A New World Order

10:00 A.M. EST

MS. NISBET: Good morning. I'd like to welcome back to the Foreign Press Center Anne-Marie Slaughter, Dean of the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University.

Dean Slaughter will be discussing current events of the day as well as her new book, A New World Order. This well received book discusses the globalization, if you will, of government networks shaping our world today.

Dean Slaughter, it is a pleasure having you back and we hope to have you back again and again. Thank you.

DEAN SLAUGHTER: Thank you. So it's a pleasure to be back. I'm becoming a regular at the Foreign Press Center and some of you I recognize.

What I thought I'd do this morning is talk a little bit about my book, and I'm happy to see lots of copies floating around, and then I'm going to open it to questions, questions on things that are related to the book and questions more generally on the affairs of the day.

So I think I should start by saying I've just come back from vacation in the Caribbean. And my father was on vacation with me and he, to prove to his daughter that he's actually reading what I write, he carried this book around with him. Everybody else was, you know, reading Danielle Steele and John Grisham, and my father is reading Anne-Marie Slaughter, A New World Order.

So someone comes up to him at breakfast and says, "What are you reading?"

And he said, "A New World Order."

And the guy said, "Well, what's it about?"

And he said, "It's about international networks of agencies."

And the guy said, "Oh, a work of fiction." (Laughter.)

In some ways, that is exactly the perception I have set out to redress. The argument of the book is really quite simple. It says that corporations are networking. Anybody who knows the management literature for the last ten years, it's all about the shift from hierarchy to network and how you lead in a networked environment rather than a hierarchical environment.

Nongovernmental organizations are networking. The power of the human rights movement, the anti-globalization movement, the labor movement -- these are because of transnational networks of human rights groups and environmental groups, groups of any kind.

Criminals are networking. We think about terrorism as a global networked crime, but of course if you think about arms trafficking, money laundering, drug trafficking, intellectual property, those are also all global crimes carried out by networks of criminals. That's what makes them particularly difficult to fight. That is what makes them so powerful.

So you see networks everywhere. My argument is you also have networks of government officials, that governments are networking as well.

Now, when I first started making this argument, and I should say that I have been writing this book for a decade -- I started in 1994 -- I would say that it proves that procrastination pays because, in some ways, it's more relevant now than it was in '94. It wasn't exactly procrastination; I had two kids along the way.

But when I originally started writing, everyone was talking about how the state was disappearing, certainly weakening. No one thinks that today, or you don't see those arguments after 9/11 in the same way. But my point was "the state" is not disappearing, it's disaggregating, by which I simply meant that the state is now exercising power in the international arena through networks of government officials.

So if the traditional myth was you have the state, which is sort of a unitary actor represented by the secretary of state or the head of state, interacting with other states, and we still see that. You know, France had a dispute with the United States. In fact, what is happening is that all the regulators, the judges, and increasingly the legislators are representing their specific interests, networking with their counterparts abroad.

And so what we have in conjunction with our corporate networks, our nongovernmental networks, our criminal networks, are government networks that are essentially doing their business of regulating corporate networks, of chasing criminal networks, of interacting and getting lobbied by nongovernmental networks, and that these networks are a critical part of the infrastructure of global governance.

So part one of the book just says open your eyes, start looking for government officials rather than "the state" and you will see these networks in every area. The second half of the book says once you understand that we have these networks, how can we use them to actually structure systems of global governance that will help us address global problems.

Let me give you a few concrete examples of what I mean by these networks. And again, we use the fiction of the unitary state, of France interacting with the United States or Japan or South Africa. We know it's a fiction but it's one that's worked well enough.

But when you think last year of all the debate about French-U.S. relations being in crisis, while, at the same time that you did have a degree of crisis between Chirac and Bush, or in Germany with Schroeder and Bush, the relations between the French Justice Ministry and Otto Schily of the German Justice Ministry and John Ashcroft -- big political differences between those people, but the relations were incredibly tight. They had to be incredibly tight. They are on the front lines of trying to track down terrorists and the collaboration was not affected at all by the political turbulence at the leader level.

Another example. You'll recall the Russian financial crisis and the East Asian financial crisis in the late 1990s. That gave rise to a whole set of op-eds and articles in journals like Foreign Affairs calling for a new global financial architecture, and Jeffrey Garten at Yale said we ought to have a world central bank and you had various other experts claiming we needed to redo the Bretton Woods institutions, we really needed to have a new architecture.

Well, what did we get? We got the G-20. The G-20 is a government network. It's a network of finance ministers of the G-7, plus Russia, the G-8, but then the major powers in every region, so China, of course, Brazil, India, Turkey, Argentina, South Korea and a number of others. Those finance ministers meeting regularly as a network, run by Paul Martin, the former Finance Minister of Canada, now the Prime Minister of Canada, was the new global financial architecture. But those finance ministers operate together with networks of securities commissioners, networks of central bankers, networks of insurance supervisors, of accounting supervisors. Those networks come together as sort of networks of networks.

