Introduction

This geopolitical and conflict-transformation blog has largely been focused on the Middle East, but it has now moved into a more global phase, with a new tranche of articles I've been writing recently for The Bangladesh Today International in Dhaka, Bangladesh.

The most recent posts come first - look at previous posts on the right to see earlier entries. Or print out this page to read the most recent articles on paper.

Here's a quote from Alexander Solzhenitsyn:

Dwell on the past and you'll lose an eye. Forget the past and you'll lose both eyes.

Thanks for being here, and I hope you get something beneficial from these articles - Palden

The Battle between Past and Future

for The Bangladesh Today International
March 2008


This century we are faced with challenges which, if we fail to meet them, can cost us and our descendants highly. Costs and benefits are becoming increasingly relevant as deciding factors. Our capacity to waste, to support outmoded ways of doing things and to carry on with 'business as usual' is diminishing rapidly. Wider global issues are bearing down more heavily on us, imposing their own costs and exposing weaknesses in all human systems and societies.

When I was a student radical at LSE in London in the late 1960s, most people didn't know much about the issues we were bringing to the public domain – about human wrongs, human rights, the costs of war, pesticides and pollution, social and economic inequalities, resource depletion, political abuses, faceless societies and a host of other interrelated issues.

But in the decades since, this unawareness has changed. Today everyone, educated or illiterate, city-dwelling or living on the land, has a rough picture of what's going on, drawn from direct experience and commonsense. Everyone can see the smog, or has been hit by climatic extremes or visible changes affecting our daily lives and communities – the details vary, but the basic message is similar worldwide.

A sharp-eyed, questioning 17 year-old is hard-pressed to find good answers about the state of the world: it doesn't really make sense. It's a scary equation of what economists call 'diminishing returns', where the price of continuing doing something increasingly outstrips the benefits gained from it. Forty years ago, people like me harped on about the price our children's children would pay, and today the price-paying is advancing, and costs are rising. Not just financial, but human, social, ecological and spiritual costs.

At times it's all very discouraging. It's as if we're heading for a deadly shoot-out between the past and the future, and their respective priorities and game-plans. If we had started on these questions when they were first raised some forty years ago, there might have been more of a negotiation rather than a fight. But past and future speak different languages and see things in different ways.

The future brandishes weapons such as typhoons, market falls, toxic disasters, epidemics or the downfalls of the high-and-mighty, while the past engages in defensive rear-guard actions, fighting its ground to maintain 'normality' and 'stability'. Each works from a very different script. It's a global-scale conflict of the world against itself. The cost-curves, in loss of natural resources, size of cities, rising global temperatures, demographics, conflict, waste, nuclear proliferation and basic sanity, are still rising, and this is unlikely to stop.

Past and future agendas also get manipulated, obscured and complexified – an analysis-paralysis in which we risk losing track of what really needs to happen. Let's take an example from Afghanistan. Noble indeed is the aim of making peace in a troubled country such as this. But NATO and the West, seeing Afghanistan as a breeding-ground for terrorism and narcotics, have fallen into the age-old trap of believing that peace can be forged militarily, by beating the enemy.

Meanwhile, the Taliban and al Qa'eda have fallen into another trap, believing that anything that harms their enemy is good – this can include killing and scaring ordinary Afghans and letting the opium trade grow to enormous proportions, against their very own Muslim principles. Both sides assert that they have Afghans' interests at heart, but actions speak louder than words, and neither really behave like bringers of peace and justice, however these might be defined. Neither is really anxious to fulfil the needs of Afghans themselves.

This situation is bound up with the past. The position of the Taliban and al Qa'eda, who see Afghanistan as a bastion of resistance to the insidious historic influence of the West, is being overtaken by shifts of a larger kind. The 21st century world is not going to be Western-dominated, and fundamentalists might do well to look at Beijing or Dubai, not New York City, as targets for their disapproval and wrath.

Meanwhile, the West, still dominated by American thinking and preoccupation with endless wars on terror and drugs, fails to see how its position is also being overtaken by events. NATO invaded Afghanistan to give it democracy and modernity and to free the world of terrorists, yet the biggest single outcome achieved so far has been to stimulate the opium trade.

Western doctrine of recent decades advocates economic growth, business and free trade as the solution to all ills. So an Afghan farmer looks at ways of making money, does his calculations and plants opium. This helps his family and village – it's a product with a reliable market, high value and good returns. It makes him vulnerable to pressures from warlords and desperadoes but, if he grew other crops, he'd then get tax-collectors and government inspectors, so the difference is marginal.

Westerners believe in eliminating opium crops – ideally by spraying, a very blunt weapon. But the negative 'hearts and minds' effect of spraying and crop-destruction, at times poisoning villagers and ruining land, is counterproductive – NATO's need to get Afghans on its side outweighs its need to deal with drugs. Yet opium production feeds socially-destructive heroin addiction in the West and funds the very terrorists and warlords NATO is trying to control. So NATO's strategy in Afghanistan is fundamentally flawed.

Meanwhile, the Taliban's own battle includes permitting the drugs trade, making deals with drug barons and creaming off the rewards, undermining the very moral stance it originally grew strong on in the 1990s. The Taliban are no longer really viable as liberators from foreign oppression, and foreign troops are no longer viable as liberators from the warlords, the Taliban and Pashtun dominance in Afghan affairs. Both sides charge their price. All this makes ordinary villagers wonder who is on their side, or whether anything at all makes sense. So they keep their heads down, waiting to see who comes out on top, and which set of rules they are next to comply with.

Then, someone in the West thinks sensibly, for once. Westerners, rather addicted to healthcare and longevity, consume vast amounts of painkillers and anti-depressants, and there is a global shortage of opiates to supply this need. So why not legitimise opium-growers, buy up their crops, relieve pharmaceutical shortages, let Afghan farmers make some money and get them on the West's side? Sounds logical, but there's a problem.

This suggestion comes up against vested interests and old mindsets. The War against Drugs has been America's longest war – a war of disinformation, aggression, double-standards and prohibition. It has had the effect of stimulating organised crime and smuggling by creating a high-value black-market product such as heroin, when previously the product was legal, unrefined, less profitable and not much used in the West except in medicines or by artists, poets and bohemians. For the last 50 years heroin has become a socially-destructive element in Western society, brought about partially by its prohibition – heroin was first made in USA, around the time that opium was first made illegal around 1920. It also happens that the vast funds generated in smuggling heroin and other drugs can quietly be reaped for other uses – so there are now hidden financial interests who prefer the trade to continue.

The plan to buy Afghan opium thus exposes a Western cultural conflict between the Christian-based moral imperative to clean up society through eliminating drug-taking, and the amoral capitalist principle that anything that makes money is good. It reveals other nasty issues too. This policy has criminalised many young Westerners without resulting in a significant clean-up. It turned innocuous drug use before the 1960s into larger-scale drug abuse, carried out by everyone from streetwise teenagers smoking crack to top executives snorting cocaine. The most socially-destructive of all drugs, alcohol, has meanwhile remained legal and approved – there's money in it, and alcohol is a cultural prop helping drown out the heartless insensitivities of Western society.

Worse, setting up the cops-and-robbers game of prohibition has professionalised the drugs trade, concentrating power and riches in few hands and making billions available in unaccounted cash. The drugs trade has funded the weapons trade, corruption and organised crime, generating vast wealth for some. Organised crime conceals its billions in offshore banks, making massive, unaccounted black funds available in the banking system to anybody who trades in billions. Very useful. Organised crime indeed has a place in the ecology of capitalism, as long as it behaves itself.

In the early 1990s, Chechen crime-clans had amassed such massive financial reserves that they disturbed the delicate balance of global organised crime, thitherto the domain of mafias, Triads, Colombians and sundry freebooters. The Chechens got rich from crime during the 1980s Soviet war in Afghanistan. By 1994 Boris Yeltsin was heavily and quietly leant upon by the West to cut the Chechens down to size – in return for favours he needed. Russia's war on the Chechens was unwinnable, but winning wasn't the point – the Chechens just needed reducing. Even Russia's own oligarch-mafiosi were threatened by turf-wars with the Chechens in Moscow. So the Chechen wars just had to happen. It kept a cosy set of international arrangements intact.

Back to Afghanistan. To preserve the status quo, a creative solution to the Afghan impasse cannot really be entertained. Besides, it suits all those who promote the mindset of international conflict to keep the conflict going. Nowadays, a key driving force behind conflict is the arms industry itself, which wins whichever side it supplies. It has a vested interest in keeping weapons consumption, arms races and the politics of war-readiness alive. Afghanistan is one of the world's great dumping-grounds, where hardship and despair are dropped on it from far away – in all honesty, to enable others elsewhere to avoid facing their own painful truths. Whether or not this dumping is intentional, it happens.

We could dig deeper, lifting other carpets. We could look at modern people's aversion to pain, giving Big Pharma the power to sell profitable medical products to captive markets – hospital clients – who unquestioningly pay billions for them. We could look at foreign policies which advocate eliminating perceived evils rather than healing their root-causes. We could look at the conflict industry, which strives to keep war high on the agenda, persuading people to permit high military spending and the influence of military-industrial interests in politics and society. We could look at the refusal of faiths and belief systems to accept and respect one another, as well as the habitual tendency of nations to look on other nations as a threat against which they must defend themselves. These are all old-think, part of the problem, not the solution.

So many of the world's major problems are stoked up by age-old assumptions, interests and beliefs which permit little or no movement or fundamental change, because change upsets vested interests. To an extent, we all play a part in this, as perpetrators, accomplices or victims – then we wring our hands at the regrettable fixity and insanity of it all.

This cannot continue, since reality itself is shifting its baseline. The costs of all this are rising. The world currently works on the basis that unrestrained economic growth is A Good and Necessary Thing – the 1980s 'Washington Agenda' – yet economic growth benefits the prosperous more than the poor, and it's not growth but distribution of resources and wealth that is the real issue.

Meanwhile, wider considerations are increasingly bearing down on us, in every department of life. Life on Earth, for rich and poor alike, is coming into question. Today, in 2008, we are already in a climatic, demographic, economic, social and spiritual crisis worldwide and, tragically, we still delude ourselves and deny that it's happening. But it is.

We habitually believe that the customary ways, situations and ideas of the past represent the only possible route to follow. But when we're forced to look ahead at the dangers of the coming decades – such as the disappearance under water of low-lying coastal areas, of which Bangladesh has more than a fair share – the future starts affecting the present far more strongly.

Increasingly, we're being forced to make the future the basis of our current calculations. We face a sharp-edged dilemma: the solutions needed for dealing with the future are heading for a collision with the ways of the past. The future demands a serious reassessment of what is deemed important and practical. If we don't make such reassessments, crises screech along to force the issue and expose systemic weaknesses.

Yes, chemical fertilisation of land, increasing crop yields and profits in the short term, makes sense in terms of the agenda of the past. But death of fish-stocks and ecosystems, decline in the land's natural water-absorption properties, pollution of water and the chemical degradation of food stocks, with the social and political implications of all these, start red lights flashing and alarm bells ringing.

This demands quite an objective cost-benefit analysis. From a purely selfish viewpoint, if businessmen wish to profit by selling to markets, they need to have people living decent lives to form such markets and consume their products. If governments wish to stay in power, ordinary people need to feel their interests are genuinely served – whether or not they have democracy.

