‘Measures to be followed to shape and establish a democratic and equitable international order’

Presentation by Benjamin George Coles

Equitable International Order: Closer to Failure discussion event,
organised by Partners for Transparency, on the sidelines of the 57th session of the UN Human Rights Council
(24 September 2024)

So I want to start by observing – what’s entirely obvious, I suppose – that ‘a democratic and equitable international order’ is not on the horizon at all, and nor perhaps has it ever been.

The struggle for a democratic and equitable international order must, it seems to me, be a long-term, incremental one, and, as much as anything, a matter of the evolution of the consciousness of our species.

I want to consider in this talk some ways in which we as individual citizens and as civil society actors can contribute to this long-term incremental struggle, and can push for this evolution of collective consciousness that I see as necessary.

In focusing on individual citizens and civil society actors, as opposed to on states and governments and international bodies, I certainly do not mean to mystify these institutions, or to be dismissive of their enormous importance in this struggle. Some of those who’ve spoken already today have indicated things that it’s crucial for states or international bodies to do or stop doing. And many of us are in positions to vote to change our governments, make appeals to them, influence or collaborate with them in other ways, or even try to enter them. If you can do these things, great! But of course our governments are not always as accessible or responsive as they ideally would be, and I think it’s important not to lose sight of the kinds of things we can do without state involvement.

I’ll start with an example that perhaps shows how ambitious I am for civil society actors. Crucial to a more democratic and equitable international order are, I think indisputably, transfers of wealth, and especially unjustly acquired wealth, from richer countries to poorer ones. I’m a Luxembourg citizen, and we could talk, perhaps, about that country’s tax haven status. I’m also a British citizen, and there have been calls for reparations to be paid by the UK to its former colonies. The British state has so far, except in one or two very specific cases, been dismissive of such calls. In the continued absence of state action, could not, I wonder, the task of reparations be taken up as a citizens’ initiative? Could not a group of us British citizens who feel passionately about this create a reparations fund and commit to paying a proportion of our income into this fund? Could we not then make the case to our fellow citizens that they also should contribute to this fund? Perhaps the amount raised would be small. Certainly it would be small compared to the inestimable amount that is owed. But when I listen to Sashi Tharoor and others making their cases for reparations, I often hear that even just the gesture would be a hugely appreciated start. It would mean a lot to me too, to know that we were at least making such a gesture.

Now, if diverse kinds of wealth transfer are crucial in establishing a democratic and equitable international order, perhaps even more fundamental are increases in understanding, care and respect across borders. And obviously not just because such increases could undergird wealth transfers; rather because they could undergird all kinds of solidaristic and even just decent behaviour between nations.

I’ll speak again as a British citizen now, though I could be speaking as a citizen of any number of counties, I think. While our government and our corporations may often knowingly screw over people in other parts of the world, it’s not, I strongly believe, like we, the general population, want that. Rather we want, in short, prosperity for ourselves and our country (understandable goals, I take it), and our government pursues those goals and enables our corporations to pursue them, and relies to a large extent on our not being alert enough to how exactly they do this outside our borders, or at least not caring enough to make an issue of it come the elections. That has to change – and in some ways it is changing.

Adam Smith, back in the 1750s, reflected on the strangeness of the fact that he would be in an important sense more disturbed by the loss of his little finger – people paraphrasing sometimes say the stubbing of his toe – than by the news that the whole of China, which he had no personal connection to, had been destroyed in an earthquake. Now, it could not be like that for someone in Smith’s line of work today. An economist, a philosopher would today most likely have plenty of personal connections to China, as indeed to most parts of the world, especially through students and colleagues. And yet it could still be kind of like that today for people working in less internationalised professions, or not working at all. And that, with our countries now interacting so extensively, is a problem. It’s well-established, I think, that xenophobia and aggressive forms of patriotism are most prevalent among those with least exposure to foreign people and foreign cultures. Perhaps then this is a major front that civil society actors could mobilise a lot more on: enabling everyone in our countries – not just the educated, urban elites – to be richly exposed to people and cultures from all round the world. Also because this is an absolute joy, right, which it’s kind of tragic that some are deprived of.

