John Bunzl

With politicians of all parties bemoaning the public's deepening disinterest in party politics and trying to devise ever more elaborate wheezes to entice them back to the ballot box, almost no one seems to have noticed that globalisation itself is quietly setting the narrow parameters within which national political discourse has become confined.

Today, financial markets represent a largely borderless world with trillions of dollars able to move from one end of the global to another in a matter of seconds. Likewise, it's relatively easy for major corporations to switch or outsource their production to wherever in the world offers the lowest costs and the highest profits.

The ability of capital to move freely and globally by and large has the effect of forcing all governments to enact only those policies designed to enhance (or defend) their nation’s ability to attract capital, investment and jobs. For without them, their economy will go into decline. It follows, then, that whichever party we elect has no choice but to follow substantially the same market- and business-friendly policy agenda; that is, what might be called the "national competitiveness" agenda – the modern-day version of pursuing the national interest.

That’s why, in whatever country we may live, we find left-of-center parties adopting policies traditionally espoused by right-of-center parties. It’s why New Labour’s Tony Blair was often said to be the best Conservative leader since Margaret Thatcher. Or, as the former Conservative prime minister, John Major, himself once put it, “I went swimming leaving my clothes on the bank and when I came back Tony Blair was wearing them” (The Week, 29 October, 1999).

Hence globalisation, for all its good and bad points, has also resulted in all political factions, once they come to power, having no choice but to pursue substantially the same policies. Party politics, consequently, has become substantially devoid of meaning. It shouldn't surprise us, then, that lower voter turnouts, and the general pervading cynicism about politics, are the inevitable outcome. These effects are the ingredients of what the famous philosopher, Jurgen Habermas, calls a “legitimation crisis”; a breakdown in the adequacy of the existing worldview and its governance systems to command allegiance amongst the population as a whole.

Globalisation, in other words, has rendered much of what citizenship means meaningless. And so, for anyone to try to address politics only at a national level is, in this day and age, to miss the “bleeding rhino head in the room”; that thinking about politics and governance now needs to move decisively up to the global level. Our thinking about politics needs to move, in other words, from nation-centric to world-centric.

The ossification and emptiness of today's political discourse is one symptom, in effect, of the present global crisis brought on by globalisation; a crisis which, in a broader view of things, is telling us that the present most senior organs of governance in the world – nation-sates – are now no longer capable of governing adequately; that they are reaching the end of their evolutionary lives and now need to be "transcended and included" by a still-higher level of governance. As philosopher, Ken Wilber, concurs, “The modern nation-state, founded upon initial rationality, has run into its own internal contradictions or limitations, and can only be released by a vision-logic/planetary transformation” (Sex Ecology Spirituality, p. 192).

And as to how citizens may discover a completely new way to engage with politics which is truly transnational (i.e. world-centric) and which transcends the old party-political divides, there is now a solution available; a solution called the Simultaneous Policy (Simpol) http://www.simpol.org. As Wilber points out, "The central idea of Simpol is very powerful; that is, the notion of how to link votes in one country with votes in another - how to link political action in one country with action in another. International competition is built-in to the nation-state system at its current level of development, and so the issue is not environmental concerns, but how to get humans to agree on environmental concerns. This is really fascinating and very hopeful. In my opinion this is the crucial issue for the 21st century".

As Londoner’s reflect on the recent rioting in their streets, they might spare a thought for the riots occurring simultaneously in the world’s financial markets. While none would condone the appalling lawlessness and destruction of life and property that erupted in cities across Britain, we should recall the lawlessness – that is, the lack of laws and social accountability – that today pervades the world’s financial markets. While rioters on the streets out-manoeuvred the police using mobile phones and social networking, today’s global financial markets out-manoeuvre governments simply by moving, or merely threatening to move, billions of dollars to some other economy offering “an environment more conducive to higher profitability” or “a higher rate of interest”; and all at the click of a mouse. This, too, is a riot because, like on the streets, it’s a dynamic that runs beyond any democratic control or accountability and, like on the streets, it causes mayhem and destruction.

These two riots are not unconnected. Whether you’re a hard-line conservative who believes we need more police on the streets and that rioters should be locked up, or a soft-hearted liberal who believes we need more resources pumped into deprived areas, the fact is that both approaches will require massive extra funding; funding which governments, because of the sovereign debt crisis that pervades financial markets, simply do not have. Local rioting, if you think about it then, is actually a global problem.

And it’s global in more ways than one. For, without a global framework of laws and regulations which ensure rich non-doms, international banks and mobile transnational corporations pay their fair share of taxes, they can always move, or merely threaten to move, elsewhere. With governments living in fear, the rich and mobile are left to run rings around them, playing one off against another, so causing governments to engage in a riotous, competitive, international down-levelling of taxes and regulations which leaves the rich richer and the poor inevitably poorer and ever less revenue to fund public services. Hence, whether it’s Britain or just about any other country, the riot of lawless financial markets ensures an upward flow of wealth to a privileged few, while leaving a deprived and swelling underclass ripe for their own brand of riot. This dynamic is no one’s fault, as such, it’s just the way the system works; the way it is left to work.

