It’s a scene with West Wing-level political theatrics and it has been replayed frequently in post-Copenhagen columns: Obama jets into the Danish capital to wrap up the COP15 with full American unilateralist finesse. He demands to meet the Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao. Twice he is sent lower-level negotiators, twice he sends them away. “I don’t want to mess around any more,” Obama says, “I want to talk to Wen”.
He strides upstairs to what he imagines will be a final bilateral meeting with Jiabao — only to find him getting on with private talks with the leaders of Brazil, India and our very own S.A.
“Mr Premier, are you ready to see me?” Obama demands.
Cue extreme awkwardness. (President Zuma, I imagine, gives him an embarrassed smile, Lula budges his chair to the left, and Singh coughs and shuffles some papers.)
This is usually related in the service of an argument about how the US rescued a collapsing conference/left the planet up shit creek without a paddle. Both of them are interesting topics.
But what fascinates me about this scene is the moment when the president of the most powerful state opens the door on the most important meeting at, arguably, the world’s most significant treaty conference since World War II and finds he has been excluded.
Obviously, the US is a big enough player that Obama could squeeze in around the table with entitlement and indignation, and any accord without its sanction would surely have been meaningless. But that meeting, I believe, must mark the death knell of popular conceptions of the hierarchy of nations.
The First/Third World World (or developed/developing, or North/South) dichotomy has always been somewhere been a farce, a sinister trope and a pragmatic and concise way of saying things like “rich, powerful, industrialised, (mostly) Western countries, etc, vs countries with little influence on geopolitics, low levels of industrialisation, non-Western cultures, high levels of income, poverty, etc.”
I say farce and sinister trope because the idea has long been underpinned by notions of Western supremacy. Complex civilisations have existed prior to and concurrently with complex Western civilisations, and nations are not on linear trajectories to some ideal state of progress. This has always given the lie to a division of the world into two camps. (Where Western is a shorthand for something more complicated. It’s hard, I admit, not to use generalisations).
Yet, for a time it was a distinction with more explanatory power than it has had since December 18. For a time it was at least good shorthand for saying highly industrialised and not highly industrialised.
But the marginalisation of the EU and other “First World” countries, and the crucial roles played by China and other “Third World” countries at the COP15 has made it obvious that these terms are increasingly redundant. What were some of the poorest nations are now some of the most powerful.
Their loyalties are — clearly — not to the poor nations in their regions or in others, neither are they entirely beholden to the favour of the former superpowers. The time has come for much more specific divisions.
South Africa does not have a fraction of the power and independence of China or India, but its inclusion in the coterie of nations that devised the final accord says something about what its perceived influence in the region is. As does the alacrity with which it betrayed the African negotiating bloc. Our leaders seem to have fully adopted Kissinger’s credo that states have interests, not friends.
Lastly, the protesters in Copenhagen demanded that the First World pay its ecological debt to the global South. Fair this, but China already has a staggering ecological debt to itself, and increasingly nations like South Africa, Brazil, and India owe their neighbours something for their complicity in environmental crimes of which greenhouse gas emissions are just one.
Welcome to the new decade, where the headline act is climate change — a global class war in which there are no easy geographic loyalties.
China is a second world country, not third.
Hopefully an end to the politics of identity that has shaped our nationalism too. But that is perhaps too much to hope for.Might help if we saw climate politics in essence as energy politics it takes us deeper and into the material basis of our new world as it unfolds or perhaps wraps up!
David Brown
One word : climategate, ruined the circus in Copenhagen…
CO2 is no more harmful to us than water, the earth weather changes all the time, driving my car has no more effect on the climate than me standing around waving my hand all day has on wind in the antarctic, these green loonies ideas of starving people of energy which leads to starvation of people should be banned.
And only the third world would come up with an idea that they can stop developing as long as the 1st world pays them money to stop developing, thank god the first world woke up to this utter rubbish quick enough, half the money would have been used to keep the people down and the other half would be sitting in Swiss bank volts before you could say global cooling…
Right on, things are more complex than the third world/ first world division.
The bottom line is that there is only one planet and one eco-system on which we are all dependent for our very existence. Another fact is that there are now so many of us and we have such powerful technologies that we meddle with the eco-system whether we like it or not. Up until now the meddling has been largely unconscious, e.g. the burning of fossil fuels. This ecologically unconscious way of living cannot continue if we want to survive into the future as a species. We have to devote ourselves to developing our skills at living in harmony with nature. We have only two options; continue ‘as is’, leading inexorably to destruction, or learn to live in cooperation with nature which will mean that our species can flourish until the sun burns out.