Speaking of joy, the arts of course have a big role to play here. I’ve known quite a few people who, despite never having met a Japanese person, have developed an intense love of Japan through manga and anime. Similarly, I sometimes imagine that, if I had the money, I’d sent the likes of Geert Wilders and Georgia Meloni all my favourite Iranian and Turkish films. More seriously, it’s a striking fact to me that, while Netflix has on it shows from all round the world, it won’t suggest many of them to you if your viewing habits aren’t already pretty international. I wonder whether we could petition Netflix, as well as other sites like YouTube, to give users a choice between two recommendation algorithms – one that would give them stuff similar to what they already watch, and one that would mix that kind of stuff in with stuff that would be truly surprising and challenging for them. And suppose that, when people were asked to make that decision, they were just briefly warned of the dangers of echo chambers, etc. I might be wrong, but I don’t think many would choose the unadventurous algorithm.

Anyway, also integral to increases in understanding, care and respect across borders must, it seems to me, be a greater harnessing of the bridge-building potential that the increasingly large number of people with mixed national heritage or multiple national allegiances have. According to the Pew Research Centre, there are almost 5 million Chinese Americans now. If we want to foster rich dialogue and collaboration between the US and China, and calm any fight for geopolitical supremacy between the two, we perhaps need to try and find ways in which we can enable this group of people to play more of a role in their bilateral relations. Just a thought.

And then there’s another challenge we might like to take up here – that of building yet wider collective identities. It’s a remarkable fact that the same emotional mechanisms that once motivated our ancestors to care about and make sacrifices for their small tribes now motivate many of us to care about and make sacrifices for enormous nation states, full of millions of diverse people we are never gonna know. The EU, it’s often said, is going through a steady process of forming a kind of national/tribal European identity. And that’s a process, which civil society plays a big role in, of not just establishing ties but also building up, emphasising, to some extent mythologising all that we in Europe have in common. On the surface of it at least, it’s a good thing if a person in Europe – in Luxembourg, say – ends up embracing more of the world’s population as part of their tribe, and as, on that basis, worth caring about and making sacrifices for, though we might still wonder about those whom this newly established tribe excludes. Could we not form a human collective identity? Or if we couldn’t, what’s the closest we could get to that? Perhaps the alternative is encouraging a multitude of globe-spanning, cross-cutting identities, so that, even if someone is not part of your national tribe, they are part of your LGBT+ tribe, or your climate activist tribe, or your Swiftie tribe, or some other tribe that matters tremendously to you.

Another basic thought we might have about a democratic and equitable international order is that it’s not likely so long as certain values and visions of the good life are so dominant. For instance, so long as such large numbers of people, and especially elites, are preoccupied with maximising their wealth, status and power, and see these largely as zero-sum games, that mentality is surely going to characterise international relations as well. Now, we all have in our countries traditions we could draw on, religious or secular, that champion collaboration over fighting for dominance, that warn against materialism and greed and power-hungriness, that celebrate solidarity, equality, unselfishness, respect for others. I personally am an atheist, and yet I long for secular churches – places where all of us who wanted to could go on a regular basis and experience community directly and physically, and, through shared art and awe and reflection and ritual, remind ourselves of what really matters in life. If such institutions are to be set up, if such practices are to be established, that surely is another job for civil society actors.

Finally, I want to mention technology. The futurist Jacque Fresco envisaged a ‘cybernated global economy’, in which AI would oversee both the sustainable generation and the fair distribution of resources. Now, I said at the start that a democratic and equitable international order is not at all on the horizon. If, however, it does pop up on the horizon any time soon, it will, I would guess, be in a form something like this, or have something like this as its basis. And it might sound like a totally Sci-Fi idea, but how many things that seemed like Sci-Fi ideas 100 or even 50 years ago are daily reality now? I’d say we, as civil society actors, need to be – if we can’t be technological innovators ourselves – at least alert to what’s emerging technologically, and ready to determinedly push it in the right direction. There have been some huge triumphs here, by the way, that we might be taking for granted now. The internet, open source, open access, the Wikimedia Foundation, Internet Archive, Z-library – knowledge is power of a profound kind, and we have seen and are seeing a revolution in equitable access to knowledge, as compared to surely any previous point in history. I’ll acknowledge the big black clouds of disinformation and censorship. (We civil society actors have got our work cut out for us there too.) Nevertheless, I’ll end by exhorting you to behold and celebrate this particular ray of light.