Centuries ago, the first kings and queens weren’t so dumb as to allow themselves to become the pawns of the financial markets of their day. They minted all their own money. But although most of us believe governments do this today, they don’t. Instead they borrow billions on financial markets at ruinous rates of interest. Little wonder, then, that they and we end up in debt and in a position where our governments can’t fund either decent public services or regenerate deprived areas, or put more police on the streets. The so-called “discipline” global bond markets exert over national governments and their citizens is actually a euphemism for lawless rioting of quite another kind; a global-level riot which, because it runs outside of any democratic control or accountability, should not be tolerated any more than the looting, murder and mayhem we’ve seen on Britain’s streets.

Like the cure at street level, the cure for the riot in the world’s financial markets will be greater “policing”; that is, governments around the world will need to co-operate far more closely than they ever have in the past to implement binding globally-applied laws and taxes on financial markets, so bringing them back under collective international social control and accountability.

Happy New Year to you!

In all of what has gone on at Copenhagen, I wonder if, like me, you see a certain contradiction or tension between the high expectations placed upon political leaders to act, and the equally high systemic barriers that prevent them from doing so? There is, it seems, an element of irresponsibility on our part; that is, an irresponsibility on the part of citizens who on the one hand expect substantive action and yet, on the other, too easily overlook what prevents it.

For me, the "bleeding rhino's head in the room" is that we are asking our leaders to dramatically cut emissions and yet we expect them to do so without significantly harming our national economies. This, effectively, boils down to the first-mover fear of economic competitive disadvantage which can only be overcome if virtually all nations act simultaneously. But beyond that there is another problem: that we expect developed nations to keep developing countries on-side by paying them off while ignoring that, especially following the global financial crisis, even the rich countries don't have adequate funds to do so. This, then, would be like expecting our national governments to financially compensate elements in society that are unduly disadvantaged by some new law, but to somehow expect them to do so without being able to raise any tax revenues with which to make the necessary payments!

In theory, the global and simultaneous nature of all nations participating in an agreement to be implemented more or less simultaneously across the planet ought to solve the first-mover competitive disadvantage problem. In practice, however, there is far from sufficient security that nations will actually meet any commitments they make, let alone do so simultaneously. Furthermore, as I said, there aren't enough funds to adequately compensate developing countries, or oil producing countries, or any other group that might be disproportionately disadvantaged by a robust emissions reduction agreement.

What all this suggests, I believe, is that the whole basis of international negotiations on climate change is fundamentally and fatally flawed. It is as if we had, to recall former UK Chancellor Geoffrey Howe's famous cricketing phrase, "put our political leaders into bat, but only after first breaking their bats in the dressing room before the game". It should be little wonder, then, that their run-score in Copenhagen was wholly inadequate.

What this shows, then, is not only that we, citizens, are being wholly unrealistic in our expectations, but also that we would be foolish to leave it to politicians alone to carry on a cricket match that, because of the way it has been set up, cannot possibly allow them to produce the needed outcomes.

So we, citizens, must surely take responsibility for the flawed set-up we have made for our politicians. We also have to recognise that our politicians cannot themselves change the set-up of the game they are playing, for they are too immersed in it to see it for what it is. Instead, we, citizens, must find a way of fundamentally changing the game they have to play. And that, my friends, is what the Simultaneous Policy campaign is all about.

So let's do all we can to help promote it this year. You'll be in good company. Because articles on Simpol are due to appear shortly in some prestigious and well-known publications, namely the Journal of Integral Theory & Practice http://aqaljournal.integralinstitute.org and the Journal of Futures Studies http://www.jfs.tku.edu.tw Ken Wilber, founder of Integral Theory and a member of the panel at the forthcoming State of the World Forum's conference on Climate Leadership, made the following comment on the article:

"The central idea [of Simpol] is very powerful; that is, the notion of how to link votes in one country with votes in another - how to link political action in one country with action in another. International competition is built-in to the nation-state system at its current level of development and so the issue is not environmental concerns, but how to get humans to AGREE on environmental concerns. This is really fascinating and very hopeful. In my opinion this is the crucial issue for the 21st century".

Please contact us if you'd like copies of either article.

While writing, the report on the results of the 2009 annual policy vote on the policies to be included in Simpol can be found at http://www.simpol.org/en/books/spvote2009analysis.pdf
Thank you to all Adopters who participated in the vote and those who proposed policies for potential inclusion,

Best wishes for a great year.
John Bunzl
http://www.simpol.org