Uniting the Two Superpowers

Global Justice and the Heart of America

By SYD BAUMEL

Empowering Americans

Clearly, like people the world over, Americans have a store of goodwill that extends far beyond their national borders. If the American people ran America, America and the rest of the world would have much less to fear from "the enemies of freedom." The Bush's administration's greatest gift to humanity may be that its plutocratic extremism is awakening us to the enemy within: an American government and a "globalized" world, of the corporations, by the corporations, for the corporations. 

Not since Vietnam has America's social justice movement been so engaged. Populists, activists, intellectuals and politicians like Michael Moore, Noam Chomsky, George Soros, Ralph Nader and Dennis Kucinich are inspiring Americans to reclaim their political soul. Organizatons like MoveOn, True Majority, e-thePeople, Public Citizen, Citizens for Global Solutions (a new merger of the World Federalist Association and the Campaign for UN Reform) and the International Simultaneous Policy Organisation are empowering Americans to reinvigorate their democracy and globalize their conscience.

Meanwhile, we Canadians – ever the front-row spectators of the American drama – may have our own role to play in bringing our neighbour back to its small r republican senses.

We are a global village indeed, in every respect that is, but one. We have not as yet determined the rules by which the inhabitants of the village, the sovereign nations of the world, govern how they interact among themselves.

When Bono sauntered onstage at the Canadian Liberal Leadership Convention this November to deliver a tribute to Canada's Prime Minister-in-waiting, most Canadians might have wondered if the pop star activist had gotten his directions mixed up.

Domestically, Paul Martin is widely perceived by leftists and antiglobalists as a Bay Street conservative in Liberal clothing, an American stooge-in-waiting ready to sign on to Bush's misguided missile defense program and sell out the family farm. [The New Democratic Party devotes an entire website to exposing the real or alleged shortcomings of Paul Martin.]

But internationally, Martin is admired as one of the developing world's most committed rich-nation friends who has steadfastly advocated, and to some extent succeeded, in loosening the noose of Third World debt. 

While Martin has taken lumps for running the family-owned transnational shipping fleet by the amoral rules of the global marketplace, Martin's political record, speeches and a recent biography by John Gray paint a different picture. They suggest Martin is a new millennium visionary who would use his prime ministerial power to campaign for a democratic rewrite of those very rules, for global market and village alike. 

And that, Martin insists, requires the "buy-in" of the CEO of the Superpower of Corporate Globalization: the USA.

Martin believes Canada is better placed than any other country to whisper sweet multilateralist nothings into Washington's ear, to encourage the United States to use its hegemonic window of opportunity to join, or lead, in "put[ting] in place the structures that will make globalization work for everybody – and not just the privileged," as he said this fall at a meeting of global governance experts.

Making globalization work for everybody is evidently a passion for Martin.

"We within our borders recognize that we have to have a basic level of welfare for the poorest of the poor in our country," he told Gray. "We've got to recognize sooner or later that the same thing has to apply internationally. . . .

"[A]t some point, 50 or 60 years from now, somebody is going to look back and say, 'I don't believe that they thought back at the turn of the 21st century that the solution to Africa's problems was some kind of public and private charity as opposed to a fundamental structuring of how the world governs itself.'"

Martin is not all talk. In 1999, he cofounded the G-20, a kind of finance ministers' G-8 for 19 major rich and developing nations, the European Union, the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. His latest project is a "Leaders' G-20." This is where Martin and progressive national leaders like South Africa's Thabo Mbeki and Brazil's Lula da Silva would ambush the U.S. president and enjoin him to help "put together a world of laws which will limit us all, but nonetheless a world that will work." If we don't, Martin tells Gray, "we'll all end up being governed by the United States."

If governments and their leaders, bound by hierarchy and patriarchy, wedded to military might for legitimacy, fail to grasp the implications of an emerging world consciousness for cooperation, for peace and for sustainability, they may become irrelevant.
As citizen-activists the world over merge, they can become an irresistible force to create peace and protect the planet. From here will come a new movement to abolish nuclear weapons and all weapons of mass destruction. From here will come the demand for sustainable communities, for new systems of energy, transportation and commerce. From here comes the future rushing in on us.

"The world both admires and despises America," writes Kevin Osborne, a Seattle world federalist who believes nation states should unite in a democratic world federation. "They admire us for the integrity we have demonstrated in our past by honoring the principles and values of our founding fathers in our own affairs. They despise us for the lack of integrity we have demonstrated abroad by applying those same foundational principles selectively instead of universally. . . .If we are to continue to be global leaders we must remember what it means to be a leader – and be responsible."

The last century bore witness to a bloody, nerve-wracking march from the chaotic multipolar balance of powers prior to World War II, to the MAD (mutually assured destruction) bipolar stability of the Cold War, to our present, post-Soviet Union state of unipolar American hegemony. 

Where others see crisis, American academic Ira Straus sees opportunity: 

"The unipolar situation of today – the so-called ‘Pax Americana – is far better than the alternatives we know from the recent past. . . .[A] world government is far more likely to grow on the basis of unipolarity than in opposition to it," Straus writes in a message to the listserv of the World Federalist Association National Council. "Our mission is to lead the USA into a world federation."

Whether that mission actually leads to a world federation, to a democratically conceived rulebook for the global village, to a major overhaul of the United Nations, to a world parliament or to any number of other global justice reforms, it is the American people, above all, who hold the key, for the United States still is a democracy. Dollars may influence, but votes decide. 

The strategy of the global justice movement, writes Brecher, "should not be to alienate the American people and elites, but rather to appeal to them to rise up and force their government from its current disastrous course." 

It is not for the United States to become a bastion of altruism in a sea of self-interested nation states and carpetbagging capital. Rather, it is a golden opportunity to lead the world in writing the rules by which all of us must play. 

It's the new Magna Carta, it's Philadelphia II.

And it all pretty much comes down to the American electorate. 

The inheritors of the world's greatest democracy are today the pivot point of the global body politic. With a single flip, America could become the bridge, rather than the barrier to a new world order of the people, by the people, for the people.