Carlos Fuentes - This I Believe - An A to Z of a Life

And today, we repeat with them:

If both nationalist ideology and the very concept of the nation are in crisis, what new ideology and structures will keep society aloft? What is the great contemporary social wound, and what kind of sutures will close it? What will we call this still nameless process that will allow us to create a new legality for a new reality?

How can the national and collective centers of identification be replaced?

We would like to think that as nationalist moments become diluted, internationalist moments will fall into place.

But things haven’t happened that way.

The case of Kosovo demonstrates the peril and doubt that plague the new international order.

The possibility of armed intervention in a delinquent state is provided for in the United Nations Charter. Not provided for, however, is the notion of a regional organization — NATO, in this case — assuming the right to intervene, overriding the international judicial order, sowing confusion and insecurity, and promoting a de facto right to interfere.

A new international order will not be possible if the strongest parties are allowed to intervene at whim, for that will generate dilemmas that will only jeopardize justice, security, and the very powers behind such intervention.

This does not mean that a solution is impossible.

On the contrary. The Balkan crisis calls upon all of us to introduce reforms to an international system created for and by a multitude of victorious nations at the end of World War II, whose goal was to confer greater representation and greater mobility on the various international institutions.

Once, when I was in Rome, I had a conversation with the prime minister of Italy at the time, Massimo D’Alema, who was convinced that NATO needed to take action in Kosovo. He confessed that although he had moved ahead with the conviction that he was on the side of the right, he had nevertheless been quite distressed about it and above all was aware that had action been taken a decade earlier, tragedy could have been averted through diplomatic and judicial means. “This has not been the case,” D’Alema said, adding that to prevent a Kosovo from occurring again, the international system would require reforms, through the creation of — and I quote the Italian premier—“crisis prevention instruments, based not only on military means, but on political and economic resources as well.”

In other words: a new legality for a new reality.

Now we find ourselves facing a situation of diluted international jurisdiction. But at the same time we find that national sovereignties, once the nemesis of people’s rights, have also grown pale and weak in the face of an onslaught that was unforeseeable half a century ago.

This is called globalization, a movement in which so many men and women on the threshold of the twenty-first century have deposited both their hopes and their fears.

Globalization subjugates and almost categorically rejects the nationalist ideology upon which the modern world was founded, but it also poses some critical questions to be answered within each individual national community, the public, private, and third sectors, the business world, culture, democracy, and the state itself.

The political responses to this transition from nation-state to globalized world will not come quickly, as was the case with the nation-state and the rise of sovereignty during the transition from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance. It is worth noting that the Middle Ages did not create a vertical, unaccountable system for the Christian community. The system evolved — and evolved into what would come afterward — through a conflict between temporal and religious power. The battles between Gregory VII and Henri IV, Gregory IX and Frederick II, and Boniface VIII and Philip IV of France created a tension between the Church and the state absent in Byzantine Russia and its identification between the czar and the Church, the Caesaro-Papism that lasted until the arrival of the party-state symbiosis under Lenin and Stalin. Democracy was born out of Western medieval tension, as the temporal sphere broke free from the spiritual sphere and both found themselves obliged to accept and respect the configuration of local powers, political powers (legal systems, courts, municipalities), and social powers (corporations), all of which introduced the possibility of a sovereign nation-state as well as a new round of debates concerning this novel issue. Politics, as far as Machiavelli is concerned, is an autonomous and amoral realm. For Bodin, it cannot be separated from sovereignty, which excludes all pluralistic participation. Hobbes invokes a naturalist absolutism, and only with the advent of the Enlightenment (and before that, with English parliamentarianism) do social classes, corporations, and eventually individuals become actors on the political stage.

Are we now in the throes of a movement comparable to such political upheaval? Will we be able to establish an international order that can control the lawless jurisdictions of the market, of drug trafficking, of migration? Will we have international bodies that we can rely on to regulate these processes? Markets that will be forced to obey regulations governing social welfare and the development of the poorest nations? Decriminalization of international drug trafficking, which will deny the cartels their extravagant and illicit profits? Controlled and codified immigration policies protected by labor laws that recognize the invaluable contribution that immigrants make to the societies that receive them? Some indicators point in this direction. A universal agreement on the sanctity of human rights, a refusal to allow the statute of limitations to be used in cases of crimes against humanity, and the International Court on Human Rights can deny impunity to those who shamelessly violate these rights and help to foment a culture of international justice that could be applied to the world’s markets, which would then be forced to adhere to social welfare regulations and political responsibility. The creation of the International Criminal Court (the Rome statute) will crown this effort by investing politics with a legal basis and punishing the violation of both.

All of this will strengthen the nation-state politically, just as the events of the very early twenty-first century have proven. Strong economies are only possible with strong states — not big states, simply regulatory ones. And strong states are only possible with strong societies that demand adherence to political mandates and regulations regarding transparency and accountability, societies that not only hold periodical elections, as Pierre Schori notes, but can fill the voids between elections as well: to revoke mandates, hold referenda, demand parliamentary responsibility on the part of governmental ministers, and provide for an independent public prosecutor who is empowered to bring to justice any and all abuses of power.

Politics is so much more than an election-day event. We need to increase political participation, broaden access to communications, and ensure that people understand and defend their rights. Politics must become a daily exercise of rights and vigilance. More than ever — and despite the fact that it is unpopular to quote Hegel — politics have a thesis (law), an antithesis (ethics), and a synthesis (legality and morality). And to counterbalance Hegel, there is perhaps no one better than Burke to remind us that politics is an association, not only in an economic sense but “in all art, in all virtue, in all perfection.”

The sum of my political hopes does not mean I am blind to the dangers of the proliferation of criminal jurisdictions beyond all control, or to the notion that one single superpower might jeopardize the world’s will to create entities for justice, development, and environmental protection, or to the possibility that in the name of a supposed “clash of civilizations” entire cultures can be demonized.