The Age of Consent By George Monbiot

It's easy to sneer at Monbiot's plans for global change but, says Johann Hari, his critics will have to explain why their way is better

The movement that protested at the G8 summit last week - once known as "anti-globalisation", now better characterised as the global justice movement - has always been plagued by its inability to answer a sharp, brutal question: "Okay, pal. Put down your rocks and tell me - how would you run the world instead?" Too often, the response of activists has been an incoherent babble. Although they have forced some of the most important issues on earth on to the political agenda - third world debt, the need to suspend drug patenting in Aids-ravaged countries - they have not drawn a sensible wider picture.

Too many left-wingers adopt a crude oppositionist stance, while leaving their own positive agenda unspoken and therefore unchallengeable. Everything John Pilger writes is informed by the fact that he is an old-style Marxist revolutionary. Everything Noam Chomsky writes is informed by the fact that he is an anarchist. Yet, since they are not prepared to think out loud or to expound their own philosophies openly, their work is often uninteresting except for their (sometimes important) negative observations. George Monbiot, in contrast, puts his political philosophy out front. He is interested in trying to articulate a road map to a better world, and offering an honest answer to that question which has been rendering the global justice movement hollow until now.

He is superbly blunt about the failings of the movement so far: his dissection (and destruction) of anarchist arguments is the best I have ever read. This book is, perhaps a little self-consciously, a Communist Manifesto for the global justice movement, a weighty political vision designed to supersede the movement's own often flimsy constructive agendas.

His central idea is simple and revolutionary. "Everything," he explains, "has been globalised except our consent. Democracy alone has been confined to the nation state. It stands at the national border, suitcase in hand, without a passport." It has become a boring social science cliché to say that we live in a world of rapid economic and cultural globalisation. Yet Monbiot upsets the low drone of sociologists with a series of rat-a-tat-tat demands: why should political globalisation be left out of the equation? Why is the nation state the sole unit within which democracy can exist? Why should democracy not be practised at the same level as economics and culture: our planet itself?

We live, he argues, in an "Age of Coercion". The United Nations and the inter- national architecture established after the Second World War have not prevented the rule of the world by a handful of rich men (indeed, some aspects of that settlement entrenched this very position). Within a growing number of nations, democracy is now practised, and we offer our consent to our governments in elections. But at the international level we live in near-anarchy. We do not offer our consent to the way the world beyond our national boundaries is run, because nobody has troubled to ask the people of the world if we like the set-up that prevails. Nations and rich corporations coerce others, without any reference to the global will. It doesn't have to be like this, Monbiot believes. The guiding principle in international relations should no longer be intergovernmental deals, or simple military might, or hard cash. It should be democracy. The world's institutions "should be run by and for their people", and when this happens, we will have inaugurated a new "Age of Consent".

It is almost painfully easy to dismiss this as the well-meaning platitudes of a sandal-wearing leftie. "Yes, yes," you can almost hear Murdoch-flunky reviewers saying, "it's a jolly nice idea, and in a perfect world..." But we must remember that we already have institutions of global governance: the UN, the World Bank, the IMF. This is not a question of madly creating some global government out of nowhere. In the absence of democracy, the rich (sometimes broadly benevolent, like Tony Blair, sometimes mostly malevolent, like the baby-milk touting Nestlé) have filled the vacuum on the global stage. There is no conspiracy, and no shame: they are quite open about it, and behave rationally in their own interests. The question is not whether to have global institutions. Rather, it is: to whom should the institutions of global governance be accountable? The rich, or the people over whom these institutions rule? If you give the former answer, as Monbiot explains, "that is your choice, but please do not consider yourself a democrat. If you consider yourself a democrat, you must surely acknowledge the need for radical change."

Monbiot has been extremely careful to avoid these charges of wild idealism and impracticality. "I have sought to suggest nothing that cannot be achieved with our own resources, starting from our current circumstances. Too many of the schemes some members of this movement have put forward appear to be designed for another time or another planet." So how does it work? Simple. The first and most straightforward plank to his vision is a global parliament. This would have no sovereignty or power to impose its decisions. It would simply have the moral force that comes from being a democratic body. This sounds wishy-washy again, but consider how keen politicians have been to court the Porto Allegre gatherings of anti-globalisation activists each year, and these gatherings are self-selecting and have no obvious legitimacy. Would they not be 10 times more anxious to court the world's global assembly?

Ah, but how would this assembly pay for itself? Monbiot offers a menu of practical options. Um, but what about countries which are not democracies? How could the people of Saudi Arabia vote? What about China? Easy, Monbiot says: just as we have with the International Criminal Court, we'll have to start without them. New democracies will be invited to enter. It is not enough to sneer at this huge project, Monbiot points out. You have to explain why your vision is better. Can we honestly say that the unimpeded government of the rich is preferable to one checked by a global parlia- ment, however imperfect it might be?

But this is only one plank to Monbiot's reforms. He goes on to offer a vision for restructuring the current, market fundamentalist model of world trade in favour of one which promotes real development in the third world, as opposed to the phoney development model which so catastrophically collapsed last year in Argentina. There is no space to explore these ideas here, although they have many strengths. There are, however, three weaknesses to The Age of Consent that must be considered.

Firstly, Monbiot does not provide a mechanism for spreading democracy into nations living under totalitarianism. This is a big hole in his theory. His vision is one which is explicitly designed to hem in the USA; but it is an America committed to spreading the values of its own revolution which is the best hope for many peoples on earth to rid themselves of their dictators. A global democracy where most of the world is excluded by their own autocratic rulers is scarcely worth having. His notion that underground elections might be held in countries like Saudi Arabia and North Korea is plainly impractical, and his idea that the exiled community might vote on behalf of their oppressed countrymen is a poor alternative for actually seeking to spread democracy.

Secondly, his notion that class and (ultimately) global identities are superseding nationalism is, I am sure, mistaken. A "species awareness", a sense that, as humans, we are all in it together will inevitably have to overlap with, rather than replace, national identities. Monbiot's contention otherwise is one of the few places where the utopian charge against him will stick. Thirdly, the only point at which Monbiot strikes a false note is when he vaguely predicts that capitalism will ultimately be "destroyed". This smacks of him trying to retain his radical constituency rather than an offer a plausible prescription, especially given the fact that it follows his passionate and persuasive defence of the ability of regulated market-based trade to increase wealth in poor countries.

But these criticisms merely mark the fact that this is a weighty book which must be engaged with. At last, the global justice movement has found a vision as expansive and planet-wide as that of the American neoconservatives. Let the battle of ideas commence.