Progressive Unilateralism?

U.S. Unilateralism, Progressive Internationalism, and Alternatives to Neoliberalism

By Ian Robinson
Ian Robinson <eian@umich.edu> teaches comparative and international political economy in the Residential College and the Sociology Department of the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor. He is also affiliated with U of M’s Institute of Labor and Industrial Relations.

Contents

Introduction
What is Unilateralism?
Progressive Internationalism
Progressive U.S. Unilateralism?
Conclusions
Endnotes
Bibliography

(This is the third in a series of Foreign Policy In Focus discussion papers examining internationalist and nationalist tendencies in citizen movements focusing on global economy issues. We invite readers to join the discussion by sending their comments to tom@irc-online.org for inclusion in FPIF’s ezine, The Progressive Response.)

Introduction¹

In the recent debate on “permanent normal trade relations” (PNTR) with China, some progressives argued that failure to ratify the bilateral deal would constitute a retreat into “unilateralism.” They asserted that U.S. unilateralism is a bad thing—so bad, indeed, that they supported PNTR even though they agreed with opponents that China’s entry into the WTO, facilitated by PNTR, would likely be bad for most workers in both China and the USA.² I think this position rests on a false premise. The policies of the United States—whether acting alone or in concert with other states—have often been at odds with progressive internationalist principles, but they need not be. This paper aims to justify this conclusion and to identify the conditions under which unilateral U.S. actions can serve progressive internationalism.

What is Unilateralism?

State policies are often dubbed “unilateral” if they: (a) are undertaken by a single state, (b) have significant impacts on people in other states, and (c) are not governed by bilateral or multilateral treaties. By this definition, U.S. refusal to grant PNTR status to China would have been a unilateral action because the U.S. would have been acting alone and because it would have exercised a de facto veto over China’s accession to the WTO. By the same token, if the U.S. and three other countries had signed a treaty agreeing not to support China’s membership in the WTO until China became a democracy, then congressional refusal to support China’s admission to the WTO would have been a case of multilateralism.³

If this is what unilateralism means, it is hard to see why it is more problematic than bilateralism or multilateralism, independent of the substance of the policies pursued. A group of states, acting in a coordinated fashion, can usually impose a policy on other countries more effectively than can any single member of the alliance. So if a policy’s net impact on most of those affected is negative, its cooperative pursuit will generally be more harmful than its uncoordinated pursuit by an individual state. The cooperation of the creditor states in their bargaining with Third World debtor nations in the 1980s illustrates this point. Cooperation enabled the creditors to impose much more far-reaching neoliberal conditionality on the debtor countries than would otherwise have been possible.

All other things being equal, interstate cooperation may be preferable to its absence. But such an abstract preference is easily outweighed when the net external effects of a policy are substantial and negative. I conclude that the animus of some progressives against unilateralism—U.S. or otherwise—cannot be justified under the conventional definition of the term.

A stronger case against unilateralism can be made if it is redefined as actions by one or more states that have significant “external” impacts, undertaken without the agreement of the governments whose citizens are affected by these actions.⁴ Here the key is not whether one or more states pursue a policy, but whether those significantly affected by that policy agree to it under noncoercive conditions. By this definition, it is not so important whether the Federal Reserve (Fed) secured the agreement of the Bundesbank or the Bank of England before it dramatically hiked real interest rates in 1979. What matters is that the Fed did not secure the consent of the governments of the many nations whose economies and people were seriously harmed when the Fed’s new policy precipitated the Third World debt crisis.

The principle invoked here is a familiar one: one ought to be held accountable for the harms that one does to others. Lack of intent to do these harms is not an excuse. Failure to consider such external consequences before acting is negligence; recognizing that serious negative externalities are likely, but proceeding nonetheless, without attempting to warn or protect the likely victims, is recklessness. It is reasonable to insist that states consider the consequences of their actions for people living outside their borders, inform those likely to be affected by these actions, and attempt to secure their consent. Where agreement by all affected states is secured, the policy is no longer unilateral—it has become a multilateral agreement.

As redefined here, unilateralism faces a serious ethical challenge any time the policy pursued has significant external effects. For if we do not ask those affected by our actions whether they see them as beneficial or harmful, how are we to know? It is not enough to say that, if we were in their place, we would like (or dislike) the effects of this policy, because there are important differences in values and policy priorities within and among our societies. Given that such differences exist, the people affected must decide how they evaluate those impacts. The consent of their governments to the policy must therefore be secured, insofar as it reflects popular judgments on these matters.

