The Ministry for the Future

by Kim Stanley Robinson

  All this was ominous enough, but it kept occurring to Mary that these people’s autonomous power might now actually put them in position to help enact a quick solution to the carbon problem, should they choose to join that effort. Even if they saved the world to save their privilege, maybe that didn’t matter. Justice being not at this moment her first priority. So she went to London.

  The Bank of England leaders were coolly unappreciative of her plan. Likely to cause inflation; could expose the central banks to currency-trading pirates; would create exposure to market pressure. Not sure how that could be avoided. When Mary reminded them that they had quantitatively eased trillions of pounds into existence when needed to save the banks, they nodded; their job was to save the banks. To quantitatively ease trillions of pounds into existence to save the world: not their job. That would take legislation.

  The following week Mary went to Brussels. The European Central Bank, a much younger institution than the Bank of England, founded in the late twentieth century as a financial instrument of the European Union, offered to her representatives who were if anything even worse than the English. The group Mary met with was formed for the most part of German and French men. These were very sophisticated, intelligent, polite, and arrogant people. Their attitude toward Mary was dismissive in the extreme. For one, she headed an agency with no financial power and little legal leverage; the ministry was some kind of idealistic gesture to make people think extraordinary efforts were being made when really they weren’t. And as an Irish woman she was doubly damned, more for being Irish than for being a woman; ever since Thatcher and Merkel and Lagarde, a few women had wedged their way into the top echelons of European and financial power; Mary admired all these women, despite her hatred for Thatcher’s politics, and of course none of them had managed to crack the top by way of being progressives. But Irish— no. A colony, a little country, one of the PIIGS, one of the many little piggie countries of Europe who had to pick up the crumbs of the big countries, and had no chance of achieving the gleaming polish of one of the big countries, which was really to say, Germany and France. These two old antagonists still fought for control of Europe, but it was a battle of two, the rest of the world was irrelevant, or at most instruments to be used. And somehow the little countries could never sort out their differences and band together to become a united front of their own. That kind of cooperation would be asking too much of nationalism and sovereignty. So the two big frenemies stood on the peak and regarded the rest with indulgent condescension at best, brusque command normally, and brutal arm-twisting at worst. Which of course was better than brutal military assaults, as in the past, but still not very satisfactory when sitting in a room with them. Thousand-euro suits: Mary did not fail to let her Irish disdain for such peacockery show. She could convey that disdain with a look while still being ostensibly polite, but of course it didn’t help in terms of getting her what she wanted. She saw very clearly that the European Central Bank was entirely focused on price stability and increasing its power in the world to carry out that task. If they were asked to adjust the interest rate half a point to save the world, they wouldn’t do it. Outside their purview.

  The People’s Bank of China on the other hand was a state-owned operation that held the most assets of any central bank on Earth, approaching four trillion US dollars; and although they were independent compared to most Chinese divisions of government, they were still ruled by the State Council. There was no point in talking to the Chinese bank heads; she would need to speak to the finance minister directly, and even better would be the premier and president, of course. In fact they were the strongest hope for her plan; they were not doctrinaire, not fixed on ideas from neoliberalism or any other political economy; practice is the sole criterion of truth, they said. Cross the river by feeling the stones, they said. If she could convince them of the worth of the idea, they wouldn’t give a damn what the other banks thought.

  But it would take a lot of central banks buying in to make this work.

  Actually, thinking about that, she set Janus Athena to studying this. If the Chinese bank were to back it alone, could it work? No, J-A got back to her to say; no one bank could expose themselves to the market that way. Even China, even the US; these were just the biggest Lilliputians, in terms of any given entity trying to tie down the global economy. It would take a gang of them.

  So, it wasn’t going to happen. The bankers were useless. They would look at each other and see the mutual lack of enthusiasm in their peers, and hide behind that. If the world cooked and civilization fell apart, it wouldn’t be their fault, even though they were funding the disaster every step of the way.

  Something was going to have to make them do it.

  The “structural adjustment programs” enforced by the World Bank on the developing countries caught in the debt crises at the end of the twentieth century set the conditions for what became the world order in the twenty-first century. These SAPs were instruments of the postwar American economic empire, which was unlike the older empires in that it did not insist on ownership of its economic colonies; it only owned their debts and their profits, no more than that. The best empire yet, in terms of efficiency, and the neoliberal order was all about efficiency, in its purest economic definition: the speed and frictionlessness with which money moved from the poor to the rich.

  So there was a reason it was called the Washington Consensus. Its SAP requirements, made of any country that wanted a bail-out in the form of further loans, came only by adhering to the following conditions: a reduction in public spending; tax reforms, especially reducing taxes on corporations; privatization of state-owned enterprises; market-based interest and currency exchange rates, with no government controls on these; a set of strong investor rights, so investors could no longer be given haircuts (the long hair provisions, so-called); and the massive deregulation of everything: market activities, business practices, labor and environmental protections.

