Keys of This Blood (53 page)

The Transnationalists, meanwhile, see their task as the forging of unity and harmony not through juridical resources—such means can be useful, but are subject to restrictions and dangerous delays. The favored tool of Transnationalists is the greatest human strength of all, in their view. Hard cash.

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Admittedly, the sociopolitical interdependence sought by these two closely related and practical-minded groups does not rest on anything like Darwin's Galápagos turtle. It rests on a three-legged creature of their own making: a real and living and evolving tripod that will carry us on its three legs into the globalist community of the near future.

The first leg of that tripod is international trade; and it is essential for the survival of interdependence itself.

The second leg of the tripod—an international system of payment—is essential to keep the first leg, trade, from collapsing.

Finally, physical security is essential as the third leg of the tripod, so that both trade and payment can be accomplished safely, and without any of those “catastrophes” that have diverted sociopolitical evolution from its true course in the past.

Avoiding catastrophes is more important now than ever before. For the Internationalists and Transnationalists have come far enough in their plans that the slow-boiling cauldron of our world rests on top of their evolving tripod. If a rough and unmerciful fate were to kick one of those legs out from under, the consequences would be so dire and universal that no Internationalist or Transnationalist would wish to contemplate the consequences for us all.

Not to worry, however. There may be a few bumps and rough spots ahead. But on the whole, so far so good.

The first leg of the tripod—the latter-day globalist version of international trade—got its start very soon after World War II. And until recently, it appeared to be doing splendidly, as it has so far been fashioned through the sensible cooperation of these two managerial groups.

For a full century before World War II, nations engaged in trade by means of networks of bilateral trade agreements and treaties of friendship, navigation and commerce.

Importantly, there had always been one power to serve as the solid underpinning of international trade, functioning as the marketplace of last resort, one power with enough military and naval strength, enough political clout and a strong enough sense of mission to provide the stability and economic stimulus necessary for world trade.

For a short while in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, that one power was Great Britain, with its far-flung colonialist and commercial empire. But in the immediate aftermath of World War II, hegemony passed to the United States. And at the same time, a noticeable change—in effect, a liberalization and expansion—began to alter the direction
of world trade. The widely felt need of so many nations at once to rebuild their shattered economies, and the new closeness of nations that had only recently been united in a common war effort, made multilateral trade the desirable and suitable option over the earlier bilateral network system.

Within two years of the end of World War II, two general arrangements were made under the hegemony of the United States. The first facilitated the building of the initial leg of the new tripod of interdependence—the new push to multilateral trade. And the second fostered the growth of the next leg—arrangements for multilateral payment for expanded trade.

The first of those two arrangements, and the more important, was the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade—or GATT. Negotiated in Switzerland in 1947 after a series of five international conferences, GATT consisted of an integrated set of bilateral trade agreements aimed at the abolition of quantitative trade restrictions and the reduction of tariff duties.

Successful even at the outset, GATT was amplified in 1949, 1951, 1956, 1961 and 1965. After less than twenty years, sixty-four contracting parties, accounting for four fifths of all world trade, had signed on the dotted line. At the end of 1990, the “Uruguay” round of GATT talks will involve 105 nations. Meanwhile, GATT negotiations have already covered scores of thousands of tradable commodities, including such “intellectual properties” as patents and trademarks.

Up to this point, GATT has been the organized method both of creating and of strengthening—of “evolving”—the first leg of the globalist tripod. But it has also served another function. It has been a powerful force in convincing the world at large that interdependence among nations is as natural as—well, as evolution; and as essential to our wellbeing as the winds that circle our common home.

Largely on the basis of GATT successes, in fact, it is now generally understood and accepted that any nation's fitness to survive—and certainly its strength to flourish—requires that it engage vigorously in trade with other nations. Swiss Confederation President Jean-Pascal Delamuraz put the case for this globalist view of international trade as a basic ingredient for the survival of the fittest. “Isolationism,” said Delamuraz, “(whether by retreats into nationalism, or by uncontrolled ‘North-South' confrontations) has been a calamity. In the future, it will be an infirmity.”

The nature of that infirmity is easily seen already, to take one of several possible examples, in Communist North Korea. Behind the severely
ailing economy of that nation, as compared with the flourishing condition of South Korea, lies the refusal of dictator Kim II Sung to allow his doctrinaire centralized economic system to join in international trade with “capitalist jackals.”

In true evolutionary fashion, the second leg of the globalist tripod creation is essential to the first. If trade is to be increasingly international, then there must be an increasingly effective and acceptable system of mutual payment. Hence the scramble on the part of Internationalists and Transnationalists to find some universally acceptable monetary system.

As the first leg of the tripod, international trade, got its modern footing with the help of GATT, so the second leg was set on the right path by means of an international agency established in the same year, 1947.

Because the basic agreements making this new monetary agency possible were signed in Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, they are often referred to collectively as the Bretton Woods Agreement(s). The agency itself, however, was named for its function: the International Monetary Fund, or IMF. Because the IMF from the beginning was affiliated with the United Nations, it depends to a certain extent on the “umbrella” influence of the U.N.

By 1967, thirty-one members had accepted IMF obligations—to maintain full convertibility of their currencies (freedom of exchange transfer for current transactions). By 1968, there were 107 members (many former colonies joined). The IMF board is composed of finance ministers of member countries. Five board members are appointed by countries with the largest quotas; fifteen are elected the IMF governors of groups of countries with quotas ranging from 3 percent to 1 percent.

