All eyes are on Sarah Palin’s left hand—you might even call it a vast left-wing conspiracy—after it doubled as a cheat sheet during a Q&A at the National Tea Party Convention. For those wondering, the words/talking points she had written on her palm were: “energy,” “tax” and “lift American spirits.” Palin did something I’ve always wanted to do in middle school, but since I annoyingly knew all of the answers and would have required 20 extra palms to paraphrase the textbook in the longest manner imaginable the opportunity never presented itself. But if I were in Palin’s shoes, I would have totally scribbled on an American-made shoe and used the publicity to promote American footwear.

We’re looking for a super intern who will devote 10 hours a week to our dear site. Main duties are writing posts and promoting Women and Foreign Policy in the blogosphere, the Diggosphere and beyond. This is perfect fit for an undergraduate or graduate student with an interest in international affairs who wants to gain experience and clips and have a flexible schedule. If you’re interested, please send a brief letter of introduction, a resume and a writing sample or two (an academic paper is just fine if you don’t have journalism clips) to Nonna Gorilovskaya at  nonnka at gmail.com. Thanks!

Larissa Douglass

Recently, one of my friends told me that the anglosphere is dead and the future lies in Asia. Beyond the condition of the world economy that this fashionable attitude reflects, the fashion is actually typical of the anglosphere itself. The term “anglosphere” became briefly popular in conservative circles around 2003-2004, reviving Churchillian values opposite a liberal vision of multicultural evolution, which was dismissed by conservative critics as self-hatred and self-immolation. With these debates at the back of my mind, I have been reading The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell, Volume 2: My Country Right or Left.

Should such ideas, either the anglosphere or its inevitable downfall, be taken literally—or do they signify something else? Orwell wrote the 1941 essay “The Lion and the Unicorn: Socialism and the English Genius” contemplating British patriotism and the English class system in the face of war and invasion. His call for British socialism to defeat continental fascism additionally isolated an ethereal spirit in historically British societies that still persists today. In Orwell’s eyes, Britain’s ramshackle dedication to internal disagreement, lack of resolution and fractured progress were held together by an overriding commitment by all citizens to the rule of law and other unseen bonds.

He likened British society to a stuffy Victorian family, with all the wrong members in charge, “cupboards bursting with skeletons … and … a deep conspiracy of silence about the source of the family income.” For Orwell, the evil of this family as it stretched across the world in the empire lay not in its power, violence or inequalities but in its insufferable banality: “Well-meaning, over-civilized men, in dark suits and black felt hats, with neatly rolled umbrellas crooked over the left forearm, were imposing their constipated view of life on Malaya and Nigeria, Mombasa and Mandalay.” The result was not some majestic and terrifying struggle between oppressors and oppressed but an acceptance of pervasive mediocrity: “Instead of going out to trade adventurously in the Indes one went to an office stool in Bombay or Singapore. And life in Bombay or Singapore was actually duller and safer than life in London.”

If internal strife between Orwell’s “Bloomsbury highbrow, with his mechanical snigger,” and middle class “Colonel Blimp” patriots, such as the “half-pay colonel with his bull neck and diminutive brain,” equally mirrored self-deception about defeat or glory, Orwell decided that the mediocre compromise between the two, where things actually got done, was equally misleading. Half-baked complacency enabled and concealed a hidden reserve of spirit that was awakened only at the last possible moment in times of crisis, healing divisions and propelling the population into unexpectedly efficient displays of decisive action and medieval aggression: “There can be moments when the whole nation suddenly swings together and does the same thing, like a herd of cattle facing a wolf.” How ever this sleeping cultural sensibility might reappear, it is safe to say that it will be in a form cast between right- and left-wing politics that no one can expect or predict. It is one of the “wild cards” that will be played in the future of international affairs.

