Foreign Policy
Fall 1998

Editor’s Note

By Moisés Naím

 

Wim Duisenberg is president of the European Central Bank (ECB). Nick van den Bergh is CEO of Executive Outcomes Ltd., a private company that furnishes clients around the world with the means to fight wars. Scott Nova is the director of the Preamble Collaborative, a nine-person organization active in the ongoing campaign to defeat the adoption of the Multilateral Agreement on Investment (MAI)).A banker, an ex-paratrooper turned executive, and a social activist—each of these men inhabits different worlds, but all are linked by one common denominator: The organizations they lead have the capacity to intervene in international affairs in ways that, until recently, had been in the almost exclusive purview of nation-states.

Much has been written and said about the emergence of these kinds of “nonstate actors,” whether about their ability to project their influence internationally, their impact on national sovereignty, or their role in blurring the boundaries between public and private, domestic and foreign. Yet all too often, such discussions have taken place at a level of high abstraction, relying on buzzwords instead of concrete examples, and generalizations in place of empirical analyses.

We at FOREIGN POLICY do not believe that globalization should become a catch phrase for sloppy thinking. In keeping with that commitment, several of the articles in this issue offer a close, discerning look at how nonstate actors are shaping today’s world. Our authors build their arguments from the ground up, eschewing grand theory in favor of facts and figures and relying on case studies and methodical analyses to enrich our understanding of some of today’s most important global trends.

Some of the phenomena they focus on are not new. Mercenaries, for example, may well be one of the world’s oldest professions. But as David Shearer’s article shows, they have taken on a distinctly post–Cold War cast. Capitalizing on the political and strategic uncertainties of this era, taking advantage of an abundance of experienced personnel and surplus weaponry, today’s private military companies are attaining a remarkable level of influence and legitimacy. From training the armed forces in Croatia to overturning coups in Sierra Leone, they are privatizing an activity that has long been the sole province of the nation-state.

The ECB, by contrast, is an entirely new institution explicitly designed to limit the monetary autonomy of its European member countries. Jeffry Frieden highlights the bank’s potential as a sovereignty buster in his article, “The Euro: Who Wins? Who Loses?” He also shows that for all the technocratic mystery that shrouds monetary policy, in practice it is rarely above politics, whether national or international. Despite official protestations to the contrary, the ECB’s actual policies will be defined by the very messy pulling and hauling of European politics in ways that will significantly distort its designers’ plans.

The growing clout of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) also provides one of the more dramatic examples of the proliferation of centers of international influence. P.J. Simmons surveys the increasingly diverse and complex universe of NGOs and argues that the question governments, multilateral institutions, and corporations must face is not whether but how to work with these new players. Witness the “victory” that NGOs recently achieved when they stymied efforts by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, a group made up of the world’s 29 most industrialized countries, to draft the MAI, a treaty setting common standards for the treatment of foreign investment by host countries. As Stephen Kobrin relates, hundreds of NGOs of all stripes, sizes, nationalities, and interests rallied against the MAI, using one of the most important drivers of globalization, the Internet, to derail an initiative designed to facilitate another of globalization’s most powerful forces, foreign investment. This “Clash of Globalizations” represents one of the more paradoxical implications of the emergence of an electronically linked civil society and its effects on world politics.

Another paradox that Kobrin’s article brings to light is that even as globalization erodes international boundaries and empowers nonstate actors, it simultaneously strengthens national sovereignty. The NGOs that oppose the MAI may be building a global civil society on the Internet, but they are doing so in part through their vehement defense of the rights of national governments to regulate their own affairs. Several other articles in this issue note the same contradiction. Private military companies, for example, may fulfill a function that was once the prerogative of the nation-state, but they are often hired to defend and strengthen existing national governments in Africa. In his dissection of Russia’s failed tax policies, Daniel Treisman notes that even as multilateral institutions pressure Russia to bring its tax policies and procedures more in line with those of the global economy, those reforms will strengthen the authority and stability of the Russian state. It is becoming increasingly clear that what Russia desperately needs is not more market but more state, not a central authority that runs factories but one that can collect taxes. Finally, in a provocative look at the unheralded role that the European Union played in Northern Ireland’s peace process, Jonathan Stevenson shows that although the transnational forces unleashed by European integration provided compelling incentives for peace, Northern Ireland’s knotty dispute over sovereignty could not have been resolved without strong guarantees from the United Kingdom and the Irish Republic, two nation-states.

In short, contrary to what many of the most breathless one-worlders would have us believe, globalization does not mean the end of the nation-state or of the world as we know it. It merely requires us to think a little harder.

—Moisés Naím
September 1998