As UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan and his aides, as well as heads of other UN system organizations head for the Swiss ski-resort town of Davos and the World Economic Forum there, to hold hands with executives of big corporations and their lobbyists and power-brokers, the United Nations and its system appears to be coming under increasing critical scrutiny from the public interest non-governmental community (once a source of uncritical support to the United Nations).Not too long ago, the World Economic Forum, with its leaders like Klaus Schwab, went about guiding and laying down the law for the world’s governments and international institutions to promote neo-liberal corporatist economics and globalization. With a skilfully choreographed annual event, to which Third World leaders are invited to be able to mix with Big Corporate CEOs (the latter are invited to pay a heavy membership to be able to come into contact with government leaders), and a careful process of selecting access to the media (with some top media personalities invited, and paid, for participation), the forum held considerable influence and sway.
However, over the last couple of years, the forum and those hobnobbing there have come under increasing pressure - from civil society movements in Switzerland and Europe, who have been holding counter-meetings and demonstrations - despite the attempts of the Swiss authorities to frown upon and prevent them.
The public protests against the neo-liberal corporatist policies of globalization at the WTO Ministerial in Seattle, and the subsequent protests against the World Bank and the IMF, and other such gatherings, which unnerved these institutions, has now enveloped the World Economic Forum.
The forum has tried to ‘legitimise’ itself and cope with the problem by trying to coopt some of the NGOs, with invitations to participate and dialogue. It has also provided links at its website to some of the critical websites, including that of the Third World Network (but without following the net etiquette of seeking the permission of the organizations involved), and using its own ‘cookies’ to keep track of those visiting its site and the other website links it provides.
Meanwhile, the world’s big business, in a special newspaper advertising supplement in the International Herald Tribune, bankrolled by the International Chamber of Commerce, patted the UN and its agencies for their Global Compact, and egged them on to go further.
In the IHT supplement, the ICC Secretary-General Maria Livanos Cattaui praised Annan’s Global Compact, but insisted that it should remain a ‘voluntary two-way agreement’, ‘open-ended', and free from ‘command and control’. If labour unions and so-called civil society organizations are seen as full partners, it will be different from the original concept, she said.
Another WEF official, Claude Smadja, in a column in the Financial Times, talks about the need for ‘effective and efficient global governance’, but has nothing on the ‘governance’ and public accountability of corporations or of the institutions promoting globalization, like the IMF, the World Bank and the WTO.
While the two-year Global Compact, and the UN pronouncements and activities, may or may not have won total US support and backing for the UN, it has spawned a number of websites, run by public interest non-governmental groups, where the UN activities and pronouncements that are seen as supportive of corporations are receiving critical scrutiny. Two sites,have been analysing and posting articles and papers on the Global Compact and the way the alliance between the UN and corporations has developed.
A paper (in December 2000) by Anthony Judge of the Union of International Associations focuses on the totally non-transparent manner in which the Global Compact has emerged, and the “surreptitious manner” in which partnership arrangements with multinationals are being agreed or foreseen, possibly to the detriment of other partnership arrangements with the UN.
The UN, Judge says, has been ‘white-anted’ -- an Australian term for the destruction of a structure from within, while maintaining an outward appearance of normality - and the faceless conceptual henchmen of a variety of forces, essentially antagonistic to the UN, are seemingly holding the Secretary-General hostage or have duped him into supporting “what amounts to a ponzi scheme”, and warns of the danger of the UN going the League-of-Nations way.
In another paper (in October 2000) , ‘The Road to the Global Compact: Corporate Power and the Battle Over Global Public Policy at the United Nations”, Ellen Paine at the Global Policy Forum has traced the history of the Global Compact and notes that after resisting for many years the post-Keynesian Corporate (neo-liberal) ideology of the Reagan era and the conservative Washington think-tanks, UN Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali in 1992 began ‘reforming’ the secretariat, scaling the UN’s economic and social agenda (yielding ground to the World Bank and the IMF, and their alleged comparative advantage) and eliminated several of the programs that aroused corporate ire, including the winding up of the Centre for Transnational Corporations (which had been monitoring TNC activities and promoting a code of conduct) and transferring some CTC remnants to UNCTAD in Geneva, where these remnants, “far from critically monitoring TNCs, became [the] cheering section for TNCs, promoting TNC investment and commending the positive effects of TNCs in the global economy.”
After the 1992 UN reforms, says Paine, corporate chieftains and Washington-based neo-liberal policy-makers pressed forward with their campaign to erase institutions of public oversight and accountability in favour of private, voluntary forms of corporate self-regulation. But there were also progressive sections within the UN that continued to criticise the Fund/Bank structural adjustment programmes and policy tools; the UN itself held several global conferences to address social and economic issues.
In 1997, when Kofi Annan succeeded to the UN top job, and saw the need to resolve the UN’s financial crisis by ‘strategic concessions’ to the largest dues-payer (the US), he met with powerful conservatives like Senator Jesse Helms to assure them that he would ‘streamline’ the UN. Soon after, he also travelled to Davos to meet with the world’s foremost corporate chiefs (at the WEF), and held meetings with the Paris-based ICC.
