Global Justice in the 21st Century

The thousands of delegates and many civic activists have temporarily retreated from the climate change wars waged on the battlefields of Cancun. The inter-governmental battles were fought in the resort setting of the five star Moon Palace Hotel, known for its manicured golf course, situated in an ecologically sensitive area beyond the easy reach of activists, while the main NGO happenings were staged on the streets of the urban poor of the town of Cancun, and in a isolated huge convention center.

The overwhelming majority of the delegates went home content, feeling that they did all that was possible under the circumstances for their governments and having rescued for the time being the reputation of the multilateral approach that had been so tarnished by the failures of Copenhagen that were magnified by the rash and unexpected ineptitudes and police violence of the Danish hosts. Cancun, at the very least, was a triumph for Mexican hospitality and diplomacy, with Latin American women running the show with panache, tact, and a credible commitment to inclusiveness of participation and transparency of negotiations. Of course, there were glitches in the process, and moments of high tension at the end, but overall, and certainly by comparison with Copenhagen, there were good feelings generated in most governmental circles by the end of the proceedings. I suppose that the best summary of these atmospherics was ‘Onward to Durban’ where next year’s climate change gathering will convene, and where there were a variety of pledges to get beyond the compromises and ambiguities that clouded the results at Cancun.

If we put aside these diversionary atmospherics to one side, it dawns on us that this meeting of governments, most represented at the ministerial level, was supposed to address urgent concerns relating to climate change, which has up to now widely understood to mean doing what is necessary to keep global warming from rising above 2 degrees Celsius, the absolute highest tolerable average earth temperature as measured since the onset of the industrial age. The scientific consensus seems increasingly to believe that this ceiling is dangerously high, having at most a 50% chance of avoiding severe harm to the quality of life throughout the world, and that a 1.5 degree increase, although seemingly too ambitious to be realistic as a target, is the most average increase in heat that it is prudent to allow. If this is the case that means a reduction of the current 390 ppm (parts per million) of greenhouse gasses to a utopian upper limit of 350 ppm. Even it these lower levels were somehow achieved over time, great problems would remain as the heating of the earth is uneven, with Africa getting a much higher than average heating, causing dreadful droughts and fires already. At Cancun these realities were essentially ignored except by Bolivia as they were correctly understood by the convenors and delegates to bring the whole negotiating process to a grinding halt, uncovering all the unresolved battles about the distribution of responsibilities for reducing carbon emissions, the developing world is united in refusing to slow their development when the problems of global warming were, in their judgment, mainly a result of the buildup of GHGs during the centuries of industrialization in the developed world. The developed world, led by the United States Government (with a climate skeptic Republican dominated Congress in the background), insists in opposition that present contributions to emissions should be the primary basis for assessing levels of responsibilities, making the developing countries, led by China, share the burden on a roughly proportionate basis. This standoff is fundamental, and seems unlikely to be resolved soon by either multilateral diplomacy or by enlightened leadership on either side of this paralyzing divide.

This state of affairs puts the spotlight on the pluri-national democratic state of Bolivia, as it insists on being identified, that stood bravely and resolutely on principle throughout the conference, cogently arguing that the refusal to work toward the control of carbon emissions was unacceptable, and meant dooming the future of humanity as well violating the integrity of Mother Earth. At the final dramatic session when there existed near unanimity in the great hall the Bolivian chief negotiator, Pablo Colon, with eloquence and indisputably, played the role of spoiler refusing to go along with a final text, called ‘The Copenhagen Agreements: A New Era of International Cooperation on Climate Change,” that he described as a virtual death warrant for the human species and the surrounding reality of a habitable earth, precisely because it failed to address the central issue of global warming in a prudent and responsible fashion. That Colon with great composure and dignity stood alone in a vast hall filled with tired and angry delegates, was shamelessly shouted down, and invoked the notion of ‘consensus’ to contend that no negotiated text could be procedurally adopted without adhering to UN procedural rules requiring ‘consensus’ to be equated with unanimity.

In the end to the relief of the assembled crowd at about 4 am, the President of the Conference, the Mexican Foreign Minister, Patricia Espinosa, declared the agreed text adopted, receiving thunderous applause that was also meant to convey the enraged response to the Bolivian efforts to block the process. It is a nice technical question for the legal community as to whether or not in UN circles ‘consensus’ should be understood to mean ‘unanimity’ or just an expression of the overwhelming political will, a kind of super-majority plurality. A related issue is whether a UN climate change conference can establish its own procedural norms for reaching decisions. The Bolivian voice was wonderfully expressive and determined, a courageously prophetic intoning of the underlying failure of the conference to come to grips with the challenges of climate change, but in terms  of process, it would operate as a veto on a process that would become unmanageable if serious decisions required the unanimous assent of the more than 192 participating governments.

Should we conclude that Cancun was a small step forward, restoring some hope to multilateral cooperation, achieving some help for the most vulnerable countries, and illustrating the willingness of most governments to work together for the sake of achieving what was attainable given the political realities of the moment? Or should we condemn Cancun as one more demonstration of the incapacity of the world of states to rise above national interests and geopolitical ambitions, to see ahead to the terrible consequences of inaction at present, and to administer a sedative to the peoples of the world when what is desperately needed is a strong stimulant?

As has been so well said on other occasions, my friends, “the answer is blowing in the wind.”

Two important reflections on the global role of the United States caught my attention during the last 24 hours, and I recommend them both as perceptive interpretations of what seems to be happening to American power and prestige and as presaging worse to come: Alfred W. McCoy, “The Decline and Fall of the American Empire: Four Scenarios for the end of the American Century by 2025,” available via TomDispatch.com, posted Dec. 5, 2010; Sahin Alpay,  “Wikileaks: the sad story of a declining superpower,” Today’s Zaman, December 6, 2010.

