Wednesday, December 23, 2009

Copenhagen

I don't mean to be a drive-by linker but the following article was brought to my attention about Copenhagen and I noticed there hasn't been too much discussion here about it.

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1 comment:

  1. JamesDecember 24, 2009 at 5:12 PM

    Watching Glenn Beck's golden Christmas special. It is awesome.

    Yeah, Copenhagen was miserable. ButI also find myself wondering what would have happened if an agreement had been made. I'm pretty sure that the US and many other countries would not have held up their end of the bargain anyway. I really liked the point about China not wanting to create a new and empowered global regime.

    Think about it this way: Historically, Britain used its power to prevent the emergence of a unified continental power. Only a unified (or conquered) continental power could challenge Britain's supremacy, so Britain fought war after war to prevent (usually the French) from creating that empire. Britain's power was largely unmatched until alliance system that developed prior to WWI.

    Modern international alliances, treaties and other such agreements allowed groups of smaller nations to challenge larger ones and limit/check their power in the international arena.

    That's what China wants to avoid here. They are the big kid on the block right now. Regulatory regimes (even ones that China is not a part of) could potentially challenge China's future interests.

    China is acting like all superpowers have historically acted. The final paragraph says it all:
    "Copenhagen was much worse than just another bad deal, because it illustrated a profound shift in global geopolitics. This is fast becoming China's century, yet its leadership has displayed that multilateral environmental governance is not only not a priority, but is viewed as a hindrance to the new superpower's freedom of action. I left Copenhagen more despondent than I have felt in a long time. After all the hope and all the hype, the mobilisation of thousands, a wave of optimism crashed against the rock of global power politics, fell back, and drained away."

    Also, here's a really cool article that uses the concept of Entropy as a way to think about international relations, politics and other stuff we'd like:
    http://www.nationalinterest.org/Article.aspx?id=22598

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