How to Unite a Divided World by Graham Barrett The Age 11:46am 2nd Oct, 2003   October 2, 2003    War, according to 19th century satirist Ambrose Bierce, is God's way of teaching Americans geography. Americans are certainly learning a thing or two about the Middle East these days as it tells them that even a hyperpower can only go so far without international co-operation.    We must hope that it translates into an appreciation by the Bush Administration and Congress that in this century we are all interdependent, not just in rhetoric but in reality.    What we see now is a world divided between a rich and powerful West preoccupied with its own protection and advancement while committing fancy promises and spare change to less fortunate societies, many or most of which are poor and in the grip of unscrupulous and corrupt elites.    It is these distressed societies that are the source of global problems, from terrorism and narcotics to mass diseases and floods of refugees. If the West fails to take seriously the simple truths of cause and effect, the 21st century is destined to be increasingly risky.    But look at the latest headlines. A World Trade Organisation gathering ends in failure. A UN summit evokes spite and recrimination. A World Bank-International Monetary Fund appeal for a revival of the spirit of multilateralism is ignored. The European Union continues to argue over whether to support the US in the Middle East. NATO struggles for a new role and relevancy despite the need for just such a body as a means of deterring or ending conflicts.    Such developments are scarcely symbolic of a global system that is confident of its identity and direction in carrying out missions to reduce poverty, protect people from diseases and weapons of mass destruction, deter or curtail conflict, or conserve the environment.There's no rocket science attached to understanding what ails the world or what we need to do to improve it.    Little reason exists for it to be confident when political leaders routinely neglect or abuse multilateral mechanisms, rendering them vulnerable to the misinformed who argue, sometimes violently, for institutions such as the WTO or the IMF to be abolished.    Flawed as these institutions are bound to be, they are all that we possess. As one of Kofi Annan's predecessors, Dag Hammarsjold, said, the UN "was created not to get us to heaven, but to keep us from hell".    The task is not to destroy the multilateral system through malevolence, neglect, underfunding, scepticism or cynicism, but to acknowledge that it is our only conceivable hope of meeting global challenges. Those who scoff that this is a ridiculous dream need only crunch a few numbers to appreciate that such goals are more readily attainable than many people imagine.    It is not a question of money. Look at the hundreds of billions of dollars that the Americans and Europeans can bring to bear on obsessions such as a war on terrorism or subsidies to the farming lobby.    Neither is it a matter of capacity. We possess a multilateral system of organisations that are designed to deal with global problems. It is a wonder that such institutions even exist. They are a product of the world wars and a determination to try to prevent humanity from destroying itself. American leadership was crucial to their creation.    The tragedy is that the idealism that inspired these organisations has evolved into cynicism, iconoclasm and defeatism in which the global system's many successes are allowed to be overshadowed by its failures.    The real impediment to a better world is a contemporary failure of leadership among the Western powers at a time in history when the information revolution, globalisation and growing interdependence should be making the concept of a world society understandable and attractive.    Instead, national and personal self-interests are still being hotly pursued in the face of challenges that are easily compartmentalised into a war on poverty, a war on terrorism or a war on drugs, when they are all related.    A holistic approach to a better world starts with an acceptance that everyone in a globalised community is at risk from these scourges and that international problems require international solutions.    It continues with a questioning of why the average industrial country spends seven times as much on one aspect of the overall challenge, military security, as on another, foreign aid and multilateral causes.    The annual budget for core UN functions is about $A2 billion, or what the Pentagon spends every 32 hours. The sum spent by rich countries on their farmers is greater than the combined income of all of black Africa.    The argument moves to the need for multilateral institutions to be reformed, revived, renewed, refocused and adequately financed so that they can correct global distortions and face the geopolitical realities of the 21st century.    This means renovating the procedures and membership of the Security Council so that we can prevent or stop Rwandas and Srebrenicas rather than mop up afterwards. It involves building public and political support for international institutions instead of allowing governments to use them as a convenient foil for their own shortcomings. It includes an acceptance that the rhetoric of a hundred summits is no substitute for a genuine commitment to meeting the goals of greater world security and prosperity.    There's no rocket science attached to understanding what ails the world or what we need to do to improve it. Looking back, such tasks would not have intimidated a Truman or a Schumann, a Keynes or a Marshall as they set about building the international institutions of the modern era. But they elude the Bushes and Chiracs, the Schroeders and Putins in a post-idealistic age.    The world in which the UN and the Bretton Woods institutions were born was exhausted from war and depression and still to experience the proliferation of sovereign states that has taken the General Assembly from a manageable handful of countries to nearly 200. Today's world is a lot more complex and difficult to co-ordinate.    As by far the leading power, the US is the only country that can summon a new dispensation. It can allow itself to fill the traditional role of a great power as everyone's favourite hate figure by acting unilaterally, remaining aloof to the International Criminal Court, eschewing the Kyoto protocol, abandoning the anti-ballistic missile treaty and discounting other symbols of global responsibility and interdependence. Or it can do what it does best and live up to its internationalist potential, in which guise it has contributed periodically and hugely to global stability and prosperity. No one else can do it.    The mess that the world has made of dealing with Saddam Hussein and Iraq over many years is a reminder of how the golden decade between the fall of the Berlin Wall and September 11, 2001, was squandered. As far back as 1994, former US secretary of state George Shultz put the plight of the international system in a way that remains valid today. "Everyone is just drifting," he warned.    Harry Truman, who learnt his geography in the trenches of World War I, and thereby picked up a thing or two about the global condition, had this to say about his country as the UN came into being: "The responsibility of a great state is to serve and not to dominate the world."    A US that truly set out to recapture the idealism of the 1940s and 1950s, joined by a European Union with all its complementary assets, would indeed change the world for the better.    (Graham Barrett is a former foreign correspondent and foreign editor of The Age Newspaper in Melbourne, Australia). Visit the related web page
	Next (more recent) news item
	Next (older) news item