by Judy Jones
If that seems like a lot to wrap your mind around, wait till we get to the EU’s setup: a parliament (elected by the voters back home), a high court, a council of ministers, an executive commission, and a presidency that rotates among member countries every six months, plus more agencies, advisory bodies, and preparliamentary committees than almost anybody can keep track of, divided among Brussels, Luxembourg, and Strasbourg, and attempting to adjudicate, legislate, or just keep an eye on everything from women’s rights to immigration policy, the freedoms of college students to the standards for air conditioners, telecommunications practices to wine prices. And a single currency, the euro.
Sounds a bit dull, and is almost parodistically bureaucratic—but it did seem, at the time, to be a brilliant idea, even better than NATO. With a series of voluntary suturings by several no-longer-great European nations, a new economic power was born to the west of the Soviet Union and the east of the United States. At the same time, in a succession of bold strokes, any number of old European rivalries, suspicions, and scratch-one-another’s-eyes-out traditions of centuries’ standing were smoothed over. Moreover, Germany got to feel respectable again. France (who hadn’t exactly distinguished herself in World War II and was about to lose an empire) got to feel like the very heart and soul of something again, smiling to herself as she vetoed Britain’s first application for membership.
Have there been tensions among the members? Don’t get them started. Agricultural policy, in particular, can be counted on to provoke tag-team wrestling matches, with, for instance, the poorer southern countries demanding subsidies for their olive oil and tomatoes and the northern ones getting tired of being treated like easy touches. More significantly, Germany and France have long been bent on “deepening” the relationship, pushing the single currency, a common military, a unified foreign policy. Britain—an island after all, and not sure it’s even really European—wants instead to “broaden” it, to take in as many new members as quickly as possible; at Maastricht, the small Dutch town where in December 1991 the EC became the EU, Britain opted out of the currency and made help-me-I’m-being-strangled noises at the idea of the other two. Six months later, Danish voters balked at approving the Maastricht treaty at all, which left everybody wondering where it—and European federation—really stood. The EU pressed on, but ran into an even bigger snag in 2005, when the citizens of France and the Netherlands voted a big thumbs-down on the proposed EU constitution and the governments of several member countries nearly came to blows over the budget. At this point, nobody thinks the EU is going to fall apart, exactly, but nobody knows what’s to become of it, either. OECD (ORGANIZATION FOR ECONOMIC
COOPERATION AND DEVELOPMENT)
Created in 1948, under a slightly different name, to help administer the Marshall Plan, that postwar American effort to get Europe back on her feet and keep her out of the arms of the Communists. Originally made up exclusively of European countries, it expanded in 1960 to include the United States and Canada, then Japan, Finland, Australia, and finally, in 1973, New Zealand. In 1994, after intense U.S. lobbying, Mexico became the twenty-fifth member, the first addition in twenty years. During the period from 1995 to 2000, the OECD opened up to Eastern Europe, inviting in the Czech Republic, Poland, Hungary, and Slovakia; it also took in South Korea along the way.
