Simpol

Party Politics: Meaninglessness in a globalised world

2012-01-23T06:40:00.000-08:00

With politicians of all parties bemoaning the public's deepening disinterest in party politics and trying to devise ever more elaborate wheezes to entice them back to the ballot box, almost no one seems to have noticed that globalisation itself is quietly setting the narrow parameters within which national political discourse has become confined.

Today, financial markets represent a largely borderless world with trillions of dollars able to move from one end of the global to another in a matter of seconds. Likewise, it's relatively easy for major corporations to switch or outsource their production to wherever in the world offers the lowest costs and the highest profits.

The ability of capital to move freely and globally by and large has the effect of forcing all governments to enact only those policies designed to enhance (or defend) their nation’s ability to attract capital, investment and jobs. For without them, their economy will go into decline. It follows, then, that whichever party we elect has no choice but to follow substantially the same market- and business-friendly policy agenda; that is, what might be called the "national competitiveness" agenda – the modern-day version of pursuing the national interest.

That’s why, in whatever country we may live, we find left-of-center parties adopting policies traditionally espoused by right-of-center parties. It’s why New Labour’s Tony Blair was often said to be the best Conservative leader since Margaret Thatcher. Or, as the former Conservative prime minister, John Major, himself once put it, “I went swimming leaving my clothes on the bank and when I came back Tony Blair was wearing them” (The Week, 29 October, 1999).

Hence globalisation, for all its good and bad points, has also resulted in all political factions, once they come to power, having no choice but to pursue substantially the same policies. Party politics, consequently, has become substantially devoid of meaning. It shouldn't surprise us, then, that lower voter turnouts, and the general pervading cynicism about politics, are the inevitable outcome. These effects are the ingredients of what the famous philosopher, Jurgen Habermas, calls a “legitimation crisis”; a breakdown in the adequacy of the existing worldview and its governance systems to command allegiance amongst the population as a whole.

Globalisation, in other words, has rendered much of what citizenship means meaningless. And so, for anyone to try to address politics only at a national level is, in this day and age, to miss the “bleeding rhino head in the room”; that thinking about politics and governance now needs to move decisively up to the global level. Our thinking about politics needs to move, in other words, from nation-centric to world-centric.

The ossification and emptiness of today's political discourse is one symptom, in effect, of the present global crisis brought on by globalisation; a crisis which, in a broader view of things, is telling us that the present most senior organs of governance in the world – nation-sates – are now no longer capable of governing adequately; that they are reaching the end of their evolutionary lives and now need to be "transcended and included" by a still-higher level of governance. As philosopher, Ken Wilber, concurs, “The modern nation-state, founded upon initial rationality, has run into its own internal contradictions or limitations, and can only be released by a vision-logic/planetary transformation” (Sex Ecology Spirituality, p. 192).

And as to how citizens may discover a completely new way to engage with politics which is truly transnational (i.e. world-centric) and which transcends the old party-political divides, there is now a solution available; a solution called the Simultaneous Policy (Simpol) http://www.simpol.org. As Wilber points out, "The central idea of Simpol is very powerful; that is, the notion of how to link votes in one country with votes in another - how to link political action in one country with action in another. International competition is built-in to the nation-state system at its current level of development, and so the issue is not environmental concerns, but how to get humans to agree on environmental concerns. This is really fascinating and very hopeful. In my opinion this is the crucial issue for the 21st century".

Durban Climate Fudge - The Futility of Single-Issue Treaty-making

2011-12-12T00:09:00.000-08:00

As the climate talks in Durban conclude with yet another fudged, delayed and grossly inadequate outcome, climate negotiations are beginning to look less like a failure of political will and more like simple stupidity. In what other area of governance on this planet, after all, are decisions ever made on the basis of just one issue? Where in an individual nation, for example, does the government ever keep its population satisfied by legislating on one issue alone, without bringing in or taking into account other issues that allow those who may be unduly disadvantaged to be compensated in some way? Indeed, without being able to mix and match different issues so that what some may lose on one issue, they can gain on another, national-level governance—our present nations and representative democracy itself—would hardly have come into being at all!

The point is that globalisation has reached a depth of economic and environmental international integration that old-style, single-issue treaty-making simply doesn’t work anymore. Just take almost any global issue and you’ll always find there are some nations that would lose out badly from any meaningful agreement, whether it’s the largest emitters that would lose out in a climate agreement, nations with strong financial centres that would lose from a financial transactions (Tobin) tax, or developed nations whose farms and countryside would go to rack and ruin if tariffs on agricultural products were globally abolished.

