U.S. President Obama announced after he left the UN global climate
conference at Copenhagen in 2009 that five major nations—the United States,
China, India, Brazil and South Africa—had together forged a climate deal. He
called it “an unprecedented breakthrough” but acknowledged that the agreement
was merely a political statement and not a legally binding treaty and might not
need ratification by the entire conference. Essentially, it was merely a
statement of the five countries’ respective goals, as if someone had announced,
“I want to lose ten pounds.” The political statement did not meet
even the modest expectations that leaders set for this meeting, notably by
failing to set a 2010 goal for reaching a binding international treaty to seal
the provisions of the accord. Nor does the plan firmly commit the
industrialized nations or the developing nations to firm targets for midterm or
long-term greenhouse gas emissions reductions.
Claiming that the conference was a success was not to stop the spin. Obama, for example, said, “For the
first time in history, all major economies have come together to accept their
responsibility to take action to confront the threat of climate change.” To
be sure, the accord does provide a system for monitoring and reporting progress
toward those national pollution-reduction goals, a compromise on an issue over
which China bargained hard, and it calls for hundreds of billions of dollars to
flow from wealthy nations to those countries most vulnerable to a changing
climate. That is, the political statement is not a binding
treaty, but the document does lay out a framework for verification of emissions
commitments by developing countries and for establishing a “high-level panel”
to assess financial contributions by rich nations to help poor countries adapt
to climate change and limit their emissions. Lastly, it sets a goal
of limiting the global temperature rise to 2 degrees Celsius above preindustrial
levels by 2050, implying deep cuts in climate-altering emissions over the next
four decades.
However, in a news conference, Obama said the accord was only a tentative start down a long road. The
accord sets no goal for concluding a binding international treaty, which leaves
the implementation of its provisions uncertain. In other words,
any developing country can opt in or out of the monitored pot of
money, and China may well still view the monitoring aspect as voluntary—meaning
to be determined by the Chinese Government what can be examined. The
Chinese had been intransigent on the matter of verification by
non-Chinese. Citing national sovereignty, the Chinese had claimed that
the rest of the world should take Chinese law as being a sufficient basis for
verification. This, I submit, is an extremely odd proposition—that people
extrinsic to China should rely on Chinese law when the legitimacy of such law
stops at the country’s borders. The statement is telling because it
demonstrates how antiquated the Bodinian notion of absolute national
sovereignty is in the modern world. The interdependence occasioned not
only by global warming, but also nuclear proliferation and an increasingly
global financial system, makes an insistence on the absoluteness of national sovereignty
an extremely dangerous proposition. The fecklessness of the Chinese
approach to “verification” and the resulting diluted “political statement”
(rather than a treaty) coming out of the conference suggest that we urgently
need to thwart the historical insistence from our global vocabulary and
institutions.
The immediate implication is
that the veto in the UN Security Council is no longer legitimate. Further
on, the binding nature of international law backed up by international
governance structures that do not include vetoes needs to be developed and
applied to the domains determined to be rightfully global. Countries
still insisting on the absoluteness of their national sovereignties, such as
China on pollution-controls and the US on international criminal law, would
have to bend or be boycotted by the rest of the world. In other
words, international relations and economic exchanges ought to be dependent on
being subject to a governance structure beyond the nation-state. If China
is left as the only country insisting that nothing can supervene Chinese law,
then no one in the world should have anything to do with that
country. In contrast, those subject to a governance structure
that supervenes in particular enumerated powers (with sufficient safeguards
against their encroachment…given the history of the US) should be able to enjoy
benefits beyond the binding nature of such powers, such as privileged positions
in trade and visas. I would argue that governments that insist that
their law is insurmountable deserve to be marginalized by the rest of the
world. I write this as an American knowing that the US may well be
marginalized under this scenario unless there is some movement on international
criminal law (i.e., being subject to the International Criminal Court, which in
turn would be given the ability to go into any country and extract
defendants).
The technological development
during the twentieth century means that political development is necessary in
the twenty-first century. We are so used to viewing change in terms of
technology that we are perhaps unaccustomed to the sort of change that should
ensue in order to obviate the new dangers from the technology. In
other words, we need to shift gears in terms of the domains wherein change is
expected or thought to occur. In some respects, we are still in the
dark ages, and being in the dark when the planet could come to equilibrium
unsuitable for human habitation—whether via carbon or radioactivity—represents
a level of danger that ought to move us to action against the default of
national sovereignty. In some respects, we are so primitive; we tend not
to see this because we identify change and development with technology.
