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A New World Order

Address by

Dr. Anne-Marie Slaughter

Dean, Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, Princeton, Author, A New World Order

May 24, 2004

Thank you.  Thank you for that wonderful introduction and particularly for mentioning my sons.  If anyone ever leaves that out I always make sure that my audiences know that that is probably the achievement I’m proudest of and certainly the thing that keeps me working the hardest.  So, it’s a pleasure to be here.  I have to say that I arrived at about 6:00 p.m. and called my husband who is also traveling and he said, “Remind me where you are again,” and I said, “I’m in the Beverly Hills Hotel.  I’m about to give a speech to the World Affairs Council,” and he said, “Ah.  Hardship duty.”  So, it’s a particular pleasure to be in Los Angeles and to be in this beautiful place and have the chance to talk to you about important current issues.

I should admit at the outset that even I, as I walk through airports, and I’ve been doing a lot of that these days, you walk past these displays of what seem like scores of books that have just come out.  We have Richard Clarke’s book on terrorism, Against All Enemies.  Of course, now there’s Bob Woodward’s book that has just come out on the origins of the war in Iraq.  There are various other books.  Karen Hughes has her new book out.  It really seems like any one who is writing about international relations waited to release their book till some five months before the election, which just happens to be when I chose to release my book. I have to say if you’re looking for immediate thrilling reading I myself have bought a number of these other books and they’re very, very good. 

I hope after the current flurry dies down and we all have even more questions about America’s role in the world, the changing nature of the world we find ourselves in, and the world that our children are going to grow up in, that my book at least provides some of the answers. What I hope to do tonight is to give you a very basic argument about what government networks are, where you can find them and then just talk about how we can use them to help address a couple of the most pressing problems that the United States finds itself in, from fighting terrorism to nation-building, a job we might not like but we are certainly stuck with, not only in Iraq but also in Afghanistan.

So my starting proposition is that we live in a networked world.  This is not hard, I think, certainly for audiences like yourself to understand.  If you just think about, on the corporate side, the Star Alliance if you’ve been traveling recently, or any number of corporate networks.  Indeed, when I first became Dean a lot of people sent me books about CEO transitions.  I have to tell you they were useless in terms of actually giving me advice on managing anything because CEOs can fire people.  Academic deans can’t fire anyone.  That’s the definition of being an academic dean – you have a lot of people working for you who have lifetime tenure and you have to beg and plead with them to get them to do what you want.  But what I did learn from these books was the shift from hierarchy to network, and that in a global environment, an environment of rapid change, the best way to be organized is through a network rather than a top-down command-and-control organization.

In the nongovernmental world, human rights activists, environmental activists, and the anti-globalization activists -- those are all networks of nongovernmental organizations.  They are able to expand their power and their influence by expanding their reach across borders. Local environmental organization networks can have its counterparts as far away as Brazil or China or South Africa.  So we have networks of corporations, we have networks of nongovernmental organizations and, as Noël mentioned in her introduction, of course, we have networks of criminals.  And it’s not just terrorists.  People who study organized crime know well that criminal networks have gone global. If you talk about arms trafficking, trafficking in drugs, trafficking in women and children or more generally in migrants, money laundering, international piracy – all of these are crimes now committed by global networks of criminals. 

Now, all of that I didn’t discover.  It’s been out there in the literature in these various areas. You can read all sorts of things about global civil society and the networks of civic groups that make up global civil society and again on the corporate side or the criminal side it’s well known.  What I have identified and what I think has been missing from this picture has been the existence of government networks – networks of national government officials.  So the people who are regulating our securities markets, the central bankers, the insurance supervisors, the anti-trust officials, the environmental officials, the judges, and to a lesser extent, legislators, are all networking with their counterparts abroad to be able to do their jobs.  It’s not all that surprising because, if you’re out there regulating corporations and the corporations are operating as global networks, you’re not going to be able to actually implement whatever regulations you’re trying to implement.  If you’re an anti-trust regulator and you’re trying to block a merger, or if you’re a securities regulator and you’re trying to chase down securities fraud, you’re going to have to reach out to your counterparts to be able to follow the entities that you regulate.  The same thing obviously with criminals.  You’re not going to be able to apprehend criminals who are operating in a global network if you can’t network with your fellow justice ministers or police investigators or, if we’re talking abut terrorists, intelligence operatives or border patrol officials. You need to have a network capacity as well.

