By Klaus Brinkbäumer and Ullrich Fichtner
Pascal Lamy has been around the block once or twice. The Frenchman is a Socialist and a marathon runner. He was chief of staff for the European Commission and, later, European commissioner for trade. Right now, he’s sitting in an office overlooking Lake Geneva. There’s a fireplace, some cartoons on the wall. A massive conference table chokes the room.
Lamy is director-general of the World Trade Organization, one of these complicated conglomerations of global politics. The WTO is considered to be powerful and even cannibalistic. But, in truth, it is only "the secretariat of its members,” Lamy says. Actually, not even that. According to its statutes, it is a collection of regulations governing global trade. "We are beholden to the interests of our members.” Lamy repeats this sentence eight times during this interview. And the 150 countries decide in consensus or they don’t decide at all. And that makes the Geneva game tedious. "The delegates spend one-fourth of their time here negotiating, and they spend three-fourths of their time trying to sell what they have negotiated to their governments, to formulate the expectations at home and to inform the home countries,” Lamy says.
The director-general of the free market is wearing a purple tie. He seems small and sinewy. He speaks soft, French-seasoned English. He has the reputation of being an overachiever and a live wire. Lamy can get loud and be biting. He’s got a vice-grip of a handshake. He says he sees exactly what’s happening in the world: "Civil society has picked up many issues. Development, animals, the environment.” But all of the NGOs are working on isolated issues, he says. There’s no single worldwide NGO that has spread its umbrella over all issues, he adds. "I can march on Monday for animals and for developing countries on Tuesday and can decide on Wednesday whether both positions fit together.”
In doing so, Lamy says, the system of non-governmental organizations is merely walking in the government’s footsteps. Everyone stands and talks and acts for himself or herself. "Our planet has never faced such a threat. We live in an uncertain and divided world,” Lamy says, and the question is: How can humans act in these times or become capable of acting again?
The WTO’s strategy is pretty clear: In Geneva, the issues are tariffs and subsidies. Free trade by all with everything is the ultimate goal. In real life, though, in all of the back rooms in the gray building on Rue de Lausanne, the United States and Europe set the tone and call the shots. They’ve got more muscle than the rest. They demand free exports and then dole out the subsidies at home. Is this the reason that all of the smart people in Geneva always know what should be done but are never fast enough on the solutions trigger because the next difficulty, the next crisis, always rears its ugly head?
No, the real culprit, Lamy says, is the "Westphalian system” that cemented the sovereignty of individual countries after the end of Thirty Years’ War, which the rest of the world received from Europe during the centuries of colonial rule and learned to love a long time ago.
Before he arrived at the WTO, Lamy labeled the organization or its type of consensus building "medieval.” "I really didn’t have to use that word,” he says today with a laugh. But he means it, still. "We have a huge discrepancy between the challenges and necessities of our times and the Westphalian system. To put it another way: We have global problems and local governments,” Lamy says.
This is one of his favorite subjects, a topic that keeps his mind occupied for hours on end. He writes about it and he speaks about it and now he says about it: "The exception is the EU.” Or the United Nations. It could be "a matrix for the future. But, it has a hard enough time right now as it is.” In Europe, for instance, citizens view globalization as a threat and are casting an ever more skeptical eye toward politics the farther the politicians move away. Brussels’ legitimacy oozes away a little more each day, he says. Every little town has to have a mayor. Every country has to have a national government. Nobody wants to have a world government. In any case, it’s "unbelievably difficult” to dissolve national governments or to take away their powers, Lamy says. "The United States, China and India would want no part of that. But Singapore, Senegal or Paraguay wouldn’t either. That’s because they believe that their national identity is what really protects them from the big elephants.”
This gives rise to something that’s known as realpolitik in Geneva and New York. Realpolitik means that the Indian ambassador at the WTO will, now and again, demand something that runs counter to what the Indian ambassador at the United Nations is seeking. Realpolitik means that the US Congress has to sign off on everything anyway. Lamy also understands completely that members of Congress base their decisions on one criterion: "Where it comes from and whether it is good for their region.” Realpolitik also means that everybody knows what must be done, argues over every single word and then fights over every one of the translations. As a result, years pass before a solution is found to something that was a hot topic back in the past.
No, you can’t say that Pascal Lamy would be surprised by the arrival of the private environmental cavalry. "It’s true. They are getting more and more involved in many fields and are very impressive. Things like HIV or famine. And that is a major contribution. The money that Bill Gates has put on the table is pretty impressive, don’t you think?” Philanthropy has deep roots in former and present Protestant countries, he notes. It’s mostly a British or American phenomenon, he adds, and the true competitive edge of people like Clinton or Soros is "that they are only responsible for themselves. Private money can be moved much more easily than public funds can.”
Still, Lamy is not a believer. He doesn’t think private individuals can pull off this rescue act. He certainly respects what the new citizenry of the world has accomplished. No question about that. "But we need coherent, interconnected political policies,” he says. "Nothing else will do.” He says the key question will be: "Can we come up with a global government that is up to meeting the challenges of our times -- and can this government still be democratically legitimate?”
It doesn’t look too good right now. The things that Lamy says, and he says them very convincingly, have a similar ring to the experience of President Bill Clinton, that global politics amounts to "sitting around a table and arguing about which word would be added to a document and which wouldn’t be.” The things that Lamy says don’t have the ring of the "doing business” that the crowd that had gathered one rainy morning in the Starlight Room of the Waldorf-Astoria in New York wanted to so gleefully practice.
In the end, all of the mutual oratorical back slapping in the Waldorf-Astoria sounded a bit like what you hear day in and day out just a few blocks away in the headquarters of the United Nations. There, too, people constantly talk about good deeds. But when they fly home and are subjected once again to the pressures of their home countries, to the things that go by the name of realpolitik, they forget quickly what they got themselves into in New York.
But the Waldorf's the Starlight Room wasn’t the United Nations. There, you heard sentences with a different ring to them: "We are in a position of being able to act, and I will spend every single day of my remaining time in office fighting to make sure that the things discussed here today will get done,” said Michael Bloomberg, New York’s mayor.
"We made a promise here,” a Siemens vice president said. We’re in, said Bangkok, Berlin, Chicago, Houston, Johannesburg, Karachi, London, Melbourne, Mexico City, New York, Sao Paulo, Seoul, Toronto -- and if they pull it off, the world will be a different place. Indeed, even the longest journey begins with a first step.
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