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 <<...OLE_Obj...>>  From the issue dated October 11, 2002 	

 <<...OLE_Obj...>> 	Navigating the Ethics of Globalization By PETER
SINGER  Consider two aspects of globalization: first, planes exploding as
they slam into the World Trade Center, and second, the emission of carbon
dioxide from the exhaust of gas-guzzling sport-utility vehicles. One brought
instant death and left unforgettable images that were watched on television
screens all over the world; the other makes a contribution to climate change
that can be detected only by scientific instruments. Yet both are
indications of the way in which we are now one world, and the more subtle
changes to which sport-utility-vehicle owners unintentionally contribute
will almost certainly kill far more people than the more visible aspect of
globalization. When people in rich nations switch to vehicles that consume
more fuel than the cars they used to drive, they contribute to changes in
the climate of Mozambique or Bangladesh -- changes that may cause crops to
fail, sea levels to rise, and tropical diseases to spread.  As scientists
pile up the evidence that continuing greenhouse-gas emissions will imperil
millions of lives, the leader of the nation that emits the largest share of
those gases has said: "We will not do anything that harms our economy,
because first things first are the people who live in America." President
Bush's remarks were not an aberration, but an expression of an ethical view
that he may have learned from his father. The first President George Bush
had said much the same thing at the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro.
But it is not only the two Bush administrations that have put the interests
of Americans first. When it came to the crunch in the Balkans, the
Clinton-Gore administration made it very clear that it was not prepared to
risk the life of a single American in order to reduce the number of civilian
casualties. In the context of the debate over whether to intervene in Bosnia
to stop Serb "ethnic cleansing" operations directed against Bosnian Muslims,
Colin L. Powell, then chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, quoted with
approval the remark of the 19th-century German statesman Otto von Bismarck,
that all the Balkans were not worth the bones of a single one of his
soldiers. Bismarck, however, was not thinking of intervening in the Balkans
to stop crimes against humanity. As chancellor of imperial Germany, he
assumed that his country followed its national interest. To use his remark
today as an argument against humanitarian intervention is to return to
19th-century power politics, ignoring both the bloody wars that style of
politics brought about in the first half of the 20th century, and the
efforts of the second half of the 20th century to find a better foundation
for peace and the prevention of crimes against humanity.  That forces us to
consider a fundamental ethical issue. To what extent should political
leaders see their role narrowly, in terms of promoting the interests of
their citizens, and to what extent should they be concerned with the welfare
of people everywhere?  There is a strong ethical case for saying that it is
wrong for leaders to give absolute priority to the interests of their own
citizens. The value of the life of an innocent human being does not vary
according to nationality. But, it might be said, the abstract ethical idea
that all humans are entitled to equal consideration cannot govern the duties
of a political leader. Just as parents are expected to provide for the
interests of their own children, rather than for the interests of strangers,
so too in accepting the office of president of the United States, President
Bush has taken on a specific role that makes it his duty to protect and
further the interests of Americans. Other countries have their leaders, with
similar roles in respect to the interests of their fellow citizens.  There
is no world political community, and as long as that situation prevails, we
must have nation-states, and the leaders of those nation-states must give
preference to the interests of their citizens. Otherwise, unless electors
were suddenly to turn into altruists of a kind never before seen on a large
scale, democracy could not function. Our leaders feel that they must give
some degree of priority to the interests of their own citizens, and they
are, so this argument runs, right to do so. But what does "some degree of
priority" amount to, in practice?  Related to that question about the duties
of national leaders is another one: Is the division of the world's people
into sovereign nations a dominant and unalterable fact of life? Here our
thinking has been affected by the horrors of Bosnia, Rwanda, and Kosovo. In
Rwanda, a United Nations inquiry took the view that 2,500 military
personnel, given the proper training and mandate, might have saved 800,000
lives. Secretary General Kofi Annan, who, as under secretary general for
peacekeeping operations at the time, must bear some responsibility for what
the inquiry termed a "terrible and humiliating" paralysis, has learned from
that situation. Now he urges that "the world cannot stand aside when gross
and systematic violations of human rights are taking place." What we need,
he has said, are "legitimate and universal principles" on which we can base
intervention. That means a redefinition of state sovereignty, or more
accurately, an abandonment of the absolute idea of state sovereignty that
has prevailed in Europe since the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648.  The
aftermath of the attacks on September 11 underlined in a very different way
the extent to which our thinking about state sovereignty has changed over
the past century. In the summer of 1914 another act of terrorism shocked the
world: the assassination of the Austrian Crown Prince Franz Ferdinand and
his wife in Sarajevo, by a Bosnian Serb nationalist. In the wake of that
outrage Austria-Hungary presented an ultimatum to Serbia in which it laid
out the evidence that the assassins were trained and armed by the Black
Hand, a shadowy Serbian organization headed by the chief of Serbian military
intelligence. The Black Hand was tolerated or supported by other Serbian
government officials, and Serbian officials arranged safe passage across the
border into Bosnia for the seven conspirators in the assassination plot.