None of this stuff is as sexy as saying, you know, we have a new world bank or we have a new global central bank, but it's what's actually doing the work. And in the financial arena now it's not surprising to anybody who covers the financial arena what the Basel Committee says and central bankers -- of central bankers is very important. The Basel Committee now increasingly interacts with networks of finance ministers from developing countries as well.

So, in competition policy, in the environment, in virtually every area you look, you'll find one of these networks.

Judges, much less well known, and I think in each of these sub-areas there's some people who knew about these networks. I've tried to put them all together. But you actually have networks of refugee judges, of constitutional judges, discussing major cases.

Indeed, if there's any case about the death penalty anywhere in the world, and even in our own, the United States Supreme Court, you will see about the same eight to ten cases cited from courts around the world -- an Indian decision, a South African decision, a Canadian decision, a German decision. Judges actively discussing these, sometimes through opinions, sometimes face to face, sometimes through the internet.

Or you have bankruptcy judges who actually negotiate with one another as to how to resolve a case resulting from the bankruptcy of a global corporation.

Again, this is kind of low-level utilitarian stuff, but it is doing the work that international lawyers, I think, long imagined a global court or a global judicial system would do. No, instead it's networks of national officials.

Legislators catching up, but lagging behind, and that's a problem for accountability purposes. But at the most recent WTO summits you've had groups of legislators there as well. At the most recent EUN summits on sustainable development you had networks of legislators as well. You've always had entities like the Global Parliamentary Union or Parliamentarians for Global Action. That's not really what I'm talking about. I'm talking more about people like Bill Frist talking to his counterpart in other countries, figuring out, you know, if everyone else in the government is networking, what do the legislators need to know to be able to do what they do.

So that's the first part of the book. I want to just say a few words about how I think we could use the ideas of these networks to do everything from fight terrorism to rebuild states like Iraq or Afghanistan or any post-conflict state.

So the first thing to say is I'm not arguing we ought to have these networks instead of existing international organizations. This is not a claim that says we should get rid of the United Nations and replace it with networks of every government official. There's an important role for many of our international organizations. Some, I think, will get reinvented to work with these networks.

But there are sometimes where we need nations represented at the highest level by official ambassadors and their delegations. At the same time, we effectively need much more governance capacity at the global level, and we know this, and we've got problems that can only be solved at a global level.

But we do not have the political will -- and not just in the United States, I think in many countries around the world -- or frankly, the ability to create the equivalent of a global government. We are not going to have a world environment organization and a world justice organization and a world banking organization. That is not, as I said, politically, I think, desirable, it certainly -- and nor feasible.

What we are more likely to have, if we do it right, is to have international organizations with a relatively limited mandate, and then these networks of national government officials. We can control the people in the networks. They are our national government officials. It's our securities regulators. It's our central banker. And that is true of every country in the world, so that when we're looking to try to develop global capacity without centralized global power, government networks give us the way to do that.

But if we're going to use them as tools of global governance, they have to be more representative. It's not okay to have the central bankers only of the 12 most powerful economies. There has to be representation of other countries, just as the G-20 is far more representative than the G-8. And indeed, the finance ministers in the G-20 would tell you there is no way to regulate the global economy with just the G-8. They must be more representative. They must be more accountable.

There are many people who hear this and think, "Oh, my God. This is, you know, a vast conspiracy. These are technocratic networks of judges and regulators who are out there making decisions that affect our lives and they are not accountable." That's too strong. But it is true that if we're really serious about delegating more power to these networks, we need to find them ways -- find ways to make them accountable to national constituencies, but also to some sense of a global constituency; that they are -- if you think about a network of global environmental regulators, they're acting in the global interest, as well as in the interest of South Koreans, South Africans, Brazilians, Canadians.

So they have to be more accountable. They have to be more representative. They have to be linked up to our existing international organizations. But I argue that there are ways to do that; that in many ways, we already see examples of organizations that are collections of networks -- APEX in East Asia is basically a collection of government networks. That's what it is.

All the different ministers meet regularly. That's obviously the key to the way the EU is governed, although the EU has its own special institutions because it is an organization designed to further regional integration.

The commonwealth. The commonwealth is essentially today a set of networks of commonwealth officials so that when the chief justice of Zimbabwe is under attack by the head of -- by Robert Mugabe, the association of commonwealth judges can try to support the chief justice and can try to put pressure on the government in various ways.

The Nordic system, for any of you who are from any Scandinavian countries, again, actually pioneered legislative networks in the '50s, that have now spread to networks of all different kinds of ministers and judges.

So these things actually exist. They hold great promise. We need to open our eyes and see them. Instead of thinking about unitary states, we need to think about these governments and government officials networking with one another, and then we need to use them self-consciously to help us gain global governance capacity.

So let me close with two fairly concrete examples of how I think: (1) how this is working already; and one way I think it could work very, very importantly.

