Social Workers of the World, Unite!

It is certainly dangerous for the class of university activists and leftist political leaders (misleadingly lumped together as the “anti-globalization” movement) who until September 11, 2001, were riding high. Until then, they were gaining increasing acceptance for their view that the hour of the nation-state was over, and that transnational bodies would now solve most of the world’s problems. “Three years ago we would have talked about how to improve the system,” said former Dutch environment minister Jan Pronk at the conference. “Now we talk of how to save the system.”

Some in attendance were ideologists of the new global left, including Manuel Castells, the theorist of “networks” as power structures from the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya; the sociologist and anti-globalization organizer Candido Grzybowski of the Brazilian Institute of Social and Economic Analysis; and the economist Jeffrey Sachs, who directs the Earth Institute at Columbia University. Others were political leaders from the decade in which both the world economy and world government projects boomed, including Mexico’s former president Ernesto Zedillo (now a professor of international economics at Yale) and former foreign minister Jorge Castñeda; and Jan Pronk. The group was rounded out with a mix of diplomats, writers, academics, and aid workers from Europe, the United States, and the Third World, of whom I was one.

There were plenty of constructive proposals and well-made points. Zedillo insisted that undertaking big projects in poor countries hinged on mending the transatlantic rift. He added that next September’s session of WTO negotiations will fail if the European Union, and particularly France, does not change its agricultural positions. “This is more important than access to medicines,” he said.

Jan Pronk urged that representatives of “international civil society” be given a formal seat at future G-8 meetings. Billionaire philanthropist George Soros insisted that non-governmental organizations of the sort that many attendees represented were not identical to “international civil society”–although many NGOs claimed to speak in its name. Former International Herald Tribune CEO Peter Goldmark suggested that the SARS outbreak in Asia might be a chance for global-governance enthusiasts to prove they could devise helpful systems. The only U.N. representative in attendance, former Mauritanian ambassador to Washington Ahmedou Ould Abdallah, argued several times for the indispensability of the United States, since “the poorest countries will never have a chance without U.S. participation.”

But such sentiments were rare. Two-thirds of the participants saw the United States as either the source of all the world’s instability, poverty, and violence, or as culpable for not stopping it. While the conference’s organizer Laurence Tubiana, a former adviser to Socialist prime minister Lionel Jospin, has written with some sensitivity of September 11, most of the invitees were otherwise inclined. As is usual at such conferences, September 11 went practically unmentioned. The Iraq war could thus be presented as a project hatched out of thin air by the demented imaginations of George W. Bush’s cabinet and “the neoconservatives.” To a large extent, it was an exercise in September-11-denial, a meeting of the high command of what the French philosopher André Glucksmann calls the “coalition of nostalgics for September 10, 2001.”

Several of the participants stressed that “this is not a meeting about Iraq.” But for most of the others, to ignore Iraq was to ignore the one big problem facing the world: America. Sunita Narain, editor of the Delhi-based Green magazine Down to Earth, described the United States as a “failed state,” contrasting American democracy unfavorably with the “rich discourse” that prevails in her own country. Lloyd Axworthy, the Canadian ex-foreign minister, laid out a typology of international actors: “the fanatic” (presumably Osama bin Laden), “the bully” (presumably the United States), and the “rules-makers” (presumably the E.U., Canada, and other actors whom, Axworthy complains, “the neoconservatives describe as ‘wimps'”). According to the Egyptian think-tank head Nader Fergany, the three pillars of the world order–peace, security, and justice–have been “destroyed by the superpower.”

But none was as unrestrained in his bile as Jeffrey Sachs, who alleged that the United States “lets people die by the millions”–as a matter of policy–and that the world should “put the U.S. on notice that there are certain standards.” His grounds for anger were that millions of lives could have been saved if the money spent on the Iraq war had been spent, first, on Third World health care and, second, on America’s fulfilling the promise its negotiators undertook at Monterrey last year to devote 0.7 percent of American GDP to aid for the neediest countries. (He did not tally up the number of Africans who could have been saved had all the conferees flown coach.)

Just as there was a split between the two-thirds who felt the United States was the main problem facing the world and the minority viewpoint that the transatlantic relationship was worth rescuing, there was a split between those who assumed they’d been summoned to urge a manifesto on Chirac, and those who came to hold an open-ended academic discussion. Here, both were wrong. For the Evian agenda was largely drafted in March. The real reason for scheduling this encounter between Chirac and the panelists must lie elsewhere, and is most likely political.

Among Chirac’s formidable gifts as a politician is an ability to embrace interlocutors as good thinkers and good people while keeping a bargepole’s distance between himself and their programs. He ruled out, for instance, meeting with the “social summit” protesters who will be at Evian, on the grounds that he has invited representatives of twelve developing countries, and those developing countries are his priority. He expressed his admiration for the “hopes” raised by the Tobin tax (a proposal to fund the U.N. by taxing currency trades), and then he lamented that it was, alas, impractical. He announced that France had persuaded Russia to sign the Kyoto protocol on global warming. This announcement impressed the conferees, not because it increases the likelihood that global warming will be slowed but because it facilitates the portrayal of the United States as diplomatically isolated.

Chirac is not viscerally anti-American, and seems ill at ease with the Jacobin side of the global-governance movement. But that no longer matters. Since his stand against the United States on Iraq, the French president and the global-governance types are stuck with each other. France has abandoned its position embedded in NATO and the Atlantic alliance for one at the head of the U.N. and a revitalized “non-aligned” movement. In geostrategic terms, this is a booby prize (how many divisions has José Bové?), but it may have other benefits–even if they aren’t evident right now. It is very important to Chirac that he get an accurate reading of the strength of his new alliance, the quality of the people who compose it, and the cost to him of maintaining it.

Is anti-globalization the natural politics of our interconnected, free-trading world? Or was it a hobby enthusiasm of the 1990s, valid only so long as the West was lulled by peace and prosperity? Six months ago, Chirac wouldn’t have cared about the answer. Today, his future, and the diplomatic weight of France over the near and middle term, hinge on it.

Christopher Caldwell is a senior editor at The Weekly Standard.