If you look you’ll see that. in fact, we have these networks -- certainly of regulators of all kinds, some of them even have their own organizations.  A little less well known have been judicial networks. I started working on this subject in 1994 and then there were a few judges who were talking to each other. Post-Cold War, there were judges who were going into Eastern Europe to try to help judges in new democracies and they were starting to exchange opinions and to cite each other.  Ten years later there are judges writing about participating in a global human rights-style dialogue.  So the Supreme Court of Canada, the judges on the Canadian courts, cite judges on the South African Court, the Indian Court, the German Court, the European Court of Justice, our own Supreme Court has summits with the European Court of Justice, with the French Constitutional Court, with the German Constitutional Court, the Indian Court. At the level of much more ordinary business litigation, like bankruptcy litigation, you have judges who actually negotiate with one another to figure out how they’re going to resolve a global bankruptcy. There’s a famous case with a British judge and an Israeli judge and an American judge, they drafted up an order and protocol for how to resolve this case.  Now in the world of international relations that I studied, only diplomats drafted orders and protocol, this was not something that judges did.  Judges were domestic, but they are, operating in a global economy so they’re not working as well.  And then legislators.  Newt Gingrich actually created the 21^st century legislators’ network.  Now that one didn’t really take off after he left office, but some of what he started to create has stuck.  We have a network between our Congress and the Russian Duma on arms control issues that has been quite effective, and there are networks of legislators on environmental issues and on human rights issues and there’s beginning to be one on trade issues and I think we need much more on trade issues.

So part of what I’m asking people to see is to recognize that we have a world in which many, many different actors operate through networks and that our government also operates through networks.  We’re not just represented by the State Department and by our formal ambassadors, but almost every major official in Washington has some international part of his or her job. That’s the way they are effectively carrying out their national responsibilities and, to some extent, global responsibilities. 

So if you accept my picture that we have a world of government networks, then the question is, well, so what?  That’s nice. And now we know that all Washington agencies and judges and legislators are networking, what can we do with that? 

What’s most important about seeing these networks is understanding how we can use them to essentially get global governing power without global government.  We know we need global capacity – we have environmental problems, we have terrorism, we have threats of epidemics, and I don’t just mean AIDS – I mean Avian flu.  The flu epidemic of 1918 killed millions of people so you can only imagine what that might be today.  We have a global economy, we need to regulate capital flows, and we need the capacity to do at the global level what our government does at the national level or at the state level.  But we don’t want world government. Or at least I don’t, and I think it’s a fair statement that for most of the people in the world the thought of world government does not make them overjoyed. Frankly, even if you wanted it, it’s almost impossible to imagine how we’d get there.  So we have this problem.  We need the capacity but we don’t want to actually create a centralized authority that would sit in some global capital, kind of a global Brussels if you think about it that way, to exercise government power, and I’m arguing that these networks, these networks of the same people we elect or appoint can essentially perform the same functions and they can give us that global governance capacity without, as I said, the form of world government. 

Let me get a little more specific. I would say there are three enormous problems – there are at least three – there are about fifteen but let’s stick with three -- that we face, and when I say “we” I’m thinking about the American government.  First, of course, fighting the war on terrorism and how actually to combat an enemy that is clearly operating globally and in a network. What that means is you can chop off part of that network and it will just reappear elsewhere.  So that’s the first problem.