But this isn't the biggest question. The biggest question concerns the sustainability and quality of human life in decades to come, and the global-scale rebuilding of the natural environment and of new social, economic and technological systems to work in greater harmony with it. Today, we're caught in a contradiction: it is in our interests to change, but we are not yet willing to change fundamentally. The consequences of this paradox fall not just on Afghans.

We're heading for something, some sort of crunch in which we all are asked a simple question. What is most important – short-term self-interest or the longterm collective good? This isn't a voting matter: when we vote, we usually vote for money-in-pockets and self-interest, not for wisdom and our grandchildren's welfare. It's a far more fundamental choice: it's para-political, overriding our former concepts of belonging to a culture, class, clan, faith, nationality, gender or allegiance, and bypassing former concepts of where our interests best lie.

It's an option-less referendum. We all know what self-interest does, while the 'collective good' option is yet to be properly tested. If existing systems worked well, we would have less of a planetary problem today. But they don't work well, in the context of the emergent future. This means systemic change is needed. Not like old-style socialism, or any other -ism: we're talking about care for and sensitivity to the needs of people and nature and the need to fit fruitfully within our planet's constraining parameters.

Perhaps we need to get those coins and banknotes out of our pockets, look hard at them, and decide how important they really are, since they don't actually represent the true and full costs and benefits we need to reckon into the future. If the past prevails over the future, even our deepest, most valued traditions are likely to be eliminated. Paradoxically, if we greet the future and its demands more openly, the past might be better preserved.

The International Community

for The Bangladesh Today International
February 2008


The West – first Europe, then America – has dominated the world agenda for the last two to four centuries. In the 20th century, between the October Revolution and the Fall of the Wall, the world was polarised into two main blocs – the 'free' West and the (by implication) unfree Socialist bloc, and everyone else was obliged to align with one or the other. Then came the end of the Soviet Union and the conversion of China from Maoism to capitalism.

Something else started. In the 1990s, USA took charge as the 'global policeman', big investor and dominant power, without realising that it was running mainly on momentum and was already in historic decline. The main contribution of George Bush has been to make it a harder landing, but he has not caused, neither can he nor any US president stop, this inevitable decline. He is a symptom of it – and his successor will be too.

It is happening because the 'new idea' that makes a culture or nation great sooner or later becomes an old idea, and someone else overtakes on the outside with another 'new idea'. USA's peak was in the 1950s-70s, and by the 1990s its creativity was becoming formulaic and its energy was driven increasingly by addiction, not ambition. With that of America, the leadership, initiative and authority of the 'developed world' is deflating too. It was a carbon-based, resource-gulping, military and materialistic civilisation, and its time is passing.

Meanwhile the momentum and influence of new powers is growing. The cards are getting re-shuffled in international relations. This is leading to a tectonic shift in the power-geometry of the world, and we're in its early stages. We're faced with the decline of the West and of 'superpower geometry'. It is becoming 'multi-polar'. This is big. It leads us to a Very Big Question.

The issue is global governance. The logical step would be a single over-arching world organisation. But the history of colonialism, the Cold War and USA's recent dominance have, in a sense, blocked the prospect of establishing global governance in a centralised or unified way. The United Nations might have become the basis for such governance, but it has so much been the plaything of dominant powers, hamstrung by the precedence of national over global interests and tainted by earlier dilemmas and errors, that this possibility is pretty much lost. At best UN can coordinate nations, but it cannot act on its own behalf with full authority – nations are still able to disagree and do more or less what they want.

What is quietly taking shape instead is a pattern of roughly equal blocs or potential unions covering the main 'tectonic plates' of today's world. Already in existence are China, USA, EU and Russia, while Latin America, black Africa, the Arab world, South, Southeast and Central Asia are making tentative steps – and then there are gaps and border areas to sort out.

This is an awkward transition for which the European Union provides a model, founded as it was on a step-by-step basis over the decades. Yet the action is happening not in Europe, but in the so-called 'developing world'. There are many frictions, complications and growth-pains involved. What the developing world is taking on is far more than economic growth and development: it is taking on the big issues of the 21st century.

There's a lot of talk about the 'international community', but it's not clear what this means. There is nevertheless a pressing need for a fully functional international community, because the biggest challenges we face, from financial systems to resources to population to climate, are global, and no superpower names the game any more. Therefore, international agreement and cooperation are needed on a growing scale. It needs to deliver results – this is an urgent, practical need, increasing each year, driven by a succession of crises.

But also, everyone wants to be an exception. The world's nations like to be internationalist when it suits them, and they become detractors when things get tricky, demanding or costly, or when national sovereignty is felt to be challenged. So the 'international community' is rather dysfunctional, and tolerated as long as it doesn't dig too deep.

This is why we're surreptitiously shifting toward 'tectonic plates'. Around ten blocs who, between them, co-determine the global game, are theoretically more workable than a gaggle of nearly 200 varied and unequally-scaled nations. A multi-polar geometry is a kind of resolution of the dilemma between national and global priorities. If, that is, it succeeds.

Its success will lie in the overall balance of the multi-polar system, and of sensible relations between blocs. Also, each bloc will need the internal agreement of its own peoples. At present, Europeans have mixed feelings toward the EU: they love some aspects of it, dislike others, and the biggest issue is actually lack of public interest. To people worldwide, Europeans are Europeans, but Europeans think of themselves as French, Danes, Czechs and Greeks.

A multi-polar system will involve jostling and power struggles, intercultural grating, differences of principle and priority, crunch points and times of disarray. So this won't be easy, and the transition over the coming decades will have painful and even dangerous moments. But the transition has started. The process answers a real need: weather events, diseases, migration, money and the actions of people do not stop at borders. Sovereignty is already a questionable notion when Mitsubishis cover the world, but it is still an emotional and historic issue.

Are we serious about this 'international community'? If we are, we'd better get on with serious community-building. One thing about communities is that we all become neighbours, obliged to live and work with each other. This has a deep effect – we all start affecting and influencing one another much more. It involves getting along with people we might not like and people we have past history with. You know, it's Americans with Iranians, Vietnamese with Chinese, Israelis with Islamists, religious with secular people, townies with farmers, old with young – Us with Them.

This involves going through a process and coming to a settlement, a big arrangement to which all members can sufficiently agree. It needs to happen at the conference table and at street and forest level. If we are to succeed in the challenges ahead, it will be because basic agreement and cooperation will have been achieved, involving all of the world's people without exception – a kind of consensus and mobilisation.

The really knotty issue is that everyone must feel willing to be members, and understand why, in terms both of their own and wider interests. We need to be willing to set aside old conflicts and situations to prioritise overriding global issues. Otherwise, the global issues we face will be hamstrung, delayed or blocked, and the consequences will hit us all, equally. We'll all go down together.

Community-building is a difficult thing. It involves a truth-process, a clearing of past ills that block progress. Everyone has to join of their own free-will, otherwise there will be perpetual drag-factors at work – detractors, exceptionalists, nit-pickers, resisters and, of course, dominators who think they know best. If drag-factors prevail, the community becomes dysfunctional, locked in perpetual conflict, lost in disarray or stuck with a case of mutually-assured deterrence and inaction. Actually, there is little choice. In a community process, it's not permissible to walk out. Everyone must stay with the process and agree to do so because, with or without them, the process must continue, and they inevitably re-join.

It's not advisable for big guys – China, India, EU, USA – to dominate the agenda unless perhaps they genuinely understand and articulate the needs and priorities of the whole community. Unlikely. The West, having set in motion the 'development model' that is now giving us planet-wide climatic and environmental problems, now lectures the rest of the world about what should be done – and, in a sense, the world is right to push back, and the West is also right to argue its case. But there is a serious job to be done, using all means that are available, and it must be done somehow. The world cannot afford to delay.

Who will facilitate this community-building process? The UN? Some countries have legitimate distrust of the UN's impartiality and competence. But it's the only genuinely international body we have. Are we going to create another? Is there time? Would it make things different? Or do we need to give UN the necessary power, finance, people, transport planes and capacity to interfere, when necessary, in nations' private affairs? If we don't take such a step, then we will need to meet global needs by multilateral cooperation, country by country, which will bring up equally large questions, many weaknesses and lots of complexity.

What about the grievances of the past? Countries have been raped for their slaves, cocoa, oil and strategic placement. People have been marched over by foreign armies. The world is stacked with old arguments that go back centuries, even millennia. Plenty of countries have an axe to grind, and internal stresses too. Unfortunately, we cannot just shrug shoulders and set these things aside. Old resentments and social pain are passed through the generations on a deep level. So community-building involves a rather profound, delicate, emotional truth-process, even a catharsis. And this, of course, is tricky.

Catharsis – emotional release – involves bringing old issues up and out. Without it, they will lurk in hidden recesses, awaiting touchy moments when a situation arises to remind us of something that shouldn't have happened before. Then they can explode. When such touchy moments arise, they not only complicate or obstruct things, but they create new damage, with new generations of hurt people, new wrecked landscapes and new tangles arising from them. The Israeli bombing of South Lebanon in 2006 was a good example of an emotionally-charged situation where the Israeli response, for whatever reason, far exceeded need or wisdom – and this was not just an isolated case. We cannot afford this – time is too short. So we must be brave.

We have to bring out the old hurts and resentments without letting them go too far. Truths do have to be said. Not only the legitimate truths of victims – of Vietnamese toward Americans, Serbs toward Germans, Uighurs towards Chinese or indigenous peoples toward imperialists – but also the truths of victors, oppressors and accomplices. The British became oppressors partially because they themselves, way back, had been invaded four times. Han Chinese became overlords partially because of the ravages of Mongols that stirred them into action. Imperialism and power-projection are fight-back strategies staged, tragically, by former victims. So tragedy cuts all ways – we are all humans who suffer the predicament of being alive in the situation we find ourselves in.

This is the realisation that bonds a community: we're all in the same boat, and we'd better behave ourselves, otherwise the boat sinks and we all drown. Men and women, rich and poor, powerful and powerless, in the 21st century we share a predicament. We are all equally threatened with major global challenges, and the only way to get a grip on the situation is to act together. This requires self-discipline, mutual understanding, forgiveness and truth. If we fail apply such qualities to ourselves, expecting others to do it first, then we might as well stop talking about an international community.

So we'd better get on with the community-building process. Not just the mandarins at the international conferences, but you and me too. This concerns changing our attitudes and behaviour. Making friends with strangers, enemies and outsiders is necessary and sensible. Sharing and cooperation is the new economics. Redefining our personal, clan and national interests is necessary, because self-interest is increasingly costly and suicidal. The extremists of today are the moderates of tomorrow. The problems of today are the hidden blessings of the future, if we will but see them differently.

This involves bringing up awkward truths, to get them out of the way. Not conflict, but reconciliation. Declaring an end to the past and its arguments. Not an easy or simple thing. This happens by being willing to go through a process, with a far-sighted determination to come out the other side, to get somewhere. We need to speak our truths without blame or accusation, share our pain without hurting others afresh, and share our strengths without excluding the stranger at our door. This sounds idealistic and fancy, but it's pragmatic and realistic now and in coming decades. If we don't hang together, we simply hang separately.

Which is why the international community just has to happen. It's why North Koreans, Iranians, Israelis, Cubans and, yes, now Americans, have to be brought in from the cold. If we cannot join hands and work together as a global team of billions, we go down. We betray our grandchildren, we hurt Allah, we burn up our planetary home, and the shame will be ours, with no one else to blame.

So, united nations, here we come. If, that is, the world will permit it. My nation and sub-group, your nation and sub-group – still relevant, but now within a much wider context. We're all God's little children, however we describe it. We have a job to do, building a new culture and civilisation, a new humanity occupying one wee planet on the edge of a provincial galaxy. If we don't, all of human history could come to little or nothing. This is the importance of the international community, and the clock is ticking.

