War on Terror: The Big Picture - The left must revive the drive for "cosmopolitan democracy", giving voice to the excluded billions. It will fail if it persists in anti-Americanism

The new governments of the centre left had a new world order in their developing trays when they came to power in the 1990s. We saw the images begin to cohere through the swirling fluid - and glimpsed a softer, better, more co-operative world. But since Manhattan, everything is up for change.

Before 11 September, the new (left) world order was a tentative, even fragile, creation. It emerged from new Labour in 1997 as an ethical dimension in foreign policy, announced by the then foreign secretary, Robin Cook, as a natural extension of the globe's interdependence. The world had become a moral forum through the media and the work of non-governmental organisations (NGOs).

On the eve of Nato's intervention in Kosovo, Tony Blair, in one of his best speeches, argued: "We live in a world where isolationism has ceased to have a reason to exist . . . we cannot turn our back on conflicts and the violation of human rights within other countries if we want still to be secure." After Manhattan, those words seem prescient.

The composite vision - which went under the names, variously, of global third way, global governance, ethical foreign policy, soft power - was seen as hopelessly naive by the old right and by many in the foreign policy establishments; and as centre-left fluff by the old left. This malign alliance stunted the growth of the vision. Manhattan may easily kill it off.

In the forefront of the new ideas were Anthony Giddens, director of the London School of Economics and a strong influence on new Labour's first term; and Robert Cooper, a senior diplomat who now advises the Prime Minister. Giddens argued that national and global governance could now be connected, since there was a state of peace between (if not within) most nations, and the world was much more interconnected than before. "Globalising processes," he said, "have transferred powers away from nations and into depoliticised global space . . . Like any other social environment, this new space needs regulation, the introduction of rights and obligations." Giddens called this movement "cosmopolitan democracy".

Cooper argued that the globalisation based on a long peace will include a shift in values - "the victory of the values of the individual over the state, the values of the market over the military . . . foreign policy ceases to be about war . . ." In the new era, foreign policy will be about the rule of law and the promotion of democracy; the influence of ideas and culture; and the growing importance of international institutions. The flea in the ointment is the state, which demands a fixed territory and an identifiable demos to whom to send electoral envelopes. "We live," said Cooper, "in a world in which co-operation is increasingly necessary, but which is structured to make it extremely difficult. Everything else may become global - markets, currencies, production processes, pollution, corporation, media, ideas, fashion - but the state remains stubbornly and necessarily territorial. It also remains in control."

This movement has attracted contempt from the right. The Bush administration, before Manhattan, was determined to govern without any of the (rather mild) measures that the Clinton administration had taken under its aegis. Humanitarian interventions, international justifiability of war and other criminals, curbs on pollution, multilateral agreements - all these were downgraded, or junked. This is not isolationism, but it is unilateralism.

Buttressing it is a revival of the realpolitik approach that is most closely associated, in theory and practice, with Henry Kissinger. Kissinger is contemptuous of the Clinton and Blair efforts to conduct foreign policy "like a psychotherapeutic exercise". He thinks states have interests, great states have great interests, and that these must be served and observed now as they have been for centuries. The diplomat's task is to learn what these interests are and how to advance those of his own state while avoiding war by transgressing too far those of other states. He is viscerally opposed to international systems of justice or governance; they would "risk substituting the tyranny of the judges for that of governments; historically, the dictatorship of the virtuous has often led to inquisitions and even witch-hunts".

An immediate effect of Manhattan is to strengthen the hand of those who argue for realpolitik. Classic diplomacy is entirely in vogue. China, Russia, India and Pakistan are being brought into a US-led alliance against another state: Afghanistan. Each is bargaining over the price of co-operation. Even Iran, which the US rightly saw as a state supportive of terrorism, is now being wooed. Soft power is not in the present lexicon; nor is a "cosmopolitan democracy".

Moreover, throughout the rich western countries, especially in the US, electorates look to states, and to heads of government, to strike back, to defend, to support and to subsidise. The heroes of Manhattan have been public sector workers or elected officials; bankers, stockbrokers and management consultants were among the helpless victims. It was a hideous demonstration of the fragility of the financial economy compared to the resilience of the state. It was also a savage irony that a president who preached a smaller state and a retreat from government should be in office when both faced huge tests.

But these developments have other sides. As we move from shock and pity for the victims to a response, the power of the US, and the west in general, will become a large issue. It will be able to project force into areas where it believes terrorist bases to be, and will be able to take them out. It may go wider than al-Qaeda bases - as many in the Bush administration have demanded.

This demonstration of power, however justified, will create an image of the powerful attacking the weak. In an image-driven world, it will make more imperative a central plank of the cosmopolitan democrats: the need to grant a voice to those who have none. A strategy against terrorism will demand a focus on the wide sea of misery within which feelings of hatred and envy of the rich world are evident. This is not a matter of placating terrorists: it becomes more evident that their leaders use destruction to further their aims of achieving power in the Muslim states, posing as anti-American radicals to gain support. The point is to begin to diminish that support.

The logic of the cosmopolitan democrats returns: the US has to treat the world as a global entity within which terrorists can find no secure space. It plans to ignore, or negotiate its way round, state sovereignty - exactly how financial globalisation works. The US and those who act with it are claiming the right to police the globe, focusing on its most dangerous criminals. They may do some good: transnational criminal and terrorist activity (there is no firm line between the two) has been a growth industry for the past two decades.

But a police force needs an authority for which to work, and that authority needs a base and a mandate. It can be found only by following the direction pointed out by the cosmopolitan democrats - down the slow road of discovering how to give voice to those who do not know how to use it, or would use it against the west.

This is what the left can bring to the table after Manhattan. It needs to argue against the trend within (especially) the US administration to rely on the knowledge that it can enforce its power and on the belief that it is virtuous in doing so. US unilateralism, to turn Kissinger's words against him, can indeed lead to "the dictatorship of the virtuous" and to witch-hunts, if unfettered.

The left wastes its time when it assents to anti-Americanism: the world needs the US to be engaged, more than ever, after Manhattan - engaged, in order to counter its own unsustainable loneliness.

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