We're Not from the Government, but We're Here to Help

June 11, 2003

Transcript prepared from tape recording

9:15 a.m.	Registration
9:30	Welcome and Introduction
9:45	Session I
	Moderator:	John Fonte, Hudson Institute
	Paper 1:	"The NGO Challenge: Whose Democracy Is It Anyway?"
		Gary Johns, Institute of Public Affairs, Australia
	Paper 2:	"International NGO Organization: Why the Left Are Winning"
		Jeremy Rabkin, Cornell University
11:05	Session II
	Moderator:	Roger Bate, International Policy Network
	Paper 1:	"Biz-War: Origins, Structure, and Strategy of Foundation-NGO Network Warfare on Corporations in the United States"
		Jarol Manheim, George Washington University
	Paper 2:	"Increasing NGO Openness and Accountability"
		David Riggs, Capital Research Center
12:30 p.m.	Luncheon Keynote Address	Kenneth Anderson, American University Law School
1:55	Session III
	Moderator:	Brian Hook, Hogan and Hartson, LLP
	Paper 1:	"NGOs and Foreign Aid: A Case Study in Institutional Capture"
		Mike Nahan, Institute of Public Affairs, Australia
	Paper 2:	"Northern NGOs in the South: Health, Wealth, and the Environment"
		Roger Bate, International Policy Network
3:15	Session IV
	Moderator:	Fred Smith, Competitive Enterprise Institute
	Paper 1:	"The Corporate Social Responsibility Policy of the European Union: A European Implementation of Globalist Goals"
		Marguerite Peeters, Institute for Intercultural Dialogue Dynamics, Brussels
	Paper 2:	"Why NGO-Stakeholder Dialogue Can Endanger Corporate Social Responsibility"
		Jon Entine, AEI and Miami University of Ohio
4:30	Adjournment

Proceedings:

MS. PLETKA: Welcome. I'm Danielle Pletka, the vice president for foreign and defense policy studies of the American Enterprise Institute. We are very, very pleased to host this conference today with the Institute of Public Affairs, Australia. I have just a few short words of welcome.

About a year ago, maybe a little less, this man on a Fulbright, this rather energetic Australian man, kept coming and knocking on our doors talking about nongovernmental organizations and how we need to pay attention to this. And I have to give full credit to Gary Johns, the aforementioned Fulbright Scholar who's sitting here to our right, for a lot of the inspiration for this conference and many of the fine ideas that go in, along with all of our other participants.

There are some people--I hope not too many in the audience and a certain number outside our front door who are less well-dressed than some in our audience--who believe that this is an assault on nongovernmental organizations, and I would like to refute that right at the very beginning. There is absolutely no intention of assault or anything else. We--and I think I can speak safely for everybody--have enormous admiration for the voluntary work that people do, for the fine work that a lot of nongovernmental organizations do in a whole variety of areas--legal, humanitarian. And so I really want to make absolutely clear that nobody here today is interested in knocking down the principle that underlies the work of nongovernmental organizations.

But. But as governments rethink their assistance programs overseas and they rethink the idea of giving money to foreign governments, they have started working a great deal more with nongovernmental organizations. A lot more foreign assistance is flowing through nongovernmental organizations. In addition, with the growth of supernational institutions like the World Trade Organization, like the International Criminal Court, and others, nongovernmental organizations, through the process of accreditation and other processes, are attaining a great deal more power on the world stage--some to the good, some to the bad.

It raises the question, and it's a fairly simple question: Who are they, what do they do? I think it's a legitimate question, and that is one of the things we're going to be looking at today.

I want to make two final notes. There will be papers that will be available as a result of this conference in a few weeks, I hope. And in addition, at lunchtime today, after our lunch speaker gives his talk, we will be--AEI together with the Federalist Society will be rolling out our new website, NGOWatch.org. So I hope everybody will take the opportunity to look at what are the opening stages of that website outside on the computer. But we will talk a little bit more about that at lunchtime.

And now I would like to introduce my colleague, Mike Nahan, who is the executive director for the Institute of Public Affairs in Australia. And thank you very much. Mike?

MR. NAHAN: Thanks. First, I would like to thank the American Enterprise Institute for helping us and co-hosting this. When the IPA over in Australia tried to set up a unit to debate and look at issues of the growth and accountability and other factors related to the NGOs, it became very obvious to us some time ago that the central place that this debate needs to take place is here. The policies, the organizations, the issues often flow from here and affect us from afar. And my colleague Gary, who was here on a Fulbright, spent most of his time searching for a partner, and AEI was very graceful and helped us do this. Hopefully, things will flow on.

Just from our own perspective, the reason why we got into this issue is quite the opposite of our friends' downstairs, and that is, quite clearly, the NGO sector has grown in importance and influence. In fact, most of us, I think--well, speakers anyway--work for nongovernmental organizations--they might be called think tanks, but they function in a similar manner--and have worked for voluntary organizations.

But with influence, size, power and whatnot come questions of accountability, transparency, and their roles. And in society, we're increasingly having debates about government accountability--which I've spent most of my life working as an economist--and corporations'. The third sector also needs it. And that's what we're striving to do here.

I might add just in the handouts, we put out an NGO Watch which focuses on the Asia Pacific region, but there are links elsewhere. That's available on our website. Please look for it. We're always looking for people to participate, debates and criticism. There are a whole range of other groups doing this.

After this session here in D.C., similar conferences will be held around the world, particularly one in Asia later this year. And if anybody wants to participate in this debate, we in particular, and I'm sure the AEI, will encourage it. Thanks.

SESSION IMR. NAHAN: The first session will include Jeremy Rabkin and Gary Johns, and its rapporteur is John Fonte, who most of you will know. He's a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute, published on a wide range of social, cultural, and educational issues, and actually has written a very fascinating paper that we republished in our journal, The IPA Review, on the issue of transnational progressives and when it tries to come to grips with a lot of the ideology that's permeating NGOs. John Fonte.

MR. FONTE: Thank you. Actually, I think you're going to hear many divergent views today, some more critical of NGOs, such as myself. I just want to make a comment before we introduce them.

Nearly a year before the September 11th attacks, wire service stories gave us a preview of the transnational politics of the future. It was reported October 24, 2000, that in preparation for the U.N. Conference Against Racism, about 50 NGOs, American NGOs, sent a formal letter to the U.N. human rights commissioner, Mary Robinson, calling on the United Nations to "hold the United States accountable for the intractable and persistent problems of discrimination that men and women of color face at the hands of the U.S. criminal justice system."

This NGO letter was signed by leading American NGOs--Amnesty International USA, Human Rights Watch, the Arab American Institute, National Council of Churches, American Friends Services Committee, National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, American Civil Liberties Union, Mexican American Legal Defense Fund, and so on. Their spokesman, Wade Henderson of the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights said, quote, that they had repeatedly raised these issues with federal and state officials, with the Congress of the United States and so on, but to little effect. So he said, "In frustration, we now turn to the United Nations."

In other words, what he was in effect saying, that he was unable to enact the policies that he favored through the normal process of American constitutional democracy, through the Executive Branch, the Congress, even the court system, either federal or state. And he had to appeal to authority beyond American democracy, beyond the Constitution. The NGOs at the Durban Conference exemplify the new challenge to liberal democracy and its traditional home, the liberal democratic nation state.

Now, this challenge is not simply to the American liberal democracy, but to liberal democracy in Australia, in Britain, in Israel, in Poland, and yes, in France and Germany. The fact that the very idea of a liberal democratic nation state and its principles are contested in the West today suggests we have not reached the end of history in the ideological sense, as delineated by Francis Fukuyama in his ground-breaking essay in 1989.

Now, the organizing spirit of this conference I will introduce, and that is Gary Johns. He is a senior fellow at the Institute of Public Affairs in Australia, where he heads the IPA's nongovernmental organization projects. He was elected by the people of Brisbane to the House of Representatives, where he served from 1987 to 1996. He is a 30-year member of the Labour Party. He also served as special minister of state in the Labour administrations of Prime Minister Hawke and Keating.

In 2002, he won the Fulbright Professional Award in Australia and U.S. alliance studies, and in March of '03, he was appointed associate commissioner for the Commonwealth Productivity Commission for inquiring into workers compensation and occupational health and safety. Mr. Johns was recently awarded a Centenary Federation Medal for "service to Australian society through advancement of economics, social, and political issues." Gary Johns.

[Applause.]

MR. JOHNS: Thanks, John, for your kind introduction. And special thanks to Danielle Pletka and Molly McKew from AEI, and AEI for its support for this conference today. And to my boss, Mike Nahan, from the IPA. And also to the American-Australian Fulbright Commission, who were kind enough to let me visit Washington for a few months last year. In particular, the chairs of each of these sessions, because these were the people who came together for the first time and thought it might be a nice idea to hold such a conference. And to those other people today, friends who will be giving papers.

Now, we, that is the IPA, started out on this issue of nongovernmental organizations and where they fit within society about three years ago. And my experience is quite particular. I come from the parliamentary system. So, okay, it's a bias towards that sort of conceptualization of democracy as an institutional form. And obviously that gives me an experience and a reflection that does two things. One, I've seen NGOs from inside government, and their ability to influence government. And that's fine. And I've seen NGOs from the outside, having worked for a number of them over a number of years. But also the IPA is an NGO.

