The weariness and cynicism the phrase
arouses are almost palpable. "Another UN Summit" people say,
as their eyes glaze over and they shrug their shoulders, barely having
the enthusiasm to enquire about the objectives, the means to be adopted,
or even the participants.
And at one level, such impatience with UN Summits is completely understandable.
In the past decade, there have been at least seven major UN Summits, including
the first Earth Summit in Rio in 1992, the Population Summit in Cairo
in 1995, the Social Summit in Copenhagen and the Women’s Conference
in Beijing in 1995, the Habitat II Conference in Istanbul in 1996, the
Millennium Summit in New York in 2000. Each of these has been more than
simply large spectacle, coming out with a string of pious declarations
and even time-bound "commitments" by countries, designed to
improve the conditions of the peoples of the world.
And yet, there has been no associated change in conditions on the ground
– environmental damage continues apace, inequalities have worsened,
material lives across the world have become more fragile and insecure.
This is why such Summits seem, to so many people at the moment, to be
little more than reasons for another set of international bureaucrats
and national delegates to visit yet another country and salve their consciences
by publicly affirming their commitment to justice and equality.
Even so, it would be wrong to be completely cynical about these exercises,
or to allow them to turn into talking shops that are complete failures
in practice. The UN may seem like an expensive dead duck, but it is still
potentially one of the important institutions that can be used to push
for pro-people government policies, and to combat the other more powerful
multilateral institutions, such as the IMF and the WTO, that are now blatantly
serving the needs of corporate capital rather than the citizens of the
world.
Consider what the second Earth Summit, or the World Summit on Sustainable
Development about to be held in Johannesburg, is all about. As a conference
on the kind of development that should be pursued by both developed and
developing nations, poverty, over-consumption and unsustainable lifestyles
are supposed to be major concerns. Officially, the main objective
of the Summit is "to reinvigorate political commitment to sustainable
development". It is supposed to conclude with a "Johannesburg
Declaration", reaffirming governments’ commitments, with a
negotiated implementation plan outlining priority actions that will promote
economic growth, social development and environmental protection.
Of course all this is more necessary now than ever before, as world consumption
patterns have never been so unequal or so unsustainable. The problem is
that the United States government, in its new more aggressively uncompromising
persona, has already undermined the outcome of the process well before
the Summit started. While George Bush (unlike most world leaders) will
not even attend the conference, his administration has already done the
groundwork, in the preparatory meetings, of removing all policy potency
from the text of the declaration and providing another paean to the glories
of unregulated capitalism. The US is effectively trying to push its free
trade and investment agenda, as expressed also by the WTO, as synonymous
with sustainable development.
In fact, the US is trying to force a withdrawal even from the negotiating
principles agreed in Rio. These include the precautionary principle, which
states that governments should be especially cautious whenever there is
a possibility of devastating and irreparable environmental harm. This
principle also underlies the BioSafety Protocol and similar public policy.
However, the US has already complained that it conflicts with free trade,
and has used the WTO dispute mechanism to push this point.
In addition, the US administration wants to roll back the principle of
"common but differentiating responsibilities" – the idea
that those countries that are most responsible for harm to the environment
should also play the biggest role in dealing with the problem. This is
not only obviously just, it is also the only practical way to deal with
the issue, since poor developing countries simply do not have to resources
to even begin to tackle the problem. The refusal last year by George Bush
to sign the Kyoto Protocol to deal with climate change was one way of
scuttling this, but the US administration has even undermined other international
efforts to fund poor nations’ implementation of Rio agreements.
But the US government is not the only culprit, of course. The governments
of developed countries together have forced some crucial changes in the
draft text, such as the commitment to develop a framework for transnational
corporate accountability. That has been watered down and put very low
on the agenda. Instead, what has been given great prominence is the extension
of corporate opportunity – by allowing for private involvement and
control of crucial areas of service delivery, including water; and by
pushing for "public-private partnerships" in all the important
priority areas. Since such partnerships are now known to be little more
than yet another means for public subsidising of corporate profitability,
they may well aggravate existing problems.
All this reflects changes in international power relations, whereby large
corporate capital in various manifestations has become disproportionately
potent, typically with the active connivance of the elites and ruling
groups in both developed and developing countries. That is why conference
after international conference, that has the potential to push for genuine
alternative policies, has been hijacked by these interests. The Johannesburg
Summit currently looks set to go the same way.
But of course this should not be allowed to happen without a fight. Corporate
capitalism now faces a worldwide crisis of legitimacy. The alienation
and despair of large populations in developing and poor countries, as
well as in economies ridden by financial crisis, is well known, even though
they seem not to matter so much in international policy making. But surveys
show that even the majority of people in the US now feel that corporations
have too much power and need to be curbed. This is clearly even more the
case for issues with long-term significance such as environment. As Victor
Menotti of the International Forum on Globalisation put it "If you
can’t trust them with your pension, how can you trust them with
the planet?"
After a long time, therefore, the current world system looks not only
unsustainable but also unstable, unable to control the spasmodic particular
crises which are breaking out all over the place. This also means that
the potential for real change is greater. So, along with the noise made
by the other parallel meetings in Johannesburg - the NGO Summit, and the
gatherings of all those who could not pay the fees for the NGO Summit
– there has to be much more noise made by all of us domestically
in our own context, to force changes in current government policies which
ensure neither democracy nor sustainability, and to control and limit
the power of large capital which currently destroys both.