  Even though these structural adjustment programs were widely criticized, and judged a failure by some analysts at the end of the twentieth century, they were the template for dealing with the EU crises in the small southern countries, and were inflicted on Greece in full to scare Portugal, Ireland, Spain, and Italy, not to mention the new EU countries from eastern Europe, at the prospect of what the EU (meaning in this case France and Germany) would do to them if they tried to create and hew to a line of their own. Join the EU, obey the European Central Bank; which meant, obey Germany and France. As Germany’s economy was about twice the size of France’s, what people around Europe took all this to mean was that Germany had finally conquered them all, no matter what it had looked like at the end of World War Two. Just as America had conquered the world by way of finance rather than arms, Germany had conquered Europe using the same methods— in some cases, using even the same capital. Because Germany had been very good at being a client state of America though the course of the Cold War. Now that the Cold War was over and Germany was in economic terms stronger than Russia, it could detach itself from the US a bit, cleverly pretending to be a client when it was convenient, but by and large pursuing its own course. This was obvious to everyone in Europe, but America’s narcissistic myopia regarding the rest of the world didn’t allow it to see that very well.

  So a visit to Berlin was for Mary always a fraught venture. The bankers and finance ministers were a little less glossy and supercilious than in France and Brussels, but even more ominous in their burgher certainty that nothing could ever change. The Bundesbank, Germany’s central bank, had been formed in the postwar period precisely to stabilize West Germany’s status as a faithful and effective wingman for the American superstate, and given the incredible traumas of the two wars and the period between, it came as no surprise to Mary to learn that in the documents associated with the formation of the Bundesbank, the “preservation of the stability of the currency” was a “moral and legal necessity.” The independence of the state bank was given a constitutional sta
tus that included the suggestion that currency stability be included among the catalogue of basic human rights. Life, liberty, and low inflation rates! Well, this was the country that had seen its currency blown to smithereens. Lose a war that you started and the conditions imposed on your surrender could include reparations you were in no position to refuse, that would damn your population unto the seventh generation. No wonder the Germans who had lived through that had said never again. “The economy creates public law,” as the founding documents of the Bundesbank put it. That Mary saw this as exactly backwards was enough to give her pause; was it some kind of stealthy German acceptance of Marx over Hegel to say that first there is practice and then theory? She had no idea; she was not a philosopher, nor a historian. Just a working diplomat; but working diplomats tended to believe in cause and effect, in plan and execution. That’s what governance was, that was bureaucracy, even economy. The laws defined the behaviors that were legal. Possibly it was chicken and egg, but never was it effect causing cause— that would scramble the definitions of the words beyond comprehension.

  Anyway she was in Berlin, feeling oppressed by these Germans who had won by losing and then adapting to that loss, and trying again by different means. Maybe now they didn’t want to rule the world; they only wanted to defend Germany by way of an active diplomacy, influencing Europe and the world as much as they could given their smallish population and economy. In which project they were doing a good job. So she, like them, tried to ignore their spectacularly awful history and focus on the moment at hand. Central banks, she urged them, quantitatively easing the world off carbon! Exertion of state sovereignty over the global market, by way of international cooperation of nation-states big enough to face down the market; even to alter the market. To fucking buy the market. She said this politely but urgently.

  They stared at her. One of them wrinkled his forehead, a deep cleft appeared between his eyebrows. He spoke. China’s central bank, the richest of them all, had four trillion US dollars in assets. All the central banks combined held about fifteen trillion in assets. The world’s annual business, the GWP, was eighty trillion a year, and in the depths of the high-frequency dark pools, something like three trillion dollars got traded every day. Even admitting that these last were in some senses fictional dollars, it was still very clear: the market was bigger than all the nation-states put together.

  Mary shook her head. Even if market and state were two parts of a single system, that single system was ruled by law; and the laws were made by the nation-states; they could therefore change the laws, that was sovereignty, that was where seigniorage and legitimacy and ultimately social trust and value resided. The market was constructed by, and parasitic on, that structure of laws.

  The market can buy the laws, one of them suggested.

  The market is impervious to law, another added. It is its own law, it is human nature, it is the way of the world.

  Mary said, It’s just a legal system. We change laws every day.

  Central banks only exist to stabilize currencies and prices, to curb inflation and keep interest rates a viable tool for that.

  Mary said, Together the central banks often advise their legislatures to change tax levels as needed to stabilize money. That means changing the laws.

  Legislatures do what they want.

  Mary said, Legislatures pass financial laws that the central banks tell them to pass. They’re scared of finance, they let their quants write the laws in that realm. If you advised it, they would do it. Especially if you advised them to increase their own power over finance!

  The Germans were practical people, their looks said. It was an idea worth considering, to see if it would help Germany.

  This was not the worst response Mary had gotten, so she left the meeting feeling drained, and in serious need of a drink, following a session in the gym punching things; but not as depressed as she had been after some of the other meetings. Germans: they had seen the worst. They knew how bad it could get. Even though these were the grandchildren of the ones who had lived through it, or now mostly the great-grandchildren, there was still a cultural memory they could not escape, a memory that would last centuries. There was repression, of course, but wherever there is repression there is also the return of the repressed, often twisted and compressed by the repression into something even more dangerous to the self. Maybe that meant that Germans were focused on staying safe to a degree that had turned dangerous. They wouldn’t be the first.

