"Global neighborhood" and the "universal otherhood": Notes on the Report of the Commission on Global Governance

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Volumn 21, Issue 4, 1996, Pages 525-549

  Baxi, Upendra ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF DELHI   (India)

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EID: 24944519316     PISSN: 03043754     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1177/030437549602100406     Document Type: Review

References (61)

1. Published in New York by Oxford University Press, 1995. Hereafter, references to the report are cited in the text by page number.
2. Common Security: A Program for Disarmament (London: Pan Books, 1982).
3. Our Common Future (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987).
4. The Challenge to the South, The South Commission (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987).
5. The second amendment's enunciation of the right of people to bear arms and maintain an organized militia has often been interpreted as assuring states rights rather than an individual's fundamental rights; of course, the latter is the dominant interpretation.
6. I follow here Mary Daly's distinction between "necrophilic" and "biophilic" types of power. See her Pure Lust: Elemental Feminist Philosophy (London: The Women's Press, 1984).
7. This formulation is subject to the caveat, "trade measures should be a part of the remedy only in really extreme and predefined cases."
8. The report does not envisage more permanent members with the veto as this could mark "regression, not reform." Rather, it envisages an enlarged Security Council of twenty-three members; the new nonpermanent members will be designated "standing members" (two from industrial countries, three from larger developing countries), who would continue in position till the accomplishment (circa A.D. 2005) of the United Nations restructuring (pp. 240-241). And the veto has to be phased out by a "concordat" among the five permanent members not to use it "save in circumstances they consider exceptional and overriding in the context of their national security" (p. 241). It remains to be seen whether the India-initiated 1992 General Assembly resolution (p. 237), resulting in the formation of an open-ended working group (in December 1993), would lead to any more thoroughgoing perestroika.
9. The General Assembly has become "less of a 'principal organ' than at least some of its founder nations might have hoped." Of course, "focus on the role of the Security Council" has also contributed to the General Assembly's "marginalization" (p. 243).
10. This forum will include relevant regional groups and may address, in a sustained manner, issues "such as refugees, food security, worker security or drug abuse" (p. 249).
11. Initially, the peoples' assembly will be comprised of parliamentarians, elected by their peers. Alternatively, such an assembly may "function as a constituent assembly for the development of a directly elected assembly of people." The report seeks "further debate" concerning these proposals (p. 247).
12. The report urges creation of a council for petitions. The council will have no power of enforcement. Its eminence and "moral authority" should be such as to induce compliance (p. 262).
13. The report also proposes the winding up of UNCTAD and UNIDO (pp. 279-283).
14. "Two billion people," says the report, "still lack electricity. In 1990 Bangladesh, China, Egypt, India, Indonesia and Nigeria together had fewer telephone connections than Canada, which has only 27 million people" (p. 31).
15. See text earlier in this article, near citations for notes 5 and 6.
16. See Nicholas Negroponte, Being Digital (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1995).
17. See also Brad Lytle, "A Prospective Risk Analysis: Low Earth Orbiting (LEO) Satellites" (mimeographed research paper written for my course "Law, Science, Technology: Human Rights and Human Futures" given during my appointment as a visiting professor at the Washington College of Law, American University, 1995).
18. Take the problematic management of "relations" between the predator peoples and indigenous peoples. For the former, "assimilation," even forced, constitutes "good" governance for the latter. In a different context, "patriarchal" governance is a grid of power worked out in a mutually reinforcing way by key state and civil society agents/institutions.
19. Management of impoverishment, gender exploitation, denials/violation of basic human rights, political corruption, or environmental destruction, for example, is management. But one would not legitimate any of these "processes" with the title of governance.
20. See The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality, eds. Graham Burchell, Colin Gordon, and Peter Miller (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991).
21. The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality, Graham Burchell, Colin Gordon, Peter Miller Ibid., p. 93.
22. This list does not specifically include women's movements; but the report does refer to it in terms of the reform of the United Nations: see the section on "Putting Women at the Centre" (pp. 284-285).
23. However conceptualized, the bulk of humanity is a stranger to "prosperity" and at home with ways of cheating oneself and the world into some kind of survival. Human prosperity must signify (in this context) the world order that safeguards the security of the affluent few throughout the world, but especially in the First World.
24. See also the emphasis on the role of the "global business sector" in the global governance (pp. 255-256).
25. Emphasis added.
26. Emphasis added.
27. The number of international NGOs grew from 176 in 1909 to 28,900 in 1993; the Asian and African component rose respectively from 14 percent to 17 percent and 8 percent to 16 percent during the period 1960-1993 (p. 33).
28. Who can protest, given, ironically, the report's insistence on people's security rights?
29. Emphasis added. The model here is provided by the Business Council on Sustainable Development. Its report, Changing Course: A Global Business Perspective on Development and the Environment (Cambridge; MIT Press, 1994), has obviously influenced the thinking of the Commission on Global Governance.
30. See Upendra Baxi, "'Summit of Hope in the Depths of Despair?: Social Development as Realization of Human Rights" (March 1995; mimeo).
31. Emphasis added.
32. John Rawls, "The Law of Peoples," in On Human Rights: The Oxford Amnesty Lectures 1993 (New York: Basic Books, 1993), pp. 72-74.
