Events in Copenhagen point the way to a new division in world politics, between those whose development is destroying the planet and those who will be the first -- but not the last -- victims, writes Hassan Nafaa* The UN Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen was a unique event in many respects. It was attended by 190 countries, of which 120 were represented at the head-of-state or prime ministerial level. This level of attendance is unprecedented in the history of international conferences. The focus of the conference was the most serious threat to the future of mankind and human civilisation, namely the ubiquitous danger of climate change. Already polar icecaps have begun to recede annually as the result of global warming caused by greenhouse gas emissions. If the rate of these emissions continues unchanged, whole cities, islands and, indeed, countries could be wiped off the world map, vast tracts of land could suffer desertification due to dwindling rainfall, and other regions could be swept by floods fed by waters from melting mountain top glaciers. Millions of people will be driven away from the afflicted areas, creating huge waves of human migration along with untold attendant miseries. Clearly, conference participants were being asked to rise to a challenge that confronts all of mankind, and not particular states or societies. But the conference also coincides with a unique moment in the history of the international order. That order stands at a crossroads and could head in any number of directions, which means that it lacks the resolve and the ability to take decisions and actions commensurate with the magnitude of the challenge. Perhaps it is premature to judge whether the results of the Copenhagen summit were positive or negative. What is certain is that it was on the brink of complete failure and only salvaged at the last moment by an agreement that the US struck with 29 other nations. The other 160 nations merely "took note" of the Copenhagen Climate Treaty, or the "Treaty of Thirty" as it was called in reference to the numbers of signatories. Most of the countries that did not sign felt that the accord was too weak and little more than a political declaration meant to conceal the failure of the conference. The fact is that it did fail, and miserably. The accord, announced by US President Barack Obama and French President Nicolas Sarkozy, states that its 30 signatory parties do not intend to allow the average temperature of the planet to rise two degrees centigrade higher than its average temperature before the industrial revolution. They also resolved to set up a fund, which is supposed to gradually reach a $100 billion target by 2020, to help poor countries vulnerable to climate change effects. Yet many countries feel that the agreement did not go far enough and that it contained no mechanisms to make it binding. If the average global temperature is allowed to rise by two degrees, some regions will experience an average increase of three or four degrees, which could doom some parts of the world to major catastrophes. Also, developing nations have plenty of experience in unfulfilled promises and funding commitments. Many of these have openly rejected the treaty and fired angry accusations at the major industrialised powers, which would be primarily responsible for what some have described as a horrific form of genocide. The events in Copenhagen throw into relief the irony of an international community fully aware of a lurking danger and what needs to be done, yet operating in an international order that is incapable of taking the appropriate actions. Everyone knows that globalisation is transforming the world into a small global village with a shared fate and that climate change threats, which were discussed in Copenhagen and will remain on the international agenda for a long time to come, will spare no one and -- hence -- require an urgent and collective response. Yet the inhabitants of this "global village" still treat each other as disparate warring tribes, which can only aggravate the problems. If the international order continues to use the same means and mechanisms that have prevailed since World War II it will court a global calamity of cataclysmic proportions. In the first half of the 20th century, the international order experienced two world wars separated by only two decades. They wrought a death toll of around 100 million and level of destruction and suffering unprecedented in human history. Apparently, it took an ordeal of this magnitude to convince the international community of the need to create a universal institutional framework for managing international relations and containing international conflicts, for clearly the alliances based on traditional concepts and balances of powers did not work. Although the League of Nations, founded in the wake of World War I, failed to preserve world peace, the international community did not despair. After World War II it set into motion a new process that its founders believed would avert the shortcomings of its predecessor. Unfortunately, not long after it was established in 1945, the United Nations proved to have two types of flaws. The first pertained to the system for collective security, which was founded on the assumption, later proven erroneous, that the alliance that emerged victorious from World War II would remain intact. Hardly had the UN found its feet than the international community split into two camps, each led by a superpower, which began to wage a Cold War that the nascent international organisation could not handle effectively. The second flaw was the inability of the new organisation to represent all components of the international community, as the overwhelming majority of the peoples of the world were still under colonial occupation and, therefore, not fully or fairly part of the new international institutional structure. The pressures of the Cold War and the paralysis of the collective security order could have conceivably given rise to a third world war and brought the collapse of the UN. However, the "balance of nuclear terror" between the two rival superpowers forestalled such spectres. In fact, instead of falling apart, as the League of Nations did, the UN developed new structures and functions to compensate for its inefficacy in collective security. In the course of this evolution, the General Assembly began to outweigh the Security Council. As Third World countries gradually came to form the majority in the assembly, this body became an instrument for ending colonialism and alerting the international community to other injustices and threats that needed to be addressed collectively, such as poverty, epidemics, issues related to refugees and displaced peoples, and environmental problems. Unfortunately, subsequent developments demonstrated that the numerical superiority of Third World nations was not sufficient to rectify the flaws in the international order. This group of nations lacked the concrete sources of strength that would enable them to assert pressure on world powers and they, themselves, were too heterogeneous and divided. If, from the 1950s through the 1970s, and perhaps even the greater part of the 1980s, the Third World could coalesce into such blocs as the G77 and take advantage of Cold War rivalry to pressure for reform of the international order, the collapse of the Soviet Union and the socialist camp and the political and ideological victory of the US and the capitalist camp would soon cast into relief how little leverage that group had and the limits to the role it could play in the international order. Today, the pendulum has begun to swing back. The era of the US's sole global hegemony has proved unsustainable now that the failed wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have demonstrated the limits of American might and the recent international financial and economic crisis has demonstrated the dangers of rampant capitalism. As a result, there is a renewed shift towards the rehabilitation of the concept and substance of multipolar plurality in the international order. Certainly the trend inspires much hope; however, multipolarity alone is not sufficient to deal effectively with globalisation, both in terms of containing the detrimental effects of this process and in terms of maximising its positive effects. Multipolarity may help stabilise the international order, but only under one condition, and this is that it succeeds in facilitating the establishment of international institutions capable of solving and containing international conflicts within the framework of a globalised order founded on belief in a common human fate, as opposed to one founded upon conventional balances of power in which disparate parties scramble to secure for themselves a bigger piece of the cake or to minimise losses incurred from others. The events in Copenhagen indicate the world is heading toward a multipolar plurality founded upon conventional power balances and not a globalised order. What we saw in the Danish capital were the signs of a new type of international polarisation. This one is between the signatories of the treaty and the non- signatories, or what we might term the G30 and the G160. The new alignment is not between capitalist and socialist nations, or even between rich and poor countries. Rather, it is between the countries that have the highest levels of greenhouse gas emissions, which are accelerating global climate change, and the countries most at risk from the greenhouse effect. Conventional balances of power allow the first group, at least for the present, to impose its conditions on the second. The tragedy is that the intransigence of that first group -- out of the obvious motive of defending their immediate and narrow national interests -- endangers the entire world, including themselves and is, therefore, ultimately suicidal. This is the even greater irony of the process of globalisation that should logically compel all nations to work together sincerely towards the creation of a globalised international order, for that is the only rational way to save the world from chaos and environmental destruction. * The writer is professor of political science at Cairo University.