Nonna Gorilovskaya

My nonfiction pick is The Great Partition: The Making of India and Pakistan by Yasmin Khan. The book is a very fluent and engaging historical account of the Partition and its terrible violence. Khan’s central point is that although we take the creation of India and Pakistan as givens, at the time, most people had only a vague idea of what was going to happen when the British left. One of the parts that I found most interesting was Khan’s discussion of the role of Congress and the Muslim League in the bloodshed:

“…Elite leaders, often the product of imperial schools and colleges, were as likely as the British that they had replaced to cite the madness of the masses, and apply the vocabulary of craziness, insanity and of a fever gripping the people, blaming ‘crooks, cranks and…mad people’ to try to explain the inexplicable devastation that had taken place. The language of class could be a convenient way for the leadership to wash their hands of their own explicit or inadvertent culpability. The poor and the uneducated must, of course, it was naturally assumed, have been mostly culpable. The information that militant, and often middle-class, organized cadres, sometimes fully answerable to Congress and League politicians, were at the forefront of events was known but glanced over.”

For my book club, I started but dropped My Life in France by Julia Child. Perhaps I am just too sarcastic, but I was generally annoyed by her constant, exuberant jolliness and frustrated by the fact that I have no time to try out her very delicious (check out my friend’s replica of Child’s pear tart) but extremely labor-intensive creations.

Now come the guilty pleasure reads! It is usually my rule—one that I break often—to read the book before I see the movie. I’ve faithfully seen all of the Harry Potter movies so far but my reading has progressed slowly. As I was reading the first two, I just felt that the movies stuck very faithfully to the text and that I was not learning any new information. But I really got into Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, and I am curious to see what I think of the later books. I was told that the editors lost more and more power as J.K. Rowling grew more and more popular.

My other guilty pleasure was Julia Gregson’s East of the Sun, a story of three Englishwomen who travel to India in 1928 in search of adventure, love and work. The characters were intriguing—the central one was a writer, so bonus points—and this was squarely good historical chick lit. A fascinating factoid from the book: Englishwomen who sailed to India annually in search of dashing (or not so dashing) bureaucrats and officers overseeing the Empire were called the “Fishing Fleet.” The women who did not land husbands were dubbed “returned empties.” Ouch!

Jessica Hun

As my research interest continues to be central-local relations in China, I have been updating my bookshelf with current scholarly works on this topic. De Facto Federalism in China: Reforms and Dynamics of Central-Local Relations by Zheng Yongnian is part of a series on Contemporary China which suggests that with deepening reform and openness, China’s central-local relations is increasingly functioning on federalist principles. Despite the author’s attempts at explaining why this may the case, I have reservations because of the simple fact that federalism is based on constitutionally guaranteed rights and powers for various levels of government, clear division of power between the central government and other state organs and, most importantly, a genuine relinquishing of central government powers. These fundamental conditions are still not present in China, nor is there a genuine intention to guarantee any local powers. Another issue is that the implementation of constitutional provisions are dependent on the further enactment of implementing legislation such that for any constitutional provisions to come into effect, more steps need to be taken to guarantee implementation.

The notion of the supremacy of the central government is further reinforced by the book Hong Kong’s New Constitutional Order: The Resumption of Chinese Sovereignty and the Basic Law by Yash Ghai. This is a comprehensive analysis of the establishment of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region focusing on the limitations of its constitutional and legal systems which aim to preserve capitalism under communist leadership. The book addresses fundamental constraints of governance implied in Hong Kong’s own constitution, better known as the Basic Law. Reading these two books back to back suggests that an important basis for communist rule is that local powers are at most selectively delegated with no specific guarantees.

Lynndie England became infamous around the world in 2004, when photos of her and other U.S. soldiers humiliating and torturing Iraqi detainees at Abu Ghraib prison became public. In 2005, the then 22-year-old England received a three-year sentence for her role in the abuses. She was paroled after 521 days of serving her term and dishonorably discharged. Tara McKelvey was the first journalist to interview England after the story broke. In this excerpt from the 2007 Monstering: Inside America’s Policy of Secret Interrogations and Torture in the Terror War, McKelvey travels to England’s hometown of Fort Ashby, West Virginia.

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by Tara McKelvey

The IGA supermarket in Lynndie England’s hometown of Fort Ashby, WV (population 1,354), was boarded up on an August afternoon. Kansas’s “Dust in the Wind” blared from the radio of a rental car: “All we are is dust in the wind. Nothing more than dust in the wind.”