Peering into the Future

An article for The Bangladesh Today
Late December 2007


The 20th Century didn’t really start until World War One broke out in 1914. The century was characterised by ‘developed world’ domination, the successor to 19th Century colonialism. We saw motor cars, planes, plastics, electronics, gizmos, radio, TV and film. There was a struggle between capitalism, fascism and socialism which fascism lost and capitalism eventually won – though it didn’t look like this at first. We saw globalisation, transnational corporations, vast population growth, over-consumption by some and overwork by most. Engines, rotors, pipes, wires and transmitters went everywhere. Vast wars and crises arose, killing people in millions. Mega-cities spread like fungus.

All of these tendencies developed from the 1880s onwards, but it took until the Great War for people to see what was happening. The Great War represented an enormous failure to accept the future: aristocratic ruling classes strove to hold power in the face of a rising tide of socialism, populism, mass culture, democracy and the new upstarts, America and Russia. The old order lost. Its time was done. A new, industrialised, totalitarian world replaced it, driven by a nomenklatura of bosses, politicians, shareholders, executives and experts, all dressed in suits.

Why this lecture in recent history? Well, we’re at it again. Some historians call the period 1914-1989 ‘the Short 20th Century’, recognising that a new agenda was starting in the 1990s. One historian even prematurely named 1989 ‘the end of history’, but he got it wrong. This was partially ideological and partially because, when standing on the edge of a threshold, it is difficult to visualise what comes next. Here we are, entering 2008 – in the Western dating system, at least – yet we haven’t entered the 21st Century. Really entered it. We’re still looking at life in past terms. If truth be known, we’re scared to look squarely at the future. It’s big.

We’re aware something else is kicking in, and we all know most of the issues, but we haven’t put them together into a Big Picture – what we could call a 21st Century Agenda. A century ago, we had a new Big Idea on the table, called socialism. But that was an ideology, conceived by a small number of individuals. Today, there are bazillions of ideas flying around, but the Big Picture hasn’t crystallised. But it is now revealing itself, thanks mainly to pretty tough ‘facts on the ground’. What the world is faced with today is not a Big Idea but a Big Dilemma.

Here we are, living out our lives, running a movie based in the past, as if rapid economic growth of the current kind had no consequences. The West is trying, at all costs, to maintain the status quo and keep its own best interests at the top of the world agenda. Enforced either by ‘shock and awe’, background manoeuvring or incentive, the rest of the world has tended thus far to fall into line, but this is disintegrating and we’re entering new territory.

The idea of a ‘developing world’, created by ‘developed’ nations, implies that development means following in their footsteps. Yes, buy our chainsaws, jeeps, tanks and burgers, and you too can be developed – and fat and unhappy, just like us! Few mention that, for one person to get rich, a hundred have to get poor. Besides, the idea that everyone can get rich and ‘developed’ is a recipe for planetary disaster.

Besides, it’s not the developing world – it’s the Majority World. The former third world is now increasingly setting the agenda. After colonialism and client-status, having adopted many aspects of the West’s provenance, something new is brewing. It’s not just a matter of copying and adoption, but one of getting to grips with issues the West cannot face, and which to a large extent, the West set in motion. The West is terribly stuck in its ways and feeling insecure.
The core difference between the majority world and the developed world is one of motivation.

For the majority world the agenda is, “Things just have to get better, and we’re going to make it so, whatever it takes”. For the developed world it is, “Things are fine as they are (with just a few problems), and change is welcome as long as nothing actually changes”. The first motivates action and progress, and the second looks backward and leads nowhere. The West has lost the plot – it is vision-less. It had an opportunity to change fundamentally in the 1960s-70s, and missed it.

This isn’t a simple transfer of power and wealth from one part of the world to another, or a re-balancing of global inequities. We stand at a juncture much bigger than this. Globalisation is digging deeper, and the Big Dilemma the world faces is global in extent. This changes sovereign states into interdependent world provinces, whether we like it or legislate for it, or not. The big issue is the international community, planetary ecosystems and climate, global intercultural relations, the living conditions of the world’s people, and a host of other related issues we all know of by now.

Resolving our planetary dilemma isn’t just a matter of tweaking, funding, regulating, developing and rearranging existing things, or even wind-farms and solar panels. It involves a completely new world-view anchored in the future. We need to visualise the far future and count back from there. Arguably, one hidden meaning of today’s major events is that the future is asserting an increasing influence on the present. We’re dealing with the consequences of the past, and the damage done to nature and humanity, but it concerns our future survival. If we don’t face this, life everywhere will become ever more unpleasant and intolerable in coming decades. Everyone is involved, without exception – especially the rich.

This planetary situation is very complex, and each country has its own version of it, with its own versions of the internal tensions and crises it brings up. The nub of the matter is global and can be resolved only through effective international decisions, action and mobilisation. All nations now have a more dramatic need for change than they acknowledge. No nation wishes to change first, and all nations must do it together. This is at least talked about but still not done – the recent Bali conference on climate change was woefully inadequate in outcome when compared with the scale of the problem and the lateness of the day.

Economic growth and activity as we do it today is incompatible with eco-sustainability, human welfare and survival. This hasn’t been accepted yet, but it’s coming. There are no Big Ideas to which all the world can agree, to sort us out. Even the dominant superpower and creative leader of the last fifty years, America, is itself lost, foundering, floundering and devoid of truly valuable strategies. We’re left with two main possibilities: the international community, such as it is, and the world’s people.

The international community is going through an anxious community-building process. This involves facing uncomfortable issues and dealing with new situations, while constrained by old institutions and mechanisms. Driven by necessity, the community-building process is approaching a critical point in which all nations must give up some of their independence. It’s not just a matter of shouting at America and the West, or them shouting back. It’s a matter of joining together to resolve differences and problems in utterly new ways. It requires entirely new thinking: not so much a new Big Idea as a new method for facing facts and resolving crises.

Scientists can crunch vast quantities of data to create climate models, but simple farmers in Uzbekistan and Bolivia understand a lot too. They see what is happening in some respects more clearly. Especially when it washes away your village and kills your family. One of the world’s big problems is that its governments and institutions have lost touch with real life quite significantly, and their legitimacy is in question. One of the big problems for ordinary people is that we are not practised in mass action without due leadership. But our leaderships are not really up to the task: when the USSR went through perestroika, the leaderships had created the problem and were part of it, not of the solution. Governments come to power to protect countries and their elites, pump economies and keep people’s narrower aims satisfied, not to save the planet or give power to foreigners.

What is shaping up is an enormous getting-real process. Globally, in a hundred years, we need to have resolved the 21st Century’s agenda points. We have to. What is this agenda? It is not an end in itself, but a means by which a new kind of planetary civilisation might come about. Sounds like sci-fi, this, but stay with it, for this is the way we are going. Here’s the agenda, roughly speaking, as far as I can describe it.

- By the end of the century our societies need to be significantly happier, safer, friendlier, more supportive and inclusive.

- We need to have created ecologically sustainable societies which not only avoid harming and depleting nature, but also engage in its enhancement and the building up of the world’s natural capital and resources.

- World ecosystems and climate need to achieve a new equilibrium under a proportioned human management which works on the basis of humans as guests, not owners.

- The world’s cultures, social and ethnic groups need to appreciate and enhance their distinctions while acting on a basis of partnership and commonality – we’re all in the same boat.

- The global economy needs to be sufficiently equitable and sustainable, regarding both human conditions and natural resources, to eliminate dire need, excesses of poverty and wealth and to give all people a fair chance.

- Our civilisation – our cities, technologies and life-means – needs much rebuilding, to accommodate and reflect the other priorities outlined here.

- Governance and social decision-making systems need to reflect not vested interests but the general and planetary good.

- Country and city need to coexist without urban needs and priorities overwhelming country ways, since simpler, rural societies are the keepers of secrets and life-ways important to all of us.

- Population-growth and demographics need at least to have stabilised.

- An emotional clearing- and healing-process of historic hurts, social guilt, dissonance and degeneration needs to be in progress – addressing the spirits and psychology of society.

- A process of spiritual, creative and cultural health needs to pervade our societies anew.

This list gives an idea of what we’re looking at. Before you say, “Well, fine, but I can’t see it happening”, just remember that, a century ago, computers, supermarkets and jumbo-jets weren’t imaginable either. In those days, folk from my country, Britain, ruled your country, Bangladesh, then part of the Raj. Now, three generations of folk from your country have lived in mine, most counting themselves as Brits and many serving in our great national institutions. Things change more than we can foresee. And necessity is the mother of invention.

Today we’re faced with a Big One, and the above-stated objectives are no longer wishful thinking or ideological. They are simply the likely results of what we will have gone through during this century, by necessity, since our welfare and survival are at stake. This hits everyone, rich and poor alike, with levelling implications. There are sufficient wealth and resources in the world, but they are badly distributed, wasted, utilised, exhausted and ruined.

At present, the critical factor seems to be climate change, bringing weather extremes, ecological and social changes. Other criticals hide behind this. The consequences and side-effects of our current way of life are enormous. Surmounting them is a bigger challenge than we prefer to acknowledge. It requires a social and economic mobilisation and quantum shift. In earlier times we have done this during wars. Yet such a mobilisation, this time, could render wars obsolete because, to win this battle, we need to work with, not against, each other. Besides, any victor in a 21st Century war is a loser anyway, because the problem is planetary.

In Britain, in 1940-42, our society and economy were transformed in just two years, from a capitalist to a command economy in which women and old people took over agriculture and production, children were shipped out of cities, men went abroad, everyone depended on each other, fairness of distribution of food and resources was paramount, people worked and played hard, and it worked. Today’s Brits look back on this time as one of national breakthrough and social triumph. Precedents such as this exist for us to refer to. But it required a big national decision, made at the top and the bottom of society, to pull through together. There was resistance at first. But when people saw the price of not doing it, things changed fast.

In our time, we approach a similar situation, but bigger. The price of not changing is overtaking the price of changing. It could be easier if we were faced with an alien invasion, because we’re used to facing external threats. But this threat comes from inside, from us, and only we can address it, through a radical change of behaviour in all areas of life everywhere.

And this is a strange Gift of God. Our Big Dilemma forces changes we needed to make anyway. We have failed to do it through wisdom and choice, so we’re now facing shock and awe of a kind that makes the American version look weak. Humans get activated and mobilised by crisis. We might have six billion mouths to feed, but we’ve got the same number of pairs of hands to do it with.

This is a taste of the 21st Century agenda. Our great-grandchildren will know the outcome, but the crunch period is in the next half-century. In a century from now, we could have a new, planet-wide civilisation of which none of us can conceive at present – though its principles are visible. To get there, we’ll need to prioritise the future over the past. The gift lies in the fact that we have no alternative but to work together and to face things we have needed to face for a long time. In a manner of speaking, this is the achievement of a new kind of umma or human community, yet far beyond the confines of the Muslim world, and for entirely practical reasons. The biggest challenge in the 21st Century is not ecological: it is for everyone to become friends – and this way, we’ll sort out the rest. That’s a quantum shift.

Legitimacy

An article for The Bangladesh Today
November 2007


Legitimacy is one of the emergent big issues of our time. In business, it is called ‘confidence’. Although ‘legitimacy’ usually means legality and conformity with existing standards or tradition, the modern term has deeper and wider implications. It pertains to all people in positions of power, in governmental, corporate, social, NGO, international, cultural and religious arenas.

