Social democrats must get their act together; the anti-globalisers have stolen a march on them

The world leaders who meet for a trade conference in Doha, Qatar, will have a larger threat on their minds than the global movements that wrecked their Seattle meeting three years ago. Terrorists would love to pull off an atrocity in Doha: the symbolism would out-shock that of the twin towers. Yet the solidarity between nations in the face of the terrorist threat may help to massage agreement out of the diverse interests. If the meeting fails, globalisation will have suffered another reverse. And the global movements will be injected with new life.

Those movements have done two things to social democrats, and above all to their governments, which they despise. They have shown the left parties and governments that they have not done global politics. And they have shown them how not to do global politics.

The global movements - called anti-globalisation groups, but to some extent wrongly, since some want a non-capitalist, or a victim-less, globalisation - are based almost entirely on ideals. They play on a perfect pitch. Without an established ideology, or a model state to which they must be loyal, they can combine the advantages of the revivalist preacher with those of the muckraker. The preacher gives an exalted sketch of what the world might become - without poverty, without war, without capitalists. The muckraker uncovers the filth and corruption of the existing world - especially the rich world, now ruled, in many instances, by social democrats.

From this position, the global movements have appointed themselves as champions of the poor global majority against the rich minority. They have given the world a new, updated version of the class struggle. The class warriors call for the masses of the world to unite against capitalism and its agents, which include social democrats, just as the communists did. Unlike the communists, however, they have no Soviet Union to defend and, therefore, no stone round their necks.

Nor do they have Marxism, with all those forecasts that never came true and those embarrassing passages in its sacred texts that lauded capitalism and imperialism and snarled at the Jews. They do not have a Marxist party life, with its obsessions with purity and its hatreds for other little groups. In replacing socialist theory with a la carte radicalism, they have pieced together a mosaic of protest that can be mobilised over any initiative any government might take.

An interview in New Left Review in July was rich in insights into the mosaic-like ideology of the new groups. John Sellers of the Ruckus Society spoke of building "a truly global resistance to what is a completely global system of exploitation". Groups such as his are about "strategically, non-violently raisin' hell because we don't like what's happening to the planet". He disapproves not of violence as such, but of unpopular violence. He praises the destruction of the McDonald's restaurant in Millau, southern France, by the Peasants Confederation, led by Jose Bove. He says that while on the Greenpeace ship Rainbow Warrior, he cut a French fisherman's driftnet in the Mediterranean. "The net belonged to a fisherman, but the global public knew why I was doing it," he said, betraying an extraordinary belief that there is such a thing as a "global public" which gives popular, if invisible, sanction to such illegal actions in the name of a much larger, unwritten system of justice.

The writer Susan George provided another example of this new global "mandate". Appearing as a witness for the defence in Bove's trial, she said: "It takes 43 seconds to make a McDonald's hamburger anywhere in the world. This uniformity is nothing less than a negation of people's culture."

This is the expression of a new kind of justice. George was proposing that the serving of uniform hamburgers from Paris to Beijing should be seen as a kind of crime; and that action against that crime, or against the over-fishing of a stretch of ocean, would finally be seen in a just perspective. Liberal theorists have always wrestled with the problem of illegality undertaken by those who claim a higher right: the global movements claim that much of what governments and corporations do is, in effect, illegal according to the higher law they propose.

They also propose a new kind of global police force: a people's police force. In this, the movements have been characteristically shrewd. They have noted that the major states, led by the US, have constituted themselves as an occasional, and necessarily arbitrary, global police force. The military actions in the Gulf, in Kosovo and currently in Afghanistan are all examples - where a coalition of willing "policemen" supported by as much of the world "community" as they could muster, attempted, and in the first two cases succeeded, in imposing corrective action.

In both cases, too, there has been some sort of global "judgement": President Saddam Hussein of Iraq has been subject to UN weapons inspections (which are now weakening) and sanctions (which are now in doubt because of their effects on the more vulnerable members of his population). Less controversially, the former president of Yugoslavia Slobodan Milosevic is on trial at a special court in The Hague.

