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GlobalSocialContractTroyDavis
From Plato to John Rawls via Thomas Hobbes, John Locke and most
prominently Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the theory that societies function
according to an implicit or explicit social contract is well accepted.
The main questions posed by political and moral philosophers are:
- what exact form does the contract take, what shape, and what are its
components (formal, informal, written, unwritten, cultural, political,
constitutional)?
- what rights and responsibilities do the people have under the social
contract? how are those rights and responsibilities guaranteed or
enforced or defended? how are they are guarded against abuse or tyranny?
- how does the social contract come about, how does it change, evolve?
informally, formally? and how is it enforced beyond the enforcement of
the specific rights and responsibilities?
If one considers the question of global politics, one can immediately
see these questions are scale-free and therefore as relevant to the
global level as they are to other historically and culturally defined
levels of governance. The main objection might be that there is no
“world people” and if this true in the cultural and historical sense (1),
it is surely not true scientifically (there is but one human race) and
it is not true “functionally”, i.e. all the people of the world are
affected by real issues that transcend national boundaries. Examples
are all the issues concerning the global commons, whether it be the
global environment (atmosphere, oceans, weather systems) or the
electromagnetic spectrum, or space, or global health issues such as
AIDS or potential pandemics, or of course a more topical problem,
global security issues, and a more abstract issue but which unattended
will undermine the efforts to resolve all other issues: the problem of
the fundamental unfair and inequitable structure of the global
political architecture, which is most visible in the fact that the
citizens of the world do not benefit from equal civic rights (2).
Therefore the concept of the social contract is relevant and pertinent
to the global level. One could of course point out that the thousands
of existing international treaties themselves are mini global
contracts, though they are restricted in scope and not as broad as the
basic notion of a the social and political contract. But the idea of a
contract is common and accepted by all peoples of the world, which is
why it is being used more and more explicitly by governments at the
national level (for instance in unemployment schemes etc.) as a way to
improve democracy.
Democracy is a special sort of social contract where the people are
sovereign and which can take many different shapes. The appeal of the
social contract concept (encompassing more generally a civic and
political contract too) is that it allows people to agree to a basic
compact to live in peace and optimize freedoms and responsibilities. As
a contract implies some sort of consent, compromise, and reciprocity
which in a world of physically relatively equal humans is necessary for
a sustainable peace, a social contract is necessary for any democracy
thus far invented. In essence, a global social contract can be
construed as a global "deal" for world citizens to solve their
problems, or a "new global deal" or "global new deal" if one wishes.
The claim is made that global democracy cannot come about without an explicit
global social contract, for the simple reason that the scale of the
world does not allow informal and implicit contracts to function as
they might at the level of smaller human units. Two other reasons for a
global social contract as a precondition of global democracy are that
first the many global problems cannot be solved in isolation (therefore
that their solutions need to be explicitly negotiated in tandem with
the related problems and they need to be contractually linked since
they are linked in the real world), and secondly that even for
unrelated issues, some world citizens would lose and some would win, so
that here too one basic global social contract rather than many
separate social contracts should be negotiated (global environmental
issues are a typical win-lose issue in many people's minds).
If, as is the case today, issues are discussed in isolation, in what is
called stovepipe negotiations like the UN, its agencies or the WTO do,
then whoever is the loser in a particular sectoral negotiation will
oppose the deal (even if it is a global optimum). Basically we need to
expand to all global problems the commonly accepted negotiating
strategy already adopted at the WTO, which is to say a global deal will
be sought for the different sectors (agriculture, industry, services)
because some people will lose in some areas but will win in others, so
that overall it should be easier to make a general deal. The facts have
shown that this is clear fantasy as was easy to see in advance since
today world trade is but one issue amongst many, and that issue is
intertwined with many other issues (global health, global security,
intellectual property, human rights, education, poverty etc.) So what
is really needed is a negotiation where everything is put on the table,
not just the various economic sectors, so that issues are not
artificially sliced up, and so that it becomes, once again, easier to
strike an overall deal. This has been tried a bit in the Iran nuclear
negotiations where Europeans have offered a package deal of trade
incentives but it has never been tried on a truly global scale and with
all cards on the table, and of course it has never been tried in a
democratic process! In effect, such a global deal would then be a de
facto global social contract, or at least part of one.