Nowadays, legitimacy is based increasingly on merit and results: an office-holder is widely accepted to be a deserving, competent, representative and supportable holder of power – or not, as the case may be – on the basis of what they do. On occasions, currents of public feeling can even bestow legitimacy, thus power, on people out of office, who act as a lightning-rod for public trust and confidence – Lech Walesa of Poland and Nelson Mandela of South Africa experienced this, both outsiders who became presidents.

The conferral of legitimacy arises from popular perception and the power of events and circumstance. The key issue is how well those in positions of responsibility handle events, especially during defining moments. Their capacity to unite people is also crucial – not by carrots and sticks but by earning support. They’re accountable to the judgement of history, to mysterious shifts of human discernment and the constraints of facts and events beyond their control.

Former French president Georges Pompidou once said: “A statesman is a politician who places himself at the service of a nation. A politician is a statesman who places the nation at his service”. This sheds light on what imperial Chinese called the ‘Mandate of Heaven’. Chinese tradition saw the emperor as a middleman between the Ways of Heaven (or the Will of God) and the fortunes of the land and people. Confucius advised that, if the emperor no longer served the Mandate of Heaven, he should be obliged to change or be deposed. Heaven and Earth need to be in harmony and, without such resonance, disaster strikes – heaven, people or evolving facts force the necessary adjustments, and emperors become paper tigers.

This isn’t yet another incantation of the virtues of democracy or the need for all countries slavishly to adopt it. The world’s ‘mature democracies’ suffer problems of legitimacy too. Voters elect governments for strange reasons, including self-interest, short-termism, gullibility and clannish allegiances, with only periodic bursts of popular clarity or wisdom. Electoral systems and quirky constitutions frequently yield skewed results, influenced by media, spin-doctors, vested interests and money. Political parties often fail to represent people’s needs, resembling managerial teams more than ethical alternatives. The true, overall, longterm national interest and social contract is rarely discussed. Big issues are swept under the carpet and, “if democracy ever really changed anything, they’d make it illegal”.

Once a government enters office, it receives a quiet lecture about what it may or may not do. In truth, democratic nations’ evangelic claims about the rightness of democracy often conceal or betray its very weakness: it is a neat way of disguising where power really lies. Many people in democratic countries know by experience that elections don’t change much, but they keep on getting psyched up for the next election, continuing to hope the next government will be different. It rarely is, and short memories bury the deeper lesson to be learned from this.

So democracy is not necessarily the big answer. To quote Winston Churchill in 1947, “Many forms of government have been tried and will be tried. No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed, it has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all those other forms that have been tried”.

Jimmy Carter, now an elder, recently said that he had achieved far more as an ex-president than when he was in office. This says something about the nature of power, influence and legitimacy.

Nevertheless, democracy theoretically enshrines two important principles. First, when people need to express a view, their voice needs to be heard. Second, when the power-structure is perceived fundamentally to fail the needs of the people or the challenges of events, people need to be able to influence or change that power-structure. As Confucius advised.

Even here, democracies fail. In my own country, Britain, the biggest popular demonstrations in our history opposed invading Iraq in 2003. Not only did the government disagree with and ignore the message but also, later, the people voted to return that government to power. This was largely because the other party had a bad reputation and wasn’t a credible alternative. But is this democracy working well?

So we arrive at a key issue. In the end, it doesn’t really matter what power system exists in a country. What matters is the approach taken by those in power, their heart, their capacity to read the signals and interpret the spirit of the time. How good are their decisions and how much do they serve the nation? Nowadays this embraces the natural environment and wider world too. It’s a tall order, but it’s still what’s needed. The nub of the matter is motivation and integrity.

Legitimacy is strange, undefined, evasive and immeasurable. Largely perceptual, it feeds mysteriously on events handled and actions taken. It is intimately connected with the inherent sub-stratum of healthy, creative vibrancy in any society. When a society is unwell, everyone knows it, somewhere in their being, even when it is unarticulated. Things just don’t work out right, and a society becomes susceptible to challenge and duress. This can arise from nature (weather extremes, earthquakes, bad harvests), other countries and peoples (wars, trade imbalances or cultural infiltration) or from internal sources (power battles, economic conditions, social stresses or public feelings).

Here we come to the Ways of Heaven and the Will of God. A nation or people could be looked on as a psychological entity and, like an individual, its psyche is made up of a number of sub-personalities, each with their natures, preferences, issues and conflicts. These sub-personalities sometimes cooperate, sometimes accommodate and sometimes clash, pulling a nation this way or that. The nation’s ego, its power structure, tries to train and control the nation’s disparate elements. The salient question is whether the nation’s ego gets things sufficiently right.

Nations have a conscious mind: what they believe to be true about themselves, their reality and their country. It is a nation’s icons, official culture, capital and institutions. They also have an unconscious psyche: the hidden dreams, horrors and unconscious behaviour, the stuff that a nation doesn’t see, or want to see, about itself – its shanty-towns, brothels, waste tips, squalors and corruptions. All nations have their own unique varieties!

If pent-up unconscious feelings grow in potency and charge, especially as a result of social denial and repression, and if a society harbours many dishonesties and injustices, it renders itself vulnerable to challenge by the force of events. If a nation is relatively disunited, dysfunctional and ineffective, such challenges can rudely expose its unspoken agendas, rifts, ghosts, devils, obsolescences, imbalances and inadequacies.

These challenges are, in a sense, utterances of the ‘will of God’. It’s not that God seeks to punish us for our badnesses. It’s more that the universe seeks balance, and if things are out of balance, then events will expose this and pose the option of correction. Correction increases social trust, support, integrity, mutuality and transparency, helping redress rampant injustices and remove glitches. This is how the Mandate of Heaven restores itself. Human choices and actions are involved at all levels of society.

This is a sensitive matter in the 21st Century, because the world is slipping into crisis, not only from climate change and oil-dependency, the two current heavyweights, but from many other problems we all know about. This is becoming less national-scale and increasingly global: Cyclone Sidr hit Bangladesh specifically, though it highlighted a global issue, climate change. It wasn’t just Bangladesh’s problem.

The capacity of nations to play their part in the international community, and the world’s capacity to respond effectively to events and crises, is now a more critical issue than ever before. Crucial here is each nation’s domestic capacity to handle its own part in the global equation. International agreements are fine, but it’s people themselves who deal with the outcomes. And to resolve global issues, each nation needs to get its people behind its power-structure. And power-structures can do this by developing their legitimacy. Legitimacy comes under test during acute crises, and such crises are growing in number and intensity. We return to the Mandate of Heaven. The Great and The Small, as the Chinese called it, need to work together.

Here lies an even deeper question, about the social and cultural integrity of a nation or people. People can, to an extent, work around problems deriving from their power-structures, and where the people lead with clarity and resolve, the leaders do follow. But power-structures are a crucial bottleneck, since they sit at the centre of nations and play a key role in defining integrity. The pressure on power-structures is coming not just from below, but from other power-structures worldwide. An enormous renegotiation of international relations is coming into view.

Legitimacy cannot be controlled with troops, propaganda, patronage, bribery or fortune. It has to be earned. Few people expect perfection, but there are standards of public integrity, truth, self-correction and service which all organisations must develop to meet coming times. Otherwise corrective events come to pass. Their wildfire effect can be rapid and widespread, exposing strings of interrelated weaknesses. Hurricanes and floods in Central America can create an insurance crisis in Hong Kong, and air pollution from the Iraq war fell on the fields of Bangladesh and has duly been eaten by its people.

We live in turbulent and unstable times. Power-structures work when they respond well to changing circumstances and truly play their part in that organism called a nation. But when limited and vested interests, or rigidity, tradition, ideology or denial predominate, it’s not going to be easy. The agenda is fundamentally changing, by necessity, and the narrative of past decades and generations is turning inside out.

The fortunes of nations are increasingly determined by all nations together, whether by shared decision or failure to decide. The legitimacy of elites around the world is tied to this, in nations, regions and localities large and small. We are all too much affected by each other. We cannot progress significantly until we all sufficiently agree to act together. To make agreements that deliver results, power-structures need to work hard to increase their legitimacy. Legitimacy gets people behind them. Without it, the world will fail to tackle the big issues before it, and we’re all in trouble.

Legitimacy isn’t a formula, but you know it when you’ve got it, and you’d better be honest if you haven’t. Nowadays it is earned, not inherent or inherited. Ultimately – and this worries public figures a lot – it concerns how history remembers you. But today’s situation is too urgent to wait for history’s judgement – it concerns today, and soon.

Every society and culture has its own ways and solutions, and these must be pursued. But what matters also is the intermeshing of the world’s societies and cultures: we must develop enough global problem-solving capacity to face what is hitting us, worldwide. Each nation and people holds a piece of the jigsaw. It was legitimate for Bangladesh to offer assistance to USA after Hurricane Katrina: Bangladesh has specialist knowhow in such matters. Every country needs to be an aid donor in whatever it has plenty of.

We’re in a global community-forming process. If we don’t want the superpower domination of the late 20th Century, in which decisions have been made for us and enforced by threat, bribery or regulation, the ‘international community’ really has to work. Regarding this, I am reminded of an apposite quotation.

This story concerns four people: Everybody, Somebody, Anybody and Nobody. There was an important job to be done, and Everybody was asked to do it. Everybody was sure Somebody would do it. Anybody could have done it but in the end Nobody did it. Somebody got very angry over this because it was really Everybody’s job. Everybody thought Anybody would do it, but Nobody realised that Everybody wouldn't do it. It ended up that Everybody blamed Somebody when actually Nobody had asked Anybody.

The Question of Israel

for The Bangladesh Today International
April 2008
Article five in a series by Palden Jenkins looking at global issues and the 21st Century.

This concerns a small land with a big obstructing influence on the world. The conflict between Israel and the Palestinians has dragged on for sixty years, and previous ways of resolving it, either by the victory of one side or by peace process, have not worked. So we must do some new thinking. It’s fitting to look at some of the underlying longterm factors affecting this conflict. This is a global issue not just because Jerusalem is a holy place to three faiths: the ‘Holy Land’ is a microcosm of the world, into which many global issues are compressed.

In the 1990s I ran a peace conference in which a Nigerian Muslim said an interesting thing. People were agreeing that Nelson Mandela was a great man, for stopping a bloodbath in South Africa. But Mahmoud had an interesting insight. He said that the hero of the day was really President de Klerk, the white Afrikaner who prepared the way for Mandela and the ANC to gain power. Why was he a hero? Because Mandela had remained consistent throughout his life, while de Klerk had had the courage to change. This silenced everyone at the conference – most were whites, and here was a black man praising a right-wing, nationalist Afrikaner.

Some Israelis call me anti-Semitic because I work mainly with Palestinians. Some Palestinians get upset with me because I talk with Israelis, many of whom are fine people. Working with both is not easy – there’s a physical and psychological gulf between them that is difficult to bridge. Here comes the bit where I risk being misunderstood: I empathise with Israelis. Not because I support Israel, but because I support people, all people. Looking at the longterm, Israel is in trouble – ultimately, perhaps in deeper trouble than the Palestinians.

Israel’s momentum is sagging, and a difficult time of truth is coming. Palestinians are already accustomed to hard truth and tough times – things can only get better, and if they get do get worse, sad to say, it’s ‘more of the same’. But for Israelis, who have had a more comfortable and successful life, things could get a lot worse, and they would notice the difference, bigtime.

