BY HAMISH ALCORN
We don't have to look very far to discover that the Commonwealth Heads of State Meetings are all about spreading human rights and democracy and struggling against poverty, disease and environmental degradation.
In the words of Queensland's Premier Peter Beattie: "CHOGM is a champion of the poor and has commitments to providing money, goods, services, training, better health, education and trained leaders to developing countries in the Commonwealth. In fact, it appears CHOGM ... and ... protesters are on the same side when it comes to the effects of globalisation on poor countries."
Beattie went on to list the following wonderful goals of CHOGM. His source is almost certainly the Harare Commonwealth Declaration of 1991: protecting and promoting democracy, the rule of law and fundamental human rights; equality for women; universal access to education; sustainable development, poverty alleviation and environmental protection; combating drug trafficking and communicable diseases; helping small states; and supporting the UN and other international institutions in the search for world peace.
Why should we doubt?
The rhetoric is predictable. No government has ever said that they intend to maintain and extend domination over the poor in order to exploit them. No government has ever claimed that they will protect the interests of the global elite, on whom they depend for power, even if it means environmental degradation, increasing poverty and a systemic deterioration of societies.
It is worth pointing to some examples, as it is this long history of disillusionment which forms the intuitive basis for opposition to the global agendas of power elites. The same propagandists who tell us that CHOGM is wonderful for the poor countries are forced to admit that after half a millennium the remnants of the British Empire are mostly in extreme poverty.
Five centuries to spread the benefits of civilisation, of British morality, of the highest ideals of European civilisation, five horrible, bitter and wasted centuries for the vast majority of the empire. We are to believe that CHOGM is seeking to correct all this, but no-one can blame the people in developing countries for having a little doubt.
The first British traders in Bengal (now Calcutta and Bangladesh) described it as a paradise. Captain James Cook wrote in his journal of the Australian Aboriginals that they are, "far more happier than we Europeans ... They live in a tranquillity which is not disturb'd by the inequality of condition."
We could continue all over the world, from Ireland to the Pacific, from the North American Indians to the Zulus of South Africa.
These were all diverse, functional societies. Britain "civilised" them. Most British people probably believed just that. At that time it would have been very marginal to argue that Britain was actually subjecting the empire to systematic domination, that its pioneering mercantilists may squeeze the wealth from it until there was left nothing but a social husk. But it would have been right.
The only British countries that actually gained a similar standard of living to the mother country were those which became thoroughly anglicised — Australia, New Zealand and Canada. Today the native inhabitants of those countries serve the immigrants of the same as a reminder of what has occurred throughout the rest of the empire.
More recently we have had the agricultural revolution of the 1950s and 1960s to solve global poverty, but which is now known to have exacerbated inequality massively whilst bringing about whole new crises of population displacement, loss of traditional ways of life and a contraction of biological diversity. Needless to say it did not fulfil its promise of eliminating starvation, but it did fulfil its promise of corporatising agriculture.
World Bank loans were also to lift undeveloped countries into the modern world with massive infrastructure projects, but they too are now widely recognised to have failed, whilst causing enormous environmental as well as social devastation. Here the corporations contracted to supply materials and do the work got their money regardless of the efficacy of the programs, and the developing countries were left with the debt. Once again, the citizens of the world do have some intuitive basis to doubt the altruistic claims of CHOGM.
Peter Beattie has also left an important CHOGM agenda item off the list, and it is one which undermines every other claim. According to successive CHOGMs, the way to do these wonderful things is to pursue the agenda of economic globalisation. In fact, all other goals are explicitly subordinated to this.
"We welcome the progress made in recent years in dismantling trade barriers and establishing a rule-based international trading system", was how CHOGM 1999's Fancourt Declaration put it. "However, significant barriers to trade in goods and services remain, and the benefits of the expansion of world trade are still unevenly shared. We have therefore resolved to . . . support the full implementation of the Uruguay Round Agreements.
"We fully believe in the importance of upholding labour standards and protecting the environment. But these must be addressed in an appropriate way that does not, by linking them to trade liberalisation, end up effectively impeding free trade and causing injustice to developing countries."
The expectation of the Brisbane 2001 CHOGM is that it will pledge support for the General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS) agreement, engineered by the World Trade Organisation.
So to suggest that the CHOGM and the anti-globalisation protestors are on the same side is wrong. It is either a lie or a bit of effervescent Beattiesque stupidity. If one disagrees with globalisation (World Trade Organisation-style globalisation at least), one can hardly think that CHOGM is a benign organisation.
The growing debate about the theories behind globalisation, along with a monumental lack of empirical evidence that it actually helps alleviate social problems, might itself cause some caution among policy makers. Globalisation however is still a matter of fundamentalist faith for our elites.
This lack of open debate should concern us in itself. The issue is simply not a subject for democratic deliberation. Despite massive protests, from across the spectrum of political thought, neither major party in Australia will contemplate a shift in policy regarding globalisation. We should recall that this faith is in institutions that have repeatedly failed to provide solutions to global social problems in the past. All they have consistently succeeded in doing is to ensure growing profits for a shrinking number of growing multinational corporations.
A recent and tragic example of this faith, which may be regarded as a microcosm of the politics of the CHOGM, was foreign affairs minister Alexander Downer's response to the protesters shot dead in Papua New Guinea. The protests were against the World Bank and IMF's program in the country. Downer responded to this tragedy by exhorting the PNG government to carry on with the programs, warning that if it did not PNG would suffer economically.
But even if we assume that the economic priesthood is correct, there is another problem which also contradicts the stated CHOGM objective of "protecting and promoting democracy".
Globalisation — and GATS is an excellent example — involves stripping whole areas of decision-making and service provision away from the scrutiny of any democracy which exists. So with privatisation of services, deregulation of financial sectors and the prohibition of trade barriers, we simply have less to vote about. More decisions are either predetermined or in the hands of completely undemocratic corporations.
So the promotion of "democracy and good governance" by CHOGM becomes a very cynical exercise.
Even while successive CHOGMs make endless statements about the wonderful intentions of respective governments, as long as the Commonwealth supports globalisation, it is anti-social.
CHOGM is a sideshow in a world where the main game is played by massive corporations with extraordinary power, which is rarely if ever exposed to any democratic process at all.
Crucially, CHOGM will do nothing to try to curb this power. It will not try to guarantee democratically elected governments the power to protect people from the greed of these corporations. On the contrary it will attempt to ensure that the developing countries of the Commonwealth have no recourse to protect local services and industries.
A lot of these countries need to be convinced, and the volumes of nice thoughts coming from CHOGM are merely attempts to convince. Don't be convinced. No one needs to be as gullible as Peter Beattie.
[Hamish Alcorn is an activist with Friends of the Earth in Brisbane and is a member of the CHOGM Action Network.]