In today's climate of the fast-paced development of international trade, it is difficult to mount a practical argument against the need for an improved international monetary system to keep that first leg from running into serious trouble. Indeed, just how essential to our common good is the strengthening of this second leg of the globalist tripod was made clear by the specter of worldwide financial chaos that lurked behind the so-called Black Monday market crash in New York on October 19, 1987.

Still, looking on the bright side, that crash did have at least one salutary effect in the eyes of true Internationalist and Transnationalist managers of our global welfare. It demonstrated to nonglobalist politicians and money managers that, like it or not, the individual private money markets of the United States, Europe and Japan have already been globalized. They have already evolved to a higher state of interdependence.

It is argued, therefore, that a more efficient pooling of methods than can be provided by such arrangements as GATT and IMF is urgently needed. A greater homogenization of procedures and a tighter coordination of aims are required for a world economy in which the equivalent of the annual GNP of the United States changes hands every day on the international capital markets.

Some members of these globalist groups speculate about a single acceptable monetary unit—the shadowy “Phoenix” and “Bank of Ultimate Resort” surface in this regard from time to time in futuristic Internationalist and Transnationalist discussions.

Also discussed is some more clever convertibility plan that can overcome the hurdles IMF struggles with in our present and separate national monetary systems. Perhaps an overall and truly global agreement can be fashioned by Internationalists with the savvy input of their Transnationalist brothers.

In the view of some of Pope John Paul's expert advisers in the field, there is a more likely starting point for improved monetary interdependence. In such a scenario, they see the emerging stock exchanges in Asia joining forces over time, and eventually producing an integrated securities market. In the view of these Vatican analysts, this would shatter the already deficient nationalist monetary mold once and for all. It would provide at least the example of a healthy regionalism. And it would represent a new stage on the road to the worldwide securities system the nations will ultimately have to establish if they are to reach the heights of socioeconomic interdependence envisioned for the common good in the evolutionary scheme of the Internationalist and Transnationalist groups.

Whatever improved global monetary system is finally fashioned, certainly it will rest on some overall agreement devised by the cooperative efforts of Internationalists and Transnationalists. And certainly it will ensure that tariffs and trade arrangements will benefit the poor nations as well as the rich. Otherwise the final leg of the tripod—global physical security—will be jeopardized to the point of toppling the tripod creation before it reaches its full evolutionary potential.

There is little need for Internationalists or Transnationalists to argue the case for the need to establish and maintain the improved physical security of nations. They do have their own specialized view of the role of physical security, however, as the third leg of their global tripod. For international trade and payment systems to work, we must all be secure from such things as robbery and blackmail, harassment, depredation,
destructive taxation and fines, and unfair competition. And such freedom depends in large part, and in plain words, on military security.

Our recent history supports this globalist view of military security. Hitherto, the only purpose of NATO—on which the United States alone spends $150 billion annually for the maintenance of American forces in Europe—has been to discourage any attempt by the Soviets to interfere by military invasion with the free-market economies of Western Europe.

Similarly, the booming economies of Japan, Germany and the United States—economies that anchor the present uneven evolutionary development of interdependence in the rest of the world—depend on that all-important international commodity, oil. Thus, when the possibility arose in the 1980s that the bloody Iran-Iraq war would seriously interrupt international trade in oil, the presence of American military and naval power in the Persian Gulf was required for the duration.

Pope John Paul is not the only international leader to understand that among the several difficulties admittedly faced by the Internationalist and Transnationalist groups regarding their tripod creation, including its attendant systems and structures, is its dependence on the now insecure and fast fading hegemonic position of the United States in trade, finance and military-political power.

Take the areas of trade and finance, represented by the first and second legs of the tripod. For the first four decades following World War II, global foreign direct investment (FDI) was dominated by the United States.

By 1987, however, that picture of U.S. dominance in both areas had totally changed. Of the $250 billion FDI, fully 75 percent came from a whole spectrum of nations outside the United States: $70 billion from the United Kingdom; $51 billion from the Netherlands; $30 billion from Japan; $20 billion from Canada; and $17.5 billion from West Germany.

Single trade items tell the same tale. In the decade of the nineties, 20 percent of the cars in the United States will be produced by Japanese-owned firms, with similar trends in a host of other areas, such as office equipment, consumer electronics and many luxury items.

Given the loss of hegemonic leadership to provide drive and stability, the multilateral system of trade favored until recently by both Internationalists and Transnationalists is now gravely affected by the recent emergence of bilateral and regional arrangements. Rightly or wrongly, many Internationalist voices in particular are raised now, stating that GATT is dead. And no less a figure than George Shultz—a leading light
for both the Internationalists and the Transnationalists—has said that “regional initiatives are playing an ever more important role in promoting free trade, closer economic cooperation and stronger growth.”

Even the preparations for the much-heralded 1992 single-market program for Europe, together with the successful conclusion of the free trade agreement (FTA) to he implemented over ten years between the United States and Canada, have both increased the trend favoring world trade resting on bilateral and regional agreements fashioned through government auspices.

Harvard professor Lester Thurow, for example, claimed in 1989 that what we need now is “a system to manage business between the three blocs [North America, Europe and the Asian Pacific], rather than global liberalization measures” (modeled on GATT). A prominent Internationalist himself, Thurow was speaking as the point man for a thoroughgoing Internationalist structure of world trade, and finance as well, as the best way to avoid calamity, given the urgent need to fill the current vacuum in global leadership.