Both pieces paint a similar picture of the United States as heading for the geopolitical dumpster, but at somewhat different speeds and consequences. What for Alpay is sad is for McCoy catastrophic. McCoy, a distinguished historian who has been writing revealingly for decades about corrosive role of secrecy and the drug connections associated with the conduct of the ceaseless American wars in Third World countries, as well as being the author of a devastating expose of the reliance by the CIA on pre-Bush era torture ever since the early years of the Cold War. In depicting the future, McCoy looks at four scenarios for abrupt decline: by economic unraveling via the collapse of the dollar; by persisting military misadventures in Afghanistan, Iran, elsewhere; by an oil/energy squeeze by way of supply shortages and skyrocketing prices; and by stumbling into World War III as a result of the spiraling out of control of the intensifying rivalry with China. McCoy’s cogent line of reasoning suggests that these converging features of the global setting are so unfavorable to the United States’ accustomed role for the last century as to produce an abrupt collapse of its imperial status on the world stage accompanied by a devastating downturn at home, likely generating an irresponsible nativist backlash that will only make matters far worse. McCoy believes that the collapse will probably occur by 2025, and not later.

Alpay, a prominent university professor and a regular columnist in Turkey, relates his assessments closely to the illuminating Wikileaks revelations of the inner and hidden dynamics of American diplomacy, arguing along the way that these massive and embarrassing disclosures should be welcomed as fully in the spirit of democratic governance, and those who made it happen should be applauded and defended, not threatened and criminalized. WiliLeaks exposes the huge gaps that separate the deep and secretive politics of the policy elites from the dishonest public rationales offered to citizens and the world by American leaders. The revelations also confirm the misguided and inept thinking that underlies current foreign policy failures. Alpay’s main observation is to cast aside those who insist that the WikiLeaks phenomenon is itself a dark conspiracy by one of the following: Israel to build support for a waging war against Iran, U.S. Government eager to intensify tensions in the Arab world, rogue bureaucrats seeking to embarrass the elected Obama presidency. Instead of conspiracies so quickly embraced in the Middle East, Alpay believes that the main value of the 250,000 plus cables confirm what we should have already known: that the inner workings of power in the United States exhibit a lethal downward spiral of disarray that puts the Middle East and Central Asia in great and immediate danger. This sudden eruption of transparency demonstrates beyond reasonable doubt the governmental indifference toward those supposedly core values of a democratic society associated with law and decency, but it also provides ample proof of the incompetence, wrongheadedness, and an uncritical embrace of dysfunctional militarism that reigns supreme in Washington.

I would add a few peripheral points to these perceptive commentaries:

–whether decline and fall are inevitable is uncertain, but what makes these outcomes more and more probable and proximate, is this dual obsessive attachment of the Beltway Gang to dysfunctional militarism and a suicidal form of hyper-capitalism, both paving the way to political extremism at home and fiscal disaster for the world;

–while the preoccupation with American failures is understandable, it deflects attention from other trends that imperil the human future, and compound the difficulties already mentioned: global warming and its secondary effects on weather, ocean levels, food security, health, stability;

‘peak oil’ implying declining production and supply curves at a time of rising consumption and demand curves; water scarcities imperiling the wellbeing of over a billion persons;

–what seems dismaying is the absence of a coherent progressive opposition that is rooted in ideas, values, and trends that rests on several vital normative premises: equality and dignity of all persons, the embeddedness of human destiny in its larger natural and cosmic surroundings, the need for human security to be build upon a foundation of justice,  locally, nationally, and globally, a reliance on rationality, evidence, education, respect for law, and ethical responsibility in reaching public policy conclusions; the contrast with an ascending reactionary opposition is striking: its views are coherent and principled, but its vision is warped, based on hostility toward ‘otherness’, division of humanity into good and evil, racism, climate skepticism, a general repudiation of knowledge and reason as guides for policy, an absence of empathy for the suffering of others, national chauvinism, an exaggerated veneration of the military and military virtues;

–what may provide glimmers of hope is the incapacity of the mind to encompass the totality of the reality that confronts society, and will disclose itself by an unfolding that cannot be fully anticipated; uncertainty makes struggle against the impending darkness an urgent and necessary imperative; if we wish to live we must be willing to fight; the biggest domestic challenge in this country is directed at the youth, briefly awakened by the promises of the Obama presidential campaign but quickly disillusioned by the performance of the Obama presidency, and now regressing to a mindless urban hedonism that is pacified by social networking and preoccupied by a hermetic world of sex, food, and careers, or at least jobs, an atmosphere unintentionally forming the background of the film Social Networking (also confirmed by the texture and circumscribed concerns portrayed in Going the Distance); in the often invoked words of William Butler Yeats, ‘the worst are full of passionate intensity, while the best lack all conviction.’ If this remains the case, we should all check in at the nearest hospice!

–avoiding the worst of these future scenarios of doom is a global challenge, not just one confronting Americans; the global presence of the United States, epitomized by its 800 or so overseas military bases, should make people everywhere insist on having  a vote in American elections as an essential, if symbolic, element in any legitimate future form of global democracy; the rest of the world is disenfranchised here in America, yet its fate is often more determined, at least for now, by decisions made in the White House without any pretense of consulting those most affected. These decisions are often more consequential for human wellbeing than are the contests for leadership in national elections. The Brazilian leader, Lula, typified this awareness when he said prior to a G-20 meeting at the height of the world recession, “I pray for him more than for myself,” My claim is that the world needs votes, not prayers, if it is to create some relationship between representation, responsibility, and social/political/economic reality. Our political imaginations remain entrapped spatially, by way of geographic boundaries, while our lives are increasingly constituted and disempowered by an array of digital machinations.