So our first paper in the NGO project was in a sense a policy paper for ourselves. The Institute of Public Affairs had to think about itself, its own legitimacy, if you like, its own place in the world. So we wrote a paper about political accountability. And you always do this, you make sure your conclusion is hitting in the right direction. We thought at the outset we can't end this by saying we need somehow to control the system, for more regulation. That would be the wrong answer. We're not seeking the regulation of NGOs, we're seeking to know how they make their input. Because we don't want the IPA to be regulated. We want everyone who's a member of a free association to speak freely in a liberal democracy.

So that was the conclusion, if you like. However, the fact that, to me, politics is now coursing through an enormous array of different streams and venues; it's not just a two-party system anymore--in our country, Liberal and Labour--it's far more complex. It doesn't revolve around a simple division between capital and labor. So parliaments, the old fuddy-duddies like me, have to take into account that politics is much dispersed, there's less loyalty along that one major division of capital and labor. So this we understand also.

Now, if NGOs raising money for themselves and organizing politically for their own purposes want to do what they want to do, that's their business. That's an important conclusion. However, where NGOs seek access to government, and especially to government resources, that becomes a question for the whole of the people. So we focused our question, really, about the relationship between the constitutional institutional form of representative democracy and democracy as participation.

Now, politics to me has always been a contest between organized interests and unorganized interests. And most people have unorganized interests. They get on about their business. And they prefer to get on about their business and to have rules written by the parliament that allow them to get on about their business. Others of us were so keen on politics, we wanted to spend all of our lives in it. And this is what NGO activists do.

But we have to remember the name of the game is that everyone doesn't live their life as a political act-up--there is another life out there--and that we should as much as possible leave them alone, leave them to their own devices. So the question is, what are NGOs asking of the people, what are they asking of their resources, and when they have an input into government policy and seek to use taxpayers' money, public resources, then governments have a right to know.

So in our second paper, we made sure that we looked at the relationship between, the formal relationship between governments and NGOs who want to use government resources. Because when an NGO steps into a minister's office, he/she is replacing/displacing the elector. Now, that's okay because politicians don't want to see 10,000 electors in their office every morning. They prefer to see a representative group on, you know, the environment or human rights or social security matters or whatever, because it would be impossible to have a conversation with the whole of the electorate.

So NGOs do good work in terms of collecting opinion. But governments sometimes forget to ask, Who are you? Who do you represent? What is your expertise? And we are now undertaking a project for the Commonwealth of Australia government of that very nature, to maybe end up with some legislation that you have in the U.S. That is, the governments should ask that the credentials of NGOs who want access and who want money and resources be tested--like in a court of law, that their standing be tested; and, probably most important, that when these measures of standing are made apparent to the government, they're shared with the electorate--they're put on the website and everyone knows who's dealing with the government for what purposes. And then I think it just opens the game out so that the unorganized feel a bit more comfortable with that debate in formal politics, which is really about organized interest groups.

Now, and in the third paper we started to think about the effect of NGOs who operate directly on corporations; that is, NGOs who, after 100 years or more of being regulated by governments, were still apparently playing up and not doing the right thing, according to some people, so a lot of NGOs want to in fact regulate corporations directly.

Now this is a concern, because I would call this nonconsensual regulation. This is pressure and rules that NGOs would like to apply to corporations, which doesn't end up in hard law, but nevertheless seeks to change the behavior of corporations in particular ways. But it's nonconsensual; no one reached that opinion, and very often it's a particular group's conception of the good and what a good corporation should be.

These papers have received a reasonable amount of feedback, I might say. But one of the--I think the most telling criticism of our work has been a very simple observation by someone who said, Look, I don't think the NGO phenomenon is going to endure. It's a flash in the pan. That person may be right. I think, though, that the NGO phenomenon will last and it will grow. I'm not simply projecting its growth from the past and the fact that they are now tens of thousands of NGOs in each nation and tens of thousands of international NGOs. Rather, there are good reasons why they'll grow.

So I have a sort of a checklist of a half a dozen reasons, and you may be able to think of more. First, the NGO [inaudible] themselves participation, not the settlement of competing interests. So it's a much more expressive form of political activity. And I know from experience that a lot of young people prefer to now do their politics in NGOs and not within the political parties.

Second, the amount of spare cash and time for political purposes is rising. The money that will come from--well, the money that will transfer between generations the next 10, 20, 30 years will be the greatest inter-generational transfer of wealth in our history. Some of that will filter into political works. People will want to do good with their money. So we're going to look at a considerable rise in the energy which people will devote, and the money which people will devote to politics. That's not always a good thing, but as long as we're aware of it, it's okay.

Another one, too--this may sound a bit strange--is that I think politics will be intellectualized. Most people play their politics as loyalists to one group or the other, the major political parties. But I think we will probably find that our new retirees and younger political activists will all be educated and they'll want to theorize what it is that makes the world go round and round.

So we won't be talking about so much of that work of NGOs which is to help the poor, the direct work; it will be can we prevent poverty--in other words, change the system? It feels much better when you want to change the system and change the world than it is to directly help someone who lives across the street. So I think we'll get more of the intellectualizing, the theorizing. Politics has been freed from the crude ideological division of class, to some extent. And I think there is now running through--a myriad coursing through a myriad of organizations, including through the corporation and into the community and courts as well as the parliament and so on.

The fifth one is that we of course have built a very large number of international inter-government organizations--the U.N. system and so on--and that they, having--while their bosses are governments, they are seeking a constituency. So they love the language of civil society, that there is a world out there that needs to be cuddled up to. So the U.N. and its senior people want to engage with civil society. Well, that's fine. But we then need to ask the question, With whom are you engaging, on what basis? What resources are being transferred? Who do these people represent? I mean, it just generates a lot of questions, but that in itself will generate new activity among NGOs.

And the sixth one, of course, is what I call the universe of contestability of ideas as being massively expanded, so public debate reaches all aspects of life, including inside families and all the rest of it, much more so than has ever been the case. There are few matters today that are left for private deliberation. Almost everything is part of public debate. Therefore almost everything will create and draw around itself people who are active in a particular proposition.

Now, in addition to this--I think; I'm predicting that the NGO phenomenon will be an enduring one--we have to ask the question, Is the NGO challenge, which is based on participative democracy, a difficult thing for institutional democratic practice? Institutional democratic practice--a constitution, a parliament, and so on--is based on the notion of democratic elitism. It is not everyone gets to play politics, thank goodness. But the fact is that if more and more participated--people really are keen on the notion of participative democracy--then of course the activists will win. So my question is who loses in the participative democracy? It may well be all those who don't want to participate. So you have to be very careful of the interests of those who don't want to live their lives as political activists.

Now, in addition to the sort of political challenge and challenge to certain conceptions of democracy, there's also a second element of democracy that's always intrigued me, and that's the one that pits the masses, the voter, the mob, the electorate, "my fellow Americans," and all that sort of group against the intellectuals. And that's okay, too. Politics is really about an elite who make decisions but who are regularly inquired of by the unelected. And it seems to me that in our political science and even in our science faculties of the past few decades, social science and science used to be about explanation. More so, it's now about advocacy.

I just don't have time to sort of work that theme up, but it seems to me that we have a lot of people entering the game of politics who would formerly seek to simply explain the way of the world, even in hard science. But they now more and more seek to advocate particular positions. This is a difficulty in a liberal democracy, where everyone's allowed to say whatever they want, because it's becoming more difficult to rely on, if you like, elements of truth. Things which you can rely on as being fact or not are being undone. So some of the mooring, some of the underpinnings of our system are starting to move somewhat.

There's a lovely little story which I want to share with you as an illustration of this. There was a doctorate awarded just last month and the University of Queensland, of which I am a graduate, which found that Jesus was gay. This may come as a surprise to some of you. The thesis was about homosexual spirituality, and the author was gay. Now, as well as the revelation about Christ, the student also reached the conclusion that three or possibly four of the Jesus' disciples was also gay. Now, he came to that conclusion by looking at Jesus' astrological chart and to clues in the scriptures, to which, he argued, the churches had been blind for some 2000 years. He said that the starting point is the matter of John, who always referred to himself as Jesus' beloved disciple. And so it went--I mean, that he was awarded this doctorate.

Again, he is entitled to his opinion, but clearly the person appeared to be reaching his conclusion based on who he was. So the whole politics of identity, we know, has been a very powerful element of politics in the last couple of years. I think I might write to this fellow and suggest that in his post-doctoral work he look at the sexuality of Muhammad and see if the response is as liberal as he gets from Christians. It might not be.

So we are somewhat open to criticism in the liberal democracy. When all things go, it's very hard to find a defense sometimes, or an attack, even.

Let me jump, then, because--John, we have a couple of minutes?

MR. FONTE: Yeah, you can [inaudible].

MR. JOHNS: Thank you. This question of, I think, NGOs and their place in politics is reasonably well handled inside nation states. It becomes more difficult at an inter-government, international level. There's a lovely phrase which I picked up from a book by Gregory Jusdanis, "The Necessary Nation." The problem of the power of the political activists and the likelihood that they do not reflect widely held opinion is solved within the nation state by a regular and responsive forum for all interests. Jusdanis says the nation is "a daily plebescite." I like that. A daily plebescite. So that the distance between the unorganized and their representatives is not too great, and it just chews through all these debates day in, day out. So there's a sense in which there's a lot of feedback.

