World order/governance

/10/jonathanpower2.jpg”> In 1776 Adam Smith published his “Wealth of Nations” which has guided economists and political thinkers ever since. It marks the start of the Industrial Revolution that began in England and then spread throughout most of the world. That was 237 years ago. It is not that long ago – only 4 life-spans or so, the time of your great, great, great, grandparents. Where will we be 237 years hence? Presumably just as today we listen to Mozart, born 257 years ago, and watch or read Shakespeare, born 439 years ago – they have survived all changing tastes and spread well outside their original orbit of European culture to countries as varied as Japan, China, Argentina, Tanzania and South Korea – we can be sure that generations to come will have much the same cultural interests. In all likelihood in 2250 we will probably still enjoy tastes picked up...

For the discerning journalists, editors and citizens Summary • Any U.S. attack on Syria will be a gross violation of international law, including the UN Charter. • al-Assad’s admission of UN inspectors obviously was seen by Washington as an obstacle for its war plans. • An attack will come only as a consequence of deliberately ignored opportunities for professional, impartial mediation and peace-making, the lack of backing of Kofi Annan’s plan of April 2012 in particular. • An attack can under no circumstances be seen in the light of a responsibility to protect since it will cause even more violence and human suffering throughout Syria. • Again, we see how the vast majority of people in conflict zones who do not resort to violence are being abandoned. • Any attack is likely to have grave consequences for the region as a whole. • For these reasons any attack must be...

/10/jonathanpower2.jpg”> Fifty years ago Martin Luther King made his earth-shattering “I Have a Dream” speech on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington DC. Is there anybody who watches and listens to it on YouTube not moved to the soles of their shoes? I’ve heard it a hundred times and still it stirs me. His dream that one day his children would “not be judged by the colour of their skin but by the content of their character” is one of the greatest lines in all oratory. The south of the US, he said, was “sweltering with the heat of injustice, sweltering with the heat of oppression”. Within ten years of the end of America’s civil war, fought over the issue of slavery, southern white Democrats had established state constitutions that stripped black citizens of their newly won political rights. Terrorist groups like the Klu Klux Klan destroyed black...

Kuala Lumpur: Perdana Global Peace Foundation, 25 August 2013: “Global Peace Efforts: What Went Wrong & What Next?” The TRANSCEND NGO Mediation Network just turned 20, and our experience is clear: a good peace proposal quite often works. To mention some out of 30 positive experiences: we have had a hand in launching peace studies and peace journalism; improving race relations in Charlottesville, VA; in ending the Cold War through bridge-building between Norway and Poland, the idea of a Conference for Security and Cooperation in Europe and nonviolence; in improving North-South relations through South-South cooperation and then relinking with North on a basis of equity–this from the early 1960s. Later on there have been contributions to peace on the Korean peninsula (first unify the nation, then perhaps the countries), the Kurdish issue (a Kurdistan as a confederation of human rights-based autonomies in the four countries), ending the longest war in...

In these morbid days, there are some home truths that are worth reflecting upon. What Happened to Tahrir Square? In retrospect, ‘’the January 25th Revolution’ in Egypt is ‘a revolution’ that never was, which has now been superseded by ‘a counter-revolution’ that was never possible. Why? The dislodging of a Mubarak dynasty in 2011 did not even achieve ‘regime change’ much less initiate a transformative political process. There was no revolution to counter. Even more modest hopes for political reform and humane governance were doomed from the start, or at the latest, when Ahmet Shafik, the overtly fulool candidate of the discredited Mubarak regime polled almost 50% of the vote in the presidential election runoff against Mohamed Morsi in June 2012. What then was Tahrir Square? Part project (getting rid of Mubarak and sons), part fantasy (hoping that the carnivalistic unity of the moment would evolve into a process of...

 Civilization: there are six sources of inspiration today, vying for the attention of a humanity looking for goals and means. Two of them are Western secular, liberal and Marxist, defining to a large extent the USA and the former Soviet Union, but not identical with them. Two of them are Oriental amalgams of civilizations, the Japanese Shinto-Confucian-Buddhist civilization, trying to be Western liberal, and the Chinese Daoist-Confucian-Buddhist civilization with strong elements of Western liberal and Western Marxist. And two of them are in-between: the Islamic and the Buddhist civilizations.[i] Dialogue: it simply has to happen.