The global movements, which opposed the Kosovo war (they did not exist in their present form during the Gulf war), have seen that these forays into international justice have a very shaky basis. They can thus, with a large degree of impunity, propose a different form of justice, which involves putting global corporations in the dock, before the jury of the global public.

The tactics of the global movements, as well as their elan, their ideological invulnerability, their moral force, their popularity with activist-inclined young people, pose a very large challenge for social democratic parties and governments. Only in the UK, among the major rich states, does a centre-left party command the political space without present serious challenge from other parties. All, including new Labour, have, in coming to government, moved to the centre, have taken on themselves responsibilities, inhibitions and constraints indivisible from democratic governance - and are thus, in the media's eyes, seen to have lost "soul" or "heart" or "ideals" or "trust".

How can the centre left counter the incoherent, unworkable, but powerful challenge of the global movements? How can it bring about real change in a world in which the system that had delivered and still delivers great wealth to the rich societies is seen by many in the developing world - often rightly - as offering nothing or less than nothing to them?

What is required is the measured and sustained creation of the means and institutions through which a world, now conscious of itself as a unity in a way it has never been before, can address its most dire problems. It is the challenge of making politics global. The global movements have correctly pointed to the numerous instances where the most powerful forces settle matters in the service of their own objectives. These movements' very existence testifies to how this approach causes resentment and opposition, which become more entrenched and violent.

The policy lines that the centre left now has the responsibility to develop, and to convert into generally accepted strategies, draw on many of its sources of inspiration. The largest shift is to make these concretely, rather than merely rhetorically, global.

The centre left has no choice but to accept and proclaim the consequences of its radical revisionism. It needs the capitalist system to work. The logic of that position is to develop partnerships with capital as well as with the groups of civil society to assist in the achievement of its aims.

New Labour would seem to need few lessons in that respect. But with it goes another logic: that the representation of the population within a country cannot be effected, at the core, by other than an elected government. The devaluation of politics and politicians, whether effected by the global movements, by the media, by corporations or by the politicians themselves, has been and remains a movement replete with danger for our societies. As much as or more than ever, politics remains the indispensable medium through which conflicting pressures and interests can be resolved. Politics does not require to be surpassed: it must be reasserted, and renewed. Only politicians with a mandate can occupy the state, and use it as a means to bring pressure to bear on other actors in what it perceives as the common good.

Tony Blair's speech to Labour's conference was remarkable not just for its high idealism, but for the way it operated on a global, not a national, canvas. Few leading politicians used a major speech to the most active sections of their parties in that way in the 1990s - the decade, after all, of the most rapid globalisation.

It was called forth by the events of 11 September, and it marked a sudden shift back to the concerns of British politicians up to the 1950s, when Britain finally ceased to have any claims on the first rank of global power and when politics became largely domestic.

Politics has again become global, for an indefinite time in the future. It is a further (possible) good that may come out of evil. It forces politicians and electorates to address what has previously been the preserve of diplomats, NGOs, multinational corporations, banks and the global movements. In becoming global, in a world in which uncertainty and danger are greater than they have been for decades, politics must again become central, finding new springs of support and idealism where before these were atrophying.

Social democracy renews itself through challenges. It has many in its domestic heartlands; but it can no longer confine itself to these, because they will not be answered by domestic responses. In seeking to become global and in transcending the boundaries of national state politics, however, it takes upon itself a task that has previously been attempted only through empire - but without recourse to empire's coercion.

How that is to be achieved, with what institutions and through which forums, is the task for social democracy now: 11 September makes it harshly clear that it cannot be delayed.

This article is based on The Protest Ethic: how the anti-globalisation movement challenges social democracy by John Lloyd, newly published at £9.95 by Demos, Elizabeth House, 39 York Road, London SE1 7NQ

Post your comment

Please note: you will need to login or register before you can comment on the website