Addressing democracy after Genoa trade talks

By Heidemarie Wieczorek-Zeul

BERLIN (DPA): The violent clashes at the G-7/8 Summit in Genoa have drawn attention to a serious lack of democracy in globalization. This deficit has been worrying experts and political scientists as well as those in government in both industrialized and developing nations for the longest time and they have been trying to solve it with possibilities of political co-ordination.

On one hand, global economic developments and interconnections are growing exponentially while, on the other, the possibilities of structuring global politics and mechanisms of participation thus far have proceeded linearly at most.

This development, however, reopens the question of who wields sovereign power in the international arena. How is the primacy of politics over the economy ensured? Politicians should be happy that there are (peaceful) demonstrators who expose these questions to the public.

The question of democracy and social justice presents itself anew for the 21st century by global standards. Both aspects of that question are issues for which the Social Democratic movement has constantly throughout history and with its whole identity sought a solution. The crux is whether and how one succeeds in anchoring in the global economy and society the principles of the state under the rule of law that was fought for at the national level; whether efforts will still be made to bring global capitalism under control; and if all regions are equally involved in organizing globalization. Those who would forego this, those who therefore would leave everything to the allegedly free interplay of market forces, would be acting gravely against the dictates of democracy and would widen the existing injustice -- the gaping rift between rich and poor -- worldwide and within local societies instead of trying to close it.

Lest we forget: The G-7 nations control 68 percent of the world's gross domestic product (GDP) but are home to only 11 percent of its population. An additional two billion people are expected to live on this planet by the year 2025, 90 percent of them in developing countries. Already, 1.2 billion people are living in abject poverty. That's why it's good that we finally have a broad discussion over Germany's international responsibility and the policy-structuring of the new world order.

All too many issues that are left to allegedly "technical" discussions -- in World Trade Organization (WTO) circles, for example -- are highly political but are not discussed in a political manner although they have drastic effects on the developing nations. Therefore, we have to think beyond the global governance approach. In tandem with this approach, a complex, multilayered system developed in which national governments both share and delegate responsibility, in which local, regional and global operators -- from the private sector also -- organize a new interaction.

The issue now is also the development of cosmopolitan structures. This is why developing nations have long been demanding a UN Security Council for Economic Policy in which all regions of the world are represented with equal rights at the highest political level. However, we also need a change in the unjust global economic system, for instance in its unequal terms of trade. This means further debt reduction; it means real market access for the developing countries and the world trade regimes that discriminate against those countries. It also means genuine elimination of European Union agricultural protectionism and export subsidies that compete with developing nations worldwide.

In particular, developing nations have to be considered in the further organization of the international financial system, for instance in the forum for financial stability. Moreover, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank have to be committed to acknowledge controls on the movement of capital as a means for developing countries to avoid and master crises in certain situations, and not to press countries with weak institutional prerequisites to liberalize their financial sectors.

But above all the international community, especially, also has to stand by its financial obligations. This applies, first of all, to the development-policy target set by the heads of state and government at the September 2000 UN Millennium Summit in New York to slash global poverty by half by 2015. It also applies to the 0.7 percent target, with which the industrial nations committed themselves to spend 0.7 percent of their GDP on development aid.

Moreover, the Commission on Financing for Development, chaired jointly by UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan and former Mexican president Ernesto Zedillo Ponce de Leon, proposed new sources of financing in order to realize important international tasks such as an international tax authority to ensure that developing nations have better control over fugitive capital. The Commission comes to the conclusion that it is necessary to double development aid payments if global poverty is to be halved by 2015.

To summarize: All those who are interested in such reforms of the world order have to work together and seek dialogue with each other. Only through discussion will they be able to eliminate differences in outlook and interpretation. This is why I would like to enter a plea for a broad global reform alliance made up of reform-willing industrial nations and developing countries, engaged non-governmental groups, anti-globalization demonstrators committed to non-violence or possibly the private sector and trade unions. A fundamental backslide into national isolation would be a development in the wrong direction.

It is the task of the governing German Social Democrat -- Greens coalition to give impulses to this global reform alliance, just as it was the responsibility of the Social Democrat-led government under late Chancellor Willy Brandt to realize the Eastern European-and detente policies started in the 1960s.

Willy Brandt was right: Each generation will be judged by whether it is keeping pace with the times and is doing justice to its responsibility.

The writer is German Minister for Economic Cooperation and Development and a Deputy Chairman of the Social Democratic Party.