On September 3., 1939, after receiving no reply to their ultimatum demanding that Adolf Hitler immediately cease the invasion of Poland and withdraw all Wehrmacht troops from its territory, the United Kingdom and France declared war on Nazi Germany. The Second World War had begun.
The Past as Prelude
Two days ago, representatives of Germany and Russia, France and the United Kingdom, Poland and the USA, as well as of various other World War II participants gathered in Gdansk, Poland, to remember this cataclysmic event that destroyed tens of millions of lives and reshaped the history of Europe and the world for generations to come -and vow to their citizens that they would do their outmost so that such a tragedy would never again be revisited upon their countries and peoples. Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk asked that the lessons of history should not be forgotten: “We remember because we know well that he who forgets, or he who falsifies history, and has power or will assume power will bring unhappiness again like 70 years ago.” In the same vein, German Chancellor Angela Merkel stated: “I bow to the victims. We know the horrors of the Second World War, they cannot be undone. The scars remain. But the future is our responsibility. “ Perhaps most remarkably, Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin condemned both in his speech and in his earlier “Letter to the Poles” published on Monday in the Polish newspaper Gazeta Wyborcza, 1939 Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact between the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany as “morally unacceptable and politically and practically senseless, harmful and dangerous” and declared that: “We must learn the lessons of history if we want to have a peaceful and happy future.”
Yet this anniversary comes at one of the most difficult moments for Europe -and the world- since the end of World War II: a global financial meltdown and economic recession unprecedented since 1929, a rise in narrow nationalism and anti-”foreigner” feelings in both the Europe and North America, continuing conflict and instability in the Greater Middle East. Most ominously, all our countries have experienced a marked decline in the trust we put in our political institutions and elected officials due to their obvious inability to seriously address some of the most urgent problems we face, irrespective of national origin: quality health-care and education, a clean environment and global warming, dealing effectively with hyper-urbanization and mass migrations, global epidemics, as well as man-made and natural humanitarian disasters. If our leaders today can gather and condemn the evils unleashed by Nazism and World War II, there is little else of importance they can agree and act on in a manner that would restore our faith in the effectiveness and efficiency of our democratic systems of government. While memories of having fought together against dictatorship, oppression, inequality, racism and genocide can still bring them together, our politicians seem at a loss to creatively imagine how to bring about in a sustainable manner democracy, prosperity and diversity for the 21st Century -and make us believe again that our voices do count and our actions can truly make a difference in achieving these aims.
The New “Politics of Hope”
Barak Obama‘ s election as President of the United States and the waves of enthusiasm he generated not only in his own country, but in Europe and around the world is witness to the fact that most of us have not lost interest in politics and retreated in our private lives because we no longer feel a duty to participate in the public realm. What we do reject are the politics-as-usual of a professional elite of politicians, who spend most of their time to defend and augment their own power base rather than creatively and boldly devise new solutions to increasingly complex problems, which require flexibility, cooperation and sharing rather than the old methods of confrontation, division and ideological purity. Above all, the Obama phenomenon – “Yes We Can!”- reflects the yearning for leadeship of citizens across continents, and especially in Europe and North America. But this is not a nostalgic desire for the old-style type of “heroic leadership” where we are called to approve by plebicite, once every four years, the totality of actions and decisions of individuals who, between elections, barely bother to consult and involve the people they represent in their decision-making process. To the contrary, we are demaning from our public servants a new, more open, more accountable, more active, and more participatory type of politics. In this perspective, leaders are seen -pace George W. Bush- not only as “deciders”, but also as facilitators of a wider public debate, capable of empowering citizens -and especially the youth- by giving them a voice that is heard, a vote that counts, and the satisfaction of accomplishing specific objectives ar various levels of governance. Only such participative action – “participaction” – will prove to all citizens that their individual actions can indeed make a difference in what British sociologist and one-time Tony Blair guru Anthony Giddens calls the “Runaway World” of rapid globalisation, impersonal economic and social forces, and loss of control over our daily lives.
However, the hopes raised by the new US administration cannot be seen as some kind of panacea for all the world’s most pressing problems; as he himself stated during his recent European tour, Mr. Obama was elected President of the United States of America, not of the world at large; his power-base, constituency and political future depend on his furthering the national interests of his own country, even where those conflict with wider, global interests. In other words, his election, although full of promise, does little to address the structural failings of an international system of governance where power and legitimacy is still situated in the hands of national leaders, wheras the most urgent and pressing problems we face lie either above, at regional and global levels of decision-making, or below, at local and community levels. Obama’s new “Politics of Hope” are bound to eventually capsize on the shoals of established national interest groups if pursued solely by means of politics-as-usual channeled though the same old, tired, unresponsive, eighteenth-century national structures of governance which cannot possibly come close to adequately address the new, unpredictable, fast-moving, ever-changing problems confronting us in the 21st Century.