England grew up in mobile home down the road from the IGA in a dirt-and-gravel patch of land situated off Route 46, behind a sheep farm, next to the windowless Roadside Pub. Her parents, Terrie and Kenneth, and her two-year-old son, Carter Allen, live here in a $200-a-month rented trailer. Her sister, Jessie Klinestiver, her brother-in-law James and their two-and-a-half-year-old daughter, Allee, live in a mobile home yards away. Terrie, 46, a former housekeeper with Dawn View Center, a retirement home down the road from the trailer park, has pale eyes, deep etches in her face and three gold rings on her left hand.

The one-stoplight town of Fort Ashby has a frozen-in-amber quality that makes it seem like a small town in the 1970s. The main hangouts are 7-Eleven and Evan’s Dairy Dip. The Fort Ashby Public Library is located near the IGA parking lot. It is the site of a Brown Bag Program for low-income families. More than 20 men, women and children stopped by the library that day and carried away cardboard boxes full of applesauce, soup, cooking oil, KitKat bars, Pace salsa and other items. The median family income in Fort Ashby is $32,375, according to data provided by librarian Cindy Shanholtz, who helps coordinate the Brown Bag Program. But many survive on less. Kenneth makes $1,500 a month as a railroad utility worker when he doesn’t put in overtime, says Klinestiver, 27.

Nobody in the England family has a bachelor’s degree. The men work the night shift—Kenneth at CSX, a railroad company; their younger brother, Josh, 21, at Wal-Mart; and Jamie at Pilgrim’s Pride, a chicken-processing plant in Moorefield, WV.

Kleinstiver says they played cops and robbers, carrying pop guns and shooting them off as they ran through the tall grass, as children. “Lynndie was always the cop. That was her big thing,” says Kleinstiver. “That didn’t work out too good.”

England’s ticket out of the trailer park was the U.S. Army. She signed up at age 17 in a Pittsburgh recruiter’s office in December 1999. She did it over the protests of Terrie. “I joined because I wanted to. And I wanted to pay for college,” England says. “I didn’t think there would be a war. But I was ready to go if there was one.”

Long before England was deployed to Iraq, Terrie tells me, she and her sister worked the same shift as cashiers at the IGA. England met a stock boy, James Fike, and fell in love. They got married in March 2002. Like many people in eastern West Virginia, England and Fike applied for jobs at Pilgrim’s Pride. At the factory, England made $10.50 an hour, more than twice a cashier’s wages.

Fike worked in Breast/Debone, and England worked in Marination. England noticed that unhealthy-looking chicken parts were being sent down the line. She told her supervisors, but they ignored her. Her sister recalls her walking over to her station and taking off her smock “I said, ‘What are you doing?’” Klinestiver says. “She said, ‘I quit,’ and walked out the door.” “I didn’t like the way management was doing things,” England explains. “People would take the good chicken off and put the bad chicken on. Management didn’t care.”

It was worse in Live Hang—located in Pilgrim’s Pride Moorefield Fresh Plant next door. During her shift as a cashier at the nearby Dollar General Store, Barr describes the plant’s slaughterhouse. Workers grab the chickens, fasten hooks on their claws and hang them upside down from a conveyer belt, she explains. Then chickens are transported to the “kill room,” where, Barr says, “They go through an electrical shock. There’s a big saw where their necks go across.”

A People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) activist was hired as a plant worker and conducted a secret, eight-month investigation of the plant from late 2003 to early 2004. He described how workers would stomp on chickens, soaking the room in blood. On November 13, 2003, according to the investigator, 200 chickens “were slammed against the wall” by employees. “Several hours later, many of the birds were still alive.” Three days later, a worker “twisted the neck of a live chicken until the head popped off; he then used what remained of the bloodied body of the chicken to write graffiti on the wall.” Klinestiver says the employees did more than beat the animals. “They told me that people there actually fucked chickens,” she says. “They’d grab the beaks and rip them apart and make them bigger. Then they shoved their sexual parts into their beaks. Besides being overly gross and sexual, it was like morally wrong.”