The second is state building and although Iraq is most immediately on the agenda it’s not the only case.  Afghanistan is still very fragile, and when you hear from President Karzai next month you will hear.  He’s a wonderful speaker, he’s doing the very best he can but he’s holding on in the center of his country where large parts of Afghanistan are still far from any government -- much less good government.  And then states like Sudan, failed states anywhere in the world, where there isn’t sufficient government authority to establish basic order, that is a problem.  It’s a problem because terrorists can move in but it’s also a problem because that’s a government that doesn’t have the ability to maintain basic health, to control the environment, to do a lot of things that we need governments to do worldwide because if they fail it affects us.   So weak or failed states is, I think, the second biggest problem we face.

Finally, and I’ve only come to say this recently – anti-Americanism is itself a huge problem for the United States.  We are finding it very difficult to get our allies to work with us because their governments cannot say to their people that they are standing up with the Americans because their people, I’m including Japanese, South Koreans, Germans, even Poles, and I was just in Warsaw, and my friends who are over there used the terms “hatred”, are so aroused against us, that their governments can’t help us.  We can’t increasingly do what we want to do.  It’s going to become more difficult to travel or to invest.  We have to restore America’s image in the world. 

So take those three examples of problems and let me give you some idea of how networks can help us solve them. I will say this is not the silver bullet, and it’s not the only thing that we need in the world, we still need international institutions like the United Nations. Even with networks, this is a long, slow process. 

Let’s start with terrorism.  We need to mobilize international cooperation on just about every level of government.  We need to be able to cut off the financing, to identify individual terrorists, to apprehend them, to bring them to justice -- and that means actually a trial, it doesn’t mean simply holding them somewhere.  We need to be able to provide more sources of economic opportunity in many of the countries where there is support for terrorism.  To do all that we have to mobilize international cooperation and we just can’t do it alone. In many ways, we’re as weak as the weakest country out there. 

Now suppose the president had said after 9/11, “You know in 1945 we fought World War II, we recognized we were in a new world, we had to create new institutions to face the threats that we found ourselves facing from 1945 to 1950 as the Soviet Union became more and more of a threat.  We created a new set of institutions; they were designed to mobilize international cooperation to make sure that our allies were with us.  Now we find ourselves, September 12, 2001, in another new world and we’re going to create another set of institutions, but they’re going to be very different institutions.  They’re going to be fast and flexible.  They’re going to have varied membership.  They’re not all going to have 191 nations. Depending on the problem, we will have various nations working with us, the global justice network, or the global financial network, or the global intelligence network. 

We have a global competition network.  That’s something the Bush administration has created with anti-trust regulators, but in fighting terrorism monopoly is not the problem.  We need to get a set of institutions that we can actually make individual government officials members of, we can support them, we can train them, we can socialize them and we can cooperate with those officials on the ground, the people who are in charge of finding financing and finding individuals themselves.  So these networks are a way of giving us much greater reach for all the countries we need to reach – Yemen, Pakistan, all the European countries, Indonesia, Asian countries.  We could use them for lots of other purposes for mobilizing international cooperation, but I would start with terrorism.

Second, state building.  Imagine if after the fighting -- the fighting hasn’t stopped in Iraq but the immediate military action stopped or slowed a year ago this month -- had said it’s not the coalition’s responsibility to rebuild Iraq.  Indeed, it’s not even the UN’s responsibility to rebuild Iraq.  It is the responsibility of all governments around the world who have an interest in a stable well-governed Iraq, not necessarily through democracy,  I’m not sure that that’s the first place you necessarily need to go, but certainly rights regarding a decent stable government.

Well, believe it or not, there’s a global utilities network and the utilities regulators who are part of that network would have been very helpful in rebuilding Iraq’s infrastructure.  That’s their job.  That’s what they do worldwide.  They meet every year, they exchange information, and they offer each other technical training and assistance.  They could have done a lot in Iraq.  And then we send in the economic regulators to help the Iraqi economy get back on its feet.  And for trying Saddam Hussein and other war criminals and getting fair and independent courts functioning we’d send in networks of judges, they exist, they have organizations, this is their job, they have organizations.  For rebuilding an Iraqi parliament, we send in networks of legislators.  Again, they exist, they spend their time offering assistance to countries that need that assistance and also cooperating with one another and strengthening one another. When one of their members is under attack it’s helpful to know that they have international support. 