“Our leaders seem to have fully adopted Kissinger’s credo that states have interests, not friends.
I hope this is true……..
One word : climategate, ruined the circus in Copenhagen…
CO2 is no more harmful to us than water, the earth weather changes all the time, driving my car has no more effect on the climate than me standing around waving my hand all day has on wind in the antarctic, these green loonies ideas of starving people of energy which leads to starvation of people should be banned.
And only the third world would come up with an idea that they can stop developing as long as the 1st world pays them money to stop developing, thank god the first world woke up to this utter rubbish quick enough, half the money would have been used to keep the people down and the other half would be sitting in Swiss bank volts before you could say global cooling…
Kissinger’s statement ws first made by Disraeli to Queen Victoris in response to her query as to whether a certain counry was a ‘friend’ or an ‘enemy’
We take our perception of victimisation too far. Why should the developed world cut its own emissions and pay us so that we are able to continue to use harmful ways to generate power, etc?
The logical arguement in SA would be (for me): We managed without electrial power, telephones, piped water, cars and so forth before Van Riebeeck landed, we could do it again…let’s try. Instead, the entire issue becomes yet another nail in the coffin of the white man, or ‘Look what you did to us’.
Oh, and I read this weekend that the Nigerian economy is likely to overtake the South African one pretty damn quickly. They have oil. We don’t. Our influence may just disappear along with the investment and we could soon be stuck with coal power and no hydro-electric, wind or solar power.
@me – I suppose Galileo was wrong and the Earth is in actual fact flat, satelite photos are wrong? May I suggest some research into other than popular denialist press?
As is always the case in our capitalist world, scientists discover what businessman/politicians use to their own sefish enrichment. South Africa is important because of its resources, nothing else. Every meeting might start with scientific fact but always ends with what can be gained by the individuals.
Thanks for a thought provoking article. It seems like the complexity of this next battle is yet to unfold and politics will once again make even stranger bedfellows. The new alliances forming will be driven by multi-faceted interests, and I’m hoping this will make for a more equitable outcome especially for developing nations like SA. It seems like President Zuma has been somewhat successful in trying to further SA’s interests internationally far better than the previous incompetent, Mbeki, ever could.
We may be facing ecological destruction somewhere down the line. You know what? i do not mind because for the first time it will be an equal-opportunity destruction.If the rich countries are not budging, they most probably do not buy the story.
Great perspective! A study about individual behaviour showed that individuals and teams that operated completely selfishly made quicker gains, but in the long-term did not do nearly as well as individuals and teams who worked cooperatively and altruistically. Do you think this new dynamic might lead nations to better decisions as they realise the importance of cooperation?
X Cepting , some of the main scientists in this scam have been shown to be “hiding the decline” and “doing tricks on the data” this is serious and it all points to money. Excuse me for not taking it all at face value, unfortunately there weren’t many satellites taking photo’s when people were growing grapes in Greenland, when ships were using the Northern passage (aka the titanic), when there was a lake in the middle of Botswana (+- 1000 years ago) … the earth is gonna get hot and its going to get cold and there aint a thing the green loonies, self important politicians or sheeple can do about it….
As an old Red with Luxembourgist sympathies, now aged into a Green with ardent climate justice tendencies, I found both your perspectives on the death knell of the hierarchy of nations, and the emergence of a new global class war with no easy geographic loyalties really intriguing – and I agree that it is an incredibly interesting transitionary space when the dominant theories, concepts, and models of our times start to lose their previously gratifying ways of explaining contemporary realities. Finally, if we adopted a less anthropocentric model of climate justice we might also be able to begin to get how short-sighted it is to concentrate so specifically on our intra-species global class war only. Keep tracking the evolving reality!
@me you seem to be of the firm opinion that what we do as species has no significant impact on our environment. My gut feeling on the other hand is that it does have a significant impact because there are so many of us. My gut feeling is also grounded in real experience at the ‘micro’ level. I grew up on a farm in the foothills of the Drakensberg. When my father bought the farm it had been abused by the previous owners. One example was that the crop lands were scarred with dongas, erosion arising from the wrong use of the plow, and some lands had had to be abandoned for growing crops. My father constructed contour banks in the crop lands and over the years the lands recovered. In the district we had another, so called, farmer who would buy a farm over grazed it into a shadow of its former self, pocket the apparent profits and use them to buy more farms to abuse for monetary gain. Luckily there was only one of him in the district. If everybody there had been doing the same thing the district would soon have been turned into a desert. There are now billions of people on earth many of whom are sadly living in environmentally destructive ways. I rest my argument.
