Time for Plan B: Our Civilization Is on the Edge of a Systemic Breakdown
Lester Brown talks about whether our civilization can survive the mounting global stresses of rising pollution, starvation, food prices, water shortages and failed states.
March 26, 2011 |
http://www.alternet.org/story/150385/time_for_plan_b%3A_our_civilization_is_on_the_edge_of_a_systemic_breakdown_?akid=6742.265841._VX8Qx&rd=1&t=5
"How many failing states before we have a failing global civilization?" asks environmental pioneer Lester Brown in Plan B: Mobilizing to Save Civilization, premiering March 30 on PBS as part of its continuing Journey to Planet Earth series. It's a Gordian knot of a question with no simple answer and nothing but complex, demanding solutions, fearsomely put forth as the fate of humanity totters in the balance.
Based on Brown's book of the same name, Plan B is likely the scariest horror film that was ever disguised as a documentary, despite its calm narration from superstar Matt Damon. That's because the acclaimed environmentalist has deeply studied the variety of environmental and geopolitical tipping points we are fast approaching, and found that we're headed for a seriously dark dystopia if we don't turn civilization as we know it around, and fast. A catastrophic confluence of food and water shortages, overpopulation and pollution, collapsed governments and communities and more natural disasters than Roland Emmerich can dream up await us on the other side of Plan A, which Brown calls "business of usual."
"Environmentalists have been talking for decades about saving the planet, but the planet is going to be around for some time to come," Brown told AlterNet by phone from his Washington D.C. office at the Earth Policy Institute, which he founded at the turn of the century after decades of public and private service in the name of sustainability. "The question is will civilization as we know it be around for some time to come? Can it survive the mounting global stresses of rising pollution, starvation, food prices, water shortages and failed states? These are the real threats to our security now, but we're not responding to them."
In a sense, we are without knowing it. Japan's bungled response to a mounting nuclear crisis, thanks to one of Earth’s most destabilizing earthquakes and tsunamis, has in a cosmological eyeblink reset the entire world's nuclear ambition. Uprisings in hotspots like Egypt, Libya, Bahrain, Yemen, Saudi Arabia and more, compounded by America's continuing quagmires in Iraq and Afghanistan, are squarely knitting together civilization's crappy experiments like preemptive war, biofuels and light-speed financial stratagems into one titanic mess that is demanding new theories of cleanup.
It's no longer intellectually feasible to consider any of these events as separate, because they, like the warming climate, are interconnected nightmares that are keeping us more awake than ever, whether we like it or not. And no matter how we spin them, Plan B argues, we're eventually all going to have to work together to survive what is without a doubt an existential crisis of historical proportions. Only the depth and vigor of our mutual efforts and understanding separate us and every other failed civilization in the planet's incomprehensibly expansive history.
But after 77 years spent on Earth, most of them trying to educate its inhabitants on the dangers of taking its astronomically singular bounty for granted, the soft-spoken Brown remains a cautious optimist. That's a comforting sign for those of us at our wits' end and wondering when the rest of civilization will get its ass in gear to forestall what passes for a collective execution.
"Change comes very quickly and unexpectedly sometimes," Brown said. "The question is whether we can turn things around quickly enough. But I don't think we have a lot of time. Time is our scarcest resource."
I picked Brown's deeply experienced brain on geopolitical and environmental change, Japan's nuclear crisis, China's powerhouse green economy, food and water scarcity, technological bandaids like desalination and lab-grown meat and much more. Taken together with Plan B's accessible yet apocalyptic programming, it points the way forward for a civilization on the edge of a systemic breakdown.
Monday, March 28, 2011
Sunday, March 27, 2011
Washington Post: Political Hypocracy and Corruption
WE NEED TO WRITE UP A SIMMILAR ARTICLE ON SB COE "BILL CIRONE AND HIS CRONIES"---The "RETIREMENT" of CASTON, SARVIS, McClish et al; the accolades and cover-up of criminals; the funding of croney consultants and the obscene benefit packages....
The Sad, Hypocritical Retirement of Evan Bayh
by Ezra Klein
Washington Post blog, March 15, 2011
Evan Bayh wasn’t a particularly distinguished senator. You’ll not find much major legislation with his name on it, or a particularly coherent philosophy laced through his votes. He was a popular Democrat in a red state, and most of his efforts seemed to be devoted to keeping it that way. In practice, that meant talking a lot about the deficit, taking occasional potshots as liberals and avoiding any overly courageous legislative stands. “An ordinary politician,” I wrote when he retired.