Accordingly, Austria-Hungary's ultimatum demanded that the Serbs bring those
responsible to justice and allow Austro-Hungarian officials to inspect files
to ensure that that had been done properly.  Despite the clear evidence of
the involvement of Serbian officials in the crime -- evidence that,
historians agree, was substantially accurate -- the ultimatum
Austria-Hungary presented was widely condemned in Russia, France, Britain,
and the United States. Many historians studying the origins of the First
World War have condemned the Austro-Hungarian ultimatum as demanding more
than one sovereign nation may properly ask of another. They have added that
the Austro-Hungarian refusal to negotiate after the Serbian government
accepted many, but not all, of its demands is further evidence that
Austria-Hungary, together with its backer Germany, wanted an excuse to
declare war on Serbia. Hence those two nations must bear the guilt for the
outbreak of the war and the nine million deaths that followed.  Now consider
the American response to the terrorist attacks of September 11. The demands
made of the Taliban by the Bush administration were scarcely less stringent
than those made by Austria-Hungary of Serbia in 1914. (The main difference
is that the Austro-Hungarians insisted on the suppression of hostile
nationalist propaganda. Freedom of speech was not so widely regarded, then,
as a human right.) Moreover, the American demand that the Taliban hand over
Osama bin Laden was made without presenting to the Taliban any evidence at
all linking him to the attacks of September 11. Yet the American demands,
far from being condemned as a mere pretext for aggressive war, were endorsed
as reasonable and justifiable by a wide-ranging coalition of nations.  When
President Bush said, in speeches and press conferences after September 11,
that he would not draw a distinction between terrorists and regimes that
harbor terrorists, no ambassadors, foreign ministers, or United Nations
representatives denounced that as a "vicious" doctrine or a "tyrannical"
demand on other sovereign nations, as the Austro-Hungarian demands had been
denounced. The U.N. Security Council broadly endorsed it, in its resolution
of September 28, 2001.  It seems that world leaders now accept that every
nation has an obligation to every other nation of the world to suppress
activities within its borders that might lead to terrorist attacks carried
out in other countries, and that it is reasonable to go to war with a nation
that does not do so. If Kaisers Franz Joseph I and Wilhelm II could see
this, they might well feel that, since 1914, the world has come round to
their view.  Terrorism has made our world an integrated community in a new
and frightening way. Not merely the activities of our neighbors, but those
of the inhabitants of the most remote mountain valleys of the farthest-flung
countries of our planet have become our business. We need to extend the
reach of the criminal law there and to have the means to bring terrorists to
justice without declaring war on an entire country in order to do it. For
that we need a sound global system of criminal justice, so justice does not
become the victim of national differences of opinion.  We also need, though
it will be far more difficult to achieve, a sense that we really are one
community, that we are people who recognize not only the force of
prohibitions against killing each other but also the pull of obligations to
assist one another. That may not stop religious fanatics from carrying out
suicide missions, but it will help to isolate them and reduce their support.
It was not a coincidence that just two weeks after September 11,
conservative members of the U.S. Congress abandoned their opposition to the
payment of $585-million in back dues that the United States owed the United
Nations. Now that America was calling for the world to come to its aid to
stamp out terrorism, it was apparent that it could no longer flout the rules
of the global community to the extent that it had been doing before
September 11.  We have lived with the idea of sovereign states for so long
that they have come to be part of the background not only of diplomacy and
public policy but also of ethics. Implicit in the term "globalization"
rather than the older "internationalization" is the idea that we are moving
beyond the era of growing ties between nations and are beginning to
contemplate something beyond the existing conception of the nation-state.
