Former UK foreign secretary’s deep thoughts
David Miliband’s jumping off point is Russia’s war in Ukraine, but his Age of Impunity is deeper and more insidious.
First, former UK foreign secretary Miliband in The New York Times:
The war’s impact goes far beyond the region. It has driven up food and energy prices worldwide, contributing to the record 349 million people experiencing food insecurity and to famine-like conditions in East Africa. The conduct of the war has flouted the most basic international laws and conventions, posing a fundamental threat to the global order. As such, it offers a textbook example of the Age of Impunity.
Impunity is the exercise of power without accountability, which becomes, in starkest form, the commission of crimes without punishment. In Ukraine this goes beyond the original invasion. It has included repeated violations of international humanitarian law, which is supposed to establish clear protections for civilians, aid workers and civilian infrastructure in conflict zones every day. The danger is that few people will ever face consequences for these crimes.
It’s a start. There exists today a culture of impunity, Miliband laments. The “Atlas of Impunity” just published by the Eurasia Group and the Chicago Council on Global Affairs scores all 197 countries on a set of abuses of power: abuse of human rights, unaccountable governance, conflict and violence, economic exploitation and environmental degradation.
Okay, then what?
Getting closer:
It’s not just war zones. Impunity is a helpful lens through which to understand the global drift to polycrisis, from climate change to the weakening of democracy. When billionaires evade taxes, oil companies misrepresent the severity of the climate crisis, elected politicians subvert the judiciary and human rights are rolled back, you see impunity in action. Impunity is the mind-set that laws and norms are for suckers.
Donald J. Trump is the poster boy.
Dividing countries into democracies and autocracies does not get at the root of the decay of law problem, Miliband argues, citing degraded scores across the globe.
More investigations! More sunlight! More “changing the incentives of would-be abusers”!
Because impunity is the result of an imbalance of power, the forces of accountability must develop “countervailing power.” This notion was first coined by the American economist John Kenneth Galbraith as a way to offset the concentration of corporate economic power that threatened workers and consumers. It now needs wider application.
Wider application than little or none? Miliband assumes countervailing power was ever really brought to bear against the concentration of corporate power. The growing worldwide wealth gap suggests not.
Our very culture, our jobs and products and services we consume are based on impunity. The corporate model for organizing businesses depends on limiting personal responsibility for corporate misdeeds: its shareholders are not personally responsible for the company’s debts. Or crimes. The limited liability company spells that out in its name.
You are staring into a computer screen built by a corporation from parts supplied by several others. Sitting in a chair built by one. Wearing clothes made by several more. Surrounded by a dwelling constructed of materials furnished by them and assembled by a company shielded by the corporate veil. It’s not complete impunity, but it’s damned near close. It’s the water we swim in and cannot see.
“The systems and cultures of impunity are built over time,” Miliband concludes. What we need is “a counterculture of accountability.”
Just so long as accountability does not meddle with the “primal forces of nature,” as Arthur Jensen (Ned Beatty) preached in Network (1976):
You are an old man who thinks in terms of nations and peoples. There are no nations. There are no peoples. There are no Russians. There are no Arabs. There are no third worlds. There is no West. There is only one holistic system of systems, one vast and immane, interwoven, interacting, multivariate, multinational dominion ofdollars. Petro-dollars, electro-dollars, multi-dollars, reichmarks, rins, rubles, pounds, and shekels.
It is the international system of currency which determines thetotality of life on this planet. That is the natural order of things today. That is the atomic and subatomic and galactic structure of things today!
[…]
We no longer live in a world of nations and ideologies, Mr. Beale. The world is a college of corporations, inexorably determined by the immutable bylaws of business. The world is a business, Mr. Beale. It has been since man crawled out of the slime. And our children will live, Mr. Beale, to see that perfect world in which there’s no war or famine, oppression or brutality — one vast and ecumenical holding company, for whom all men will work to serve a common profit, in which all men will hold a share of stock, all necessities provided, all anxieties tranquilized, all boredom amused.
How’s that corporatist fable working out for you? For the Ukrainians? For those suffering food insecurity? For people seeing their island homes slowly sink into the ocean? For those seeing their freedoms whittled away by autocrats and their authoritarian followers?
Miliband, admirably, would like to see our world behave more humanly. Fat chance. Fat chance he would challenge the underlying system that nurtured and sustains him and us.
The world Miliband inhabits struck a devil’s bargain with that system centuries ago. We know what we are. Now we’re just haggling over the price.