But on we go, madly trying to tackle global problems one issue at a time; in this case trying to get the big losers in any binding climate agreement—the U.S., China and India—to agree to deep and binding emissions cuts which, because there is no mechanism to compensate them, plainly aren't in their interests. So is it any surprise the talks effectively go nowhere or the agreement is wholly inadequate? Little more than “kicking the can further down the road”?

But if some other global issue were included alongside the climate negotiations—a global financial transactions (Tobin) tax, for example—the billions of dollars this tax would raise could be used to compensate the big losers on the climate part of the agreement, as well as to assist developing countries to adopt clean technologies (and it might help calm financial markets to boot!). Moreover, making the Tobin Tax the subject of global negotiations, rather than the European Union trying in vain to force it on the UK, would neatly meet the UK’s condition that Tobin must be implemented globally if it’s to gain Britain’s support. By mixing more than one issue in a single global negotiation, in other words, opportunities for compensations and trade-offs are created and the chances of making it in everyone’s interests to co-operate become vastly greater.

Some may object that rich countries should "listen to the people" and, in the name of global justice, simply suffer their disadvantage without any compensation or complaint. But isn’t it time we accepted that co-operation rarely results from exhortations to justice, but rather from a well-designed deal that’s sophisticated enough to be in everyone’s interests?

It would be nice, then, if before we completely ruin our chances of civilised survival on this planet, we recalled the lesson that global co-operation requires not just simultaneous action by all nations, but a multi-issue policy framework; a framework which provides the absolutely vital opportunities for trade-offs and compensations between nations without which meaningful co-operation becomes impossible. This is a lesson we learned centuries ago at the national level, but how much longer are we going to keep ignoring it at the global level? How much longer can we afford to keep ignoring it?

John Bunzl. Trustee, International Simultaneous Policy Organisation

www.simpol.org

Occupy Wall Street. Occupy your mind

2011-10-20T01:01:00.001-07:00

As deepening economic woes finally bring people onto the streets in

Western capitals, protesters on Wall Street, in the City of London and elsewhere are keen to remind Western leaders that calling on Arab governments to allow freedom and democracy is a call they could well heed at home. For too long, citizens in the West have felt alienated from the political process. But with unemployment and prices now rising steeply while the rich, the bankers, and the corporations continue to get away with outrageously high pay-offs, the people, finally, are starting to fight back. The people, finally, are saying “enough is enough!”

Reports suggest that Occupy is a very diverse initiative with no clear demands, so it remains to be seen whether a more coherent movement will emerge. As Sasha Sethi, a former investment banker put it when interviewed by Sky News, "I think it is fantastic to see a non-apathetic youth here. It's too fragmented though. There are too many voices. They need to focus on some firm intellectual ideas." This, I recall, was the same criticism levelled more than a decade ago against protesters in Seattle in 1999 who successfully brought the World Trade Organisation’s summit to an abrupt halt and promptly claimed “victory” over globalisation. But having succeeded in their aim of halting the WTO, they had no practical plan to follow it up with; no deeper idea of what they wanted and how it could be achieved. Will it be the same for Occupy?

Interestingly, Mr Sethi, our investment banker, told Sky News that many of his former colleagues would sympathise with the worldwide protests. "Bankers are a mixed bunch," he said. "I think a lot of them in their hearts will agree with it." That’s interesting because it elucidates the difficulty the protesters have in branding bankers, or indeed anyone, as “the enemy”. Because, the complexity of our globalised world makes it hard to identify who, if anyone, is really at fault and who has the power to do anything about it. Because identifying the winners in today’s global economy is one thing; identifying who’s actually capable of changing the system that makes them winners is quite another.

We live in interesting times; I would almost say evolutionary times;

times when people’s understanding of the world they live in is struggling to catch up with a reality that has largely left them behind. For the reality today is that power substantially resides beyond the nation-state; the reality is that individual governments simply aren’t in a position to unilaterally influence global events, be it global energy markets, bond, or currency markets. In other words, events now occur in the ungoverned global space, as it were. And yet people’s understanding still operates largely in the national space. It’s little wonder, then, that they still cling to the out-dated belief that the government still has the ability to act effectively. As the governor of the Bank of England, Mervyn King, acknowledged in a recent interview, the underlying problems in the global economy which caused the current sovereign debt and global economic crises, “cannot be dealt with by any nation alone. … They won’t be tackled,” he says, “unless countries, as a group, come together to ensure that the world economy can keep growing.”

