Statement of Purpose for Vasudhaiva Kutumbakam Finland

The current crisis of modernity has a well-known political aspect. Imperial, corporate-driven, capitalist globalisation has prompted a crisis of governance with world-wide implications. Not only are basic survival conditions of disadvantaged people, animals and plants destroyed at a phenomenal rate. Ironically, the collapse of many states and the growing uncertainty and disregard for rules that grows from within capitalism itself is, arguably, creating increasing risk for the traditional winners in global capitalism, the large corporations, and the political and administrative elites of the dominant powers.

The ensuing so-called crisis of governance has received enormous attention, especially among the educated, western and westernised elites. The natural, often-heard response is the call for more transnational and / or global governance. Just see how wide the call has rung in academic circles, the web, NGOs, World Bank reports, government programmes and western media during the past decade. Sometimes the call is moderated by calls for democracy in global governance, and lately radical groups and intellectuals have started gathering around programmes for transnational and global democratisation.

The call for global democratisation has my sympathy and support. It can also be dangerous, however, unless it is understood in a larger cultural context. As long as we think of the crisis we face today primarily as a crisis of governance we will not be able to see that the call for governance and the call for democracy are ultimately two entirely different cultural models. We will then be prone to engage in a politics for global democracy with an agenda so narrow that it risks becoming, inadvertently, the unlikely ally of imperial, belligerent capitalism. This risk looms large in centre-left politics today and is a key reason for our collective weakness at all levels of politics. As I think this diagnosis is politically quite potent, I will next provide some warrant for it. Before going to that, let me stress, however, that I do not see Vasudhaiva Kutumbakam as a forum exclusively for those who agree with my diagnosis and argument. I see it rather as a forum, in which concerns such as the ones I express here can be debated among friends sharing common values so that we can learn together.

Let me start with an analogy. Between 1965 and 1985, the rising awareness of the ecological problems and of their links to the development crisis in the South led to a much needed questioning of the industrial growth model of society in Western Europe and North America, or ‘the North’. In the mid-80s, however, after the invention of a new terminology with the concepts ‘ecological modernisation’ and ‘sustainable development’ at the core, the radicalising questioning of the dominant development model in the North was transformed into a search for more-of-the-same. As we have seen so clearly since the publication of the so called Brundtland Report on Sustainable Development in 1987, the political search for sustainable development since has not been a search for cultural transformation in the North due to the limits to growth nor has it been about social and political transformation in order to advance global equity. Sustainable development has become the legitimating ground for a politics of technological and administrative fixes in which the political potential of the ecological crisis is domesticated. What used to be a reason to put checks and limits on imperial aggression and corporate power has become a vehicle for enhanced power for the educated elites in business, administration, academic institutions and the new power brokers called NGOs.

There is no exact parallel between ‘sustainable development’ and ‘globalisation’, and not all uses of the word globalisation are dangerous. Nevertheless, it seems to me that some very troubling political developments are intrinsically linked to the rise of the term ‘globalisation’ to the centre of our present political vocabulary.

First, there is what I want to call the unintended affiliation between e.g. many political initiatives discussed at Porto Alegre and in Davos, in the World Social Forum (WSF) and the World Economic Forum. Even President Bush will agree easily with many discussants at the WSF that because of economic globalisation, ‘the world’ needs creativity and bold action in shaping new structures of transnational governance. Given the asymmetry in communicative and administrative power, this agreement is often sufficient to enable the elites to translate radical and well-intended propositions for transnational institutional reform into a political dynamics that works in their favour. Just think how smoothly radical reform proposals, such as the call for a Currency Transaction Treaty (the ‘Tobin tax’), have during the past few years been translated into a legitimation of new means of technocratic control, such as the investment treaty in the World Trade Organisation (WTO) or greater centralisation of power in the European Union (EU). The crucial step is often the shift from the correct claim, “we need fair and democratic rules to control so-and-so, e.g. transnational capital flows” to the potentially genocidal “we need a rules-based global system to control so-and-so”.

