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J. O'Sullivan: International Journalists Must Be Watchdogs
Written by John O’Sullivan, Editor, The National Interest, Former Editor-in-Chief, UPI
Monday, August 11, 2003
Delivered at Summit of World Leaders, “The World at a Turning Point: A Global Vision of Peace and Good Governance,” Seoul, Korea, August 11-16, 2003
At past conferences, I have been invited to perform the role of devil’s advocate, pointing out the risks, dangers, and hidden snares in words like peace and governance, and suggesting that the broad structures implied by a culture of world peace neglect important considerations such as democratic accountability, and popular support and, in general, raining on the conferences’ parade. That it will be no different today.
What after all, is the new understanding of world politics that this conference hopes to promote and someday see expressed in new international structures? I suggest to you that it is composed of the following items:
- that the power of the nation state should be reduced and its functions radically redistributed to other institutions.
- that international, transnational and super national bodies such as the UN or the World Trade Organization, should grow in influence and be given greater authority in world affairs.
- that nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) represent the conscience of mankind or least those aspects of mankind’s conscience not represented by the UN, that they protect many of the rights of individuals like the right of asylum, through international treaties that the nation state used to protect, and that they, too, should be given greater authority in world affairs.
- that the rules of the international game are now determined by the international community, expressed in such UN documents as the Declaration of Human Rights, and say, the Rio Treaty, and increasingly enforced by new bodies, such as proposed international criminal court at the Hague.
- that the four institutional innovations that I’ve just announced, taken together amount to a new way of governing mankind, call it world governance, or global governance, and governance is a word I shall be returning to examine later, in which a new system, in which the UN is the legislature, treaties and conventions are the law, agencies like WTO and ICC the executive, and NGOs the electorate.
Now this view of world politics and in particular the notion that it is a series of inevitable developments, has taken a heavy hit since September 11, 2001, for two reasons.
First, it very rapidly became clear that all the above institutions were pretty useless in conducting the war on terrorism. If anything serious was to be done about terrorism, it would have to be accomplished by nation states, by ad hoc cooperation between them, and perhaps by new institutions founded for the purpose of combating terrorism.
Second, when the United States determined that its national interest in the war on terrorism required the invasion of Iraq, the new institutions of world governance were unable to do anything about that. So it is evident that there is nothing inevitable about the growth of world governance, and further that its advocates have somewhat exaggerated its current importance.
But there are also theoretical objections to this new theory of international relations, that to my mind at least, are much more fundamental. Where does it derive its legitimacy, and where do ordinary people, the voters, figure in its impressive structures? To begin with, NGOs cannot plausibly substitute for the world’s peoples as a sort of electorate. Though NGOs may be internally democratic, they are elected by no one. They have to account to no one for their actions. And if they act wrongly, or foolishly, there is no way that the rest of us can throw the rascals out, which is the preeminent democratic right. NGOs are quite simply, pressure groups and special interests not unlike trade associations or chambers of commerce.
To be sure, their interests are ideological, rather than economic. We should have learned from the history of the last century that people are prepared to treat others badly for ideological or even idealistic reasons quite as much as they are prepared to do so for economic ones. NGOs do good works, to be sure, but good works establish no claim to rule over other people.
Even if NGOs were themselves above reproach, the fact is that those attending UN conferences are selected by the UN itself and subsidized very often by national governments. Not all NGOs have an equal chance of selection or subsidy. Governments and international bureaucrats choose those NGOs that suit their personal or corporate inclinations. The Chinese government for example, lobbies incessantly to have Freedom House removed from the UN approved list of NGOs, and the Canadian government has successfully resisted the participation of conservative religious NGOs in international conferences.
When Kofi Annan calls NGOs the electorate of international civil society, he reminds me of Bertolt Brecht’s description of the East German government’s suppression of the East German workers rising in 1953. Brecht said the people have lost the confidence of the government, so the government has decided to dissolve the people and elect a new one.
