Multilateralism 2.0
Concept preseted by James Quilligan
Video Presentation
Video from the International Commons Conference in Berlin, November 1-2, 2010, via http://www.boell.de/economysocial/economy/economy-commons-10451.html (see part 8)
Discussion
Multilateralism 2.0
"Multilateralism gets a bad name because it's associated with governments and their
limited abilities to provide people- and ecologically-centered goods
and services through international cooperation. That's certainly the
case at the present. Let's not forget that the multilateral
institutions were initially created after WW II to provide global
public goods. This experiment has been bungled for many reasons,
mainly the one that you note, that Neo-Liberal ideology has taken
over. That philosophy needs to be rooted out from the bottom-up, yes,
but it cannot happen without sympathetic support from the top-down.
Yet this is not simply a matter of tone, it's a matter of actual laws
and institutions. The commons will never scale up to the global level
(or, to put it another way, become scale-free) simply through
associations of like-minded commoners. It also needs institutional
support from governments and the private sector, of course, to the
extent that they will endorse this tripartite arrangement; but it
also requires institutional support at the transboundary level of
global common goods. The sky, the Arctic, the seabeds all need to
have specific watchdogs and managers -- who is capable of organizing
that? Not commoners, not public sector or private sector. They have
no authority to do so and never will under the current circumstances.
That's why the commoners and multilateral institutions are
(ultimately) natural allies -- which commoners have not yet realized.
The break will come when government power evolves upwardly to empower
new multilateral institutions in charge of managing specific global
commons, and downwardly to the commoners who are vigilantly watching
the commons across the world and who will work alongside the
multilateral institutions for the protection of the commons -- now
with actual authority for the global commons. The time will come when
commoners will sit on the board of the (existing and new) multilateral
institutions, along with government reps (let's keep the private
sector out of this). I don't see anyone grappling with these matters
in the conference document -- our commoners appear to be walking over
a cliff without a global vision. This needn't happen. The commons
offers us the ability to transform multilateralism, but there is not
the slightest hint of that here. Redefining Neo-Liberal ideology is
not the same as transforming our existing multilateralism -- these
changes are not going to happen through ideology alone. That's where
the pernicious dichotomy of the digital commons Vs. the physical
commons creeps in -- the Neo-Liberal mistrust and penchant for
enclosure and division is reified by underscoring the specious
ideological rift between non-depletable and depletable goods and
translating this into major North-South differences (we're seeing this
at the WTO as well as the Copenhagen talks, and it will continue to
develop without the global commons discourse). The split in our Solidarity is not inevitable, but first we are all going to have to
embrace globalism rather than shun it. Someone must elaborate, in calm and definitive terms, the
holarchical unity of the noosphere, the biosphere and the physiosphere (which can
only be balanced through a new multilateralism) -- or we will not
merely have conflicts over resources, we will have a global conflict
between the ideological representatives of each of these spheres --
wars between the 'replenishables' and the 'non-replenishables'.
Without a multilateralism of the commons, this rift will fester and be
exploited -- not only by our own internal critics -- but also by the
masters of Neo-Liberalism. Then the commons will become an 'ism', we
will be positioned against ourselves globally, and all of us can
probably expect the worst. That's what we'll get without
Multilateralism 2.0 -- which only our commoners can spearhead (and co-
create) by continuing to evolve the broadest possible concept of the
commons."
(by email, August 2009)
More Information
Related policy paper:
- Shooting the Rapids: Multilateralism and Global Risks. A paper presented to heads of state at the Progressive
Governance Summit, 5 April 2008. By Alex Evans and David Steven.
URL = http://globaldashboard.org/wp-content/uploads/2008/04/Shooting_the_rapids.pdf