Consider further, the debates over the WTO and over the EU. In both debates, the centre-left stands divided. Some of us are eager to use the WTO and EU as tools for our goals. The reason is not that we think so well of the present WTO or EU. The reason is that we think both, or at least one of them, say the EU, belong to the best promises we have in the struggle for global democracy, peace and justice. The core of the argument to this effect is very well known. It runs, with little variety as follows:

“In the 20th century, the centre-left came a long way ino taming capitalism at the national level. The finest achievement was, arguably, the creation of the welfare societies of the Nordic countries, which became models of equality, prosperity and democracy of global significance. Unfortunately, however, capitalism has outgrown the political reach of nation states. The centre-left must therefore create new structures of transnational governance. If we do not join forces to reform the EU (and perhaps the WTO too) from within, we lose some of our best tools for taming global capitalism. Therefore, and also as a counterweight to US military hegemony, we need a strong EU (and, perhaps, a strong WTO).”

One could call this the political programme of the social democratic reformist optimists.

The reformist programme is challenged by other centre-left forces. They claim that the present prospects for reform of the WTO and / or the EU are so dim that we should oppose and resist rather than go along with and seek reform from within. Not all transnational power, these forces will claim, are effective when we seek to tame capitalism. The present WTO and the present EU, they will claim, are fundamentally undemocratic. Rather than serving as tools to control corporate power the EU and/or the WTO work, in fact, to enhance it. We should not be misled by our dreams. No one who takes the trouble to analyse the draft constitution for the European Union prepared by the ‘European Convention’ can fail to see that it promises no democratisation of the EU, but rather cements the present power structure. Far from developing into a tool for democratic control of capitalism, or for putting checks on the military hegemony of the US and the EU as we have it in reality and not in our dreams, the draft constitution is developing into a tool for control by industry and finance of the polity and for securing an improved European contribution to US-led imperialist aggression. Giving more power to the EU will not, therefore, bring more justice and peace to the political system but less.

The debates over the role of EU and WTO reform to advance global justice and peace illustrate a larger problem that haunts the centre-left today. The quarrels over the role of short-term realistic reform of existing transnational institutions in a comprehensive politics for global solidarity has resulted in what could be called the Great Divide. On one side, we have the committed realists and reformists of the centre-left. Their fate during the past decade or two has been to play quite weakly in government or government coalitions whose politics is defined by a solid neo-liberal hegemony. Tax cuts and deregulation in domestic politics have been accompanied by corporate-friendly ‘liberalisation’ of the international economy, under the guidance of the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, the WTO and their regional clones. The result is known by all: growing income gaps in and between countries globally, growing insecurity and marginalisation on all continents, the decline of small scale farming and local self-reliance, etc.

At the same time, more radical centre-left groups who refuse to fight on the terms dictated by the dominant right have been marginalised from pragmatic decision-making. Simultaneously, they have encountered their notorious ‘strange bed-fellow problem’ i.e. the problem of distinguishing themselves from communal, nationalistic or xenophobic groups.

The situation we end up in is this: The more radical left stands with a growing nationalist and fascist right in a position of a morally righteous but politically impotent opposition. And the reformist left stands helplessly in power with the prevailing, neo-liberal right. Unable to level out their differences, the divided centre-left fights a defensive and losing battle in the capitalist whirlpool while the fascist right advances to power.

What we have lost, or never achieved sufficiently, in most European countries at least is the day-to-day co-operation and sense of self-evident solidarity between the reformist left-liberal spectrum and the more radical green-left spectrum of politics. In my country, Finland, and I believe many other countries as well, the loss takes the form also of a loss of solidarity between established parties, trade unions and farmers’ organisations on one side, and radical more or less anarchist movement groups on the other side. (The WSF-process serves well to break this unhappy constellation. And maybe the new governments of Ecuador, Venezuela and Brazil are a sign that a new centre-left hegemony is on the rise? But I shall not discuss that here.) What we witness in consequence of these divides is the sorry spectacle of a centre-left that lacks moral vision and political courage. The end result is that we have been slow and weak in challenging imperial capitalism at its roots; at the levels of cultural imagination and daily mass-support.

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