Washington Post / Editorial
THE UNITED Nations is not the place it used to be. Until quite recently, U.N. officials never criticized a member government; now they rightly declare that leaders who commit war crimes should be held accountable. Not so long ago, the U.N. churned out studies on the evils of transnational firms; but recently Secretary General Kofi Annan met representatives from 50 of those demons. When critics of globalization complained that the U.N. was selling out to the ideology of free trade, one of Mr. Annan's lieutenants responded with unbureaucratic vigor: "Open markets offer the only remotely viable means of pulling billions of people out of the abject poverty in which they find themselves."
That is exactly right; but it is also worth listening to the other half of the U.N.'s message on globalization. Mr. Annan and his team argue that, just as the globalization of a century ago collapsed into two world wars, so the current globalizing trend may not advance forever. For all its growth-enhancing efficiency, globalization coexists with inequalities that threaten its legitimacy: Nearly three billion people--half of all humanity--subsist on $2 or less a day, and the growth of international rules on trade, intellectual property, and so on are not matched by rules on labor standards or other social objectives. The backlash against globalization, the U.N. argues, will gather force until its harsher side is softened.
The U.N.'s proposed softener is something called the Global Compact, which was launched at the meeting with corporate executives. The idea is to get companies to sign on voluntarily to a set of principles drawn from the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the International Labor Organization's charter and the Rio Principles on the environment. At least once a year, the participants are supposed to announce progress toward implementation of those principles. They also are expected to help realize the U.N.'s development goals, such as spreading Internet access in poor countries.
You can quibble with this agenda. Strict international labor standards are a utopian idea; on the other hand, woolly ones give corporations cheap halos. But the idea of partnering with the private sector beats merely denouncing it. The good news is that some nongovernmental organizations seem to understand this too: Amnesty International, the World Wildlife Fund and the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions attended the meeting and will help to monitor the corporations' self-improvement efforts. In Seattle last year, business and nongovernmental groups were at each others' throats. The U.N. deserves credit for working to change that.
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