* The world situation subordinating states, elected governments (including bad ones) and laws to the lords of the world market and their regulatory edicts (article XVI4 of the treaty.
b) Under pressure from the IMF and World Bank, the debt continues to play a disciplinary role tor the dependent countries. Even if the World Trade Organization retains dimension of national representation, at the level of the IMF and World Bank there is no such thing. They embody capital' undisguised law: one dollar, one vote! Of course these institutions have limited decision-making powers, relative to the weight of the main multinationals: while the IMF controls liquidity equal to less than two percent of world imports, ten transnationals secure for themselves profits almost as great as the 190 next-biggest, and the 500 biggest companies in the world have laid off an average of 400,000 employees per year, despite their increasing profits. But the IMF and World Bank have the power they need to police the Third World and Eastern countries. Another mode of planetary cooperation and growth is conceivable: international regulatory bodies replacing WB/IMF/ WTO/G7; bodies to develop inter-national trade between countries on the same level of productivity; planned transfer of wealth from those countries that have accumulated it over centuries to the detriment of the poor countries; new trade regulations allowing diversified development projects; partial and managed disconnection from the world market as long as it remains dominated by commodity exchange and a corrective pricing policy; and an immigration policy negotiated within this framework.
c) The perversity of the system is clearly illustrated by the debates on a hypothetical "social clause" against imports from the dominated countries. In the rich countries, any tariff barriers would only be admissible as a way of punishing industries that move elsewhere in order to take advantage of cheap, defenseless labor (the European code of conduct or the Sullivan principles for businesses investing in South Africa during the sanctions 16 International Viewpoint period). Invoking Third World competition to explain unemployment in the industrialized countries is pure sleight of hand.
Trade between rich countries and dependent countries, even Newly Industrialized Countries, can be accompanied by loss of jobs, but it is generally beneficial in terms of capital flows. The problem of employment is therefore not mainly a problem of competition that is portrayed as unfair, but a problem of the economic logic itself, and a problem of higher productivity in jobs that respond to social needs.
Because of the effects deregulation, the relative benefit of moving to Third-World countries is tending to decline, while the benefit of moving to other areas of the rich countries, to uneven development of social guarantees and norms, has grown. (Wage differentials have become substantial even within the European Union).
Besides, most of these imported goods in labor-intensive sectors (such as textiles or electronic components) come from runaway shops that belong to industrial groups based in the imperialist countries, not mostly companies based in the exporting countries (with the exception of South Korea). The key question is thus not a social tax on imports into rich countries whose control and ultimate consequences would in any event be uncertain), but the strategy of multinational corporations that produce abroad and how they might be brought under control (receivership, total or partial expropriation, tax reform), or even projects that could be alternatives to the big capitalist projects (the G7 plans for telecommunications). 8. THE REORGANIZATION OF WORLD leadership is one of the political conditions for emerging from the crisis. How far has the American decline gone?
• Since the Gulf War, the U.S. has used its military supremacy and the power of its state to reaffirm its militarv and diplomatic hegemony. It has also begun developing its productive competitiveness in certain sectors. But the survival of enormous budgetary and commercial deficits underlines the fragility of this evolution. The European impasse and Japan's limitations have blocked the short-term emergence of a real alternative to American world leadership. The contradiction between its political power and its economic weakening are reflected in the very contradictions of international institutions: the reorganization of the UN Security Council, the absence of a new monetary order, the redefinition of military pacts, the precariousness of WTO in dealing with the hidden protectionism of the powers that be.
• Since before the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, the U.S. (and the main European powers) had reoriented their military policies in function of the new strategic situation (Aspen doctrine), mainly against the instability of the Third World. The new doctrine had already been prepared and tested by the implementation Rapid Deployment Forces, so-called low intensity wars (Central America), and direct short-term interventions (Grenada, Panama). The Gulf War was conceived of as the first illustration on a different scale of these massive one-time strikes in the context of the new worldwide relationship of forces. Imposed by European politico-strategic upheavals, the redefinition of NATO's role is, from the very beginning, subordinated to this overall policy.
• Legitimizing on a humanitarian basis military interventions is the fourth strategic level in the From Containment to Enlargement documents of the L.S. National Security Council. The concepts of rights and duties to intervene (and reciprocity) oscillate between moral duty and political right. The dutt postulates the existence of an impossible innocence of the interveners as though the past, the interests, the hierarchy concentrated in the UN Security Council and its permanent members no longer existed.
In reality, what we are dealing with here are the gropings of a new international law reflecting the new relationship of forces and restoring legitimacy to the maintenance of the world order that colonial wars, and particularly the long intervention in had eliminated. The interventions in the Gulf, Somalia, Haiti, ex-Yugoslavia, Rwanda have clearly revealed contradictions in this legal-ideological scaffolding. Who decides and who applies (UN decisions and the operational military command in the field)? What happens to the officially proclaimed sovereignty of states? What would be the reciprocity of this one. way right: not simply the intervention
14th World Congress of the Fourth International of the rich in relation to the poor, but the opposite?