But he was a very interesting near-retiree. When he decided not to seek reelection in 2010, he published a precise and devastating broadside against the institution in which he and his father had served. Instead of merely condemning the bitter partisanship of the place, he proposed to close the loopholes that had enabled polarization to metastasize in paralysis. “Filibusters should require 35 senators to … make a commitment to continually debate an issue in reality, not just in theory,” he wrote. And “the number of votes needed to overcome a filibuster should be reduced to 55 from 60.” Strong stuff. He then went after money in politics, calling for “legislation to enhance disclosure requirements, require corporate donors to appear in the political ads they finance and prohibit government contractors or bailout beneficiaries from spending money on political campaigns,” not to mention “public matching funds for smaller contributions. Bayh had no record of leadership on any of these topics. But, in part for that reason, it was particularly potent to hear him speaking out on them.
An acknowledged moderate who’d taken on these crusades wouldn’t have just been a good senator. He’d have been a great one. This new incarnation of Evan Bayh, I wrote, should stay in the Senate, where he could do some good. But he didn’t want to stay in the Senate, he told me in subsequent interviews. He waxed rhapsodic over his time teaching at Indiana University’s Graduate School of Business. “It was real, it was tangible, and it was making a difference every day,” he said. He wanted that feeling again. He wanted to come home at night, he told me, and say, “Dear, do you know what we got done today? I’ve got this really bright kid in my class, and do you know what he asked me, and here’s what I told him, and I think I saw a little epiphany moment go off in his mind.” For a United States senator to explain his retirement by saying, “I want to be engaged in an honorable line of work,” was the single most persuasive and devastating critique I’d ever seen of the Senate as an institution.
But Bayh did not return to Indiana to teach. He did not, as he said he was thinking of doing, join a foundation. Rather, he went to the massive law firm McGuire Woods. And who does McGuire Woods work for? “Principal clients served from our Washington office include national energy companies, foreign countries, international manufacturing companies, trade associations and local and national businesses,” reads the company’s Web site. He followed that up by signing on as a senior adviser to Apollo Management Group, a giant public-equity firm. And, finally, this week, he joined Fox News as a contributor. It’s as if he’s systematically ticking off every poison he identified in the body politic and rushing to dump more of it into the water supply.
The “corrosive system of campaign financing” that Bayh considered such a threat? He’s being paid by both McGuire Woods and Apollo Global Management to act as a corroding agent on their behalf. The “strident partisanship” and “unyielding ideology” he complained was ruining the Senate? At Fox News, he’ll be right there on set while it gets cooked up. His warning that “what is required from members of Congress and the public alike is a new spirit of devotion to the national welfare beyond party or self-interest” sounds, in retrospect, like a joke. Evan Bayh doing performance art as Evan Bayh. Exactly which of these new positions would Bayh say is against his self-interest, or in promotion of the general welfare?
I should say, for the record, that I got in touch with McGuire Woods to give Bayh an opportunity to comment, or offer an alternative interpretation of his career decisions. I didn’t hear from them, but I got a call back from a PR person at Fox News. “I’m going to decline the interview for Mr. Bayh,” the flack said. And I guess I’m not surprised: It’s one thing to take the positions Bayh took without much of a record on them. It’s a whole other to try to sustain them when his paychecks are being signed by people who profit from the very forces he lamented.
In our last interview, Bayh complained of the poor opinion the public had of him and his colleagues. “They look at us like we’re worse than used-car salesmen.” Yes. They do. And this is why.
This entry was posted on Saturday, March 26th, 2011 at 4:25 pm and is filed under Articles. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
“The Sad, Hypocritical Retirement of Evan Bayh: Ezra Klein”
Prof. Duane Whittier Says:
March 26th, 2011 at 6:28 pm
A most insightful article here. Well worth reading. Thank you for bringing it to our attention.
sharon kerley Says:
March 27th, 2011 at 2:56 am
It is so sad when we really find out that we are not the country we thought we were. Who does really run our country, it becomes more and more evident that there are people behind the scene who run the show. The book that really showed the truth was Confessions of an economic hit man.
