Six headlines last week from around the world and closer to home show how much the old order is gone for good, writes TONY KINSELLA.
DENYING THE existence of change can be comfortable, but last week shows it’s no longer feasible. General Motors went bankrupt. The 35-member Organisation of American States (OAS) overrode Washington’s reluctance to end its 49-year suspension of Cuba’s membership.
Beijing’s guilty unease over the Tiananmen Square massacre 20 years ago was revealed through a mixture of repression and tolerance. Ireland’s religious orders continued their contortions as they were obliged to accept responsibility for decades of abuse, torture and enslavement of tens of thousands of Irish children.
Gordon Brown’s ill-starred government continues its extraordinary headless chicken stagger. Barack Obama delivered a ground-breaking speech in Cairo, radically shifting the centre of gravity of US Middle Eastern policy and challenging us all.
This list could be extended, but these six headlines tell us a lot about the world we inhabit and underline the lack of any conveniently comprehensive ideological frameworks. Change follows an evolutionary path from an initial theoretical identification to general acceptance as everyday reality. We gradually grasp new theoretical realities such as smoking is dangerous or needlessly spewing CO2 into the atmosphere is suicidal, but find ourselves obliged to live with systems constructed on the basis of older realities.
Living through such transitions is awkward, confusing, and often paralysing. We know we need to change, but find few opportunities to actually do so. We recognise that we should purchase non-polluting cars, but none are available on the local forecourt.
General Motors was, for most of the last century, one of the world’s largest corporations and its biggest motor manufacturer. Massive injections of US and German public funds might just allow a couple of smallish auto businesses to emerge from its ruins.
The former Saudi oil minister Sheikh Yamani famously remarked: “The Stone Age did not end for lack of stone, and the Oil Age will end long before the world runs out of oil.” We understood, in a theoretical sense, that he was right. The death of GM marks the transition from the theoretical to the real. The oil age is now behind us. The auto industry as we have known it will no longer be at the centre of economic activity.
The reintegration of Cuba marks a coming-of-age of the OAS. It has grown from a body dominated by the US into a regional organisation with the US as a key member. The last chills of the Cold War are now confined to a decrepit Kim Jong Il in his North Korean museum, some leading lights of the US Republican party, and probably an ailing Fidel Castro – a fresh confirmation of what most of us have understood for some time.
In 1989 the Chinese government under Deng Xiaoping faced a real popular threat. Chinese citizens found themselves significantly worse off under the initial impacts of economic liberalisation. Popular anger at inflation and gross corruption spilled on to the streets of Beijing and other Chinese cities in an anarchic outpouring of discontent that grew for nearly two months.
The Communist Party agreed to negotiate – live on national television with student leaders – but could find neither a compromise nor any effective interlocutor to compromise with. The very act of participating in negotiations was in itself a tacit abandonment of the party’s dictatorship. Deng was reportedly reluctant to send in the army but eventually saw no other option. The couple of thousand dead earned his regime a conditional reprieve – no direct political challenge in return for prosperity.
Beijing now faces the altogether trickier challenge of managing an orderly emergence for some Chinese version of democracy. Hong Kong, with is special status, acts as a kind of political laboratory. Hence the clampdown in Beijing and tolerance of a 100,000 strong demonstration in Hong Kong’s Victoria Park to commemorate Tiananmen.
We understand that China is moving, although probably nobody really understands how. This legitimate confusion has once again been confirmed.
It has been obvious for years that our young republic has to replace religious orders in the delivery of vital public services. Quite how we are going to finance the acquisition of their physical assets so that they can meet their responsibilities to those they savagely mistreated remains far from clear.
There is more than a degree of bittersweet irony in the fact that it was a ghastly cocktail of their haughty arrogance, vicious brutality and delusional denial that has triggered their death sentence.
Brown’s Labour has taken a hammering at the British polls. The message seems more one of despair with Labour than active enthusiasm for the Conservatives. Decent, honourable and intelligent man that Gordon Brown undoubtedly is, he just doesn’t get it. Worse he seems utterly incapable of getting it. Messrs Brown, Cowen, Cameron and Kenny all demonstrate a chilling similarity of uncomprehending irrelevance.
And then there is Barack Hussein Obama and his almost unique ability to accept and present uncomfortable, even conflicting realities. Nuclear weapons are as useless as they are lethal. The price of non-proliferation is nuclear disarmament, including by the US and Israel. We have, in a way, known that for years but it had become almost impossible to say so without either being attacked for being anti-Semitic or derided as a dreamer.
The venue combined a millennium of Islamic learning from the Al-Azhar university with the more modern tradition of Cairo University, and President Obama spelled it out with a challenging unvarnished realism. As the editor of the Bahrain newspaper Al Waast, Mansoor al-Jamri, put it: “If he delivers on what he said, and it is a compromise, many people will ultimately be happy.”
Our world is metamorphosing.
An uncomfortable challenge we must face, not least because it’s one we can simply no longer deny, much less ignore.