The Politics of Climate Change

by Anthony Giddens

  Not long ago, most US military bases were located in Western Europe, South Korea and Japan. Over the past few years, a transfer from such areas to East-Central Europe, Central and Southwest Asia, and parts of Africa has begun. These regions contain states deemed to be supporting terrorism, but they are also home to more than three-quarters of the oil and gas reserves in the world and a large percentage of those of uranium, copper and cobalt.8

  China and Russia are building their own security networks, in a self-conscious challenge to US dominance. As already mentioned, China’s involvement in Sudan has arguably contributed to the bloodshed in that country. China is also active in North Africa, Angola, Chad and Nigeria. It has become one of the main suppliers of military equipment to some of these states. Its development and military advisers compete with those coming from the US. In Central and East Asia, Russia and China have formed a counterpart to NATO, in the shape of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, a large military alliance. Its component states have made a strong push to assert influence over resource-rich countries. One of those countries, Kazakhstan, is a member of the alliance, together with Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan.

  An illusory world community?

  Just at the time when the world needs more effective governance, international institutions look weaker than they have been for some years. The United Nations has played a vital role in the struggle against climate change, particularly in the shape of the IPCC, which has been the major influence propelling international concern about global warming. Yet the UN has few resources of its own, and can be paralysed by the actions of blocs of nations, or even single nations, especially on the Security Council. A more multipolar world could, of course, provide a better balance for cooperation, but it could just as easily produce serious divisions and conflicts with no arbiter to resolve them.

  We seem to be seeing a return to a form of authoritarian nationalism, prominent among some of the key players on the world scene, most notably China and Russia, but including many smaller oil-rich nations too. Together with the policies of the administrations of the George W. Bush era – which to some extent sparked that return – the international system was redefined in terms of power and military capability. The burst of enthusiasm at the turn of the century that heralded a new world order based on international agencies rather than nations, and upon collaboration between nations rather than traditional sovereignty, seems already to have gone into reverse.

  Discussing such changes, the influential writer on global politics, Robert Kagan, speaks of a ‘return to normality’.9 The title of his book is The Return of History and the End of Dreams. The dreams he is talking about were those of creating a new kind of international order following the end of the Cold War, and, more generally, with the advance of globalization. They were about the shrinking importance of the nation-state, the deepening of international collaboration, the disappearance of ideological conflicts and the freeing up of commerce and communications. The European Union seemed in the forefront of these transformations, pioneering a mode of organization that is not just international but genuinely transnational.

  ‘It was all a mirage’, Kagan says.10 The nation-state remains as strong as ever, while competition between the great powers has returned. The major nations are struggling with one another for influence and prestige. China and Russia, in particular, are seeking to assert themselves, and both see international relations through the prism of great power rivalries. In each case there is a strong connection with energy. Russia’s quest to return to great power status is based on its large oil and gas resources, while China is searching for energy supplies to sustain and fuel its continuing growth.

  The long-standing conflict between liberalism and autocracy has re-emerged, coupled with ‘an even older struggle’, between radical Islam and modernity. Two of the largest developing countries, India and Brazil, are democracies. However, China and Russia are not, and are explicitly marked by a belief in authoritarian leadership as the condition of effective growth, as well as of containing the possibilities of division and fragmentation which each society faces. Prime Minister Putin’s notion of ‘sovereign democracy’ is all about creating popular support for decisive leadership while expanding the sphere of Russia’s international influence from the low point it reached in the 1990s.

  The member–states of the EU, Kagan says, placed a gigantic bet at that period, that economic interdependence and the collaboration of nations would triumph over traditional concepts of sovereignty. They cut down on military spending, in the belief that the power of example would win out over the power of armed force. The EU, its leaders reasoned, has served as a vehicle for the integration of a growing number of states in Western – and now Central and Eastern – Europe into a transnational system. Why shouldn’t the same model be successfully applied elsewhere?

  For a brief while, the chances of success looked good. Regional associations were formed in several different parts of the world. The North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) spanned the US, Canada and Mexico; a counterpart, MERCOSUR, emerged in South America; in Asia, several nations got together to form ASEAN. Yet these organizations have remained no more than loose trading groups. The EU, Kagan concludes, has lost its bet. Russia has responded with traditional forms of power to blunt EU influence in the ex-Soviet states that border it. Heavily dependent upon Russia for its oil and gas supplies – as discussed in chapter 2 – the Union has proved an easy target for a resurgent Russia, which has had no problems dividing its member–states and concluding bilateral energy deals with some of them.

  According to Kagan, the decline of the UN and other such international organizations is terminal: he speaks of the ‘demise of the international community’. The UN Security Council, which had a brief moment of cogency just after the Cold War, ‘is slipping back into its long coma’.11 It has been undermined by the division between the democracies and the autocracies. The scramble for energy is one of the driving forces of this division.