The same, of course, applies if nations want to stop themselves being eaten alive by the markets or to reign in poor corporate behaviour. Rather than competing with one another to remain relatively more attractive to global markets and corporations, and so necessarily favouring banks, global investors and the rich in the process, nations need to cooperate to implement robust global rules and taxes to ensure global markets and corporations operate for the common good rather than just for the benefit of the globally mobile few. Until nations learn to cooperate, then, the markets will continue to pick nations off one by one; until they cooperate, the market tail will continue to wag the government dog.

Perhaps Occupy and countless other protest groups around the world need above all, then, to develop a more acute and genuinely global awareness; an awareness that protest itself is questionable when even governments aren’t in control; an awareness that action must be global and not merely local or even national. Indeed, the Euro crisis is showing that meaningful action can’t even suffice on a European level. Only global action—all or virtually all nations implementing an agreement with global reach and effect—can now possibly hope to do the job. Moreover, since governments are stuck in the vicious circle of having to compete with one another, we’d be foolish to expect them to lead the way to international cooperative action.

It’ll be interesting to see, then, whether Occupy evolves into

something greater than the sum of its parts and whether other protest movements, NGOs and concerned citizens around the world can come together in a coordinated way to drive their politicians and governments towards a cooperative global agreement broad enough and robust enough to bring global markets, transnational corporations, bankers, and the mobile rich back under proper democratic control and accountability. The challenge, it seems, is to find a basis for international cooperation which avoids any nation losing out unduly to any other and so makes it in the interests of all to cooperate. The challenge, too, is to find a more effective means than protest for driving politicians and governments towards that objective. These, perhaps, are some of the “firm intellectual ideas” citizens and protesters alike will have to grapple with and find answers for.

Like Mr. Sethi, many of us who still live relatively comfortable lives are beginning to get seriously worried and will sympathise with the protesters who, unlike us, are willing to rough it in make-shift camps in the world’s financial centres. So maybe now is the time for all of us—bankers and street cleaners, rich and poor, protesters and wider public—to start talking; maybe it’s time for all of us to stop blaming one another and start working together to find a way through.

Deficit Reduction vs. Growth Stimulation: a false dichotomy in a globalised world.

2011-10-13T06:13:00.000-07:00

The government says deficit reduction, the opposition says go for growth.

Doing the former, Chancellor Osborne tells us, will keep interest rates low and so, in time he hopes, help the economy to grow. But given future growth is heavily dependent on the growth of other national economies around the world, the only thing to be said for deficit reduction is that it will prevent us from being eaten alive by the markets, at least for now. But doing the latter—going straight for growth, as Shadow Chancellor Ed Balls would have us do—would give deficit reduction a lower priority and so likely incur the wrath of global bond markets, push up interest rates, and so make growth much more difficult or impossible anyway! So whichever way we go, there’s no solution in sight. I’m not an economist, but when each argument is as self-defeating as the other, one does have to wonder if our economists and politicians are really looking in the right place for solutions. A genuine solution, in other words, probably lies on an entirely different plane altogether.

Indeed, both arguments depend for their success on what happens in the wider global economy; on the health of the economies of other nations. If other nations don’t grow, there won’t be sufficient demand for our exports. If they don’t grow, then, we can’t grow—regardless whether the deficit is reduced or not. And even stringent deficit reduction won't necessarily prevent us from being eaten by the markets. For it’s important to understand that any nation’s standing with the markets is an entirely relative affair. That is, there’s no absolute state of affairs that guarantees market approval. Rather, it’s whichever nation is most vulnerable that will get eaten; whichever nation that, regardless of its absolute economic health, fails to keep ahead of its competitors that will be sucked under, dismembered, and consumed. So whether it’s keeping the markets happy or keeping GDP up, both approaches are predicated on events and forces no nation can control.

It's here, then, that we see the fallacy upon which both approaches are based. National political parties, we see, are in the business of getting us to believe that national governments can actually deliver solutions; that they still have relevance in a globalised world. But the truth is that the factors determining success lie well beyond any individual government’s control. The blunt truth, then, is that while we may like to believe our governments are in the economic cockpit, they’re just sitting in First Class along with the transnational corporations and hedge-fund managers, buffeted and shaken by global market forces no one is in control of. But the disastrous effects are felt most in Economy Class, of course; by the poor in both rich and poor nations alike. Politicians may pretend to be in control, and we may want to believe them, but the fact is that in our globalised world it's the overwhelming impersonal forces of global markets that determine what happens; forces that are running out of any democratic control or accountability.

