Revolutionary ideas for global justice

GlobalisationIn 1994, US corporations inflicted an estimated $2.6 trillion worth of social and environmental damage (five times their total profits) on the world because they did not have to pay the full costs of such "externalities".

The money given by the rich to the poor world diminished in real terms by 12 per cent between 1992 and 2000. The poor world obtains 32 times as much revenue from trade as it receives from aid - and for each 1 per cent increase in its share of world exports the number of those in extreme poverty would be reduced by 12 per cent, or 128 million people.

In 2002, the US handed $3.9 billion (three times its entire aid budget for Africa) to just 25,000 of its cotton farmers, reducing world prices by 26 per cent. The rich nations, including the EU and the US, now give their farmers $352 billion a year - six and a half times the aid they give to poor nations. Despite a global surplus of food, 840 million people are officially classified as malnourished, because they lack the money required to buy food. Much of the poor world's farming has been diverted from producing food for local consumption to feeding the livestock required to supply richer people with meat. The number of farm animals on Earth has risen fivefold since 1950 and they now outnumber humans by three to one.

Facts such as these appal and enrage George Monbiot. They have driven him to write this manifesto for a new world order, proposing ways to tackle these deep inequalities in the distribution of resources and the global system of power which reproduces them. He has gained a well-deserved reputation over the last 10 years as a radical commentator (notably in the Guardian) and activist on global inequality and environmental degradation. He is one of the leading theorists of what he describes as the "global justice movement", which has arisen to confront these inequalities in the so-called "anti-globalisation" protests and the intense debates underlying them.

Monbiot says this is the largest such movement in history. It has developed, he argues, at a time when a profound mutation is under way in world affairs, comparable to the rise of Christianity and Islam or the 18th-century Enlightenment that ushered in the industrial and democratic revolutions, which gave most of the current rich countries their privileged position. The new mutation "will force us to abandon nationhood, just as, in earlier epochs, we abandoned the barony and the clan".

The new movement "has raised its eyes from the national sphere, in which there is democracy but no choice, to the global sphere, in which there is choice but no democracy". It has now reached a stage where concrete proposals are needed to channel its energy and catalyse change. His book argues that issues such as climate change, international debt, nuclear proliferation, war, peace and the balance of trade between nations can be tackled only globally or internationally. In keeping with his perception of a major change in the framework of political identity he says these terms may need to be rescued from their friends - because the nation-state acts as a barrier between citizens and the United Nations, which has been captured by states. Thus the world suffers from "a deficit of globalisation, and a surfeit of internationalism".

He makes three major proposals, saying: "Our task is surely not to overthrow globalisation, but to capture it, and to use it as a vehicle for humanity's first global democratic revolution." Democracy is the least worst system, compared to communism - which failed to control party leaderships, leading to totalitarianism - and to anarchism, which fails to comprehend the need for accountable government. Monbiot is equally dismissive of "localisation" movements which seek to escape from the effects of globalisation, and of neoliberal "market fundamentalism", which, like anarchism, ignores the need for governance.

Democracy can and must be applied at a worldwide level. Monbiot proposes a world parliament of 600 members, elected from constituencies of 10 million people apiece. Arguing and mobilising for it would be a means of rendering world power more accountable to its peoples. Although it would not be a world government it would spur and stimulate such a demand in years to come.

An International Clearing Union would rebalance world trade by penalising nations in trade surplus or deficit. This would work along the lines of a plan unsuccessfully put forward by John Maynard Keynes at the end of the second World War. Monbiot resurrects this idea from the Bretton Woods system with which Keynes is inaccurately associated, pointing out that the US decisively rejected it and has benefited ever since from being the world's biggest creditor.

A fair trade organisation would enforce social and environmental standards on transnational corporations, thereby enabling international rules to catch up with their mobility and allow poor nations catch up with the rich ones by sustaining trade surpluses and tariff protection, just as virtually all developed states have done at critical stages of their history. Monbiot uses comparative historical studies of development to good effect in making this case.

Together these proposals would alter existing unequal balances and replace the institutions associated with them, such as the IMF, the World Bank and the WTO. In terms of agency, Monbiot sees a crucial role for the hundreds of thousands of activists advocating them, while governments of poor nations have "no option but to fight back" in the knowledge that by their debts they control the world's banking system. The demands he makes are intended to be transitional, "through the deployment of a modified species of capitalism, to create the conditions in which capitalism can be destroyed".

This book is too long for a manifesto, but it is a compelling and radical argument for comprehensive change in world politics. Monbiot's occasional cocksure judgments are modified by his readiness to engage in arguments with opponents and to state his case clearly and well. It deserves and needs to be debated by them.

Monbiot attacks "hopeless realism", reminding his readers that every revolution - the American and French ones, female enfranchisement, the rise of communism and its fall, the aspirations of decolonisation - were described as unrealistic before they happened.

Paul Gillespie is Foreign Policy Editor of The Irish Times

The Age of Consent: A Manifesto for a New World Order By George Monbiot Flamingo, 274pp, £14.99