Читать книгу The Age of Consent - George Monbiot - Страница 7

I might appear to have begun with a presumption: that a democratic world order is better than any other kind. This was not the approach with which I started my research; I sought (perhaps not always successfully) to begin without preconceptions. I was forced to adopt this as my basic political model only after examining the alternatives, the two ideologies which, within the global justice movement, compete directly or indirectly with the package of political positions most people recognize as ‘democracy’ – Marxism and anarchism.^*

It is the common conceit of contemporary communists that their prescriptions have not failed; they have simply never been tried. Whenever it has been practised on a continental scale, the emancipation of the workers has been frustrated by tyrants, who corrupted Marx’s ideology for their own ends. For some years, I believed this myself. But nothing is more persuasive of the hazards of Marx’s political programme than The Communist Manifesto.¹⁸ It seems to me that this treatise contains, in theoretical form, all the oppressions which were later visited on the people of communist nations. The problem with its political prescriptions is not that they have been corrupted, but that they have been rigidly applied. Stalin’s politics and Mao’s were far more Marxist than, for example, those of the compromised – and therefore more benign – governments of Cuba or the Indian state of Kerala.

The Manifesto’s great innovation and great failure was the staggeringly simplistic theory into which it sought to force society. Dialectical materialism reduced humanity’s complex social and political relations to a simple conflict between the ‘bourgeoisie’ and the ‘proletariat’; that is to say the owners of property and the workers, by which Marx and Engels meant the industrial labourers employed by large capitalist concerns. Any class which did not conform to this dialectic was either, like the peasants, shopkeepers, artisans and aristocrats, destined to ‘decay and finally disappear in the face of modern industry’, or, like the unemployed, was to be regarded as ‘social scum, that passively rotting mass thrown off by the lowest layers of old society’,¹⁹ with no legitimate existence in a post-revolutionary world.

Unfortunately for those living under communist regimes, society did not function as Marx suggested. The peasants, aristocrats, artisans and shopkeepers did not disappear of their own accord: they, like everyone else who did not fit conveniently into the industrial proletariat, had to be eliminated, as they interfered with the theoretical system Marx had imposed on society. Marx, who described them as ‘reactionaries’ trying ‘to roll back the wheel of history’, might have approved of their extermination. The ‘social scum’ of the lumpenproletariat, which came to include indigenous people, had to be disposed of just as hastily, in case they became, as Marx warned, ‘the bribed tool of reactionary intrigue’. As the theory so woefully failed to fit society, society had to be remodelled to fit the theory. And Marx provided the perfect excuse for ruthless extermination. By personalizing oppression as ‘the bourgeoisie’ he introduced the justification for numberless atrocities. The simplicity, of both the theory and the objective, is attractive and enticing. Even today, it is hard to read The Communist Manifesto without wanting to go out and shoot a member of the bourgeoisie, in the hope of obtaining freedom from oppression.

Moreover, Marx’s industrial proletariat, modelled on the factory workers of Lancashire, upon whom he relied to foment revolution, turned out to be rather less inclined to revolt than the peasants, or, for that matter, the petty bourgeois, artisans, factory owners, aristocrats and educated middle classes from whom he drew almost all his early disciples. In order to overcome this inconvenience, Marx effectively re-invokes, in the form of bourgeois communist ideologues such as himself, the guardian-philosophers of Plato’s dictatorship. Rather than trust the faceless proletariat to make its own decisions, he appoints these guardians to ‘represent and take care of the future’ of that class.

His prescriptions, in other words, flatly fail to address the critical political question, namely ‘who guards the guards?’ Democratic systems contain, in theory at least, certain safeguards, principally in the form of elections, designed to ensure that those who exercise power over society do so in its best interests. The government is supposed to entertain a healthy fear of its people, for the people are supposed to be permitted to dismiss their government. The Communist Manifesto offers no such defences. As the ancient Greeks discovered, guardian-philosophers tend rapidly to shed both the responsibilities of guardianship and the disinterested virtues of philosophy.

Moreover, by abolishing private property and centralizing ‘all instruments of production in the hands of the State’,²⁰ Marx granted communist governments a possibly unprecedented power over human life. Officials could decide what – indeed whether – people ate, where they lived, how they worked, even what they wore. Marx himself, in other words, devised the perfect preconditions for totalitarian dictatorship. The ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’²¹ transforms itself, with instant effect, into the dictatorship of the bureaucrat.