Nor are international bodies rooted clearly in democratic accountability, or popular consent. The Rio treaties on the environment were more or less imposed on reluctant national governments by a combination of UN bureaucrats and noisily supportive NGOs. At no point were voters involved nor were national debates held on these treaties. Only after they had been signed and become part of a kind of an international consensus of respectability did they become part of serious international debates. And when that happened it was treated as a sort of scandal if nations like Australia and the U.S. showed any reluctance about endorsing them. Yet those treaties would have imposed very considerable costs on compliant countries, caused industries to contract and decline, raised costs across the board, substantially increased unemployment, and finally, I would add, had little or no effect on climate change because they exclude the countries that are the major polluters. All these are the natural meat and drink of vigorous national political debate and democratic decision making. Yet international elites, citing the merits of global governance, have done their level best to prevent any serious debate on them at all.
Many international laws and treaties suffer from a similar flaw. As you have seen in both the attempted extradition of Pinochet under the torture convention, and the claims of asylum made under refugee conventions, international conventions today are interpreted in ways that the diplomats who signed them would never have conceived possible. They impose obligations that the governments would never have wittingly accepted if they had thought them part of the conventions. And most important of all, it is not at all clear how such errors can be corrected if global governance means anything. The international criminal court is irresponsible in the sense of not being responsible to another body. It is not, for example, responsible to the UN Security Council. It makes up many of its own rules. It claims the right to try citizens of states that have not ratified its founding treaty if they are alleged to have harmed citizens, for example. Suppose I, as a citizen, object to some of these rules or of a particular decision of the court? If a national court similar errors, I can stand for parliament or congress to have the law amended. But can I realistically amend or appeal a new international law?
Finally, UN rules and conventions do not reflect the full varieties of human cultures. Nor can any system of law or regulation do such a thing. Laws are, among other things, the reflection and expression of a particular culture. That is why you hear people talk of Roman law in Europe, of Sharia law in the Muslim world, of common law in the AngloAmerican world. If international law were to reflect all these cultures and others too, it would either be incoherent and contradictory or it would operate at such a level of generality, such as, stealing is wrong and it should be discouraged in some way, as to be practically useless.
Now, if we are honest, we will admit that international law at present reflects the cultural underpinnings of western liberalism. International treaties begin as diluted western liberalism and the more they are interpreted, the more liberal they become. I am a western liberal myself. On most topics I find myself instinctively supporting the liberal rules. But I am not liberal on all topics, no religious person can be, and I am a Catholic. And I find the drift of international law and opinion in support, for example, of abortion rights, very objectionable. But even when I sympathize with a particular application of liberal thought through international law, I must concede that there is no reason why Muslims or Buddhists should necessarily have to be governed by rules proceeding from cultural traditions that they may find alien and at times unsympathetic.
And here is where my objection to the word, “governance,” comes in. Governance is a slippery word and its lack of clarity serves a dangerous purpose. We all know what government means, and what it involves. Among other things it means a monopoly over the use of force and the power to tax. Because government possesses these formidable powers, we fence it in with all sorts of restraints that forbid it to do some things, such as holding people in custody without lawful procedure, and empower them to do others, such as providing for the common defense. Some nations impose these restraints through constitutions, others rely on tradition, but all civilized nations seek to place some restraints on government to enumerate and limit its powers and to insist on mechanisms that make it accountable to the people.
Governance, however, is a far more elusive concept. As one political theorist has pointed out, the concept seems to assume that international rules and conventions will emerge almost imperceptibly from international conversation; there will be no conflict, no divisive debates, no up and down votes, perhaps not even the necessity of ratification. Instead, agreement will float upwards, from the sea of acronyms, the UN, WTO, NTIDE, FWO, without anyone having realized that they have invented new laws at all. Very often it will be impossible to see quite how these laws came into existence.