Now, I think we can easily argue that despite the appeals to international citizenship and the wonders of e-mail and the apparent ease of international travel, the daily plebescite is not available in international forums. And it's international forums, I think, where we may encounter some of our greatest difficulties. So let me quote from Mike Moore--this is the former New Zealand prime minister and not the--I've seen the movie, too. But Mike Moore, the former prime minister of New Zealand and director general of the World Trade Organization for 1999 to 2000.

Now, Mike, he published a book just earlier this year. "All the U.N. agency heads meet once a year under the chairmanship of Kofi Annan. At one meeting, an agency head shocked me by stating, We're in a post-parliamentary, post-democratic age. Nation states can't function anymore, politicians are despised, and people can't even be bothered to vote anymore. He went on to assert that the future of governance was with international organizations in partnership with NGOs representing civil society by passing politicians. And of course," Mike says, "many NGOs subscribe to and push this theory. It gives the power, status, and resources."

Now that, I think, is a significant observation and insight and we're all beginning to think about how we might, having formalized and understood and worked on the relationship and the disclosure between governments and NGOs inside nation states--or in some of them, I might say--I think the task will be even more important in inter-governmental and international--the international issues.

Let me finish on one last illustration. This is also a difficulty that corporations have. Corporations by and large have been, yes, in a deal with governments over many years about how their activities will be regulated. But NGOs are beginning to buy into that game. There was published in the last three years in Australia a corporate reputation index of Australia's top 100 companies. Now, we've analyzed all three, but the last one was intriguing. About 20 NGOs ranging across environmental and human rights and labor issues and so on and so forth measure the performance of corporates. And some are right at the top, number 1, and some are rated at the bottom, number 100. And I thought, well, that's intriguing. So someone who scores just 100 could be said to be a bad corporation, not socially responsible.

So we had a little bit how they arrived at this. And it was pretty simple, really. If you filled out the form in 2002--sorry. We looked at those who had moved a great deal in rankings between 2002 and 2003. And I asked the question, did the performance of these corporations with respect to corporate social responsibility change? So we analyzed it, and we found that the top one-half-dozen big movers-up had not filled out the questionnaire, i.e., refused to participate with the NGOs in 2002, but did fill it out in 2003. They were rewarded with good marks. Those who filled it out in 2002 but were jack of it by 2003 and refused to participate, were punished. And they dropped. None of those corporations changed a thing. It was whether or not they played the game of filling out the form and ticking the boxes that said, according to NGOs, this is the correct conception of corporate social responsibility. If you played the game, you were rewarded with a better reputation, and if you didn't play the game, you were punished with a worse reputation.

Now, fortunately, maybe because of our work, maybe because of others, that index will probably never see the light of day again. But it will pop up in another form, believe you me, because NGOs want to be players. They want to be regulators. My only problem is they do it in at least a reasonably scientific manner and that they appreciate that theirs is not a consensual position. It's just their view of what's good. It has no more meaning than that. We can only share views about what is good in a formal sense when we run it through some of our formal institutions and have them tested.

That's where we've reached at this point, and we look forward to doing a lot more work on NGOs. Thank you.

[Applause.]

MR. FONTE: Thanks, Gary. The next speaker is Professor Jeremy Rabkin, who is professor in the Department of Government at Cornell. Professor Rabkin is one of the foremost thinkers on the whole question of democratic sovereignty. He wrote a book--I think the best book, actually, on explaining democratic sovereignty called "Why Sovereignty Matters." I asked him right before--it's available here at AEI, but apparently it's been sold out, so you have to wait for the next book, which is coming out in a couple of months, which is called, "Safeguarding Sovereignty."

Professor Rabkin is a professor of American constitutional law, international law, and the history of political thought. He's also a member of the AEI Council of Academic Advisors. And he published a monograph with the Competitive Enterprise Institute on U.N. supervision of public parks in American territory, and has presented congressional testimony on behalf of the American Land Sovereignty Act. He also co-edited the AEI volume, "The Fettered Presidency: Legal Constraints on the Executive Branch," 1989. Professor Rabkin.

MR. RABKIN: Thank you. Are these protesters outside?

MS. PLETKA: They're gone.

MR. RABKIN: Oh, they're gone? So AEI is championing racism, war, and the spread of global capitalism. The racism thing didn't sound right to me.

[Laughter.]

MR. RABKIN: But let me start with the war point. Irving Kristol, one of the great figures of American intellectual life and of the American Enterprise Institute, was in a debate in the mid-1980s, and somebody said to him, "It's really important for the Reagan administration to make clear that it is in favor of peace, because otherwise you cede the peace issue to people on the left." And Irving Kristol scoffed at this and he said, "Peace? Peace is a Stalinist concept." I don't know if he won the debate with that.

But I would start by saying nongovernmental organization is a Stalinist concept. It's literally true. The origin of that expression, you can find it in the U.N. Charter, 1945. They mentioned that the Economic and Social Council can seek advice from nongovernmental organizations. Now, where did that term come from in 1945? Why did they express it that way? What exactly did they mean?

There's a history to this, and it's pretty well-documented and agreed. During the 1930s, during the period of the Popular Front foreign policy in the Soviet Union, the Soviet Union joined the International Labor Organization and it sent--the International Labor Organization required a delegation representing government and business--whatever that was in the Soviet Union--and labor, whatever that was. And since the ILO was very interested in unions, there were people there who said, Wait a minute, these are not real labor unions that you're claiming to send us delegates from; this is just a communist government organization and they can't be recognized as true representatives of labor in the way that representatives of American labor unions or Australian unions are. And the Soviet Union said, No, they are a nongovernmental organization.

That's the origin of the phrase. And if you think of it, it's a very odd phrase because it implies--I mean, the normal way we talk of this is "private." AEI is an NGO, Cornell University is an NGO, General Motors is an NGO, the First Presbyterian Church in Ithaca is an NGO. They all should be NGOs. And of course that is not how people hear the word. They hear it as, It's nongovernmental but somehow very engaged in politics. And at U.N. forums, they're very insistent this is not business organizations, this is not religious organizations, this is not academic organizations, it's nongovernmental organizations. It is somehow you're involved in political advocacy, but you're not governmental and therefore you don't have to stand for election. And not meaning to be sarcastic about this, I mean, that is a little bit--well, let's say it's reminiscent of Stalinist politics, this idea of you should have this authority but you shouldn't be accountable for it.

And I think it is not a surprise that the real explosive growth of NGOs, just as a matter of who's registered at the U.N.--if you go back to the 1950s, about two dozen organizations that were recognized by the Economic and Social Council of the U.N. as nongovernmental organizations that could give testimony and participate in some activities there, or at least listen, be present; and there are now over 500. Most of that growth is in the '80s and '90s. And during the '80s and '90s, they didn't just proliferate. I mean, they had slogans and they had energy. And one of their great slogans, "Global Governance," I think sums up what at least the advocacy organizations think they are doing.

So I want to just pause to say, if you think about it, of course this is a left-wing program which is going to appeal to people who have left-wing sensibilities. Now, I'm not saying they were all bolsheviks, they're all totalitarian--I'm not saying that. But just if you divide up the spectrum between, let's say, parties of the right and parties of the left, the whole enterprise of global governance of course is going to appeal much more to, let's say, parties of the left, people whose viewpoint is more toward the left.

To start with, the obvious meaning of "governance" is blurring the distinction between "private," as in private property, as in private firm, and "government," as in it's the public authority that therefore needs to be accountable and elected. Governance is already something in between private and public. It's not government, it's just governance. And that slogan is deliberately meant to appeal to the idea that, well, there's a lot of stakeholders in how an economy is run and we can't just say that things are private, everyone is part of the discussion, but the government is not something unique, it's just another part of the discussion. That whole outlook is, of course, more appealing to people who believe in controls than people who believe in private rights and markets.

Once you say "global," of course, you are appealing to people who have very cosmopolitan views and you're not appealing to people who say, No, wait, we in our country want to just do what we do in our country. If it is global, it is anti-national. So you've dropped off another important constituency of conservative politics or parties on the right.

Finally, if you speak about global, there is something almost millenarian about this, almost spiritual about this. And it's quite explicit in a lot of rhetoric of NGOs, they are saving the Earth. Of course, they were saving the whales and they're saving other animals, they're saving endangered this and endangered that, but in the end they're saving the Earth. And this rhetoric of "saving," what does that remind you of? Well, it's more or less explicit that it's a kind of replacement for religion.

Michael Ignatieff, who's by no means a man of the right, devoted the past 10 years to advocacy on behalf of international human rights causes, wrote a book just a year or two ago in which he talks about the idolatry of human rights thinking. And he says this is really troublesome, people are talking about human rights like a replacement religion, and this has really gone too far, and people have expectations for the international human rights movement as if it were something delivered by, you know, prophets, something that is a religion unto itself. And of course he's right about this. And he wasn't even saying it as "I'm indignant." He was saying it as "Come on, guys"--speaking to his people in this movement--"we are getting carried away with this."