The WEF, in turn, offered to connect the Secretary-General and his top officials to the WEF’s private video-conferencing system, enabling Annan and his team to converse with the Forum’s CEO members and select political leaders from international institutions. The new technology helped the cash-strapped UN with a state-of-the-art communications tool to connect the UN SG and other UN leaders with corporate executives, bypassing the intergovernmental process. At the same time, the UN secretariat moved to impose a financial charge on NGOs for electronic access to UN documents, and with these and other moves, restricted the access of NGOs while widening that of business, Paine says.
Tracing the other meetings and events leading to the Global Compact, Paine says that the UN leaders saw themselves as ‘realists’ ready to deal with slightly unsavoury corporations in the same way they dealt with less-than-ideal governments. They believed that a corporate-dominated world was already a reality, and that if they did not accept this reality, the UN would be assured of irrelevance. Annan and his aides offered the corporations a strategic bargain: in return for curbing their appetite for accumulation and agree to some regulation and social protection, the UN would mobilize public support and legitimacy to defend corporations against their most critical opponents.
The corporate chieftains on their side viewed the partnership from a different angle and had at least six policy goals which they wanted to achieve:
· first, to collectively influence the broad social and economic policy-making of the UN system to minimize regulation, taxation, trade barriers, labour codes and other initiatives;
· second, to influence the UN’s ‘ideological production’ - speeches, publications, briefing papers, meeting agendas etc - so as to confirm private corporate solutions as the only ones available and practicable, and frame giant corporations as ‘concerned and helpful world citizens’ and end the UN system’s advocacy of non-market based solutions;
· third, to counterbalance and roll back the influence of NGOs, seen as an increasingly dangerous source of criticism and profit-threatening policy alternatives;
· fourth, to shape policies, ideologies and regulations of interest to their particular business sector;
For example, the cooperative relationship of computer hardware company Cisco systems with UNDP helped create an atmosphere in which UN leaders gave prominence to the ‘digital divide’ and the need to close it by making computers available to all the world’s citizens. “These UN statements, absurd in the light of the large number of the world’s people without adequate food, shelter or drinking water, served the computer and technology industry well." UN enthusiasts joined in a public relations mania that pictured computer-based technical fixes as solutions to the world’s social problems.
fifth, promoting the public image of particular firms, by ‘blue wash’; the UN lending its good name and reputation to help corporations create a (false) positive image of themselves;
As the ICC head, Maria Cattaui pointed out, companies are enthusiastic about working with the UN because of their ‘determination .... to be seen to be good corporate citizens.’
· sixth, the goal of corporations to promote their own products.
For e.g. Ericsson, through an agreement with the UN to distribute its brand-name mobile phones for use by humanitarian workers in the UN Disaster Response Initiative, garnered a positive image and its products, positive publicity. Cisco Systems similarly boosted its high-speed internet switches and routers with its NetAid partnership with UNDP.
Firms also had other goals, like boosting employee morale and building public support in a wide range of countries for their operations. Thus, Rhone-Poulene, which had been facing intense public criticism for its agro- industrial and genetic research activities, was able to ‘rebrand itself’ by a deal with UNESCO in 1999 - to restore the Taj Mahal in India by investing ‘a paltry $237,000’ in the project.
The paper also cites examples of the rush into business partnerships, changes at the UNDP, and the call by UN Under-Secretary General for Disarmament Affairs, Jayantha Dhanapala, on 8 July 1999, for “creative partnerships” between the UN and the arms manufacturing companies “to control the illicit arms trade.”
Placing the Global Compact history in this context, the Ellen Paine paper notes that the UN has promised that it would not undertake monitoring nor would the companies be brought under any enforcement procedure or formal process of scrutiny. The approach of Annan and his advisory is one of partnership with business, “values” rather than rules, with a reminder of the threat that grassroots opposition might pose to globalization. According to the UN plan, the only test of the compliance of companies with the Compact would be a special UN website where the corporations would post information, in the form of ‘best practices’, and control the information flow, while the UN would invite the public to examine and make comments - ‘chat -room democracy’.
However, it notes, NGOs and parts of the system remain critical of this approach. A number of member-states of the UN too have expressed their opposition, but Annan has not altered his course.
“The UN’s corporate policy,” the paper says, “strains the organization’s relations with NGOs and many governments. In exchange, it will likely produce only the most superficial and cosmetic changes in company behaviour. The UN could lose its public support if it is seen as scarcely distinguishable from business-dominated institutions like the WTO or the IMF. Secretary-General Annan is gambling with the UN’s most precious heritage - its reputation as an institution that works for the well-being of the world’s people.”
Advocating NGOs, and their allies in social movements and sympathetic governments to reverse this trend at the UN, the Global Policy Forum paper says that the basis for common action must be a citizen’s compact: “We must say ‘no’ to a corporate-dominated UN. We must advocate a financially- and politically-strengthened UN that is responsive to the needs and demands of ordinary citizens. And we must insist that corporations be subject to citizen control, not the other way round.
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