This problem is compounded by the Utopian myth at the heart of the Manifesto’s philosophy: that with the triumph of the proletariat, all conflict will come to an end, and everyone shall pursue, through ‘the free development of each’, ‘the free development of all’. But history does not come to an end; dialectical materialism has no ultimate synthesis. New struggles do, and must, emerge as needs change, interests diverge and new forms of oppression manifest themselves, and a system which takes no account of this is a system doomed to sclerotic corruption. Indeed, Stalin and Mao recognized this, through their perpetual discovery of the new enemies required to sustain the dynamic of power.

Marx helped the industrial working class to recognize and act upon its power. His analysis remains an indispensable means of understanding both history and economics. But his political programme, as formulated in the Manifesto, was a dead end. It stands at odds with everything we in the global justice movement claim to value: human freedom, accountability, diversity. Any attempt to systematize people by means of a simple, let alone binary, code will founder, with disastrous consequences both for those forced to conform to the Marxist ideal, and for those judged by the all-powerful state to offend it.

At first sight, anarchism appears more compatible with the ideals of a global justice movement. It is the political idea I find most attractive, and to which, almost instinctively – however much I have now come to reject it intellectually – I keep returning. For the first few years in which I had a system of political beliefs, I considered myself an anarchist. Anarchism’s purpose, of course, is to reclaim human freedom from the oppressive power of distant authority. Every atrocity committed by the state is a standing advertisement for self-government. Over the past one hundred years, as everyone knows, states have been responsible for the deaths of tens of millions of combatants and civilians in wars concocted principally for the purpose of expanding the wealth and power of the dominant elite. They have sought to destroy entire ethnic or religious groups: Jews, Roma, Tartars, Kurds, Tutsis, Bosnian Muslims, East Timorese, Maya, Mapuches and many more. They have engineered famines, destroyed ecosystems, killed political opponents and curtailed the most basic human freedoms.

Those who have succeeded in capturing the wealth and power of the state have enriched themselves enormously at public expense: both King Leopold of Belgium and his indigenous successor Mobutu Sese Seko used the Congo as his personal treasury, effectively enslaving an entire nation for the purpose of filling his own pockets. The men and women who have governed all the recent superpowers – Britain, the USSR and the United States – have sought to enhance their power and secure domestic support without redistributing wealth, by seizing control of other nations and looting their economies. When anarchists assert that the state is a mechanism for violently depriving humankind of its freedom, we are forced to agree that it has repeatedly been used for this purpose. Anarchism, as a result, presents the most consistent – and within the global justice movement the most popular – challenge to the world order this manifesto invokes, in which governance plays a major role.

But the history of the past century, or even, for that matter, the past decade, is hardly an advertisement for statelessness either. When the government of Sierra Leone lost control of its territory, the lives of its people were ripped apart by men who are commonly described as ‘rebels’, but who possessed no policy or purpose other than to loot people’s homes and monopolize the diamond trade. They evolved the elegant habit of hacking off the hands of the civilians they visited, not because this advanced any political or economic programme, but simply because no one was preventing them from doing so. Only when foreign states reasserted governance in Sierra Leone were the bandits defeated and relieved of their weapons.

When the state effectively collapsed in the former Soviet Union, losing its capacity to regulate and tax its citizens, the power vacuum was filled immediately, not by autonomous collectives of happy householders, but by the Mafia, which carved its empires out of other people’s lives. The assets of the former state were seized not by the mass of its citizens, but by a few dozen kleptocrats. Anyone who sought to resist them was shot.

For most of the past decade, the eastern Congo has been effectively stateless, and the people who in earlier eras endured the depredations of King Leopold and President Mobutu, have been repeatedly attacked by six marauding armies and scores of unaffiliated militias, squabbling over their resources. Two million people have died as a result of this ‘civil war’.