I mention this, again, just to say there's another constituency of politics on the right which is not going to be attracted to global governance. So you exclude people who are concerned about private property and markets, you can exclude people who are concerned about, let's say, national identity, you exclude people who are connected with traditional religions, and you get a, let's say an outlook which is not across--doesn't represent the same spectrum that you have in national politics in many countries.

I'm not saying this indignantly, I'm not saying it's an outrage, I just call your attention--what this is inherently is a project that is tilted to the left.

In domestic politics, even in Europe, you know, there are contending constituencies. In particular, people don't like taxes, and if you have advocacy groups on the left saying let's fix [change tape] --your economy begins to suffer and voters rebel, the unorganized voters that Gary was talking about.

If you look at the European Union, which is a great sponsor of NGOs--and it's a great sponsor of NGOs, I think, for exactly the reason that Gary mentioned, which is it doesn't have real citizens, European Unionites. The European Union is mostly bureaucracies which are hard to penetrate. Nobody knows the name of his elected member of the European Parliament. I mean, it's such a strange organization. So you want to give the impression that there's a lot of life in the European Union, there's a lot of activity, there's a lot of enthusiasm. And that's very hard to do when you're a tedious bureaucrat. So you want to have NGOs out there who are champing and demonstrating and getting excited and doing things. And quite a lot of money goes into funding environmental advocacy groups in Europe and human rights advocacy groups and other kinds of advocacy groups.

The thing I just want to call to your attention is they get quite a lot of money because they collect the tariff, the common tariff of the EU member states--so that's quite a lot of money. But compared to a modern state with full taxing power, the EU is actually starved of revenue. They have something like 5 or 6 percent of total GNP of the member states, which--oh, that was the good old days, when government only took 5 or 6 percent. And the national states, of course, are multiples beyond that of their own GNP.

NGO politics goes with the kind of governance that can't reach directly into your pocket. The EU, everyone says, oh, well, it has a sort of democratic deficit. They have a democratic deficit, and that has a lot to do with why people don't trust it to directly tax them--that's the point at which people would rebel--but it has tremendous regulatory reach. The Economist recently did a survey--these things are very hard to measure, but they just--they obviously went and asked people in national capitals in members states, How much of the law that you are enforcing--and EU law is also enforced by national governments, I mean all of it has to be enforced by national governments. They don't have police. They're parasitic on the governments.

They said, How much of the law you are enforcing is made in Brussels? And most of them said about half. Some felt more than half, some felt a little less than half. So you can have quite a lot of regulatory reach without full governmental authority.

And I go on about the EU not only because it's a big sponsor of this--it is in a way a model of this, which is how much can you do even without basic taxing power; how much can you do even without other attributes of what we think of as government? And the EU shows you, well, quite a lot.

Once you organize a forum for NGOs--I mean, in the European case, I want to mention one other thing that's just very striking to me, which is the commission in Brussels seems to be much more to the left than national politics in most of the member states. And I think the reason for that is, right, it's very hard for religious groups who have some influence in some of the countries to cooperate across national boundaries. It's possible for business groups to do that, but they get shunted into different forums. It's hard, of course, for nationalist groups in different countries to cooperate across borders. That's the problem of being a nationalist group.

So you see a model of this already in the EU, that it gets tilted to the left. And if you think about this internationally, I think it is, and is bound to be, tilted much more to the left. And here I just want to go through a few quick advantages that these groups have had in creating forums that are favorable to them.

They're very media-genic. And one of the great advantages they have is that, unlike diplomats, NGOs don't have to be diplomatic. Diplomats cannot dress up in costumes and stage protests and do other things that are fun to show on the news.

They are very good, NGOs, at creating a sense of their being a whole international community that is excited and involved.

They're very good at being additive; that is, saying, Oh, that cause, yes, that's also part of this. I'll give you an example. If you look at the Stockholm Declaration, which is one of the sort of early events in mobilizing interest in international environmental regulation in 1972, it's really worth looking at. It talks about we're running out of resources and we need to conserve not only energy but resources and limit growth. It's a document of '70s environmental ideology. And half-way through it there's And we're all opposed to racism, colonialism, apartheid, and Zionism. And you think, oh, what's that doing there? Well, obviously what that's doing there is you have Third World countries who were not interested in the rest of it, but were willing to be recruited if you would put that in there, their favorite slogans.

If you compare that with the Rio Declaration, it's become, 20 years later, much more expansive. There are a lot more groups that are being appealed to, there's more rhetoric about women, about indigenous peoples, about minorities. You've made environmentalism into a human right, and human rights into an environmental cause and claims of consumers and people who feel that the economy does not serve them, and you're able to aggregate all of these things.

Let me come now to my punch line and then I'll stop. I think what is true in Europe, which is that people have been willing to allow a lot of power to gravitate to Brussels on the understanding that, yeah, yeah, but it's not real power, I mean it's not taxing authority, it's not armies, it's not police, it's not criminal court; it's just a power to make half of our law. And that's very important to it, the sense that it's not threatening because it is weak. It is in some ways more true of NGO advocacy on an international scale, which, to be sure, is very much weaker. I mean, it doesn't have any of the direct powers of the European Union. But it, I think, plays on this same syndrome of weakness is a kind of strength. It seems unthreatening. Well, we have these forums, everybody gets up and makes speeches, it isn't really law, it isn't really binding--well, it might be, it might enter into customary international law, but that's down the road, it's sort of vague, it's not clear, it's--don't worry.

NGOs, I think, play this game of you don't have to hold us accountable and you don't have to be afraid of us because it's just--we're just talking. And I think the key to all of this--I'm all in favor of, you know, more transparency, it would be good to know more about particular groups. But I think, really, the key to all this is to hold governments accountable, to say to the governments, They held a conference, they passed resolutions, they made a lot of noise; that doesn't matter. You are accountable to your own electorate.

I have quite a bit of optimism that this can be done in the United States, where NGOs have actually had the least success in getting courts to adopt their agendas as customary international law, the least success in intimidating legislators, the least success even in intimidating the State Department, the foreign ministry.

The downside to this, of course, is every time the United States says no, we are not bullied by this, this is--you weren't elected to anything, these were just conferences, it's very nice, you were talking but that's not us. Every time the United States does that, the response is, America is a dangerous, unilateralist power. It does, of course, play into people who want to say America is a bully because it's not giving way to international advocacy movements and their agendas. And I think the only answer to that is this is not just something that we demand of our government, it's something that our government has to demand of other governments, which is, That's very nice, people went to a conference, there was a lot of talk, but the United States government demands this from other governments.

And I'm actually on the whole, I think, somewhat more optimistic than Gary that you can make a big difference by saying to governments, These are things that we accept and these are things we do not accept. I think it's been very helpful in the last few weeks to make clear to Belgium we don't care that advocacy groups think that the Belgian criminal court system is a kind of forum for prosecuting anyone who is bad, that we won't accept that in the United States, don't try to prosecute an American that way; we don't care how many NGOs are enthused about it.

I think we were rather successful at the Johannesburg conference in which the American delegation said forthrightly these European proposals that everyone should limit their use of fossil fuels, we don't think they're a good idea and governments of less-developed countries, don't you agree? Well, Iran stood up and was a big champion of our viewpoint on this. Good. Fine. There's a lot of governments which can be more susceptible to more reasonable policies if you put it to them as governments and if you are fairly clear about, okay, what is one government going to do with another. That requires a certain amount of courage, particularly on the part of the United States, but I think it's entirely feasible, and I look for more hope from that direction. Thank you.

[Applause.]

MR. FONTE: Okay. I'm sure we have a few questions, so this gentleman right here. Please give your name and your affiliation. And wait for the microphone. Three things: Wait for the microphone, name, and affiliation.

QUESTION: Thanks. Steve Charnovitz [ph], I'm at Wilmer Cutler & Pickering.

I wanted to press Professor Rabkin a bit on his history. He had said that the term--I wasn't sure if it was the term or the concept of nongovernmental organizations was Stalinist and left-wing. And I wonder how he squares that with Toqueville's discussion of associations of the United States in 1830, the widespread use of the term "NGO" by political scientists, or "nongovernmental interests," also by political scientists in the 1920s looking at NGO activity in Geneva.

And then second, where he said that NGOs were excluding groups or religious concerns and private interests, how he squares that with the active work of the Quakers in the 18th century and the 19th century to eliminate slavery, the Christian trade unions, the Jewish groups working on human rights in the 1920s and '30s, and the creation of the International Chamber of Commerce in 1920, which has been one of the most active international NGOs throughout the 20th century, promoting capitalism and private property interests.

MR. RABKIN: The term is all I meant, the term "nongovernmental organizations." I was not saying that before the Bolsheviks started spreading their propaganda, we used to have only two things, business and government. I mean, it would have been a horrible world if that were true. Of course it wasn't true. You're perfectly right. I don't think it needs saying that just, if you think about any free country, there's quite a lot of things that go on that don't fit into the category either of business or government, and that's fine. That's more than fine. That's excellent. It's admirable.

The term literally is an odd term. Let's start with that. And I believe that is the genesis of the term. That's first. But the second thing is, apart from the term, the understanding of what does that term imply for us. It is just understood. I mean, NGO forums, if you want to participate at an NGO forum at an international conference, and you say, Hi, I'm here from General Motors and I'm nongovernmental, they won't say, Oh, sit down, great, good to have you. I mean, their understanding is that it doesn't include business.