With all the talk about the war on terrorism in the United States and the focus on the military side of that war -- and I might add the military side also operates through networks, as Dana Priest has demonstrated in her book, The Mission -- the U.S. military is operating primarily through networks with its counterparts abroad.

The broader focus on the military side, I would argue, far more has been done and can be done through the networks national official side, e.g., the networks or financial regulators working on money laundering; cutting off terror financing; the networks of justice ministers working to try to actually apprehend and try individual terrorists in different countries; obviously, intelligence cooperation in various ways; police cooperation in various ways.

Thinking about tackling what is a global crime through global networks of government officials is to me a more promising long-term strategy for thinking about how you fight terrorism than thinking about what country you're going to attack next, point one.

Point two, nation building. The United States said we don't do nation building; or we do do national building, we're just not doing it very well. Think about what you might be able to do if you said in a country like Afghanistan or Iraq that rebuilding that country is not up to the United States or Britain. It's not just up to the UN. It is up to these networks of government officials in every area. You need to rebuild the utilities in Iraq? Well, there is a global utilities regulators network and they meet every year and they offer technical assistance and they have codes of best practices, they have some funds, they have people. They can go in on the ground and help the Iraqis.

The judges. We've got global judges networks. They can go in and help train the Iraqi judiciary and help them try. It doesn't have to just come through an international institution. The entire financial infrastructure, we have the capacity through networks of the people who do it in all of our country.

Legislators. Why, instead of our trying to set up, you know, here is the election, here is what you do. If you had a global network of legislators that would include legislators from Muslim countries, for Asian countries, from European countries, they'd have far more legitimacy and far more capacity.

We can use these things. We can use them in ways that have legitimacy and effectiveness, but we have to recognize that they're there, and that they are proof of a new world order.

Thank you.

(Applause.)

Blowing down 10 years in 20 minutes is tough, but I'll take all your comments. (Laughter.)

Mr. Ellickson-Brown: I'd just remind everybody to identify yourself and your news organization when you're asking questions is helpful. Good.

QUESTION: Hello, Neeme Raud, Voice of America. I would like to ask about NATO and the ad hoc coalitions that Rumsfeld is talking. Are those ad hoc coalitions that U.S. is trying to put together for operations, networks like you describe, and what will be the future of NATO in broadcasting to the Baltic states that will join NATO? So they are very anxious to know what will happen to them.

DEAN SLAUGHTER: Right. It's a great question. I do not -- my government networks are not the same as coalitions of the willing. I mean, there are -- they can be, in the sense if you think about the Proliferation Security Initiative, and you think it is possible to get together the ministers, or the particular area of a group of countries, as a kind of pilot project to do something, that's a government network.

But a coalition of the willing, in the way Secretary Rumsfeld uses it, is saying we're not going to go through an international organization, we're going to simply create a kind of ad hoc alliance. That's not what I'm projecting at all. What I'm imaging is much more what goes on within NATO.

NATO, in many ways, is a very effective network of defense ministers, who come together on a regular basis, who have developed interoperability, who know each other. A large part of these networks is the personal dimension. And if you ask Paul Martin about what made the D20 work, he would say, because we all knew each other and we met on a regular basis, and we called each other to account. It's harder to make a commitment in that setting and then not deliver on it.

So what the Baltic States would be by joining NATO is precisely integration into a set of existing networks that in this case took place under the aegis of an international organization. But it has to be institutionalized to make it work. And that's why the ad hoc approach is really counter to what I'm talking about. To just sort of meet occasionally for one set of purposes, no. It's got to be a long-term thing, it's got to be institutionalized, and it has to be formal enough that other people know what's going on. I mean, all of us, all of you, but all of us as citizens.

QUESTION: Lennart Pehrson, Sydsvenska Dagbladet Swedish newspaper

DEAN SLAUGHTER: Oh, the Baltic system.

QUESTION: I wonder if you could address a little more the problems with accountability. For one thing, do you see a risk that those officials might be pulled together by their own set of values developed, their own values that might be different from the people they should represent?

You also mentioned that some people might see this as conspiracies. Some level of conspiracy thinking and some suspiciousness is not that unusual, at least not in this country. And how would you sort of try to explain this? I think that there is -- there would be a risk if you would go out and tell people in general that this is the way the world works. You could be their nightmare coming true and it wouldn't seem like it's really democratic.

DEAN SLAUGHTER: Okay. So this is, I think, the great challenge here, is how you design these institutions so that they are not only accountable but seem to be accountable in ways that make this an acceptable prospect for global government.

The first thing to say is to remember, it's accountable compared to what? So I think most voters do not think the United Nations or the World Bank or the IMF is particularly accountable; and if you expand that vision, the sort of top-down traditional inter-governmental vision, you get a lot of the same concerns, that the world is being run by people that we ordinary voters have no control over, which is a way of saying it's not going to be perfect, whatever you do. This may be the second-worst option, as Churchill said about democracy.

That said, what you are seeing in some of these organizations, like the central bankers and the securities commissioners, they are recognizing themselves that they must be more public and more transparency.

