It went down well in Boston but will it wash in Washington?

The speech in Boston gave Gordon Brown the opportunity to remind Americans of their global responsibilities — that ‘acting alone we cannot establish justice throughout the world. We cannot ensure America’s domestic tranquillity’. (John F. Kennedy, Independence Day speech 1962),  and ‘each of us is our brother’s keeper’ (Martin Luther King). These thoughts went down well in Boston. He also quoted General Marshall at Harvard in 1948. Now was the time for a new Marshall Plan, with the rich countries working together to make the world more prosperous and secure.

Americans were reassured that they and Europeans shared values and that the balance of power was giving way to a world of interdependence and a truly global society.  And the emergence onto the world stage of India and China, and the re-emergence of Russia, would suggest that the balance of power was not yet dead.  But Brown spelled out that if things were to improve the world needed US leadership.

The UN system should develop its role as peace-builder after a civil war and there should be a post-crisis recovery fund — a Peace-building Commission and a new Fund, was established in 2006. Stronger arrangements to deal with abuses of human rights were needed. — in 2005 the Security Council and General Assembly both accepted the Responsibility to Protect doctrine, mandating intervention and set up a new Human Rights Council.

There should be more efforts to encourage civil society and train police and security forces — already being done. More development help should be given — the UN set up  a new Development Fund in 2006 and was trying a unified approach to development. It was good to give these tasks an extra push, but they were not the New Deal which Brown claimed.  It was also disingenuous to suggest that the reforms he was proposing would have helped avoid the Rwandan genocide or the tragedy in Darfur. These failures resulted from the lack of will of governments, which is still lacking; inadequacies in the mechanisms of the UN were largely irrelevant.  

Brown challenged the US on a number of counts. A list of anti-terrorist functions for the UN sounded like a good idea but the US was unlikely to accept any system requiring them to share intelligence, which rather spoils the UN’s efforts in this area.

Brown bluntly told the Americans that they should accept specific targets for the reduction of global GHG emissions, long resisted by the US. He was also right to remind them of the need for a global trade deal that ‘benefitted rich and poor countries alike’.

Some proposals from earlier Brown speeches came up again: the World Bank should take on a stronger role on environmental questions, linking its development work to environmental targets and the IMF should be more active in alerting the world to impending monetary and financial crisis. But how could the IMF succeed when national regulatory authorities had so abysmally failed?

The pitch was made to a liberal New England audience and cleverly enlisted the right iconic authorities — the Kennedies, Martin Luther King, General Marshall, etc.  Harvard University was entrusted with the job of researching the proposals.

China, India, Brazil, Mexico and South Africa should be brought ‘into the heart of the debate’, and offered a greater role in the G8, the World Bank, the IMF and the Security Council.  All this was good news for the Boston audience.  However, the Bush people regarded attempts to strengthen the multilateral system with suspicion.  They had proclaimed the virtues of US unilateralism, and the right not to be restrained by global organizations.

They would rather the Security Council remained unreformed, and that the main global economic institutions remained American fiefdoms. And the Bush administration had been lukewarm towards attempts to beef up economic development.

Nevertheless, the Brown speech made the right noises at this stage in the warm up to the US Presidential election in November. If this was the intention it was both timely and shrewd, and it was addressed to the right audience. The next US administration should  return to its role of leadership in the global multilateral system. It was a good idea to remind a sympathetic American audience of what was at stake.

Paul Taylor is Emeritus Professor of International Relations, LSE and author of ‘International Organization in the Age of Globalization’ (Continuum, 2003).