Jonathan Todd

“While government cooperation has declined”, writes Paul Collier in a fascinating article in the RSA Journal, “there has been an acknowledgement that global problems can only be addressed by common responses”. Gideon Rachman provides illustration of this decline in government cooperation in today’s FT. “If you look at Mr Obama’s top priorities, you get a sense of just how little the Europeans are prepared to give him. More help in Afghanistan? Most Europeans will do the bare minimum. A co-ordinated fiscal stimulus? Sorry, Europe is out of cash as well as troops”. If this really is the “most pro-American European leadership in living memory”, as Gordon Brown recently told a joint session of Congress, they have a funny way of embracing “the president that Europeans hoped and prayed for”, as Rachman correctly describes Barack Obama. It seems to me that European leadership presently provides more support for the thesis of Collier than that of Brown.

“Fortunately”, however, as Collier writes, “while the ability of governments to cooperate has declined, the ability of citizens to cooperate has increased. The Obama campaign was a spectacular demonstration of this at the national level, but there are examples internationally. It may be that cooperation at the level of civil society can be a substitute for that between governments in introducing common responses to global problems”. The Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (EITI) is an example given by Collier to support an argument that has much commonality with David Miliband’s thinking on the – apologies for the jargon - ”we can” generation. Essentially, this is about citizen-centric policy on a global scale, which is all very exciting, but apologies for layering jargon upon jargon.

The historian Peter Clarke distinguishes between the “moral” and “mechanical” reformers. Perhaps, I can escape charges of jargon by switching to this terminology. Collier is more optimistic about the potential for moral, rather than mechanical, reform. However, “moral and mechanical reform have to go together”, as Miliband has noted. The point here is that global problems seem so vast that we cannot be sanguine about the decline in the capacity of governments to cooperate. The development of a global citizenry is certainly to be welcomed but governments must also raise their game. This week at the G20 would be very good place to start.