But this change needs to be reflected in all levels of our thought, and
especially in our thinking about ethics.  For most of the eons of human
existence, people living only short distances apart might as well, for all
the difference they made to each other's lives, have been living in separate
worlds. A river, a mountain range, a stretch of forest or desert, a sea --
those were enough to cut people off from each other. Over the past few
centuries the isolation has dwindled, slowly at first, then with increasing
rapidity. Now people living on opposite sides of the world are linked in
ways previously unimaginable.  One hundred and fifty years ago, Karl Marx
gave a one-sentence summary of his theory of history: "The hand mill gives
you society with the feudal lord; the steam mill, society with the
industrial capitalist." Today he could have added: "The jet plane, the
telephone, and the Internet give you a global society with the transnational
corporation and the World Economic Forum."  Technology changes everything --
that was Marx's claim, and if it was a dangerous half-truth, it was still an
illuminating one. As technology has overcome distance, economic
globalization has followed. In London supermarkets, fresh vegetables flown
in from Kenya are offered for sale alongside those from nearby Kent. Planes
bring illegal immigrants seeking to better their own lives in a country they
have long admired. In the wrong hands the same planes become lethal weapons
that bring down tall buildings. Instant digital communication spreads the
nature of international trade from actual goods to skilled services. At the
end of a day's trading, a bank based in New York may have its accounts
balanced by clerks living in India. The increasing degree to which there is
a single world economy is reflected in the development of new forms of
global governance, the most controversial of which has been the World Trade
Organization, but the WTO is not itself the creator of the global economy.
Global market forces provide incentives for every nation to put on what the
foreign-affairs columnist Thomas L. Friedman has called a "Golden
Straitjacket," a set of policies that involve freeing up the private sector
of the economy, shrinking the bureaucracy, keeping inflation low, and
removing restrictions on foreign investment. If a country refuses to wear
the golden straitjacket, or tries to take it off, then the electronic herd
-- the currency traders, stock and bond traders, and those who make
investment decisions for multinational corporations -- could gallop off in a
different direction, taking the investment capital that countries want to
keep their economy growing. When capital is internationally mobile, to raise
your tax rates is to risk triggering a flight of capital to other countries
with comparable investment prospects and lower taxation.  The upshot is that
as the economy grows and average incomes rise, the scope of politics may
shrink -- at least as long as no political party is prepared to challenge
the assumption that global capitalism is the best economic system. When
neither the government nor the opposition is prepared to take the risk of
removing the golden straitjacket, the differences between the major
political parties shrink to differences over minor ways in which the
straitjacket might be adjusted. Thus even without the WTO, the growth of the
global economy itself marks a decline in the power of the nation-state.
Marx argued that in the long run we never reject advances in the means by
which we satisfy our material needs. Hence history is driven by the growth
of productive forces. He would have been contemptuous of the suggestion that
globalization is something foisted on the world by a conspiracy of corporate
executives meeting in Switzerland, and he might have agreed with Friedman's
remark that the most basic truth about globalization is, "No one is in
charge." For Marx that is a statement that epitomizes humanity in a state of
alienation, living in a world in which, instead of ruling ourselves, we are
ruled by our own creation, the global economy. For Friedman, on the other
hand, all that needs to be said about Marx's alternative -- state control of
the economy -- is that it doesn't work. (Whether there are alternatives to
both capitalism and centrally controlled socialism that could work is
another question, but not one for here.)  Marx also believed that a
society's ethic is a reflection of the economic structure to which its
technology has given rise. Thus a feudal economy in which serfs are tied to
their lord's land gives you the ethic of feudal chivalry based on the
loyalty of knights and vassals to their lord, and the obligations of the
lord to protect them in time of war. A capitalist economy requires a mobile
labor force able to meet the needs of the market, so it breaks the tie
between lord and vassal, substituting an ethic in which the right to buy and
sell labor is paramount.  Our newly interdependent global society, with its
remarkable possibilities for linking people around the planet, gives us the
material basis for a new ethic. Marx would have thought that such an ethic
would serve the interests of the ruling class, that is, the rich nations and
the transnational corporations they have spawned. But perhaps our ethic is
related to our technology in a looser, less deterministic way than Marx
thought.  Ethics appear to have developed from the behavior and feelings of
social mammals. They became distinct from anything we can observe in our
closest nonhuman relatives when we started using our reasoning abilities to
justify our behavior to other members of our group. If the group to which we
must justify ourselves is the tribe, or the nation, then our morality is
likely to be tribal, or nationalistic. If, however, the revolution in
communications has created a global audience, then we might feel a need to
justify our behavior to the whole world. As Clive Kessler argued recently in
Third World Quarterly, that change creates the material basis for a new
ethic that will serve the interests of all those who live on this planet in
a way that, despite much rhetoric, no previous ethic has ever done.  If this
appeal to our need for ethical justification appears to be based on too
generous a view of human nature, there is another consideration of a very
different kind that leads in the same direction. The great empires of the
past, whether Persian, Roman, Chinese, or British, were, as long as their
power lasted, able to keep their major cities safe from threatening
barbarians on the frontiers of their far-flung realms. In the 21st century
the greatest superpower in history was unable to keep the self-appointed
warriors of a different worldview from attacking both its greatest city and
its capital.  My thesis is that how well we come through the era of
globalization (perhaps whether we come through it at all) will depend on how
we respond ethically to the idea that we live in one world. For the rich
nations not to take a global ethical viewpoint has long been seriously
morally wrong. Now it is also, in the long term, a danger to their security.