  Kagan suggests that a ‘Concert of Democracies’ should be set up, bringing together the democratic nations from the developed and developing worlds. Its role would be an interventionist one. The strength of the autocratic countries, he says, is in some ways more apparent than real. Unlike in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when democracy was the exception, China, Russia and other authoritarian states live in a world where it is preponderant. Hence they face problems of legitimacy that cannot simply be ignored, or not for long. Yet the democratic countries cannot expect to exert an influence just because of the values and ideas they represent. Quoting Hans Morgenthau, Kagan concludes that we should not imagine that at some juncture ‘the final curtain would fall and the game of power politics would no longer be played’.

  How far this type of analysis is correct will make an enormous difference to the world’s chances of resolving the issues of climate change and energy security. Great powers acting in the traditional way treat resources in terms of a zero-sum game. If Kagan is right in his portrayal of the current state of international affairs, there is little likelihood of avoiding a battle for resources. As it deepens, it could very well lead to armed conflict, a potentially terrible prospect if nuclear states become involved. The UN would be powerless to intervene, since it would be rendered impotent by the very conflicts it was supposed to help overcome.

  Thankfully, what Kagan says is valid only to a limited degree. Take the case of the United Nations first. It would be difficult to deny that the record of the UN since 1989 has been distinctly patchy, as even its strongest supporters concede. David Hannay, formerly Britain’s permanent representative at the body, has spoken of the early 1990s as ‘the crest of the wave’ in terms of the UN’s successes, ‘the moment when it was possible to hope that the organization was set on a new path, destined to become an effective component of the system of collective security’.12

  During those years, the UN led a number of successful humanitarian interventions – and th
e Rio Summit got a new and serious environmental agenda under way. From 1993 onwards, however, the UN’s performance began to tip in the other direction, as the organization became bogged down in key missions in Bosnia and elsewhere. Supporters of the UN fear that it has become marginal and discredited, while its critics actively hope that such is indeed the case. Yet, as Hannay quite rightly observes, states continue to turn to the UN for help in facing common problems. It has an ‘underlying indispensability’ because there is no obvious alternative.13

  The international community is not ‘illusory’. It was wrong when then US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said it originally, and it was wrong when Kagan repeated it.14 If we concentrate only on the Security Council, which does indeed tend to be a place of power-brokering, we get quite a misleading view of the progression of world interdependence and the UN’s role in furthering it. The world is far more interdependent than ever was the case before, and the UN and other international agencies are playing a fundamental role in nurturing it. Take as an example telecommunications, which are now truly globalized, but depend upon vast networks ranging across a multiplicity of national contexts. The UN and other international organizations play an essential role in such coordination, because binding international agreements are involved.

  Even in more contentious areas of humanitarian intervention and the management of health and disease, the role of the UN has been, and is, central. As far as the management of conflicts go, the UN has been more important than would appear on the surface – and more successful. The failures, such as in Bosnia or Rwanda, tend to be very visible, but successes – preventing conflicts from developing in the first place – receive much less attention and publicity.

  Kagan says the world has reverted to what it was before the ‘dreams’ of the early post-1989 period – an arena for nation-states to pursue their power struggles. Yet this conclusion is eminently disputable. The nation-state has obstinately refused to go away, yes. I have argued for its continuing importance throughout this book. However, the world context in which nations stake their claims to sovereignty has changed massively over the past two or three decades. It is simply not the case that there is a ‘return to normality’ – to patterns of the past. Sovereignty does not have the same meaning as it did. This is surely obvious on an economic level, where states, no matter how large, cannot govern their economic affairs in the way in which they were able to earlier in the post-war period.

  Interdependence is a part of our lives in the twenty-first century, and states which act in denial of that situation will quickly be brought to heel in one way or another. The fate of the attempt of the Bush administration to ignore the new realities is instructive. Bush wanted to reintroduce exactly the kind of world Kagan sketches out – one in which power is what counts, and where the US is pre-eminent in wielding such power. Such a world-view went along with a contemptuous attitude towards climate change.

  The abrogation of international agreements which followed undoubtedly influenced the actions of other nations, including China, Russia and Iran, which, in opposing the attitudes of the US, in fact mimicked them. But look what happened to those US ambitions. The United States, the world’s greatest military power, was unable to pacify a single medium-sized country, Iraq, in spite of an easy initial military victory. It was not able to fight two wars at the same time, even with the help of allies, and as a consequence the project to bring stability to Afghanistan is meeting with, at best, limited success. The US has the world’s largest economy, but the country, acting alone, has very limited capacities to influence the world marketplace – as the financial crisis has shown all too clearly.