I take your point. I mean, they have--there are quite a number of advocacy groups which are explicitly religious and are sponsored by religious organizations. The Vatican, somewhat to my regret is very active in a lot of international forums. I'll come back to that in a minute, why I regret that, because it's worth mentioning.

But I think it is true that in the nature of what this is, just in the same--speaking now about international forums. I'm not speaking about advocacy groups, I'm speaking about international forums. I think in the nature of what this is, just as it is not very hospitable--these are not hospitable forums and this is not a hospitable movement to nationalist groups. Because if you say, Hi, I'm a Croatian nationalist, is there anybody else who wants to join with me in enthusiasm for Croatian nationalism, you're not going to get a lot of people outside Croatia. You might do great within Croatia; you're not going to do so good outside Croatia.

And this is not all-or-nothing, and I do understand in the European Parliament there are, you know--there's a kind of conservative parties that are somewhat nationalist at home. But it's hard. It's very hard. And I think that is so also with regard to regard to religion, that if you have not just religious sponsorship of what is basically a socialist agenda but actually a religious agenda, such as you want to do missionary activity, and you really want to convert people, and you go to an international forum and you say, Hi, all those who want to support our Christian missionary activity, couldn't we be a--I don't think they would let you sit down. I mean, that's just not what that forum is about.

And permit me to say one more quick thing about--come back to this point about the Vatican. We're going to hear more about this, I hope. But I find it astonishing, and to me it confirms this point, which is that the Vatican does not have the self-confidence to be more in opposition to things which in fact it opposes. I mean, the pope is out there saying, Oh, the European Union, great, yes, Poland ought to be part of it. Why ought Poland to be part of it? What is Christian about the European Union? What exactly do you like about the European Union? Well, it's European.

And I think, I mean, apart from whatever his views on Poland are, there's this sense in the Vatican that, well, this is the trend of the world and we don't want to be opposing it. And at every international conference they say, oh, yes, oh, well, yes, a new standard, a new--yes, okay, we're for this.

I just tell you this anecdote, that somebody called me, fourth level down in whatever is the equivalent of the foreign ministry there in Vatican City, and he said, Well, they want to endorse some international environmental conventions because they just feel that they should, because, I mean, well, I mean, they should, right? And so they finally decided the one they're going to endorse is the Biodiversity Convention, and you've written about this and would this be okay? And I said, Well, I suppose it would be okay if you don't mind increasing levels of starvation in Africa; I don't know, does that bother them in the Vatican? Because what this is really about is preventing access to genetically modified foods and--why is that good for people in Africa? Many of whom are Christians, actually; maybe you'd be concerned about that. And he said, oh, yes, well. So I said, well, why are you even getting into this? Why do you have to take a stand on this? He said, Oh, well, because we feel that we need to be part of an international movement. You don't have credibility in raising your own concerns unless you're part of an international movement.

Well, that to me says that's in a way the exception that proves the rule. I mean, here's this--can I call it an organization?--authority which has, clearly, a very religious agenda, and they feel that they cannot even sort of get a hearing for the things that they want to talk about unless they sign on to all these other things. I mean, if you understand that that's the logic of this forum, then I think you say this is not a good forum for people who actually have religious concerns as opposed to, you know, this agenda.

MR. FONTE: Just a word on Toqueville before we go on. Toqueville was talking, of course, about associations within the American nation state, within the American union. When he went over to English-speaking Canada, he found no associations there. He wasn't talking about international associations, he was talking about associations within the American nation state.

QUESTION: Hi, Jim Lobe from InterPress Service. Following up on the last question, I just wanted to ask could we get a specific definition of nongovernmental organization from the panelists at the outset? Because you're placing it in a specific context that it could be argued is quite tendentious. You're talking about in a global--like global or international NGOs. And I would just point out in the description that the AEI gave talking about development projects, I mean, many of those are religiously based organizations.

MR. FONTE: Okay, let's move on. There are a lot of people who have questions. We want to get to as many people as we can. Gary--

QUESTION: It's not a hostile question.

MR. FONTE: Yeah, I know. We're trying to answer. Gary, go ahead.

MR. JOHNS: It's impossible to start to make a divide about who's in and who's out, who will be an NGO and who will not. But the people we observed claimed to be NGOs, and that's fine by us. They're NGOs. Someone criticized us by saying, Look, NGOs are different to civil society. And I said, yeah, well, I suppose that's right, but if NGOs say they represent civil society and use the language, then that's okay by me. This only arises, as far as I'm concerned, in the relationship between mainly private organizations and government. So it's the relationship between the two. So I'm not that concerned about who's in and who's out. But if they self-identify and they have this relationship with a formal institution named government and they want in some ways to change public rules or use public resources, then they come within our purview.

QUESTION: Michael Allen. I'm a visiting fellow with the National Endowment for Democracy, just around the corner. Until recently I worked for a what you might call consortium of NGOs, corporates--and the World Bank was another partner. And the truth is that although a great deal has been said about the movement and EU's sponsorship and support for NGOs, many NGOs--in fact, an increasing number--derive substantial sums of monies and resources from corporates themselves. And what we're seeing more recently is the emergence of so-called multi-stakeholder partnerships, huge global firms committing huge amounts of resources to these partnerships and NGOs. And when you ask corporates' executives and managers why they do it, their argument is that usually that NGOs have something that corporates don't have--social capital, legitimacy, expertise, call it what you will.

How do you explain, given the analysis that we've heard from the front of the room so far, which is [inaudible] political, why so much corporate support? Is it a form of a shakedown, or are their legitimate reasons here?

MR. FONTE: I think we're going to hear a lot about that in the next sessions, but we'll just have a brief answer from someone here.

MR. RABKIN: I want to focus on the word you used, "legitimacy." Corporations think that by giving money to NGOs or cooperating with NGOs, they're getting legitimacy. Now, why are NGOs in a position to confer legitimacy? To go to the question previously, what are NGOs, can we give a definition? Evidently it is included in the definition that they're not corporates, they're not business, they're not therefore merely private. Whoever heard of a private organization conferring legitimacy? What does it mean, conferring legitimacy?

I think what it means is you say a corporation is merely selfish, whereas NGOs are engaged in public activity, altruistic activity, global activity, and so therefore they are able to confer legitimacy. And, look, I can't tell people what to think if that's how they think. I mean, okay, that's what they think. But I do want to draw a very, very bright line and say this is all just stuff that you people are doing in private. Some people are consulting mystics, some people are consulting, you know, people who read palms and tell the future, and now you do whatever you want. Some people are buying organic foods which they think will cure cancer. I mean, whatever you do, that's fine. But let's be very, very clear, this isn't law. This is not something which anyone is bound by.

And I'm not optimistic that you can go to corporations and do standing up to this. I think a lot of this is a kind of protection racket in which these NGOs say cooperate with us or we'll call you names. But I at least want to say this doesn't go beyond the calling of names. This is PR on both sides, and good luck to you all. But it's rather important to us to be able to say actual--actual--coercive authority goes through constitutional states and back to voters, and it doesn't go through NGOs at any point. Never.

MR. JOHNS: Just briefly--and I agree entirely with what Jeremy's saying--I despair of CEOs who think that they can somehow buy legitimacy like that. They haven't lost legitimacy.

I just wanted to tell the shareholders, if you're going to do a deal with WWF to save X or Y, tell your shareholders that that was the price of the deal, if it was $100,000, and let them be aware that that was the best deal you could get. Because it was a deal, since for some reason you were spending that money. And I think if we spoke in more explicit terms like that, we might find that the owners of the corporations say, No, I don't like the deal.

I also despair of corporations getting into public policy. You can help the poor directly by giving some money. If you want to eliminate poverty, you're talking about very difficult issues. Governments and NGOs and lots of people have been at it for a while now, and we haven't quite worked out the solution. But corporations think they can buy whatever--whatever it is they're seeking to buy by getting into these immensely complex public issues. And they're crazy to do it.

QUESTION: Fred Smith, Competitive Enterprise Institute. The biases, or the inclination of NGOs to create a statist bias, legal statist bias is, of course, also applicable to domestic public interests groups, as we call our NGOs. And we understand that as politics becomes a more and more important forum, more and more [inaudible] will be attracted and you'll get these unholy coalitions of big NGOs, big government, and big business.

But the United States at least has some barriers to that. It doesn't seem to be as metastasized in the United States, partly because we do not require that before you can become a public interest group in America you have to swear allegiance to the statist agenda of the United States government. And secondarily, we have rules, observed to some extent, that mandate that no government agency can fund an NGO to explicitly lobby for the expansion of that governmental program--obviously, observed in the breach sometimes.

But do those two filters make a difference? Or why hasn't the United States gone as berserk in these areas as the EU or the United Nations?

MR. FONTE: Jeremy?

MR. RABKIN: That's a terrific question. That was really the question I was trying to answer, and I'm not saying you weren't paying attention because I gave a completely adequate answer. That's, I think, a very useful way of thinking about this. I mean, we have all kinds of advocacy groups in domestic politics. But in domestic politics you've got a lot of advocacy groups of the right as well as of the left. And if you are a Republican congressman, or a centrist Democrat, you get pressure from both sides. And you can, if you are not somebody who's making his career with constituencies of the left, you can feel that you've got some troops behind you. You'll have some people who will applaud when you say no, let's not do this, let's do the opposite. And you don't see an international counterpart to that at these, you know, jamborees that the U.N. hosts.