So with the Basel Committee, they initially adopted a Capital Adequacy Accord, which was entirely done between them. And your point was exactly right; this was central bankers who agreed with each other. Well, that's not the processing. And they effectively were able to do something and then implement it domestically without many of the checks that might have existed at least in some countries. I mean, we don't have much control over -- we have a deliberately independent central bank, but it was really done very quietly.

Second time around, they're opening this to notice and comments. By their own recognition that to have legitimacy for their decisions, they must be more transparent and more accountable.

So you're seeing some of this as a -- simply as the evolution of these networks. I think there could be much more. I mean, ultimately, I think what has to happen at the national level is that national congresses, as happened in the EU with national parliaments, right, it's not just enough to have it in the EU parliaments but national parliaments said, "Wait a minute. There's an awful lot of stuff going on at the EU ministers level that we need to know about," and so that Sweden may decide, "We want our ministers testifying in a certain way," or, "We want to know what's coming up beforehand." United States might decide a different thing. But different national polities have to be aware of what's happening within these networks.

A lot can be done, frankly, through the Internet. This is an odd situation where you can make a network real by making it virtual, by creating a website and knowing, this is who's in the network, this is when they meet, this is what's on the agenda, you can do a lot.

You can't formalize too much or you lose the whole value of networks. Then you end up with international organizations. So there's a balance here, but I think there's quite a lot that could be done.

On the perception issue, though, I ultimately think we have to have legislators involved. I think there's no way to sell to voters anything that looks like it's just judges and regulators. I mean, they are -- that's the least democratic part of our democratic government, so that unless you can say -- and indeed, Newt Gingrich pioneered this back in the early '90s; he had the 21st Century Legislators Project -- now he did it because it was divided government. He figured he'd get support among other legislators. But you have to be able to talk to your Congressperson or your Senator or your Parliamentarian and know that they are also talking to their counterparts and they are aware of whatever is happening in the non-elected networks.

No perfect solutions, but I think a menu of things that we could do.

Yes, here in the front.

QUESTION: Yes, Martin Suder, Sonntags Zeitung from Switzerland. I find the word "network" intriguing, but I think it also leaves out a central question. In other words, network -- I mean, you visualize a net where you have nodes of equal size, you know, and in actual fact, it leaves out the question of power, doesn't it?

I mean, I'm coming from a small country that finds itself increasingly on the receiving end, you know, of other, you know, bigger powers. And I wonder whether that talk of networks helping to organize the world maybe looks a bit different if it's written by people, you know, which are not in the U.S., you know, which is after all, you know, the leading superpower and kind of extended its reach over the world.

So how do you integrate questions of power into your network theory?

DEAN SLAUGHTER: Right. It's the other, I think, critical question: power and accountability. And you heard me say that if these are going to be networks who are going to use these as tools of global governance, they need to be more accountable and they need to be more representative. So the first point is you have to make sure that there are voices at the table. You're not going to have 191 members of each of these networks, but you have to make sure they are representative within a region, globally, and there are many, many, many different forms of these networks.

But the first part of the answer is similar to accountability. We don't have any formal international organizations where there aren't major power discrepancies, either, that are effective. I mean, you have weighted voting in the IMF and the World Bank. Obviously, you have the Security Council. So, to some extent, I don't think there's any effective tool of global governance that will not in some way reflect power disparities. So I just don't think you can achieve it. I don't think the framers of the UN thought you could achieve it and I don't think you could achieve it now, which is not to say that you need to accept the existing distribution of power and simply make them reflect power of politics. But it says you can't depart completely from disparities of power.

Networks actually can help in this regard, in that they are -- they're informal, and they operate by consensus. Now, does that mean that the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission has more power than probably the Swiss equivalent in a network? Yes, because the Securities and Exchange Commission is powerful, it's got a lot of money, it's got a lot of people. On the other hand, it cannot dictate, when you're talking about codes of best practices and how, in fact, you ought to set up securities regulations systems in many developing countries or reform them in many countries.

What you hear when you talk even to U.S. officials is that they've had to listen as well as talk, that they -- and a good example would be the anti-trust area, where the United States always supported a global anti-trust network rather than a formal organization, because it thought we were the most powerful anti-trust regulators. Well, in fact ,the EU model has proved dominant with respect to all of Eastern Europe and a number of our countries in Africa.

The U.S. model has been more effective in a number of commonwealth countries, but what you're hearing from officials is, when we all sit around the table, there are many different ways of doing things and we actually have to accept that there are other, better ways of doing things.

So it's not -- I would -- I think it's absolutely right that within a network, as within any international organization, those government agencies who are well-funded and have resources have more power to set the agenda than smaller countries who don't, but I think the form of the network and way they interact actually means that smaller countries have more power than they do with formal voting rules.

Let me give you one more example. The U.S. Supreme Court thinks it, you know, it invented constitutional law. Well, through these judicial networks, the courts that are most effective are the South African and the Canadian courts. Why? Well, for one thing, they are courts; when they make a decision, they look around the world and see what other countries have done. So if you read a Canadian or a South African decision, you find out very quickly that you're reading a kind of global account of what's been done in something like the right to housing, or again, the death penalty or privacy.

