The big five news stories of '98
By Gwynne Dyer
LONDON (JP): This year has ruined an old phrase for good. United States President Bill Clinton gave a whole new meaning to the phrase "unimpeachable behavior" -- and in the end, the Congress impeached him anyway.
Clinton's sexual peccadilloes, lawyerly evasions and ultimate confession were the biggest news story of 1998.
The impeachment hearings in the Senate will keep the story going well into 1999, but apart from the salacious bits it was never much of a story, and now it is slowly limping toward oblivion. There are not enough votes in the Senate to dislodge Clinton from office, and in any case the Republicans do not want to give Vice President Al Gore the advantage of running in 2000 as an incumbent president.
In terms of importance, Clinton's travails do not even make it into the year's top five stories.
So what were the real big five?
Number one, beyond dispute, was the virtual collapse of the extreme free market doctrines that have dominated the emerging global market since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, and seemed for a time to be synonymous with globalization.
The global market is still there, though a bit battered after a year in which the 18-month-old financial crisis in Asia spread to Russia in July, and was barely halted -- at least for the moment -- by a huge International Monetary Fund rescue of Brazil in November. The stock markets of the developed world have not done another 1929, though they have been through a wild roller coaster ride this year. However, the neoliberal triumphalism that characterized the '90s is stone cold dead.
As British economist John Maynard Keynes -- who is due for a revival -- once remarked: "When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do?" The most striking evidence that the real economic decision makers have changed their minds was the mercy killing of the Multilateral Agreement on Investment (MAI) in Paris.
When the rich nations began the MAI negotiations in 1995, Renato Ruggiero, director general of the World Trade Organization, declared that "we are writing the constitution of a single global economy".
That monetarist vision of a world run wisely and well by the impersonal forces of the market had so little credibility by this February that the major players simply walked away from the Paris talks. Subsequent attempts to revive the MAI talks in October failed ignominiously.
The number two story in importance -- or maybe it will turn out to be the most important by far -- was the beginning of work on the International Space Station in November.
It will take five years to finish, and we may all be dead of old age before anybody really knows how important it was. But a full-scale orbital station is the prerequisite for real space flight. And that may be where much of the human race's future lies.
("No, Your Majesty, we should solve all the problems here in Spain before we waste money on this fellow Columbus and his fantastic notions.")
Number three was a real sleeper: The growing reluctance of consumers, particularly in Europe, to fall in with the agrochemical companies' plans for world conquest through genetic modification.
"This is not right and we won't do it," said Malcolm Walker of the Iceland food store chain in Britain, explaining that his shops would no longer carry any genetically modified foods. By year's end, an internal Monsanto document reported a disastrously rapid rise in consumer resistance throughout Western Europe.
Monsanto and its coconspirators may win in the end: Their lawyers are as ruthless as Disney's, and they have the U.S. government in their pocket. North America has already accepted their genetically modified crops without a fight. But grass roots activism is forcing European governments into open resistance, and the Third World is starting to read the fine print too. What looked like a walkover is becoming a battle.
Many stories jostle for fourth place, including the worrisome lack of progress at the review conference on the International Climate Convention in Buenos Aires in November. (It's especially worrisome if you live near a seacoast.)
But let's go with a positive story instead: The agreement in Rome to create an International Criminal Court (ICC).
This was a battle, too, with the United States and its usual embarrassing handful of allies (Algeria, Iraq, China, Libya, etc.) fighting tooth and nail to stop or cripple this attempt to expand the reach of international law.
But everybody else won, and once the treaty is ratified there will be a permanent international court to do the job that has hitherto only been done by occasional ad hoc courts like the Nuremberg tribunal or the courts on the Bosnian and Rwandan genocides.
The ICC is "a great hope and a giant step forward that a few years ago, nobody would have thought possible," said UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan, when the Rome negotiations concluded in triumph in July.
It is the sort of thing people in his position are paid to say, but on this occasion he was not exaggerating.
Five years ago, it would not have been possible, but now world public opinion supports the concept. Governments have little choice but to follow -- and even the United States will probably sign in the end.
As for the last of the really big stories of 1998, it is only last because it happens at the very end of the year.
On New Year's Eve at 12.30 p.m. Central European Time, 290 million Europeans living in eleven different countries adopt a single currency -- the euro. It will be worth around US$1.20, and pretty soon it will probably be playing as prominent a role in the world economy as the U.S. dollar.
Large as the economic consequences of a single European currency are, they are dwarfed by the political implications, for this is really the start of a process that may well end with the emergence of a real United States of Europe.
The European countries involved cannot afford to let this new currency fail, but to keep the euro credible they will be forced to create more and more federal institutions. That was precisely what the German and French leaders who came up with the idea intended, and if a federal Europe really comes to pass, the world will be a very different place.