  Where Kagan must be listened to is when he says that the curtain will not fall on power politics. It is quite futile to analyse what might happen as a result of international collaboration to halt climate change without setting it in the context of the rivalries that cross-cut efforts at international collaboration. For those rivalries will determine the real opportunities that exist, the points at which real purchase can be achieved. Let us consider how this point bears on the relation between the developed and under-developed worlds.

  The bottom billion

  The bulk of the emissions causing climate change have been generated by the industrial countries, yet its impact will be felt most strongly in the poorer regions of the world. A basic sense of social justice should help drive attempts to reduce that impact, but there are more selfish reasons for the more affluent countries to help the more deprived too. Extreme poverty is potentially very destabilizing indeed in world society. The level of risk it produces for the more favoured countries and regions, even if global warming didn’t exist, would still be formidable. Among other harmful effects, poverty is one of the main influences leading to population growth; population pressures ease as countries become richer.

  The Millennium Declaration of the United Nations pledged ‘to spare no effort to free our fellow men, women and children from the abject and dehumanizing conditions of extreme poverty’. Over halfway to the date set for reaching the millennium goals, 2015, progress has certainly been made. The most important one, that of reducing absolute poverty by half, looks set to be reached. The same is true of those concerning education, reducing the impact of some of the worst killer diseases, and improving gender equality, employment and sanitation.

  In geopolitical terms, it is essential to recognize, as Paul Collier has put it, that ‘the third world has shrunk’.15 For much of the past half-century the question of ‘development’ was one of a gulf between one billion affluent and four billion impoverished people in the world. The millennium goals were established with such figures in mind. Yet about 80 per cent of the five billion now live in countries that are developing, some of them at extraordinary speed. These countries have experienced rapid growth in income per capita. They have recorded an average GDP growth rate of over 4 per cent during the 1980s and 1990s. Over the early period of the current century, that rate has risen to over 4.5 per cent, although of course the fast pace of China’s development alone over the period accounts for a substantial proportion of this.

  These statistics drive home the importance of what I have earlier called the development imperative. Economic growth on the large scale is the only way out of poverty for the mass of the world’s poor, and for many people in the world it has worked. Yet at least a billion people – located in about 60 different countries – have been left out. Most of these societies are small and their combined population does not approach that of either China or India. As Collier says, they ‘are falling behind, and often falling apart’.16 Their economies have not grown; on the contrary, their level of income has declined. It was, on average, lower in absolute terms by the year 2000 than it had been in 1970. Since then it has increased by just over 1 per cent, not enough to make any significant difference to their fortunes – they are marked not only by poverty, but by epidemics, ignorance and despair.

  These societies lag behind the rest of the world because they are caught in what Collier calls four ‘traps’. One is that of civil war. Over 70 per cent of the societies that contain the bottom billion have either recently experienced civil war or are still caught up in one. Susceptibility to civil war both causes economic stagnation and is caused by it. These countries face a 14 per cent possibility of experiencing a civil war over any given five-year period. Every percentage point increase in growth knocks 1 per cent off this risk. Conflict almost always affects neighbouring countries – and, as mentioned earlier, can spread to whole regions, to some extent dragging them down too.

  One of the four traps is actually the possession of natural resources, especially oil and gas. Some 30 per cent of the world’s poor live in countries where the economy is dominated by resource wealth. The reasons for this situation are well known. There are a few rentier states which, to some degree, have been able to escape the ‘resource curse’ – such as Kuwait or Saudi Arabia – mainly because their oil and gas revenues are enormous. For
others, however, revenue from such sources only provides a livelihood for a tiny elite. At the same time, that revenue discourages investment in other industries, and renders the country’s exports uncompetitive. Moreover, as in the past, the prices of oil and gas have been unstable, and that instability is imported into the economy.

  The other two traps are, first, being a land-locked country with dysfunctional neighbours and, second, bad governance. Almost 40 per cent of the people in the bottom billion live in countries that are land-locked. The case of Switzerland shows that it is possible to be both land-locked and wealthy; but Switzerland has friendly neighbours, whose countries have excellent communications. In countries such as Uganda, Sudan and Somalia it is a different story. The economies of the land-locked societies in Africa are not integrated with those of their neighbours, but are either turned inwards or open to the vagaries of the world market.

  Bangladesh ranks 134 out of 178 countries in the world covered in Transparency International’s ratings of corruption.17 Yet it has managed to put in place fairly effective economic policies and has achieved a significant measure of economic growth. It has done well because it has few natural resources of its own and because it has an extensive coastline – (although, as discussed in chapter 7, one which puts it at high risk as sea levels rise as a result of global warming). No doubt the country would have fared even better if it had been less corrupt.

  Bad governance, a matter that extends well beyond corruption as such, compounds each of the other sets of problems – producing societies in which governments are either paralysed by divisions or where there is, in effect, no government at all. One study equated failed states with countries comparable in other respects. The results showed the average cost of being a failed state, over the period during which it could be classified as such, to be £100 billion.18