GLOBALIZATION, INTERNATIONAL DEMOCRACY AND A WORLD PARLIAMENT

by Prof. Lucio Levi, University of Torino

Globalization and the Decline of Democracy
Globalization arouses disquiet from the prospect of deep and inevitable change. Primarily an economic process, its political dimension has been largely neglected. The market became global, as governments remained national. Private centers of power, e.g., multinational corporations, non-governmental organizations, and criminal or terrorist organizations have taken on a global size and acquired an increasing freedom of action in countering the power of states.

Governments have responded to globalization by pursuing international co-operation and seeking to solve problems they cannot solve alone, through additional international organizations. The weakness of this lies in their decision-making procedures, based on unanimity and the veto, and the lack of executive powers. This formula for managing globalization, termed "global governance," justifies retaining the world order based on national sovereignty and the dominance by multinational corporations of the world market and the United States in world politics. This internationalist approach, the illusion that a solution to the main international issues can be based on mutual consent among sovereign states, is the antithesis of federalism. Federalism's strength lies in the goals of world government and international democracy, which are the answer to the need to control globalization and establish peace among nations through law.

When sovereign states decline, there is a parallel decline in democracy. Many citizens feel that the most important decisions have migrated from the institutions they can control toward international centers of power without democratic controls. National governments are unable to submit globalization to democratic control, while international organizations are nothing but places where sovereign states co-operate to try to solve global issues.

International Democracy
The most revolutionary objective of our age, the democratization of the United Nations, would remove the government of the world from the control of the big powers and the private centers of power and put it into the hands of the peoples of the world. After the recent advance of democracy in Eastern Europe, the ex-Soviet Union, Asia and Latin America, today, for the first time in history, over half of the countries of the world have adopted a democratic form of government. But the revival of nationalism has triggered a process of disintegration of multinational states and threatens new-born democracies.

Because democracy is fragmented among many national states, too small to assure their economic development and torn apart by international conflicts, independence can be reconciled with it only through federal institutions that must be created both at the regional and world level. Some international organizations have recently been enriched with parliamentary structures, most made up of national parliamentarians. But we can draw a lesson from history (and utilize it for UN reform): the strengthening and democratizing of the directly- elected European Parliament helped promote European unification.

Decline of the Political Parties and Rise of Civil Society
Revolutionary change, which creates new institutions and higher forms of political coexistence, has always resulted from new social forces. All over the world citizen movements have grown, operating on all levels of political life in the sectors of peace, human rights, international justice, development aid, environment, culture, education, health, etc. Faced with the globalization of social, economic and political life, political parties are prisoners of the national states, and politics deteriorate steadily into a power game.

On the other hand, global civil society movements try to strengthen their influence over international politics. At summit meetings citizens, largely young people linked by a common situation (globalization), protest being excluded from representation within international organizations (IOs) and want a say in international affairs. This manifestation of a world unification movement lacks means to control this process. Some NGOs resort to violence in opposing globalization and IOs, considering the latter as irreformable. Others are recognized by IOs, behave like reformers, and participate in international conferences in an advisory capacity, exerting real influence on negotiations. Although each movement deals with only one single problem, they can become the vanguard of international democracy.

Democratic Federations
The first condition for the formation of a world federation is that the member states be republican. Without domestic democracy, an essential prerequisite of international democracy is lacking. Though the democratization of states all over the world hasn’t been completed, this does not preclude starting the democratization of the UN. Six Western European countries founded the Euro- pean Community, starting its democratization without waiting for the democratization of the institutions of all the European states.

The plan to bring globalization under democratic control is meeting with formidable opposition not only from authoritarian regimes, but primarily from the U.S. Government, which won’t let its power be lessened by IOs or global civil society. The U. S. has such heavy world strategic commitments that it can’t promote international democracy. With a Parliament elected by universal suffrage, the emerging European Federation can become the leader of international democracy, prepared to promote this experiment in the other great regions of the world and at the the UN.

World Parliament Models
In 1995 the Commission on Global Governance proposed creating a permanent Global Civil Society Forum to transmit the views of international civil society to the UN General Assembly. The Millennium Forum at the UN Building in New York in May 2000 was a dress rehearsal of such a Forum. Until the formation of a parliamentary body and political parties at world level (are the NGOs not movements anticipating political parties?), the Forum would represent as closely as possible the most active segments of the peoples of the world. However, it would lack real democratic representation, for the will of the people can come only from an election based on competition among political parties.