On July 25, 2004, a Los Angeles Times op-ed appeared under the headline: “Echoes of Abu Ghraib in Chicken Slaughterhouse.” Several employees were fired. But no one was prosecuted.

Klinestiver and England were both shocked by the behavior of coworkers at the plant. And England had even protested shoddy plant standards. She was a whistle-blower. “A lot of people complained about it,” England says defensively. “It wasn’t just me.” When I ask her why she didn’t stand up to the abusive practices at Abu Ghraib, she falls silent and looks at her hands.

After leaving her job at Pilgrim’s Pride, England, then 20, got a job as an army administrative clerk in Cresaptown, MD. She processed the paperwork of Graner, 35, for the 372nd Military Police Company when he arrived in November 2002. “He was funny, the jokester,” she recalls. Other times, he was raunchy. “An outlaw,” she calls him. Their affair started in March 2003 while they were stationed in Fort Lee. “After Lynndie joined the army and was working as an orderly in the U.S., she didn’t know anybody. She was a really quiet girl,” Janis Karpinski, a former commanding officer at Abu Ghraib, tells me. “Enter Charles Graner. He’s much older, and he’s full of himself. He’s just got that kind of personality.” “She was blown away,” Karpinski says. “She felt like someone was finally talking to her. Paying attention. He seemed far more experienced and worldly than anyone she knew. It only took a few, short conversations. She was enamored with him.” “Graner was the total opposite of Jamie [Fike],” says Kleinstiver. “Lynndie told me, ‘He’s real open. He likes to do stuff. Wild stuff.’”

Graner has admitted to beating his former wife, Staci Morris, and dragging her by her hair across a room. He was accused in a federal suit, Horatio Nimley v. Charles A. Graner, filed on May 25, 1999, in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Pennsylvania, of injuring an inmate, Horatio Nimley, while Graner was working as a prison guard at Pennsylvania’s State Correctional Institution-Greene. On June 29, 1998, according to the suit, Graner and another guard hid a razor blade in a side dish of mashed potatoes that was served to Nimley. He bit down on the razor, slicing the inside of his mouth, and bled profusely.

In March 2003, England went with Graner and another soldier to Virginia Beach. Their friend took a picture of England performing oral sex on Graner. In addition, Graner took a series of pictures as they engaged in anal sex, showing the progression of the sex act, “minute by minute,” says Hardy.

“Everything they did, he took a picture of it,” says Hardy. “She was asked why she let him. She said, ‘You know, guys like that. I just wanted to make him happy.’ She was like a little plaything for him. I think the sexual stuff—and the way he put her in those positions—was his way of saying, ‘Let me see what I can make you do.’”

Graner flaunted his affair with England, and the photos were passed around among the soldiers in their unit. Military rules forbid soldiers from taking lewd photographs. Also, England was married to Fike. Her affair with Graner violated army rules. Neither England nor Graner got in serious trouble, though. Several weeks later, they got ready for their deployment to Iraq and were eventually stationed at Abu Ghraib.

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Tara McKelvey is a frequent contributor to the New York Times Book Review. Her work has also appeared in Columbia Journalism Review, The Washington Post, Boston Review and other publications. She is currently a fellow with the Alicia Patterson Foundation.

*Noam Scheiber, the senior editor of The New Republic, says that much of the Haiti coverage is “redundant” and worries that the massive media onslaught is further complicating the recovery efforts. He proposes a “disaster pool” to deal with the problem:

“Just like they do for White House coverage, the major (and some not so major) news organizations could draw up an agreement to send a contingent of print, radio, and television reporters to wherever the next global disaster strikes. The participating news organizations could then use the raw material transmitted back to them to fashion their own reports.”

*Kevin Smith, president of the Society for Professional Journalists wants journalists to know their place: “I think it’s important for journalists to be cognizant of their roles in disaster coverage. Advocacy, self promotion, offering favors for news and interviews, injecting oneself into the story or creating news events for coverage is not objective reporting, and it ultimately calls into question the ability of a journalist to be independent, which can damage credibility.”

