Most
of the proposed UN reforms seem very difficult if not impossible to realise.
The permanent members of the Security Council have also a veto right over
all amendments and any review of the Charter. Security Council or General
Assembly reforms appear thus unlikely. The US dominates the contemporary
UN system not only by its veto right but also by financial blackmail and
by translating its other resources into bargaining power within the UN.
Also the location of the UN headquarters in New York makes the UN staff
and representatives susceptible to the influence of US culture, media and
public opinion. In addition to the consistent opposition of the US, also
a veto by China, Russia or the ex-colonial powers Britain and France would
suffice to block any reform.
The US and China, in particular, would as well seem to oppose the establishment of a People's Assembly. An ECOSOC-based reform of the UN would not be as difficult, however, because the existing UN Charter already authorises it. The trouble lies in the lack of political will and money. Indeed, our analysis indicates that the best immediate way to reform the UN system is by way of establishing new sources of finance. This might also contribute to changing the power structures within the UN. The establishment of a UN world lottery or UN credit card are real possibilities to find alternative sources of funding for the UN system. More ambitiously, as will be argued in the second part, it is also possible to establish a currency transaction tax or a global carbon tax on sales of fossil fuels without the consent of all "great powers" (although some of them are needed). It is achievable to feed some of these revenues into the UN system and thereby lift some of the pressures on the UN caused by financial conditioning and troubles.
The decision-making system of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank is perhaps the most explicitly undemocratic aspect of global governance. The IMF directly dictates the economic and other policies of a large number of countries. These and many other countries, particularly in the South, are strongly shaped by the World Bank priorities. While it continues to be recommendable that democratically minded states and movements demand democratisation of the one dollar/one vote system of the Bretton Woods twins, the system is not likely to undergo significant changes in this regard any time soon. In order to change the rules so that no single country can have such a veto, there would need to be a super-majority, which can be thwarted by the US alone. Under these circumstances, a realist short- to medium-term strategy of democratisation may include support to campaigns that aim at drastic debt relief and restructuring, in order to make countries more independent vis-à-vis the Bretton Woods institutions. This has to be coupled with a quest for transparency, accountability and full effective participation in the decision-making process by all states and global civil society actors - even if one would have to start with relatively minor reforms.
As regards the World Trade Organization, the issues at stake are slightly different. In formal procedural terms, the WTO is not as obviously undemocratic as the IMF and the World Bank. Although the real practices and decision-making procedures of the WTO mimic existing disparities of power, the consensus-based decision-making system of the WTO, combined with the one country/one vote principle, means that there are formal possibilities to transform the system if sufficient political will can be built. It is noteworthy that under the pressure of criticism coming from the global civil society and the Third World, even many of the OECD countries support some reforms of the practices and procedures of the WTO. More fundamentally, however, the problem lies also with the expanding logic of "free trade" itself. The WTO has become a neo-liberal political programme, which constitutionally ties the hands of any future government of any member country to maximal free trade and neoliberal restructuring of everything "related to trade". Exit options and opt-out mechanisms would leave more room for democratic will-formation within individual countries. Moreover, the GATS and agreement on TRIMs would have to be abandoned and the agreement on TRIPs drastically revised, perhaps also taken out of the WTO. Given the decision-making structure of the WTO, this is not a mission impossible. At any rate, the current WTO process may not be on a sustainable basis, economically or politically.
Most proposed reforms of the International Court of Justice and the International Criminal Court would give them a stronger mandate. This would make states more equal and stop double standards. It would also make overt repression of transformative political activities less likely. Reforms of international courts would not, however, in themselves bring about profound democratic transformations. Without other democratic reforms in world politics, judicial reforms will remain limited in their democratising impact. Moreover, crucial sectors of the US public opinion are strongly opposed to moves that would place the US under compulsory jurisdiction of international courts. Various other countries are also likely to have reservations about giving up their possibility to turn down ICJ proceedings against them. Despite this resistance, it has been possible to establish the International Criminal Court, which is about to start functioning in 2002.
In this part of the report we have delineated politically possible and feasible strategies for democratic changes of the existing global institutions. Few of the suggested reforms are alone sufficient to profoundly transform global governance, and many presuppose other reforms. However, during the process of writing we had to partially revise our initial assumption that reforms of any significance would not be politically possible in many of the institutions analysed above. The focus on connections between reform proposals of different institutions helped us see how reforms that as such might appear relatively modest could open new possibilities for other reforms.
In the first years of the 21st century, the key points seem to be finance and the WTO. New sources of independent funding would be needed to make the UN system more autonomous, to create novel funds to finance development and thereby to relieve the pressure of the IMF and World Bank conditionality. The hope is that this would also contribute towards change in the constellation of political forces and thereby enable further reforms, transforming the constitutive agreements and practices of the existing organisations. On the other hand, the WTO is - at least formally and relatively speaking - more open to change than either the UN system or the Bretton Woods institutions. There is also a lot of significant political support for amending the WTO practices and procedures of agenda-setting and decision-making. Although any attempt to revise the logic of the expanding are of "trade liberalisation" is likely to encounter much more resistance, this seems to be becoming a major area of struggles over global democratic reforms, for good reasons. Changes are politically possible, even if difficult; and, in fact, a more feasible global trading system could be constructed through democratic reforms.
Changing the structures of global power will not be possible only by revising the existing multilateral institutions. An overall global democratisation strategy will also have to formulate proposals for new institutions, the theme of the next part of this report. And as regard the existing ones, our analysis has obviously not included all possible institutions, such as the increasingly important Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers. Another important type of global institution we have not directly analysed in this report is the transnational corporation. The role of the corporations is mainly taken into account when we analyse the conditions and prospects for democratisation initiatives. In future research on global democracy initiatives, more explicit focus on possible transformations of the formally private corporations is needed.