Solutions, we must realise then, no longer lie within the gift of individual national governments, but can only be achieved through widespread international cooperation; cooperation strong and broad enough to reign the markets in. As the governor of the Bank of England, Mervy King, also acknowledged in a recent interview, the underlying problems in the global economy which caused the current sovereign debt crisis, “cannot be dealt with by any nation alone. … They won’t be tackled,” he says, “unless countries, as a group, come together to ensure that the world economy can keep growing.” One might also add, that nations won’t stop themselves from being eaten alive by the markets until they come together to agree robust global rules and taxes to ensure global markets start to operate in the common good rather than just for the benefit of the globally mobile few.

So there are solutions, but we won’t find them by listening to governments or economists. Only when we take on board the truly global nature of our problems will we realise, both that solutions can only be achieved in the realm of global international cooperation, and that we, citizens, are the ones who will have to drive our respective governments towards it.

A tall order, you might think, and rightly so. But there are some people who’ve taken up this monumental challenge. Over two general elections, in 2001 and 2005, a small group of UK citizens campaigning for global cooperation succeeded in getting 27 Members of the UK parliament and countless candidates from all the main political parties to pledge to implement the campaign’s global policy package simultaneously alongside other governments. In some UK electoral areas, more than one candidate signed the pledge, meaning the campaign gained support in parliament regardless which of those candidates won the seat. This showed the campaign was capable of transcending party-political divides and was global in scope.

But how could a very small number of citizens achieve such big results in so short a time? The answer, it seems, lies in their discovery of a new, powerful way to use their votes. They do this by writing to all parliamentary candidates in their electoral area, informing them that they’ll be voting in future national elections for ANY politician or party—within reason—that pledges to implement the campaign’s policy package simultaneously alongside other governments. Or, if they have a party preference, they encourage their preferred politician or party to sign that pledge. In that way, campaign supporters still retain the ultimate right to vote as they please, but they also make it clear to all politicians that they’ll be giving strong preference to candidates that have signed the Pledge, to the exclusion of those who haven’t. So, politicians who sign the Pledge stood to attract those votes and yet they risked nothing because the policy package is only to be implemented if and when sufficient governments around the world have signed up too. But if politicians failed to sign the Pledge they risked losing votes to their political competitors who had, and so risked losing their seats.

With many parliamentary seats and even entire elections around the world often hanging on a relatively small number of votes, it’s not difficult to see how, with this novel way of voting, only relatively few campaign supporters could make it in the vital interests of all politicians to sign up for global cooperation. And therein lies the power that citizens who join this campaign already have to ensure their governments cooperate. As increasing numbers of citizens in all democratic count learn to use their votes in this way, one can imagine how more and more governments could be driven towards global cooperation. As more signed up, others would come under pressure to follow.

Whether democratic or not, and whatever their level of development, the worsening world predicament is in any case making it in the interests of all nations to solve problems cooperatively, as Mervyn King suggests. But what this campaign uniquely seems to provide is an appropriate framework for that to occur, and a way for enlightened citizens to take the lead. Moreover, the campaign is spreading: some Members of the European, Australian and other parliaments have signed up alongside their UK colleagues. The campaign presently has supporters in over 70 countries and endorsements from some leading statesmen, economists and ecologists. So maybe global cooperation is simply a matter of time; and of how quickly world citizens realise that voting in this new way may well be the most potent way forward. The campaign’s name? The Simultaneous Policy (Simpol) http://www.simpol.org.

Riots in Financial Markets

2011-08-18T04:12:00.000-07:00

As Londoner’s reflect on the recent rioting in their streets, they might spare a thought for the riots occurring simultaneously in the world’s financial markets. While none would condone the appalling lawlessness and destruction of life and property that erupted in cities across Britain, we should recall the lawlessness – that is, the lack of laws and social accountability – that today pervades the world’s financial markets. While rioters on the streets out-manoeuvred the police using mobile phones and social networking, today’s global financial markets out-manoeuvre governments simply by moving, or merely threatening to move, billions of dollars to some other economy offering “an environment more conducive to higher profitability” or “a higher rate of interest”; and all at the click of a mouse. This, too, is a riot because, like on the streets, it’s a dynamic that runs beyond any democratic control or accountability and, like on the streets, it causes mayhem and destruction.

These two riots are not unconnected. Whether you’re a hard-line conservative who believes we need more police on the streets and that rioters should be locked up, or a soft-hearted liberal who believes we need more resources pumped into deprived areas, the fact is that both approaches will require massive extra funding; funding which governments, because of the sovereign debt crisis that pervades financial markets, simply do not have. Local rioting, if you think about it then, is actually a global problem.