Anarchists would be quick to insist both that there is a difference between the stateless chaos of places like the eastern Congo and true anarchism (in which freely associating communities can seek mutual advantage through cooperation) and that many of the recent atrocities in stateless places were caused either by the collapse of the state or by the aggression of neighbouring states. We will turn to the first point in a moment, but it should surely be obvious that the second argument causes more problems for the anarchist position than it solves. Unless anarchism suddenly and simultaneously swept away all the world’s states and then, by equally mysterious means, prevented new states from emerging, it is hard to see how the people of anarchist communities could survive when thrust into conflict or competition with a neighbouring state, which – by definition – would possess the wherewithal to raise an army. It is just as difficult to see how they could defend themselves from the robber barons arising within their own territories, who would perceive this collapse not as an opportunity to embrace their fellow humans in the spirit of love and reconciliation, but as an opportunity to embrace their undefended resources.

It is impossible to read any history, ancient or modern, without acquiring the unhappy intelligence that Homo sapiens is a species with an extraordinary capacity for violence and destruction, and that this capacity has been exercised in most epochs in all regions of the world. Those who wish to exert power over other people or to seize their resources appear to use violence as either a first or a last resort, unless this tendency is checked by some other force, principally the fear of punishment by people with greater means of violence at their disposal. Any political system which seeks to enhance human welfare must provide the means of containing and preventing the aggression with which some people would greet others.

The state claims to do so by asserting a monopoly of violence. By attesting that only the servants of the state are permitted to use violence against other people, and then only according to the rules the state lays down, it pretends to offer protection to its citizens both from external aggression and from people with violent tendencies within its own borders. In theory a democratic state is prevented, by accountability to its people, from the arbitrary use of that violent power against its own citizens. The notional safeguards against its use of violence towards the people of other nations are less clear-cut: indeed, this is among the global democratic deficits which this manifesto seeks to address.

In mature democracies, arbitrary violence by the state against its own people is fairly limited: the police sometimes beat up protesters and members of ethnic minorities and extort confessions from suspects by violent means, while the security services occasionally assassinate troublesome citizens. The anarchists would argue, with justice, that the relatively low frequency and low intensity of state violence in democratic nations reflects the fact that most citizens, most of the time, obey the state, whether they agree with its prescriptions or not. If people were more inclined to behave as they wished – in other words, if they were more free – they would be subject to a corresponding increase in state violence.

Nor will democratic states always succeed in protecting their own people from the violence of others. There is no shortage of recent examples of popular governments being deposed by external aggression. There are also plenty of instances of state authorities turning a blind eye while a faction with which they sympathize assaults a faction towards which they are antagonistic. Recent attacks on Muslims in India have been passively witnessed, and occasionally abetted, by police and soldiers. In Britain, as I know to my cost, the police often refuse to intervene when protesters are beaten up by private security guards.

But this system (with the significant caveat that it does not, as yet, prevent the state from attacking the people of other nations) does, at least, function in theory. It could be argued that both the state’s own arbitrary violence and its toleration of the violence of certain favoured citizens are the results of the failure of its people to hold the authorities sufficiently to account. It is possible to see how, in a mature democratic state, effective campaigning by the victims of violence or their supporters could be turned into such a public embarrassment and electoral liability that the government is forced to desist. Indeed, on many occasions, precisely this has happened. There can, or so we should be inclined to hope, never be another Bloody Sunday in Northern Ireland, or another sinking of a Rainbow Warrior by the French security services. Such restraint as democratic states display arises only from fear of losing public support, and therefore losing power.

No state but the dominant superpower can guarantee to defend its citizens from external aggression,^* but the state does appear to be rather more capable of doing so – when it is responsive to the will of its people – than unaffiliated autonomous communities. Indeed, one of the reasons why both the Roman Empire and, 2000 years later, the British Empire, expanded so swiftly is that many of the tribes they attacked were either aggregated only loosely into states, or were not aggregated at all. Had there been no state of Nicaragua, the proxy warriors financed by the US could have overrun that region immediately, seizing the land and its resources from its people. The Sandinista government was far weaker than the United States, but, through ingenious organization, it succeeded in resisting the greater power for several years, during which it mustered the support both of other nations and of many people within the US. The eventual settlement was almost certainly less oppressive than it would have been, had the proxy warriors not encountered a regular army and the resistance and public relations coordinated by the state.

It is not clear, by contrast, that anarchism works even in theory. The problem with the model is that, for the reasons outlined above, it has either to be applied universally, or applied only in those regions which are so poor in resources that no one else would want to live there. In other words, if states continue to exist, they will seize from relatively defenceless peoples the assets which would be to their advantage. Anarchist communities which possess valuable resources can sometimes survive for short periods in accessible places, or for longer periods in remote and impassable regions. Their establishment has often been associated with emancipation and, within the community, redistribution. But these communities are always likely to be vulnerable to attack by those federations of people – which we call states – big enough to command armies and rich enough to deploy advanced military technology.