*Historian Joseph A. Palermo is glad Haiti is finally getting some media attention but wants reporters to delve into some uncomfortable questions about the United States’ long and unsavory history in the country. As Palermo writes in Huffington Post:

“Publicizing the catastrophe has generated tens of millions of dollars in relief donations. That’s a good thing. But why were Haiti’s long-suffering people deemed so un-newsworthy before the quake? Passed over in the process have been some uncomfortable truths behind the outpouring of compassion toward the plight of the Haitian people.

For over two centuries the U.S. has been on the wrong side of history in Haiti. It has propped up military dictatorships that enriched a tiny oligarchy at the expense of Haiti’s population. Decades of abuse have created a country with a level of food insecurity on par with Sub-Saharan Africa, a per capita income of about $390 a year, and a sizable underclass forced literally to eat mud to sustain itself.”

*The funny people at The Onion remind us that “4.2 billion people—a full 70 percent of the planet’s inhabitants—could use an all-star benefit concert.” A simple but important message for the stars and the rest of us ordinary beings to keep in mind, especially after all of those camera crews inevitably leave Haiti.

I know that times are hard. I also know that many of you want to help the people of Haiti at this horrible time. Below are some organizations whose vital work you can support. The links will take you directly to the donate pages. It’s not the size of donation but the thought that counts.

Doctors Without Borders

In a recent interviews with MSNBC, Bloomberg and VentureBeat, PayPal co-founder and Slide CEO Max Levchin has discussed the development of social networks and similar online worlds as “self-enclosed economies,” in which all the normal economic rules can be made to apply in the new, burgeoning trade of virtual goods. He suggested that this is the face of the future in business, with the main problem being assigning scarcity and setting the price of the imagined goods for different big brands. These imaginary objects, beginning with the “coin,” “token” or “property” on MMPORGS, widgets such as the piece of cartoon birthday cake on Facebook and the family of Facebook applications, the blinking animated smiley, food for your virtual pet on Neopets.com and bundles of individual consumers’ brand preferences, are ironically the most concrete evidence of the resilience of human nature in the face of current social and economic changes. These phenomena are only one aspect of what Erik Qualman, global vice president of online marketing for EF Education, dubs “Socialnomics.” Levchin claims that distribution of these goods depends on “the social mechanisms that make people share what they love or express themselves when they normally wouldn’t.”

The virtual good has already made its debut well beyond Levchin’s endeavors. What is being sold to the consumer here is his or her own private beliefs in human norms, personal hopes, aspirations, ambitions, dreams—even if those values are summarized in the desire to “win a game,” “find love, happiness, or salvation” or “learn the truth about international crises.” It does not matter that these victories, happy endings and lofty, expert-driven analyses do not reflect reality as it actually exists.

Under bombardment from a multitude of industries—services, entertainment, manufacturing, media, health, research, military, communications, trade—moving to carve up this new terrain, and in the face of the transition from tangible to intangible goods banked on human emotion, what is remarkable here is that cynical members of the public are not more jaded or decadent. In fact, between the onset of the Tech Revolution and the present moment, there has been a lag in human attitudes, a strange, persistent innocence. There are vast sums and huge amounts of political capital to be gained in the grey area where human ideals and credulousness survive, a place where you can literally sell anyone almost anything, if they believe it somehow embodies the essence of what they are, or the way they think the world should be. Consumers may be cautious and savvy, but they still generally believe that any random online merchant is who he says he is; people think they get value for money, even if what they are buying does not exist; and in the realm of foreign affairs, they imagine that the Internet is offering them choices between good and evil. They still fail to recognize the full implications of anonymity in international communications, world politics and global online trade and the associated lack of accountability, not just for a single transaction but for our entire society.

