Archive for December, 2009
A Seed From Which Much Will Grow Fast
Posted by: Peter Sain ley Berry in EU on December 22nd, 2009
First things first. Should anyone still be reading these pieces, stuck as we are in the snowy wastes of the mid-winter solstice then let me wish them – in the language of the ancient Britons - Nadolig Llawen or a happy Christmas, which I extend to one and all. May we all prosper in 2010.
As we leave this curious year, that has seen so much trouble but also new beginnings, particularly in the shape of the Lisbon Treaty at last now come into force, let me add my own note of a new beginning and optimism for the year ahead.
Many people are still wringing their hands following what was held widely to be almost the worse possible outcome to the Copenhagen climate change negotiations. Yes, it would have been wonderful to close the books on the year with an all-singing, all-dancing treaty, embracing 192 countries and wrapped up like some Christmas parcel with deadlines and limits and finance and agreements to do this and to stop doing that all, tied together with some legally binding string.
And yet the more I think about this the more unrealistic it seems our assumptions were. Did we ever truly think that this is what would happen? What could happen?
This may have been what was needed but the problem with legally binding treaties is what to do when they are broken? We can offer and pledge and monitor and verify and accuse countries of being non-compliant – but even in our tight and right little Europe we have problems at times in enforcing treaties, particularly when the going gets rough and tough. Then all the talk is of ‘a light touch’ and interpreting the regulations ‘flexibly.’ But in most cases countries that don’t like treaties simply ignore them and leave it to the European Commission to do its (not very awful) worst.
How then did we expect the world to police a complicated climate treaty? Or did we naively expect that countries would simply deliver on their pleadges no matter what the cost or inconvenience or whatever the future held? Did we expect that hope in this instance would triumph over expectation?
And our expectations were absurdly high. We looked at what the scientists said was needed – and I don’t for a moment resile from what the scientists are saying – and assumed that because – in an analogy – the bridge needed to take ten tonne trucks we could merely command the bridge to take ten tonne trucks and it would happen. Just as the King in St Exupéry’s story of The Little Prince commands the Prince to obey him without any power to make this happen and so to preserve his impotent authority is reduced to issuing an order that sometimes his orders are to be obeyed and sometimes not. That is the true nature of so widely drawn an international treaty. It is sometimes to be obeyed and sometimes not.
We know that politics is the art of the possible. Regardless of what needs doing, regardless of what size trucks our bridge needs to take, we can only send over a weight that the bridge will bear. But we do so in knowing that provided the bridge isn’t broken by the weight then it can be strengthened and a new bridge constructed with the materials thus shipped to the other side.
And that is how I view the Copenhagen Accord. Yes a failure in terms of what the world needs but nevertheless a start in constructing the edifice that will finally have the strength to deliver the solution. Yes you may think my specatacles rose-tinted, you may call me naive – but I seriously believe we should take the Copenhagen Accord at its face value. It doesn’t represent a new bridge, it doesn’t even represent the footings of a new bridge, but it does represent ground being cleared somewhere where the new bridge may be built.
Who would have thought it possible, even a mere twelve months ago, that the United States and China – the two biggest producers of greenhouse gases, the one per capita, the other absolutely – would have reached agreement on a climate accord and an accord, moreover, designed to be built upon. That alone seems to me to be grounds for optimism in all sorts of ways that go beyond climate and into the very bosom of the future of humanity.
The one sad part of this accord – for me anyway as a dedicated European – was that Europe seemed to be nowhere to be seen. We are pursuing our own track, keeping our powder dry, refusing to commit to our carrot-dangling offer of a 30 per cent reduction in emissions by 2020. We have taken back our ball, retreated from the real job of climate change leadership and persuasion. And that makes me sad.
We said we led the world on climate change. Our actions and asirations were indeed worthy and reached further than anyone elses actions and aspirations. But in fact no-one was actually following us. No-one paying us much attention and if we are not careful our influence will wane even further over the coming years.
Will the coming decade – the decade of the 20 teens – therefore relegate us to a bipolar world of the United States and China or will we see a tripolar world in which Europe is an equally important player? That is indeed a question suitable to ponder upon during the turn of the year.
Meanwhile I expect to see the Copenhagen Accord as a seed from which much will grow and grow fast. Therefore I shall not be wringing my hands this Christmas, but be quietly confident that at long last the world has come together even if it has come together in disagreement and confusion. We are human after all and this is our sad condition. But we have come together and that is to be celebrated.
The Old Woman of Hvalsey
Posted by: Peter Sain ley Berry in EU on December 15th, 2009
I am trying to make sense of Copenhagen. What I cannot understand is the fury of those who deny climate change is man-made. Even on the principle of Pascal’s bet – (whether God truly exists or not, the prospect of hell surely makes it advantageous to assume that He does) – you would have thought that the sceptics would have wanted to give those engaged in these epic negotiations a fair wind.
In a sense we have been here before. So as this is Christmas, let me crave your indulgence by telling you the story of the Old Woman of Hvalsey.
