Private Pursuits

NEW YORK — A Miami bingo entrepreneur, Dr. Irving I. Moskowitz, disrupts what remains of the Middle East peace process by moving a handful of Jewish settlers into an Arab neighborhood on the Mount of Olives. The prime minister of Malaysia charges that financier George Soros destabilized his country’s stock and currency markets. Television entrepreneur Ted Turner pledges $1 billion, $100 million a year for 10 years, to the hard-pressed United Nations, a donation that will add measurably to the status and power of the global organization.

None of these men are new to international politics and controversy. Moskowitz has long played an important role in financing Jewish settlements. Soros’ Open Society projects have attracted controversy for high-profile political philanthropy ranging from support for democracy in Eastern Europe to support of last year’s medical marijuana referendum in California. As the architect of Cable News Network, Turner has already done more to shape international politics than most U.S. presidents.

The importance of these three individuals dramatizes one of the major trends of our time: the retreat of the state. A generation ago, governments everywhere were far more powerful than today. Economic activity was tightly regulated at both the national and international levels. Everything from airlines to savings-bank interest to phone rates was controlled by government bureaucrats.

Now governments are on the run. Even the U.S. Postal Service has lost its monopoly to technological agents like the Internet and to private competitors like United Parcel Service and Federal Express. Outside the United States, government-owned airlines, telecommunications companies and enterprises of every kind are being either privatized, subjected to new competition or both.

This isn’t just about delivering the mail. Core government activities, like the administration of justice and the provision of order, are increasingly moving into private hands. Gated enclaves with private security police are increasingly common; so are private, for-profit prisons. Abroad, for-profit mercenaries fight wars, foil (or foster) coups and maintain order for foreign investors in turbulent countries. In parts of Africa, government has broken down completely, and private mercenary police provide the only security that exists. When the feeble Zairean government was overwhelmed by refugees from Rwanda, private, humanitarian NGO’s took responsibility for basic refugee assistance.

As the activities of private free-lancers like Soros, Turner and Moskowitz show, even the world’s most powerful governments are losing their monopoly on the conduct of foreign affairs.

The power shift away from government is both good and bad news. For Americans, who generally believe that government power is a threat to individual freedom, the retreat of the state is, to some degree, welcome. Governments acquired unprecedented power in the 20th century, largely as a result of the terrible wars it brought. The two world wars gave governments broad authority over every area of national life, as even government-allergic countries like the United States and Britain submitted to national economic planning for the sake of the war effort.

In the aftermath of the two wars, the world economy was so disrupted that extensive government control and intervention was necessary to prevent mass starvation. After World War I, business never got back to normal until the Depression; after World War II, it was 20 years before countries like Germany and Japan lifted currency and capital controls. Even today, the world economy is, by some measures, less free than it was before 1914. From this point of view, the retreat of government is a good thing. War strengthens government power; peace undermines it. We should all thank God the scars of the 20th century are finally beginning to heal.

Yet, the retreat of the state also raises troubling questions. For all their flaws, government institutions are at least partly controlled by democratically elected representatives. If power leaks away from these institutions to unaccountable private individuals, or to an even less accountable global economy, then important decisions--including decisions for peace or war--might escape public control altogether. If globalization means no country can set standards for minimum wages and environmental protection, where does that leave democracy?

Moreover, foreign policy is dangerous stuff. It is bad enough when politicians posture and meddle, but even a Jesse Helms is accountable to voters. Rich kooks with big egos and no constituency can cause major-league trouble when they butt into matters they don’t understand.

Maybe Moskowitz is right, and what Israel really needs is more Jews moving into Arab neighborhoods. But what qualifies him to make a decision that could drastically affect the future of millions of both Palestinians and Jews? Nobody elected him, nobody can fire him if he makes a mistake; he is accountable to no outside or impartial authority, and the people whose future he is shaping have no way of influencing his behavior.

Rich, unaccountable kooks are one danger; chaos is another. Diplomacy is a difficult business on its own; it threatens to become impossible when too many cooks stick their spoons in the pot. If America ends up with a thousand free-lance secretaries of state, we will end up with no foreign policy at all.

Before we push the panic button, however, we need to put the contemporary trend in context. Private actors today do play a large and visible role in international affairs. But that is not new. Go back 100 years, and we see people like British entrepreneur Cecil Rhodes, who pursued his own foreign policy in southern Africa, and almost dragged Britain into a war. Earlier still, governments often sold their power to private organizations. The British and Dutch East India companies, for example, exerted sovereign rights across much of Asia.

Even wars used to be partly private. “Letters of marque,” authorized in the U.S. Constitution, were authorizations to private vessels, allowing them to attack enemy shipping in time of war. Any booty they collected from foreign ships was legally theirs.

Today’s trend toward privatization is comparatively modest. Nobody wants to privatize the Seventh Fleet. Governments remain much more powerful than at any point in the longer sweep of history. The federal government spent 20.8% of the total U.S. gross domestic product last year. No ancient emperor or king had that kind of power.

Furthermore, not all private activism in foreign policy is bad. After all, it was private citizen Stanley Sheinbaum who helped start the peace process by bringing Yasser Arafat into a dialogue with prominent American Jews.

Whether it is romantic Irish nationalists collecting money for the IRA in Boston bars, or American citizens petitioning Congress over Chinese policy toward Tibet, citizen participation is an indispensable and, hopefully, valuable element of foreign policy-making in a democracy. Government is only one of the institutions through which the American people conduct foreign policy. Through their investment and business decisions, through their churches and charities, through student-exchange programs and travel abroad, the American people shape the world beyond anything government can or should do.

That is as it should be. Diplomacy, in the end, is too important to be left to the diplomats. Private citizens intervene in foreign policy because they have important interests at stake.

Still, our emerging era of private diplomacy will be a dangerous one. In the new era of weakened government, U.S. foreign policy will be as effective and as wise as the American people make it. It takes millions of people to build a peace process; one misguided loon can sometimes set off a war.