What you're also finding, though, is in these networks of judges, U.S. judges basically are too arrogant to play. That's changing, but that has been true. And the result is, they have less influence.

Yeah. Sorry, and I'll turn to this side. I realize I've been calling exclusively on that side.

QUESTION: Renzo Cianfanelli, Corriere della Sera. Talking about what is arguably the largest world network -- in other words, the United Nations -- would you say that it's not urgent to address what is possibly the most obvious anachronism; in other words, the fact that the Security Council does not reflect the international balance of power, and in fact, it's largely ineffective when a quick decision has to be made?

The second point, I don't want to spoil the fun, but I noticed that there is some mistake on the list of abbreviations, unless it's a Freudian slip.

DEAN SLAUGHTER: Forgot to take it out.

QUESTION: FAO is listed as the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United States, (inaudible) United Nations.

DEAN SLAUGHTER: Yes, it certainly is. (Laughter.) Well, at least I knew that. Thank you for pointing it out. We'll hope that there's a second edition and I can change that.

So on the -- the first question, first point is, yes, I think there should be Security Council reform. I don't think there will be Security Council reform, which brings me to the relationship between the United Nations and networks.

I don't think there's going to be Security Council reform because I think what will happen is the best will be the enemy of the good; the effort to try to get that will stall any other reform in the United Nations and that, you know, diplomats have been working on this in the UN, as you probably know, throughout the '90s, and you talk to any of them involved in it and they just say, "We just can't get there from here, even though we should be able to."

However, imagine if you brought in the G-20 at the leadership level as an informal caucus within the United Nations, where that does look more like what we could imagine a Security Council should look like today. It has most of the great powers around the world represented. And it's not just done in terms of size and military power; it reflects economic realities as well.

I would suggest that on something like Iraq, where it looked like the Security Council was stalemated, if you had a caucus of leaders within the -- it could be a caucus in the General Assembly; it doesn't have to be formal -- that is looking at the same issues and coming out with its own decisions, that would put a lot of pressure on the Security Council because there's the possibility, then, of a power saying, well, you know, we just can't -- the Security Council is blocked for political reasons, but we have legitimation through this other group.

Alternatively, it can become a force for UN reform on the inside that again has more legitimacy than either the P5 or possibly the General Assembly acting as a whole.

So, and beyond that, the UN has done relatively little to try to convene networks of ministers. Imagine if the UN said -- or, say, the WTO, but the UN might say, you know, we're going to convene a network of agriculture ministers and trade ministers and develop ministers because one of the greatest problems facing the world today are the problems of agricultural subsidies, in terms of really having genuine free trade.

And the WTO has got the trade ministers there. They're not getting there. We, as the UN, can convene the official, the leaders, and then the officials who are directly involved. You don't know that it would get you anywhere, but it -- I think it's at least a promising alternative to put pressure on existing institutions.

Yes.

QUESTION: Hi, good morning. Elizabeth Mora-Mass, El Tiempo.

DEAN SLAUGHTER: Great.

QUESTION: How do you see the relation between the international network and the situation in Colombia and Venezuela? (Inaudible.)

DEAN SLAUGHTER: Well, it's, even though I'm immodest enough to call the book, A New World Order, I don't think this is the solution to absolutely everything. And I, you know, there are still circumstances, obviously, they both require traditional diplomacy, and in that situation you've got tremendous security problems that I don't think networks of government officials other than networks of the military, which we already have, are going to address.

What I could well imagine though, if you were to get at a relatively stable situation, you could use the OAS to help deploy networks of regional ministers, lower level officials, who would have to take responsibility for rebuilding the region, working with the Colombians to rebuild. And again, part of this is the notion that we have tremendous governmental capacity and those government officials are talking to their counterparts abroad, but the minute we move to something that says foreign relations we turn to the Foreign Affairs Ministry or the State Department, and that misses a lot of this capacity.

So I could imagine designing institutions through networks that might help rebuild and stabilize. I don't see a role for the networks in actually bringing about the peace. I wish I did, but I think that's a deeper set of problems that this can address.

Nobody on this side wants to ask any questions? I'll go in the back.

QUESTION: Good morning, my name is Hau Nguyen from Vietnam News Agency. This is my second time to attend your talk, and thank you very much for your book. I read it.

DEAN SLAUGHTER: Thank you.

QUESTION: My question is about a network of terrorists. What do you think about the activity happened recently in Spain, in Iraq, in Russia, and do you think there is really a network of terrorism in the world now?

And the second part is, do you think that the terrorist activity in Iraq will be decreased after bin Laden will be caught? I don't know whether he will be caught now, but what is your opinion?

DEAN SLAUGHTER: Well, I think the answer, very quickly, is yes and no. Yes, there is a global network of terrorists. And although from studying government networks, I think what it tells you is, you know, a network is a much looser form of organization, right? And there can be subnetworks within it.