There is one great obstacle to further progress in this direction. It has to
be said, in cool but plain language, that in recent years the international
effort to build a global community has been hampered by the repeated failure
of the United States to play its part. Despite being the single largest
polluter of the world's atmosphere, and on a per-capita basis the most
profligate of the major nations, the United States has refused to join the
178 states that have accepted the Kyoto Protocol. Along with Libya and
China, the United States voted against setting up an International Criminal
Court to try people accused of genocide and crimes against humanity. Now
that the court seems likely to go ahead, the U.S. government has said that
it has no intention of participating. Though it is one of the world's
wealthiest nations, with the world's strongest economy, the United States
gives significantly less foreign aid, as a proportion of its gross national
product, than any other developed nation.  When the world's most powerful
state wraps itself in what, until September 11, it took to be the security
of its military might, and arrogantly refuses to give up any of its own
rights and privileges for the sake of the common good -- even when other
nations are giving up their rights and privileges -- the prospects of
finding solutions to global problems are dimmed. One can only hope that when
the rest of the world nevertheless proceeds down the right path, as it did
in resolving to go ahead with the Kyoto Protocol, and as it is now doing
with the International Criminal Court, the United States will eventually be
shamed into joining in. If it does not do so, it risks falling into a
situation in which it is universally seen by everyone except its own
self-satisfied citizens as the world's "rogue superpower." Even from a
strictly self-interested perspective, if the United States wants the
cooperation of other nations in matters that are largely its own concern --
such as the struggle to eliminate terrorism -- it cannot afford to be so
regarded.  I have argued that as more and more issues increasingly demand
global solutions, the extent to which any state can independently determine
its future diminishes. We therefore need to strengthen institutions for
global decision making and make them more responsible to the people they
affect. That line of thought leads in the direction of a world community
with its own directly elected legislature, perhaps slowly evolving along the
lines of the European Union.  There is little political support for such
ideas at present. Apart from the threat that the idea poses to the
self-interest of the citizens of the rich nations, many would say it puts
too much at risk, for gains that are too uncertain. It is widely believed
that a world government would be, at best, an unchecked bureaucratic
behemoth that makes the bureaucracy of the European Union look like a lean
and efficient operation. At worst, it would become a global tyranny,
unchecked and unchallengeable. Those thoughts have to be taken seriously.
They present a challenge that should not be beyond the best minds in the
fields of political science and public administration, once those people
adjust to the new reality of the global community and turn their attention
to issues of government beyond national boundaries.  We need to learn from
the experience of other multinational organizations. The European Union is a
federal body that has adopted the principle that decisions should always be
taken at the lowest level capable of dealing with the problem. The
application of that principle, known as subsidiarity, is still being tested.
But if it works for Europe, it is not impossible that it might work for the
world.  To rush into world federalism would be too risky, but we could
accept the diminishing significance of national boundaries and take a
pragmatic, step-by-step approach to greater global governance. There is a
good case for global environmental and labor standards. The World Trade
Organization has indicated its support for the International Labor
Organization to develop core labor standards. If those standards are
developed and accepted, they would not be much use without a global body to
check that they are being adhered to, and to allow other countries to impose
trade sanctions against goods that are not produced in conformity with the
standards. Since the WTO seems eager to pass this task over to the ILO, we
might see that organization significantly strengthened.  Something similar
could happen with environmental standards. It is even possible to imagine a
United Nations Economic and Social Security Council that would take charge
of the task of eliminating global poverty, and would be voted the resources
to do it. These and other specific proposals for stronger global
institutions to accomplish a particular task should be considered on their
merits.  The 15th and 16th centuries are celebrated for the voyages of
discovery that proved that the world is round. The 18th century saw the
first proclamations of universal human rights. The 20th century's conquest
of space made it possible for a human being to look at our planet from a
point not on it, and so to see it, literally, as one world. Now the 21st
century faces the task of developing a suitable form of government for that
single world. It is a daunting moral and intellectual challenge, but one we
cannot refuse to take up. It is no exaggeration to say that the future of
the world depends on how well we meet it.  Peter Singer is a professor of
bioethics at Princeton University. This essay is adapted from One World: The
Ethics of Globalization, to be published later this month by Yale University
Press. Copyright © 2002 by Peter Singer.