The decision by former President of Ireland Mary Robinson not to seek a second term as United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights highlights a deep crisis of world governance that has been neglected for some time.

Mary Robinson is to be admired for her contribution to Human Rights at home and abroad, and her frustration at the low level of funding accorded Human Rights (less than 2% of the United Nations budget), the failure to staff their Human Rights activity on a proper basis, and her impatience with the empty rhetoric of those who speak of Human Rights but who fail to implement the United Nations Mandate, is understandable. So too is her identification of those whom she sees as obstructing the achievement of Human Rights, and whom she identifies as bullies. Yes, there are those who personify the abuse of Human Rights but much more dangerous are those who frustrate the very aims of the United Nations itself by placing conditions on their contribution and participation.

But it is timely and appropriate to reflect on a deeper crisis within the world system that has drawn insufficient comment and which obstructs the achievement of social and economic rights for so many people on our planet. This crisis is represented by the passive and unquestioning acceptance of a neo-liberal economic agenda - under the fabric of a globalisation that is presented as inevitable - as the only possible model of ongoing economic affairs.

Speaking at the opening of the One World Week at NUIG recently, I realised how things have changed. Twenty years ago we were debating false consciousness in societies in the developing world - how native elites, manipulated themselves by colonial power, came in turn to manipulate their own people, mutilate their common memory, culture, traditions and enslave their imaginations. In short, how those who were oppressed came to be immobilized by false consciousness.

In 2001, the false consciousness problem is in the developed North. Now it is in the affluent Irelands of the North that history is being obliterated, context destroyed and intellectual cowardice created.

Indeed there is now a unique intolerance for anything that questions the single paradigm by which we are forced to live, an economic model which presents itself as universal in its application. Economies such as that of Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic are regarded as transitional economies - which is to say, in transition to being like us, as far as some contributors are concerned. Thus, they are on the brink of sacrificing many social securities in health, education, welfare for an economic growth whose benefits will, they are told, trickle down in time to all.

Our version of ourselves - which in Ireland requires two incomes to get within hitting distance of a mortgage, which requires work from before dawn to darkness, which is anti-child, and which is usually without security - is now being sold as the only acceptable version of their lives. It is a version of life that requires one to be alert, combative, hungry for success. Looked at another way it is violent, aggressive, inhuman, narrow and miserable - certainly not very Republican in the best sense of that term.

Social, it is not. Solidarity is an outdated concept, we are led to believe. Other people live in a space called "out there". Life is so intensely competitive that institutions are constantly looking at what is happening in the next better-tilled field of aggression. Every place is a market.

Academic life, for example, has become a contradictory term. You simply can't afford to read, write, play or exist without a purpose defined by the market, and in the short term it is one of the ironies of our academic leadership that while affecting a concern for the desolation which the abolition of fees allegedly brought many, academic leaders choose to stay comprehensively silent on the turning of places of scholarly reflection into pressure driven replicas of the factory system at its worst.

Abolition of fees is not a substitute for funding greater access and they know it. We need to restructure grants, increase them and define education as a rights issue. It is not a consumption issue. It is a citizenship issue. But more of that another day. Suffice it to say that the third level is a conquered country for the New Intolerance, the single paradigm of utility, the new information technology-driven speculative capitalism.

Exceptional voices of dissent are thus all the more valuable at such a time. They support events such as those organized by the One World Week and I am as much in admiration of them as their young listeners are indebted to them.

And yet, how often will the abuse of economic and social rights have to be repeated? In front of me is the WHO Report on Removing Obstacles to Healthy Development; it tells us that in 1995 $15 billion was the estimated global expenditure for prevention and control of Aids, TB and Malaria. Since 1945 150 million deaths are attributed to these. The global military spending, on the other hand, in the same year, was $864 billion. The military and civilian deaths from war, from 1945 to 1993, were 23 million people. Is this not a rights issue?

As the world is invited to march to the single tune of neo-liberal economics it is asked to avert its gaze from the obscenity of arms production, from slavery, from poverty, from child malnutrition and from savage neglect of the elderly.

What is being dislodged by the New Intolerance is any concept of Universal Rights - rights located in the person, and the groups with which he or she mediates their experience. The World Trade Organisation - as is appropriate in times when the economy has displaced the social - has eschewed all ethical consideration and enjoys more attention than the Security Council of the United Nations. Indeed this latter institution has, to my knowledge, never discussed slavery or bonded labour in recent times.

The International Labour Organisation, the world Trade Organization and World Health Organization are within walking distance of each other in Geneva. But they might as well be on different planets.

The ILO has discussed bonded labour, but the WTO must not let anything interfere with free trade. Meanwhile, the WHO courts the victims and swims against the tide of the only economic model allowed to exist.

The WTO will defend the right of pharmaceutical companies to threaten in the courts governments struggling with AIDS, so as to stop their producing cheaper non-branded generic drugs. Forced to choose between the South African or Brazilian peasant's life and profit for the shareholders, the shareholders always win with the WTO. The New Intolerance dictates it so.