But let us suppose, as many anarchists do, that this system can, somehow, displace all states, simultaneously, worldwide. What we then discover is that this very universalism destroys the freedoms the anarchists wish to defend. Anarchists, like most people who support particular political systems, see those systems as responding to people rather like themselves. Most anarchists associate with oppressed communities, and envisage anarchism as the means by which the oppressed can free themselves from persecution. But if everyone is to be free from the coercive power of the state, then this must apply to the oppressors as well as the oppressed. The richest and most powerful communities on earth – be they geographical communities or communities of interest – will be as unrestrained by external forces as the poorest and weakest.

This is why, though both sides would furiously deny it, the outcome of both market fundamentalism and anarchism, if applied universally, is identical. The anarchists associate with the oppressed, the market fundamentalists with the oppressors, but by eliminating the state (as some, but by no means all the market fundamentalists wish to do), both simply remove such restraints as prevent the strong from crushing the weak. This, of course, is the point of market fundamentalism. But it is also the inevitable result of anarchism. If you have difficulty envisaging this, simply picture an autonomous community of impoverished black people living next to an autonomous community of well-armed white racists. For the majority of humankind to be free, we must restrain the freedom of those who would oppress us.

So the anarchists would have us make another extraordinary leap of faith. Having caused the state magically to evaporate everywhere, they also insist, without providing a convincing explanation of how this might happen in the absence of the state, that we can eliminate those disparities of wealth and power between communities which would permit one group of people to oppress another. But even that would prove inadequate. Even if every community had equal access to resources, there is nothing in the anarchist system to prevent one group from seeking to acquire more resources by invading another. Indeed, precisely this happens, almost continuously, among the nomadic tribes of that part of Africa where the borders of Sudan, Ethiopia, Uganda and Kenya meet. These are classic anarchist communities, with centuries of organizational experience, and far more sophisticated means of managing their resources and resolving disputes than the intentional communes of the West. They are forced into cooperation within the tribe by the erratic ecology of the lands they inhabit and their consequent inability to sustain the accumulation of wealth. They have been, by and large, abandoned by central government.

Their loyalty to other members of the tribe is unimpeachable, but whenever the livestock belonging to another tribe come within range and are insufficiently defended, those men with sufficient arms will attempt to steal them. These forays, especially since the arrival of modern weapons, can be exceedingly bloody. When I was working with the Turkana of north-western Kenya, my visit to a cattle camp was delayed by illness. By the time I arrived, all that remained of its people were their skulls and the remains of their clothes, scattered across the savannah after their bodies had been eaten by hyaenas. Warriors from another tribe had arrived in the night, surrounded the camp, and inoculated it with bullets. Ninety-six of its ninety-eight people were killed.²²

The anarchists may respond that the brotherhood of man has, in this case, been corrupted by modern weaponry. There is no question that automatic weapons have accelerated conflict, but long before they first experienced the electrifying sensation of holding the stock of a gun, the people of these anarchist communities murdered their enemies when they perceived that they were favoured by the balance of power. Indeed another anarchist tribe, the Maasai, armed only with spears and knives, seized almost all the grazing lands of what is now central and southern Kenya and northern Tanzania within a century of emerging from the region the Turkana now inhabit. So the anarchists, as well as disposing of states, greed, wealth and power, would also need to disinvent all weapons which could be used to harm another person: not just bombs and automatic rifles, but also, as the massacres in Rwanda show, any bit of metal, stone or wood which can be sharpened on one side or knocked into a point. Theirs may be the perfect political system for another planet, inhabited by life-forms whose responses to scarcity and competition are the very opposite of ours. Regrettably, it is not a system destined to enhance the lives of those who live here.

The absence of government, then, is unworkable and ultimately intolerable. Communist government appears to depend on the extermination of entire categories of human being, while vesting power in the hands of unaccountable dictators. The dictatorship of vested interests, which is what passes for governance at the global level today, is oppressive and unjust. Unless some other system, which all political philosophers have so far overlooked, emerges, we are forced to conclude that all we have left is democracy.