From wildly-popular primetime reality television “talent searches,” with their pre-picked finalists and YouTube-, MSM- and blog-driven hype over planted underdogs, to high-profile humanitarian, religious and military agendas, it is hard to imagine a cause or good in this world that does not factor in old-fashioned sentiments and associated projected values. Despite this new world of imagined capital, be it spiritual, emotional or political, a moral chasm has not opened up. Online merchants like eBay and Amazon develop through customer reviews a communal consensus on values of trust, mutual faith and responsibility. Sites like “We’re Not Afraid” cultivate courage. The Internet seems to be generating mechanisms that reinforce common decency and heartfelt convictions, even as it spawns an economy to sell those very ideals back to us.

No one can predict whether or not humanity’s basic faith in itself will become a metafictional sub-factor in the creation of millennial capital. And marketing experts such as Chris Brogan and Julien Smith, co-authors of Trust Agents: Using the Web to Build Influence, Improve Reputation, and Earn Trust, may ultimately see nothing new here. But what has changed is that the stakes have gotten higher, while virtue, trust, innocence and credulity—in all their cultural variations—have together become a hard currency that is inflating faster than the price of gold.

Happy 2010, dear readers! May it be joyful and successful! We humans are impatient beings, so it is a natural that we seek crumbs about the future from East European fortune tellers in gloomily-colored headscarves, uptight Englishmen wearing purple ties and friend victims who know how to shuffle those Tarot cards. Here are some bold predictions that caught my eye:

*The Russian newspaper Pravda cheerily reminds us that the late Bulgarian prophetess Baba Vanga predicted that World War III will break out in 2010. Baba Vanga is said to have foretold the start of World War II, perestroika and the September 11th, 2001 attacks.

*The Economist, normally so witty, is notable for the pure lameness of its list: “May—The 189 signatories of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty meet in New York to review it….September—The world’s diplomats gather in New York for the UN General Assembly.” I just can’t handle the excitement! Please, stop!

*CBS News legal correspondent Jan Crawford forecasts changes on the U.S. Supreme Court: “Justice John Paul Stevens will retire from the Supreme Court at 90, giving Obama his second nomination. Solicitor General Elena Kagan will be the nominee to replace him.”

*Newsweek single-handedly dashes Sarah Palin’s presidential ambitions but projects a rosy future in the media for the former Alaska governor: “The only thing Sarah Palin will be president of in 2012 will be TV ratings. Palin will get a talk show as early as next year. We’re betting a startup like Lifetime or Bravo will make an offer she can’t refuse.”

*Miss Ramona makes boldly humorous predictions for my wacky and wonderful hometown of San Francisco: “In an attempt to stand in solidarity with same-sex couples who still can’t legally wed in California, straight San Franciscans declare that they will cease marrying and divorcing until Proposition 8 is repealed or James Franco answers their marriage proposals in the affirmative, whichever comes first.”

*Epicurious senses that we will all be eating fried chicken and mini whoopee pies and washing them down with homemade beer. At last, a prediction I can believe in!

by Nona Willis Aronowitz

In November 2006, mere weeks after the death of my mother, radical feminist and journalist Ellen Willis, my friend Emma Bee Bernstein and I found ourselves contemplating what feminism meant to us. We were just 22, and we felt that the legacy of feminism was slipping through our fingers and that our generation needed to define this word, this concept, this feeling for ourselves.

So we did what any sensible young women would do: We hit the road. For several months, through dozens of cities, we drove across the United States in a Chevy Cavalier, photographing young women and finding out what was important to them. We talked with women as diverse as a burlesque dancer, a future nun, an air force worker, a 16-year-old pop star hopeful and a bartender on welfare.

What we discovered is that there is no feminist “movement” anymore—and that’s not a bad thing. Whether it comes from a progressive non-profit in Uganda, a tiny grassroots group in Lake Andes, North Dakota, or a single working mother in Mexico City, today’s feminism works better less as a movement and more as a pervading cultural force. Our generation isn’t interested in labels, in binding together over a few common issues and following the lead of a few faces of feminism—the kind of thing that made women feel marginalized in the first place. It happened during the Second Wave, when most of the feminists in the spotlight were educated, middle-class white women in big cities. It happened in the Third Wave, when both real and manufactured generational divides crippled the movement. And it still happens now, when certain bloggers or issues are privileged over others by the mass media.

