COPENHAGEN WAS a snapshot of humankind in gestation, and gestation is always messy, writes TONY KINSELLA
The UN climate conference was a fiasco, but a fiasco within a process. It was humanity’s first real, and distressingly representative, parliament. Washington’s political paralysis, Europe’s gradualism, Brazil’s pragmatism, Beijing’s anxiety, the naked fear of island states, and the messianic zeal of some climate-change campaigners all corrosively mingled around the Bella Centre.
It was neither just another summit, nor was it just about climate change. It was a global assembly struggling with the challenging concept of a new planetary ethos.
Our species has a very short experience of global policymaking and one built on classic diplomacy. In 1795 Immanuel Kant suggested a global body "to control conflict and promote peace" in Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Sketch. A century and a quarter later we made a first attempt when the League of Nations was founded.
At its height in 1934, the league had 58 member-states. Five had withdrawn and the US senate had, with its usual vision, blocked US membership. Our first limited attempt at global organisation catered for a world of 64 countries and just under 2 billion people.
When the UN general assembly met for the first time in London during the spring of 1946, 51 states were represented. The global population was then around 2.4 billion.
Some 192 sovereign states were represented in Copenhagen from a planet which is now home to slightly less than seven billion human beings.
The essence of diplomacy is the facilitation of good relationships between countries. Classic diplomats decide little and administer less. Effective diplomats provide opportunities for others to do so. When faced with specific policy questions the traditional diplomatic response has been to design an international organisation and then hand it over to more qualified specialists.
This has given us the UN’s 17 specialised agencies and a range of other bodies. Normally these bodies quietly get on with their jobs. We only hear of the World Health Organisation or the International Atomic Energy Agency when a crisis emerges.
It seems obvious that much of our accumulated understanding of the strengths and weaknesses of diplomacy and international summitry was overlooked or rejected in the preparations for Copenhagen.
A political summit can, at best, make the ultimate compromises within the framework of a largely agreed deal. No deal had been agreed pre-Copenhagen; there was not even a generally-accepted structure for such a deal. Maintaining the long-planned summit and hoping for a breakthrough once the world’s leaders assembled on the shores of the Baltic was a political long shot. When participants arrived in Copenhagen, the inadequately and inflexibly organised conference threw up further obstacles. There was a shortage of interpreters and meeting rooms, particularly late at night. Controls erred on the heavy-handed side, as the BBC’s Robin Lustig tactfully put it: “The head of the Chinese delegation shouldn’t have found his entry to the conference hall barred because of a misunderstanding over passes.”
So we had an under-prepared summit lacking the necessary human and material resources trying to tackle a truly enormous question. The political leadership which could have overcome some of these obstacles was conspicuously absent in Copenhagen.
President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva of Brazil unflatteringly compared the discussions with those he had once known as a trade union activist. US president Barack Obama’s speech seemed to be crafted more to placate conservative Democratic senators than to address a global audience. His public insistence on external verifications was predictably taken as an affront by China’s prime minister Wen Jiabao.
These shortcomings, oversights and provocations further stacked the already formidable odds against any political breakthrough being achieved in Copenhagen. While their collective impact was undoubtedly negative, they could have been overcome if humanity had reached some level of agreement on the existential questions it faces – and we haven’t.
If, as the overwhelming majority of the world’s scientists agree, we are dealing with the very survival of our species, then the practices and approaches which have served us since the industrial revolution began over 250 years ago no longer suffice.
The economic practices under which the developed world’s wealth was built cannot be duplicated. If the rest of the world chops down its forests, extracts and burns its coal and pursues our old industrial development models, humanity will be threatened.
Accountancy systems are calibrated on market values, so clean air or non-acidic oceans cannot feature. No value can be ascribed to fish stocks because nobody “owns” them. Perversely, Greenland’s ice cap features on no balance sheet, but if it continues to melt at its current rate, the profits from building sea defences would be expressed.
If we are to survive we will need to balance the traditional concept of “more” with an innovative one of “enough”. We desperately need to invent replacement systems.
German chancellor Angela Merkel was being realistic as she contemplated the ruins of the summit. Noting that we live in a “world in transition”, she concluded that “we will have to continue with this process”.
We will indeed, and become better at it.