Political

2 February 2015 at the Penang Institute, Penang A theory serves comprehension, prediction and identification of conditions for change. Seven such historical-cultural pointers will be indicated for China; using the West in general, and the USA in particular, for comparisons. The presentation draws on countless dialogues in China over 40 years, since 1973. * China: in time, as dynasties; West: in space as empires. Look at a histomap combining world history and geography, time and space: China shows up through 4,000 years as relatively coherent dynasties with complex transitions – and the West as empires–birth-growth-peaking-decline-fall, like the Roman, UK and now US empires – duration vs bubbles that burst; as China-centric vs hegemonic.

It is misleading to describe ‘world order’ as consisting exclusively of sovereign territorial states. This misimpression is further encouraged by the structure of the United Nations, whose members are states, and only states. The UN was established in 1945 in the aftermath of World War II, reflecting a West-centric orientation that emerged at the time, quickly morphing into the Cold War rivalry between the two states that were geopolitically dominant and ideologically antagonistic: the United States and Soviet Union. Even in the UN, however, this surface allegiance to statism is misleading. The geopolitical dimension was highlighted in the UN Charter by conferring a veto power on five winners in the recently concluded war, which amounted to the grant of a right of exception with respect to international law. But there are differences in hard and soft power that make the interactions among states within the UN exhibit more inequality than...

Before ISIS The beheading of American and British journalists who were being held hostage by ISIS creates a truly horrifying spectacle, and quite understandably mobilizes the political will to destroy the political actor who so shocks and frightens the Western sensibility, which is far from being free from responsibility for such lurid incidents. Never in modern times has there been a clearer example of violence begetting violence. And we need to ask ‘to what end?’ Political leaders in the West are remarkably silent and dishonest about what it is that they wish to achieve in this region beset since 2011 by a quite terrifying outbreak of political extremism, whether from above as in the cases of Syria, Egypt, and Israel or from below as with ISIS and al-Nusra. It is difficult to recall that at the start of 2011, just three years ago, progressive voices around the world were inspired...

The two giants did something unusual for Western thinkers: they were very holistic. Nothing less than the whole society and the world, and much more than the economy, for Marx; nothing less than the whole body-mind complex, with excursions into culture, for Freud. Equally unusual: they were very dialectical. There were forces and counter-forces. Means vs modes of production for Marx, simplified to Capital vs Labor; Super-ego vs Id, values from the outside vs drives from the inside for Freud. For Marx the dialectic was inside Structure–of Culture and Nature there was little–for Freud between Culture and Nature–of Structure there was little. Holism and dialectics are the pillars of daoist thought, giving rise to a dynamic theory of organic systems like societies and humans. Calling the forces yin and yang, over time they will both be vexing and, waning, the dominant will recede and the dominated will grow. In this...

 John B. Sparks made a histomap in 1931—updated in 2010 (Metro Books) – a long, vertical chart covering “peoples and nations for 4,000 years”. Time, history, is on the vertical axis, listing when of events and where in the space of peoples and nations. The chart starts with the Chinese, the Indians, Amorites (Babylon), Aegeans (Minoans and Mycenaeans), Hittites (Anatolia), Iranians and Greeks, goes on to the Romans, the British, the Huns (Mongols) and ends with Latin America, Europeans West and East (the EU is absent), the Middle East, sub-Sahara Africa, Russians and Americans, Asia as India, China and Japan; each part proportionate to their significance at the time. Debatable. But let us focus on something crucial: the shape of the “peoples-nations” bubbles in world history, from a beginning to an end? By and large exactly like that: a birth somewhere in this Einsteinian timespace, and a death. Two points,...

Introduction He was a tall man and a great man, a visionary, pacifist, civil resister, educator and philosopher. He took life more seriously than most and he could be playful and fun like a child. His life’s guiding principle was ”Engage in your time!” and while he wrote and talked a lot he also did it. His name was Aage Bertelsen, he was born in Denmark in 1901 and died on August 15, 1980. Bertelsen’s imprint on history is two-fold. First, with his wife Gerda he was a prime mover of one of the groups, the Lyngby Group, which organised the rescue of altogether 7.220 Danish Jews into safety in Sweden in October 1943 during the German occupation of Denmark – more here. The Lyngby Group – Lyngby is north of Copenhagen – got about 1.000 of these in safety by organising their nightly transport onboard small fisher boats over the Sound between Denmark...