The WTO Parliamentary Assembly
According to the proposal to create a Parliamentary Assembly for the World Trade Organization, drafted by Canadian World Federalists and supported within the Canadian and European parliaments, the Assembly should be composed of members of national parliaments and have consultative powers. The limitation of this scheme lies in its sectoral approach, which would entail the multiplication of separate one-issue assemblies for the IMF, the World Bank, the ILO, etc. But in addition to trade flows, the process of globalization affects many other aspects of political, economic and social life, like security, international monetary and financial issues, poverty, human rights, environment, health, education, etc.

In fact, the WTO faces the problem of correcting the distortions of the world market through the establishment of social and environmental standards, the creation of an anti-trust authority, and so forth. There are no appropriate answers to these problems in the absence of the necessary powers and because of the plurality of bodies dealing with these problems. It is therefore necessary to create a center to co-ordinate functions that are presently scattered among so many institutions operating independently of each other.

The problems concerning the strengthening and the democratization of the UN must be addressed together. The UN, as a whole, should be entrusted with new tasks, particularly those related to the international commercial, monetary and financial relations, and a Parliament should be constituted within the fabric of the UN system. Therefore, if the goal is the democratization of globalization, the democratization of the WTO is not enough.

The UN Parliamentary Assembly, Out of Date?
Approximately ten years after the publication of The Case for a United Nations Parliamentary Assembly, written by Dieter Heinrich, we must reconsider this proposal. UNPA, inspired by the example of the European Parliament, starting as an assembly of members of national parliaments and endowed with consultative powers, was to be a preliminary step toward a real World Parliament directly elected by the world citizens and endowed with legislative powers. However, we must ask whether UNPA would be an adequate response to the rapid growth of globalization and the parallel increasing influence of global civil society movements on international politics.

In 1968 European Federalists started the campaign that paved the way to direct election of the European Parliament and the strengthening of its powers. Meanwhile, the world has to face the contradiction between the increasing intervention of international organizations in the field of economy, finance, human rights, environment, etc. and their democratic deficit. Since globalization wipes out the distinction between domestic and international politics, the extension of democracy to international relations has become imperative. However, UNPA seems insufficient to respond to the increasing need for international democracy, because it confines itself to the mobilization of parliamentarians and, not reaching the citizens, is unable to mobilize them. In conclusion, UNPA seems too weak in the face of the big changes occurring in world politics and in the global civil society.

A World Parliament
I think that we should choose an alternative. "For a directly elected World Parliament" is the simple and strong slogan that identifies the contradiction between globalization and the lack of international democracy, and expresses at the same time deep reasons that inspire the global civil society movements, the need for an assembly representing the general will of humankind.

The World Federalist Movement can become the leading force of a large coalition of NGOs striving for a UN Parliament. In fact, most global civil society movements, striving for peace, the protection of the environment, international justice and the defense of human rights, do not yet have a strategy for achieving these goals. The task of WFM is to make these movements aware of the institutions which mankind needs to attain international democracy, peace and justice.

The role that the civil society movements have acquired on the international scene paves the way for new forms of political action, now termed new diplomacy. One of the most significant examples is the alliance between reform-oriented nations and NGOs, which generated enough critical mass to give rise to the ICC. It is the updated version of the strategy largely experimented by the European Federalists: achieving the federal union by combining two political currents, one government-inspired and one popular-inspired.

Governments view political unity in terms of co-operation among sovereign states, while federalists conceive ot it in terms of the creation of a new power. Governments are opposed to using their power for objectives that go beyond international co-operation. On the other hand, although federalists do not have the strength, they have an initiating capacity, which can be used during moments of crisis to move the governments to transfer their authority to supranational institutions.

According to Richard Falk and Andrew Strauss, whose article "Toward Global Parliament" appeared in Foreign Affairs in early 2001, an alliance between reformist governments and NGOs such as this could give rise to a treaty instituting a World Parliament. It could begin to exist after being ratified by a minimum number of states. I think 50% of the UN members and world population would be sufficient. As Falk and Strauss wrote, "Once the assembly became operational, the task of gaining additional state members would likely become easier. A concrete organization would then exist that citizens could urge their governments to join. As more states joined, pressure would grow on nonmember states to participate".

In concluding, I think the World Parliament will encourage the formation of true world political parties, which will likely develop positive relations with the civil society movements. Secondly, in order to democratize globalization, a global Parliament is not enough. No parliament can govern a country alone. An executive body is necessary. So the World Parliament must be seen as a crucial milestone on the way toward forming a democratic government endowed with the necessary powers to enforce the laws passed by the World Parliament

When the WFM Council met in Ventotene in September 2001 , Fergus Watt of the World Federalists of Canada presented a paper on a "WTO Parliament" promoting a project to democratize the WTO (Mondiale, Nov. '01). At Ventotene Levi, a senior member of the WFM Executive Committee, presented a different point of view.