Copenhagen 9: Let Us Refuse to Acknowledge ‘Defeat’

by Kennedy Graham

It is Friday at 1500 hours.  My wife will be sleeping in our Ilam home in Christchurch.  It is cold up here, in the streets of this Nordic city that is ironically being buffeted by driving snow and biting wind.  I miss Marilyn – her warmth and her untiring common-sense, qualities I rely upon in equal proportion through my life.  And my sons and their young families, they will be asleep too.  Suddenly, with Jeanette and Rick, and several hundred people all around me, I feel incredibly alone, in a cosmic sense.  It is a feeling I have never had before.

Plenary has broken for lunch.  The ALBA group is holding a press conference.  The leaders of the Latin American ‘radicals’ – Venezuela, Bolivia, Cuba, Nicaragua, Ecuador – are speaking.  They mix a global cry of despair with traditional anti-gringo rhetoric.  I am able to discount the latter – I had two decades of Cold War experience in doing it.  The global socialist state is not the answer to climate change, any more than the global Caliphate or the global boardroom

The cry of despair, however, is new, and compellingly authentic.  I do not regard the US as imperial the way ALBA might, but I do concur that the US-led North disproportionately shares responsibility for the ‘failure’ that is Copenhagen.  If we in the North refuse to acknowledge historical responsibility for emissions, if we refuse to meet the UN’s prescribed targets, if we insist, perversely, that the South put their numbers on the table with vice-like ‘measurement, reporting and verification’ before we move further, and if we display an incomprehensibly callous indifference to the plight of our Polynesian cousins – how in God’s name can we expect to lead in a legitimate global bargain?  I just do not believe it.

This is not the moment for negative partisan politics.  What I have to say is more underlying, more fundamental.  In addressing the challenge that is climate change, and the temporary ‘failure’ that is Copenhagen, I declare greater political support to the leaders of ALBA than to the Prime Minister of New Zealand.  I remain loyal to New Zealand – to the constitutional apparatus that is the Crown.  But I believe that the ALBA leaders are correct in what they say, and that the Government of New Zealand is wrong, profoundly wrong, in what it says and does.  ALBA is the voice of the Earth, the voice of humanity.  New Zealand, in its current official form, is the voice of indifference, of vested interest, of fatal procrastination.  I am less ashamed than incensed.

The ‘blame-game’ industry will get a new lease-on-life in the New Year.  The Danish leadership has been trenchantly criticised – both for its organizational shortcomings and, far more importantly, for its hapless strategic misjudgements in the negotiations.  But those shortcomings could have been overcome.  Failure derives from the underlying faults in the structural and political configuration of the international community.  Too many nations.  Too much national self-interest.  Too much political obduracy.

Forgive us, Lord, for we knew not what we were doing.

It is not the end of the world – yet.  We have six to twelve months to achieve what we have failed to achieve here this week.  Copenhagen is the shrill wake-up call to humanity.  To squeeze through the eye of the needle, we shall need to mobilise a global chorus of political demand straight from the citizens everywhere.  Fragments of that – intermittent snatches of the haunting hymn that can be humanity’s single harmonious voice – have been heard already.  But it is nothing compared to the swelling chorus that will be heard over the coming months – before, through and after Xmas.

And we need extraordinary global leadership.  From whom is it to come?  To whom are we to turn, in our time of need?  The national leaders have come.  They have dined, and talked off the record.  That has proven insufficient to the task. The UN Secretary-General has just requested them to stay overnight.  We trust they are all up to such extraordinary self-sacrifice.  But they seem more in personal national defensive mode than in proactive global leadership mode.  One of them needs to break out.  Is it Obama?  What of the UN Secretary-General himself?  He says the right things, pretty much.  But will they follow him?  Unlikely.  He lacks the constitutional empowerment.

At the Law School in Canterbury University, I teach a course entitled ‘Global Constitutionalism’.  Ban Ki-moon lacks the constitutional empowerment to lead humanity.  Read Hammarskjöld’s remarkably prescient philosophy back in the mid-20^th century.  History, now, yet speaking to us today – 18 December 2009, in Copenhagen.

As I sign off on this, we have returned to the High-Level Segment in plenary.  It is the turn of the International Youth delegation.  They are on stage.  The young man says to the leaders – “You should be ashamed”.  His voice breaks.  “Please, please, do it now”.   The 17-year-old young woman from the Solomon Islands had earlier said – “I was born in 1992.  You have been negotiating all my life.  Finish your work.”

This is the voice of the young – echoing around the planet, out into space, following in the wake of Voyagers I and II – carrying the tremulous sounds of a species at risk