And it’s global in more ways than one. For, without a global framework of laws and regulations which ensure rich non-doms, international banks and mobile transnational corporations pay their fair share of taxes, they can always move, or merely threaten to move, elsewhere. With governments living in fear, the rich and mobile are left to run rings around them, playing one off against another, so causing governments to engage in a riotous, competitive, international down-levelling of taxes and regulations which leaves the rich richer and the poor inevitably poorer and ever less revenue to fund public services. Hence, whether it’s Britain or just about any other country, the riot of lawless financial markets ensures an upward flow of wealth to a privileged few, while leaving a deprived and swelling underclass ripe for their own brand of riot. This dynamic is no one’s fault, as such, it’s just the way the system works; the way it is left to work.

Centuries ago, the first kings and queens weren’t so dumb as to allow themselves to become the pawns of the financial markets of their day. They minted all their own money. But although most of us believe governments do this today, they don’t. Instead they borrow billions on financial markets at ruinous rates of interest. Little wonder, then, that they and we end up in debt and in a position where our governments can’t fund either decent public services or regenerate deprived areas, or put more police on the streets. The so-called “discipline” global bond markets exert over national governments and their citizens is actually a euphemism for lawless rioting of quite another kind; a global-level riot which, because it runs outside of any democratic control or accountability, should not be tolerated any more than the looting, murder and mayhem we’ve seen on Britain’s streets.

Like the cure at street level, the cure for the riot in the world’s financial markets will be greater “policing”; that is, governments around the world will need to co-operate far more closely than they ever have in the past to implement binding globally-applied laws and taxes on financial markets, so bringing them back under collective international social control and accountability.

2010-01-06T09:01:00.000-08:00

Politicians Failed Us in Copenhagen. But We Only Have Ourselves to Blame

We like to think failure in Copenhagen was the fault of short-sighted, action-shy politicians. But calling for “action”, or simply recognising that action is needed, is only the first step to solving any complex problem. It’s not our politicians so much as our own collective failure to understand complex problems that has made Copenhagen a failure.

Suppose, for example, we see babies drowning in a river. We might dive in fast and rescue as many as we can. But as more drowning babies come down the river one after another, we’d soon have to admit the problem was more complex than we thought. We can save a few, but if someone doesn’t go up-river to stop them being thrown in in the first place, saving just a few can hardly be described as a solution. Neither, by the same token, can action by individuals – be it individual citizens, corporations, or nations – to unilaterally reduce their carbon emissions. For unless everyone does so globally, the impact will be insignificant and thus inadequate.

Complex problems thus require at least two different kinds of action. One, down-river, is direct and immediate, and can be taken by anyone; the other, up-river, is strategic and preventative, and requires cooperation and a strategic approach. Or to put it more bluntly, one deals with symptoms, the other with causes. Both are necessary and complementary, yes, but if we fail to distinguish between the two and instead simply scream wildly for “action!”, chaos, or simply no action at all, are the only likely outcomes. Little wonder, then, that Copenhagen resulted in failure and future talks hardly offer better prospects.

The climate recognises no national boundaries: it is a global commons. This should immediately tell us that direct and immediate action by individual citizens or by individual nations, although useful and welcome, can never be enough unless all or sufficient nations co-operate to solve the problem globally. For personal actions, or the limited actions an individual nation can take, will only be drowned out unless fast-developing nations like China or India, as well as developed ones such as the USA, can be brought to cooperate. Governments are patently failing to act, so let’s find out why.

Politicians and the media are giving us good clues if only we’d take notice. Tony Blair, for example, once said that “The blunt truth about the politics of climate change is that no country will want to sacrifice its economy in order to meet this challenge”.[i] The implication is that, while it’s clear there can ultimately be no economy without a stable climate, there is nevertheless a very significant short-term economic disincentive for any nation wanting to rein in its industry’s emissions. Why? Because a nation that did so would only risk losing investment and jobs to countries that didn’t. The Financial Times confirmed this, noting that “…governments remain reluctant to address this [global warming] threat because any country acting alone to curb its greenhouse gas emissions, without similar commitments by other governments, risks damaging the competitiveness of its industries.” With all governments fearing to act first for fear of losing capital, jobs and investment to other competing nations, it’s hardly surprising there’s little action.

“Rubbish!” say some alternative energy advocates and environmentalists. Far from incurring a competitive disadvantage, a country moving first to reduce its emissions would, they suggest, give its economy a competitive advantage because government regulation would spur investment in carbon-saving technologies, so creating jobs and wealth. But in a globalised world there’s no guarantee that new jobs would be located in the UK or in whatever country made that first move. More likely, the bulk would quickly be outsourced to some lower-cost country just as they are with most other industries. Also, whatever relatively small advantage may be generated by new green industries would be drowned out by the more general disadvantage suffered by the nation’s many other industries. After all, if there really was a clear competitive advantage to be gained by any nation or industry that moved first, it would already have happened! The fact it hasn’t indicates that Blair, on this issue at least, was right: the problem of first-mover competitive disadvantage cannot be ducked.