  Then on to Russia. Russia’s central bank was almost as much a state operation as China’s. Half of its profits went to the Russian state, by constitutional design. It owned sixty percent of Sberbank, the country’s largest commercial bank, and one hundred percent of the country’s national reinsurance company. Their central bankers were very intent on protecting Russian interests above all. It made sense to Mary; and the men who met her were friendly. Any country that could produce Tatiana probably had some good in it. And Russians too had seen the worst that could happen. Their empire had imploded on them within living memory, and before that they had suffered the extreme trauma of the world war. They had reasons to hate the Germans, also to hate the Americans, to a lesser extent; really to hate everybody, you might say. Russia against the world: that had been part of their collective psyche for as long as they had been aware of the world. But their own problems absorbed most of their attention most of the time; they were a world apart, to some extent. So many places had been like that for most of human time, and were like that still— everyone living in the past of their own region’s psyche to one extent or another, because they all lived in their languages, and if your native language was anything but English, you were estranged to one degree or other from the global village. Globalization was many things— including a reality, in that they all lived on one shared planet in which borders were historical fantasies— but it was also a form of Americanization, of soft power imperialism combined with economic dominance, in that the US still had seventy percent of the capital assets of the world secured in its banks and companies, even though it had only five percent of the world’s population. So the globalization determined by physical reality could never be escaped, and would only become more prevalent as the biosphere problems got worse, while the globalization of American imperialism could not possibly last, as it was one of the main causes of the biosphere’s problems. And yet the world’s lingua franca was a permanent soft power.

  So the two globalizations were at war, and both had to change; they had to be destranded and dealt with separately, but also understood for now as one, and dealt with together.

  In the midst of these thoughts, feeling the useless spin of them, as in a bad dream, she got a call from Badim.

  “What’s up?”

  “That man who kidnapped you?”

  “Yes?”

  “They’ve caught him.”

  “Ah! Where?”

  “In Zurich.”

  “Really?”

  “Yes. Down by the river, in Needle Park. He was helping at a refugee dinner, and they got attacked by some fascist group and he got in the fight.”

  “How did they know it was him?”

  “DNA. And they’ve got him on some cameras, as usual. The DNA also links him to a death on a beach on Lake Maggiore, Swiss side. Someone got punched in the face and died. Looks like your man was the one who punched him.”

  “Damn,” she said, feeling shocked. “Well, I’m on the train back to Zuri in the morning. I’ll want a full report.”

  Mary spent that long trip home stewing. She didn’t know what she thought or what she felt. A thrill of fear; a strong curiosity; a sense of triumph; a big touch of relief. Now at least she was safe. She wasn’t going to wake up some night being strangled by that disturbed young man. That was good; but the thought of him imprisoned was also strangely upsetting to her. Should people suffering mental illness really be incarcerated? Well, sometimes they had to be. So it was quite a confusing mix of feelings to feel.

/>   But there was no denying that whatever these feelings were, she was interested. Interested enough that she even somehow wanted to see this man again. And with him in jail, it would be safe. But why should she want it? She didn’t know. Something about that night had snagged her. As of course it would.

  As the train crossed Germany, she realized she was going to do it. She was going to go see him, whether she understood the impulse or not. That suggested to part of her that it might be a bad idea. Well, it wouldn’t be the first time she had done something she knew was not smart. Always she had been prone to the rash act. She put it down to something Irish. It seemed to her that Irish women doing rash things was precisely how her people had managed to perpetuate themselves.

  A phrase occurred to her: Stockholm Syndrome. Was that what this was? She looked it up. Conversion of hostages to a state of sympathy for their kidnappers. Generally regarded as a mistake on the hostages’ part, or a psychological weakness, a result of fear, transference, and the hope to survive by turning belly up and exposing the throat (or other parts) rather than fighting their captor and getting killed.

  But what if it wasn’t a mistake? What if you had been forced, by being taken hostage, to focus for once on the reality of the other— on their desperation, which had to have been extreme to drive them to their own rash act? What if you saw that you might do the same sort of thing in the other’s shoes? If that insight were to occur to you, in the immense protraction of time that occurred when taken hostage, you would then see the situation newly, and change somehow, even if much later. Possibly that change was, at least sometimes, the right reaction to what had happened.

  No doubt it depended on circumstances, as always. In the original Stockholm situation, she read, a pair of bank robbers had held four hostages, three women and a man, in a bank vault that they too were trapped in, and over the course of a week many small kindnesses had passed both ways. By the time it was all over, and of course it had ended peacefully, with the kidnappers surrendering, there was a bit of sympathy established. The hostages had refused to testify at trial against the kidnappers. The syndrome named after them was said to affect about ten percent of the victims of kidnappings, and the kinder the behavior of the kidnappers, inside the fundamentally hostile act of holding a person against their will, the more likely the effect. As made sense.