Fancily set up in Paris, the OECD was, until the mid-1990s, considered a “rich man’s club,” made up of twenty-four countries accounting for 16 percent of the world’s population and two-thirds of its output. With its low-profile, think-tank image, it monitored and predicted and recommended and then went out to lunch. Now, since the advent of high-kicking Asian economies and bent-double former Communist ones, a single European market and the proliferation of regional trading blocs, there’s been pressure on the OECD to get a little more hands-on, actually emerging from its tony headquarters long enough to set some policy on, say—and this is just a suggestion, guys—unemployment, investment, the environment, that sort of thing. In the meantime, try not to confuse it with the OED, the Oxford English Dictionary, that other monument to the ways of the wonk. G7/G8 (GROUP OF SEVEN/
GROUP OF EIGHT)
Formed in 1975 by the six biggest industrial democracies—the United States, Japan, Germany, France, Britain, and Italy—and joined by Canada a year later. Starting in 1991, the USSR, then Russia, began dropping by for postsummit conferences. In 1994 Russia became a regular visitor, and in 1998 it became a full participant in what now became the G8, although the G7 has continued to function alongside the formal summits, presumably just to confuse the average newspaper reader. These days, the G8 meets annually, and by turns, in the capital, another big-deal city (Montreal, Florence), or a jewel-like historic landmark or golf resort (Versailles, Williamsburg, Gleneagles) of the host nation, with everyone’s finance minister (our Treasury secretary) and all the prime ministers (our president) in attendance, at which point it considers, and attempts to bring into line, matters of economic policy and planning, then schmoozes, often managing to work out an intractable problem or two over one of the six-course dinners prepared by the host country to show off the national cuisine. With old-style Kennedy-and-Khrushchev-type summit meetings largely a thing of the past, the G8 get-togethers have become some of the most important meetings in the world, real pileups of power and money at which issues as broad as terrorism and the environment are hashed out, often leading to the creation or resuscitation of some new international organization to “handle” the problem. OAS (ORGANIZATION OF AMERICAN STATES)
A Pan American “arrangement,” formed in 1948 to promote “peace, security, and hemispheric solidarity” and continuing at least some of the traditions of the Pan American Union, founded in 1910, in whose former marble monument in Washington, D.C., the OAS is headquartered. Every country in the hemisphere belongs (although Cuba was expelled in 1962 and Canada didn’t join until 1990). Long considered a major do-nothing (and a rubber stamp for U.S. interests in Central America) whose delegates pull up in their limos at two in the afternoon for that ten-in-the-morning session, the OAS has lately become a little more assertive, monitoring elections and vowing to stay on top of military coups; but intervention is prohibited by the terms of the OAS charter, there’s no money to give out, and even trade sanctions have to be imposed back home, in the national legislatures, member by member. Meanwhile, genuine crises wind up being taken to the United Nations. In a way, it’s just another one of those Latin American initiatives—the Good Neighbor Policy and the Alliance for Progress also come to mind—that gets a lot of press at the outset, then seems to fade away (although the Monroe Doctrine manages to keep a high profile). Still, democracy is today a given in most Latin and Caribbean nations, and small-scale trade pacts (Caricom in the Caribbean; the Andean Pact; Mercosur, among Brazil, Argentina, Paraguay, Uruguay, Chile, and Bolivia) are all thriving, and if the OAS is even 5 percent responsible for any of it, who are we to be looking down our noses? By the by, if you haven’t read a newspaper in forty years, this is not the other OAS—l’Organisation de l’Armée Secrète, the terrorist military group out to gun down de Gaulle during the Algerian War for Independence. OPEC (ORGANIZATION OF PETROLEUM
EXPORTING COUNTRIES)
Founded in 1960 by Saudi Arabia, Iran, Iraq, Kuwait, and Venezuela and later joined by Qatar, Ecuador (which dropped out in 1992), Indonesia, Gabon (dropped out in 1994), Algeria, Libya, the United Arab Emirates, and Nigeria. Its eleven current members account for about half the world’s oil supply. They attempt to maintain stable oil prices by controlling production, a notoriously difficult task that’s made even more problematic by the members’ habitual failure to agree on anything and the tendency of at least a couple of them to cheat on quotas. The international cartel began striking fear in Western hearts back in 1973, when, in retaliation for U.S. support of Israel in the Yom Kippur war, it embargoed oil supplies to the United States and yanked worldwide prices from around $3 up to $12 a barrel (about $10 to $40 a barrel in today’s
dollars). Prices have been fluctuating wildly ever since—in response to turmoil in the Middle East throughout the Seventies and Eighties and to the Asian economic downturn of the Nineties, among other things. These days, prices are peaking at well over $60 a barrel, but economists say the reason is simply the increased, and apparently insatiable, demand caused by all those Americans driving around in Moby Dick–sized SUVs and all those Chinese trading in their bicycles for subcompacts. OAU (ORGANIZATION
OF AFRICAN UNITY)
Established in 1963 by thirty-two African nations, it’s since grown to fifty-three members, including every independent country on the continent and island just off it, black and Arab both. South Africa joined in 1994, which was, at the time, another of those mind-blowing events, like former Soviet republics applying for membership in NATO. The OAU sets itself the task of promoting unity and development, defending sovereignty and territorial integrity, eradicating colonialism, and coordinating economic, diplomatic, educational, defense, etc., etc. policies. There are no colonies left to speak of—though connoisseurs will immediately bring up the Western Sahara, just south of Morocco, which has spent thirty years trying to absorb it—so this goal can be judged a success, although not particularly thanks to the OAU. As a result of Africa’s having been divided up so cavalierly, arbitrarily, and ineptly by the colonial landlords at the end of the nineteenth century, border disputes and secessionist provinces get a lot of attention at OAU meetings, although members, each of whom is afraid some tribe or neighbor of his own is planning a civil war or an invasion and needs only a little encouragement to actually try it, are inclined to support the status quo, even when appalled by it. A further complication: Arab Africans and black Africans have little in common and, worse, don’t seem to like each other much; consider Sudan, with a lot of each and a particularly nasty civil war.