Certain factual issues can no longer be ignored or avoided in Israel and Palestine. The Israeli tendency to stave things off to make them go away, doesn’t make them go away. It’s a collection of issues.

First, aliyah, the migration of Jews to Israel, has slowed to a trickle. Israel is not the safe haven Jews initially sought, back in the shadow of WW2 and the Holocaust. The majority of Jews are happier outside Israel, and those who wished to move have already migrated there. In addition, some people are trickling away from Israel, to get a job, get a better life for their families, or alienated after doing military service. They’re not decisively emigrating, but they’re leaving until things get better – perhaps a vain hope. These are signs of deflation of Israel’s national project.

Second, Israelis are a disparate and argumentative lot. Many outsiders find difficulty figuring out how these people stick together as a nation. They are united by their nationalism but, beyond that, 'for every two Israelis there are three opinions', strongly held too, and national unity is a troublesome factor. This is partially ethnic – Israelis originate from so many countries. Disparities between rich and poor are amongst the world’s highest, and these cleave along ethnic lines, with European and American Ashkenazim at the top of the pile.

At the founding of the nation in 1948-49, the Israeli Knesset couldn't even agree on a constitution, so contradictory were the competing views. Today, though Israel is democratic, its governments are usually made up of coalitions in which small, diverse, fringe parties gain disproportionate influence. The nation’s prime ministers are frequently retired military men, as if defence, not social wellbeing, were the highest priority.

This political unclarity has long bugged the nation, allowing military and minority agendas and calculations to dominate. Anticipation of the threat of annihilation of the Jewish people causes the nation to lock step against its enemies and suppress its internal differences, at least while the heat is up. This belief has its foundation in history, but it also acts as a prophecy seeking fulfilment. It is growing outdated as the older generation dies off – and what would happen if peace actually came and the threat evaporated? The ‘iron wall’ mentality has become a comfort-zone, less threatening than dropping the idea that goyim, non-Jews, are anti-Semitic and not to be trusted. But it presents an enormous moral dilemma too – it causes Israelis to act against their own longterm interests.

In a context of peacemaking, the Zionist tendency, which has long influenced the national agenda, must give way to a more reasonable tendency, willing to make deals and concessions with the neighbours. This would be an historic, emotional shift, involving dropping an old historic fear and reformulating the nation’s purpose. Yet achieving genuine peace would give Israeli Jews the safety they seek – after a generation of calming and bridge-building, that is.

At least half of the Israeli public is conflict-weary. But the ‘iron wall’ mindset is strong as a national survival strategy and most toe the line when under pressure, close their eyes, stay ‘in the bubble’ and hope the problem of conflict will go away. Which repeatedly it doesn’t. Peace is inevitable – it’s simply a matter of how long it takes and what it involves. Israelis have to face this sometime, and facts on the ground are nowadays pushing things forward.

Third, Israelis pay an enormous price for war, military preparedness and the insecurity of conflict. This is psychological, multi-generational, and it harms society and the economy. West Bank settlements are claustrophic, the Israeli security wall isolates Israelis as well as Palestinians, domestic violence is escalating, and many Israeli adults are damaged by military service. Tourism and pilgrimage have collapsed, Israel is regarded by some as a pariah state, taxation is high, conflict and uncertainty keep returning, and poverty hits some people hard. This price cannot be borne indefinitely.

Fourth, USA is Israel’s only serious supporter. USA’s capacity to continue supporting Israel is decreasing, yet Israel depends on it. Without this support, Israel will need to fully acknowledge its position in the Middle East, by necessity making friends with its neighbours. Not only because Israel is surrounded, but also because time simply moves on, and new and different things need to happen. Time indeed is moving on – its defeat by Hezbollah in 2006, and USA’s failure in Iraq, show that the impassioned feelings of fighters can overwhelm mighty military machines.

Fifth, it’s those Palestinians. Despite losing their conflict with the Israelis again and again, the Palestinians have two factual advantages. One is their high birth rate. Whatever their status, they are becoming a majority of the joint population of Israel and Palestine – even the proportion of Arabs living in ‘Israel proper’ has increased, currently around 20% of the population. In the end, numbers count. The Palestinians haven’t gone away.

The other advantage is that, despite Palestinians’ misery, their society is in a strange way socially healthier than Israeli society. Palestinians have been so thoroughly deprived and have lived without proper governance for so long that they have adapted in ways that make their society quite resilient. A mixed blessing, this spirited accommodation to hardship and tragedy represents a valuable and rare community resource.

Despite the tendency of young Palestinian men to squabble and fight when they get worked up, and the recent schism between Fatah and Hamas, Palestinian social bonds are a strength. They’re economically poor and socially relatively rich – meanwhile developed countries are rich materially and poor socially. Israelis know little of this: most never meet Palestinians or see their living areas. When Israeli soldiers serve in the Palestinian Territories, it often takes them a year of national service to realise that what they have been taught about Palestinians does not reflect what they see – and many soldiers land up angry, disorientated or go into exile as a result.

There are further issues. One is environmental: Israel is a toxic mess, and Palestine too. Military and economic priorities in Israel have prevailed over the ‘luxury’ of environmental cleanup, except now it is no longer a luxury. Palestine’s hardships, shortages and weak infrastructure render it into a health and pollution risk for itself and for Israel – Palestinians are not in a position to attend to environmental and public health issues. There is a massive water resource problem for both countries, and paradoxically Palestinians, Syrians and Shi’ite Lebanese, ‘the enemy’, live on top of Israel’s main water-sources. Environmental issues are like a time-bomb waiting to go off, and they could be determining factors in the future.

Another matter is the wider world, where things are moving on, and to an extent Israel and Palestine are being left behind. In the longterm, this could benefit Palestine more than Israel. Palestine, especially Gaza, being walled off from the world, suffers great hardship, yet this insulates it from some of the development-related problems experienced in other countries. Martin Bell, a veteran BBC war correspondent, once wrote, “Peace and freedom can be defined as the peace that makes traffic jams possible and the freedom to be stuck in them”.

In the longterm, Palestinian sufferings could have some advantages. Hamas, despite the economic embargo imposed by Israel and the West after its election to government in early 2006, is still more popular than Fatah. If its project of building a society based on the principles of the umma eventually succeeds, its tough stance of resisting Israeli and foreign pressure might pay off in the longterm – though this is currently an open question. Palestine could become a seedbed for a new kind of society in a generation’s time, under different global conditions.

Meanwhile, Israel, rather self-preoccupied and defying the world on matters of international law and decent behaviour, is missing out on important developments. A small and crowded country, it cannot forever live within walls. The course Israel has followed since its founding sixty years ago is changing. This ‘whither next?’ feeling eats away at the Israeli heart. Israel was a land of hope and promise for Jews, and things have gone strangely sour.

As an immigrant land, the nation needs a clear sense of purpose to define itself, and Israel is faced with finding a new one. Currently it is reluctant, clueless and divided, stuck in a loop of blocking progress in peace, behaving badly and denying it. The fear is that if its defensive aggression stops, the nation will lose out and fall apart. Still, the wider agenda surrounding Israel is changing, in the Arab world and globally, the Israeli army is not as strong as it once was, and sooner or later Israel will need to square up with emergent facts. It’s a matter of how easy or painful this is to be.

This is scary for Israelis, perhaps more scary than the threat of Palestinians or Arabs. It involves building a new national consensus based not on a post-Holocaust mentality but on the demands of the future. Historically, Jews have had a legitimate fear of persecution and annihilation, but new generations are growing up for whom the Holocaust is their grandparents’ history. In the 21st Century Israelis are in a position to make peace with the world and to end this cycle.

The main problem is not the fact of being Jewish, or anti-Semitism, but the current behaviour and perceived behaviour of Israel. Its settlement- and wall-building, its oppression of Palestinians and Lebanese and its international intransigence are simply unsustainable, if Israel wants friends. Given time to cool down, many Arabs and Palestinians would be willing to accept a friendly, fair and neighbourly Israel: but first, crucial matters of justice and correction have to be worked out.

This involves Israelis and Arabs making a profound choice to get on with each other. Here lies the basis of Hamas’ proposal that a final peace settlement cannot be achieved in this generation. They propose making a longterm truce and interim agreement, allowing time to cool tempers, leaving a final settlement to a later generation. This is a mature viewpoint, recognising the depth of the damage done on both sides. But it rather confronts Israelis’ hidden fears too: Israel’s many ‘tribes’ will then have to come to an accommodation between themselves – the Ashkenazim and Sephardim, the seculars and the religious, the different nationalities and interest groups who jostle together for influence in Israel. For they have come to rely on having an enemy to keep them united.

Israelis yet need to clarify whether they wish to live in a state reserved for Jews, or a multi-ethnic state with significant Palestinian, Bedouin, Druze and foreign populations. Current Israeli delaying tactics are eroding the possibility of a two-state solution, so Israel will have to square with this question and the Palestinians in another way. This is emotionally and politically difficult for them. But it’s easier than the alternative – continued conflict.

Palestinians have already seen downfall and hardship. Israelis fear the worst – and this prospect eats at their belief in themselves. Though Palestinians suffer immensely, their agenda is relatively simple: they need a better life. How to get there divides them but, while significant, this is a manageable issue. Meanwhile Israelis are deeply confused, their government fails to represent their needs, and they resort to digging in, repeating past errors, for want of another strategy.

For them, a lot of soul-searching, social and emotional reorientation lies ahead. Israelis will ultimately gain from this. It leads toward the building of a safer, happier society, at peace with its neighbours, no longer surrounded by walls, watchtowers and barbed wire, openly playing a part in the wider Middle East and the world.

Meanwhile, the Middle East is moving surreptitiously toward a reuniting process – whether in the form of a common market as proposed by the sheikhs and magnates of the Gulf states, or a caliphate as proposed by Islamists. However this process unfolds, the Middle East is likely, within fifty years, to be relatively unified, very different from today. This would re-contextualise Israel’s position, especially since the Middle East might by that time be more central and in charge of its fate than it has been.

For millennia, Jews have been spread around the Middle East, integral to its societies. Returning to this might be anathema to some Muslims, but let’s remember that Jews and Muslims coexisted well enough for centuries until the arrival of Israel in the mid-20th Century. Events in Europe set the founding of Israel and its militant stance in motion, and many Middle Eastern Jews had grave reservations over it.

The reuniting of the Middle East implies a weakening of the national borders drawn by Britain and France in the 1920s and a gradual reintegration of its diverse societies. Whatever anyone’s feelings are today, the linking of ethnic security with territorial control is likely to be superseded by bigger regional and global priorities in the coming time. We’re all in this rather threatened world together, and we sink or swim together.

We can thus imagine a time when Jews form a grouping within a larger Middle East, in which the different peoples of the region define themselves not by territory but by their social niche and role. Over the centuries, Jews lived in Sumer, Babylon and Baghdad, in Damascus and Alexandria and from Spain to Central Asia. The future has a place for Jews, just as South Africa has remained a place for whites, living together with blacks. The big issue of the future is ecological survival and international cooperation, not narrow national interest or ethnic or religious strife. This massive shift of global priorities is coming.

But such a fundamental change requires an act of trust, a getting-real process in the Middle East. This is easier when it’s behind you than in front of you. Israelis have a big choice ahead. If they fail to make that choice, their nation might be doomed – not by being driven into the sea by Arabs, but because Israelis lose hope and a sense of future. For this reason, Israelis deserve some understanding. But to deserve it fully, the behaviour of the nation of Israel needs to change.

