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NGOs in the
US firing line
By Jim Lobe
WASHINGTON - Having led the charge to war in
Iraq, an influential think-tank close to the
administration of US President George W Bush has added a
new target: international non-governmental organizations
(NGOs). The American Enterprise Institute (AEI) is
setting its sights on those groups with a "progressive"
or "liberal" agenda that favors "global governance" and
other notions that are also promoted by the United
Nations and other multilateral agencies.
The AEI
and another right-wing group, the Federalist Society for
Law and Public Policy Studies, have announced that they
are launching a new website (www.NGOWatch.org) to expose
the funding, operations and agendas of international
NGOs, and particularly their alleged efforts to
constrain US freedom of action in international affairs
and influence the behavior of corporations abroad.
The organizations are especially alarmed by what
they see as the naivete of the Bush administration and
corporations that provide NGOs with funding and other
support. "In many cases, naive corporate reformers,
within corporations and in government, are welcoming
them," complained John Entine, an AEI fellow.
To
mark the site's launch, AEI, which is funded mainly by
major corporations and right-wing foundations, also held
an all-day conference called "NGOs: The Growing Power of
an Unelected Few" that featured a series of
presentations depicting NGOs as a growing and largely
unaccountable threat to the Bush administration's
foreign-policy goals and free-market capitalism around
the world. The conference was co-sponsored by a
right-wing Australian think-tank, the Institute of
Public Affairs.
"NGOs have created their own
rules and regulations and demanded that governments and
corporations abide by those rules," according to
conference organizers. "Politicians and corporate
leaders are often forced to respond to the NGO media
machine, and the resources of taxpayers and shareholders
are used in support of ends they did not sanction. The
extraordinary growth of advocacy NGOs in liberal
democracies has the potential to undermine the
sovereignty of constitutional democracies, as well as
the effectiveness of credible NGOs," they added.
Both the website launch and Wednesday's
conference might normally be dismissed as a pep rally of
a far right obsessed with left-wing and European
conspiracies to impose world government on the United
States and destroy capitalism. But the fact that no
fewer than 42 senior administration foreign-policy and
justice officials have been recruited from AEI and the
Federalists and that AEI "fellows" include such
prominent figures as Lynne Cheney (Vice President Dick
Cheney's spouse), former UN ambassador Jeanne
Kirkpatrick and the influential Iraq hawk and former
chairman of the Pentagon's Defense Policy Board, Richard
Perle, suggests that the events may herald a much more
antagonistic attitude toward NGOs on the part of the US
government.
The conference was also held on the
heels of harshly critical remarks late last month by
Andrew Natsios, the director of the US Agency for
International Development (USAID), which often contracts
with NGOs for relief and development work. Natsios
reportedly charged that NGOs that received USAID funding
for projects in Afghanistan and elsewhere were not
giving sufficient credit to the US government as the
source of the aid.
His remarks coincided with
moves by USAID to use more private contractors, instead
of NGOs, for work in Iraq and other countries, and to
impose stricter rules regarding contacts between NGOs
working on USAID projects and the press that would
reduce their independence.
In that context,
according to one international NGO official who asked
not to be identified, the AEI conference could be seen
as part of a troublesome pattern. "There are a number of
things we're seeing that we want to be sure are nothing
more than coincidence," he said.
The general
message at Wednesday's conference was that, while NGOs
such as Amnesty International, CARE, Oxfam, and Friends
of the Earth have performed valuable work in promoting
human rights, development and environmental protection,
their general policies, particularly at the
international level, may be inimical to US interests and
free-market principles.
According to George
Washington University political-science Professor Jarol
Manheim, international NGOs are pursuing "a new and
pervasive form of conflict" against multinational
corporations, which he calls "Biz-War", the title of his
forthcoming book. NGOs, for example, work with
like-minded institutional investors, such as union- and
church-based pension funds, to sponsor shareholder
resolutions demanding that corporations adopt more
environment- or human-rights-friendly policies.
Such efforts, he said, should be seen as "part
of a larger, anti-corporate campaign", which includes
consumer boycotts and other efforts to influence
corporate behavior. Companies are increasingly engaging
in joint projects with NGOs, using them as consultants,
or even hiring former NGO officials to protect
themselves against negative publicity.
This was
echoed by John Entine, an AEI adjunct fellow, who called
the "social investing" movement a "wolf in sheep's
clothing". "Anti-free-market NGOs under the guise of
corporate reform are extending their reach into the
boardrooms of corporations," he said.
Cornell
University government Professor Jeremy Rabkin was
particularly contemptuous of corporations that tried to
establish good relations with NGOs by, for example,
working on joint projects or contributing money or other
kinds of support. "Why are NGOs in a position to confer
legitimacy?" he asked. "A lot of this is a kind of
protection racket."
On the political front,
international NGOs, which in recent years led the fight
for the global ban on anti-personnel mines, the Kyoto
Protocol to fight global warming and the treaty
establishing the International Criminal Court, are
pursuing a "liberal internationalist" vision that "wants
to constrain the United States", said American
University law Professor Kenneth Anderson.
The
groups prefer a world order based on "global governance"
and the rule of international law to one that is based
on "democratic sovereignty", where nation-states whose
governments are subject to the vote of the people are
the highest authority. In this quest, they are aided by
UN agencies, which see in international NGOs and the
global civil society they claim to represent an
"alternative form of legitimacy beyond democracy",
Anderson said.
"If you think about it, of course
this is a left-wing program," added Rabkin. "The whole
enterprise of global governance is going to appeal more
to the parties of the left ... if it is global, it is
anti-national," he said, at one point noting that the
original notion of a non-governmental organization was a
"Stalinist concept".
(Inter Press
Service)
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