To achieve strategic international action, then, the problem is not any lack of awareness about global warming. It’s the problem of how to secure sufficient international co-operation. It is not a question of what needs to be done but how it can be done when each nation justifiably fears moving first. It is a question, in other words, of going up-river; of strategic and preventative action.

A further, as yet largely unrecognised problem is that global problems like climate change are unlikely ever to be solved if we deal with each global problem one at a time. The problem is that, even if all nations reduced emissions simultaneously, the cost for big-polluters would still be far more than for low-polluters, thus making it unlikely big-polluters would cooperate at all. Or, if they did, their reductions would likely be token or inadequate. But if emissions reductions could be coupled, for example, with a global tax on currency speculation (a Tobin Tax), considerable revenues could be raised which could then be used to compensate big-polluting nations and oil-producing nations, as well as providing adequate funding to help developing countries, thus keeping all of them on-side with the emissions part of the agreement.

But trying to solve global problems only one at a time, and not having any capacity to raise new global taxes, governments, on their own, are unlikely to find a solution to climate change, or to any other global problem. They’re just too preoccupied with the need to keep their economies competitive to see that they’re in a vicious circle. We may like to think politicians and the global financial institutions are in control of the global economy, but patently, they’re not. So, calling blandly and blindly upon governments to “act decisively” on global warming (or on any other global problem), as we’ve done so far, will not bring us further forward.

The same, I might add, goes for direct action, for example to stop the building of a third runway at London’s Heathrow airport. Because such action will always be over-ridden by the government’s need to keep the economy competitive, as The Guardian reported: “Ruth Kelly, UK Secretary for Transport, said abandoning expansion plans might salve green consciences but it would have no impact on the environment because … if Heathrow is allowed to become uncompetitive, the flights and routes it operates will simply move elsewhere.”[ii] And so the third runway will be built regardless. So while governments certainly do need to act co-operatively if our problems are to be solved, the point is that they’re unlikely to do so unless we citizens make them – not by asking them, but by compelling them. We citizens must take not only immediate action to curb our personal carbon footprints, we must also take collective political action to drive our governments to co-operate with one another at the global level. “But how can we do that?” you might ask. “Governments rarely do what the people want and my vote has become ineffective and meaningless anyway, and what’s more, party politics turns me off. So what can I actually do, politically, to get my government to co-operate with other governments? How can I make a real difference as far as collective international action is concerned?”

Fortunately, there’s one organisation that offers citizens across the world a way we can use our right to vote in a completely new and very powerful way to drive the politicians of all parties and nations to co-operate, not just on global warming, but on just about any other global justice problem you care to think of.

Just when you thought politics had become a waste of time, the International Simultaneous Policy Organisation (Simpol) and its national affiliate organisations allow us to make our votes more powerful than we could possibly imagine. Simpol provides citizens around the world not just with a way to set the global policy agenda, but a way to drive politicians, political parties and governments to implement that agenda. “But how can this be? And how can it work?”

Since politicians alone can’t solve global problems for us, it’s your responsibility to find out!

International Simultaneous Policy Organisation, December 2009.
http://www.simpol.org/

[i] The Guardian, 3rd November 2005
[ii] The Guardian, 22nd November 2007

Where to go after the failure in Copenhagen?

2010-01-05T05:16:00.000-08:00

Happy New Year to you!

In all of what has gone on at Copenhagen, I wonder if, like me, you see a certain contradiction or tension between the high expectations placed upon political leaders to act, and the equally high systemic barriers that prevent them from doing so? There is, it seems, an element of irresponsibility on our part; that is, an irresponsibility on the part of citizens who on the one hand expect substantive action and yet, on the other, too easily overlook what prevents it.

For me, the "bleeding rhino's head in the room" is that we are asking our leaders to dramatically cut emissions and yet we expect them to do so without significantly harming our national economies. This, effectively, boils down to the first-mover fear of economic competitive disadvantage which can only be overcome if virtually all nations act simultaneously. But beyond that there is another problem: that we expect developed nations to keep developing countries on-side by paying them off while ignoring that, especially following the global financial crisis, even the rich countries don't have adequate funds to do so. This, then, would be like expecting our national governments to financially compensate elements in society that are unduly disadvantaged by some new law, but to somehow expect them to do so without being able to raise any tax revenues with which to make the necessary payments!

