Were there a Nobel Prize for hypocrisy, it would be awarded this year to Pascal Lamy, the European Union’s trade negotiator.
A week ago he argued that the World Trade Organisation (WTO) ”helps us move from a Hobbesian world of lawlessness into a more Kantian world — perhaps not exactly of perpetual peace, but at least one where trade relations are subject to the rule of law”.
On Sunday, by treating the trade talks as if, in Thomas Hobbes’s words, they were ”a war of every man against every man”, Lamy scuppered the talks in Cancun, Mexico, and very possibly destroyed the organisation as a result.
One result could be a trade regime, where, as Hobbes observed, ”force and fraud are … the two cardinal virtues”. Relations between countries would then revert to the state of nature the philosopher feared, where the nasty and brutish behaviour of the powerful keeps the lives of the poor short.
Lamy made the poor nations an offer that they could not possibly accept. He was apparently trying to resurrect, by means of an ”investment treaty”, the infamous Multilateral Agreement on Investment. Allowing corporations to force governments to remove laws that interfered with their ability to make money, this was crushed by a worldwide revolt in 1998.
In return for granting corporations power over governments, the poor nations would receive nothing. The concessions on farm subsidies Lamy offered amounted to a reshuffling of the money paid to European farmers. They would continue to permit Europe’s subsidy barons to dump artificially cheap produce on the poor world, destroying farmers’ livelihoods.
As Hobbes knew, ”If other men will not lay down their right … there is no reason for anyone to divest himself of his: for that were to expose himself to prey.” By offering the poorer nations nothing in return for almost everything, Lamy forced them to walk out.
He did this because he sees his public duty as the defence of the EU’s corporations and industrial farmers against all comers, whether citizens of Europe or other nations. He imagined that, according to the laws of nature that have governed the WTO, the weaker parties would capitulate and grant the corporations the little that had not already been stolen from them.
His behaviour appeared to confirm the most lurid tabloid scare stories about Eurocrats running out of control. He stuck to his guns even when it became clear that the poor nations were mobilising a collective response to aggression. For the first time in 20 years, they were beginning to unite and to move as a body.
That they have not done so before is testament to the corrosive effects of the Cold War and the continued ability of rich and powerful nations to bribe, blackmail and bully poor ones. Whenever there has been a prospect of solidarity among the weak, the strong — and in particular the United States — have successfully divided and ruled them, by promising concessions to those who split and threatening sanctions against those who stay. But now the rich countries have become victims of their own power.
They have been seeking to recruit as many developing nations into the WTO as they can, to open up the emerging markets and force them to trade on onerous terms. But while doing so, they have found themselves massively outnumbered.
The EU and the US may already be regretting their efforts to persuade China to join. It has now become the rock — too big to bully and threaten — around which the unattached nations are clustering.
Paradoxically, it was precisely because the demands of Lamy and, to a lesser extent, the US were so outrageous that the smaller nations could not be dragged away from this new coalition. They simply had too much to lose if they allowed the rich bloc’s proposals to pass.
Their solidarity is empowering. At Cancun the weak nations stood up to the most powerful negotiators on Earth and were not broken.
The lesson is that if this was possible, almost anything is. Suddenly the proposals for global justice that relied on solidarity for their implementation can spring to life. While the WTO might have been buried, these nations may, if they use their collective power intelligently, find a way of negotiating together. They may even disinter it as the democratic body it was always supposed to be.
The World Bank and the International Monetary Fund had better watch their backs. The United Nations Security Council will find its anomalous powers ever harder to sustain. Poor nations, if they stick together, can begin to exercise a collective threat to the rich.
For this they need leverage and, in the form of their debts, they possess it. Together they owe so much that, in effect, they own the world’s financial systems. By threatening, collectively, to default, they could wield the sort of power that only the rich have so far exercised, to demand greater concessions.
So, by fighting so doggedly for a worse world, Pascal Lamy may accidentally have engineered a better one. — Â