Prospect readers may have been less surprised than most by the emergence of the murky BAE Systems/al-Yamamah story. Lewis Page, writing in the March 2007 issue of Prospect, drew attention to the unhealthy influence of BAE over government and called for the MoD to direct its procurement efforts towards “off-the-shelf” US products rather than propping up the BAE colossus. Read his piece here.
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Authors,
This is a great blog, but please change the banner logo. It gives me a headache, even after looking at it for just a second.
We have a system of national sovereignty that flows effortlessly into a system of international corruption.
The BAE scandal illustrates this: It shows how the free-for all between powerful states is so clearly the largest source of corruption in the contemporary world. I mean where else would you see kickbacks to the tune of 1 Billion?
The current political system is based on an outdated sense of who we are, that does not square up to our current collective circumstances. Hence the grotesque carnival that is “appropriate sovereignty” in arms procurement. It is this blockage in how we imagine ourselves that leads us to tolerate such an insane system of global governance.
We choose an international system that verges towards being unregulated, because we think it is good for business, and it squares with our illusions about national sovereignty. However, the BAE affair shows that this business efficiency is also utterly illusory, if you start to count up the real social costs.
We have a huge gorilla in the room called climate change, which was, up till now, an uncounted social cost of this calculated international anarchy.
Surely it serves as a reminder that now is the time for us to grow up, and for humanity to find a way of governing itself so that it can choose its fate, rather than sliding comfortably to its doom.