In short, we can mobilize the resources of government officials all around the world who do what governments need to do in failing states or post-conflict states.  We can do it over the long term; we can rebuild these countries and make sure that they are members or part of something bigger, something supportive.  We’ve actually seen this happen, although in a slightly different version.  If you think about it, the European Union is largely responsible for the stable transition to democracy of ten former Communist states.  It wasn’t at all clear it was going to happen.  I remember immediately after the Cold War people going to Hungary. There were people wandering around Budapest – my husband is half-Hungarian – with maps of greater Hungary.  The problem was that greater Hungary includes a large chunk of Romania and the Romanians didn’t think that this was particularly friendly.  In Slovakia, there was a clear danger of some kind of a return to dictatorship.  The possibility of being a member of the European Union and the participation of government officials from all those countries in European government networks as part of being a candidate member of the European Union helped stabilize those democracies, helped ensure that their judges and their officials and their legislators were effectively participating in a larger concept of liberal democracy.

Finally, networks are going to help anti-Americanism.  There are other ways to signal to the world that we are aware that, in my view, we have acted both with hubris and hypocrisy. But I would say over the longer term even if you think the immediate causes of anti-Americanism are centered on Iraq and on other actions we’ve taken after 9/11, over the longer term we engender resentment because we’re the biggest power in the world and because we tend to talk a lot more than we listen.  Joseph Nye, Dean of the Kennedy School, argues that one of the things we need to do is build our “soft” power.  That what we have done is to use our soldiers and our economic power to force people to do what we want them to do where we should be using the power of attraction, of people wanting to do what we want them to do because they admire us, because they like our values, because they respect the quality of our government and indeed of our private citizens.  Within government networks, when you have a group of government officials -- and again, it can be Supreme Court justices, legislators, regulators -- there are sites of soft power because nobody can force anyone to do anything else in these networks.

 The currency is a currency of conversation, of exchange of information, of working together and brainstorming new solutions to problems.  It’s a lot of the power of information and the power of personal relationships, and in those networks Americans listen. I’ve heard our own Supreme Court justices talk about how transformative it was to go abroad and realize that their counterparts in other countries were every bit as smart as they were. I’m a lawyer so I can say our Supreme Court justices think they are pretty much the cat’s meow and we as lawyers treat them that way, but they discovered their counterparts speak multiple languages, they know their own country’s law, they know international law, many of them know American law as well, and it really transformed their own view of how they do their job and what they could learn as well as teach.  That’s a good thing.  We want Americans learning as well as teaching. At the same time, of course, the vast majority of our officials are very competent, they’re dedicated professionals, from the military throughout our government, and they do have a lot to teach and they are very generous with their time and with material support and that is a posture that we want to be in with respect to the rest of the world -- helping failed states rebuild again, not by doing it in a centralized way, but by helping every single one of those officials, offering support over the long term, and through personal interaction between Americans, Iraqis, Indonesians, Japanese, people the world over.

So, in conclusion, let me say that the title of my book is not modest -- A New World Order -- at least it’s “a” not “the” new world order, and I was willing to call it that because I wrote it for a decade and I thought, “Well, if you spend ten years on a book you can afford to be maybe a little ambitious with the title.”  But in 1994 when I started writing a new world order was George Bush the first’s phrase.  He called for a new world order after the Gulf War and the new world order he was talking about was actually an older version of the world order.  It was the 1945 version of the world order.  It was a world in which the UN would actually work, and Great Powers – the 5 permanent members – would come together in the Security Council and make decisions about when to use force and when to intervene for humanitarian purposes or to stop aggression. He was basically saying “After 40 years of the Cold War, this new world order can actually work and we’re going to make it work.”  I’m talking about a very different new world order, a new world order that is appropriate, if he would see it, to the second President Bush rather than the first.  It is a world order appropriate for an age of globalization, for the information age, and it is a network world order.

Thank you.

Views expressed are not necessarily those of the World Affairs Council, which pays neither honoraria or expenses to its speakers.