SKYPE INTERVIEW BRIAN COUGHLAN-FAI ON UNPA – JAN 2013
Fernando Iglesias: Democratic supranational institutions are needed to avoid a global cataclysm
Fernando Iglesias
AUDIO IN http://blog.unpacampaign.org/assets/Fernando-Iglesias-UNPA-Interview-5.mp3
Last week I spoke to Fernando Iglesias, a
writer and a member of the Argentinan Parliament from 2007 to 2011, who was
recently elected as chairman of the the council of the World Federalist
Movement. His books include “La modernidad global”, an analysis of the “complex
dynamics of globalization” published in 2011. Fernando is also a professor at
the Universidad de Belgrano in Buenos Aires and during his term in the
Argentinian Parliament, he was also Co-Chair for the Global South of the Parliamentary
Advisory Group of the Campaign for a UN Parliamentary Assembly.
We talked about world federalism, regional
integration, global challenges, the role of the nation-state, the meaning of
global democracy, global change and what the future might look like. The
discussion was supposed to last five minutes but instead we ended up
talking for over twenty!
Audio transcript of the interview
Today I’m speaking to Fernando Iglesias, a former
Member of the Argentinan Parliament and current chair of the World Federalist
Movement. Welcome to the UNPA Audio blog!
Hi Brian, nice to hear you.
We’ve been trying to get a hold of each other
for a while. We finally managed to get together, that is excellent. In July you
were elected as the chair of the council of the World Federalist Movement. For
our listeners, could you say in a few words what the World Federalist Movement
is about?
I was elected chair of the council of the World
Federalist Movement and this is a big responsibility as it is the first time
someone from the South has been elected, this is a sign of the times.
The World Federalist Movement is a very important
movement that tries to put on the table the question of the political
organization of our global world, meaning the idea of federalism which was
thought of as being a way of organizing national states. It is also
a great idea to be applied to the global world, meaning we should have
federalism at the regional level, maybe the European Union is the best example
– but we need also to have federalist structures at the global level. Then we
need to reform the United Nations, create new agencies and establish the rule
of law at the global level. The basic contribution of the World Federalist
Movement is the existence of political union inside the European Union – which
was originally only an economic project; meaning the European Parliament for
example, and also the campaign for the establishment of an International
Criminal Court was an initiative of the World Federalist Movement at the
beginnings of the 1990s…
…can I stop you there very briefly? The World
Federalist Movement has important programs on the International Criminal Court
and the Responsibility to Protect. So what do you think is the next important
milestone in the world federalist strategy – from that point of view – from the
International Criminal Court, Responsibility to Protect-point-of-view?
I think we should move towards two other goals, in
addition to the development of the International Criminal Court and
Responsibility to Protect - these two goals are, in my opinion, the
campaign for regional integration, meaning defending and promoting European
regional integration now, but also using this model for different regions of
the world which in different ways need something similar; need more political
union; need more agreement on the common interests of their citizens…
…sorry, Fernando. So the European Union is a
good example of the way things are going? Which other regions do you think
could go the same way or in the same direction?
I think that there are many
aspects of European integration that should be extended to other regions.
Not the general model which can change according to the local situation. When I
say European integration I mean a model of political integration with
supra-national institutions, a supra-national parliament, a supra-national
court of justice; meaning also the economic development but also the welfare
state. It’s very important to defend the European welfare state and not just to
defend it inside Europe but to promote this kind of welfare state all over the world.
This year you initiated a manifesto for global
democracy that was signed by a large number of intellectuals from around the
world, and you are also working on regional integration and a UN Parliamentary
Assembly. So you’ve talked a bit about regional integration. Now how do you
connect that to the UN Parliamentary Assembly? What does that look like?
A basic fact of the last 20 years was the
globalization of the economy and finances without the globalization of
politics; particularly democratic institutions. So we are living in an imbalanced
world in which finances and economy are very, very strong and politics is not.