As redefined here, there is one situation—and one alone—in which unilateral action can be morally justified: where the external effects of the policy benefit most of the people in the countries affected, but the governments of those countries oppose the policy nonetheless. This situation is most likely to arise where two conditions are met: first, the policies in question embody progressive internationalist ideals (as defined below); and second, the governments that oppose them are authoritarian regimes or low-quality democracies catering to the interests of powerful minorities within their societies. The agreement of such states is not sufficient to certify that a policy benefits most of “their” people; on the other hand, failure to secure the support of such states does not indicate that the policy would be opposed by most of the people in those countries.

When broadly popular political organizations, autonomous from the political regime, call for a particular policy—as the African National Congress (ANC) called for economic sanctions and rejected the U.S. alternative of “constructive engagement” with the apartheid South African regime—this manifests that most people in that country support the policy, even though the state strongly opposes it. Whether sanctions are pursued by one or more states often determines how effective they are likely to be. But sanctions are justified, even if only one state imposes them, provided they have at least some of the desired impacts.⁵ This is a relatively easy case.

What are we to do, though, in countries where an ANC or a Polish Solidarity does not exist, because the regime has been successful in suppressing their equivalents? China is the largest and most powerful example of such a regime today, but it is far from the only one. Here we face a more difficult challenge, not only because it is more difficult to learn what most citizens in such countries actually think, but also because what they think is heavily manipulated by the state’s control of information flows and interpretations of that information. Despite these difficulties, it is our responsibility in such cases to impute those interests based on the best evidence available to us.⁶ The alternative is paralysis, and that is unacceptable: those with power and resources to make a difference have an obligation to help the oppressed to escape their bonds, particularly if the governments of the powerful were partly responsible for the creation of those bonds, as is often the case in our world.

We cannot be sure whether most Chinese peasants, given the opportunity to investigate and discuss the matter freely, would support the agricultural trade liberalization and intellectual property rights provisions of the World Trade Organization (WTO). But we know that many of their Indian counterparts strongly oppose these policies and the WTO in its current form. Peasants constitute a majority of the populations of both countries, so in high-quality democracies, we would expect their opposition to the WTO to weigh very heavily in government deliberations.⁷ A full analysis of the economic interests of Chinese peasants with respect to trade matters would have to be much more sophisticated than this, but these are among the arguments and evidence that would have to be considered in such an assessment.

Where our best efforts to impute interests indicate that the external effects of the policy contemplated would be largely positive, unilateral action is justified, despite opposition by authoritarian or low-quality democratic states. On the other hand, reckless (or negligent) unilateralism, such as that of the Federal Reserve in 1979, cannot be morally justified.

Progressive Internationalism

What is progressive internationalism? What are the basic elements of a progressive internationalist (PI) conception of a just international political economy? The argument in the previous section implies at least part of an answer. It assumes that principles of fairness and justice that we would apply among ourselves should not stop at national borders, and that what is true of ethically responsible behavior by individuals is also true of responsible behavior by states in the international system.

The first objection to such a position is that it makes a mockery of the principle of national sovereignty: the Federal Reserve should be accountable only to the people of the United States.⁸ If states are ethically constrained to pursue only policies to which majorities in countries affected by those policies would assent, what is left of national sovereignty? If the same argument holds for reckless unilateralism by transnational corporations, as a progressive internationalist would hold, what is left of private property rights? The answer is that neither national sovereignty nor private property rights would disappear, but both are second-order values that must operate within the space that is left by the requirements of justice.

Put this way, to achieve a just international political economy, the policies pursued by such an economy’s organizations—as well as the institutions that shape the goals of those organizations and the means by which they may be pursued—must have the consent of the governed. This consent implies an international political process in which the interests and preferences of popular majorities in all countries are effectively represented (Held 1995).⁹ This, in turn, implies high-quality democracy in all of these countries, so that national governments know what the interests and preferences of the majority of their peoples are and actively pursue those interests in negotiations.

The low quality of democracy in many contemporary states—including the United States, where private money and growing social inequality have been reducing the quality of democracy (from a modest baseline) for a quarter-century—means that we cannot look to the policies of these states to learn what the majorities of the world’s peoples would approve. What, then, can we do? I see two ways to proceed. One is to focus on the various requirements of a progressive internationalist order that are built into its very definition—above all, the stipulation that all of its constituent states be high-quality democracies. The other is to focus on what popular sector organizations from the North and South have so far agreed would be a superior alternative to the neoliberal model of global economic organization. I will treat the common elements of two proposals developed by Northern and Southern nonprofit, nongovernmental organizations as a first approximation of a progressive internationalist alternative.¹⁰ The six most important measures common to both proposals are summarized in the left-hand column of Table One.