Clockwise from top left: The European Community (EC), a.k.a. the Common Market, and today the European Union (EU); the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN); the Organization of African Unity (OAU); and the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) ASEAN (ASSOCIATION OF SOUTHEAST
ASIAN NATIONS)
Formed in 1967, when the Vietnam War was in full swing, by Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore, the Philippines, and Indonesia, five countries in search of a little regional security. But the organization didn’t meet, not even once, until 1976, by which time the United States had pulled out of Vietnam, leaving a vacuum in the area. The five then decided to create “a zone of peace, freedom, and neutrality,” although for years they seemed interested only in containing Communism. Since the breakup of the Soviet Union, ASEAN’s been an economic union. It describes itself as mellow and consensus-seeking, “in the manner of a traditional local village,” but gosh, its members sure buy a lot of weapons. Granted, it’s been forced to deal with everything from terrorists to tsunamis lately. Actually, ASEAN began to come alive in the early 1990s, when it began shifting its focus to security matters and taking a broader view of its own region. In 1993 it came up with the idea for the Asian Regional Forum (ARF; ASEAN’s member states plus their “dialogue partners,” the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, the EU, Japan, North and South Korea, Russia, China, and India, and also Papua New Guinea, whose observer status does not really mean it has to sit on a folding chair at the back of the conference room). The tiny, oil-rich sultanate of Brunei became a full member of ASEAN in 1994, and Vietnam, Laos, Myanmar, and Cambodia all came aboard between 1955 and 1999. Claiming to be sick of the old bilateral arrangements of the Cold War—the United States and Japan, the United States and South Korea, the United States and the Philippines, and so on—ASEAN says it wants to think multilaterally, which seems like a reasonable enough idea. At a meeting in Bali in 2003, the member nations agreed to create an “ASEAN community” with a population of five hundred million, annual trade of $720 billion, and a free-trade area, by 2020. They are also working toward a trade agreement with China that would create the world’s most populous market, with 1.7 billion consumers. Lick your chops, eBayers. CIS (COMMONWEALTH OF
INDEPENDENT STATES)
Founded in December 1991 by Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus, the Slavic heartland of the former USSR; eight other of the republics that made up the ex-Soviet Union—what Russia calls its “near abroad”—joined soon after. In 1993, Georgia committed itself to joining (it had been slow to join the United Nations, too). The Baltics weren’t interested; from the beginning they had their eye on EU membership. Well, the Russians had to do something, if only to coordinate policies on all those leftover nuclear missiles, and this was it. It’s hard to be too specific here, but the goals outlined in the charter include the prevention of inter-republic warfare (otherwise known as descent into chaos, and bear in mind all the trouble Russia’s having keeping even itself and its remaining minorities together), the mediation of disputes, the military in general, and the promotion of trade, among themselves and in the world. The CIS—like the British Commonwealth—is not itself a country, simply a loose confederation of countries, so that all of us other countries have a lot of extra embassies to staff, but it’s all for a good cause. Isn’t it? APEC (ASIA-PACIFIC ECONOMIC
COOPERATION)
Founded—though to no practical effect—in 1989 by “member economies” of the Pacific Rim: the United States, Canada, Japan, South Korea, China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, the six original ASEAN countries (Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, the Philippines, Thailand, Brunei), Australia, and New Zealand. For the United States, the idea was to satisfy (and cash in on) East Asia’s dreams of an economic alliance “without drawing a line down the middle of the Pacific Ocean,” as then–secretary of state James Baker put it. Papua New Guinea, Mexico, and Chile joined in 1993–1994, the inclusion of the latter two causing some analysts to worry aloud about diverting the group’s attention from East