This sad tale of a community extinguished by climate change contains all the elements of our present, larger story: the despoliation of the environment, the refusal to listen to predictions, false hopes, encroaching poverty, the escape of the wealthy, the fury of the deniers; even misogyny is there.
It’s a story I first heard long ago, on the radio, during a childhood illness. The words climate change were unfamiliar then, but I remembered this tale of an old woman, whose voice seemed to fill my sickroom with prophetic chill….
She spoke of a little colony by the sea, somewhere where once there had been trees: great birches, six metres tall, and abundant grass with which the farmers made hay to feed their wintering animals. Indeed, so green was this land, she said, that Erik the Red, the Norseman who founded the colony, had called it Greenland.
The settlers erected houses and at Hvalsey, one of the biggest settlements, they built a high and wide church, plastering the outside with pulverised mussel shells whose nacre glowed in the low rays of the sun, making the church appear white and sparkling and fluorescent.
The colony thrived until some time around the beginning of the fourteenth century when the farmers began to notice how little soil there now seemed to be on their fields. The trees had been cut for building and firewood and to clear new land for crops. The rich loam that had once lain under the birch trees had been eroded by the rain and the wind and washed into the sea.
Whenever it rained now the hill streams ran thick and brown, carrying away the earth to the sea. And now also the summers themselves seemed to be shorter, the winters longer. The settlers had to go further for timber, cut down more of the forest. The thin fields were less productive; everyone grew poorer.
Indeed so poor did the colony become that the elders of the Hvalsey church sought a dispensation from the Pope. From 1345 the settlement was absolved from the payment of tithes. Some settlers began to leave. But Norse folk are hardy and tenacious. Most clung on. Yet the old woman, whose words had chilled me, said that the colony was doomed. It was being extinguished, she said, by the cold and the snow of the ever lengthening winters.
She said that on the low hills that rose above the sea, where once the beech trees had grown, snow now lay. Of course the hills had always been snow-covered in winter but the summer sunshine would melt the snow and the cattle would graze on the summer pasture and the wildflowers. But now there were patches of snow that didn’t melt all summer long, even on those hills beside the sea. Snow began to fall on snow.
Each summer the size of this permanent snowfield grew. The farmers marked it with sticks. Sometimes the snow retreated. Then the farmers were happy for a year, or perhaps two. But the old woman foretold that decade by decade the summer snowfield would grow and keep on growing, faster and faster, until at last it came down the hillside and overwhelmed their remaining crops. And so it came to pass. And sooner than they had expected.
The colonists witnessed a sad succession of ‘lasts.’ In the year 1408 came the last marriage to be performed in the church with its nacre plaster. Love flourishes even in the harshest conditions. We even have the names of the bride and groom.
She was Sigridur Björnsdóttir, high born and originally from Iceland, who had sailed to Greenland as a young woman to marry a man who had many farmsteads at Hvalsey. But he died soon after leaving Sigridur a widow.
Her groom was Thorsteinn Ólafsson, a sailor, captain of his ship in fact. He had been blown off course and by a happy accident had put in at Hvalsey in 1406. While making repairs he had met and fallen in love with the grieving Sigridur. And so occurred the last marriage in Hvalsey. The final recorded Norse document to come out of the settlement.
Sigridur and Thorsteinn didn’t stay long. His ship seaworthy again, Thorsteinn Ólafsson sailed out of the fjord and turned south before rounding the cape and running before the west wind up to Iceland and home.
That wasn’t the last of the colony, though; ships continued, very occasionally, to call. Many people left when they could. But the old woman stayed for she had nowhere else to go.
The colony was reduced to a few families, famine struck and riddled with disease, clinging to their homes and to life itself through those chilling, snow-enveloped winters when all was dark. And in their poverty and misery and the bleakness of their environment they turned upon each other, fighting over scraps of land or possessions.
The colony began to die a slow and lingering death, killed by the encroaching snow and poverty and the internecine struggles. But before it did those remaining colonists fell upon the old woman, who, years ago, had foretold what would happen when snow began to fall on snow, unmelted from the winter before.
They accused her of witchcraft, of poisoning the colony, of bringing insanity and death to its people. Bundling her into the church for a show trial they condemned her to death.
It is said that whom the gods wish to destroy they first make mad. In a last act, to propitiate the gods of weather, as if fire itself could drive away the snow and the white glow of the earth, the settlers tied the old woman to a stake and used what little firewood remained to burn her to death.
Today little remains at Hvalsey, though the church, now without its turf roof and fluorescent plaster of ground mussel shells, still stands. Six hundred years later we would do well to listen to the old woman’s story. It is the story of what climate change can do to a people who won’t listen.
Picture is courtesy of Wikipedia
Sarko’s Secret Plan?
Posted by: Peter Sain ley Berry in EU on December 1st, 2009
Baroness Ashton, who today takes up office as the Union’s High Representative for Foreign and Security Policy under the Lisbon Treaty, could do no better than study the life of another of her noble predecessors on the European stage – that of the Prince de Talleyrand-Perigord, Foreign Minister of the French Empire and architect not just of much of the present French state, but of much of present inter-European relations as well.