A UN conference adopts some cloudy declaration. This has been accepted as a working hypothesis by the UN bureaucracy. At their conferences international lawyers suggest it is now part of soft international law that no parliament has ever debated. An NGO brings a case before the national court citing the original declaration and the judge declares that this overrides the actual law passed by parliament or by congress after vigorous debate. You might suppose that, having been adopted in this way, such laws might be a matter of almost voluntary acceptance—not at all. These laws involve coercive force and the power to tax quite as much as national laws do. They can impose heavy costs on companies and individuals. The ICC will send people to prison for sentences as long as life. Towns in Britain, America, and Europe are bearing heavy costs in human services because international conventions insist that they must accept asylum seekers and so on and so on.
For the moment, governance delegates the enforcement of its new rules to national governments. But even that will sometime change and become the direct power of international bodies. In other words, governance has all the powers of government but none of the constitutional restrictions upon it. There are clear lines of responsibility, and no roots in popular consent. Why is it accepted and promoted by men and women of good will? And what clear and present dangers does it pose?
It is promoted by men and women of good will, I believe, because they have come to think of national governments as representing narrow and selfish interests, while international bodies represent broad, idealistic, and selfless motives. That is mere superstition. It cannot withstand a moment’s examination. It would be truer to say that national governments represent in however distorted a form, the interests and values of their peoples. And in democratic societies, this means the interests and values of their peoples at almost all levels of society.
International bodies, however, represent people like us, the elites who attend international conferences and debate these questions. They represent the interests and values of an international class of bureaucrats, lawyers, and activists who increasingly exercise power without accountability through courts and international agencies and who increasingly like it that way.
Francis Fukuyama, who wrote The End of History, posed the choice in effect between international governments and national governments very clearly in his recent John Bonython lecture in Australia. He pointed out that one cause of the rifts between Europe and America is their different views of the source of democratic legitimacy. Europe believes that it flows down from the willowy, disembodied, international level, whereas the United States sees it as flowing upwards, from concrete, legitimate, democratic publics.
Within Europe, including Britain, the European view is accepted with very little skepticism. Yet, as Fukuyama observes, it positively invites abuse on the part of elite who are then free to interpret the will of the international community to suit their own preferences. How can we prevent or limit the abuses perceived by Fukuyama? And how can we safeguard some form of democratic accountability?
This is where the media and also religion come into the picture. The role of the media in international politics is or should be exactly like the role of the media in national politics. Journalists exist to be watchdogs—watchdogs of the public interest. They are watchdogs whose governing motive is not peace or good governance, but truth. It is the job of journalists to tell the truth. It is not the job of journalists to determine what the truth is on the basis of what is convenient to their own political ideas or in order to promote some other motive, like world peace.
I believe, if you ferret out and present the truth, you will in general promote other good things, but it would be too simple to say that you will invariably produce other good things by seeking the truth. Sometimes the truth will embarrass, hurt, and even cause conflict. That is up to politicians and churches and others to solve. The job of the journalist is to seek and publish the truth.
Now the idea of journalists as watchdogs of the public interest is well understood in national politics. Indeed, since Watergate, in America, it has become something of a journalistic obsession. But that traditional media skepticism, that supposed adversarial attitude now needs to be transferred to the UN, to NGOs, and to the class of international civil service I have mentioned above. Until recently the media has done this job very badly. One reason is that it shows many of the prejudices of the international class. It thinks of international bodies and NGOs as the good guys and it sees its role as assisting them in keeping watch on corporations and national governments.
Thus, it has not scrutinized the failures of the UN in Rwanda, for example, with sufficient zeal. Hundreds of thousands died in those massacres, yet have any civil servants, international civil servants lost their jobs over it? Not that I have heard of. Nor have major news organization reported as well as they should have done on how NGOs in the new protectorates of Kosovo and Bosnia have been carrying out their tasks. Yet those NGOs spend large sums of taxpayers’ money and exercise very considerable powers delegated to them by the international community. Some of the people working for them have been involved in very dubious, even criminal activities, such as turning a blind eye to forced prostitution. They have not succeeded in restoring a strong economy in those countries. And they live in a very high style, compared to the local people. In these and other cases, if NGOs and international bodies are to be kept honest, the media must scrutinize their activities with the same skepticism it devotes to national governments. It must not become a naive cheerleader for seemingly progressive causes.
