2010: the year for getting serious?

President Obama certainly seems unable to do anything about their structural power. He talks tough but has done little to deal with the underlying problems.

Obama, after such a popular win, has been less than impressive. Although he has done plenty by recent presidential standards, including introducing a new health system for the US and reengagement internationally after the barren Bush years, he has mostly been stifled at home by the increasingly corrupt American political system and abroad by hard-nosed governments who just don’t trust the US.

The running sore of Palestine, which continues to inspire the worst terrorism, the continuing intransigence of emerging nuclear powers North Korea and Iran, the ongoing slow wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the rise of new powers like China, bedevil Obama. Of course he inherits a foreign policy in tatters thanks to former President George W. Bush, but Obama is finding out that US power is not what it once was.

Obama’s basic problem is that he cannot breakthrough to wholly new ground, like Roosevelt did in 1933 and then again in 1941. And here lies a more basic problem.

The national representatives who failed to find a solution to the global warming threat at Copenhagen were operating within a 20th century paradigm. This was the way of bargaining for self-advantage, not the common good. Unpressured by strong national constituencies for real change, they talked to each as adversaries, as if it were just another arms control meeting or trade round based in zero-sum logic.

For genuinely effective policy to emerge on global issues like global warming, two things need to occur.

First, national constituencies have to arise and link up globally to transform the political process. NGOs can be midwives for this process, but ultimately the corporate sector has to get on board and politicians have to get the message that they either change their ways or they will be voted out of office.

Second, we need a new strata of global specialists to emerge and work for transnational organisations whose basic commitment is to the global commons, not national interest. Perhaps existing bodies, such as the United Nations and the World Bank, can be revitalised to form a core sector, or perhaps arrangements based in different forms of cooperation can emerge.

Hopefully, with the failures of 2009 in mind, a shift towards such institutional change can seriously begin in 2010. There are plenty of vested interests arrayed against such a change, but increasingly the real dimensions of what we face as a species and what we must do to deal with it is better and better understood by more and more people.