We need a new strategy to renew the international institutions' credibility. We need, in the Pentagon's language, a strategic counterattack, to reinforce the UN and bring democracy to the secret international bureaucracies that decide our fate.

This strategy may be simpler than we imagine. Our national representatives to international bodies should be directly elected at the general election. In addition to electing one MP, we should elect the nation's representatives to the UN, the EU and the WTO. We should start with these most important bodies and then look at including others such as Nato and the negotiations on climate change.

In other countries such as Sweden, Germany or Ireland electing key ambassadors would be simpler than in Britain. In these countries, ballot papers have lists of candidates from the parties. So any party could designate people on these lists as candidates to represent the country at, say, the UN. In this way there would be a direct relationship between the electorate and the nation's key ambassadors.

Organisations such as the UN security council and the EU council of ministers would be turned into elected assemblies as more nations adopted the policy, and there would be a direct relationship between the national constituencies and the decision-making bodies.

In the UK, a start could be made by posting ministers abroad as the UK's permanent representatives, a job now left to diplomats. In this model, Treasury ministers would be sent to the WTO, Cabinet Office ministers to the EU council and a Foreign Office minister to the UN.

Suddenly, you would find the Today programme and Newsnight interviewing our minister in Brussels or Washington. These types of negotiations are going on now, but the diplomats are rarely allowed to talk on the record after their secret meetings. This would change.

Once countries started to send elected representatives as key ambassadors, the whole culture of secrecy would unravel. At international meetings there are occasional bustling gatherings of NGOs trying to influence the proceedings. Democratising the institutions would make the interaction between politicians, pressure groups and the press as part of normal political life at the UN in New York as they are now at Westminster.

Nowhere is new democratic credibility more badly needed than at the UN. It can be re-empowered without waiting around for reform. Countries could send elected representatives to be their ambassadors in residence in New York. Imagine how different the recent crisis over Iraq would have been if from the start the national representatives had had the authority of a direct mandate from their people. Then criticism of the UN as an institution would have been far harder to start.

After the UN, the EU is the most important body that needs an infusion of democracy, and the most controversial institution of which the UK is part. And the greatest criticism of it concerns its lack of democracy.

This issue is being discussed by the convention on the future of Europe run by Giscard D'Estaing, who is concentrating on creating an elected president. This would still leave the rest of the bureaucratic maze hidden from any democratic scrutiny.

The European parliament is elected, but it is widely regarded as powerless. The two powerful EU organisations are the commission and the council of ministers - and despite the latter's name, its day-to-day work is done by officials, with the politicians flying in for occasional meetings that they often barely understand. We need our representatives there all the time, not just for the dinners and signing ceremonies.

The commission is made up of national representatives picked by the prime ministers of the member states. We should take this power back to ourselves and elect our representatives to the commission.

Democratising international institutions would radically transform the international system. If we are going to influence globalisation we must be able to have greater direct control over international decision-making. Electing representatives to these institutions plays an essential part in creating a democratic global society.

Democracy must keep up with the globalised society we now live in. It is no more acceptable to rely on elections to Westminster and to the weak EU parliament than to think that a British company can survive with having global reach.

It is now 700 years since the first English parliament of 1283. Then, it must have seemed far-fetched to think that a parliament could control the king and force him to put taxes and other laws to a vote in the Commons. The changes proposed here are much less dramatic than electing someone to travel to the court hundreds of years ago, but no less essential to preserving our freedoms.

· Dan Plesch's pamphlet Taming Globalisation is published by Charter 88 tomorrow

danplesch@aol.com


Special reports
Globalisation
May Day
Debt relief

Explained
25.06.2002: G8 summit
07.09.2001: IMF
04.09.2001: World Bank

Background and resources
31.10.2002: What is globalisation?
31.10.2002: Globalisation: good or bad?
31.10.2002: Globalisation: world-changing or word-changing?

Useful links
G8 summit
World Economic Forum
European social forum
World Trade Organisation
Critical Mass
Indymedia
Oneworld
Abolish the Bank
World Development Movement

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