THE CHALLENGES OF REMAKING TODAY’S WORLD

If you were to bring four or five of the best minds in the country together, invite them to a gorgeous setting, pamper them with good food and sunshine, and tell them all they had to do was think, what do you suppose would happen?

Well, a small foundation here, the Gihon Foundation, has been trying just that for a decade. Every two years, foundation chief Michael Nesmith calls forth a “Council on Ideas,” just to see what talented and intelligent people might come up with in the way of salving or saving the world. This year’s council was particularly interesting, as the theme developed that the entire world, in effect, needed some serious rebuilding.

If you don’t think it is preposterously difficult to obtain a final statement that these folks can even minimally agree upon, you don’t know idea people. But this year’s five were at least able to agree: “As never before, governments and other institutions must be capable of nimble response. Yet most of today’s international institutions are a half-century old and drained of political will. . . .

“The coming era demands a period of concerted social innovation and institution building–this time encompassing all sectors–comparable to that which followed the end of World War II.”

Ahh, but therein lay the conundrum, the confusion, the contradiction. Weaving its sinuous way through the conversations was the fact that, far from being a post-World War II world, when the allies’ victory gave them the singular power to remake the world, in this imprecise post-Cold War world not even the powerful nations seem to have the power to do that.

“In the period following World War II, there was an extraordinary burst of creativity and good will,” mused Jessica Tuchman Matthews, head of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. “We created almost every system that we now live by. Yet those systems were created between governments–this time, the systems must encompass `actors’ who are non-governmental.”

Writer Robert Kaplan, one of today’s most provocative thinkers on change in the world, then remarked that “many institutions do have validity, but some need to be re-created. Some of us were concerned to build new institutions, and not just new bureaucracies. Yet, at the same time, it is utopian to think that such institutions can exist without appropriate hierarchy.”

Kaplan then reminded the group to remember that “the World War II institutions were created through the aegis of countries who were victors.” He put his finger on a major problem of today: “Unless you have a national self-interest, you won’t get international goals, whereas today there is a tendency to have U.S. power mold international organizations.”

The lack of a clear perceived national interest on the part of this American administration is made even more complicated, Jessica Tuchman Matthews went on, because “the new institutions need to encompass the non-state sectors.” At the same time, she took on the people of both left (multiculturalists) and right (corporate globalizers) who say we don’t need a nation-state anymore.

“These institutions are not meant to be outside the central governments,” she said. “Yet, at the same time, there is recently an enormous proliferation of hybrid organizations that encompass governments, business, NGOs. Look at the European Union.”

Kaplan, for his part, remained worried about the big corporations, whose global reach more and more “de-links” them from the nations and the citizens that, despite all, still sustain them. “The more corporations are de-linked from geography,” he said, “the less self-interest they have in being moral.”

My perhaps not-too-original thought is that, yes, some kind of “re-institutionalization” of the world ought to head our list of concerns as serious citizens today.

Human beings crave connections and community today as never before, in great part because the old ties–tribes, clans, traditional military units–have been disintegrating all around us. Yet the international institutions that have been left to us by modern history (the United Nations, the international lending agencies, the world trade organizations) are more than imperfect. In most cases, they are barely working.

At the same time, a vast confusion over roles is arising within nation-states. This has to do with two things: the fact that economic units–the big industries and companies–are being “globalized” and thus, at least in their minds, no longer adhere to national norms and principles, and the uncomfortable reality that nation-states themselves have become so dangerously weakened, in power but even more in principle, that they no longer compel the total loyalty of their citizens.

All of this should not really be surprising. The seemingly endless stresses of the Cold War exhausted the world. At the same time, the new internationalism that had arisen gave people the idea that we really could have mythological things like a “world without war” and “world citizenship.”

In the United Nations and elsewhere, moral judgments were put aside in the name of an amoral “neutralism” that has stymied the great powers from making the underlying judgments necessary to form this new world.

This would be easy to change–but only if the United States, which is the key, because it provided the original mold for the international institutions, had leaders willing to lead and to use their power.

That’s surely not going to happen in the Clinton administration, which personifies the rot that has pervaded the Western world, ironically coinciding with its greatest historic victories. But I still dream.