Of course, in practice, it would be much easier to first negotiate a
basic document, a fundamental contract (such as a world constitution
based on basic human rights), then move on to more nitty-gritty
problems. Even if a world constitution was very short and basic, over
time it would acquire a greater moral force (as did the Helsinki
Accords who were laughed about and dismissed at the beginning, but
played a huge role to free the peoples of the former USSR and its
satellites), and would thus help democratize the world.
And it is more likely that everyone would agree since everyone would
gain and lose some. Finally, the stability of a global social contract
would be optimized if it were 1) freely and openly negotiated by the
world's peoples, 2) based on the equal human dignity of all, 3)
explicit rather than implicit so as to allow full scrutiny and
participation, 4) based on a process that is widely perceived as fair.
These are four conditions that would create a groundswell of public and
citizen enthusiasm and would reduce geopolitical tensions and a
possible conflict of civilisations. The notion of a contract based on
equal dignity and fairness has a powerful innate appeal to people of
all nations, races, cultures and religions. If this contract in
addition concerns the basic political architecture of the world, it can
easily be hypothesized that the very vast majority of world citizens,
if they were polled, would agree to the negotiation of such a contract.
The idea of a global social contract is a powerful instrument for human
progress and allows humans to reassert conscious democratic control on
a globalization process that does not work to the benefit of all
people. Traditional objections to social contract theory, namely that
it is implicit and imposed as an accident of one's birth rather than by
explicit consent, is answered in the case of a global social contract
that is explicitly negotiated by the world's citizens.
Now I finally come to the issue of global political parties. Global
political parties come into play once we consider the very practical
issue of how to negotiate a global social contract. There are a few
scenarios here, from the most traditional to the most radical (but not
necessarily the worst or the least feasible). The most traditional is
the classical diplomatic intergovernmental process, augmented possibly
by civil society input on the margins. It would be the worst scenario
in my opinion because it would be very elitist and would not create the
necessary popular participation and enthusiasm necessary to ensure that
a global social contract would actually be perceived as a contract,
i.e. a statement of rights, responsibilities and reciprocities which
are binding on all world citizens. Unless we build a global police
state, which obviously is a nightmare scenario we must try to prevent
with all our might (because it is unfortunately not impossible, and
high technology and genetic engineering will make this even more
possible in the future), the main enforcement of a global social
contract must come from the voluntary participation and compliance of
the people not because they would go to jail, but because they believe
in it and in its principles.
The most radical scenario might be a decentralized global
constitutional process, using modern technologies, and this scenario is
not as far-fetched as it seems (3).
An intermediate scenario is one where global political parties
represent the peoples of the world, are held to account by them and
negotiate a global social contract. Why global political parties as
such rather than simply the concatenation of national political
parties? For a practical and for a psychological reason: the practical
one is that in a global parliamentary negotiating forum (which
therefore de facto and functionally would be a proto world parliament,
whether that is its name or not), to negotiate between hundreds of
different entities would be impossible; it would be necessary in any
case for parties to coalesce into groups, which is exactly what happens
at the European Parliament and the Parliamentary Assembly of the
Council of Europe. Theoretically, such coalescing could take place on
an ad hoc basis for each separate point of the agenda, but in practice
this would be too difficult and impractical. So the practical pressures
of efficiency would force national political parties to coalesce into
global political parties in a global body. The psychological reason is
that the average citizen would then identify not just with a
representative of his nation, but also with the representative of other
nations who happen to be in the same political grouping as the group
which his own personal representative sits in. So a Ghanean who had
voted for a socialist would get used to hear a socialist from France,
or Chile represent his political family, and a German who had voted for
the Christian Democrats would get used to hearing a Philippino of the
same political family. In effect, this would foster the commonality of
the human experience, the consciousness of world citizenship, but of
course this could only happen if as is said above, the Ghanean or
German can actually SEE the global representatives actually speak on an
issue. This brings us to a major point which is often underestimated,
that for it to be effective, the negotiation should be public and
transparent. The major reasons for that are psychological.