China’s per capita CO2 emissions are 4.47 metric tonnes while USA is 18.67 metric tonnes per capita.
The reason the Copenhagen talks failed is public opinion in the developed world is still in denial about the fact that a final deal must be asymmetrical.
No progress can be made until this mindset is overcome especially in the United States, as it is politically impossible for the Chinese to make concrete commitments until the Americans do.
The Obama administration knows this and is just trying to spin its way out of a difficult situation.
Ammm no Rory Short, I believe that our species certainly has a detrimental impact on its local environment, at least the 2 sixths of the earth we actually populate, I just do not believe that Global Warming is man-made, its happened a million times before we even arrived and will continue to happen a million times after we become extinct like the the other 99.99995 percent of creatures that have inhabited this earth and no longer exist, how much Carbon Dioxide is in the earths atmosphere (CO2 is a what the earth uses to sustain life) has no basis on the heat of the earth, the recent 6 year cooling period is pretty much proof of this…
I believe that Climate Fear Mongering is a socialist plot to stop people developing and to tax the successful members of our species, while fulling up politician’s pockets (Al Gore) , thats why you have ex commies like Mary Ann Cullinan spouting about “climate justice”
Nice one. I was starting to think we had seen the last of original thought in thoughtleader.
I agree that states should have interests, not friends. We have far more in common with India and Brazil than with Uganda or Malawi (notably re: gay rights). The myth of African solidarity died when Mandela took on Sani Abacha over the execution of Ken Sarowiwa — and lost.
I agree with @me: Carbon dioxide emissions not an issue. Deforestation is an issue — our forests turn carbon dioxide into oxygen. Contamination of ground water supplies is a problem — that impacts directly on the food supply -> health -> longevity.
@me and Kanthan Pillay
CO2 not an issue? 20 years of careful scientific research does not count? Mainstream scientific consensus that CO2 causes climate change does not matter to you?
Millions of people will die and be displaced by freak weather, droughts, rising seas, new diseases, and you say don’t worry about CO2 emissions.
Helloooo!!!!
But then some people beleive the earth is flat, welcome to that club.
@Clean Air research ClimateGate (hide the decline) and while you are researching it also see why Al Gore’s documentary is no longer allowed to be shown in many state schools, and also see how this humble millionaire politician is now the world’s first Eco-billionaire…………… there is no such thing as consensus in Science there are theory’s in science, consensus thats something you do in politics… Meteorologists cannot predict for sure what the weather will be like tomorrow never mind in two years time never mind 20 years time… once again the freak weather was here before we got here and it will be here when we disappear….
Global Warming is going the same way as the 1970′s Global Cooling Theory, the 1980′s Acid Rain theory and the massive hole in the Atmosphere of the early 1990′s, just another scary theory that does not exist….
@me – You do not believe? Science works with provable facts, not beliefs. That is the realm of religion. Whilst admittedly, and as often stated, there are many so-called scientists who have muddied the evidence for their own gain, the evidence collected by the real scientists are pretty damning. Superimpose a graph of the rise in CO2 levels and the rise in industrialisation and compare this with pre-industrial times. Popular press have latched onto “CO2 levels” and “carbon footprint” which falsely gives non-scientists the idea that this is the only global warming inducing gas and that global warming is the only problem. Superimpose on previous two graphs a graph of the increase in irritant related diseases (cancers, allergies, nerve disorders). Pretty damning. We are not just poisoning our planet but ourselves.
Some philosopher said: if only philosophers and intellectuals actually did something than trying to sound smart and highlight all the problems in the world, not coming up with solutions to them. I mean, its a general statement but true to some extent.
I personally feel that the mere high-lighting of the in-competencies of our politicians and their partners in crime, the capitalist, is not helping the poor, nor making a difference in climate change.
Nothing is new, it has all happened before and it has all been said before, we’ve seen before it happened talked about it and we are still talking. Ego and power not only exists in politics but also in the politics of words.
The earth will eventually detox itself from the poison that we have infected it with. So my question is are we going to be writing these beautified problems till the world comes to an end or are we going to do something physical to change the problems that exist in the world?
Don’t get me wrong! the topics are very thought provoking but then what after? People can see things are bad. With the passion and influence that some writers, philosophers have over the masses, doing something material would also inspire others to follow suite.
Blogging is only accessible to a very small number of privileged people, so who are we talking to really? each other to see who can out smart who???????