The Shackles of Consensus

By the time the Cold War ended, key players of the United States’ foreign policy elite had developed a habit of intervention in the affairs of other states and a confidence in their own ability to manage the world’s affairs. These political elites believed the world was on the edge of truly major changes, and they thought they knew what the future would and should look like.

Key members of the George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton administrations brought with them to the White House a world view that was global, egalitarian, redistributionist, and multinational in new ways. They brought the same views to their participation in the "international community." Most Americans still do not fully understand the implications and consequences of multilateral decision making. The multilateral approach has not only procedural consequences but also important substantive consequences because it redistributes power and affects the accountability of decision makers and the culture in which they take action.

To have power, political scientist Harold Lasswell wrote, is to be taken into account in the policies of others. In multilateral assemblies, affluent states (such as those in the G-8) submit themselves to unfamiliar egalitarian constraints. These states not only agree to consider the views and interests of small, less developed states but also often agree to be bound by majorities of small states, such as the majority that determines outcomes in the U.N. General Assembly.

Multilateral organizations achieve more equal distribution of power by adopting rules such as those of the U.N. General Assembly or the World Trade Organization, which operate on the principle of "one government, one vote" regardless of the character, size, population, achievement, productivity, technological advancement, representativeness, or responsibility of individual member states. Traditional socialists and old-style Marxists believe that social justice requires a more egalitarian redistribution of wealth — from the haves to the have-nots. New-style multilateralists believe political justice requires the redistribution of power as well — from the haves to the have-nots.

Former U.N. Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali wrote that he not only supported democracy for all countries but also hoped to move the world toward the "democratization" of international relations by empowering the weakest states and diminishing the power of the most powerful. This effort would require, inter alia, redistributing power within the U.N. Security Council. But would the five permanent members of the Security Council — the United States, the United Kingdom, Russia, China, and France — accept such a redistribution in U.N. policymaking? Would they accept a redistribution of power that would reduce the influence of their countries to that of, say, Nepal, Mexico, Liberia, or the Bahamas? How far could an egalitarian redistribution move forward before being stopped by the permanent members?

This kind of global "democratization" would in fact mean less democracy because there is no way to make multilateral decision makers accountable to those they "represent," as happens in national democracies. Indeed, problems of representation and accountability are the most important obstacle to a more egalitarian distribution of power on a global scale. The British, for instance, have called the inaccessibility of decision makers in the European Union a "democratic deficit." In effect, multilateral decision making increases the cultural, political, and geographical distance between those who choose decision makers, those who make decisions, and those affected by these decisions. Abstract relations cannot produce the same solidarity among people as common identifications, education, and experience. The democratic institutions that make and keep decision makers representative and accountable are national, as are the cultures on which they rest.

The officials of multilateral organizations are not elected by a popular vote. Often they are not even chosen by elected officials. Multilateral institutions do not merely add another layer of bureaucracy between rule makers and those who live under their rules; these institutions create wholly new jurisdictions that do not coincide with existing institutions — based on nation-states — that provide democratic accountability. Voters can rarely "throw the rascals out" when the rascals hail from 200 countries scattered around the globe.

Multilateral decisions to use force — such as U.S. decisions to participate in U.N. peacekeeping — often escape oversight and/or control of either the U.S. Congress or electorate. No voter from any country has the capacity to determine the decisions of the U.N. Security Council or to hold a Security Council member accountable. This lack of representation and accountability afflicts all multilateral arenas and actors and has loomed large in debates on multinational organizations and global initiatives — such as the North American Free Trade Agreement, the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, the Convention on Biological Diversity, the Law of the Sea, the Kyoto Protocol, and the International Criminal Court.

The need to maintain a consensus in multilateral arenas often forces the powerful to make concessions they would not otherwise offer. Building and maintaining a consensus may become the focus of attention in multilateral arenas, displacing the substantive decision that the consensus serves. A commitment to multilateral decision making thus renders it extremely difficult for actors to make decisions with dispatch, as the possibility of rapid reaction becomes tangled in bureaucratic red tape and groupthink dominates the problem-solving process.

The irony is that collective action and collective security do not necessarily require multilateral action. Peacekeeping, for example, does not require decision making by countries beyond the participants in the conflict. Indeed, those who need defending are more vulnerable to the delays and ineffectiveness of a multilateral team than are those who are attacking; aggressors are not required to coordinate their actions and policies with anyone. But even in matters of life and death, multilateralism wrests the problem of survival away from those most directly and intensely concerned and assigns it to others. Recall how the U.N. Security Council imposed an arms embargo that effectively denied Bosnians the capacity to defend themselves, even though no one else was so ardently interested in defending Bosnians or had as much at stake in doing so. Similarly, no one has as great a stake as Israelis in the various anti-Israel and anti-Zionist actions that are common in U.N. bodies.

Ultimately, the result of multilateral processes is often war by committee and peace by committee. Neither works very well.