Copenhagen is a symptom of a wider failure

Copenhagen is a symptom of a wider failure - the failure of the nation state as an organising principle for today’s world, a world that is radically different from the one  in which the nation state principle was devised.

This is closely related to two other modern dilemmas.

Why do people get so angry with their politicians?

Why is there such a big gap between the way people spend their scarce time and money, and the things they say we believe are really important?

The  failure of world leaders  to come  up with a meaningful  and binding agreement on  climate change at the long  planned  meeting in Copenhagen means  that the binding, if incompletely applied, agreement  in the Kyoto protocol  will now expire and will not be replaced in time, if ever.

People get angry with politicians because they see them being unable to match their words with deeds. They see that they are also powerless when trying to eliminate other global problems, like financial booms and busts and the international narcotics trade.

But perhaps it is the gap between peoples own beliefs and actions, as much as the failings of politicians, that is at the heart of the problem. If people did not buy bigger cars, bigger houses further from town, and buy more and more food that goes to waste, there would be less climate change. If people did not borrow so much, banks would not lend so much, and taxpayers would not have to bail them out. If people did not buy narcotics, there would be no international drugs trade, no drug lords, and no Taliban either.

The  gap between  what we do, and what we say,  has become wider because  we  live in a  world that has become  so big and  so complex that often we  see  no link between our own acts or  omissions, and what happens afterwards.   This is because what is done or not done in China  affects what happens in Cork, what happens in Afghanistan  affects what happens in Atlanta, and vice versa in  all  cases.   We are all affected by forces we cannot see or control, but also in our daily spending decisions, we all of us create forces, whose effects in other places, we neither see nor control, and  often do not want to see or control.

That was not always so.

When the concept of the modern nation state was devised in the Peace of Westphalia in 1648, what happened in China had little or no affect on what happened in Europe, and Atlanta was not even a mark on a map. Then the nation state was a perfectly workable means to organise world affairs, and remained so for  centuries. That is no longer the case

Frustration with politicians grows, and people do things that do not match their beliefs, because there are no globally effective rule makers powerful enough to set minimum global standards that will govern behaviour in China, Cork, Antwerp, and Afghanistan. The failure in Copenhagen is a failure to make a rule that would have applied to the whole world.

Hundreds of Nation States, meeting at the highest level in Copenhagen after years of preparation, were unable to make a deal on an urgent and relatively simple matter for the whole world.  Other similar failures are in prospect in regard to world trade and in making a global court on war crimes globally effective. These failures are failures in modern conditions of nation states as a means of getting what the world needs to do, done. They show that the ideology, that says that the nation state is the sole repository of the people’s sovereignty, does not live up to all modern challenges.

Small nations saw that and banded together in groups, like the EU, in an effort to pool their sovereignty so they can make   global deals. But big nations, like the US and China, clung to the old and bankrupt notion than nations should be absolutely sovereign inside their own territory and should not be bound by global rules.

For example, The US Senate was a big obstacle to President Obama making a legally binding  deal in Copenhagen because many in  the US Senate is still wedded to the idea that international rules should not bind the United States and  should never  override US law. This is ironic. It was the United States that pioneered the idea of a League of Nations, of  the United Nations, as  global rule makers.

But now, along with China, it is holding out for non binding political agreements and understandings rather than binding rules. Anyone who studies the history of Europe  between the years  1900 and 1914 will see  how dangerously weak and ineffective  such political  understandings can prove to be.

As in  1914, we now live in an a interdependent  world, but one  where  no one power is any longer  completely dominant, and  where there  is no agreed and properly functioning system  for making  binding decisions collectively between nations. We are now relying on a series of ad hoc arrangements of the very kind world leaders tried before the Great War.   Those arrangements did not suffice when the crisis erupted between Austria and  Serbia in  July  1914.