So again, if you take securities regulators as one example, there was for a whole time a, you know, a subgroup of Sub-Saharan African security regulators who were Francophone who had their own network but who were linked to the larger network, and you're seeing that clearly in global terrorist networks. It's not like there's, you know, one central node controlling. There are many different groups but they are linked together in ways that make them a greater threat collectively than they would be if it was just distinct national problems.

And because of that, no, I think even if bin Laden is captured that is not -- I mean, I think that would be a good thing, but that does not address -- it's not going to solve the problem. And I don't think the problem can be addressed with the sort of old rules of you attack a particular state, you attack a particular group. It has to be a coordinated global effort engaging, as I said, all the tools at our disposal, which sometimes are military but are, as often or more often, criminal justice, financial regulation, social regulation, economic development. I mean, you know, there are many, many different dimensions.

Yeah.

QUESTION: Good morning. Andy Bettag, Fuji Television, Japanese News.

Basically, I think there is a perception that the United States is working unilaterally and doing things without the world's support right now. How do you see this affecting this network, and what does that mean in the long run?

DEAN SLAUGHTER: Well, I think it's actually not true at the network level. I mean, you know, if you go and talk to Treasury or Justice or the EPA or the SEC, you will find there intensively multilateral efforts and you will find them often, I think they probably won't say so, but concerned that the unilateralism at the top and the perception could long term harm their efforts. I mean, the one way you could see this harming efforts is, of course, if, in the end, foreign other governments decide that they're going to retaliate by denying cooperation in a number of these areas.

But, in fact, I think you see the United States playing a very active role in setting up these networks, but also participating when others have set them up -- and these are not all coming from the U.S., by any means -- and actively interested in using them, in funding them. Indeed, a great deal of this, again, is U.S. regulators, EU regulators, Japanese regulators, judges, can't do their job unless there's greater capacity worldwide and unless they have counterparts. They simply can't because the people they're regulating can take refuge or manipulate other systems. So there's really a sense that it has to be a global effort, and the only way to do that is through national networks.

So I think there's -- it is much more multilateral. One of the advantages of recognizing this approach would be to say, look, you know, what happens in the State Department and the Pentagon is not the sum and substance of foreign policy.

That said, I would a lot happier if we were far more multilateral at every level. I mean, I think the two things should be -- can work together. But I don't think that the professed unilateralism is actually, at this point, harming the networks.

Yeah.

QUESTION: Hi, Gabe Plesea for Romania Libera. Could you tell us how does a clash of civilization feed into this networking, knowing that there are forces, you know, antagonistic forces in the world that will probably never be as reconciled?

Thank you.

DEAN SLAUGHTER: This is a strongly anti-clash of civilizations argument; indeed, this is, in many ways. My original article came out right when Sam Huntington's did, and this is the antithesis of that. This is saying, you can argue about clash of civilizations, but it's odd that at the same time you claim there is a fundamental divide. You can find networks of judges from every culture and every country. You can find networks -- again, everything from utilities regulators to financial regulators, for whom the functional job they do, whether it's regulating water or the environment or competition policy, transcends cultural differences.

Now it doesn't obliterate them, but definitely allows them to interact with one another, and if it were really the clash of civilizations in the dramatic terms that Sam Huntington talks about, that should not be so. There should be a divide. And as I said, you can find these networks in every area of the world. You can -- and you can find networks of networks.

That said, I think there is no question that it's very important to think about how you include more officials from Islamic countries in them. Because, clearly, in the financial area, for instance, you have, you know, you have Islamic finance, without question, but the rules are different. And ironically, in the judicial arena, judges in Islamic countries are closest to the judges in the U.S.

When I used to teach perspectives on American law to 150 foreign lawyers, and I would teach about the American judicial system, the Europeans would come up and say, "Yeah, this is government by judges. This is just crazy." The Islamic students would come up and say, "Yeah, you know, we have strong, independent judges. Now they're religious-based, but they play a very strong independent role."

I don't think you can have participation in a government network if you have a government that is an absolute dictatorship or any form of government that doesn't allow for any independent action. You do not have to have three branches that looks like the United States or like Europe or Japan.

There are many different forms. But you have to have some independent judiciary, in the sense of at least judges being able to decide cases according to their own view of the law. You have to have some independent financial regulators. You have to have some independent legislators, if they're going to participate. There are certainly more incompatibilities between the way many Islamic countries are organized and many countries in other parts of the world.

But that to me is not a function of Islam, that's a function of a particular kind of political development. And one of the things I would say is, if you're thinking about these really as tools of global governance, you need to think about how you take account of political differences, how you include officials, where you can. And where you can't, I think that's often a sign of a deeper problems. But it's not civilization, it's political.

Nobody else on this side?

Okay. Yes.

QUESTION: Hello, Johann Fernandez from the Star in Malaysia.

DEAN SLAUGHTER: All right.

