Foreign Policy
Spring 1999

Editor’s Note

By Moisés Naím

 

In early 1999, the president of the world’s most powerful country was under siege and nobody seemed to care. Yet, when the governor of the Brazilian state of Minas Gerais decided to suspend debt payments to his own federal government, international markets trembled. His decision pushed the dollar down, dropped prices of U.S. stocks, weakened financial markets from Tokyo to Frankfurt, and a few days later, forced a devaluation of Brazil’s currency. “We obviously felt the shock,” said Germany’s finance minister Oskar Lafontaine, while Wim Duisenberg, president of the European Central Bank, worried publicly about the impact of the Brazilian situation on the recently launched euro. Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan also voiced his concern about the possible effect on the U.S. economy.

How can the potential unseating of an American president have less of an international impact than the populist machinations of a Brazilian state governor? Perhaps the lack of discernible international consequences to President Bill Clinton’s impeachment stems from widespread disbelief that he will be ousted. Or perhaps American institutions are so strong that a presidential impeachment is not perceived as a threat to the status quo. In contrast, the Asian, Mexican, and Russian economic crises have shown that if a country like Brazil crashes, the international repercussions are profound, swift, and very tangible. Obviously, the United States does matter. The world would not be indifferent, for example, if Greenspan or Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin were replaced.

This is also not to say that economics has completely displaced politics as the force shaping the way countries relate to each other. Globalization has never been just about economics. In fact, it is sparking new forms of international political contagion that are equally profound and potentially destabilizing, if not as widely recognized. Ask the Chileans—who have endured riots and the potential derailment of their successful democratic transition thanks to the actions of a judge on another continent—if they see globalization as only an economic phenomenon. General Augusto Pinochet’s indictment is a powerful reminder not only that politics continues to matter but that new kinds of political shock waves now travel across the world at the same speed and with the same destabilizing consequences as today’s surging tides of speculative capital.

Moreover, governments and their ministries of foreign affairs have far less control over which international issues become national priorities and how they should be handled. In the Pinochet case, a lone Spanish judge, newly empowered by laws flowing from European integration, and a powerful coalition of international civil organizations led by Amnesty International, defined the issue, took action, and created important precedents with global consequences. Meanwhile, embarrassed governments scrambled to improvise policy for a confusing situation where past practices offered little guidance.

A world largely oblivious to Clinton’s impeachment yet hypersensitive to the actions of a provincial official in a less-developed country and a judge whose unilateral actions rocked the political system of a distant nation is a world that has become interconnected in ways that clearly require new thinking. As has become foreign policy’s practice, we continue to explore such perplexing interconnections brought about by globalization and to illuminate their unexpected consequences. The Pinochet case is discussed here as a practical example of international political contagion by Ricardo Lagos and Heraldo Muñoz, two authors who share a unique perspective: Both were active in the opposition to Pinochet and were jailed and harassed during his rule. Yet, in their article, they argue that it is not for others to meddle in Chilean affairs—Pinochet ought to be sent back to Chile and not tried in Spain or England.

William Martin offers another fascinating example of the links between domestic politics and international affairs in his article documenting the influence of the Christian Right on American foreign policy. The antagonism of the U.S. Congress toward multilateral institutions such as the United Nations and the International Monetary Fund has many reasons and reflects a variety of constituent pressures. And as Martin’s article shows, the hostility of the Christian Right toward these institutions has played a major role in defining that antagonism. The Religious Right sees institutions such as the United Nations as mechanisms for promoting antifamily values—a venue for the international secular élite to impose their point of view on nations everywhere. The Family Research Council, for example, has attacked the UN’s efforts at family planning as “globalizing safe-sex ideology” and “population imperialism.”

The American Christian Right is not alone in harboring strong apprehensions about globalization and the institutions seen as promoting it. In this issue of foreign policy, we also document the extent to which the American people as a whole have reservations about globalization. Since 1979, this magazine has collaborated with the Chicago Council on Foreign Relations to publish the results of a survey of American attitudes toward international affairs. This year, only a slim majority (54 percent) of those people surveyed said globalization was a “mostly good” phenomenon. These results are particularly striking when compared with the opinions of America’s foreign-policy leadership, who overwhelmingly (87 percent) rated globalization as a “mostly good” trend.

This difference of opinion between the policy élite and the public is not an exclusively American phenomenon. The available evidence shows that uneasiness about globalization and even outright fear over some of its negative consequences is a global trend. This trend coexists, of course, with the world’s enthusiastic embrace of some of globalization’s most salient aspects, notably easier communication, cheaper transportation, and the myriad new opportunities for personal advancement and freedom that have come with them.

There is as yet no reliable road map for this confusing and constantly changing international landscape, full of paradoxes, ironies, and bewildering new realities. Nonetheless, around the world there are many promising attempts to unveil the facts, clarify conceptual confusion, and identify the policy equivalents of dead-end streets. These pioneering efforts are the stuff of which foreign policy is made.

—Moisés Naím

March 1999