33. The racial discrimination is in the treating of the value of life or physical integrity of Bhopal victims on a different scale than in the United States. See Himanshu Rajan Sharma, Denial of Justice: The Bhopal Case and Multinational Liability, elaborately showing how Union Carbide has violated the letter and spirit of the racial discrimination convention (mimeographed paper in my research seminar on jurisprudence of mass torts, 1995).
34. I have already noted some of the most superficial recommendations to ameliorate transnational lawlessness. One needs to read in full pages 169-170 of the report to appreciate how deferential and self-limiting discourse can be in relation to transnational accountability.
35. The difficulties are: (1) "When the neighborhood is the whole planet, moving away from bad neighbors is not an option"; (2) "multicutural communities are facing strains in many parts of the world"; (3) global change "benefits some, but disadvantages others"; (4) "stress is also caused by corrupt, criminal self-serving forces that exploit the instabilities created by change in global neighborhood"; (5) "society is enriched by the increasing freedom of women to control their own lives and to shape and participate fully in governance structures, but changing understandings of gender roles involve difficult abandonment of deeply imbedded attitudes and social mores."
36. Internal threats arise from "autocratic rulers," repression or exile of ethnic groups, or "for collapse of states and accompanying anarchy." Even in times of order they arise by "social and economic patterns." External threats arise from "a state which turns predator" or "even from an enterprise whose activities overwhelm a local community or its traditional culture."
37. See also pp. 99-114.
38. The report speaks of liberty of free speech, free press, freedom of worship, "right" to vote along with freedom from persecution and oppression," liberty to "earn a livelihood," and liberty to receive information. This somewhat careless listing excludes gender-equality rights, rights of labor, and rights of indigenous peoples.
39. Rawls, note 31, pp. 70-71
40. Ibid., p. 71. Rawls's argumentative strategy, overall, furnishes one of the most cogent justifications for human rights in the face of onslaughts on the very notion of "human rights" by postmodernist thinkers. Some of Rawls's notions may seem to be a just rationalization of the distribution of political power in the international arena: for example, his startling proposition "The defense of well-ordered peoples is . . . the first and most urgent task" (p. 73) and his legitimation of the notion of "outlaw states." It is beyond the scope of this article to contest Rawls's basic structure.
41. It lists: (a) "secure life"; (b) "equitable treatment"; (c) "an opportunity to earn a living and provide for their own welfare"; (d) the "definition and preservation of their differences through peaceful means"; (e) "participation in governance at all levels"; (f) "free and fair petition for redress of gross injustices"; (g) "equal access to information"; and (h) "equal access to global commons" (pp. 56-57). Unexceptionable, perhaps, as articulate approximations of some of the human rights enunciations, if considered as the quintessence or core of human rights, this statement is simply outrageous. Neither genocide nor racial discrimination nor gender equity and aggression nor human rights of labor nor those of indigenous peoples are featured. The criteria of exclusion are not clear. Such feeble-minded attempts to summarize even principal human rights put the clock back.
42. See Drucilla Cornell, Beyond Accommodation: Ethical Feminism, Deconstruction and the Law (New York: Routledge, 1991). Cornell contends: "If what is prized is only the possibility of a new choreography of sexual difference and not the feminine within the sexual difference, we will reinstate the gender hierarchy in spite of ourselves" (p. 188).
43. See also U. Baxi, Mambrino's Helmet: Human Rights for a Changing World (New Delhi: Har Anand, 1994), p. 168.
44. Emphasis added.
45. On the jurisprudence of corruption see Upendra Baxi, Liberty and Corruption: The Antulay Case and Beyond (Lucknow: Eastern Book, 1989) and the literature cited there.
46. For example, "the duty to protect the interests of future generations." Ethical philosophers have argued that "the more distant the generation we focus upon, the less likely it is that we have an obligation to promote its good." Indeed, one "might go so far as to say that if we have an obligation to distant future generations it is an obligation not to plan for them. Not only do we not know their conditions of life, we also do not know whether they will maintain the same (or similar) conception of the good life for man as we do." Martin P. Golding, "Obligations to Future Generations," in E. Partridge, ed., Responsibilities to Future Generations (Buffalo: Prometheus Books, 1980), pp. 69-71.
47. Emphasis added.
48. Zygmunt Bauman, Postmodern Ethics (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1993), p. 153.
49. Zygmunt Bauman, Postmodern Ethics Ibid., p. 162.
50. Zygmunt Bauman, Postmodern Ethics Ibid., pp. 153-154. Bauman here invokes Martin Buer's notion of mismeeting.
51. Zygmunt Bauman, Postmodern Ethics Ibid., p. 155.
52. Zygmunt Bauman, Postmodern Ethics Ibid., p. 155.
53. See Norbert Elias and John L. Scatson, The Established and the Outsiders: A Sociological Enquiry into Community Problems (London: Frank Cass, 1965), pp. 81 and 95, quoted in Bauman, note 47, p. 165.
54. See "In Sarajevo, Victims of a 'Postmodern War,'" New York Times, May 23, 1995, p. 1.
55. See also Skjepan G. Megtrovic, The Balkanization of the West: The Confluence of Postmodernism and Postcommunism (New York: Routledge, 1994).
56. See Michel J. Shapiro, "That Obscure Object of Violence: Logistics and Desire in the Gulf War," in David Campbell and Michael Dillon, eds., The Political Obiect of Violence (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1993), pp. 114-136.
57. Helen Fein, ed., Genocide Watch (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992).
58. I borrow, out of his context, the title of Jean-Francois Lyotard's Libidinal Economy, trans. lain Hamilton Grant (London: Athlone Press, 1993).
59. See, for example, Veena Das, ed., Mirrors of Violence (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1992)
60. Veena Das, Critical Events (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1995).
61. Bauman, note 47, p. 185.