An Exercise in Futility

Moisés Naím / Financial Times

With all the feverish talk of anti-globalisation protesters, people seem to have lost sight of an important point: today's summits would achieve little even if the angry mob stayed at home.

Television coverage of protesters engulfed in clouds of tear gas obscures the fact that while the action in the streets of Geneva, Seattle, Washington, Prague, Quebec City, Gothenburg and Genoa was frantic and at times even lethal, the action in the rooms where the dignitaries were meeting was frustrating and for the most part inconsequential.

Both protestors and summiteers have a strong self-interest in conveying the impression that today's global gatherings are where momentous decisions for humankind are made. Yet for all the talk of a democratic deficit, the real problem facing the world is not that these summits produce too many decisions but that they produce too few. At a time when problems that require international agreements and co-operation are multiplying, the capacity of the world to reach collective agreements seems almost exhausted.

There is an irony here. While protestors rail against a monolithic system bent on homogenising economies, polities and cultures, one of the primary reasons for this era of stillborn summits is a cacophony of entrenched competing national interests.

International leaders suffer from multiple goals, fragmented factions and deep confusion, just as anti-globalisation protestors do. Both have little idea how to achieve their respective goals and form a coalition that can make progress on vital issues such as global warming, Aids and genetically modified organisms.

Trade talks are a good example. The rifts between developing and developed countries, the European Union and the US, technology-based economies and agricultural ones, capital-importing and capital-exporting countries are becoming more pronounced every year.

While the mood against anti-globalisation that mobilises the protesters might have also had some influence in shaping governmental agendas, that is not what is stopping the world's governments from agreeing on rules to facilitate international trade and investment. Rather, the paralysis stems from the demands of an increasingly complex and interdependent global economy for a wide range of sophisticated standards, as well as for rules and institutions that need a degree of consensus.

Unfortunately, as globalisation continues to exert its disorganising and often unequalising effects, the interests of the countries that need to agree on these common rules are becoming even more disparate.

Moreover, the search for consensus is often placed in the hands of multilateral organisations such as the World Trade Organisation or the World Bank. These institutions have become even more ineffective because they have been given responsibilities that exceed their authority, capabilities and resources. It is hard to imagine that a single young, understaffed, and underfunded multilateral institution such as the WTO will ever be capable of providing the unifying framework needed to break the stalemate over the rules for international trade.

In fact, no multilateral organisation can provide the leadership needed to create gridlock-breaking coalitions. Only committed and credible government leaders can.

Trade talks will continue to be hopelessly mired in endless negotiations until the US, Europe and Japan take the demands of the developing countries more seriously. Poor countries went to the meeting in Seattle and will go to Doha in November demanding that the developed countries make good on their promises to secure a successful conclusion of the Uruguay round in 1994.

Chief among those were the resolution of issues such as agricultural protectionism in Europe and Japan, the frequent use of anti-dumping measures to restrict imports into the US, and the widespread use of subsidies to support rich countries' exports. Seven years later, the developing countries have little to show for their concessions, other than a resentment for having been exposed in all their naivety.

Meanwhile, the US goes to Doha bent on strengthening the global enforcement of intellectual property rights that underpin the information and biotechnology revolutions. This priority will clash with concerns of African countries ravaged by the Aids pandemic, for which they cannot afford the medicines, and also with Europe's apprehension about genetically modified organisms.

Not much is likely to happen in Doha. Even the street action is likely to be more subdued.

Perhaps this failure will spur the search for alternative approaches in the quest to agree on the rules that should guide global trade and investment.

Demonstrators, meanwhile, would do better protesting against the futility of the summits than trying to block meetings where nothing happens.