I had always thought that we were the best, we sent food, missionaries, clothes etc. Then I find out that what we really were doing is gettin other countries tied up with interrest payments which went or goes to European Bankers. Do we even have an honest upright person to be our next president????The Haiti situation, and also the New Orleans situation only gives u s a glimpse of the magnitude of it all. There is a lot more.
k8longstory Says: Your comment is awaiting moderation.
March 27th, 2011 at 8:17 am
“Truth Will Out, Justice Prevails, and Love Conquers All in an Eternal Conflict against Humorless Arrogance, Illusory Prestige, Brute Force and Primeval Stupidity.” Santa Barbara is the Perfect Storm of Injustice; “WE, the People” are calling for PRACTICAL WISDOM, COMPASSIONATE COMMUNITY and RESTORATIVE JUSTICE—and we’re demanding a Federal Grand Jury to EXPOSE corruption, incarcerate the Education-Politico-Industrial Complex (EPIC)—Good Ol’ Boys SBCOE Bill Cirone and His Cronies. It is up to US to RESTORE JUSTICE and DEMOCRACY to our schools and communities.; social change is messy but inevitable….
« Secret Fears of the Super-Rich: Graeme Wood in the Atlantic (Part Two)The War on Elizabeth Warren: Krugman’s Powerful Indictment
The Sad, Hypocritical Retirement of Evan Bayh
by Ezra Klein
Washington Post blog, March 15, 2011
Evan Bayh wasn’t a particularly distinguished senator. You’ll not find much major legislation with his name on it, or a particularly coherent philosophy laced through his votes. He was a popular Democrat in a red state, and most of his efforts seemed to be devoted to keeping it that way. In practice, that meant talking a lot about the deficit, taking occasional potshots as liberals and avoiding any overly courageous legislative stands. “An ordinary politician,” I wrote when he retired.
But he was a very interesting near-retiree. When he decided not to seek reelection in 2010, he published a precise and devastating broadside against the institution in which he and his father had served. Instead of merely condemning the bitter partisanship of the place, he proposed to close the loopholes that had enabled polarization to metastasize in paralysis. “Filibusters should require 35 senators to … make a commitment to continually debate an issue in reality, not just in theory,” he wrote. And “the number of votes needed to overcome a filibuster should be reduced to 55 from 60.” Strong stuff. He then went after money in politics, calling for “legislation to enhance disclosure requirements, require corporate donors to appear in the political ads they finance and prohibit government contractors or bailout beneficiaries from spending money on political campaigns,” not to mention “public matching funds for smaller contributions. Bayh had no record of leadership on any of these topics. But, in part for that reason, it was particularly potent to hear him speaking out on them.
An acknowledged moderate who’d taken on these crusades wouldn’t have just been a good senator. He’d have been a great one. This new incarnation of Evan Bayh, I wrote, should stay in the Senate, where he could do some good. But he didn’t want to stay in the Senate, he told me in subsequent interviews. He waxed rhapsodic over his time teaching at Indiana University’s Graduate School of Business. “It was real, it was tangible, and it was making a difference every day,” he said. He wanted that feeling again. He wanted to come home at night, he told me, and say, “Dear, do you know what we got done today? I’ve got this really bright kid in my class, and do you know what he asked me, and here’s what I told him, and I think I saw a little epiphany moment go off in his mind.” For a United States senator to explain his retirement by saying, “I want to be engaged in an honorable line of work,” was the single most persuasive and devastating critique I’d ever seen of the Senate as an institution.
But Bayh did not return to Indiana to teach. He did not, as he said he was thinking of doing, join a foundation. Rather, he went to the massive law firm McGuire Woods. And who does McGuire Woods work for? “Principal clients served from our Washington office include national energy companies, foreign countries, international manufacturing companies, trade associations and local and national businesses,” reads the company’s Web site. He followed that up by signing on as a senior adviser to Apollo Management Group, a giant public-equity firm. And, finally, this week, he joined Fox News as a contributor. It’s as if he’s systematically ticking off every poison he identified in the body politic and rushing to dump more of it into the water supply.