In theory, the global and simultaneous nature of all nations participating in an agreement to be implemented more or less simultaneously across the planet ought to solve the first-mover competitive disadvantage problem. In practice, however, there is far from sufficient security that nations will actually meet any commitments they make, let alone do so simultaneously. Furthermore, as I said, there aren't enough funds to adequately compensate developing countries, or oil producing countries, or any other group that might be disproportionately disadvantaged by a robust emissions reduction agreement.

What all this suggests, I believe, is that the whole basis of international negotiations on climate change is fundamentally and fatally flawed. It is as if we had, to recall former UK Chancellor Geoffrey Howe's famous cricketing phrase, "put our political leaders into bat, but only after first breaking their bats in the dressing room before the game". It should be little wonder, then, that their run-score in Copenhagen was wholly inadequate.

What this shows, then, is not only that we, citizens, are being wholly unrealistic in our expectations, but also that we would be foolish to leave it to politicians alone to carry on a cricket match that, because of the way it has been set up, cannot possibly allow them to produce the needed outcomes.

So we, citizens, must surely take responsibility for the flawed set-up we have made for our politicians. We also have to recognise that our politicians cannot themselves change the set-up of the game they are playing, for they are too immersed in it to see it for what it is. Instead, we, citizens, must find a way of fundamentally changing the game they have to play. And that, my friends, is what the Simultaneous Policy campaign is all about.

So let's do all we can to help promote it this year. You'll be in good company. Because articles on Simpol are due to appear shortly in some prestigious and well-known publications, namely the Journal of Integral Theory & Practice http://aqaljournal.integralinstitute.org and the Journal of Futures Studies http://www.jfs.tku.edu.tw Ken Wilber, founder of Integral Theory and a member of the panel at the forthcoming State of the World Forum's conference on Climate Leadership, made the following comment on the article:

"The central idea [of Simpol] is very powerful; that is, the notion of how to link votes in one country with votes in another - how to link political action in one country with action in another. International competition is built-in to the nation-state system at its current level of development and so the issue is not environmental concerns, but how to get humans to AGREE on environmental concerns. This is really fascinating and very hopeful. In my opinion this is the crucial issue for the 21st century".

Please contact us if you'd like copies of either article.

While writing, the report on the results of the 2009 annual policy vote on the policies to be included in Simpol can be found at http://www.simpol.org/en/books/spvote2009analysis.pdf
Thank you to all Adopters who participated in the vote and those who proposed policies for potential inclusion,

Best wishes for a great year.
John Bunzl
http://www.simpol.org

2009-04-09T08:29:00.000-07:00

Globalisation in reverse?

As the shock of the global credit crunch subsides, the next phase inevitably kicks-in: steeply rising unemployment and growing domestic political pressure for a return to protectionism. As the global economic hangover hits home, the world’s nations, like a bunch of recalcitrant teenagers, sink into their morose, self-centred protectionist sulks.

But is greater protectionism – each nation for itself - the answer, or should free trade and open markets be maintained? That’s the question facing governments, trade unions and citizens alike - or so they think. But answers to the financial crisis, as well as to global warming, poverty and many other global problems do not lie in changing the mode of trade. That’s because protectionism and free trade are equally flawed and equally contradictory. Neither offers the answer.

The problem with free trade is that the free movement of capital forces nations to compete destructively to attract footloose global investors, resulting in a race to the bottom as each nation competitively de-regulates and dismantles environmental and social safety nets. And it is that competitive de-regulation, we now realise, that fuelled the financial recklessness and risk-taking which led to the global financial crisis in the first place. Little wonder that over the last twenty years of de-regulation the rich got richer, the poor got poorer, and climate change was left to run rampant.

It’s been clear for some time that free trade has reached its limit. Years of failure to reach agreement in the Doha round of WTO trade liberalisation talks have shown that already. But reverting to protectionism is not the answer. For that simply unleashes a competitive, beggar-thy-neighbour raising of retaliatory tariff barriers, anti-dumping suits or other more subtle forms of trade or employment discrimination. Protectionism only raises international tensions and, as many astute commentators have noted: where goods are prevented from crossing borders, armies soon will. Moreover, when it comes to protectionist policies, almost no government is beyond reproach, so any government complaining or litigating against others only risks looking hypocritical.

The problem with both free trade and protectionism, then, is that they’re both predicated on the same unsustainable premise: on an underlying state of destructive competition between nations; on a vicious circle no nation can escape. The answer lies not in competitive free-trade nor in competitive protectionism but in something quite different: in co-operation. It lies not in the mode of international trade but in changing the mode of international politics.

