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'US must stop moralistic preaching'

Kaushik Basu

Rules and customs, once formed, tend to outlive people and even nations.

India's caste norms may once have had a rationale; but the norms have easily outlived the rationale and the individuals who played a role in their formation are in the mists of distant history.

We are today living in an age in which the idea of global governance is beginning to take shape. International conventions on climate change, labour standards, and the treatment of prisoners of war, and the formation of the International Criminal Court last July are all incipient attempts to bring the world under some common norms and laws.

The United States has been in the forefront of many of these efforts. During Bill Clinton's presidency it took the initiative for the ICC and signed the 'Rome Statute' that made it possible.

It is unfortunate that the current US administration, while, on the one hand, deeply involved globally, has, at the same time, become the most vigorous opponent of global governance and democracy.

Bewilderingly, it has sought to resist virtually all these conventions. As for the PoW convention, the Bush administration does not reject it but insists that it alone has the right to decide who is a prisoner of war, which amounts to pretty much the same thing.

Not surprisingly, this unilateralism has met with intense criticism in the media.

What has, however, not been pointed out is that, no matter what the advantages are to the US being able to flex its muscle undeterred by global courts and norms (and no doubt there are some), what the US does at this formative stage of globalisation will leave its imprint on the future.

If, for instance, the rule gets set that the militarily most powerful nation will be above the global law, then it is likely that this rule will survive changes in the pecking order of powerful nations.

We do not know if the future powers will be benevolent or malicious. But if we, by then, have the rules of global governance and laws in place, then, no matter who they are, they will be under pressure to play by those rules, just as, within a nation that has a settled tradition of democracy and the rule of law, leaders, no matter how autocratic they are, find it difficult to flout that tradition.

What the Bush administration is asking for is also morally flawed. From the time of the philosopher Immanuel Kant it has been treated as virtually an axiom of moral philosophy that laws must be universalisable and 'anonymous', that is, they should apply to all - the name of the person or nation in the dock should be irrelevant.

The original objection of the Bush administration to the ICC was that it may be used against Americans. Poor Kant, he must have spun in his grave. Just change the name of the nation and it will be transparent how this demand sounds like a line from the theatre of the absurd: North Korea says that it objects to a treaty banning the use of chemical weapons because that can get North Korea into trouble.

Someone in the Bush administration must have realised this and so the argument has, recently, been bolstered. It is now being said that the US administration objects to the ICC because, as Mark Grossman, Under-secretary of State for Political Affairs, put it, it may be used to bring politically motivated charges against American soldiers and bureaucrats. Of course, the law should not be used to settle scores.

But again, it is not clear why only Americans should be protected against politically motivated charges. We should try to draft the law such that no one becomes a victim of politically trumped up charges.

There is talk of nations signing bilateral treaties with the US, exempting it from the purview of the criminal court. Some nations have already done so. But to exempt some agents or nations from the purview of a law meant to spread justice in the world makes a travesty of the very idea of international justice.

There are other domains where unilateralism is being indulged for even flimsier reasons. Take the ILO Convention 138, by signing which a nation vows to do away with child labour.

To date 117 nations have ratified it, which includes almost all industrialised countries. The surprise is that this does not include the US.

US laws on child labour are very strict and the incidence of child labour in the US is low. According to the latest estimates available, in any random week there are 148,000 children doing illegal work. Given the size of the US labour force, this is not a large number.

The US could easily adopt the ILO convention without, in fact, having to do anything for it. If, despite this, it has resisted the convention, it is to make the point that Jesse Helms often stressed, namely, that the US cannot be subservient to global governance authorities, such as the UN or the ILO.

In the first weeks following 9/11, one felt that President Bush was serious in involving and being involved with the whole world. It was almost as if he realised that through military action you can finish a group of terrorists, but not terrorism.

To end terrorism we must try to ensure that large masses of people do not feel marginalised and treated unfairly in this rapidly globalising world. As long as we do not attend to this, the resentment of the masses of marginalised people will be the breeding ground of terrorism.

Is it naïve to expect that the US president can play a genuinely international leadership role? I do not think so. There have been American leaders, like Jimmy Carter, who have tried to keep the larger interests of the world in mind while crafting policy.

It is true that to do so is to risk losing some popularity at home, among one's electorate (as Jimmy Carter must well know).

Hence, it may not be in the self-interest of the politician to do so. But there is no surprise in the fact that morality does not invariably coincide with self-interest. If it did, there would be no need to have a separate concept called morality.

And when there is a conflict between the two, some leaders have risen to undertake the moral action rather than the electorally popular one. The leader of the world's most powerful nation has a special duty to do so.

In this case I am arguing that it is in America's enlightened self-interest to help institute global norms of justice, laws and courts.

These will no doubt restrict some of the freedoms of the world's most powerful nation, but, once instituted, they are likely to outlive the tenure of not one but several most powerful nations.

The author is professor of economics and director of the Programme on Comparative Economic Development at Cornell University.

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