge gains and should be encouraged.
The second challenge is peace. Life on earth is too often scarred by human strife, of which the causes are many. Competition for natural resources or for access to markets frequently lies at the root of war. Intolerance between people of different religion or race breeds conflict, as does resentment about the influence of one civilisation over another. The parts of the world where the three major monotheistic religions meet - Islam, Christianity and Judaism - are well-known hotbeds of conflict. But conflict between 'fundamental' religious believers and those of a secular disposition is also on the rise.
1 www.aneki.com accessed 8th June 2005
Ideological totalitarianism, too, has been a major source of strife. Though democracy is still spreading, the world's major authoritarian regimes (China and Russia) and its many minor ones (notably Saudi Arabia, North Korea, Burma, Cuba, and most of the central Asian republics) are regular offenders against modern standards of human decency. Mature democracies which should lead by example, such as the USA, have recently allowed their standards of respect for human rights to slip, for example in Guantanamo Bay and in detention centres in Afganistan and Iraq, thereby giving moral free rein to the world's more persistent offenders. Liberal Democrats remain convinced that policies against terrorism should respect fully the provisions of the Geneva conventions and the international declaration of human rights.
The US-UK led invasion of Iraq without UN support is an affront to democracy and global solidarity. The current occupation fans the flames of radical Islam. Yet modern war is more often within than between states. The horrors of conflict in the Democratic Republic of the Congo or in Darfur in Sudan require new public policy approaches. Liberals and Democrats are deeply concerned at the indifference displayed by the international community and the inability of the United Nations to prevent mass rape and murder in Darfur and elsewhere. UN Security Council members should commit themselves not to use the veto in dealing with genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes. The conclusions of the UN summit of September 2005, though disappointing in other respects, offer hope in this area.
A Liberal Democrat response to conflict prevention starts with action against the manufacture of and trade in weapons. Easy availability of weaponry and munitions increases violence, prolongs wars and enables widespread human rights abuses. Amnesty International argues that the majority of current armed conflicts could not be sustained without the supply of small arms and light weapons and associated munition. They point out that in Columbia, arms have been supplied by the USA, Brazil, France, Germany, Spain, South Africa, the Czech Republic and Italy2. Liberal Democrats have pressed for an international treaty to control the trade in small arms, which are used to kill half a million people every year.
Bringing to justice those guilty of war crimes is also a must for Liberal Democrats. The development of the International Criminal Court in The Hague has been a major step forward for us in this regard.
A deeply worrying development in capacity for warfare lies in the development of weapons in space. Low orbit space is less than 150km distant from the earth, providing a country possessing the technology to launch weapons from space with a considerable proximity to any target. The USA will spend about $3bn in 2005 on space control and space force projection programmes, including anti-satellite and space-based missile launch capabilities3. The dangers of other major powers being pulled into an arms race in space and of a superpower conflict involving destruction of satellites are very real. The United States Space Command's ‘Vision for 2020’ argues that "space superiority is emerging as an essential element of battlefield success and future warfare" and identifies 'control of space' as one of its operational concepts4.
2 Amnesty International Annual Report, 2004.
3 Lewis, J., www.armscontrol.org. Accessed 8th June 2005.
4 United States Space Command ‘A Vision for 2020’.
Liberal Democrats believe there is an urgent need to update the 1967 Outer Space Treaty, which calls for the use of space to be conducted "for the benefit and in the interests of all countries". The US-USSR Incidents at Sea Accord (INCSEA) of 1972, which has served as a model for comparable agreements signed by more than thirty other seafaring nations, might be used as a basis for a new treaty for spacefaring nations which should also contain 'rules of the road' to help prevent dangerous military activities leading to incidents of conflict. It would include provisions against simulated attacks, the testing and deployment of space weapons and dangerous manoeuvres in space.
Safeguarding the natural environment is a third major challenge, and arguably the most important of all. Water, air and soil are all under threat.