This will not be an easy psychological transition for many journalists for several reasons. First, NGOs are some of the best sources for reporters seeking information. Second, as I have said, reporters are often sympathetic to the causes that NGOs publicly represent, and thirdly, reporters have simply got into the habit of taking the side of NGOs against national governments. But that transition must be accomplished. If the media is to be a fourth estate internationally, then it must realize that institutions seeking power very often assume the mantle of virtue unjustifiably. And it must then scrutinize everyone equally.
Here, or so it seems to me, religion can play a useful role, for the churches are among the relatively few world bodies that see dangers in the new international structures and in the culture that accompanies them. In effect, religion saw some years ago what I suggested a few moments ago, that the legal, moral and political cultures underlying international law and bodies are built on western liberalism, and sometimes on a western liberalism that is hostile to religion and its concerns. That realization has promoted new and fruitful cooperation among different faiths.
At the Cairo UN conference for instance, the Vatican joined with Muslim countries to oppose the suggestion that abortion should be a right, recognized and promulgated by the UN. I believe that kind of cooperation will grow in the future as the realization deepens among religious people that the international regulatory class that aspires to govern us is not friendly to religion and would like to see it largely confined to the private sphere.
If the churches do indeed continue to cooperate as I suggest, that will inevitably lead to further clashes with UN bureaucrats and that will have two good effects. First, it will reveal that there are real conflicts to be decided that cannot be wished away or handed over to the tender mercies of governance. They have to be openly debated and resolved democratically. Second, the rows between the churches and these bodies will naturally attract the attention of the media. Almost certainly, reporters will begin their reporting with the assumption that the religious people are wrong. But the mere fact of their having to report these rows will make them think twice, will give them wider information and will alert the general public to what is happening.
At present the public is often completely unaware of major international developments. Does that justify the idea of a religious council within the UN structure as a sort of House of Lords? I must confess that I am of two minds about this. In the first place, such bodies tend after a time to be captured by their bureaucracies. Look at the World Council of Churches, or the National Council of Catholic Bishops in the United States. The World Council of Churches, in particular, had a very inglorious role in recent years, being neutral at best in the Cold War, and since then, turning a deaf ear to the evidence, much evidence, of anti-Christian persecution. Bureaucratic influence with its concern for compromise and reaching agreed upon formulas will, over time, tend to work against prophetic witness, or even simple fidelity to God’s truth.
On the other hand, the existence of a religious bureaucracy within the UN system, with the right to be consulted and to contribute in all relevant matters would serve as a very helpful counterweight to the existing bureaucracy with its own antireligious attitudes. And the religious bureaucrats, with their access to documents, would be a very useful source for journalists following religion in the UN system and, therefore, it would be a further addition to the watchdog role of religion in the media, in the wider interest. In the end I think I come down on the side of such a council, provided that it is advisory, and does not seek overeagerly to reach agreement on all topics.
Most religions do agree on the basic moral rules of God’s natural law, but they disagree on a great many other things including revelation and important points of doctrine. Since religions are truth vehicles, they cannot compromise on their own truths, but must be content to deal with disagreement charitably and adhere to the spirit of peace. That means decisions cannot be reached or presented in this council on a purely democratic basis. We cannot have a chairman summing up, by saying, well, the Catholics, the Muslims, and the Jews win on that one, sorry Buddhists! You must lobby harder next year, but for now the council teaches that insect life is not precious. That kind of thing is alien to the real sense of what we need in international affairs.
Democracy has its place. Where is that place? That place essentially is national politics. National politics is for electorates and national governments. International politics is and should be, essentially an intergovernmental affair, wherein negotiations are the main method of decision making. NGOs should alleviate suffering from sicknesses, fill the mouth of famine, and leave politics to elected officials. Unelected officials need to know their place, which, in the words of Winston Churchill, is to be both civil and servants. And the job of the media is to report on all of these fallen creatures, without fear or favor. If these various cobblers all stick to their particular tasks, then the world will indeed be a better place.