The “corrosive system of campaign financing” that Bayh considered such a threat? He’s being paid by both McGuire Woods and Apollo Global Management to act as a corroding agent on their behalf. The “strident partisanship” and “unyielding ideology” he complained was ruining the Senate? At Fox News, he’ll be right there on set while it gets cooked up. His warning that “what is required from members of Congress and the public alike is a new spirit of devotion to the national welfare beyond party or self-interest” sounds, in retrospect, like a joke. Evan Bayh doing performance art as Evan Bayh. Exactly which of these new positions would Bayh say is against his self-interest, or in promotion of the general welfare?
I should say, for the record, that I got in touch with McGuire Woods to give Bayh an opportunity to comment, or offer an alternative interpretation of his career decisions. I didn’t hear from them, but I got a call back from a PR person at Fox News. “I’m going to decline the interview for Mr. Bayh,” the flack said. And I guess I’m not surprised: It’s one thing to take the positions Bayh took without much of a record on them. It’s a whole other to try to sustain them when his paychecks are being signed by people who profit from the very forces he lamented.
In our last interview, Bayh complained of the poor opinion the public had of him and his colleagues. “They look at us like we’re worse than used-car salesmen.” Yes. They do. And this is why.
This entry was posted on Saturday, March 26th, 2011 at 4:25 pm and is filed under Articles. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
“The Sad, Hypocritical Retirement of Evan Bayh: Ezra Klein”
Prof. Duane Whittier Says:
March 26th, 2011 at 6:28 pm
A most insightful article here. Well worth reading. Thank you for bringing it to our attention.
sharon kerley Says:
March 27th, 2011 at 2:56 am
It is so sad when we really find out that we are not the country we thought we were. Who does really run our country, it becomes more and more evident that there are people behind the scene who run the show. The book that really showed the truth was Confessions of an economic hit man.
I had always thought that we were the best, we sent food, missionaries, clothes etc. Then I find out that what we really were doing is gettin other countries tied up with interrest payments which went or goes to European Bankers. Do we even have an honest upright person to be our next president????The Haiti situation, and also the New Orleans situation only gives u s a glimpse of the magnitude of it all. There is a lot more.
k8longstory Says: Your comment is awaiting moderation.
March 27th, 2011 at 8:17 am
“Truth Will Out, Justice Prevails, and Love Conquers All in an Eternal Conflict against Humorless Arrogance, Illusory Prestige, Brute Force and Primeval Stupidity.” Santa Barbara is the Perfect Storm of Injustice; “WE, the People” are calling for PRACTICAL WISDOM, COMPASSIONATE COMMUNITY and RESTORATIVE JUSTICE—and we’re demanding a Federal Grand Jury to EXPOSE corruption, incarcerate the Education-Politico-Industrial Complex (EPIC)—Good Ol’ Boys SBCOE Bill Cirone and His Cronies. It is up to US to RESTORE JUSTICE and DEMOCRACY to our schools and communities.; social change is messy but inevitable….
« Secret Fears of the Super-Rich: Graeme Wood in the Atlantic (Part Two)The War on Elizabeth Warren: Krugman’s Powerful Indictment
Monday, March 21, 2011
The Age of Activism
Published on Thursday, March 17, 2011 by Foreign Policy In Focus
The Age of Activism
by John Feffer
The world is convulsed in protest. In recent months, people have filled the streets in the Middle East, the Balkans, Africa, and many parts of the United States. Their targets are local: autocratic leaders, corrupt politicians, and dismal economies. They're not performing acts of global solidarity. Nor has there been an outbreak of some protest virus. These demonstrations are responding to specific conditions. Tunisia isn't Bahrain. Croatia isn't Burkina Faso. Madison, Wisconsin isn't Frankfort, Kentucky.
Yet, I am an inveterate lumper – and only a half-hearted splitter – so I feel compelled to connect the dots between these disparate events in an attempt to delineate our era, to name our moment. In four magisterial works, the historian Eric Hobsbawm divided 200 years of modern history into the Age of Empire (1789-1848), the Age of Revolution (1848-1875), the Age of Capital (1875-1914), and the Age of Extremes (1914-1991). The period after 1992 so far remains nameless.
Let me rashly and prematurely propose a name for our era: the Age of Activism. Here’s a preliminary sketch for a history of the age in which we are currently immersed, as well as a diagnosis of where this activism is heading.
