”The rolling out of democracy should happen at our pace and not what pleases those watching us or trying to help us succeed. Our foreign policy should be directed at securing first and foremost our interests in the world. The legality of the means we use to achieve this should be defined only by us and nobody else. The United States election has shown us that even the world leader in all aspects of human endeavour is not interested in the world. Why should we be? Globalisation is indeed dead. Or what do you think?”
So, last week, writes Ali Mufuruki in the opinion page of The Citizen, one of the main Tanzanian daily newspapers. The attitude of the Bush administration to the rest of the world encourages a new standard for international relations: blatant, flagrant unilateralism. It is Mufuruki’s chilling phrase — the legality of the means we use to achieve this should be defined by us and nobody else — that captures the essence of this dangerous trend.
US President George W Bush should be proud to recognise his own doctrine, replicated like a rapacious cancer, spreading across the globe.
I do not know anything about Mufuruki, save, readers are informed that he is the chairperson and CEO of the Infotech Investment Group. He is sufficiently important to be given the main spot in Tanzania’s most influential daily in the days following the US election result when everyone is trying to work out what it means and how we should respond to it.
Thus, a new age of global Darwinism is born: the survival of the fittest, and to hell with everyone else. As someone said the day after the election: ”Bush with a mandate and a majority … Doors to manual!”
”Doors to manual”, in international relations terms, means a Hegelian nightmare in which the norms of international relations encourage rather than ameliorate the worst excesses of human nature — greed, violence and rapacious consumerism.
When Mufuruki asserts that globalisation is dead he is wrong, of course. Commercial and cultural globalisation is as resilient as it is entrenched.
In Zanzibar, London football club Arsenal will remain the most popular team, with replica shirts adorning locals, even at end-of-Ramadan parties.
What he means to say is that multilateralism, and the post-World War II consensus about international relations is, if not dead, then in grave peril, and with it the notion of universal human rights that underpinned the 1948 reconstruction of the global order.
United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan is a very worried man. The persistent refusal of the US to obey the UN over the oppression of the Palestinians had already seriously undermined the integrity of the rule of international law. In the coming four years it is likely to be shredded. Unless.
Unless what? We are in a new sort of ”Cold War”, with the US this time the pariah empire, shunned by an enlightened, progressive alliance of nations and citizens.
On the one side is a dogmatic, conservative ideology, underpinned by a pre-modern articulation of social mores and Christian fundamentalism.
Liberals talk about the dangers of fusing the ruling party and the state. Humanists speak of the peril of merging church and state. And democratic socialists concern themselves with the overlap between the private and public sectors. Astoundingly, the Bush regime does all three, thus marking the end of the remarkably resilient tradition of relatively progressive American civil rights jurisprudence.
On the other side: a post-modern alliance of progressive states and transnational states and entities, both governmental and non-governmental, characterised by its commitment to three founding beliefs. The first: a belief that the affairs of the world are best determined by multilateral engagement and compliance with international law.
Second: a belief in ideological diversity, and an understanding that the market is not a panacea.
Third: a belief that secular values must be defended against the dangers of religious fundamentalism and dogmatism of any hue.
The more visionary of international relations scholars have described how the geopolitical pivot of power and influence has a habit of rotating perpetually. For three centuries Europe was the centre of the world. The US came to replace it, but its reign may prove to be shortlived. It is already approaching imperial overstretch.
The balance of power is tipping steadily towards the East. Most obviously, China and India are potential new superpowers. Africa, although economically insignificant, is growing in political respect and influence, not least through the efforts of the South African president to build a new era of multilateral cooperation and order on this continent.
European values — the humanist principles of secularity, social democracy and the welfare state, and of the human arts — are central ideas for the sort of alliance I am describing, though Europe itself is suffering a crisis of leadership. This time they must be achieved in concert and not competition with those of Africa and Asia.
British Prime Minister Tony Blair has chosen sides, but will other European leaders have the courage as well as the insight to forge a new alliance with the East — especially with a reforming China and India — and with an emergent new south, led by Brazil and South Africa?
Critics from the school of realism will correctly point to the lack of democratic credentials of China. Indeed. But the point is to protect and enhance the great ideas of universal human rights and international law and so a new strategic alliance must engage with China and the Muslim world, to influence it as much as to contain it.
This strategy must be selective as well as smart. It should not be anti-American; on the contrary, it must reach out to Democrats who are feeling desperate about their country and its place in the world. Some are genuinely fearful; no exaggeration, they see the seeds of Nazi Germany in the evangelical extremism of the Bush regime. The time to act is now, not later when it is too late. As Mufuruki might say: ”Or what do you think?”