Democracy is unattainable unless it is brokered by institutions, mandated by the people and made accountable to them, whose primary purpose is to prevent the strong from oppressing the weak and to prevent people of all stations from resolving their differences by means of violence. The collective noun for such institutions is government. So democratic government, of one kind or another, appears to be the least-worst system we can envisage. It is the unhappy lot of humankind that an attempt to develop a least-worst system emerges as the highest ideal for which we can strive. But if democracy is the only system which could deliver the Age of Consent we seek, we immediately meet a paradox. The reason why democratic governance is more likely to deliver justice than anarchism is that it possesses the capacity for coercion: the rich and powerful can be restrained, by the coercive measures of the state, from oppressing the rest of us.

This is not the only sense in which democracy compromises consent. In long-established democracies, no living person has volunteered her consent to the system under which she lives, for it pre-dates her. In some of the newer democracies, the majority of those of voting age alive today may well have supported the political system’s formation, but those who are coming of age, and will also be forced to submit to the system, have not been consulted. Succeeding generations are likely to inherit the structures approved by their parents, whether or not they wish to be bound by them themselves. Of course, we can vote for reform and seek to persuade our representatives to change the constitution, but even in the most responsive of democratic systems, citizens are unlikely to be permitted to vote to dissolve the state, not least because so many powerful people have an interest in sustaining it. As Marx noted, ‘Men make their own history, but not in circumstances of their own making.’²³

A further problem is that, even if we do change the system, and a large majority approves of that change, there will always be people who do not. Yet they, just as much as everyone else, must surrender their consent and submit to the will of the majority. This is a distressing property of the democratic order: that it does not permit those who wish to remove themselves from the system to do so. But it appears to be a necessary one, if we are to prevent the powerful from escaping the legal restraints which defend us, however inadequately, from exploitation. This does not mean that we cannot break the rules with which we disagree. Indeed from time to time, many of us in the global justice movement violate the laws against criminal damage, obstruction or breach of the peace for political purposes, and believe we are morally justified in doing so. But the sustenance of the democratic state requires that we should expect it to seek to prevent us from doing so. We can, of course, use civil disobedience to try to change the law when, as it so often does, it discriminates in favour of the powerful. But without a body of law and the assumption of equality before it, the weak are without institutional defence.

In another sense, however, democracy is more consensual than any other political system, in that it is the only one which, in principle at least, consistently provides us with opportunities for dissent. It permits us to express our disapproval of policies and ideologies which offend us, to vote against them, and to overthrow them without bloodshed. No other system offers this. Orthodox Marxist regimes are viciously intolerant of dissenters. Anarchist systems appear to offer great scope for dissent within a community, as well as the opportunity to leave that community and join another one, but because they do not protect us from persecution, the only means of dissenting from the violence of others is through greater violence of our own. If we happen to possess the less effective weapons or belong to the smaller community, that dissent will be pointless. The dictatorship of vested interests offers opportunities for dissent only to those who represent the vested interests.

This is not to say that democracy is without substantial and systemic dangers. The most obvious of these is the tyranny of the majority. There have been plenty of states run by democratically elected governments which have, with majority consent, persecuted their minorities. The theoretical defences against this danger – such as weighted voting and special consultation rights – are flimsy and introduce problems of their own, such as complexity (rendering the political system less comprehensible and therefore less accountable) and definition (the laws designed to defend oppressed peoples can be exploited by oppressive minorities). But in this respect democracy appears to work rather better in practice than it does in theory. In most democratic countries, despite the recent advance of the far right, public acceptance of ethnic and religious minorities, homosexuals, children born out of wedlock and other oppressed groups appears to have increased with time. The same could not be said, for example, of the Muslim theocracies. Democracies whose people have access to communications technology appear to be self-improving in this respect, because they provide the political space in which minorities can explain themselves to the majority.

Another obvious danger is the crude and clumsy nature of the decision-making process. In representative systems, elections tend to be won or lost on just one or two issues, yet almost every party standing for election has dozens of policies. By choosing one potential government over another, we are forced to select an entire package, parts of which may be disagreeable to us. Representative systems permit a small degree of modification. If a political position turns out to be so offensive to the general will that it can threaten the survival of the government, it is likely to be dropped. But this is an insufficient safeguard, as most policies, though they may be particularly hurtful to a few people, or mildly hurtful to most people, are unlikely to generate sufficient opposition to threaten the entire government, especially if they are so complex that few will bother to discover what all their implications may be. This can be ameliorated a little by introducing an element of participatory democracy into a representative system, though this, as Chapter 4 shows, has its own limitations.