So do we still even need the word “feminism”? Absolutely. Feminism still has the power to ignite a gender awareness, hearkening back to that old-fashioned but very much alive concept of “consciousness-raising.” The word may no longer be necessary to label our generation’s hardworking activists. As one race activist in New Orleans told us, “Who cares? Just do the work!” But destigmatizing feminism is essential in a less tangible way. Not only does it make young women cognizant of issues relating to gender equality and justice, but it also encourages them to consistently talk about these issues. Our generation of feminists don’t have one-track minds—our ideas about race, class, sex, politics and everything else are all channeled through the prism of feminism. It’s an amorphous, intersectional prism that’s making real political change.

Whether they feel empowered, discouraged, enraged or mobilized, young women have strong opinions about what they want to see happen in the future. And no matter whether you agree with or identify with it, the concept of “feminism” starts these ideas flowing. It acts as a code word to bring to light gender issues. It keeps us on a continuum of history. If a word can do all that, then it’s sure as hell worth fighting for.

Nona Willis Aronowitz is the co-author of Girldrive: Criss-crossing America, Redefining Feminism. She is a reporter at Chicago Tribune’s Triblocal.com, and she also blogs at www.girl-drive.com.

The impact of the global financial crisis creates an illusion that there are real prospects for effective co-operation to reach long-term global goals. Despite China’s immaculate hosting of the Olympic Games and its inevitable rise to the global negotiation tables as a key decision-maker, reality forces her to come to terms with her own pressing issues such as maintaining an eight percent growth rate and increasing domestic consumption. Inasmuch as the Chinese government wants a louder voice in the global regimes, shouldering responsibility is not on the agenda.

The resulting accord of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) reflects what global, negotiated governance for co-operative action to reach long-term global goals entails. The Convention demonstrates typical barriers and complexities of building any form of global regime. What determines the pace of the negotiation process and the speed of reaching agreement is the immediacy of dangers in question. Even where dangers are immediate, politics is politics. The result of the two-week convention of leaders from 192 members is a reality check that environmental dangers are still not immediate enough to create any binding deal that obliges member states to contribute meaningfully. Anyone who expects more than this is just unrealistic.

At the end of the Copenhagen summit, there is no consensus, no shared vision for long-term co-operative action, including on emission reductions. In the words of the UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, the accord is a “beginning”—a start at building a foundation for intergovernmental efforts to tackle the challenge posed by climate change; a start that can last a long time.

The ratified Convention recognized that the climate system is a shared resource whose stability can be affected by industrial and other emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases. Under the Convention, governments are only expected to:

* gather and share information on greenhouse gas emissions, national policies and best practices;
* launch national strategies for addressing greenhouse gas emissions and adapting to expected impacts, including the provision of financial and technological support to developing countries;
* co-operate in preparing for adaptation to the impacts of climate change.

The delegates passed a motion to “take note” of a deal that has no binding effect; an accord that lacked specific targets for reducing carbon emissions. Don’t forget that the Convention was set up to build the necessary framework to clarify what these targets are, as well as how and when these targets can be met. There has still been no real negotiation on targets for developed nations. Sessions have been held, yes, but all developed countries set their own targets before they arrived and stuck to them.

The attitude and the lack of sincerity of the leaders of China and the United States—the world’s two biggest greenhouse emitters, responsible for 40 percent of world emissions—were telling. They flew in at the end of the two-week convention, making it clear that they had nothing fair, effective and binding to offer. Their entourages just took over the agenda and emerged with what was basically their own private deal, announced on live television before others realized it had happened.

Under the confines of the UNFCCC, the so-called accord is an official recognition that there is the need to limit global temperatures rising no more than 2°C above pre-industrial levels. There is money pledged and a fund created. However, how predictable and sustainable are these financial resources remain somewhat murky as developed countries agree to “set a goal of mobilising jointly $100 billion a year by 2020 to address the needs of developing countries.” The lesson here is that an accord based on a proposal tabled by a U.S.-led group of China, India, Brazil and South Africa is not global. The year 2009 is a mere essential beginning for any co-operative action to reach long-term global goals.