• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1408 0

Monetary Fund (and later the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade and the World Trade Organization, which grew out of GATT in 1995) were ostensibly forged as instruments of democratic sovereign nations designed to guide and regulate private-sector interests in the name of public sector reconstruction, over a period of time they became instruments of the very private-sector interests they were meant to channel and keep in check. Those who today call for their elimination in the name of transparency, accountability, and democracy might be surprised to learn that these norms were once regarded as among the postwar financial order’s primary objectives. Given the role modern institutions representing this order play as potential pieces in a global regulatory infrastructure, one way to begin the process of global democratization would be to redemocratize them and subordinate them to the will of democratic peoples.

Globalization does not occur in a vacuum, of course. Its corrosive impact on democratic governance and our inability to put to real democratic use international financial institutions that are nominally already at the service of democracy is augmented by a cognate ideology of privatization that is prevalent both on the international scene and within the countries whose economies are being globalized. McWorld is accompanied by this ideology of privatization—what Europeans often call neoliberalism and George Soros has labeled market fundamentalism (an appropriate implicit comparison to Jihadic fundamentalism)—that saps democracy by attacking government and its culture of public power. By arguing that markets can do everything government once did, and better, with more freedom for citizens, privatization within nation-states opens the way for a deregulation of markets that in turn facilitates the globalization and hence privatization of the economy. It softens up citizens to accept the decline of political institutions and tries to persuade them that they will be better off—more “free”—when their collective democratic voice is stilled, when they think of themselves not as public citizens but as private consumers. Consumers are poor substitutes for citizens, however, just as corporate CEOs are poor substitutes for democratic statesmen. It is telling that on the morning of September 12, 2001, America did not call Bill Gates or Michael Eisner to ask for assistance in dealing with terrorism. A privatized airport security system turned out to be fallible because it was more attuned to costs than to safety. Long-neglected public institutions reacquired overnight their democratic legitimacy and their role as defenders of public goods.

Can this renewed legitimacy be employed on behalf of international institutions dedicated to public rather than private goods? If it can, new forms of civic interdependence can be quickly established.

The ideology of privatization has always confounded private and public modes of choosing. Consumer choice is always and necessarily private and personal choice. Private choices, autonomous or not, cannot affect public outcomes. Democratic governance is not just about choosing; rather, it is about public choosing, about dealing with the social consequences of private choices and behavior. In the global sector this is crucial, because only public and democratic decisions can establish social justice and equity. Private markets cannot, not because they are capitalist but because they are private. In the language of the great social contract theorist Jean-Jacques Rousseau, through participation in the general will, global citizens can regulate the private wills of global consumers and global corporations. They can tame Jihad and interdict terrorism even as they regulate markets and civilize their consequences.

It is both a noxious tribute to the power of privatization and a marker of our deep confusion about the difference between public and private goods in the new century that the question of “who should own the code of life” (as the headline of a recent Newsweek article had it)3 is being asked.