In the early 1990s, the decay of Cold War structures that kept the Age of Extremes in place gave rise to new possibilities for national transformations in Eastern Europe, South Africa, and Latin America as well as activism on a regional and global level. A Europe-wide movement came together to support a united, peaceful, and Green continent. Activists launched similar efforts in Asia, North Africa, and Latin America. Meanwhile, the United States and its allies began to construct a "new world order" based on the expansion of multilateral and bilateral military alliances, the free flow of capital, and the management of the new global economy by a trio of organizations (World Bank, International Monetary Fund, World Trade Organization).
The fall of the Berlin Wall, in other words, was to lead to the fall of all the smaller walls that prevented the free flow of goods, investments, and armaments. But this free flow of trade threatened to increase both global inequality and the divide between rich and poor within countries. To fight this vision of world order, a new anti-globalization movement emerged, breaking into the headlines at the World Trade Organization meeting in the legendary Battle of Seattle of 1999. Throwing sand into the gears of free trade and throwing into question the very foundations of global governance, the movement seemed to gather irreversible momentum in 2001. The first World Social Forum brought activists of all stripes to Porto Alegre, Brazil in January 2001. In April, protesters blocked the Free Trade Area of the Americas at the third Summit of the Americas in Quebec City. The preparations to gather in Barcelona in June scared the World Bank into canceling its meeting. The next month, thousands descended on Genoa to protest the G8 meeting.
Everything was building toward September 30, 2001. Activists were planning a giant demonstration with 150,000 people protesting the IMF and World Bank annual meetings. "The IMF and World Bank had rented miles of chain link fence and were planning to fence off dozens of city blocks," recalls John Cavanagh, my colleague at the Institute for Policy Studies. "It was going to be the biggest global justice demonstration to date."
And then came 9/11. And suddenly talk of war eclipsed talk of economics. Activists turned their attention to reining in U.S. foreign and military policy. On February 13, 2003, the largest protests in world history took place around the world in an attempt to forestall the U.S. invasion of Iraq. The effort failed, but it was an important step in the development of global civil society. Governments had failed to outlaw war in the infamous Kellogg-Briand Treaty of 1928. Citizens now stepped in, attempting to put this renunciation of aggressive war into practice.
After eight years of failed policies, the neoconservatives no longer run the show. Responding to pressure from the peace movement, the Obama administration has put a timetable on what had once been wars without end in Afghanistan and Iraq (though the drone war continues unabated in Pakistan and elsewhere). The effort to create large multilateral trade agreements through the World Trade Organization has foundered (thought bilateral treaties have taken their place). It might then be said that activists have scored victories, albeit qualified ones, in the first major engagements of the Age of Activism.
One vector of activism has targeted global institutions (WTO) and senseless bloodshed (the Iraq War). A second vector that included the revolutions of the first decade of the 21st century – Rose (Georgia), Orange (Ukraine), Cedar (Lebanon), Tulip (Kyrgyzstan), Green (Iran) – has focused on national political elites. The current convulsions in the Middle East and elsewhere on the globe are mostly found at the confluence of these two vectors.
To explain this confluence, let's first look at three conventional explanations for the current wave of discontent. According to one school of thought, the protests can ultimately be traced back to economic crisis. Rising food prices caused considerable discontent in Egypt. Limited economic opportunities created enormous frustration in Tunisia. Austerity measures in Greece brought out hundreds of thousands of protestors in a 24-hour strike on February 23. "With youth unemployment hitting 35 percent, young people in Greece see a bleak, jobless future," writes Foreign Policy In Focus (FPIF) contributor Kia Mistilis in The Battle For Greece. "Greeks say a mass exodus is looming, similar to the period following World War II." Economic downturns were also partially responsible for the rise of Solidarity in Poland in 1980 and the Tiananmen Square protests in 1989 in China. Sociologists call this failure of governments to deliver the promised goods a "legitimation crisis."