QUESTION: I'd just like to ask a question regarding all you're talking about. There seems to be a lot of books, a lot of articles which has written about the end of globalization. So how does all of this relate, if globalization, which has been worked on so long, is suddenly disintegrating, you know?

So how do all this that you are talking about come into play, if globalization as such a long thought out plan is falling apart?

DEAN SLAUGHTER: Well, I think it is quite possible that you will see globalization halted. It might even retrench somewhat, although I think the history of globalization, like the history of democratization, shows that it surges forward, and then maybe some retrench, but never going all the way back. So I could well imagine a situation in which you would say the networks we have now are not necessarily going to expand in every area, if the global economy slows down and actually retrenches.

So you'll have less pressure to do this. But I don't see them actually being undone because, to the extent you have, as I said, corporate networks, nongovernmental networks, criminal networks, it's hard to imagine those really getting undone. I could imagine them not going further, but I don't see them crumbling any time soon.

I think more important, again, is how you use these networks to address the problems generated by globalization that put tremendous pressure on globalization, some right, probably, some not right.

So in other words, again, to go back to the G20, the G20 put forward the Montreal consensus, in opposition to the Washington consensus, saying, you know, look, we are finance ministers saying there is not just one way to run an economy, and the way -- the template that's being imposed is actually creating huge social dislocation in many countries and it is ill-thought out and potentially dangerous.

That's an example where you use a network of government officials who have a lot of power to counteract a particular international organization. There are lots of different ways where you can look at the problems of globalization and see -- again, admit more people into the decision-making circle, so that, I think you can address those problems greater. But I don't see globalization disappearing, even if it's slowing down.

Yes, there.

QUESTION: Hi, I'm Elena Sorokina from Die Welt Germany. You have mentioned competition policy. Do you think that the recent decision on Microsoft was a result of successful networking?

DEAN SLAUGHTER: Well, I'm sure Microsoft doesn't. But, yes, actually I do, and competition policy is an area where, you know, originally the United States was completely unilateral. We, basically, applied U.S. competition law to anyone, anywhere in the world who made a combination that affected the U.S. market. A lot of countries fought us for a long time. The EU basically decided, you know, better, if you can't beat them, join them, and then -- and use their own weapons against them.

What then happened is tremendous cooperation between the EU and the U.S. competition authorities, the development of something called positive comedy, which I write about in the book, that says, when the U.S. has an anti-trust issue, instead of trying to enforce U.S. law in Europe, they go to the Europeans and they say, we think there is a problem here. Will you investigate it, and vice versa?

So between them, they have mutually strengthened each other's capacity. They've shared a lot of knowledge of best practices, and they've sort of divided up the territory in various ways, and so this kind of a decision, while I'm sure Microsoft is not happy at all, is an excellent result of something the U.S. -- well, has sort of done on its own, not completely -- but could never have done in Europe by itself.

It would have been extremely difficult to get Microsoft for its European operations, but that instead, the EU node of that network has the power to do it. And ideally, you would imagine that happening in Africa or Latin America or Asia, as well.

You had a question, in the back there -- no, I'm sorry, in the middle there. Yeah.

QUESTION: Middle?

DEAN SLAUGHTER: No.

QUESTION: Hi, I'm Juergen Schoenstein from Focus magazine, in Germany. One question, you know, we talked about accountability and transparency. There is still one area that I wonder how -- but that's consistency between the levels. You mentioned that Schroeder and Bush were not talking, but Fischer and Powell were. But in the end, somebody has to call the shots.

So how do you -- because some of those networks may be obscure even to, you know, elected officials? So how would they know what's going on there?

DEAN SLAUGHTER: Yeah. That is the third area of concern: accountability "representativeness" of power -- and more than representation, actual power. And when do you need unified policy?

And some of this, of course, you can imagine sort of general direction being set by leaders networks. So part of the answer is that the leaders networks need to operate more than the G-8 operates now, and there has to be a way in which leaders can both convene networks but also can know what they're doing.

In some areas, loose delegations are probably enough, where, as long as we know roughly what the agriculture people are doing, it's okay. In some areas, you can have real conflict between what the finance ministers are doing and what the agriculture ministers are doing or the leaders. And indeed, the finance ministers -- I don't know if any of you noticed this -- when the G-8 meet, there are leader statements, communiqués and their finance ministers communiqués, and they are separate and they're deliberately kept that way because the finance ministers really don't want much interference.

So one possibility -- and you talk about something that's not only unsexy, but is downright terrifying, is some -- the equivalent of a global interagency process, right, where you could imagine that all of these different networks, there is some way that the representatives from the different networks talk to the representatives of the other networks.

That is not a happy picture, in my view, and I think, frankly, there -- the better approach is to think about the issues on which it's very important that there be a more unified voice, and nations and individually taking measures. So within Washington, I could say, look, there are some areas here where I don't think the State Department can play its traditional role.

But I think the State Department has a new role figuring out what Treasury is doing and what the environment's doing, and what the agriculture is doing, and then doing that within our own process and feeding that to the White House, and that should be part of our process so that -- and the same would be true in Germany.