That's a very interesting question. You don't see a counterpart to that in Brussels. That's really what I was focusing on. And I don't believe it is what you said, which is just the formality of in order to show up at this conference you have to fill out these forms and say that you support the U.N. program, because I think, as you well know, people could be not-- Yeah, people could be not entirely sincere in saying they sort of at some level of abstraction support the U.N. principles, and get in there. But I think people don't have the incentive to do--they just think, bluh, what's that, I don't want to be part of that. Right? And if you're a business firm, you think, oh, why should I fight this? Why don't I just buy it off and then focus on the WTO? I don't want to go to these big, you know, forums about the environment and human rights and population because it's just--it's all a downside from the point of view of a business. Which it doesn't think when it's thinking about the Congress. I mean, it allows some issues to go off to the sidelines, but every business firm sees that the Congress matters, as do a lot of other constituencies that wouldn't be attracted to international things.

So I think that's--if I have not explained it, I say again, I mean, I think that's something that people should keep in mind.

I would say one last thing, which is, you know, this is one of the few themes of American political science--what should I call it?--reporting, writing over the past 80 years that has had some real, reliable validation of people, you know, testing it and saying yes, it's so; which is that if you change the forum, you change the politics. That, you know, people want to push things out of the state capital into the national capital because in a different arena you get different coalition partners, different dynamics. People engaged in politics are extremely well-aware that it matters at what level or in what forum, in what arena you press your cause. And I think the people who are dominating now in these international forums, the NGO forums, it's not by chance. I mean, those are forums that they like. Those are forums that they have helped to build up because it works for them. And it just doesn't work for people like you.

QUESTION: Christian Borge [ph] with the United Press International. I wonder if you can address the issue--a two-parter, really. You talked a little bit about the corporate involvement, but there are--for instance, the Chamber of Commerce in the United States has a nonprofit offshoots. They get money from USAID to do work in their agenda overseas. What do you think is the specific availability or at least specific characteristics of those organizations that will enable them to act as some kind of counter-balance? Is there a potential for that, number one? And number two, what do you make of the arguments that come from the NGO, the more liberal NGO arena that they're essentially working to counter-balance the inherent access to government that corporations have?

MR. JOHNS: I think what Jeremy and I are both saying is that inside nations there's plenty of room--there are plenty of advocates for both sides, it's a robust sort of debate. Internationally there are reasons why it might tilt one way or the other. So it's up to the players to get organized. That's not my business.

I'll tell you one thing I object to, though, it's when a minister of a government attends an international forum and takes NGOs with him. That's a massive confusion of responsibility. So the minister, if you like, steps down from his role of being the representative of the broad opinion of the people and the government, et cetera, et cetera, and says, well, look, I'll take the National Farmers Federation and the WWF along and they can participate, too. Why? You've done the deal, you've done the business, and it's literally, figuratively, legally in the hands of the minister to do the negotiation.

So one of our views, of course, is to, you know, look for transparency amongst NGOs and so on and so forth. But Jeremy, I'm with you. At the end of the day, governments have to reassert their legitimacy. The only game in town is that they've got the only measurable vote that's around. And they're certainly the only people who represent the unorganized.

So sure, let all the groups gather around internationally. I mean, there's enough [inaudible] around; they're not going to stop doing it. But we need to remind governments that they carry the weight and that when they meet, they should meet alone. I don't care what happens outside the door.

MR. RABKIN: Just two quick responses to this. Right, NGOs are now saying business has all this access. And they're not just talking about domestic access. They're saying business has these forums and the one that they're really lusting after is the WTO. So all these big decisions are being made on behalf of business at the WTO. Well, okay, that's--I understand that people are upset about that, and that's an issue and we can talk about that. It's not actually true that businesses are lobbying at the WTO. Businesses are lobbying back home. And if you want to influence your government's trade policy, you can do it back home. But of course that isn't what they want, because back home they're competing with a lot of other groups. They want an international forum in which they can predominate.

To say that because there are trade negotiations in an international forum--which, after all, trade is about exchange, you know, across borders--to say that because we have this for trade, we have to have it for the environment, for human rights, for health, for indigenous peoples, for everything else, I think is a complete non sequitur, but it's the way they argue these things. And just a few years ago they were saying security, why are we constantly having international conferences to talk about arms control? We should be having international conferences to be talking about diseases, to be talking about health, to be talking about other threats to--

Well, okay, I mean, but what that's really saying is, Nobody else, no--governments cannot simply have meetings to talk about things in which governments are exchanging. The governments shouldn't be allowed to do that on their own. If the governments are going to do it, then our movements should have to do it. And their movements are conceived in such a way that a lot of governments are intimidated.

I have just one quick point about which governments bring people with them. I was just at the Pentagon yesterday and someone said to me, you know, it's really annoying. We go to these meetings and some of the countries bring--to talk about military things--bring NGOs. Who does it? Australia. Australia's one of two countries that do it. Who's the other one? Canada.

And why do they do that? I think the reason is--and maybe you have a better explanation that goes deeper into Australian, you know, folk culture, but I think the explanation is it's a little bit scary--or at least it's a little bit unsettling when you are a smaller country talking to this vast power, the United States, and you want to say, well, we have potentially in the background a whole international movement. And if you guys in the Pentagon don't listen to us, there's going to be people handing out leaflets saying that you're for war and the global spread of capitalism. I mean, that makes you feel like you're, ah yes, more of a contender.

But I think it's not really in the end going to work too well for Australia and I don't think it's--I mean, I don't think it's a good thing even for the smaller countries in the long run to get themselves tangled up with international movements that aren't accountable to their own people.

QUESTION: Thank you very much. I'm Patricia Forner with World Vision. Now there's a whole new identity crisis. I think they call us faith-based organizations instead of nongovernmental organizations, but I'm not sure where the differences lie.

I'm very interested in your commentary about parliamentarians--or congressional representatives in our case, in this country--taking NGOs along to help them have legitimacy, maybe, at this table with the Department of Defense or--I find that extraordinary. I don't think it's correct at all, and I quite agree that, you know, we belong, like other people do, just going and lobbying our--or advocating with our congressmen and representatives.

But my question is in the case of international trade, and you have in this country a preponderance of market access out there and it really--a lot of it happens in the negotiations between corporations and Congress, I find that it's a slightly different slant than what an NGO would have or what an NGO would accomplish, that it does have international implications. We have, I think, over 64 percent of market--not access, but--control, I guess, in the international spectrum. NGOs don't have anything like that. So I myself don't think that NGOs are much of a threat to corporations. I know that they talk a lot about keeping corporations honest and so forth, but I think the OECD has a policy now about corporate responsibility, if I'm not mistaken, and do you think that that's because the NGOs had anything to do with this or it's--because I don't see even--each individual country in Europe doesn't really feel like it has to be bound by what the OECD has decided.

MR. JOHNS: I think we're talking about a language and a conversation that's building, that says we're passing laws now to govern the behavior of our corporates. And we do it not because we think they're bad, but someone says we can make them good--gooder, if you like. And you pass laws. What normally happens is that we get things through the House of Representatives, it gets into the Senate, the government doesn't have a majority, and some minority, some very small parties say, well, we'll let it through but you've got to write these words in. And these words are to the effect that we will love the environment and respect human rights, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

So nice ideas become law without a great deal of debate. So we're beginning to load up, under the corporate agenda, an enormous amount of regulation that, I think at the end of the day, will probably leave us with more poor people. I mean, that's my fear. So it's a dialogue. It's not just physically who gets to the forums and so on. I like Jeremy's remark that if you shift the forum, you do shift the politics. There's no doubt about that. But to me it's also on that extra thing, building dialogue, we're all going to do good. So you write down long lists of good things and then judges see them and then they interpret what goodness is and away you go. Before long, you have a degree of regulation that no one thought was possible. And I think we all will rue the day.

QUESTION: My question concerns one of the tenets of conservative philosophy here in the United States is that the private sector does things better than the government, and it's led to government contracting out of services or things like the president's faith-based initiative. I just wonder what the inter-relationship of this may be with the comments here on NGOs. Is the problem with NGOs partly when they get so much money from the government they really cease to be, in effect, private organizations anymore. My experience with USIA was they had contract agencies which 70-80 percent of their funds came from government contracts, and therefore very little of their role was private anymore.

MR. RABKIN: You know, it may be true that contracting out for services in many circumstances can be more efficient than having the government do it itself. And there's all kinds of plausible reasons why that would be so--the government has more red tape, and so on and so on and so on. But I think it's a real mistake to say, ah, the private sector does things better, therefore the government should just hand over its governing responsibility to private--

No. I mean, the most--the reason why the private sector does things better fundamentally is that consumers are choosing. The consumers say, no, we don't like this product, no, we don't like this price. And they're choosing in a market. That's the fundamental thing.

What AID is doing, that's not a market at all. I mean, that's just the government saying, okay, we want money to be spent on this, and so then they hand over the money. And maybe it's worthwhile to hand over the money and maybe it isn't, but this is not a market. The ultimate beneficiaries are not choosing. It isn't their money. And I think that makes it extremely easy to have boondoggles.

