This wasn’t realpolitik. It was reality-politik

he idea that a PR, celebrity spectacle like Copenhagen could change the world is worse than naive – it’s ludicrous.
I have a few hours to kill in Copenhagen before I catch a train to Sweden. Maybe it is the sculptures of emaciated humans outside the conference venue, but for some reason as I walk around I cannot avoid the feeling that I am in the middle of a medieval passion play.

I keep bumping into earnest pilgrims who take every opportunity to remind passers-by that the situation is desperate and the end is nigh. They may describe themselves as protesters or observers at the climate change conference, but in a different era they would have been characterised as camp-followers. There is clearly a symbiotic relationship between the official delegates and the activists hanging around the outskirts of the Bella Centre.
(...)
Throughout history serious negotiations that yield significant results take place in private. In a different era, the idea that 15,000 people hanging out in the Bella Centre could make history and cobble together an agreement that could save the planet would have been dismissed as naive if not ludicrous. Whatever the problems with old-fashioned secret diplomacy, reality TV-style negotiations are far worse. Negotiations carried out in public invariably turn into a routine of play-acting and posturing. The adoption of the reality TV format for an apparently momentous international proceeding guaranteed that the Copenhagen conference would have little substantive meaning. After all, it was meant to work as a spectacle rather than as a venue for the conduct of global diplomacy.

Frank Furendi


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Labels: Climate Change, Copenhagen

- posted by DD @ 4:51 p.m. Perma Link/Print  

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