A second explanation focuses on impunity. Protesters are incensed at the corruption of their ruling elites. In Croatia, where protests have nearly paralyzed the country over the last two weeks, "protesters have focused on the lavish lifestyles of many of Croatia’s politicians," writes FPIF contributor Sabrina Perić in Days of Rage in Croatia. "The discovery last week that former Croatian Prime Minister Ivo Sanader received a commission of 3.5 million Croatian kuna in negotiations with the Austrian Hypo Bank has served to consolidate the loose alliances amongst protesters created via newspaper websites, Facebook pages, Twitter feeds, talk on the streets, and phone calls between family members." In China, meanwhile, apartment owners are rising up against the management in their buildings in an effort to create democracy on the ground floor. "This is the same class that occupied Tahrir Square and pushed out Hosni Mubarak, the first generation to have the Internet and the first to think about buying a home, however small," writes Doug Saunders in The Globe and Mail.
Finally, a third theory attributes the spread of discontent to the multiplier effect of new technologies. Photocopiers helped spread dissident ideas in Eastern Europe in the 1980s. Faxes were a key part of the Chinese democracy efforts in 1989. And now Twitter and Facebook serve to connect the likeminded – those who want to ogle silly kitty pictures as well as those who want to bring down governments.
But here's another way to look at the current wave of activism that goes beyond economics, transparency, and technology. The fundamental issue is the nature of the state.
In the Age of Activism, protesters aren’t venting rage just at authoritarian governments, like those of Egypt and Tunisia. They’ve gone into the streets against democratic governments in Croatia and Greece and Wisconsin. They protested the Islamic republic of Iran. They’re organizing, if only indirectly, against China's communist government. The modern state has proven woefully ill-suited for dealing with the challenges of the international economy, the worsening environment, or the aspirations of rising classes. The state is letting us down. And we're beginning to sense that a mere rotation of elites, through election or selection, isn't good enough.
Neoliberalism – the creation of a borderless global economy – was one response to the failure of the state to rise to these challenges. Another response was neoconservatism – a last-gasp effort of the United States to retain global power by force. The anti-globalization and anti-war movements have tackled each in turn. The current wave of activism, on the other hand, challenges the state as a vehicle for the enrichment of elites at the expense of the common good – at the local, national, and global levels.
The Age of Activism isn't, of course, all about progressives. There have been tea party activists, radical Islamists, European racists, and ugly populists of all hues. They also use the Internet, dislike economic austerity, and rage against corrupt elites. In Pakistan, supporters of the country’s blasphemy laws have already claimed two victims, Governor Salman Taseer and Christian politician Shahbaz Bhatti. "More troubling than the murders is the soft support for – if not outright approval of – the law among the Pakistani public," writes FPIF contributor M. Junaid Levesque-Alam in How to Prevent Pakistani Anarchy. "Lawyers, once hailed by Western media as heroes of Pakistani liberalism, raucously supported the alleged murderer of Taseer."
We can imagine more democratic forms of governance at the global level. Activists are championing sustainability at the local level through community economics. But the real struggle in the Age of Activism is over that middle term, the state. In our era, a laissez-faire state cannot provide justice for the disenfranchised or tackle the major threats of climate change and nuclear proliferation. And our welfare states struggle to deal with the scarcity imposed by ecological and economic limits. We must conjure a different kind of state, which intervenes just enough to subordinate the military and the corporation on behalf of the common good. It must adhere to the principle of subsidiarity by which it performs only those tasks that can't be done effectively at a more local level. And it must be thoroughly transparent to reduce corruption to minimal levels. This is what activists are fighting for in Egypt, in Croatia, in the peace movement, and the anti-globalization movement.
We must fight hard in our Age of Activism to construct this new political entity: the activist state. This is, literally, a do-or-die situation. If we fail, we will slip, inexorably, into an Age of Apocalypse.
© 2011 Foreign Policy in Focus
John Feffer is the co-director of Foreign Policy In Focus at the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington, DC. He is the author of North Korea, South Korea: U.S. Policy at a Time of Crisis (Seven Stories, 2003) among other books.
The Age of Activism
by John Feffer
The world is convulsed in protest. In recent months, people have filled the streets in the Middle East, the Balkans, Africa, and many parts of the United States. Their targets are local: autocratic leaders, corrupt politicians, and dismal economies. They're not performing acts of global solidarity. Nor has there been an outbreak of some protest virus. These demonstrations are responding to specific conditions. Tunisia isn't Bahrain. Croatia isn't Burkina Faso. Madison, Wisconsin isn't Frankfort, Kentucky.