A World Transformed
What do the new politics of the 21st Century have in common with the 70th anniversary of the beginning of World War II? In many ways, we live though times that mirror the decade preceding the start of this conflict – the decade starting with the 1929 Stock Market Crash and Great Depression and ending with the events our current leaders gathered two days ago to remember and vow never again to let happen. Without engaging in a lengthy comparison between these two historical periods, we can still note the main similarities: an apparent victory in a lengthy war of attrition -World War I and the Cold War; the disintegration of empires and emergence of dozen of new “nation-states” with their own minorities problems; the belief -especially in Europe and North America- that large-scale wars among major powers could no longer be fought because of their utter destructiveness combined -ironically!- with the rise of new nationalisms rejecting the “Other” as different and hence, “undesirable”; an unparalleled financial and economic crisis accompanied by the election of a dynamic new US President enjoining us that “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself” -the parallels could well go on. It would be to easy to argue, with Karl Marx, that history repeats itself in cycles -first as tragedy and then as farce, and claim that sometime in the next decade we will be faced with a similar global conflict as World War II. But it would be just as dangerous to ignore the lessons of the inter-wars era of 1919-1939 and go on repeating the same mistakes our grandfathers did some eight decades ago. Among those, the most important were failures of vision, of leadership, of communication, and of participation.
Then -as now, our political elites on both sides of the Atlantic failed to acknowledge, for domestic political reasons, that the sovereign, independent nation-state was no longer able to efficiently, effectively and legitimately deal with the increasingly complex problems of a dawning century and devised an international order based on the Treaty of Versailles, designed to shore up this community of states rather than transform it from the ground up into a novel structure of governance capable of addressing the new challenges they faced. Then -as now, they preferred to enjoy their already acquired short-term privileges of power and position, rather than putting them at risk by providing true leadership for those who had entrusted them with their vote and their voice and attempt to bring about the transformational institutional change their era demanded. Then -as now, they failed to communicate to their electorates what Martin Luther King, Jr. called “the fierce urgency of now” and reinforced the narrow cultural and political stereotypes of the day which underpinned their own political legitimacy, thereby rendering impossible that the necessary changes would be brought about by democratic means and leaving the field open to more radical, revolutionary forces of violent transformation based on ideologies of racial superiority or economic determinism. Then, in Yeats‘ stirring words, “the best lack[ed] all conviction, while the worst [were] full of passionate intensity” as the democratic politics of participation gave way to the rise of plebiscitary dictatorships where lofty ends of “1000-year Reichs” or “golden ages of Communism” excused any and all means of injustice, oppression and destruction. Will this cycle repeat itself again, at the beginning of the 21st Century, in a similar way to that in which it unfolded in the middle of the 20th because of the very same failures of vision, leadership, communication and participation of our current politicians? As Angela Merkel said two days ago in Gdansk, “the future is our responsibility”: it is up to us all to ensure that this particular historical cycle does not re-turn and ends up trampling our lives, our hopes, our dreams under the unforgiving hoofs of Conquest, War, Famine and Death.
Participating in the Creation of a Resilient World
The traditional pattern of our national politics in virtually all advanced representative deomocracies runs its course in roughly the following manner: angry voters have enough of the incompetence and corruption of the governing party and demand accountability, results, improved economic conditions and a better standard of living in a more peaceful, stable world. Opposition parties use leading-edge opinion research and polling techniques and promise the electorate what it wants to hear, all whilst knowing that the chances of delivering on such promises are slim to none. Once elected, the new government claims that changed circumstances and events make it impossible for it to live up to its election commitments andd falls short of the hopes and promises it had generated in order to gain power. Disillusioned and angry, the voters lose even more respect for and trust in their political elites, abstain from voting in ever larger numbers, have enough of the incompetence and corruption of the governing party and finally drive it out of office and replace it with a new generation of politicans promising them what they want to hear. And with each passing cycle, the disillusionment, alienation and anger we feel towards our politicians, parties and institutions of governance only deepens and becomes more dangerous for the health and very survival of our democratic system of goverment. As Walter Russell Mead, the Henry A. Kissinger senior fellow for U.S. foreign policy at the Council on Foreign Relations recently remarked about the US political scene: “It isn’t a liberal or a conservative thing in the end. It’s that the American people are losing faith not only in the promises of the liberal society but in the experts and the professionals who design, administer and explain it. Increasingly, the lower middle class and the middle middle class wat ton fire the snooty upper middle class know it alls who collectively have gotten the country into such a mess. How this all will work out, I don’t really know. But it’s a big deal and it isn’t going away anytime soon.“
How can we break out of this vicious cycle? How can we re-invigorate our democracies, re-energize our electorates and re-form our institutions in order to re-gain the ability to address and resolve the critical problems we face today in accordance with the values we profess to hold? These are the most important and urgent questions we need to address and resolve on both sides of the Atlantic in the decade to come if we are to retain any hope to master the “Runaway World” that today seems to paralyze our very ability to act. In my next blog, I will address these issues head-on and outline the key values, principles, methods and concrete actions which could allow us all in Europe, North America, and around the world, to bring about a more sustainable and resilient world – a more democratic, prosperous and diverse world based on our desire to participate, power to innovate and enthusiasm to create a brighter tomorrow for us all.
“We Have the Power: The New Politics of the Global Civil Society
Part1: Back to the Future? Remembering the Start of World War II
Part2: At the Edge of Tomorrow: The Path To A Sustainable World
Part3: Participactive Polycracy: Reforming our System of Governance
Part 4: CRÆDO – The Birth and Aims of a New Social Movement