So we need to regulate the global market and we need to make technological
improvements, this benefits all human beings all over the world and that is why
we need - in one way - to build this kind of supra-national
institutions, we need to democratize globalization. Meaning building democratic
institutions above the national and state level, meaning the regional and
global levels; that’s why we need a regional integration on the one hand and a
UN Parliamentary Assembly on the other hand.
So just to clarify: basically what you’re saying is
that on the one hand we have an integrated unified or nearly unified global
economy but on the other hand we have no political accountability and that
is the big imbalance…
…this is one of the
problems; and the crisis of 2008 – which is still continuing – shows that
you cannot manage a global economy through international agencies; you need global agencies and
you need these global agencies to be democratic, like the United Nations
Parliamentary Assembly. These are the kinds of agencies that should be created
inside the United Nations. We need these kinds of agencies not only for
economic reasons but also for ecological reasons; we need also to stop
nuclear proliferation; and we need to make decisions about a lot of global
crises and global trouble we are facing now; like criminality; trafficing of
drugs and people. That’s why we need to build these kinds of
global institutionsm, just as we built national institutions some
centuries ago.
And yet the manifesto you initiated starts off with
a statement that politics is standing still and resists the trend of
globalization and it seemed, perhaps 15 years ago, that the nation-state was on
its way out, that the nation-state was doomed, but now global politics has
become very nation-state centric again. How do we explain this? How can a UN
Parliamentary Assembly help us overcome this national-centric global governance
model?
The first thing we need is an explanation. Why are
we coming back to the past? I think that the world is facing now a kind of
challenge; the kind of challenges that Europe faced at the beginning of the
past century. When the international crises and global crises started at the
beginning of the 20th century, the first reactions were to be nationalistic:
“our country,” “our family,” needs to be kept safe from international affects.
The problem is: if you continue this way you’re going to face the same kind of
scenario of the European crisis during the first part of the past century when
everybody was focused on their own country.
Then you have
protectionism, you have nationalism, then you have crazy men like Hitler and
Mussolini starting to develop big armies and you need to do the same; and you
know, we know where all these forces go. So we need to stop that and apply a
different logic in which you keep national states – but you integrate national
states and national interests into a more complex order which is global. Which
is regional on the one hand, but which is global – and this is the
challenge of the 21st century. Because, if we don’t find the way
of managing nuclear proliferation, global warming, financial crises, in a
common way – in a participative and democratic way, we’re going to have the
same kind of craziness.
Fernando, I have one last question for you. You’ve
touched on this idea of a kind of a hierarchical structure. The nation-state at
the bottom, regional institutions in the middle, and the UN Parliamentary
Assembly on top. Is that kind of what you’re looking at? Is that an accurate
portrayal of the structures you envisage?
Well, I think there are so many processes going on.
For instance the G20. Ten years ago, the discussion was if global institutions
were meant to be! But now the real question is: these institutions which
already exist – meaning the World Trade Organization, G20, and the United
Nations Security Council etc. – the question is if these organizations are
going to be democratic or not; and this is a repetition of the history of the
world. Because national powers were not democratic at the beginning they
existed – and then they became democratic through the work of organizations,
citizens etc.
So we need to start something similar. We need to
think about developing democratic agencies. For sure the United Nations
Parliamentary Assembly would be perhaps the most emblematic one; but we also
need regional parliaments; and a real court of justice; and we need also
the International Criminal Court to be more balanced and be
strengthened in order to judge criminals, crimes against humanity
- like the war in Iraq, for instance. So there are so many ways.
What is very clear now is that there is a
general dissatisfaction about the way politics exists at the global level
and we need new answers, so, of course, a United Nations Parliamentary Assembly
– by the way, I was the chair of the parliamentary advisory group of the South
for many years and work together with the people who are developing this
amazing initiative. We need to push on with the participation of people, the
participation of citizens of the world , and this kind of initiative is crucial
in order to put this on the agenda.