Yet, I am an inveterate lumper – and only a half-hearted splitter – so I feel compelled to connect the dots between these disparate events in an attempt to delineate our era, to name our moment. In four magisterial works, the historian Eric Hobsbawm divided 200 years of modern history into the Age of Empire (1789-1848), the Age of Revolution (1848-1875), the Age of Capital (1875-1914), and the Age of Extremes (1914-1991). The period after 1992 so far remains nameless.
Let me rashly and prematurely propose a name for our era: the Age of Activism. Here’s a preliminary sketch for a history of the age in which we are currently immersed, as well as a diagnosis of where this activism is heading.
In the early 1990s, the decay of Cold War structures that kept the Age of Extremes in place gave rise to new possibilities for national transformations in Eastern Europe, South Africa, and Latin America as well as activism on a regional and global level. A Europe-wide movement came together to support a united, peaceful, and Green continent. Activists launched similar efforts in Asia, North Africa, and Latin America. Meanwhile, the United States and its allies began to construct a "new world order" based on the expansion of multilateral and bilateral military alliances, the free flow of capital, and the management of the new global economy by a trio of organizations (World Bank, International Monetary Fund, World Trade Organization).
The fall of the Berlin Wall, in other words, was to lead to the fall of all the smaller walls that prevented the free flow of goods, investments, and armaments. But this free flow of trade threatened to increase both global inequality and the divide between rich and poor within countries. To fight this vision of world order, a new anti-globalization movement emerged, breaking into the headlines at the World Trade Organization meeting in the legendary Battle of Seattle of 1999. Throwing sand into the gears of free trade and throwing into question the very foundations of global governance, the movement seemed to gather irreversible momentum in 2001. The first World Social Forum brought activists of all stripes to Porto Alegre, Brazil in January 2001. In April, protesters blocked the Free Trade Area of the Americas at the third Summit of the Americas in Quebec City. The preparations to gather in Barcelona in June scared the World Bank into canceling its meeting. The next month, thousands descended on Genoa to protest the G8 meeting.
Everything was building toward September 30, 2001. Activists were planning a giant demonstration with 150,000 people protesting the IMF and World Bank annual meetings. "The IMF and World Bank had rented miles of chain link fence and were planning to fence off dozens of city blocks," recalls John Cavanagh, my colleague at the Institute for Policy Studies. "It was going to be the biggest global justice demonstration to date."
And then came 9/11. And suddenly talk of war eclipsed talk of economics. Activists turned their attention to reining in U.S. foreign and military policy. On February 13, 2003, the largest protests in world history took place around the world in an attempt to forestall the U.S. invasion of Iraq. The effort failed, but it was an important step in the development of global civil society. Governments had failed to outlaw war in the infamous Kellogg-Briand Treaty of 1928. Citizens now stepped in, attempting to put this renunciation of aggressive war into practice.
After eight years of failed policies, the neoconservatives no longer run the show. Responding to pressure from the peace movement, the Obama administration has put a timetable on what had once been wars without end in Afghanistan and Iraq (though the drone war continues unabated in Pakistan and elsewhere). The effort to create large multilateral trade agreements through the World Trade Organization has foundered (thought bilateral treaties have taken their place). It might then be said that activists have scored victories, albeit qualified ones, in the first major engagements of the Age of Activism.
One vector of activism has targeted global institutions (WTO) and senseless bloodshed (the Iraq War). A second vector that included the revolutions of the first decade of the 21st century – Rose (Georgia), Orange (Ukraine), Cedar (Lebanon), Tulip (Kyrgyzstan), Green (Iran) – has focused on national political elites. The current convulsions in the Middle East and elsewhere on the globe are mostly found at the confluence of these two vectors.
To explain this confluence, let's first look at three conventional explanations for the current wave of discontent. According to one school of thought, the protests can ultimately be traced back to economic crisis. Rising food prices caused considerable discontent in Egypt. Limited economic opportunities created enormous frustration in Tunisia. Austerity measures in Greece brought out hundreds of thousands of protestors in a 24-hour strike on February 23. "With youth unemployment hitting 35 percent, young people in Greece see a bleak, jobless future," writes Foreign Policy In Focus (FPIF) contributor Kia Mistilis in The Battle For Greece. "Greeks say a mass exodus is looming, similar to the period following World War II." Economic downturns were also partially responsible for the rise of Solidarity in Poland in 1980 and the Tiananmen Square protests in 1989 in China. Sociologists call this failure of governments to deliver the promised goods a "legitimation crisis."
