Global Governance

The tension outlined by Chomsky is in fact one that has plagued the question of global leadership for centuries. From the dawn of history, leadership of all humanity has been either the call of the prophets, or the exclusive purpose of empires. The former relied mainly on moral authority, the latter principally on sheer physical force. One is more evocative of norms and principles and thus is closer to our conception of leadership, while the other stresses control and subjugation, akin to our view of rule. Indeed, the same working definition of leadership as an expression of moral principles can apply to the issue of institutional leadership and global governance. The tension here is not between individuals, rising to the moral challenges of leadership or succumbing to the political expediencies of power. It is between two competing conceptions: the supreme rule of the concept of state sovereignty tenaciously defended by its principal beneficiaries on the one hand, and global governance institutions with a moral vocation to devise common solutions to common human concerns on the other.

But since these global governance institutions are established by states, the ideals underlying these institutions may also be perverted by these very states that established them. In the 20th century, the League of Nations and the United Nations were founded to provide global leadership by mobilizing universal support behind a set of universal values of social progress and human development. At the end of World War I, the League of Nations held the promise of global leadership based on universal moral values such as self-determination and collective security. But the League was controlled by imperial powers more interested in furthering their respective states’ imperial interests than in providing moral leadership. The League and the mandates (a "sacred trust" of civilization) turned out to be little different from the political balance of power system of the Congress of Vienna. The League became a congress of European powers determined to defend colonialism tenaciously against the rising tide of self-determination and to fight communism while turning a blind eye to the danger of fascism in their own backyard. The result was a collective failure of moral leadership. World War II was evidence of the magnitude of that leadership failure. The United Nations came into existence in 1945, again with the promise of global leadership based on universally shared human values and ideals. However, the reservation clause to the statute of the International Court of Justice making its jurisdiction optional and the veto power allotted to the permanent members of the Security Council ensured that the United Nations would reflect the realpolitik balance of power brought about by the military realities of the results of World War II.

Since the end of the Cold War, the United Nations has attempted to chart a revised ethic of global leadership. UN Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali maintained that peace, development, and democracy are inextricably linked, and that democracy was needed not only inside a state but also among states in the international community. The urgent leadership task for the United Nations now was to intensify the struggle against inequalities, and to reconcile globalization with the common good. There is a similar imperative for the United Nations to achieve true leadership in facing the challenges of conflict resolution, which requires dealing with internal conflicts and the multiplicity of would-be mediators—in particular with respect to the conflicts between Palestinians and Israelis and in Northern Ireland.

But, as with the League of Nations, there exist serious restrictions on the ability of the United Nations to achieve these laudable goals of moral leadership. The United Nations can do only what its members, and especially its permanent Security Council members, will allow it to do. This fact was exemplified by the decision of the United States and United Kingdom to go to war against Iraq after failing to obtain specific authorization from the UN Security Council, in spite of the strong opposition of other permanent members. This result seriously undermined the Security Council’s claim to leadership for global governance in the area of peace and security.

People-Driven Moral Leadership

In the February 18, 2002, issue of The Nation, Susan George writes that the emotions which the September 11 atrocities evoked in the Western countries caused her "briefly to entertain the naïve hope that their [Western] leadership might finally recognize the gravity of the situation and provide an appropriate response. I should have known better. Those who hold our futures in their hands are not serious. They see no farther than the noses of their bombers. Frightening though the prospect may seem, citizens must accept the risk of being serious in their place." George thus points to an increasingly critical source for moral leadership—the people themselves. Such people-driven moral leadership is vital in situations where designated leaders of organizations or states are themselves questionable in terms of their pursuit of truly moral leadership goals.

People-driven moral leadership is in fact already underway, first in the people-driven democratic revolutions that swept Eastern and Central Europe in the 1980s and 1990s, and in the impact that civil society organizations were able to have on global governance in the 1990s. During the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe, civil society associations that included intellectuals, artists, students, writers, workers, church leaders, and human rights activists led the democratic revolutions. The Committee for Workers’ Defence (KOR) in Poland, for instance, began in 1976 the formulation of ideas that became the intellectual progenitor of the Solidarity trade union. In Hungary, Szeta was initially established as an organization devoted to relieving poverty but quickly became the focus of moral and intellectual opposition. In Czechoslovakia, the Charter 77, which emerged in response to the Soviet repression of the Prague Spring of 1968, kept alive the spirit of intellectual dissent and opposition. It was the Charter 77 dissidents who joined in the Civic Forum to provide the revolutionary impetus and leadership in the crucial period of November 1989. In East Germany, Neues Forum emerged from small opposition debates in the 1980s and took political initiatives in the last days of the Honecker regime. In 1990, the Neues Forum was the biggest single political force in the country.