Question: Is the world community getting closer to or farther away from avoiding human-rights abuses?

Method: literature survey, monitoring newscasts, subscribing to online news services and searching the global Internet.

Points left open: Globalization is transferring power from the nation-state to multinational corporations, MNCs. But MNCs will still be accountable to their share- and stakeholders. Just as nation-states are intermediaries between the world community and their voter constituencies, so are MNCs intermediaries between their nations-states and their stakeholders. Emerging nations spurred by both economic and demographic growth, especially the Far Eastern "Tiger" states, are developing new forms of more-or-less democratic governance. It remains to be seen, however, and falls beyond the scope of this study, what forms of corporate governance will emerge among MNCs' stakeholders in the Far East.

This problem complex calls for a multidisciplinary approach: solutions are sought mainly through economics, history/ government / political science, geography, international law and diplomatic negotiation techniques. But also the behavioral sciences and cultural disciplines are important in understanding the problems involved, and include comparative religion and ethics. Likewise the natural sciences have an important role to play, in that the central climate problems are defined by chemistry and biology, while the central energy question is also answered by technocrats and physicists (nuclear power).

Why is the climate problem central? It is illustrative of the many "issues" that are going global, demanding new solutions, which involve use of some part of the global commons.

Furthermore, recently some innovative approaches to the climate problem have put it in relation to basic issues of human dignity and property rights. Proponents of these approaches make the widely understandable assertion that every person on the planet has a right to use the atmosphere part of the global commons, both for breathing and for the economic development associated with the oxidation of fossil fuels. The climate change negotiations have brought forth a mechanism designed to compensate financially for differences in the resource-allocation strategies preferred by groups at different stages of development.

Ideally, if the developing countries in the South do not choose to use their rights now to generate carbon dioxide, CO2 (or more comprehensively classified as greenhouse gas GHG) emissions, so the theory goes, they could sell the rights until they reach the state of development when they, or their children, would some day be in a position to use more electricity. With the proceeds they could, in the meantime, accumulate enough credits to pay for new equipment to provide their future power supply with a higher energy efficiency. Combined-cycle power plants are more expensive than conventional coal-fired technology, but the advantage of the more efficient new equipment is that it makes possible marginal costs of GHG abatement which are considerably lower than what would otherwise have to be expected if the South used conventional technology. Higher efficiency would help minimize the projected rise in GHG associated with growing populations. GHG abatement by means of new equipment in the South is also cheaper than making further efficiency increases in the North would be.

The international negotiating community has to cope with a lack of trust between the North (OECD) and the South (G-77).

TREND: WRI proposes to overcome this impasse by taking a new approach to the problem of climate change, re-evaluating guilt from the Industrial Revolution and potential for remediation, and to allow the South to get onboard by using a new indicator, GHG intensity.

With the negotiating partners N + S, each suspects, or in some cases even accuses, the other of free riding on itself. Both face the classic prisoners' dilemma preventing better cooperation.

TREND: Pessimists claim there is no comfortable way out.

The background: globalization

Globalization is resulting from such factors as:

• the end of the Cold War,
• weaknesses in the voting system that give the advantage to low-tax proponents,
• weaknesses in the government bureaucracy that act as disincentives on effectiveness

Globalization is causing a roll-back of government capabilities. Governments are being forced to cut back services and to lower their borders. Meanwhile multinational and footloose transnational businesses (MNCs and TNCs) and nongovernmental organizations NGOs are gaining power vis à vis the traditional nation state.

In addition, technological change and lowering of communication and transport costs are

leaving anarchy among individual countries' domains of sovereignty.

Globalization is exacerbating inequality, helping rich countries to grow faster than poor ones.

"Playing fields are far from level, and access to markets is hardly free and competitive. ..For both rich and poor countries, globalization appears to be reducing the space available for the pursuit of autonomous policies. Even accountability to voters seems to be diminishing as politicians of every hue must increasingly placate global markets and ensure competitiveness" (Rao, in: Kaul, p.72). Environmental and social conditions are likewise extreme, posing a challenge for the application of any standard criteria for a level considered the minimum acceptable one across cultures.

TREND: UNDP's Kaul introduces a new paradigm.

A third possible more general perspective might be to take one of the central issues in the debate on globalization involving one of the experts, MIT's Paul Krugman. Krugman is regarded by many as an advocate of free trade for stressing the wide applicability of early 19th Century economist David Ricardo's theory of comparative advantage. Jan-Peter Olters, though, points out that Krugman criticized the term "competitiveness" (the German term being "Standortwettbewerb" coined by Dr. Herbert Giersch, former president of the Institute for International Economics, Kiel) in Krugman's 1996 book Pop Internationalism as being alien to economics because it says nothing about the central concern, welfare. Olters explains that the term was originally used only in a corporate context, but then hijacked by the business lobby and applied to nation states. There it had come to mean the ability to attract investment. This distinction was documented in Olters' article "The Unfriendly Competitiveness Whip" in World Economic Affairs, Winter 1999, p.78. The "whip" is itself a term reminiscent of the "golden straitjacket" image mentioned throughout Friedman, Thomas L.: The Lexus and the Olive Tree: Understanding Globalization, New York: Farrar Straus Giroux , 1999. Konrad von Moltke of Dartmouth and the Free Univ. of Amsterdam concurs that the idea of "Standortwettbewerb" has been overplayed (per personal communication with him). Consequently, competitiveness appears to be less appropriate as a central issue in the debate on globalization, clearing the way for an alternative key concept such as Kaul's global public goods to become all the more useful.

According to the new book coedited by the UNDP's Inge Kaul many erstwhile domestic issues are becoming new hybrid domestic/ global issues, as more and more "internal sovereignty" (Reinicke, 1998, p.57) is eroded or surrendered to the global marketplace. A "public good" is a concept comparable to the "commons" described in Garrett Hardin's seminal 1968 article entitled "The Tragedy of the Commons" (in: Science 162, Dec., pp.1243-1248). National public goods are today being continually degraded, while their counterparts, global public goods GPGs, remain in short supply. GPGs nonetheless could serve as a means of operationalizing a reform of globalization. GPGs define the issues to be addressed in the anarchic sphere among the sovereignties of nation states. Regimes (Young, 1997, p.5-6), themselves comprising a form of "intermediate global public good" (Kaul, p.454), are increasingly needed to fill the gaps among nations, where new forms of global governance could evolve.

The economic forces fuelled by globalization are threatening to become a "race to the bottom" in the environmental and labor standards practised in many developing countries. The more highly developed North wonders how to improve conditions in the South. "The crucial issue is whether the use of trade sanctions, formalized in the context of trade agreements, to accelerate the development and enforcement of labour standards in developing countries would be effective, beneficial and sustainable.... [and whether] trade clubs should be the vehicle to enforce them," Birdsall, Nancy and Robert Z. Lawrence: "Deep Integration and Trade Agreements: Good for Developing Countries?" In: Kaul, Inge et al.1999, pp.143-144.

TREND: This concern is very controversial at the trade talks in Geneva as of Summer 1999. The U.S. wants labor and environment standards included, but UN Sec.Gen.Kofi Annan and the International Chamber of Commerce ICC have advocated putting such issues into side agreements. The EU called for putting investment rules in future agreements, and doing a sustainability assessment of the measures in future agreements (see also details on its position in the coming sections). "...European leaders tend to oppose the U.S. thrust for a world regime of free capital markets," adds Wade, Robert: "The Coming Fight over Capital Flows", In: Foreign Policy, Winter 1998-99, p.52, http://www.foreignpolicy.com, where the great "Asian Crisis" of 1999 and resulting "battle over capital controls" are discussed.