But I think that is an area where we're really going to have to think through it issue-by-issue because, you're right, it's a problem -- it could become more of a problem. I can't come up with a good global solution. So I think we're going to have to come up with a patchwork of national solutions, and I do think there are some issues where you still want a unified voice. There is no question.

In the back.

QUESTION: Good morning. Phuong Nguyen from Vietnam News Agency. Thank you very much.

DEAN SLAUGHTER: You're welcome.

QUESTION: I'll return to (inaudible), and I want to -- you have a (inaudible) the government and the countries. You have a network to address the global issues. Okay? So can you make it more clear about this? And what are the benefits and what are the dark side or the negative consequence of the globalization to the developing country? And how can the weak country to overcome the big gap between the weak country in the world now, that by using the network?

Thank you very much.

DEAN SLAUGHTER: Okay. So how can weak countries use networks, and more generally, more specifically, how can you use networks for globalization?

Well, one -- part of the answer is the answer I gave you, which is that, weak countries have a lot of leverage in a number of these areas because if you are a developed country regulator and you are worried about air pollution, ozone, global warming, crime, in a network, you're as weak as your weakest link. Right?

I mean, you need -- you've got to have strong counterparts to be able to implement a policy that you might all agree is the right policy if you, in large parts of the world, sign on, but you can't do anything, you've got a problem. You've got a problem from the developed country.

Now this is true, of course, in treaties too. But the problem with treaties is you do this at the top level, then it requires implementation through all of the different legislators. By the time you actually get to national practice, you can say, "Well, yeah, the problem is that a whole lot of countries in the world don't have the capacity to comply with the Montreal protocol. They just don't."

But the people who are in charge of getting them that capacity are not in the loop. The advantage here is, it's the environment ministers and their lower level officials, who are -- they may not be in charge of negotiating the protocol -- I mean, again, there is a role for unitary governments, but they should be in charge of making it work, and they should be in charge of getting the kind of assistance and training and support, ongoing support, through information and actual assistance to all the countries in the network.

So there is really, if you think about the situation that many developing countries in environmental negotiations, where the developed world needs them to stop polluting if we're ever going to make a difference. They have a lot of power. There is a version of that in virtually all of these networks, whether it's fighting crime or economic regulation, or, as I said, the environment -- indeed, even things like intellectual property -- where when you get the individuals who are responsible, you can get a lot of strengthening. And that's also how, as I said, you tackle a lot of global problems.

It's not very glamorous but it requires action at the national level. And so what you want to do is get the officials who are in charge of that directly involved, subject to a global interagency process.

In the back.

QUESTION: I'm Pedro Riberio from Publico newspaper, Portugal. Now even in the European Union, people are still very attached emotionally to the concept of Venetian States, and you're presenting the world view where many decisions are taken at the transnational level. To people with nationalistic leaning, this will sound downright scary. How do you sell the idea that global networks are a good thing?

DEAN SLAUGHTER: Oh, gosh. Now I'm glad you asked me that question because I'm trying to say exactly the opposite. I really am. I mean, I -- you've got two choices. You can make these decisions about global governance at the level of an international institution, a -- the European Commission, for instance, or a -- the institution that will have its own staff, who will be international bureaucrats, or you can make these decisions through networks of national officials.

This is an argument that strengthens the state. This is an argument that says the state should be and is likely to remain. So normatively and empirically, the primary unit of political legitimacy and power. And if we want to be able to tackle these problems effectively, we need to empower our own national officials in all of these countries to work with their counterparts to make these decisions.

So there is no such thing as a transgovernmental network apart from the nation state, right? They don't float out there somewhere independently. They are us. They are our own government officials. Now it is certainly true, if we do not monitor what they do, the central bankers will come back and tell us, "Well, we decided with our fellow central bankers X, and we must do this because we agreed." And ditto in every area you can think of. That's bureaucratic politics, and this is one forum where you can now apply some leverage. That can be countered. I mean, those games are played nationally all the time. They can be played transgovernmentally.

But what I am saying is we have global governance capacity within nation states, and we can do a lot of what we need to do by simply using our own national officials rather than setting up international institutions that are apart from the nation state and harder to control.

That said, and this is the last part of my answer to your question, which I didn't get to, as in the EU, again, there are -- there is still a role for genuine international or super national entities in the EU, where you have lots of these networks, what you have created is European information agencies because there are some things the networks just don't do well enough through this horizontal model.

There are things where you need a centralized body. But the power of that body is limited to coordinating, providing information, not actually making decisions. But I think the message of this is, we face a dilemma, we need global governance capacity, but we don't want global government.

So the answer is: Networks of national government officials who interact with international institutions and who are held accountable, not only to national constituencies, but we have to find ways to hold them accountable to a hypothetical global constituency.

I think we're done.

MS. NISBET: Thanks so much for your time.

DEAN SLAUGHTER: Thank you all.