The hangover the world’s teenager-nations suffer is, for the first time ever, global. That’s why fiscal stimulus policies carried out on a nation-by-nation basis won’t be effective, as Gordon Brown repeatedly points out. Even China, once thought to be the undisputed winner in the global economy, suddenly finds growth faltering and thousands out of work as global demand for its exports chokes off. Unlike the 1930s, no nation is immune and we are all in this together. We live in a global world and only global solutions will do. So, like it or not, nothing short of global governance can cure simultaneous national hangovers. All the while the global economy remains riddled with conflicting interests, undermined by tax havens and dogged by the ability of corporations and the rich to avoid paying taxes, traditional national governance cannot hope to solve our problems.

We should remember that the emergence of national market economies in the 17/18th century produced similar national hangovers: periodic recessions, bank runs and adverse social and environmental fall-out. None of that is new. So how were those problems overcome? By crisis! That fall-out eventually drove each national society to demand its government to regulate its growing domestic market. When they did, the problems were largely solved. The fall-out we see globally today is no different – and neither is the solution. Global problems will soon become so dire that governments will eventually be forced to regulate transnationally. So Gordon Brown and Barack Obama are absolutely right to call for international policy co-ordination. But given the current framework of competitive international relations and the fact that governments, economists, business-people and trade unionists are all still asking themselves the wrong “free-trade vs. protectionism” question, politicians haven’t the slightest clue how to achieve it.

Some of you may fear that global governance means yet another level of distant, burdensome government bureaucracy, or that our national identities will be lost, or that national governments will lose their freedom to act. But it is the very lack of cooperation between nations - the lack of a seamless global regulatory regime – that caused this crisis in the first place and is now preventing nations from acting adequately to halt it. Far from limiting national freedom of action, co-ordinated policy across national borders would actually enhance everyone’s freedom of action. While individual governments today fear taking any action that might displease the rich or the markets, co-ordinated action would at last allow them to reign them in decisively without fear of them moving elsewhere. Co-ordinated international action across a multitude of issues would allow the world’s nations to deal decisively with today’s global problems. But would we be wise to wait patiently in the hope that politicians will make that a reality? Would we be wise to think politicians can achieve this on their own?

Happily, citizens who support the Simultaneous Policy (Simpol) campaign aren’t waiting around to find out. Simpol is a unique global campaign which allows citizens to use their votes in a completely new way to drive the world’s politicians towards implementing the right global solutions - simultaneously.

The basis of Simpol is that all or sufficient nations are to implement the needed stringent measures simultaneously, so avoiding the fear that first-mover nations would lose investment and jobs to other countries. By posing no-risk to any nation’s economy or its international competitiveness, simultaneous action removes the excuses for inaction and delay and opens the way to far more robust policies being adopted than relatively weak agreements we see governments trying to implement today, such as the Kyoto Protocol to curb global warming. Not only could simultaneous international action open the way to solving the global recession, it would allow global warming and a host of other global problems to be solved too.

Announcing his support for Simpol, Lembit Opik, one of a growing number of MPs who support the campaign summed it up when he said, “We live together at once, on the same small planet. There are some things we should do together, at once, on this same small planet. The compelling logic of Simultaneous Policy is really collective common sense – it’s a campaign to find out how common sense really is!”

But what about nations that refuse to cooperate internationally? To secure sufficient international political will for the implementation of the Simpol, citizens around the world who support it, known as Adopters, not only decide the global policies to be implemented, they tell all the politicians in their constituency area that they will be voting in future national elections for any candidate, within reason, who has signed the pledge to implement the policy alongside other governments. Or, if they have a preferred party, they encourage that party to support Simpol. In this way, citizens are seizing the political initiative, firstly, by taking the task of global policy-making out of the hands of politicians and, secondly, by intensifying the competition between candidates to a point where politicians who fail to support Simpol risk losing their seats to those who do.

This new way of voting even though adopted by only a relatively small number of people has already resulted in 27 UK MPs and countless candidates pledging to implement Simpol alongside other governments. With more and more parliamentary seats and even entire national elections being won or lost on fine margins, it needn’t take many of us to make it in the vital political interests of the main politicians and parties to support Simpol, thus offering Adopters the opportunity of driving even uncooperative governments to sign on.

Ambitious, no doubt. But do we really think politicians are going to save the world for us? Do we really think they can achieve international cooperation on their own? It’s not just politicians who need to grow up and take responsibility: it’s us, too. What Simpol offers is a powerful way for us to do that; a powerful way for citizens to show our politicians that "when the people lead, the leaders will follow".

John Bunzl, March 2009.