Down the road in Geneva the WHO tells us that six deadly infectious diseases - pneumonia , tuberculoses, diarrhoea diseases, malaria, measles and HIV/AIDS - account for half of all premature deaths. "Every three seconds, a young child dies - in most cases from an infectious disease. In some countries one in five children die before there fifth birthday. Every day 3,000 people die from Malaria - three out of four of them children. Every year 1.5million die from tuberculosis and another eight million are infected..."

All of this is against the backdrop of the way in which multi-national corporations have come to dominate world trade. The World Investment Report of 1997 shows that the top 100 transnational corporations had a trade valued at 2 trillion US dollars while the leading 50 developing countries had a trade of 120 billion dollars.

The result is to make life in the South of our planet an unimaginable struggle for survival. In the North of our planet, meanwhile, what we produce only matters if it creates a profit - be it drugs or armaments.

Consider this: we spend more that 50 times globally on military expenditure than we do on preventable disease!

When the United Nations was founded in 1945 its motivating principles were the ending of aggression and the promotion of economic recovery, development and security. The Breton Woods Institutions were founded with such aims in mind. Indeed the Economic And Social Council of the United Nations was envisaged as a tool of global economic governance.

What has emerged, however, is a nightmarish contradiction of accountable economic governance. In trade and development the heavier populated South of the planet is increasingly driven into poverty. In 1994 Erskine Childers and Brian Urquhart in their most valuable text on reforming the UN (Renewing the United Nations System) stated that:

"Some 1.4 billion people now live in absolute poverty, 40 per cent more than fifteen years ago. Nearly 1 in every 4 human beings alive today is only existing on the margins of survival, too poor to obtain the food they need to work, or adequate shelter, or minimal health care, let alone education for their children…

"Overall, for the poorest among humankind the past thirty years have been like trying to go up the down escalator. In 1960 the richest one - fifth of the world's population enjoyed 30 times the income of the poorest fifth; by 1989 the richest fifth was receiving 60 times the income of the poorest. Within a single country, this situation would be recognised as the classic condition for a massive and probably violent revolution.

As to trade at present, a recent paper I have seen quotes a World Bank source which shows one third of the world trade taking place within global production networks, and more than half the exports of foreign affiliates of American and Japanese Corporations, represented intra-firm trade. In other words, Multi-Nationals are trading between sections of the same entity. This, of course, gives the lie to theories of economic development or technology being diffused.

When it comes to Foreign Direct Investment, the top 100 Multi National Corporations account for one third of it 104 trillion US Dollars. By far the greatest proportion is in the form of acquisition and takeovers, thus creating new international monopolies. In communications, this means the suppression of cultural diversity and the commodification of experiencing. For example, international TV advertising is worth more than 65 billion dollars - more than four times that spent on preventable diseases.

We are currently getting ready for a new round of World Trade talks. It is worth considering the results of the last talks - known as the Uruguay Round. These talks resulted in the following gains;

• Europe 80 Billion US dollars

• China 40 Billion US dollars

• Japan 25 Billion US dollars

• US 18 Billion US dollars

• Africa lost 3 billion US dollars

The trade talks made the rich richer and the poor poorer. Have we the moral capacity to oppose this happening again?

Meanwhile, even the WTO is feeling a little old fashioned these days by comparison with the speculative capitalists, many of whom work out of Geneva. The total world trade of any year is exceeded every four days by the amounts of speculative money pushed through the currency exchanges of the world. Every day 1.3 trillion US dollars is speculated.

The Tobin Tax - suggested by Nobel Prize winning economist James Tobin in 1972 - would levy a tax of 0.1% on such exchanges. This would yield 50 billion US dollars annually. It could fund the WHO programme. It could help eliminate the debt of some of the poorest countries. But it is being blocked at every level by the US as an "obstruction to trade".

At home in Ireland too it is harder rather than easier to suggest that economies should serve societies, that ethics enhance life, that life is for play as well as toil and that at some time it might all be different.

It is the most radical act in a lifetime to choose to live reflectively. It is full of risk and yet it is perhaps the nearest one can get to true peace of the mind and heart - to seek to know how one's world works, how it came to be, how it can be changed. This reflexive task, with its moral implications, has given us philosophy, culture and a varied but limited form of democracy. Contemporary sensibility seems to be unaware, perhaps unwilling, to engage with the task of a critical understanding and the even more urgent task of putting the stamp of humanity on the world.

In our time, Fukuyana has written of the end of history. In geo-politics there is one super power that purveys a single economic model and that will go to war again and again to defend it. So long ago Jerry Rubin wrote "How can I say I love you when Cars love Shell?". Today the question is: how can we speak of freedom when it is used by such disciples of Friedrich Von Hayek as Margaret Thatcher to mean the freedom of the market at the cost, if necessary, of freedom from hunger, unemployment or poverty of the citizenry.

There is nothing either inevitable or natural about a greedy, self-absorbed and miserable existence. It is possible to understand our world. It is necessary to change it. The reaction of cynicism is corrosive, self indulgent and innately cowardly. It is far better to be involved.