[1] The leaks are not about “whistle-blowing”, but a nonviolent, civil disobedient, fight against huge social evils. Whistle-blowing, warning, presupposes that somebody can be warned, in fact wants to be warned, and is in a position to do something. Obviously those who can do something about US foreign policy, who have the power–legislative, the Congress, particularly the Senate; executive, State Department-Pentagon-White House; judiciary the Supreme Court; economically the giant banks; culturally the mainstream media – know perfectly well what is going on: these are all efforts to hang on to imperial economic, military, political and cultural power. But they do not want change. And those who want a change, a major part of the US population, allied populations and most of the rest of the world have been warned, but are to a large extent powerless. So they believe; but see thesis [5]. The whistle-blowing discourse is much too optimistic.

Among those who comment influentially from the sidelines of power, there are new trends visible in thinking about American foreign policy. The most salient of these concerns is a shift away from the post-9/11 counter-terrorist agenda to a new phase of mainstream policy advocacy that emphasizes the renewed strategic importance of geopolitical rivalry among leading sovereign states. There is also a shift away from the temptations of military intervention and regime change as a favored Western tactic for sustaining influence in the post-colonial world. There is a realization, at least temporarily, that adventures in military intervention, whether Afghanistan, Iraq, or Libya, are just that – ‘adventures,’ if not fiascos. And costly too, rarely a success even when overwhelming military superiority is brought to bear. After the Vietnam War there emerged a similar reluctance to intervene overseas that was derisively labeled ‘the Vietnam Syndrome.’ It endured for more than a decade...

/10/jonathanpower2.jpg”> Even taking into account the terrorist bomb attack on the Boston marathon an American has had less chance this year of being killed by a terrorist than killed falling off a ladder. Is it really necessary to monitor the phone calls and e-mails of half the world in order to combat such a small threat (including countries such as Brazil which have never had a terrorist incident)? Why not monitor the use of ladders? Or find a way of reducing car crashes in the US which claim 33,000 deaths a year to the Swedish level? Or spend the vast budget of the spy program on education and give up hunting down Edward Snowden who has performed the brave task of opening up this debate to media and congressional scrutiny? And just keep a very modest intelligence spying operation for the handful of countries that could produce a terrorist that...

Speech held in the Senate, Rome Your Excellencies, Foreign Affairs, Defense, EU… SYSTEMS: A Reorientation [1] Transarmament: States use armies for defense, and for offense, for wars. Si vis pacem, para bellum, peace through security tries to cover both; but offensive military threatens, provokes arms races, even wars. Si vis pacem para pacem, security through peace is not disarmament leaving regions, states and local level defense-less; rather, it identifies conflicts and traumas underlying violence in order to solve them, builds peaceful state relations, and defensive defense “just in case”. [2] Nonalignment: Solidarity and help to victims of aggression should be based on the merits of the case, not by alliance membership. This implies NATO and EU transarmament to regional defensive defense, and UN world collective defense under representative military command. [3] Being useful to other countries: having developed positive relations such that others want to enhance, not destroy the country....

The post below is a major revision of another piece on the Snowden Affair that was published in AlJazeera English recently. I have dwelled on the pursuit of Snowden because it raises such vital issues of principle, but also because so much of the public discourse has proceeded on a mistaken understanding of the applicable international law. Beyond the legal guidelines on extradition and asylum that are applicable, there are considerations of world order: protecting dissent and pluralism in a global setting in which the principal political actors are sovereign states that increasingly rely on secrecy and security rationales to constrain democratic open spaces. What Snowden did was to expose this dynamic of constraint in relation to secret surveillance programs administered by private, for profit, contractors. Also exposed was the ‘Global Big Brother’ implications of extending surveillance to foreign societies and their governments. It is these questions that should receive...

Keynote Speech, World Futures Studies Federation 40th anniversary – Bucuresti, România Future studies, like peace-development-environment studies, is an inter-disciplinary, inter-national effort to get a grip on key issues; divided into preferred futures–utopias–whose?; predicted futures–forecasting–who does it for whom?; and future practice–scenarios bending the predicted toward the preferred–by and for whom? The title of Ravi Morey’s Looking Backward: 2050-2013 catches future studies in a nutshell: exploring intermediate stages between a fully democratic world government and our 2013 present. The road may pass through a bankrupt USA bailed out by a democratic China in 2025. Some may argue that is already happening, with China – more democratic than the West knows – being creditor No. 1, and the USA – more bankrupt than the USA admits – debtor No. 1; Nos. 1 and 190 among 190 countries. Like in 1967, in Oslo, for the predecessor organization Mankind 2000 this keynote is on...