National and international narratives now become more fractured and incoherent, making purposeful national action, especially policies calling for costly and intrusive international cooperation, far more difficult to achieve

Randall L Schweller: Ennui Becomes Us

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It is unusual for any major international gathering to be presented by its participants as a failure. Why? Because the great leaders there assembled present any outcome as some sort of success, lest a bemused public conclude that they incompetently wasted a large pile of taxpayers’ money.

So when a senior Swedish politician representing the EU Presidency says that the Copenhagen Conference on Climate Change was “a disaster – it really was a great failure” we can be pretty sure that things did not turn out too well.

Negotiation is all about two things: Power (objective), and Psychology (subjective).

If one side is to persuade another side to change position in favour of Outcome X, the first option used is persuasion backed by an appeal to a brighter shared future: “surely you can agree that Outcome X benefits you and is in all our interests?”

If that does not work - and most countries get peeved when another country busily tells them what is in their interests – the alternatives are our old friends, bribes and threats, carrots and sticks.

The first is a bribe: “OK, will you accept Outcome X if I give you this?”

The second is a threat: “I regret to have to say this, but if you do not accept Outcome X I plan to bring about Outcome Y under which you will be much worse off. As you know, I have the power to do so.”

So far so trite. Somewhat more interesting are the psychological factors behind these approaches, which go to their credibility.

Persuasion works well where parties know each other well and high levels of trust prevail. But most international dealings are characterised by emotional distance and suspicion (“Yes, Outcome X looks pretty reasonable – even beneficial. But if they want Outcome X so badly, there must be something else going on…”). So persuasion does not get far.

The promise of a bribe makes sense to the party offered it only if the bribe is both sizeable and seen as likely to be delivered as promised. Distant or modest or vague-looking carrots (or carrots already promised) impress no donkey.

The threat of the stick motivates the party threatened only if the threat is real and painful enough. Plus the party threatened will not fear the threat if it believes that its capacity to withstand the pain is greater than the capacity of the threatening party both to deliver the pain and to sustain delivering it.

Last but not least, it is always wise to be clear that all the parties to a negotiation are negotiating about the same issue.

How does all this relate to the Copenhagen Climate Conference?

The claim is made and proclaimed to be accepted by the ‘international community’ that the planet faces a serious threat from man-induced climate change. This claim is widely agreed to be based on a great deal of credible scientific evidence, even if there are scientists who disagree with the core premises and many more who disagree on much of the attendant detail.

That said, with so much at stake the scientific basis for much of the key research relied on by the UN and national governments is under relentless scrutiny (all those leaked Climategate emails have not helped) with demands for full transparency about the raw data and methodology used in processing the data. Public opinion not surprisingly is uncertain in many parts of the world.

It is one thing to accept the broad propositions that anthropogenic climate change on a global scale (a) is happening, (b) is mainly bad news, and (c) needs to be brought under control. It is quite another to decide what precisely needs to be done now – and by whom.

This stems from genuine scientific uncertainty as to the likely impacts of climate change, not all of which will be bad for everyone, and from disagreements as to the wisdom and equity of spending heavily now for the benefit of people in the future who are likely to be richer and more tech-savvy than we are.

Not to forget the fairness problem: should the rich countries which have caused much of today’s problem foot the main part of the bill (whatever it is) alone, or should less rich countries fast producing much of tomorrow’s problem also be expected to contribute?

And if all that can somehow be settled, how best to pay for the changes needed? Are large resources transfers between states more likely to work than (say) generous tax incentives to encourage new technological fixes?

All in all, these are as complicated cause-and-effect policy questions stretching far down distant decades as might be imagined. How to tackle them in a mature, hard-headed way calculated to get some sort of meaningful result?

Look at this Wikipedia list of heavyweight global emitters of CO2 in thousands of metric tonnes. (Lists by countries according to per capita emissions are different, but not really relevant. When it comes to Saving the Planet it is total emissions and trends of growth of emissions which matter). Thus:

South Africa is at 13th place, providing 1.5% of global emissions - the most polluting African country by some way, but still not that important overall. France misses the Top Ten because it has a good nuclear power industry.

These figures measure emissions by burning fossil fuels. Add in carbon emissions caused eg by deforestation exposing peaty soil which then dries and emits CO2, and Indonesia (19th in the list above) soars towards the top of the charts as the world's third biggest emitter.

So to make a strategic difference, we need a negotiation aimed at a possible treaty involving (say) the top twenty heavy emitting countries using all categories of emissions, and those countries alone.