Progressive U.S. Unilateralism?

Under our redefinition, unilateral actions can involve one or many countries. What makes them unilateral is that they are undertaken without the consent of states that are seriously affected by the actions. U.S. unilateralism occurs when the U.S. is the only nation pursuing a unilateral policy. Can the United States, acting alone and unilaterally, do anything to shift the current international political economy toward our first approximation of the progressive internationalist ideal? The rest of Table One addresses this question.

The center column identifies actions that the U.S. could undertake alone with a realistic prospect of advancing the progressive internationalist reform agenda. We see that, for five of the six most important reform proposals summarized in the table, the U.S. could make a significant positive difference, even if it had to act alone. The right-hand column of Table One considers whether the U.S. actions listed in the center column would be unilateral as defined here—that is, would they be opposed by at least some of the states whose populations would be affected by the U.S. policy. In all five cases, the table indicates, the U.S. might have to act unilaterally, though only in the case of core worker rights is this almost certain to be the case.

All six of the measures summarized in the table are important, but the first one deserves particular attention, because success in protecting core worker rights would not only realize progressive economic goals but would also substantially enhance the prospects for high-quality, stable democracy (Rueschemeyer et al. 1992, Robinson 1993, Adler & Webster 1995). Frundt has shown that worker rights provisions in U.S. trade law since 1984 have had significant positive impacts on struggles for worker rights in Central America and the Caribbean. This was so even though executive branch support for worker rights (whether at home or abroad) was minimal, and administration officials interpreted and applied the worker rights provisions in ways that significantly weakened their potential effectiveness (Frundt 1999). The U.S. could also use social tariffs—or, more aggressively, economic sanctions—to promote direct changes in state behavior conducive to higher quality democracy.

There is not space here to explore in similar detail the reasoning behind the other four measures where individual U.S. action could make a positive difference. However, they are perhaps relatively straightforward. For example, if the U.S. administration announced that it would not seek to enforce NAFTA and WTO restrictions against Southern states wishing to impose investor performance requirements on U.S. investors, it would be less intimidating for these states to employ such measures.¹¹ Individual U.S. action is not likely to advance the Tobin tax proposal (row 6), because if the U.S. were the only country imposing such a tax, currency trading would simply move offshore to avoid it. Consequently, the cooperation of at least the other G-3 powers—Japan and the European Union (EU)—would be required. Could the U.S. act unilaterally to bring pressure on these states to cooperate in such an endeavor? As always, the U.S. can bring many bargaining chips to the table to induce the cooperation of other states, but ultimately the Tobin tax cannot work without their active support, so unilateralism is not a live option here, even if it could be justified.

Conclusions

Over the past 25 years, successive U.S. administrations have taken the lead in promoting a neoliberal model of global economic organization. To this end, these administrations have acted either alone or in concert with other states, depending upon which approach they thought would be more effective. Many of these actions—both the individual and the collective ones—were both unilateral and reckless, as these terms have been defined here. Reckless unilateralism by transnational corporations is also rampant in the global economic order that has resulted from these policies. Recklessness—whether individual or collective, private or public—is morally unacceptable. International institutions that now permit—and sometimes encourage—such recklessness should be reformed so that they punish recklessness and compensate its victims.

That said, not all unilateralism is reckless or negligent. Progressive unilateralism is not an oxymoron. Some unilateral actions can be legitimated on progressive internationalist grounds, whether the unilateral action is undertaken by the United States, some other state, or a combination of states. Unilateral actions are justified on this basis if and only if two conditions are met: (1) the balance of evidence suggests that most people in the affected countries believe that the policy would benefit them (or would believe this if they had access to all of the relevant facts and arguments); and (2) the affected states that oppose the policy are low-quality democracies or authoritarian regimes in which national governments routinely ignore the interests of the majority of their people. Where these conditions are met, unilateral action by the United States is ethically justified. Whether justified U.S. unilateralism is also a potent force for progressive internationalism can only be assessed on a case by case basis. However, the examples in Table One suggest that this can sometimes be the case.

