David Miliband: Multilateralism can only take us so far – we need the nation state
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Independent Minds
Most politicians are starting their speeches with quotations of Obama, and I want to do the same. He said, "the world has changed, and we must change with it".
Obvious, but it's important how you define the change, and I just want to say that three things define the change for me. One is global real-time interdependence, the second is the shift in the balance of power from governments and corporations to individuals. I call it the "civilian surge", and I believe that that shift brought about by the freedom with which information and ideas move around the world is very, very significant indeed. The third is the economic crisis, and in my judgment there are two very different forces pulling in opposite directions as a result of it. One force is pulling toward more nationalist protection. The opposite is a renewal of multilateralism.
It's not that "we're all multilateralists now", but unless multilateralism is renewed, we're not going to tackle these problems. If you think about most of the multilateral institutions, above all the UN, it was created to stop one state abusing the rights of another, and that remains an important function of a multilateral system.
However, the international system was not set up to take care of weak states. I spend a lot of my time thinking about Afghanistan and Pakistan. There is not an absence of multilateral engagement in Afghanistan. We've got a wide range of institutions seeking to support good governance by the Afghan government – no one wants Afghanistan as a new colony – rather to bolster a sovereign government.
We require a regularising of the strong states and their behaviour, and a supporting of weak ones. After that, the great insecurity is the absence of a mechanism to deliver public goods. Economic stability is a global public good and climate change (or rather its global mitigation) is a global public good. If you thought the world trade deal was a tough negotiation, climate change is much more complex.
There is a strong feeling in Europe that we need an era of responsible sovereignty to address all this. The nation-states are still the locus of political activity – they must know their limits, and know when to work together.
The Foreign Secretary was speaking at Chatham House on Tuesday
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Comments
The Taliban were invited guests, remember to GW Bush's family ranch in Texas several years ago. But they refused to allow the United States control of their country for the gas and oil pipelines which the US was salivating over, from the central asian republics.
So what did your masters do? They declared the Taliban the enemy, it didn't matter what excuse they used - as long as they got to invade and destabilise and destroy another nation to get what they had their eyes on.
You manage to ignore the carnage in Afghanistan - poor folk don't have rights, do they? Impoverished, foreign looking people, living far away don't even have the right to life. But you dress it all up as false patriotism.
One million female foetuses are aborted every year in China because of the one child state policy. But of course you don't invade China over the convenient issue of women's rights, now do you?
Gaza is now a graveyard.
Your friends, Israel committed mass murder against 1.5 million Palestinians in Gaza.
You didn't lift the blockade but spouted the drivel we hear from the Israeli war machine instead.
You spectacularly FAILED to condemn or stop arming the Israelis. Infact you have no intention of stopping Israel from acting in this barbaric way again. Have your friends in high places stopped arming Israel? Of course not. Why not?
Miliband you lack all credibility. Stop using excuses to bring ongoing genocide against the Afghan people and God knows where else. Stop using mindless US arguments to go and bomb the hell out of which ever country refuses to let the Americans invade and control them. You and your US "friends" are responsible for creating more carnage and terror, ironic isn't it? Rather silent over the Israelis destroying southern Lebanon in 2006, too, weren't you?
Unfortunately your cowardice is clear for all to see.
Haven't you visited the Gazans yet? Why not go and see for yourself how Britain,the EU, US have all successfully armed Israel to the teeth to carry out this mass murder?
You must be feeling SO proud.
The current unfair capitalist economic system is based on favouring the US nation state. Prior to US hegemony, the nation state was the prefered model of European imperialists who openly used military force to take what they wanted to better their nations at the expense of nations considered lesser. Many of these 'lesser' nations were not even nation states. So the Europeans made them into nation states, thus bringing presumed European higher values to the rest of the world.
Hubris, arrogance and ultimately prejudice are component forces shaping the nation state. "I will take at your expense". It assumes a balance of power and resource that swings between favour and disfavour, success and failure, pitting nation against nation in a quagmire of fruitless competition, misplaced production and conflict.
Islam promotes the concept of the Ummah, of a broader nation of people joined together by a shared experience of travelling through life. A spiritual nation. This is the fundamental challenge to the model of secular-capitalist-democracy that requires the maintenance of the nation state to feed its empty competitive materialism in this century. I encourage all people to take time to read about Islam, to visit mosques and to destroy the myths that abound.
And what was all that verbal manure about "change"?