Water is the key to all animal and plant life. There are 263 transboundary rivers and lakes in the world. The importance of agreement on the use of the water they carry is immense. Air and soil too are shared resources, vital to life. Pollution of either is known to have serious adverse effects on human health. Yet the industrialised world, despite recent agreements to limit emissions, pumps 20m tonnes of carbon dioxide into the air and 4.5 billion litres of chemical fertiliser into the soil every year. This causes degradation of air quality and eutrophication of water, both impacting on the ability of our planet to sustain life.
The ozone layer, which protects the earth from the harmful rays of the sun, is thinning as a result of human activity, particularly the burning of fossil fuels. The hole in the layer which has opened up over Antarctica is causing skin cancer in humans and blindness in some other animals. Urgent concerted action is necessary to stop - and, if possible, reverse - this destruction of ozone. Despite the capacity of the world’s oceans to absorb increases in world temperature, CO2 emissions and other greenhouse gases are almost certainly changing climate patterns too, changing the shape and extent of the heat belt known as 'El Niño' which determines temperatures in the summer months over much of the equatorial latitudes. 1998 was the warmest year in the past 2000 years, and the decade from 1990 to 2000 proved to be the warmest decade. Professor Ralph Keeling of the University of California argues that if humankind had acted on the Cherney Report of the late 1970s we could have prevented the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere causing climate change; it is now too late, but we may still be able to control the pace of climate change and therefore limit the damage caused by shrinking ice caps and rising sea levels.
Liberal Democrats believe that in addition to the market mechanisms agreed under the Kyoto Protocol to stabilise CO2 emissions, government action must be taken to limit global warming to 2 degrees centigrade and to limit CO2 concentration to 550 ppm. This will require environmental incentives to reduce carbon intensity, technology enabled breakthroughs to cut energy use and a mandatory cap on carbon emissions. The idea of the 'stability triangle' developed by Christopher Mottershead of British Petroleum to keep carbon emissions to their year 2000 level until 2050 offers a useful framework for public policy.
With the world's population forecast to grow by 50% by 2050, a partnership between developed and developing countries will be essential: the former must cut carbon and nitrogen emissions, the latter must develop cleanly and manage carefully the use of coal. Co-production of food and fuel (i.e. developing bio-fuels as a co-product of food production through the use of enzymes to break down crop waste) will also be important. In every area of human activity, the precautionary principle must guide Liberal Democrats and advise policies designed to improve our stewardship of the natural environment.
Education (especially of women) lies at the heart of Liberal Democrat strategy to resolve and prevent conflict and to safeguard the environment. Better educated people are less easily misled. Formal education of all children is important; currently 120 million children worldwide are receiving no formal education. But girls are currently less likely to be chosen by their parents to attend school than boys, even though women provide better social glue and social support systems than men and are more important determinants of human behaviour.
Beyond formal education, education in civil society is also needed. In this area, the work of the Soros Foundation, the National Endowment for Democracy and the European political foundations such as those in Germany are examples of good practice. Where once people in Europe or North America spoke of a North-South or an East-West conflict, a broader understanding of the complexity of conflict and the imperative for co-habitation is growing and with it a recognition of the value of democracy and good governance which favours cohabitation.
Though huge progress has been made in medical science in the past quarter millennium, millions of people still die of or are crippled by preventable diseases. With good health so important as a factor of human happiness, improving human health is a challenge Liberal Democrats cannot ignore.
The failure of humankind to prevent the spread of the HIV/Aids virus, which is ravaging whole populations, is awesome in its terrible implications. During 2003, young people aged 15-24 years accounted for half of all new HIV infections worldwide; more than 6000 became infected with HIV every day5. For the developed world to pay so little attention to HIV aids and other diseases suggests a degree of cynicism sadly at odds with the social solidarity which Liberal Democrats hold to be essential. For some churches to condemn the use of condoms, which could save the lives of thousands, is little short of criminal neglect.
The World Health Organisation must be mobilised to focus global energies in the fight against Aids. The WHO lobbies national governments to increase access to treatments and efforts aimed at prevention. It principally provides care and support in the community with a view to preventing mother-child transmission. Governments must also put pressure on pharmaceutical companies to make available at affordable prices drugs used in treating those infected with the HIV virus.