These countries between them include all UN Security Council permanent members and all EU big hitters, plus countries from all other continents. Saudi Arabia is there both as a leading Muslim country (joined by Indonesia and Iran, to make things more interesting) and as a major oil producer. Over half the world’s population would be represented.

In short, a Top Twenty with perhaps a few passive technical observers from the UN and EU plus African Union, ASEAN and other regional groupings would be a respectable and globally representative group.

They together create some 80% of the carbon emissions said to be causing the strategic damage now, and are likely to be doing so for a good time into the future. They could sit in relative seclusion somewhere and work up robust ideas on a comprehensive set of deals - transparency, rich-to-poor subsidies, moves to cheaper energy sources and so on - without a non-stop circus outside.

If they can strike a deal, the rest of the world might feel vexed at having been excluded but should nonetheless be cheering lustily that those responsible have acted firmly and shown leadership on behalf of all. The moral, political and technical weight behind any such deal would leave everyone else little option but to join it or go along with its main features.

Will a Top Twenty-style negotiation ever happen and reach a deal? Maybe not. Precisely because it stands a better chance of reaching some far-reaching outcomes a number of powerful countries may duck and weave, waving the banners of Inclusiveness and Global Equity to prevent it taking place.

Copenhagen itself was far from a reasonable intelligent negotiation, and instead a decadent and ultimately frivolous circus.

Why did this come about? Mainly because politicians in some Western capitals and none more than the UK’s Labour Government have allowed themselves to be swept away by their own zealous rhetoric.

To convince their own voters that the climate problem is sufficiently scary to merit action on an unprecedented scale (namely manifold restrictions plus new taxation and other disagreeable measures) and to generate ‘momentum’ towards a deal, they have had to invoke incessant images of fairly imminent worldwide calamity, backed by appeals to a fuzzy collectivist internationalism.

Which has had two unintended negative consequences.

It has encouraged every country on Earth to demand by right a strident voice in deciding what is done to tackle a global problem, even though that voice in many cases will be incoherent or (in terms of the problem as a whole) quite marginal.

And it has projected a confusing sense that Western countries on the one hand are so idealistic that they will pay large bribes to achieve an ‘historic’ deal, but on the other hand are irredeemably cynical, talking up the problems far beyond any measures likely to be affordable to solve them.

Few countries are big enough to make a serious practical difference acting alone. Which explains why for most countries process is more important than outcome: a voice in process is more or less guaranteed to any state, however tiny.

This creates a significant noise and mood in the room against any agendas driven by richer/bigger powerful countries which often happen to be former colonial powers (hence shameful applause for Presidents Chavez and Mugabe ranting against ‘capitalism’ while enjoying Western hospitality).

Copenhagen was a startling example of how this big tent approach to agreeing global issues is unworkable. It predictably slumped into an uncontrolled haggle which as each day passed grew more and more detached from respectable scientific and long-term economic calculations.

The mass of participants had no real interest in being responsible.

Those who hoped for a carrot had every incentive to keep pushing up the price.

The relatively few countries both wealthy enough and inclined to pay into a collective new pot could not write a blank cheque; they needed guarantees that they would be getting a reasonable return on their investment, which meant above all buy-in from the fastest-growing mass emitters, namely China and India.

And China and India saw that for the first time in centuries things were going their way – was it really so risky to them to prioritise development now and take their chances with climate change in decades to come?

In other words, the negotiating psychology framework was all wrong.

The ‘stick’ waved by those wanting a deal was far too remote: incalculable and uncertain climatic problems decades down the line.

The carrots offered by the few countries prepared to offer carrots (in the form of large new development funds to help poorer countries cooperate with expensive climate change policies by making the transition to cleaner technologies all the faster) were too small to deal with the problem as they themselves had defined it.

Plus many would-be recipients could read news reports of horrible pressure on government spending in the Western democracies, and no doubt suspected that a lot of the promised ‘new’ money would be funding rebadged from existing development budgets, much of which in any case would end up in the coffers of Western consultants.

In the ensuing melee, which countries were likely to do have most or least impact?

For all the noise made by the mass of countries clamouring for attention, any deal would have to be struck between a relatively small group of countries pursuing national interests. And number one among those national interests would be to get into that small deal-making group, as an end in itself.

Which is why, as has been described in different accounts from people close to the negotiations, President Obama suddenly found himself sitting round a table with the leaders of China, India, Brazil and South Africa, with none of the other Top Twenty countries anywhere to be seen.

The ‘deal’ they struck set some significant headline goals, but had no special legitimacy or binding force in terms of the grim global problem supposedly being tackled. After one final undignified row, the Conference ‘noted’ this accord and drifted sulkily for home.