By Johan Galtung Alfaz; History group, Municipio, Spain Can we know the future? Rhetorical answer: can we know the past? We rewrite history all the time, not because facts become dubious and new facts appear, but because our angle, perspective, changes. Say, from a series of kings, presidents etc. and their exercise of military and political power to economic and cultural changes in the life of common people, in their wellbeing and identity. Quite some change. Will we arrive at that single, true, objective perspective? No, objectivity may be multi-subjective, not inter-subjective. This is why Al Jazeera is so much better for knowing the present than CNN, which presents the US angle, and if there are other angles a US “expert” will give the final interpretation. Al Jazeera presents many angles of many parties and leaves final interpretations to the viewer. How can we shed some light into the future?...

B Pretoria, South Africa, Keynote Governance is politics, power–political-economic-military-cultural; decisions-carrots-sticks-ideas. Politics is about problems of realizing one goal; about conflicts realizing incompatible goals. Contradiction = danger+opportunity; the art of the impossible. Answer: Good Governance GG = CC Creative Conflict-transformation. This includes diagnosis, who are the parties, their goals and the incompatibilities; prognosis, from frustration to aggression/apathy, from prejudice-discrimination to hatred-violence; therapy, conflict solution-transformation, proposing creative visions of a new reality where the goals are compatible and new conflicts more easily handled. Two examples of creative, good governance from Norway and Europe:

/10/janoberg.jpg”> Democracy is a core feature of Western society, normally understood as representative parliament – i.e. in free elections citizens vote for people to represent their interests for a parliament consisting of parties of which some form the government and some the opposition. It’s not always included in the definitions that democracy requires a reasonable level of knowledge and information, freely available. For instance, one often hears that India is the world’s biggest democracy but 26% of the people are still illiterate (287 million people). So the ”world’s largest democracy” also has the world’s largest population who can’t read and write. In comparison, China illiterate citizens make up about 3% and is regularly called a dictatorship. Also, in a society where the persons running for office are – or have to be – extremely wealthy to pay for their campaign and where large corporations make multi-million dollar contributions to certain...

/10/janoberg.jpg”> Lund, Sweden, June 3, 2014 Fears has been expressed in Europe about the recent EU parliament voting pattern. Instead of the fear and denouncing the winners we should ask: What causes such an outcome? My short answer is this: Democracy itself is in deep crisis. It has become performance or ritual rather than something genuinely lived. Two things stand out – one, the increase in votes going to nationalist, populist, right-wing and anti-Muslim parties as well as Euro-skeptics – particularly in Denmark, France, Greece and Britain. Secondly, the voter turnout has fallen from 62 per cent in 1979 to 43% in 2009 and this year it increased only 0.09% in spite of the EU Commission’s attempt to increase it. So while people struggle around the world for democracy, only 43% of the EU citizens find it meaningful to go and vote every 4th year. How tragic for an EU...

[ This post was previously published online at the website of the Global Transition Initiative, which is dedicated to promoting “Transformative Vision and Praxis.” It responds to an essay on global citizenship written by Professor Robert Paehlke, who cogently advocates the formation of a Global Citizens Movement, including indicating how it might become effective. What seems important about such dialogue is the recognition that given the realities of this historical period, it is increasingly necessary for political thought and action to proceed by reference to human interests as well as being responsive to national, local, ethnic, and religious interests and values. A feature of modernity that is being rightly questioned from many angles is the presumed radical autonomy of human interests, especially the modernist illusion that the co-evolutionary dependence on nature and the environment was being superseded by the marvels of technological innovation. One way back to the future is...

“Have we agreed to so many wars that we can’t Escape from silence?…” Robert Bly, “Call and Answer” In my understanding silence is passivity as a way of being. Silence can be much more than the avoidance of speech and utterance, and is most poignantly expressed through evasions of body, heart, and soul. Despite the frustrations and defeats of the period, America was different during the years of the Vietnam War and the civil rights movement. It was then that alienated gun-wielders assassinated those among us who were sounding the clearest calls for justice and sending messages of hope. In a perverse reaction, Washington’s custodians of our insecurity went to work, and the sad result is this deafening silence! I have long felt that most American ‘citizens’ increasingly behave as ‘subjects,’ blithely acting as if a love of country is exhibited more by obedience than conscience. In my view the...