Endnotes

1. Thanks to John Gershman and John Cavanagh for their helpful comments on an earlier draft of this paper.
2. These positions were taken in (Bello & Mittal 2000) and (Gershman 2000), among others.
3. This particular rule is not so far-fetched. The European Community required democracy as one of its membership criteria, and it refused to admit Spain, Portugal, and Greece until they democratized.
4. A policy has “external effects” when it has substantial impacts, positive or negative, on people outside the territorial boundaries of the political systems of the actor or actors pursuing the policy.
5. This is not to deny the possibility of powerful prudential counterarguments. A boycott might be justified by progressive principles. However, if it induced a “cornered” authoritarian regime to launch a military attack on its neighbors, the harm caused by this reaction might well outweigh the potential good done by the policy if it had not stimulated such a reaction. Thus, relative probabilities of different regime reactions must be assessed as part of any such analysis. However, the burden of proof in difficult judgments should be borne by those who would refrain from acting according to the requirements of justice.
6. Lukes, in his analysis of power, makes a similar argument (Lukes 1974).
7. In the highest quality democracy, the preferences of all citizens would have equal weight in the policy formation process (Dahl 1989). All actually existing democracies fall well short of this ideal, but it still serves as a useful orienting standard.
8. Of course, the Fed is hardly accountable to the American people either, but that is another matter (Greider 1987).
9. This formulation does not imply a federal world government based on one person, one vote, though Held seems to lean toward this position (Held 1995). I have argued elsewhere that a quasi-federalist formulation, organized around the representation of the world’s many peoples by democratic nation-states, is likely to be more just and more stable.
10. The proposals are: (1) the Hemispheric Social Alliance’s “Alternatives for the Americas” document, drafted at the Santiago meeting of April 15-18, 1998; and (2) the “Call to Action,” drafted at the December 1998 meeting of Friends of the Earth, the International Forum on Globalization, and the Third World Network. The Alternatives for the Americas document, together with information about the groups that contributed to it, may be accessed on the web at: http://www.web.net/comfront/alternatives.htm. The Call to Action proposal is summarized and analyzed in Part III of (Anderson & Cavanagh 2000), available on the web at: http://www.laborrights.org/projects/globalecon/ips/index.html.
11. This example raises the question: are unilateral actions justified if their direct effects are benign, but third parties object? The direct impacts of the U.S. refusal to exercise some or all of its WTO investor rights fall on U.S. investors, U.S. citizens, and the citizens of the countries in which the U.S. does not exercise these rights. However, other capital exporting nations might claim that they are injured because the U.S. stance makes it more difficult for them to enforce their WTO investor rights. If a third party could demonstrate substantial harm to its population from such a unilateral action, this would count against the legitimacy of unilateral action, unless the third party were compensated for the harms done in a fashion that it deemed acceptable.

Bibliography

Glenn Adler and Eddie Webster, “Challenging Transition Theory: The Labor Movement, Radical Reform, and Transition to Democracy in South Africa,” Politics & Society, vol. 23, no.1, March, 1995.

Sarah Anderson and John Cavanagh, “Bearing the Burden: The Impact of the Global Financial Crisis on Workers and Alternative Agendas for the IMF and Other Institutions,” available at: http://www.laborrights.org/projects/globalecon/ips/index.html.

Walden Bello and Anuradha Mittal, “Dangerous Liaisons: Progressives, the Right, and the Anti-China Trade Campaign,” available at: http://www.foodfirst.org/pubs/backgrdrs/2000/sp00v6n1.html

Robert Dahl, Democracy and Its Critics (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1989).

Henry J. Frundt, Trade Conditions and Labor Rights: U.S. Initiatives, Dominican and Central American Responses (Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida, 1999).

William Greider, Secrets of the Temple: How the Federal Reserve Runs the Country (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1987).

John Gershman, “How to Debate the China Issue Without China Bashing,” available at: http://www.fpif.org/papers/china/index.htm

David Held, Democracy and the Global Order: From the Modern State to Cosmopolitan Governance (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995).

Linda Lim, “Singapore,” in Stephen Herzenberg and Jorge Perez-Lopez, eds., Labor Standards and Development in the Global Economy (Washington: U.S. Department of Labor, Bureau of International Affairs, 1990).

Steven Lukes, Power: A Radical View (London: Macmillan, 1974).

Ian Robinson, North American Trade As If Democracy Mattered: What’s Wrong with NAFTA and What Are the Alternatives? (Ottawa, Canada and Washington, DC: Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives and International Labor Rights Education and Research Fund, 1993).

—, “Democratic Critiques of the Institutions and Processes of Neoliberal Economic Integration: An Assessment,” Cahiers de Recherche Sociologique, vol. 24.

Dietrich Rueschemeyer, Evelyne Huber Stephens, and John D. Stephens, Capitalist Development and Democracy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992).

Other Discussion Papers available from Foreign Policy In Focus How to Debate the China Issue without China Bashing    By John Gershman Don’t Strengthen the WTO by Admitting China    By Sarah Anderson, John Cavanagh, and Bama Athreya

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