At last, the long-awaited Climate Change Conference, COP27, is about to start. Its aim is to marshal international efforts against one of the most serious threats to the planet and humankind. Climate change, like the Covid-19 pandemic, is a feature of globalisation: it leaves no part of the world untouched. However, its scientifically established impacts are of a greater scope and magnitude, to which the rampant forest fires, destructive storms and rising water levels that are eroding coastlines and could even submerge entire island nations all testify. This multidimensional crisis affects human health directly due to record high temperatures and drought, and indirectly, due to its impacts on food, energy resources and national development. The urgency of COP27 cannot be overstated. The problem is that it is being held at a time when the international community, as much as it needs to focus on the mounting threats of climate change, is sidetracked by the discord and divisions surrounding the crisis in Ukraine. As a consequence, it is increasingly hard to muster an international consensus on such a critical, universal threat. The international and global orders appear to be at loggerheads, so much so that the former is propelling the latter to the brink of nuclear catastrophe.
The international order is a dynamic system shaped by the interplay of military and economic powers and by immense technological advances, some of which have growing destructive capacities evidenced by two world wars. The use of the atomic bomb at the end of World War II had a profound impact on international political thought. The spectre of human extinction raised by this weapon of mass destruction prompted the creation of international agencies whose purpose was to increase cooperation and reduce tensions between nations. Although there was a precedent to be found in the League of Nations, formed after World War I, that body failed to prevent World War II. That dismal failure led the parties that emerged victorious from World War II to create something more robust. Thus, the body that began politically as the UN quickly acquired economic and cultural dimensions by dint of the Brenton Woods organisations (the IMF and World Bank), the Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC), UNESCO and dozens of other organisations concerned with global affairs from the post and aerial and maritime navigation to health and food.
Despite the Cold War, the US and USSR’s first forays into space in the late 1950s heralded the rise of the “global village” and a shrinking world. As the third industrial revolution gained impetus in the 1980s, so too did an “international agenda” that would yield the geopolitical and geo-economic interactions that brought an end to the Cold War, the collapse of the Soviet Union, globalisation and the rise of a “global order” led by the US. This new global order was founded on a plexus of commercial and cultural interactions, growing interdependency and the movement of peoples, and intense competition for the largest slice of the international economic pie.
But as the new global order became truly global, it began to jar with the US-dominated international order. Russia, the heir to the Soviet Union, was regaining much of its former strength. China was emerging as a new superpower because of its ability to take advantage of the benefits of globalisation. The rise of these and other emergent powers began to challenge the unipolar international order. Although the global order managed to contain the situation in Eastern Europe in the 1990s and to deal with the Asian economic crisis in 1997 and even the global financial crisis in 2008, the discrepancies between the international order and the realities of the global order had grown more distinct. In the former, the dominant countries scrambled to defend their geopolitical interests at the helm. In the latter, countries worked together to defend their existential interests which were of a nature that compelled them to work more closely together because no country on its own could handle problems of the scope, magnitude and persistence of global warming and some infectious diseases.
But then, the war in Ukraine unleashed a host of spectres from the possibility of a comprehensive European war such as those that had engulfed the continent in past centuries to a third global war pitting the US-NATO against Russia. The Russian-Ukrainian war is an international crisis par excellence. Virtually every country in the world is affected by its fallout, especially the economic consequences which have caused levels of inflation with painful effects on energy, food, construction and human well-being everywhere.
Meanwhile the planet is in jeopardy. As mentioned above, the climate change crisis is part of the ongoing process of globalisation in which issues - including those related to the environment - have worldwide impact and affect the international order and vice versa. Climate change has been politicised internationally since the beginning of the era of globalisation. Governments and blocs have traded blame over who was responsible for the manmade greenhouse gasses and the consequent harm, even though it has been scientifically proven that just three countries – China, the US and India – produce more than half the mass of environmentally pollutant carbon.
Unfortunately, it seems impossible to deal with a grave global crisis of this sort when the polarisation is so acute. Will COP27 be able to build the bridges needed for the consensuses necessary for essential binding agreements? Will negotiators be able to separate geopolitical issues from global threats that do not recognise national boundaries, East or West, “democratic” versus “autocratic” governments, or industrialised or developing nations? Can we hope for a new global order equipped to manage the problems of the 21st century such as pandemics and climate change, the breakdown of globalisation and regional organisations, and the challenges of new technologies that have brought people from around the world closer together than ever before while identity politics and insularism are growing fiercer and more entrenched?
There are a lot of antitheses at work, but then they have always held the key to human evolution.
A version of this article appears in print in the 3 November, 2022 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly
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