And again, I'm not saying this as, you know, a devastating critique, but just to remind ourselves, just like "NGO" is in a way a phony expression, which is, oh, they're not the government so you can just trust them. There's something phony about the idea that if you have a private organization doing it, therefore it's being done well, in the end somebody's making a decision about what to do. And it isn't the beneficiary, because the beneficiary is not paying for it. So it is the governments. If the government's making the decision, we want to know more about it than just isn't it nice, it went through Oxfam. I don't know if that's nice.

And I myself, just anecdotally, think that quite a number of these organizations are invested in delivering services and therefore do become rather politicized, because they're always looking for, oh, where's the next contract coming from. So you lose some of the benefit of their ostensible private independence.

MR. JOHNS: I agree with Jeremy entirely. Now, it's not a market, so I don't care that much who delivers aid as long as they do it well. But it's whether or not there's a missionary perspective here. What do you get with your aid? And I understand the USAID budget has been expanded so that we can sell something like democracy and build civil society. And I bet if someone sitting in a Third World country greets an American at the door with a big bag of money who says I'm here to build civil associations, the person receiving the money will say, Yup, I'll be in that; yup, I'll help build your civil association. And it will last as long as the money lasts.

So it's what comes with the aid. It's the message behind it that worries me. But I don't have any difficulty about who delivers it, because I presume that whether it's privately or other delivered is another matter.

MR. FONTE: Okay, one final question, then.

QUESTION: David Rothbard, CFAC Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow. The panelists have made the point that the answer to this, or part of the answer, might be holding governments accountable, to hold NGOs accountable. And that clearly would take a large step toward helping to solve a part of this problem--more accountability. But should another part of the strategy be that as long as NGOs are having this kind of access and influence, to encourage those who support property rights, who support national sovereignty, who support liberal democracies to also take a place at the NGO table, to encourage them to get involved at these international gatherings and other things so that the NGO forum isn't left only to those who oppose these kinds of things?

What do you think is the potential and the opportunity for NGOs that are perhaps a bit more like-minded to participate?

MR. RABKIN: I'm not optimistic. I mean, there are people here who've had experience with this, and I'm looking forward to hearing from them. And I certainly think it is useful to have them be there, if only someone's paying attention who is not part of that same group-think. But I think that these forums are set up to be forums for people who have somewhat similar left-wing vision, leftist vision. So I'm not at all optimistic that, oh, well, but other groups could go in there and talk about property rights. I don't think so.

But one other thing quick, you said, well, the government needs to hold these groups accountable. No, no, no. The government does not need to hold these groups accountable. I'm not in favor of that, I don't think it's feasible, and I don't think it's right. I mean, these groups are talking and that's fine. Let them talk. All I'm saying is the government itself needs to be accountable for what the government chooses to do. And the government cannot say NGOs made us. They cannot say, oh, well, it's now become an international norm because NGOs said so. No, no, no. The government has to make its own decisions. And if it happens to agree with NGOs, that's fine, but anything NGOs say is not an excuse--it is certainly not a justification--for what the government does. That's what we should be clear on.

And that, I am somewhat--considerably more optimistic about that, that we can say in our own domestic debates, wait a minute, that's not an argument; we don't care what they said in Durban. That's something we ought to be able to do. And it maybe will be helpful that people like Austin Roussin [ph] know exactly what they said in Durban because he was there and can chime in.

MR. FONTE: Thank you very much.

[Applause.]

SESSION IIMS. PLETKA: We're going to move on to our second panel, and the moderator is Roger Bate. Normally I only do a little line from the biography, but I got to the last line and I have to read all the way through. Roger Bate is the director of health advocacy group Africa Fighting Malaria and a fellow at the International Policy Network. He is a frequent author on global international policy, especially on the topics of malaria, water, and trade. He's advised the South African government and is highly involved with all of these environmental and food policy issues.

He's also currently working on two books, one on global water markets and one on the DDT debate, as well as--and this is what I was really waiting for, because you're going to have to go into this--as well as a monograph on the Cayman Turtle Farm. So I know that we will all enjoy hearing a little bit more about the Cayman Turtle Farm. And if you will be kind enough to start. Thank you.

MR. BATE: Thank you very much, Danielle, and thank you very much, AEI, for inviting me to this event here today, chairing this session. You'll hear more from me this afternoon when I speak on NGOs and their activities in the south, in particular in Africa.

To respond to Danielle's point, actually it links very well into today's meeting. The Cayman Turtle Farm is the only turtle farm in the world that works to commercially rear turtles. It would have been a successful model for environmental conservation around the world were it not to have been shut down by Governor Jerry Brown of California back in 1973--which is a long history in its own right and one that I'm writing about in the monograph. So you'll have to buy it, and I'll make sure that I get the mailing list to bother you all with that.

And actually, very recently on that topic, the Costa Rican government was represented by several environmental NGO representatives at the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species, which is a major U.N. convention, and stopped the Cayman Turtle Farm from being seen as a captive breeding center, which would have allowed it to open up into international trade. So it was actually a representative from an NGO acting for the Costa Rican government which caused problems and landed to an EU bloc vote. I'm not going to talk about that this afternoon, so I thought I'd throw that out now since it was raised.

I'm really looking forward to this panel, and I'm delighted to be chairing it. We have two great speakers. First Jerry Manheim's going to be speaking, and then David Riggs.

Professor Manheim is professor of media and public affairs and professor of political science at George Washington University. He has numerous accolades which are all listed out in the biographies attached. I think most interestingly, both for today and also the book that I'm going to read--I haven't read yet--includes "The Death of a Thousand Cuts: Corporate Campaigns and the Attack on the Corporation." And today, Jerry is going to talk about the strategy of NGOs against business.

MR. MANHEIM: Thank you. I thought we had the PowerPoints set up and then suddenly discovered that we didn't. But we're good now.

The paper that I've prepared for this conference is the 25-cent version of the book that I've been working on and am nearly finished with for the last year looking at the phenomenon of biz-war, and the presentation that I'm going to give you this morning is the 25-cent version of the paper. So I think I have two chances of giving a two-bit presentation.

My paper is strictly about U.S. domestic politics, but I think has some parallels and broader applications. I'm making an argument in this paper about what we now know as the progressive left in the U.S., the latest incarnation of the left, which I think has been designed rather purposefully, if not wholly systematically, to replace the pre-Reagan-Bush liberal left, and which I think is the product of a series of strategic experiments and strategic decisions that have been made by labor and a variety of other activists over a period of 25 or more years.

In making those decisions, I think that they have been guided by two things: an antipathy to the business community, and also an understanding of the forces that came together to raise the Reagan-Bush right and drive them from power and influence lo those many, now, years ago.

I'd like to make an argument that's in five parts, and I'll just list the parts and then go through very briefly and give you a little bit of each one, and then they're developed a little bit more thoroughly in the paper itself. The best way to think of this might be to picture a puzzle with five parts. And if the parts come together, then the puzzle makes a picture. And you need to have the right parts, you need to have them in the right place, they need to go in the right order. But you can end up with a picture. And the objective here, I think, is to create such a picture. And I think there are five pieces in this puzzle.

The first is a guiding empirical theory of social, political, and economic organization. I think that the left has come to a relatively common--never totally common, but a relatively common view of how power works in the U.S., and that that view has guided much of the decision making and experimentation that I'm referring to.

Then you have to have language that implements your theory. And there's a very clear nomenclature here that constructs the political self for the progressive left--the notion of progressive is where I'll go with that--and constructs an enemy: the corporation.

Then the third piece is to build an institutional counter-structure. If you've lost power and you want to regain it, and you have an understanding of how the world works, then you want to put that understanding into motion by creating a counter-structure.

Then you have to have a strategy to make the counter-structure politically effective.

And finally, borrowing a term from the Rand Corporation, some studies that they've done for the Pentagon, they've developed a notion of social net war, which is a combination of Internet collaboration, but--for my interests, more importantly--social collaboration, social networks put together to achieve particular purposes--in this case, the reacquisition of influence and eventually power.

Collectively, I think that these five pieces coming together create a new and pervasive conflict, a new form of conflict between labor and other activist groups on the left and the corporate establishment. And it's that phenomenon that I've labeled "biz-war."

Let's start with the intellectual grounding. And I'm just going to trip through this pretty briefly. A lot of the thinking about the relationship between corporations and power traces to the work of C. Wright Mills, political sociologist, and to others who followed in some of his thinking. Mills argued that there were economic, political, and military elites that controlled country, and they were facilitated by wealth and the control of wealth and by organizational position, but that they operated beneath a facade or veneer of apparent democracy and pretty much got their way through elitist action.

Mills didn't live very long after writing those sentiments, but they attracted a great deal of attention elsewhere. And in particular I point to one sociologist and one political scientist who picked up on that theme. The sociologist is Bill Domhoff, who extended Mills by increasing the emphasis on social class, and he argued that there's a ruling class that is literally class-based and controls the power elite. Dye was more interested--less interested in class, as was Mills. But Dye was more interested in the organizational structure and in organizational power relationships.

So the influence here intellectually, for example, during the '60s, '70s, into the '80s, I think, in political science, there was something called the elitism-pluralism, or elitist-pluralist, debate that had to do with whether the apparent institutions of democratic politics and governance really had much influence or whether there were in fact other forces that were more influential, and what the precise roles were.