The third major problem with democracy is that a system capable of restraining the oppressor will also be capable of restraining the oppressed. If we are to prevent the rich and powerful from wrecking our lives, we require a government big enough to sit on them; but a government big enough to sit on them will also be big enough to sit on us. Conversely, if the system is sufficiently responsive to the will of the oppressed, it may also be responsive to the will of the oppressor. This, of course, is the great conflict at the heart of all democratic systems, and the one with which many of those in the movement have been rightly concerned. While states, over the past few years, have become ever more willing to regulate their citizens, they have become ever less willing to regulate the corporations. This is one of the problems this book seeks to address.

But while democracy has evident defects, it also possesses two great attributes. The first is that it is the only political system which contains the potential for its own improvement. We can overthrow our representatives without having to kill them. To a lesser extent, we can affect their behaviour while they remain in office. Democracy can be understood as a self-refining experiment in collective action.

The second is that democracy has the potential to be politically engaging. The more politically active citizens become, the more they are able to affect the way the state is run. The more success they encounter in changing the state, the more likely they are to remain politically active. Unhappily, this process appears to have gone into reverse in many democratic countries. As the competing parties offer ever less political choice (partly as a result of the constraints introduced by the migration of power to the global sphere), citizens are alienated from government, which leads, in turn, to a further withdrawal of the government from the people. A system which should be politically centripetal has instead become centrifugal.

The argument for democracy at the national level then seems to be – if not exactly robust – more compelling than the argument for any other system, or, for that matter, the absence of a system. But if we can – as most people do – agree that democracy is the best way to run a nation, it is hard to think of any reason why it should not be the best way to run the world. Indeed, it is surely demonstrable that many of the most pressing global and international problems arise from an absence of global and international democracy. The way in which states engage with each other is much closer to the anarchist model than the democratic one. The US government, like that of other superpowers before it, has seized the domestic mandate provided by its people (the ‘autonomous community’) to assert an international authority to rule the world. It expands its dominion – just like any powerful and well-armed community in the anarchist model – by means of violence and expropriation, in those parts of the world which do not form an alliance with it against lesser powers, succumb meekly to its demands, or successfully resist it with violence of their own. The democratic restraints within a state, in other words, do not prevent it from attacking weaker ones.

There are also, as this manifesto has argued, certain issues which affect humanity as a whole, and yet whose resolution is brokered by nation states. This introduces a number of problems. The first is that it permits powerful governments dominated by special interests to impose their will on the rest of the world. In some cases those governments are led by their domestic concerns to perceive a circumstance which is generally disastrous for humanity to be to their advantage. An administration which owes its election to the funds provided by oil companies, for example, will encourage the increasing use of fossil fuel.

The second problem with this brokerage of global issues by nation states is that even if all governments had an equal voice, our ability to affect their decisions is muted. Except in wartime, global and international issues seldom feature among the priorities of a domestic electorate. As national governments, we elect them, quite rightly, to tackle national issues. Without a separate process for determining what our response to a global issue may be, even a government with the best intentions has no effective means of assessing and representing the national will. This problem is commonly described as ‘photocopy democracy’. A democratic decision is taken, to elect a particular government. That government then mandates an agency, such as a government department, to set certain policies. That agency then delegates people to represent those policies at the international level. With each ‘copy’, democracy becomes greyer and harder to decipher. This can be partly addressed through referenda, but the government still acts as a filter between us and the mediation of global policy. Moreover, we cannot guarantee that other governments would have polled their citizens. Governments which have consulted their people can be outvoted by governments which have not.

A third problem is that brokerage by nation states diminishes the sense that we are all in this together. It encourages us to treat a problem affecting everyone on earth as a matter of national self-interest, and reduces our appreciation of our common humanity. Just as importantly, the lack of democracy at the global level leads to a lack of choice at the national level. National governments can seek to act as if they were free to respond to the will of their people, but they will be relentlessly dragged back to the set of policies imposed (by means I will explain in Chapters 4, 5 and 6) by those who possess global and international power. Without a global transformation, national transformations are impossible.