Perestroika in the West

Around 1990 I did a series of talks called 'Perestroika in the West'. Perestroika (restructuring), with glasnost (openness or transparency) was a concept introduced by Mikhail Gorbachev in the 1980s to give philosophical underpinning to the reforms he was introducing at the time in USSR. My point in 1990 was that Gorbachev was announcing something not just for USSR but for the whole world. The global geometry did indeed change once the Cold War ended, though not as much as might have been.

One reason for this was denial in the West. To justify its massive investment in the Cold War, and the way it used the Cold War as a means of perpetrating Western hegemony over much of the world, and to reinforce its former projection on USSR as a malign global influence, the West claimed victory as it watched USSR scale itself back and eventually collapse. By doing this it justified the West's standpoint, blocked questioning of its own position and covered up its own inadequacies.

Psychologically this is a suppression technique which commits truths to the lurking realm of the unconscious - other such techniques are addiction and over-consumption, projection (soon to be applied to Muslims), elaborated control agendas, deflection through entertainment and glitz, and others - keeping everyone looking away from the core issues. Such suppression always comes back to haunt us.

The rule of the nomenklatura

At the time I predicted that the West would unconsciously inherit many of the ills of the late Soviet Union, as a result of this denial. Lo behold, we see nowadays the prevalence of the Western nomenklatura (its class of technocrats, experts, CEOs, investors and lawyers), of top-down regulation and micro-management, systemic inefficiencies and waste, military adventurism and many other characteristics which once we identified with the Russians. 'You become what you hate'.

The period around 1990 constituted a window of opportunity for global reform in international relations and, not only this, but a reform of capitalism and the Western system. This would be driven not by benign, idealistic intent, but by realistic calculations and strategic forethought. The West itself was due for restructuring but, during the 1990s, it overrode this need by engaging in a combination of technological change, amphetamine economics and talking up almost to cult proportions the virtues of the Western project and its get-rich-quick opportunities. The window of hope of around 1990 was shut by the Gulf War of 1991, which reasserted superpower politics in the new, post-Cold War period.

I touched on this subject of lost opportunities in a recent article on this blog called Hope I Die Before I Get Old, about 'extremist' Muslim social movements - Hezbollah and Hamas being the best-known. I likened many of the dynamics of these movements to those of the popular movements of the 1960s in the West, of which I had been a part. The 1960s represented a dawning from within Western society of a new vision and paradigm. It was based on new principles and priorities of social and ecological change, human rights, re-proportioned materialism, a new creativity and a psycho-spiritual awakening.

During the 1970s these were largely overridden and, during the 1980s, diverted into a new consumptive modernisation binge, with the overall effect of developing ever deeper and more sophisticated levels of cultural denial. It dangled the possibilities of freedom, democracy and prosperity before the world while in fact, for many in the non-Western 'rest of the world', the result was too often the opposite - only some became beneficiaries.

By 1990, Western vested interests, widening their embrace by making many ordinary people property-owning stakeholders in the status quo, were not about to yield to an altruistic epiphany and drop the Western perpetual-growth project, however much the system was riddled with systemic problems. Instead, they resorted to a pattern of steamrollering and out-running commonsense, foresight and realism, by offering ever-expanding inducements and sanctions to keep the West on track and the rest in place. New ideas and reform movements were headed off worldwide by branding them negative and threatening. Muslims have suffered this most in recent times.

Had it happened, perestroika in the West would not have been an import from the ailing USSR. It would have arisen from within the West, where many answers were already part-developed, largely outside the corridors of power in the NGO sector and the 'movement for change'. The troubles of the West had been pointed out in the 1960s by professors, pop musicians and protesters, many of whom came from relatively educated, not necessarily deprived, backgrounds. "Western civilisation? I think it would be a good idea", Gandhi had said - and this disarming statement still holds true.

Today, in 2007, the prospect of radical reformation, perestroika, again begins to rear its head, set in motion mainly by climate change and the 'clash of civilisations', with a constellation of other issues too. We are now in a phase of acknowledgement-with-avoidance. Climatic and environmental threats are now being taken reasonably seriously, though narrowed down to a preoccupation with carbon dioxide and answered with a barrage of quick fixes and superficial solutions. We may retain our lifestyles - we just need to pay some extra taxes, get some new gizmos, set some targets, do some carbon trading and hope we're dead before it gets ugly.

Meanwhile, with Muslims, a stream of answers is trotted out about what needs to happen in the Middle East - anything except listening to them and understanding their needs and perspective. This avoidance phase could last some years until evolving facts finally force the issue - a much more fundamental change. When that happens, we'll probably be offered the option of the threat of chaos or a new globalised order of top-down control to save us from our plight. Neither option will really be what is needed, so deep is the avoidance and so profound the tendency of governments to misjudge and re-package reality.

The war against error

Fundamental, root-and-branch changes are necessary, ultimately down as far as matters of the soul. Yes, it could hurt at first, until a majority of people see things in a new way and come to understand how much simpler things could be than they are now. And yes, I risk being regarded as a crank for suggesting this. A key ingredient is to prioritise collective interest - not just vested interest. 'Collective' doesn't mean only the social dimension, but the complete planetary dimension.

Such a transformation would shift the motivations, priorities and emotional needs of humans in such a way that its problems with over-consumption, social disintegration, ecological damage, cultural intolerance, identity and human purpose might become largely self-adjusting. At present, the world is scared of really facing this possibility and all that it implies. So we engage in elaborate displacement strategies - in the developed world it is called 'stability' (for which, read 'high-level consumption') and elsewhere it is called 'development' (for which read, 'aspiration to high-level consumption').

The questions raised in this article about the West are important since current problems in the Middle East are overshadowed by the priorities of the West. This concerns not just the oil trade, the arms trade or support of Israel, but also Western interventionism and economic hegemony and, behind this, the blocking of new developments and solutions. As I pointed out in Hope I Die Before I Get Old, the Middle East is spawning new movements, albeit imperfect, which could bring a quantum shift in global politics, social affairs and collective moral issues. (The title of that article was an allusion to a song called 'My Generation' by The Who, around 1970.)

The West has for decades been consistently dedicated to blocking these movements, ever since WW2. Currently examples are the financial embargo and arming of Palestine, USA's Iraq and Iran strategies, its bungling in Lebanon, the manipulation of the ruling elites of countries like Saudi Arabia and Egypt, and its support of Israel.

Descendancy strikes again

All this said, Western obstructionism is arguably a manifestation of its underlying, gradual decline. Some historians assert that empires are at their most destructive when they are in decline, out of a concealed desperation to plug gaps in the dyke of a river which is overflowing its banks. The up-coming power in this world is not like the Western superpower configuration of the 20th Century: it involves an as yet unshaped architecture of continental-scale interests, and the current historic ascendancy of China, India, South America, with Africa and the Middle East following, are symptoms of this. The West is slipping from being a modernising to a conservative force, as reflected in the demographic contrast between the ageing West and the much younger 'majority world'.

Meanwhile, we live in times of 'asymmetrical warfare' in which a small, tight network of troublemakers or a 'rogue' nation can cause the world's self-appointed guardians - USA and Europe - to expend enormous sums and energies in ultimately unproductive activity, staving off a rising tide. Not only this but, to preserve its own cherished freedoms, the West is gradually limiting them 'for security reasons'. 9/11 sparked the expenditure of multi-billions in a quixotic war against terror. Yet one well-placed bomb can change things far more than democratic elections.

And a tight and lean militia such as Hezbollah can checkmate the armed might of Israel. This asymmetry is bad news for the West. It falls into the trap of believing that massive force and economic hegemony will overcome everything, and that reconciliation is unacceptable or anathema. Despite its vast and costly intelligence agencies, this is very unintelligent behaviour. The small guys in the Middle East draw inspiration from precedents such as the mujahedin in 1990s Afghanistan, who drained the USSR of its dwindling resources and hastened its downfall. They're doing it again in Lebanon, Afghanistan, Chechnya and Palestine and, in their own perception, they are simply defending their people.

All this Western effort and expenditure is aimed primarily at stopping not Muslims but perestroika in the West. The West believes it is preserving its interests but, in the longterm, the opposite is true. The West's continued survival demands infrastructural change and, to carry this out without resorting to a new totalitarianism, it involves a major social-psychological change too.

This is not as difficult as it sounds, because Westerners, despite relative freedom and prosperity, are not happy. By comparison to many of the world's peoples, Westerners are too busy for each other, dislocated, tense and rather lost. But it is unacceptable to the status quo. As a result, the West is losing energy by going against itself and, while oil and gas energy-sources can perhaps be replaced by wind, sun and ethanol, loss of vivacity and spark aren't so easily substituted.

Here we return to the strategic and holistic issues first clearly perceived in the 1960s: the West is a house of cards or, as Mao put it, a paper tiger. The Western system stands on a number of 'big ifs', such as market confidence, continued supply of oil and resources, Western military superiority, perpetuation of an unsettled international order, absence of major disasters, the continued complicity of masses of people and the continued capacity of vested interests to hold the reins. If one or several events or agencies knock away a few of the key chocks holding up the whole system, the whole lot risks subsidence or collapse.

Today USA is increasing its involvement in Iraq for reasons that many sensible people deem to be at best miscalculated, at worst dismaying. But the key issue behind this is the maintenance of the rather dishonest narrative that keeps the West ticking. This is partially public and partially secret - a symptom of the double standards Middle Eastern people talk about. The public picture, in Iraq, is that USA and UK seek to establish peace, democracy and prosperity, while the secret picture is that, by destabilising the Middle East and making it a cauldron of strife and disunity, it is stopped from finding solutions and breakthroughs of its own. How much this is intentional and how much 'the law of unintended consequences' is a matter of debate.

Whether or not you believe that something is going to crack in the system as a whole depends greatly on your disposition toward the Western narrative and your position in it. But this is vexing, because each of us variously knows both sides of the story. The future is disconcertingly unknown, and hard-and-fast forecasting is wisely avoided even by the most informed of analysts and commentators. But possibilities and probabilities are visible. The underlying global agenda is shifting from competing national interests to that of global environmental change. In the 1990s, business interests were the great globalisers, but now it is the environment.

Last Chance saloon

At risk of labouring my point, I wish to repeat mention of the two massive missed opportunities that the West, with all its thinktanks, professors, expertise and focus groups, has failed to take advantage of. The first was the visionary time of the 1960s, which could have been the start of a forward-thinking period of incremental change lasting from the 1970s onwards. The second was the time of profound change around 1990 and the Fall of the Wall, when many of the initiatives of the 1960s were working through into Western consciousness. Both offered the West an opportunity to undergo a sensible restructuring, clean up its covert agendas and double standards, and face the environmental and other global challenges by starting at the right time.

Restructuring in the West didn't happen, and now we are paying a rising price. We cannot just wring our hands and rue lost opportunities. But we do need to take note of what we in the West already know. And, like the visionaries of the 1960s, who were driven by a homegrown perception while co-opting ideas and methods from other cultures, times and peoples, we might do well to look at the essence of what the 'majority world' is saying and doing today.

That is, to generalise optimistically, the people of the Middle East are pointing at a new umma or community of shared belief and moral behaviour, a new social order; the political movements of Latin America are pointing to a new middle way characterised by greater social justice, fairness and consensus; the Asians are looking at technical and productive innovation which increasingly will knock spots off the West's technical predominance and prove applicable to far wider swathes of people than we have seen; and the Africans are likely one day to show humanity new elements of balance, proportion and integrity, born of the extremes they experienced in the 20th Century and offering what could be a key to the resolution of all of the above.