The activists--we know that Tom Hayden and the folks in the Students for Democratic Society, who were very influential as the beginnings of an intellectual movement in some ways that we can just touch on today. We know that they read Mills. In fact SDS, when it was in its infancy and basically a kind of think tank, actually had a bibliography of things that all members were required to read before they could participate.

And we also know that there were a great many students who were exposed to these ideas because the Domhoff book in sociology and Dye's work in political science were both very widely assigned, not only in advanced courses but in introductory courses. So there were a lot of people who were exposed to this set of ideas.

All of which I take to mean that in the 1970s and the 1980s, the crucial period here for direction setting--especially the 1980s--the idea that there was some interlocked network behind the scenes operating to control the country was a prominent idea. And if the left were to adopt that idea--which I'm going to argue they have done--was really a short step for them to do it. It wasn't a giant leap to come to that.

Which gets us to the theory, and I couldn't hope to do justice to all of that, but I thought I'd show you the summary model that Tom Dye produced and that Bill Domhoff has also made reference to in his work. Dye believed that power was controlled by wealthy individuals and corporations that used their money and their position through a series of intermediary institutions to achieve influence. Foundations like the Ford Foundation, for example, university centers, research centers, and faculty members with agendas of compatible research and the like, think tanks, like AEI, were all part of that model. Commissions were a bigger thing in the '70s, when we were doing Social Security commissions and things. That's not so much around anymore, but the news media played a role.

What the arrows represent here is the flow of money, the flow of personnel, interlocking directorates, things that tie together these institutions and provide for direct or indirect means of control. And the argument wasn't that this was a perfectly controlling system, but that it was a significantly influential component of political decision-making that, at the end of the day, produced an agenda of choice, a menu of choices that the--what Dye called the proximate policy makers, the people in Congress and the White House, and in the courts and in the regulatory agencies, could choose among as having been tested,legitimized, fundamentally researched and presented as viable options. So it was a form of agenda control.

And you notice I've got a little box down here in the lower right that says Parties, Elections, Opinion, and Interests. Those are the mainstays of pluralist democratic theory. I put that box there, but Tom Dye didn't. He just didn't think that was part of the explanatory framework.

So that was the sort of democratic veneer. What we think of as electoral democracy and its trappings was a democratic veneer in the elitist model.

The second piece of my argument--once we have a theory which says that there's something you can do behind the scenes structurally--the second piece of my argument has to do with language. The thing that eventually defeated the liberal left was the outlawing of the L word. Quite literally, the label was taken away. Well, part of the reconstruction of the liberal left--it can't call itself liberal anymore and it may not be the same combination of interests--was the need for a new word. And progressive was the word that they settled on.

Now, this quote actually is from 1905. According to historian Edmund Morris, this was the first time that the word "progressive" was used to describe a political movement, rather than simply as an adjective. I'm not sure if that's accurate or not, but it captures the essence of the value of "progressive." Progressive connotes high-mindedness, forward-looking. It captures the agenda of the left but it doesn't constrain that agenda, because it's an ambiguous kind of word. We've heard some reference to that previously.

Americans tend not to be ideological people. Progressive is a word that masks ideology as pragmatism or problem-solving. So it made it more palatable. It's also a word that resonates with populist feeling, and in fact you'll see in some quarters that instead of the progressive left you'll see references to progressive populism. It's deeply rooted--100 years in American history. It also has one other advantage: it creates a natural enemy, and that's clear in this quote as well. The natural enemy is the corporation. It's an enemy with which the progressive left is quite comfortable. It's the natural enemy that they perceive. So it all fits together into a nice verbal package.

So then the task is to construct the out-of-power elite. If the power elite's got you down, then you want to have an out-of-power elite. Now, I'm not suggesting, I'm not suggesting that there was a cabal where five people with left arms only sat down and decided how all this was going to happen. It think there's been an evolution, an historical process that has pointed in the directions that we're talking about now. But there is evidence at certain critical junctures of conscious decision-making and knowledgeable, purposeful, informed decision-making.

So how do you go about constructing the out-of-power elite? And this is really a short list. There's more to this. One thing is you get rich people who want to give to progressive causes and you take their money. And that was an early-on approach; it's still in use. In fact, there's now a group called Responsible Wealth, one of whose main functions is to recruit newly rich people and teach them how to be progressive donors. So this is an institutionalized function. It produces probably tens of millions of dollars a year, but it's not a massive infusion of capital. And ultimately there has to be a massive infusion of capital if you're going to accomplish this end.

So you need to do some more. One thing that you can do in addition is to pool wealth and channel it through activist foundations. And the classic example here is the Tides Foundation, which has a large number of programs for pooling small bits of individual wealth and then applying them to policy agendas.

Another piece of this, which isn't really mentioned up there, is to redirect wealth. The Pew Charitable Trusts, for example, were actually created by some of the most prominent conservative Republicans of the New Deal era, but that money has now been redirected to causes that those founders probably wouldn't be very comfortable with. And you know that the people at Pew realize it, and they're a little uneasy with it. If you read their half-century--the recent history that they produced, I don't remember the exact period it covers, but in 44 pages there are something like 41 references to maintaining the desires of the founders.

Then you need to have some think tanks--working through the Dye model, with some modification--you need to have some think tanks and legitimizing rubric. The Institute for Policy Studies has been around for a long time, and it's certainly a focal point of some of this organizing activity. The Economic Policy Institute is an example from the labor side. One of the probably less significant but more interesting--in one way--groups is the Campaign for America's Future, which brings together labor and some traditional liberals, some of the somewhat harder-line IPS types. And it's interesting because of the hundred--there were 100 founders who came together to form the Campaign for America's Future in the mid-'90s, and one of them was Bill Domhoff. So we know that he was there, fully enlightened about the power elite theory and how one might use that.

Then you get into what I've labeled here pseudo-democratic activism. There have been other references to this kind of activity, and I'm sure we'll hear some more going through the day. This is protest as democracy. These are not for the most part electorally active or influential groups. They're working outside of the electoral process in large measure, with the notable exception of the unions. But protest and demonstration as expression is a way of interpreting democratic values and, in a way, provides a veneer or facade for the out-of-power elite in much the way that interest groups and public opinion might have under the power elite theory.

Then we get to the issue of redirecting corporate power, and that's what I want to talk about for the remaining few minutes. One of the really significant initiatives that we've seen in the U.S. in recent years is the rise of proxy voting for social policies and corporate governance--issues which are not the same thing for the most part, although they're closely related. The problem that at the end of the day the new progressive left confronted a few years ago was that when they get all this foundation money and when they redirect the old foundations that they can do that with, and when they pool their funds, the problem is, at the end of the day, foundation money is static. There's a body of money, they can spend a part of it each year--the government says you have to spend 5 percent.

On the other side is corporate money, and corporate money is dynamic. Corporations don't live on their accumulated wealth; they live on cash flow. And that's an altogether different kind of money, and there's a lot more of it. If you added up all the foundation money that the progressive left has influence over--and it's really a fairly large number--it pales by comparison available to what they regard as the other side.

So they need to find ways of controlling that money if they want to eventually succeed in regaining power. And I think that's what a lot of the economic democracy and proxy voting activity is about. Governance issues and social policy issues are two pieces of that. SEC Rule 14a-8 is just a regulation that tells corporations how flexible they have to be in letting ballot measures come before their shareholders. And in 1998 that rule, under great pressure from the domestic NGO community, that rule was broadened to include social issues. So corporations could no longer automatically exclude social policy issues in their operations from shareholder consideration. And that has led to a much greater flow of activism among shareholders.

And then you get to a group called Institutional Shareholder Services, which was actually featured in the Wall Street Journal last week. Their role in this is to be the quote-unquote independent arbiter that tells corporations it's okay--or tells, I'm sorry, large institutional shareholders who control corporations, in many instances, through their votes that they really ought to be backing this agenda of governance and, in some measure, the social policy issues. And now there's a new rating service, Corporate Library, which has come out with its own separate ratings, except that Corporate Library and ISS are really sort of the same family.

The piece that makes this work is that it's part of a larger effort to pressure corporations. The proxy voting and shareholder activity is really only one part of what I have called in previous work corporate campaigns, when I've been looking at their use by organized labor, but in this instance I think of them as anti-corporate campaigns because they have somewhat different content. They all have the same idea, which is that--it's called power structure analysis. It was developed in part by a guy named Ray Rogers about 30 years ago, but also by others. It comes out of Saul Alinsky's thinking as well.

The idea is that if you think about a corporation, it has a variety of stakeholder relationships on which it's dependent. And some of those stakeholder relationships may be vulnerable to pressure. If you can pressure the stakeholders to pressure the corporation, then it's better than doing it directly yourself, because it's people who they care about, that they have to care about, who are bringing the pressure. Now, this gets much more elaborate. An earlier book actually assigned roles to these various players and talked about how they fit in with various communications strategy. But the idea is that by researching, studying all these stakeholder relationships, finding the vulnerabilities, matching them--if you're an environmental group find the ones that you think will be most interested in the environment--it's not that you ever persuade any of these groups to do something that's not in their interest; it's that you persuade them to identify