On the general side of the arguments for transparency, one can say that
the legitimacy and image of global political parties will be improved,
as which political party could be against transparency, especially if
the body in question is a global body, hence inherently more remote
than all other political bodies? So transparency is a way to reduce the
remoteness and the distance to the ordinary citizen. It is also is a
way to maintain, and hopefully increase the trust of the world
citizens, which is the key quality needed for the global negotiations
to have any meaning, since otherwise we fall back into the
dysfunctional scenario of an elitist process resulting in a long
document distrusted by the average citizen (this was the mistake of the
European constitutional process).
But the main point to understand about the relation of the citizens of
the world and global political parties and global political processes
in general, is that the world is right now so unequal, so fractured (4),
there is so much bitterness (mostly on the side of the poor and the
dispossessed) and so much fear (on all sides including on the rich side
that the poors will invade them), that no piece of paper will have
enough influence unless it is the result of a global cathartic process.
Global catharsis is needed via a psycho-political process that breaks
down the deep roots of hatred, fear and envy. The process must be so
clean, so ethical, so obviously based on and respectful of human
dignity that the few irreducible fanatics out there will lose all power
of nuisance because the immense majority of the worlds people will want
to give the process a chance. This is why it must be as participatory
as possible, using all resources of modern technology but not only. I
believe that such a global participatory process to negotiate a global
social contract and the basic rules of human conduct could occur within
a time of 2 years, and its cost would be on the order of a magnitude of
a billion Euros, which is ca. 0.12 % of global military spending. I can
think of no better investment for world peace and security than this
type of process, which would result in a huge peace divident and allow
the world to enter a virtuous circle of peace, development, more
education, less extremism, more peace etc.
And therefore global political parties can only truly claim to be
legitimate and to play the role they must play if they play midwives to
this global cathartic process. That is the operational and design
challenge for global political parties. It sounds like a grand
challenge but in fact it is eminently doable and easy once one
understands what needs to be done. It does not require much except a
clear mind and the will to change the world for the better, and to be
part of a historical transformation of Humanity from a species bent on
war and destruction to one fostering peace and liberty via a conscious
global contract based on the equal human dignity of all.
Troy Davis, consulting democracy engineer, troydavis@post.harvard.edu
President, World Citizen Foundation/Fondation des Citoyens du Monde (www.worldcitizen.org)
Président, Association de soutien à l’Ecole de la Démocratie (www.ecoledelademocratie.org)
Footnotes
(1)This is true because we do not have yet at the world level
the equivalent of national creation myths which all nations base their
identity on. This is why I suggested in 2002 that we, Humanity, need to
create a common Global Creation Myth, which tells the story of the
birth of Humanity as a species and as a social construct, and that this
Global Creation Myth should be based on factual and scientific ideas,
that we share one planet Earth and that we are one Human Family. We may
run into trouble in the not very far future as genetic engineering may
create different human races and as we take to other planets, so we
might want to keep the myth flexible to accommodate sentience and
multiple habitats. But even a simple Global Creation Myth that would
therefore create a stronger sense of a world people and of world
citizenship would be a tremendous achievement for human progress and
freedom.
(2)I am still waiting for the day when some political party or
NGO coalition will launch a “global civil rights movement”, as a sort
of global equivalent of the civil rights movement in the US in the
1960s. It is surprising that even such progressive bodies like the
World Social Forum do not stumble on this idea, but maybe it is not so
surprising given the neo-nationalist slant of many if not most movers
and shakers at the WSF, who have still not understood that it is
impossible to put globalisation back in the box, that national
democracy can never control global markets and that the only “good”
solution, which happens to be both ethical and pragmatic, is to
globalize democracy. How to do so concretely should be the subject of
discussion instead of only complaining about the unjust global order.
(3)An active proponent of decentralized global constituent
processes is Rufo Guerreschi, of Partec-Participatory Technologies in
Rome, www.partecs.com, who has been working on such processes for
several years.