The American Revolution, the French Revolution
these were all – even to some degree I suppose the Russian Revolution in 1917 –
these were all critical pivotal points. What is the equivalent breakthrough
moment for global democracy? Is there some kind of critical mass? Is there some
key pivotal moment? Has it maybe already happened? What would such a
breakthrough look like?
Well, firstly, I wouldn’t put together the Russian
Revolution with the French and American Revolutions. Focusing on these two last
ones, the French Revolution and the American Revolution appeared in a
moment of history that was very clear. It was a change from a civilization
which was based on agriculture and had a particular way of political structure,
meaning monarchy and the Pope etc., very hierarchical powers. Then
the techno-economic environment changes from agriculture to the industrial
revolution and then, of course, the old structures were not able to cope with
the challenges of the future, so I think that the French and American
revolutions were a way of adjusting the political system to the new conditions
that were created by industrialisation and now we are facing exactly the same
thing; because we are changing from the industrial society to a new global
society of knowledge, information, Internet, mass media, communication,
innovation. So the old structure of industrialism - meaning basically
national states and secondarily international organisations - are not able
to cope with the challenge of the future. If we’re not able to change, and
change in a fast way, we are going to face a very critical situation and I
have to say that at the moment the initiatives are all very valuable but
are still very far away from the objectives we need to achieve.
It sounds like you’re saying the breakthrough
moment has already occurred, the Internet, social media and the ability for
many millions of people to contact each other and exchange ideas; that
information revolution is already underway and that to some degree is what is
pushing the agenda forward.
Yes, yes, of course, of course! I mean nobody knew
that the Soviet Union was going to fail till the moment it failed and
these kinds of ongoing processes – you are building a critical mass and you
don’t know that something is really happening until it happens –
like in the Arab Revolutions, the Arab Spring, whatever.
Anyway, I think the real question now, for me, is:
are we going to be able to develop these kinds of new structures as fast as the
techno-economic situation changes the world? Because we are clearly – and
this is another assumption of the global democracy manifesto about the delay in
politics - we’re facing an amazing change in the techno-economic aspect of
life but the change in politics is very slow in comparison. So the problem is:
we’re in a similar situation to which Europeans were a century ago and could
face a big catastrophe before we arrive at the correct conclusions.
We need real input from civil society, from the
citizens, from the political system in order to change the order and build new
institutions, so this is the real question: whether we are going to arrive at
these new democratic global structures before a big crisis occurs or after?
Millions of lives, maybe the future of humanity, is at stake.
So we can do this the hard way or we can do it the
easy way. The easy way is to recognize our shared interdependence and to act on
it to create relevant institutions. The hard way is to have some kind of
global war or some kind of global ecological collapse and emerge out of that
and do the same thing anyway?
Yes, this is the point of history in which I think
we are… I could be wrong…
…no, I agree. I think you’re right. We’re very much
on the same page…
…in any case, if we’re going to face a disaster,
the point is to compare the end of the First World War and the end of
the Second World War. At the end of the First World War, the political decision
was to keep the politics and institutional organization of politics at the
national level and the results of such a wrong decision was the Second
World War.
In the meanwhile there were
many people – Altiero Spinelli, Lionel Robbins – who were working
hard keeping the mind on the need of creating some kind of federal union
of Europe and to overcome the national paradigm. At the end of the Second World
War, we have a catastrophe which was even worse than the
first but the right idea was inside the minds of many politicians
- Schumann, Jean Monnet – and the united Europe was built and the result
was – even if there are many things to say, Europe is in crisis etc.
- Europe has had a long period of peace and social progress and
economic development for sixty years. So the problem now at the global level is
this: at least if we’re going to face a global crisis, we need to develop the
right ideas for changing the world before or after the crisis.
Absolutely, let’s hope we go the easy way! We do it the easy way so we
don’t have to go through the birth canal of some kind of violent conflagration
or ecological collapse or something before we realize that we really all have
to pull together.
Fernando, thank you for chatting to me, I
appreciate you taking my call.
Entradas