These assertions might sound sweeping and ridiculous, but let me remind you: at the beginning of the 'renaissance' and 'enlightenment' of Europe starting some 500 years ago, no one in their right minds, anywhere in the world, would have guessed that those uncultured, smelly, barbarian Europeans and their successor Americans would come to dominate the world. They did. Something else is now developing. Such is the way that things turn. Twenty-first Century, here we come. We still have an opportunity.

The Right of Return

The question of the Palestinian Right of Return is big and crucial. But the discussion is predicated on factors and notions which do not really help the debate or a solution. This issue needs to be looked at, to some extent separately, in two different ways: the first concerns deep emotional-historical issues and principles, which are being discussed, and the second concerns planning, sustainability and real-life viability issues, which largely are obscured.

Emotional-historical issues are rooted in a number of big assumptions. First up is the notion that most or all refugees are likely to return. Yet, once the principles of justice are sorted out (compensation, residency rights in other countries and other practicalities), how many Palestinian exiles, and their descendants, are likely to see return as a real-life advantage economically and in terms of their life-prospects and those of their families? It is neither safe nor realistic to assume that return will actually be advantageous for large numbers, with or without the presence of conflict or today's conditions in Palestine or Israel.

Second comes the well-hardened assumption that Palestinians and Israelis cannot trust one another and will always have a conflict of interest - with or without security walls, checkpoints and current restrictions. Yet many outsiders are correct to observe that the potential for symbiosis between Palestinians and Israelis is significant, and their mirroring of each other in so many details does not automatically imply conflict - equally, in time, it can imply complementarity and mutual advantage.

Third come two major under-discussed issues. These are, first, environmental sustainability - possibly, in the coming fifty years, a bigger issue than the existing context of conflict itself. Israel and Palestine are very built-up and urbanised, with serious water-supply, space and toxicity issues, and the convenient forgetting of this, between two peoples who assert that they love their land so much, does not get rid of the massive minefield that is yet to be identified and cleared. This clearance can be done only through collaboration. Water-flows, species propagation and climatic variables don't recognise security walls, green lines or classes of people.

Then there's that thorny question of national boundaries and sovereign states, established less than a century ago by, amongst others, my own country, Britain. Lost in arguments over one-state or two-state solutions, we lose sight of a bigger eventual possibility, a no-state solution - some sort of Middle Eastern union.

Before rejecting this possibility, please remember that one model, the European Union, was founded to bind previously warring states into a system where conflict would be eliminated. This has succeeded (nowadays we just shuffle feet and bicker, but we don't fight, and we haven't lost our national identities). Crucial ingredients were the free movement of people and resources, free trade and investment and collective, continental-scale legislation.

The EU is by no means ideal, but it is far better than what my father's generation once had. In his twenties he lived and fought under the belief that 'the only good German is a dead German', while in his seventies his favourite car became the Volkswagen. In his nineties he wishes well toward Germans. Things change, bigtime, over the decades, especially when they look as if they never will.

The scenario of a regional union cannot be ruled out in the debate on return and a 'final settlement', and it might even be the only viable option. This also embraces the possible return of Jews to Baghdad, Alexandria and Tehran, the freeing of nomadic Bedouin to follow their goats wherever they roam, and the freedom of Christians and Druze to spread around as they will. It embraces the fact that, before the West interfered, the ethnic groups of the Middle East defined their identities not territorially but through their social roles, while territorially they were substantially integrated and interrelated. It was Western border-drawing interference that laid the foundation for the current tragedy.

There is a big challenge here. The challenge is to inform the argument on right of return with genuine research into and storyboarding of the genuine issues, factors and full range of options before us. It is necessary to free up the argument and suspend old assumptions and fixities.

One is the Israeli assumption that they cannot trust and make friends with their neighbours, who will always have the stated or covert intention of eliminating them. It's time to revise and re-proportion this assumption, with generations in mind - generations who care more about their kids than what their parents thought.

Another assumption is that Palestinians are narrowly and solely Palestinian, when historically they are interrelated with people across the Middle East and elsewhere - today, as exiles, they are substantially internationalised, like Jews. This means we need to separate the emotional principle of return from its possible demographic realities because, in the fullness of time, it's the demography that matters.

In the next fifty years, and in the context of enormous global-scale change from which Israelis and Palestinians are not exempted, only a proportion of Palestinians will choose to return - arguably 10-50%. Of these, some will make a complete move, while others will prefer the right to visit, invest or take up partial residence (like many Israelis in Israel).

Some Palestinians and Israelis will leave too - in Britain, we have sizeable immigration but also significant emigration, especially since we are reasonably free to do so. Those who do not return are due some sort of just settlement, concerning compensation for past losses and guarantees of full rights in those countries where they now reside. The highest priority here, especially in terms of resource limitations, is not the principle of restitution, important though this is, but the restoration of full and proper life-chances for all of those who are disadvantaged and trapped in their situation. Equal rights.

Then there is viability and sustainability, economic and ecological - the big unmentioned factor. Israel has prospered in the past on subsidy from USA and international Jews, and from military and political muscle and international acquiescence, but this is not reliable in future. Many Israeli settlements are environmentally unsustainable, and they suffer many of the ills of new towns elsewhere - domestic breakdown and violence, health and psychological problems, employment and facilities problems, and others. The problem of settlements could be self-adjusting in the long term.

Many Palestinian towns are infrastructurally creaky and, while Palestinians are right to hope for better than they now have, it is important to remember Martin Bell's pertinent statement from his book Through Gates of Fire, 2003: "Peace and freedom can be defined as the peace that makes traffic jams possible and the freedom to be stuck in them".

It is not safe for Palestinians to assume that all will be well whenever peace and a final settlement comes, that the economy will thrive and that returning to Palestine will be viable and advantageous to everyone. It will be advantageous to some, and this depends greatly on the style of development Palestinians choose, and the very real limitations in terms of water, space and practicalities that are present in 'historic Palestine'.

Since the resource-hungry Western lifestyle is now under threat, Israelis might be forced to choose between a reduction of living standards or residency in Israel - with or without Palestinian return. And Palestinians might have to develop a greater equity, clean-up and collaboration between themselves than even Hamas talks about.

So, to carry out this debate properly, serious research and investigation of a variety of scenarios is necessary, without the corrupting influence of current prejudice, assumption and predication. For peace to work, all people of all kinds need to feel they are receiving an acceptable deal - and this will involve sacrifices and hidden benefits for all parties. Nothing is going to be easy and no one will get their own way.

Collaboration, normalisation, the opening of borders, the establishment of appropriate development and large-scale ecological efforts will bring many benefits but, to get there, the whole narrative needs to change. So an inventorising of resources, limitations and potentials needs to be done, based on significant future possibilities embracing climate change, political and technological developments and, not least, a variety of social-psychological variables. A seat-of-the-pants approach could work too, but part of this 'contract' involves the willingness to encounter and deal well with decisive, unavoidable crises.

It could be that Israeli population is outsized by Palestinian population, or even that the Israeli population declines - but is this truly a mortal threat to Israelis? It could be that many or few Palestinians actually choose to return, with a variety of possible consequences, but we cannot assume that most or all Palestinians shall do so or make a successful realistic transition.

It could be that, by dint of disease, toxicity or resource shortage, Palestine and Israel become less attractive. Alternatively, that with an arrival of peace and normalisation, living conditions could improve - this won't mean golf-courses and endless road-building, but it could mean a society which becomes something socially very attractive, even if materially relatively lean and economical.

We do not know until the spectrum of options is properly visualised and researched. We cannot know unless movement toward the future is permitted, unlocked from the fixed mess it now is in. We cannot know until evolving circumstances worldwide are permitted to evolve further. But we can clarify the terms of the debate and the argument by proportioning it to likely realistic scenarios and suspending fears and anticipations based on an obsolete 20th Century agenda.

Continuing along the current trajectory does no one any good, and it could be that, in future, the costs and consequences for Israelis and Palestinians rise steeply, not from threat and conflict - the old picture - but from failure to adapt to the new picture - enormously changing world circumstances.

Hope I die before I get old - Muslim extremism

There's something many people don't understand about what's happening in the Middle East. It concerns generation gaps and the way that history changes because old people die and young people grow up. We hear a lot about Middle East 'extremism', but this is the language of paunchy authoritarians indicating that Middle East popular movements do not agree with their values and profit margins. Meanwhile, there's more.

Speaking as an aged hippy extremist who went through a spiritual and political awakening in the 1960s, boldly going where few had been before, seeking to change the world and finding that 'working within the system' was less productive than 'dropping out', I see many parallels between the cultural movement of which I was a part and the young end of the Muslim movements of today. They're not just Muslim, they're social movements, and they could equally be socialist, nationalist, rights-based or just 'cool'.

While such movements are often led or inspired by older people (men), they are populated to a great extent by young people, with not a few women. Across the Middle East, a majority of the population is younger than thirty. This matters because today's youths are tomorrow's policymakers, 'the street' is a crucible of new ideas and, democracy or not, majorities matter.

In the West, we see things in terms of a 20th Century picture: the 'developed world' as the fount of wealth, ideas, initiative and power. But we're now in a new century, and many seem oblivious to the full implications of this. Since 2000 the geopolitical agenda has been dominated by the noisy 'Project for the New American Century', an attempt to stamp American hegemony on the future, specifically on hapless Afghanistan and Iraq. It hasn't worked, and many sensible people now know this. But they have little idea of what comes next.

In the 1960s-70s my generation envisioned a new age and civilisation. Raucous and colourful it was, yet it was also the germination-point for many issues now dominating the public arena: bio-sustainability, gender, minority and race issues, global networking and culture, holistic or 'joined up' thinking and more. Another key element, spirituality, is not mentioned so much in the mainstream, but it lurks beneath the surface, perhaps waiting until people's waistlines shrink and their insecurities rise. Inner transformation has been subsumed in a tide of makeovers and fixes which address appearances, not core realities. The world is now faced with mammoth issues and a need for quantum solutions. And the Middle East is one of the nexus-points for this.

Love is still all we need

To Westerners preoccupied with terrorism and insurgency - that is, assaults on our sense of order and control - what is not seen is the revival of love, humanity and spirituality lying behind Middle Eastern movements. Westerners see violence, mayhem and insurgency, not the potential dawning of a new paradigm of human behaviour - and they're both right and wrong. Central to emergent street-level thinking in the Middle East is the notion of the umma, the 'community of believers'. Taken a level deeper, the umma is what French enlightenment philosophers called 'the social contract' - an implicit consensus of mutual good behaviour, respect, integrity and support between all people and social institutions.

In the Sixties, a key element of the 'new paradigm' was community - transformed personal, social and global relations. Those who like to denigrate the 'alternative movement' of that time quote this as an example of its failed, lofty idealism. But the times they are a-changing, and what once was an ideal is now looking suspiciously like the basis for a pragmatic solution.

Faced as we are with drastic climatic, eco-sustainability, resource, development and conflict issues worldwide, we're heading either for terrible downfall or enormous breakthrough. And collective choice is involved. At present, talking about reconciliation, peace, cooperation and, dare I say it, love, is studiously avoided. But this doesn't mean it's irrelevant as a realistic geopolitical mechanism. Visionary and pragmatic solutions surreptitiously converge in a vacuum of fundamental answers, and we're obliged to face such notions cooperation, fairness and cross-cultural respect. Love is not only what we need: in future decades it might well constitute a macroeconomic and geopolitical survival agenda.