• The UN, supposedly the cosmopolitan authority in the new world order, very rapidly revealed itself to be what it remains the "gizmo" that covers and legitimizes imperialism's undertakings. The UN produces the communiqués. The legal loopholes from the point of its charter and of international law allow for a multiplicity of interventions, each with a different status. In the most burning cases, the States intervene under NATO command (Bosnia) or U.S. command (Gulf) or any state which decides to intervene, taking advantage of UN positions (France in Rwanda, U.S. in Haiti). The end of the bipolar partnership of Yalta clearly reveals the problems of representatives of these international bodies and the difficulties in re-defining their composition on the basis of criteria other than the relationship of forces that presided at the end of the last world war (i.e., the Security Council, zones of influence, military power, demographic weight?, etc.).
The hierarchies inherited from Yalta are null and void, but there is still no form of foreseeable international democratic sovereignty that would go beyond the mediation of states or alliances of states. The contradiction thus remains explosive between the necessity of a proto-world wide state regulation linked to the globalization of goods and capital markets, formal or informal transfers of goods and capital markets (of sovereignty) on the one hand, and the principally national social regulation linked to the fragmentation of the labor market. 9. THE MAASTRICHT TREATY REPRESENTS a strategic choice: that of advancing toward a political organization of Europe under the constraint of a monetary straightjacket and the criteria for convergence that it involves. In the course of the ratification proceedings we fought against this treaty, not by screaming about national sovereignty like the chauvinistic right, but from a class point of view in the name of social solidarity that Euroliberalism was attacking and in the name of a project for a Social Europe of Solidarity. A Social Europe of Solidarity compromised by the selective and antiegalitarian effects of their nondemocratic and financial Europe. The initial Maastricht project is dead in the water, as much for economic reasons
(the technocrats had not foreseen the brutality of the crisis that destroyed the European monetary system and the criteria for conversion since 1992) as for political reasons (the collapse ot the Eastern bloc and the geo-political imperatives of expansion), but the process has been put in motion. The concept that has since been publicly put forward by the German Christian Democrats for a multi-speed Europe (a free-trade zone and a network of political association all the way to Russia, organized a proto-state Franco-German hard core) is a response to this new situation within the continuity of the Single Act and the spirit (it not the letter, since that has become unworkable) of Maastricht.
• Although we are not starting from scratch, and although we are in
The world situation * part the prisoners of decisions that have already been made (the Single Act, Maastricht, enlargement), from which the German Christian Democrats' document incidentally drew some of its arguments, we have to put the European project back on its feet. Europe will be different depending on the social forces that take the initiative and determine its content:
• Broadening and deepening political adherence and social convergence against the monetary straightjacketing; a coordinated reduction in work time to an immediate maximum of 35 hours; European wage indexation and a European minimum wage; harmonization of social security based on the highest acquisitions; a plan for major public works in transport,
17
* The world situation communications and energy; industrial projects and "Europeanization" of strategic multinationals;
• a democratic Europe of citizens: European citizenship and institutions (right of vote for all residents; genuinely equal social and civil rights for women; a European assembly and the right of veto for national parliaments; suppression of the Schengen agreements and of all discriminatory measures like the Pasqua laws. • The proper use of subsidiarity: defining the democratic content of subsidiarity as a new distribution of power and of the attributes of sovereignty on the levels of the states, the European Union, and internationally.
Such a framework would make possible resolving both advancing toward supernationality recognizing collective national rights (Euzkadi, Corsica, etc.);
• a peaceful Europe of solidarity: nuclear disarmament, cancellation of the debt, new forms of cooperation, ecological measures. 10. IN THE PRESENT CONDITIONS OF THE internationalization of production and trade, of the crisis of efficiency and legitimacy of existing states, of a redeployment of the division of labor, of new minglings of populations, those nations which accede to a state existence can no longer play the integrating role that the nation-states of the past century or the decolonization period played. This explains the tendency to search for a mythical legitimacy (our land and our martyrs), an ethnic identity-based (chauvinistic and xenophobic) legitimacy with its full load of purifying fantasies. Yugoslavia is not an exception (Israel, Germany). Under these conditions, the nationalism of the oppressed can be quickly converted into an oppressive nationalism against one's own minorities. A class alternative requires more than ever a close relationship between national democratic projects and an close international perspective (regional responses, redefinition of exchanges, alternatives to the WTO and the IMF's structural adjustments), as well as inserting regional or ethnic democratic 18 International Viewpoint demands within the framework of broader solidarity so as to avoid the devastating impasse of micronationalism:
• primacy of citizenship over nationality;
• the right to self-determination and voluntary association (subsidiarity);
guarantees for (linguistic, scholastic and cultural) minorities. 11. TRANSITIONAL DEMANDS ARE BRIDGES from immediate demands that respond to urgent needs to the seizure of power. But these bridges and passageways are quite shaky today. Where is the power to be seized? It is still concentrated in the really existing state apparatus, but it is already being delegated to regional and international institutions. This is a problem for the ruling classes.