TB, ebola, malaria and avian flu are other diseases which pose the risk of becoming epidemic. Though it does no yet transmit easily to human beings, the HN51 strain of avian flu is becoming a serious threat to bird populations as 2005 draws to a close. Greater cooperation between governments, including the sharing of information and the common development of prevention strategies, must be a priority.
The plight of women is a challenge which can no longer be underestimated. Women are victims of genital mutilation, violence and rape on an unprecedented scale. Honour killings persist in many Islamic countries. Rape is used as a tool of repression by government troops in Burma. As a weapon of war it is widespread in Africa. Discrimination against women persists even in developed countries. The work of Emma Bonino MEP and others in raising awareness of women’s rights and in building mutual support groups to empower women to stand up against discrimination is a shining example of Liberal Democratic ideas in practice.
Internationally organised crime poses perhaps the most immediate threat to people's security. Criminal syndicates built around the growing and processing of narcotic drugs in countries like Colombia or Afghanistan, involved in the smuggling of small arms and of weapons-grade fissile nuclear material stolen from poorly guarded small nuclear reactors in the Commonwealth of Independent States6, profiting too from the vile trade in human beings for the purpose of sexual or other forms of exploitation and increasingly linked to terrorists - since they need terrorists to keep countries like Colombia or Afghanistan ungovernable - pose a massive threat to individual liberty.
5 http://www.avert.org/worldstats.htm
6 In 1994 there were five known cases of weapons materials smuggled into Europe from Russia and former Soviet Republics. There have been numerous unsubstantiated incidences since.
Terrorism poses perhaps the most visible current threat to human freedom. As Gijs de Vries, the EU's counter-terrorism coordinator (and a predecessor of mine as Leader of the Liberals and Democrats in the European Parliament) has pointed out, terrorists attack fundamental human rights: the right to life, the right to a life lived in freedom from fear. They attack the essence of democracy, which is that political differences are settled through rational deliberation and the power of law instead of by the bullet and the bomb7.
To fight internationally organised crime, including the international terrorism which has caused recent outrages in New York, Istanbul, Madrid, London, Bali and elsewhere, co-operation between democratic governments must be extended hugely. The sharing of criminal intelligence information, cooperation between police forces and judiciaries and cross-border tracking of criminal communications and money movement are essential. Those who oppose or seek to retard such co-operation are promoting international anarchy, often in the name of national sovereignty.
7 Gijs de Vries, European Counter-Terrorism Coordinator. Speech to Liberal International Conference, Sofia, May 13th 2004.
The trafficking of drugs and people are significant causes of human misery. Strategies to combat these crimes in developed countries have focused on hitting supply and have not been effective. Liberals and Democrats are increasingly of the view that focusing on cutting demand would produce greater benefits at lower cost, both in financial terms and in terms of interference with human freedom.
Opening markets is another great challenge for Liberals and Democrats. It must be accompanied by safeguards, however, for those who benefit from open markets are not only the law-abiders. Illegitimate trade probably accounts for between two and six percent of global GDP; that is, between EUR 492 bn and EUR 1.25 trn8. While legitimate trade in goods or services brings mutual enrichment and furthers human understanding and peaceful relations, illegitimate trade destroys communities (through the environmental devastation of logging or the social devastation of drug-related crime) in the country of origin just as much as in the country of destination. Never has the need been greater for supranational measures to tackle the supranational challenge of policing trade.
The power of legitimate trade is perhaps only now being fully appreciated. The value of world trade has grown from Eur 48bn in 1948 to Eur 6.04trn by 2003. In Asia, it has lifted 600 million people over the poverty line in the space of a single generation.
Nonetheless, the economic dynamism of countries like India and China which enjoy the world's highest economic growth rates obscures the fate of the 14 Asia and Pacific countries which rank among the poorest of the world's poor. Nearly 450m people in countries from Afghanistan and Bangladesh to the tiny pacific island of Tuvalu live on less than a quarter of the average income of the rest of the region. Yet none of these countries is eligible for relief under the HIPC initiative and they receive in total less than half of the world's development aid though they house two-thirds of its poor. While the current western focus on poverty in Africa is laudable, it ignores a huge challenge in Asia.