All this occurred because the Conference was doomed to fail, so behind the scenes a new negotiation on a new subject had been opened: Who defines and decides the outcome?

The best available result for the five major participants at that meeting was to put down their own bold markers for global leadership: reaching a deal notable not for the fleeting moments of favourable media coverage for themselves before everyone headed for home, but because they and only they had struck it. No sanctimonious Europeans (or Russians or Japanese or Koreans or Mexicans or Nigerians) getting into the picture.

Particularly striking was the boldness shown by China in intervening on numerous occasions to dilute the substance and reject any legally binding agreement, where necessary thwarting movement in the name of protecting its ‘sovereignty’ from reliable outside verification.

Hard-hitting Chinese tactics left President Obama in a dilemma. For his own domestic reasons (unhappy ratings) he did not want to return to Washington empty-handed. On the other hand, it made little sense for him to press for strong legally binding measures if the prospect of getting them approved by the US system was slim. Hence a declaratory deal struck with a small group of ‘countries of the future’ was acceptable.

Did President Obama nonetheless concede too much? When he and other leaders found themselves talking to a Chinese official rather than the Chinese Premier Wen Jinbao who was deliberately absenting himself to show that any outcome would be on his terms alone, the strong move in terms of negotiating technique - and long-term substance - was to leave the meeting until Wen Jinbao appeared. Tolerating overt discourtesy of that sort is taken as a sign of weakness.

Conclusion

The Copenhagen Conference vividly showed the paradox of the modern state. Most of the states on Earth formally were represented at the Conference on something like equal terms, small island states fiercely demanding ‘justice’ for themselves from the vastly larger carbon-emitting states. Yet neither they nor the main vehicle for coordinating international agreements, the United Nations, proved effective.

Randall L Schweller spells it out in the fascinating piece cited above:

Most new treaty-making and global-governance institutions are being spearheaded not by an elite club of great powers but rather by civil-society actors and nongovernmental organizations working with midlevel states.

Far from creating more order and predictability, this explosion of so-called global-governance institutions has increased the chaos, randomness, fragmentation, ambiguity and impenetrable complexity of international politics. Indeed, the labyrinthine structure of global governance is more complex than most of the problems it is supposed to be solving. And countries’ views are more rigidly held than ever before.

In this confusion the European Unionists (collectively the planet’s third biggest CO2 emitter) representing their own uneasy internal consensus processes were especially ineffective and ended up ignominiously sidelined, despite their strong effort to work up policy options, to offer funds for the new pot, and indeed to host the Conference.

There is a fine balance to be struck in a complex negotiation between being positive and creative, and being obstructive and hard-to-get.

The European Union started in a weak position because it wanted a deal too much, promising too many undernourished carrots but no real stick; it therefore could safely be ignored by India and China and the USA, whose enthusiasm for a deal was much less pronounced.

They rightly counted on the fact that the Europeans would have no real choice but to go along with (and maybe ultimately pay for) whatever they decided. A small group of the largest EU member states acting together with other partners in a more mobile, firmer way would have had a better chance of making a difference.

Thus this spasm of post-modern irony: with nearly 200 countries pressing their views on issues of global weight, a small self-proclaimed group of states arbitrarily defined the main outcome on behalf of everyone else. This has sent a powerful message to everyone else, which national Foreign Ministries from other countries with aspirations to sharing global leadership will do well to heed.

Now what?

This sort of collected planetary lunge at a ‘solution’ to climate change issues is not serious (which is not to say that it will not be re-attempted in 2010 and beyond). Too many countries are suspicious of the science, and/or unsure of which problems should be addressed and by whom, and/or unable to agree on how best to tackle the problems, and/or unwilling to make sacrifices now on the scale said to be required to make a difference in the future.

While the haggling drags on, short of a global political and economic meltdown nothing can stop many hundreds of millions of Asian and African people rapidly getting more prosperous and entering the global market for jobs. The means of production of the planet’s most valuable commodity - ideas – are being owned by some two billion people. Nothing like this has ever happened before.

Pressure on natural resources will intensify, but this in turn will bring forth new technologies for making those resources go further. Huge efforts will be made to step up energy efficiency, although as the wonderfully named Khazzoom–Brookes postulate tells us, greater energy efficiency tends to create greater overall energy use.

In short, we’ll end up with no one Big Policy, but manifold smaller policies of adaption to climate changes as and when they occur. Not because that is the best or even wisest way forward – no-one knows what that is.

But because this is mainly what is going to happen.