• The idea of a homogeneous political, economic and territorial space has gone out of date, and it is by no means certain that any such space will be reconstituted on a higher (continental or regional) level. Divisions within the bourgeoisies are already showing the contradictions among capital that is directly globalized, capital that is still protected by its national institutions, and capital at a middle-level reorganization (the European Union), with all possible and imaginable intermediate forms between these three sectors of capital.
• It is a major strategic problem for the workers' movement, whose policies were shaped for decades within the framework of national states, with revolutionary variants (nationalizations, a single bank, monopoly on foreign trade, dual power and reformist variants (democratization and Keynesian policies). Today the disjunction between economic and political power, the dispersal of decision-making centers (on the local, national, regional and worldwide levels) are such that the gateways established by immediate demands tend to go off in all directions. It is striking to note that the Brazilian PT's program was far more moderate than the radical reformist program of the Chilean Popular Unity in 1970, or that what would now be a radical program in certain European countries (reduction of the workweek, immigrant moratorium, demilitarization) is often far weaker than the reformist programs of the seventies (nationalizations, elements of workers self-management and control). Faced with the impotence of reformless: reformism, the majority currents in the workers' movement waver between adaptation to free-market logics (modernizing social democracy) and nationalist turns inward (various
Defense of social rights and gains depends on existing laws institutions, but effectiye measures to reduce unemployment and for an economy in the service of human needs
La directly regional or international dimension (coordinated shortening of the work week, joint training policies, investment projects
For socialization of multinationals). So what we have to do, starting trom people's struggles anc experiences however modest an‹ partial they may be, is formulate and implement a transitional approach for the 21st century. This is how, around simple and accessible themes, we can give a dynamic content to the recomposition in progress and lift it out of tactical and self-seeking ruts. Once again, we have to reformulate the basic elements of an approach that leads to an challenge to the whole of the established order:
a) Citizenship/democracy (political and social). Against the restricted universality of human rights, civil rights and equality of rights (immigrants, women, youth), civil rights and social rights (male-female parity); social rights and public services.
b) Against the dictatorship of the market, its short-sighted consequences, its anti-egalitarian logic: the right to exist, beginning with the right to a job and to a guaranteed minimum income; recycling the gains of productivity, (housing, education and health services), which implies a broadening of free services and incursions against private property rights. The right of citizens to social property, ot businesses including the choices and decisions which have a major impact on their present and future living conditions; this right to social property does not necessarily involve nationalization, but rather effective socialization (the right to user self-management, decentralization, planning).
c) Solidarity between generations (social security, ecology).
d) Solidarity without borders: disarmament, debt, regional political
14th World Congress of the Fourth International 19 spaces, internationalization of social rights.
Similar work should be done starting from the most burning issues for the dependent countries (debt, land reform, regional cooperation) and for the Eastern countries (alternatives to privatization, democracy, the national question).. III. BY WAY OF A TENTATIVE CONCLUSION 12. OF COURSE THERE ARE ECONOMIC cycles. Of course there are upturns and downturns in struggles, and we will take part here and there in explosions, mobilizations, and fierce resistance. But these good-sense reminders must not make us forget that the changes under way are not conjunctural: we are witnessing a historic mutation of the mode of capitalist accumulation, whose full strategic consequences we cannot yet foresee. At least it is not too soon to take stock of the magnitude of the problem. The "crisis of revolutionary leadership", which has become a crisis of the workers' movement as such, acquires all the more importance in this historical perspective. The world situation is always the scene of contradictory tendencies. However, it is not possible over the previous decade to balance out the good points and the bad points: Nicaragua with Chiapas, Palestine with South Africa. The terms are not equivalent. One need only listen to and read the declarations of the Zapatistas: an insurrection of despair of liberal modernization. A number of factors were at play in the end of apartheid as well as the collapse of the bureaucratic dictatorships. Mass mobilizations and expression of democratic aspirations, of course, but these were also combined with the specific needs of capital: the system of apartheid was increasingly came into conflict with the whims of liberalization and deregulation.
Once this dynamic set in, its evolution was largely determined by the world relationship of forces. So one tendency is clearly winning over the other, not on the basis of calculations but as proven by major events: the dislocation of the USSR without even the beginnings of a political revolution, the dominant restorationist dynamic in the East, the imperialist reunification of Germany, the defeats of the Central American revolution, the Gulf War, the Israeli-Palestinian agreements, the increased isolation and exhaustion of the Cuban revolution. The crisis of and of the workers' movement's political project thus results from a combination of three tactors: long-term social ettects of the crisis (social mutation): the cumulative disorganizing effects of the policies of the reformist and populist leaderships confronted with the first shock of the crisis; and the profound effects of the bankruptcy of "actually existing