Asia with a lot of Latin America stuff. Peru and Russia joined in 1998, although Russia, which had been knocking at the door since the group was born, wasn’t sure exactly why it wanted to be a member, since its share in the region’s trade was less than 1 percent. Potentially the biggest regional economic grouping in the world, accounting for 40 percent of world trade and most of the world’s economic growth, and making the EU and G8 look like pikers, APEC set out to transform the Pacific Rim into something more than a geographical term and could, it was thought, one day turn America’s influence, economic and military, 180 degrees away from Europe. Its official mission, stated in 1994, was “free and open trade and investment in the Asia-Pacific by 2010 for industrialized economies and 2020 for developing economies.” Although this hardly qualified as a rush job, there hasn’t been much progress so far. The Asian economic bust of 1997–1998, which APEC was powerless to stop, considerably dimmed the group’s luster, and America’s “war on terror” put its members at odds. APEC’s recommendations are nonbinding, anyway, so nobody seems too upset by the fact that the member economies haven’t been able to agree on trade policy for years. Supporters say APEC works best as a sort of regional trial run for the WTO (see below). WTO (WORLD TRADE ORGANIZATION)
The only global organization dealing with the rules of the international marketplace, the WTO is, simply put, out to promote free trade. Created in 1995, it is the successor to GATT (General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade), which was established by the United Nations after World War II to keep an eye on world trade in much the same way its sister organizations, the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, were to oversee investment and currency. GATT, specifically, was charged with preventing the world from falling back into the benighted protectionist practices of the Depression years—quota restrictions, sky-high tariffs, and the like—and to promote David Ricardo’s make-what-you-make-best-and-shop-for-the-rest theory of comparative advantage, which had long provided the basis for most thinking people’s thinking about international free trade. The WTO, which was part of the plan for GATT from the beginning, is much grander and more authoritative than its predecessor.
Whereas GATT had 23 members, the WTO has, as of this writing, 148, with another fistful of countries, including Russia, waiting in line for admission. Headquartered in Geneva, the WTO operates both as a forum in which to negotiate international trade rules and as a high court for settling disputes over them. Unlike GATT, it actually has the power to enforce its “agreements,” which cover everything from tariffs on manufactured goods to intellectual property rights and food safety standards around the world. Critics of the WTO are legion; in 1999 tens of thousands of protestors famously derailed the organization’s summit in Seattle, Washington, and anti-WTO NGOs have been proliferating ever since. They have many complaints: lack of transparency in the WTO’s decision-making processes, a structure that allows rich countries to strong-arm poor ones, and a version of globalization that subjugates humanitarian and environmental concerns to commercial interests, to name just a few. On the other side of the police barricades, supporters argue that worldwide prosperity is the best insurance against human rights and environmental abuses and that, since globalization is not only inevitable but well under way, it makes more sense to try to shape its growth through international regulations than simply to step back and let it run wild. It’s tricky stuff, pitting, for instance, left-leaning workers’-rights and environmental advocates against hungry third-world countries worried that compliance with rules against, say, factory emissions and sweatshop labor will put them out of business, and at the same time outraging right-leaning politicians who are discovering that, in the WTO’s version of globalization, corporate power trumps national and state sovereignty every time, even when that sovereignty is American. We’d love to hear what you think about all this, but please don’t get in touch until you’ve read and understood the 23,000-page compendium of international agreements that serves as the WTO’s user manual. NAFTA (NORTH AMERICAN FREE