Liberals and Democrats should encourage the faster-developing countries to cycle their budget surpluses into further development rather than into US$ or euro denominated investments. The current account balances of developing and emerging market nations swung from a deficit of $88bn in 1996 to a surplus of $336bn in 2004. In the same period the US current account deficit grew from $120bn to $666bn, financed mainly by borrowing from these countries. After a series of financial crises from 1996 to 2002 which caused painful devaluations and sharp economic contractions, developing countries boosted exports and restricted imports to protect themselves against future capital flight, through the accumulation of foreign currency reserves. In 2004, the reserves of developing countries grew by $400bn9. Such accumulation of reserves makes good monetary sense but deprives the poor of the chance to develop.
Another current challenge is how to ensure that free trade is also fair trade. Not even Liberal Democrats could deny that freer trade sometimes harms the poor. Trade in services, in particular, would benefit from a greater recognition that there is a legitimate role for state regulation where the gains from remedying market failure -for people or for the environment - outweigh the cost of government intervention. Agreement within the WTO and elsewhere on which services constitute services of general interest would be highly desirable in this regard.
8 www.wto.org. Accessed 8th June 2005.
9 Figures from the Institute of International Finance.
Perhaps the biggest factor of change in human development has been the advances made in communications science. The establishment of the internet in 1965 by Tim Berners-Lee et al, and developments in satellite and mobile telephone communication have changed and continue to change the framework for human interaction. The development of the Voice Over Internet Protocol (VOIP) is cutting the cost of verbal exchanges just as the world wide web brings the printed word to so many more so much more quickly. Televisual image transmission brings the world to our living rooms. This in itself poses new challenges. While such advances in communication vastly expand the access of people to knowledge and information and improve immeasurably opportunities to share ideas (and allow investment to move more quickly to the most profitable places), they are not free from interference by governments which seek to deny to their own people the fruits of such progress. Moreover, use of electronic technology for the purposes of eavesdropping or control by government of the activities of individuals has expanded at an alarming rate and at potentially great cost to human freedom. Freedom of information and strict laws on privacy and data protection therefore remain priority areas for Liberal Democrats.
The challenges posed by globalisation and discussed above are by their nature supranational, while humankind is organised mainly into nation states. The European Union has been a largely successful experiment in supranational government, though it has yet to win over the hearts of its citizens. The United Nations is in the midst of a major reflection about its raison d’être. Needing to move from the role of a passive referee to one of an operational force, it finds it lacks the management structure and the political commitment from its member nations to give it the resources and tools to do the job. Its successes in Burundi and Sierra Leone are offset by its failure in Darfur and elsewhere. Embarrassing disclosures about its management have further soured relations with its largest funder. Renewed political commitment from its members, combined with major internal reform, is urgently needed.
Unlike the right wing in politics, Liberal Democrats have no ideological difficulty with the development of supranational responses to the supranational challenges of our age; indeed, national ideologies are threatened by Liberalism less because of the size of its political presence than because of the strength of its ideas. Socialism appears to have lost its way not only because it lacks maps of the new country which it is crossing, but because it thinks maps are unnecessary for experienced travellers10. And among the many features of green parties which we find unattractive is their resistance to scientific and technological progress.
Liberal Democrats are the world’s hope-mongers. We are not naïve about human nature, but we are inspired by the capacity of the human spirit for altruism and solidarity. Our growing political success beyond Europe and North America is testimony to the global appeal of our ideas, which can be found historically in Islamic and Buddhist thought, not just in the west11. We believe, with Victor Hugo, that the day will come when the only battlefields will be those of markets open for business and the human spirit open for ideas. We share the optimism of the Irish poet Seamus Heaney that we might look forward ‘to a time when hope and history will rhyme’. We work to those ends.
10 This observation was first made by British Labour politician Richard Crossman.
11 Sen, A., ‘The diverse ancestry of democracy’, Financial Times 13th June 2005.
The essay is based on the book, "Liberal Democracy and Globalisation" Edited by Graham Watson MEP and Katharine Durrant (2005). |