A second explanation focuses on impunity. Protesters are incensed at the corruption of their ruling elites. In Croatia, where protests have nearly paralyzed the country over the last two weeks, "protesters have focused on the lavish lifestyles of many of Croatia’s politicians," writes FPIF contributor Sabrina Perić in Days of Rage in Croatia. "The discovery last week that former Croatian Prime Minister Ivo Sanader received a commission of 3.5 million Croatian kuna in negotiations with the Austrian Hypo Bank has served to consolidate the loose alliances amongst protesters created via newspaper websites, Facebook pages, Twitter feeds, talk on the streets, and phone calls between family members." In China, meanwhile, apartment owners are rising up against the management in their buildings in an effort to create democracy on the ground floor. "This is the same class that occupied Tahrir Square and pushed out Hosni Mubarak, the first generation to have the Internet and the first to think about buying a home, however small," writes Doug Saunders in The Globe and Mail.
Finally, a third theory attributes the spread of discontent to the multiplier effect of new technologies. Photocopiers helped spread dissident ideas in Eastern Europe in the 1980s. Faxes were a key part of the Chinese democracy efforts in 1989. And now Twitter and Facebook serve to connect the likeminded – those who want to ogle silly kitty pictures as well as those who want to bring down governments.
But here's another way to look at the current wave of activism that goes beyond economics, transparency, and technology. The fundamental issue is the nature of the state.
In the Age of Activism, protesters aren’t venting rage just at authoritarian governments, like those of Egypt and Tunisia. They’ve gone into the streets against democratic governments in Croatia and Greece and Wisconsin. They protested the Islamic republic of Iran. They’re organizing, if only indirectly, against China's communist government. The modern state has proven woefully ill-suited for dealing with the challenges of the international economy, the worsening environment, or the aspirations of rising classes. The state is letting us down. And we're beginning to sense that a mere rotation of elites, through election or selection, isn't good enough.
Neoliberalism – the creation of a borderless global economy – was one response to the failure of the state to rise to these challenges. Another response was neoconservatism – a last-gasp effort of the United States to retain global power by force. The anti-globalization and anti-war movements have tackled each in turn. The current wave of activism, on the other hand, challenges the state as a vehicle for the enrichment of elites at the expense of the common good – at the local, national, and global levels.
The Age of Activism isn't, of course, all about progressives. There have been tea party activists, radical Islamists, European racists, and ugly populists of all hues. They also use the Internet, dislike economic austerity, and rage against corrupt elites. In Pakistan, supporters of the country’s blasphemy laws have already claimed two victims, Governor Salman Taseer and Christian politician Shahbaz Bhatti. "More troubling than the murders is the soft support for – if not outright approval of – the law among the Pakistani public," writes FPIF contributor M. Junaid Levesque-Alam in How to Prevent Pakistani Anarchy. "Lawyers, once hailed by Western media as heroes of Pakistani liberalism, raucously supported the alleged murderer of Taseer."
We can imagine more democratic forms of governance at the global level. Activists are championing sustainability at the local level through community economics. But the real struggle in the Age of Activism is over that middle term, the state. In our era, a laissez-faire state cannot provide justice for the disenfranchised or tackle the major threats of climate change and nuclear proliferation. And our welfare states struggle to deal with the scarcity imposed by ecological and economic limits. We must conjure a different kind of state, which intervenes just enough to subordinate the military and the corporation on behalf of the common good. It must adhere to the principle of subsidiarity by which it performs only those tasks that can't be done effectively at a more local level. And it must be thoroughly transparent to reduce corruption to minimal levels. This is what activists are fighting for in Egypt, in Croatia, in the peace movement, and the anti-globalization movement.
We must fight hard in our Age of Activism to construct this new political entity: the activist state. This is, literally, a do-or-die situation. If we fail, we will slip, inexorably, into an Age of Apocalypse.
© 2011 Foreign Policy in Focus
John Feffer is the co-director of Foreign Policy In Focus at the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington, DC. He is the author of North Korea, South Korea: U.S. Policy at a Time of Crisis (Seven Stories, 2003) among other books.
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