Our Global Neighborhood.

"We believe the most notable feature of the past fifty years has been the emancipation and empowerment of people. People today have more power to shape their future than ever before, and that could make all the difference."

With observations like this, Our Global Neighborhood offers a bracing change from the sort of policy-speak usually found in the reports of eminent commissions. In an uncertain and rapidly changing world, policymakers all too often opt for the "pragmatic" or "realistic" measure - which is frequently just a way of reinforcing the status quo. Or they seek the technological fix, rather than the social and political changes that durable reform generally requires. Our Global Neighborhood is eloquent on the "global civic ethic" that a truly sustainable future will require of us. And throughout the report, there are compelling appraisals of the pluses and minuses of interdependence - of the turmoil, the pressures, and the opportunities inherent in the development of the global neighborhood. Unfortunately, the report is not a consistent success. Yet even its failures are worthy of attention, since they tell us a great deal about the current state of international policy.

Our Global Neighborhood is the work of the Commission on Global Governance, a group of 28 former and current political leaders of exceptional stature, co-chaired by Ingvar Carlsson, Sweden's Prime Minister, and Shridath Ramphal, former Secretary-General of the [British] Commonwealth. Founded in September, 1992, the Commission has drawn on its members' experience, as well as outside expertise, in order to fulfill an ambitious mandate: to find new approaches to global problems. Its efforts are the latest and the most comprehensive in a series of high profile attempts at international trouble-shooting. Among the group's predecessors are the commissions chaired by Willy Brandt (which reported in 1980, on North-South issues), Olof Palme (1982, disarmament and security), Gro Harlem Brundtland (1987, environment), Sadruddin Aga Khan and Hassan bin Talal (1988, humanitarian issues), and Julius Nyerere (1990, development). Such a roll call of commissions speaks volumes about the inability of established institutions - national governments and international organizations alike - to provide a guiding vision for the next century. And guiding vision was crucial to the current commission's work, since it was tasked with achieving an integrated view of the issues it addressed.

That vision is clearest when dealing with matters of military security. The Commissioners propose a number of important reforms in the international institutions associated with those issues. They argue, for instance, that the United Nations Security Council should have its membership reviewed and its current veto privileges phased out. They also suggest that governments accept the jurisdiction of the World Court as compulsory, and establish an International Criminal Court, to provide a permanent forum for war crimes cases.

As for the security issues themselves, it is refreshing to hear an unambiguous call for the elimination of all nuclear arsenals by a clear timetable - the Commissioners would allow 15 years. They also call for constraining the arms trade by international convention, for the formation of a volunteer rapid deployment peacekeeping force, and for an international demilitarization fund.

Such recommendations demonstrate the Commissioners' interest in rethinking global issues from the ground up. But arguably their most important contributions to the security debate flow from their understanding that governance is not an exclusive preserve of governments. They are right to stress the importance of greater involvement by non-governmental organizations or, as they prefer to say, "civil society." To ensure such participation, they propose to convene an annual Forum of Civil Society at the U.N. - an NGO counterpart to the U.N. General Assembly. In addition, they argue for an NGO "Right of Petition," in which such organizations could address a new U.N. Council for Petitions on matters that threaten public security. In a somewhat similar fashion, an NGO Early Warning Service would help strengthen the U.N.'s conflict resolution capacity.

But when they turn to economic matters, the Commissioners' vision seems to get cloudy. Their security analysis is informed by a notion of governance as a force that could help reshape humanity's future, but there is little trace of that assumption in their economics. Instead, the Commissioners seem content with - or perhaps resigned to - the rather narrow possibilities of "managing" the present system. Like the Brundtland Commission before it, this commission displays an unquestioning belief that humanity's best prospects for development lie with the standard notion of economic growth - a notion that seeks as little regulation of trade and investment as possible. And the Commissioners have adopted a certain "the-genie-is-out-of-the-bottle" attitude. Noting the reality of "globalized private capital markets," for instance, they conclude that "it is not possible or desirable to recreate. . . strong public-sector control over the international monetary system."

But the reader might well wonder, Why not? Why shouldn't the operations of multinational banks and corporations, for instance, be subjected to some form of democratic control? Why shouldn't the Commissioners' interest in the broad participation of civil society shape their approach to economic issues, just as it shaped their security analysis? Unfortunately, fundamental questions like these go unanswered, as the report focuses instead on such matters as ensuring fair competition and resolving trade disputes. The result is a failure to take into account the logic that underlies corporate globalization. As environmental economist Herman Daly and others have pointed out, the political influence of multinational corporations has tended to force down wages, as well as labor and environmental standards - with devastating consequences for some communities.

In general terms, the Commissioners recognize these dangers. They champion the value of human equality in the abstract, and acknowledge that economic globalization has "increased the vulnerability of the weak through uneven distribution of gains and pressure on natural resources." So it is strange that they should then fail to address the problem when it comes to specifics. Strange, too, that although they understand the necessity of restricting state powers for the sake of security, the commissioners cannot see the obvious economic analogy. Economic equity requires greater accountability from multinational corporations and from other big financial players, including the "Bretton Woods" institutions - the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF).

A similar failure to make connections is evident when it comes to the economic policy recommendations. The Commission proposes the creation of a new entity - a U.N. Economic Security Council - to consider global economic problems and their relation to other issues, and to coordinate the policies of multilateral economic institutions. But unlike the existing Security Council, the ESC would not have authority to make binding decisions; instead, it "would gain influence through competence and relevance" - or so the Commission hopes. But the Commission also proposes to enhance the IMF's role, and real power in the field would almost certainly remain at the IMF rather than coming to the ESC. The precise nature of the ESC's relationship with the Bretton Woods institutions is left undefined, but it is likely that the ESC would soon be marginalized by them. It is true that both the proposed ESC and the reformed IMF would be more representative of the world than the Bretton Woods institutions are now - but only marginally so. And the Commission has ignored persistent NGO criticism of the Bretton Woods structure in the reforms that it does propose.

The flaws in the economic analysis spill over into the treatment of environmental issues. The overview in the book's initial chapters suggests that environmental policies will get the kind of fundamental rethinking they so badly need. It's disappointing, therefore, to discover that the environmental section is little more than a market-based analysis relegated to a nine-page subsection in the chapter on economics. The Commission does propose that the U.N. Trusteeship Council, originally charged with decolonization matters, now be given "the mandate of exercising trusteeship over the global commons" - but without elaborating. Elsewhere, however, the report assigns the ESC tasks that would inevitably duplicate or rival the Trusteeship Council's new functions. An obvious question the report never answers is: If there are to be Security Councils for both peace and economic issues, why not establish another for environmental issues?

Even in the Commission's own account, the phrase "our global neighborhood" has the ring of a euphemism, but implementing its proposals would make it less of one. Despite its flaws, the report presents a compelling case for the potential of international governance. It should be required reading for anyone concerned with international policy, particularly in the United States, where the Republican party's new agenda, the "Contract with America," is encouraging people to think that "the world's sole remaining superpower" can still ride roughshod over the rest of the planet.