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By Root 1502 0

calls for a “true world central bank” that “would require the ceding of a substantial degree of monetary sovereignty, which in turn would mean giving up a good deal of policymaking sovereignty as well.”15 But to whom is sovereignty to be ceded? The cohort of nations that funds the bank? Member national banks (which actually do the funding)? Individual bankers, who are natives of some country or other and have both interests and ideologies of their own? Kuttner speaks of the need for regulatory international institutions, but never addresses the question of democratic legitimacy. Who do such entities actually represent? To whom are they accountable? Whose interests are they supposed to advance? It is not even clear to whom such formed collective entities as the new “Europe” are to report. To member national governments? Or to the individual citizens national governments represent? Or, as the German Laender and other powerful regional entities like Lombardy and Catalonia are insisting, to provincial and confederal fragments of nation-states?16

As presently organized, the European Union is accountable to elites: through the Council of Ministers, to the governments of its member states and through its burgeoning bureaucracies to technocrats and other professionals with norms and interests of their own. The European parliament may eventually come to represent people directly, but it is currently the product of highly politicized local elections in which elites and ideological parties continue to play a crucial role. A few maverick members have been chosen who represent a distinctive democratic viewpoint (usually Green rather than red or black)—for example, Eve Quistorp from Berlin, who works as a local Green movement organizer and has won a seat in the European parliament. But at this stage her case is the exception rather than the rule. Ultimately, a transnational form of sovereignty will have to spring from a transnational form of group identity and patriotism, but there is no appropriate form of international civil society in which such a citizenship, whether Green or communitarian or world federalist, might thrive at present. If, at the national level, citizenship comes first, and civic institutions only thereafter, where is the global citizen capable of struggling for a global democracy? Stoic cosmopolitanism has yet to fire the imagination or elicit the affections of ordinary women and men, making proposals for global government seem clever pipe dreams at best.17 Many local activists in Europe have set their democratic sails against the winds of integration.

More than twenty years ago, James Tobin proposed a tithe on international currency transactions that could be applied to the development of disadvantaged nations. More recently Robert Reich, now secretary of labor, advanced a brilliant proposal for a “kind of GATT for direct investment” that would regulate bidding by individual nations for “high-value added investments by global corporations,” and develop “fair tactics” that barred “would be threats to close the domestic market unless certain investments were undertaken within it.”18 But to succeed, these proposals would have had to have been supported by the very nations that benefit from today’s unfair practices. These practices reward with fat contracts the nations willing to sacrifice the most in the way of cheap labor, high subsidies, low taxes, and environmental laissez-faire, and in effect compel peoples to barter away social justice and the common good for a stake in the international economy. Reich’s fair practices would preclude such competition but to work would have to be secured by an international institution capable of execution and enforcement. It was hard enough for the national government of the United States under the two Roosevelts to contain and regulate America’s early monopolies in oil, coal, steel, and railways. Where might we find political support and a mobilized citizenry for comparably muscular international organizations to contain and regulate, say, Microsoft or AT&T or Coca-Cola (which