An aristocrat who served Louis XVI, the Directory, Napoleon, the Allies, the restored Bourbons and finally King Louis – Phillipe, no-one could claim to be a better survivor. But the twists, turns and accommodations that his tortuous life entailed, have left him a detested figure in much of France. Which is rather sad when you consider that but for his efforts to have it restored, the Tricolour might have flown for the last time at Waterloo.
Talleyrand’s negotiating skills were supreme: France even came out of the defeat of Napoleon, thanks to his negotiation, with more territory than she had had at the beginning.
But his crowning triumph, achieved when he was already into his ninth decade and on his final mission as Ambassador to Britain in the 1830s, was finally to align British and French foreign policy and to set it on the course that would result in the ‘entente cordiale’ and an unbreakable alliance that later survived two world wars.
That he should have done so in the aftermath of twenty years of bloody war with Britain’s traditional enemy, when Germany was the rising nation in Europe and when even the household language of the British court was German, should be enough to make any aspiring diplomat go weak at the knees with admiration.
Asked what had driven him throughout his long and turbulent life, he said that he had always acted in the best interests of Europe, believing that what was good for Europe would also be good for France and that what was good for France was also good for Europe.
Nevertheless, if Talleyrand is generally despised by today’s French politicians, his famous dictum seems still to be imbibed with their mothers’ milk. Indeed, it is no exaggeration to say that the whole European construction, certainly in France’s eyes, turns on this very premise.
This is not necessarily something to be regretted, still less opposed. From a British perspective what is good for Europe can also be good for Britain. We too, in our own way, have wanted to civilise the world. So the French motivation is not necessarily something to fear, just to be aware of.
With that in mind – and if it is not too much of a bother – let us return to the much tilled ground of the Lisbon appointments. You remember that the initial reaction from the commentariat was astonishment when we learned that two relatively unknown figures – Mr van Rompuy and Baroness Ashton, had been appointed.
This astonishment was certainly real enough: we had been led towards thinking that while one group of politicians did indeed want a low key President of the European Council, others wanted a strong campaigning figure such as Tony Blair, who, at various times, was espoused by a raft of senior European leaders, including President Sarkozy of France.
Indeed, even as late as 19th June, and after he had dropped his support for Blair, Sarkozy was still saying: “…if we have Lisbon I’d like the first President of the Council to be someone strong and ambitious for Europe because Europe deserves and needs such a person.”
Once the Lisbon appointments had been made, however, the commentariat rapidly switched tack, arguing that no-one had wanted strong figures in these roles, that France and Germany did not want their national prestige usurped by some traffic-stopping figure; that what was required was a back room person, an organiser. And on the foreign policy side, someone who would not make waves.
I am still wondering whether this is correct. Has the leopard really changed his spots?
You remember Sarkozy’s French Presidency? (More Sarkozy’s than French you might think). The lavish expenditures, the rushing around all over the world waving the European flag. The frenetic pace continuing right to the very last day and last hour of the Presidency, trying to show what might be done, what ought to be done, with French leadership.
Put this together with Mr Barroso’s second Commission, now assembled. Its composition is very much in the French interest. The wings of free market liberalism – something for which Barroso’s first Commission was roundly criticised for embracing too closely – are now almost certain to be clipped. Agriculture, too, so important to France, is in safe and friendly hands. In Pierre de Boissieu, France has also secured the Secretary-Generalship of the Council.
Consider also that Sarkozy, has been careful to stress that Mr van Rompuy’s appointment as Council President is for two and a half years. Of course the appointment can be renewed for a further term when in comes to an end in May 2012. That is, if the member states so wish.
But whose term of office expires in April 2012? None other than Mr Sarkozy’s! Should he not stand again for the French Presidency, the Presidency of Europe – the ‘strong and ambitious’ figure that Europe ‘deserves and needs,’ could be his. Why not?
Fifteen years ago a newspaper cartoon from the dying days of the government of Edouard Balladur pictured the French cabinet as if in a game of Cluedo. Every minister was depicted as attacking another. Each was being shot, stabbed, clubbed, poisoned or strangled by a colleague. Meanwhile, through a window, we see Sarkozy, retreating from this mayhem with a gleeful smile.
Sarkozy’s volte-face, first supporting Tony Blair, then abandoning him, now becomes explicable. Britain is palmed off with the foreign minister post – which is not important because, should Sarkozy indeed become President of the Council, he will want to play the chief diplomatic role himself. Skilful, very skilful. Worthy of Talleyrand himself.
Talleyrand also said, memorably, that zeal was the enemy of diplomacy. That the best things came to he who waited. I am wondering whether Sarkozy has learned this injunction too; whether Mr van Rompuy is no more than his stalking horse. Having got his Commission ducks in order and disarmed his possible opponents, will Sarkozy now descend in two and a half years time to claim what he regards as his (and France’s) inheritance?