As a young hippy, I saw no purpose in war, competition, ego, materialism and exploitation. I set about building alternatives, with a minority of kindred spirits. We didn't set out to oppose 'the system' - we sincerely set out to bring new light, love and solutions to our fellow humans. We ate macrobiotic, toked chillums, sat cross-legged and thought geodesic thoughts. Soon it became clear this was not welcome, and the heavy hand of repression came down - for our own good, of course. Our fathers had fought for freedom, and we should be grateful. Yet the 'free world' we lived in was totalitarian, and it still is today - all that has changed from Stalin's and Hitler's time is the use of carrots instead of sticks. If truth be known.

Had the West openly investigated the possibilities revealed in the Sixties, starting a programme of incremental change over the decades that followed, we might now have no war on terror, no clash of civilisations, neither the same degree of social degeneration, hypergovernment, devastation, nuclear proliferation, climate change or even drug addiction. Heaven wouldn't have dawned on Earth, but we would have made significant progress in tackling issues that were visible 30-40 years ago and now constitute a pending crisis.

Today, we're seeing a parallel nascent movement in the Middle East. Young people are again struggling for new answers - partly thrashing around, partly inspired and innovative. Teenagers have a sharpness of seeing that their jaded, experienced elders don't. The paradoxes they face are enormous, yet they also see possibilities where older generations see none or have given up. As in the Sixties, the picture is formative, not yet clarified, a mishmash of ideas and beliefs within which something simple and clear hides. It is generated from deep feelings of pain over the state of the world, out of a struggle to find a new identity, a future to hope for.

The key movers are those who have grown up straddled between Western and Muslim values, whose position and identity are most unclear. To the surprise of staid Westerners, many terrorists are educated, with families and prospects, not the deranged losers they would like them to be. Similarly, the visions and principles of the Sixties grew up amongst young, educated, privileged middle class youngsters, not amongst the workers and the downtrodden. 'The revolution' didn't reach the workers, who by then were the old guard. Similarly, what goes on in the text messages of young folks in Basra, Isfahan, Beirut and Ramallah is hardly comprehended by the oldsters who look on from across the street. They just don't know.

The manic mujahedin

It all started with 'fundamentalism' in the 1970s-90s - an ethic wrung out of aversion to what the Middle East had become and reaction to the influence of amoral Western modernism. The idea was that, by cleaving to a categorical rendering of orthodox Muslim values, society could be weeded of its degenerative ills. Foreign powers didn't like this - dependent as they are on Middle Eastern oil - so we saw a succession of wars for control, from the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan to the American invasion of Iraq. Fundamentalism became tied to gunfire, with mujahedin as its foot-soldiers. Westerners failed to recognise that, though confused and militant, this movement's roots lay in a sincere quest for new human relations. It referenced back to a lost golden age, a caliphate, from the time before the foreign infidel Crusaders came along - a romantic perception, yes, but with some basis to it.

This was just a start, and things have moved on. As the ayatollahs of Iran have proven, old men with religious authority are not necessarily the fount of all wisdom, and they didn't share the full range of perceptions of the upcoming young. Many of the young began to feel the weight of the old guard. But the same is also the case for many of the young disaffected in the West who, given a choice between a tab of ecstasy or the right to vote, might well choose the ecstasy.

Though anti-Western feeling pervaded fundamentalism, Western technology played a crucial role in taking things on to the next stage. The Ayatollah's Iranian revolution was facilitated by the smuggling and circulation of cassette tapes and, by the 1990s, networking moved on to mobile phones and Internet. These have helped create a new, buzzy fermentation and reality for young people. Also, these gizmos are no longer Western - the hardware comes from China and the software increasingly from India and Brazil. This fermentation tends to turn against the West, especially when it customarily misbehaves itself. Longer-term, it will outpace the West.

Behind this networking phenomenon lies a moral questing, a soul-searching before Allah in the face of social disintegration, violence and oppression. For folks like me 3-4 decades ago, such questing was fulfilled through LSD and lifestyle transformation. For many younger Muslims, a new understanding of Allah, of social goals and community standards is emerging from between a rock and a hard place, and Gaza, Beirut and Baghdad are the nexus of their concerns.

For young Arabs or Iranians the Q'uran provides many useful spiritual and behavioural answers - but a new, self-defined interpretation is emerging. There's an anxious sense of "What did we do wrong to incur all the suffering we get?". Allah, help me become whole again. What went wrong was two main things: a loss of progressive impetus in Muslim society, and its insidious corruption by Western ways. The key element here was the breakdown of the social contract and the rise of individualism. It gave some the freedom to explore life as they felt best, yet it isolated people, killing off families, communities and inter-generational connections. It killed the umma, that consensus of mutually-supportive values, understanding and cooperation that should, by rights, be common in the world. Though it was already weak.

The Umma

Western intervention in the Middle East has had two counterproductive effects: it corrupted and obstructed the process of natural, self-generated renewal in the Islamic world, and Western behaviour over the years has alienated many Muslims or driven them further into Islam seeking homegrown answers. The more it has imposed its values, economics and military might, the more it has driven younger Muslims against it.

The struggle to revive the umma is not just an anti-Western jihad. It is primarily a struggle against what is 'not right' in Islamic society and culture - though definitions vary as to what this means. It's a movement for solidarity, peace, social welfare and community, seeking a new future, not a return to a golden past. To young people, many of the older generation have also come to constitute the problem, having fallen into a compromised, corrupt or tainted condition. This is a different perspective from that of fundamentalism - it's heterodox and psychological rather than orthodox and ideological.

At root it is peaceable. But too many young have watched family being killed or jailed, or witnessed American or Israeli missiles slamming into neighbours' houses. The older generation tried negotiation, and look what they got: current generations want no more of it. Hence, in Palestine, the gentlemanly Abu Mazen and the Fatah establishment, who made deals with the Israelis, only to watch them bulldoze and enclose even more Palestinian land, have lost support, while Hamas, who refuse to deal with the Israelis until they behave themselves and until some time has passed, have gained it. Because they have a philosophy based on the umma. And they are noticeably lacking in corruption - that's a big factor.

So 'resistance' is a moot term: does it mean fighting back, or does it mean preserving one's culture quietly while the tanks roll by outside? In the end it means neither: movements like Hamas and Hezbollah recognise that a society becomes strong when it has justice, welfare and relative equity - a reconstituted umma. To foreign visitors, this is already somewhat visible today in Palestine: despite 60 years of pressure and hardship, the surprising strength of Palestinian society, and its tangible human and community values, are impressive. A Palestinian street is safer to walk down than a Western street on Friday night. You don't hear about this in the media.

But Western governments and media have decided the Muslim world is fundamentally violent and chaotic, harbouring terrorism and resisting progress. The Western approach, demonstrated by USA in Iraq and by Israel in Lebanon, nowadays defeats its purpose: by bombing hell out of ordinary people, the lesson many Muslims learn is that resistance is even more necessary. And it turns cultural resistance into fighting back. Hezbollah beat the Israelis in 2006 because of resolve, passion and sheer effectiveness, not military superiority - their hearts were in it.

But the Middle East is caught in a loop of violence. To quote a friend, Ibrahim Issa, co-director of Hope Flowers, a peace and democracy school in Bethlehem on the West Bank, "Every act of violence is the result of an unhealed wound". This school teaches kids how to handle difficult situations, speak their truth well and work together with others. It uses counselling, therapy and creativity to help kids and their parents heal their pain and slip out of the loop. This is the language of feelings, vulnerability, faith and reconciliation in the new umma - though Ibrahim would not count himself as a Muslim activist or extremist. The urge for umma, for social intimacy, trust and community, is not unique to Muslims - it's inherently human, but Muslims are placing this issue centre-stage. The big Western visionary reformers of a century ago, socialists, failed to create an umma because they lost their hearts in the rubble of politics.

The West's failure to recognise the validity of Muslim social movements such as Hamas and Hezbollah puts the West itself in danger. There are many parallels between these and the Western labour movements of the early 20th Century - a joining together of people at the bottom of the pile, generating new ideas and morphing into a new order. Social reformers of a century ago were troublemakers and extremists too, but now they are historic figures. If the West were wiser, it would listen to the modern Muslim movements, for they play a key part in the future.

Quantum shifts

There is more to this. The movements of the Sixties - not just flower power, people power, black power, feminism and eco-warriors, but also new ideas in science, technology, media and social thinking - were not just a logical extension of what went on before. The full, historic story is yet to be fulfilled, and the ideals and visions sketched out then are becoming more solid now. That decade represented a quantum shift, the prequel to a new time and a new global order. Huh, weird talk - but if humanity ends up in good shape at the end of the 21st Century, it indeed will be living in a new civilisation. You may call me a dreamer, but I'm not the only one.

Toynbee observed that, when a civilisation reaches its zenith, it needs a new guiding vision to give it a future - otherwise it lapses into repeating its successful formulae, losing creative initiative, becoming irrelevant and eventually dying out or being superseded. In the 1960s, such a zenith-vision emerged in places like San Francisco and Liverpool, crazy as it seemed. But the price the West now pays for shoving it to the side, is that it is now losing the plot. Its finger has lost the pulse, it's talking mainly to itself, and it's miscalculating badly.

Not that the rest of the world knows the answers, but something else is happening. The future lies in the hands of those who once were the victims, clients and subjects of the West and the Soviet bloc - once the third world, now the majority world. The West is gradually being overtaken. For better or worse, this is their century - like the last few centuries were ours.

Young Muslim movements suggest a quantum shift resembling that of the Sixties. They represent a new computation of the issues and solutions, starting from a new starting-point and seeking a new horizon. They might be led by forty-something figures such as Hassan Nasrallah of Hezbollah or Ismail Haniyeh of Hamas, but even these leaders struggle to stay abreast of developments on the street, which has a collective mind of its own. Osama bin Laden is outdated - a hero to some, but good only at humbling the West, not at building a new umma.

The street has a new perception, facilitated by the community of the cellphone, the e-mail, the videoblog, satellite TV and the airplane. It's driven from below, it's youthful and it's half of the population. It's an organic network, not an organisation. It has language and laws, shared sentiments and perspectives. This is a form of texted, e-mailed hyperdemocracy. Like us pot-smokers of old, they have their ways of bypassing the authorities, and only a few get caught. And like the ecstasy-driven dance generation of the 1990s West, their community and feeling of togetherness, their umma, is the key.

In Palestine, broadly speaking, Hamas represents a newer generation while Fatah represents an older one. Both have their flaws and both need each other, yet they are polarised because Palestinian society has been under so much pressure for so long. They are currently conflicting over the future: to an extent, it's a generation gap issue, and it's a paradigm-shift issue too.

Israel and the West cannot deal with Hamas because they are oriented to maintaining the past while it is oriented to building a future. Hamas has new perspectives, but the world doesn't want to hear - also, it is not good at PR because it is averse to the simplistic glosses, artifices and personality cultism of the media, controlled as they are by owners with ulterior motives. Hamas proposes a 25-year hudna or cease-fire with Israel, leaving it to a future generation to achieve a final settlement. The grounds for a true settlement are far larger than can currently be seen, and it recognises a longterm process of quantum change is at work. Ultimately this involves the distillation of a new sense of togetherness and shared experience, a new umma on both sides. To achieve settlement with the Israelis, the Palestinians need time and space to clarify who and what they are to become. And Israelis have not just a few changes to go through too.

The world transformation ethic of the Sixties was suppressed in the 1970s, diverted into glitzy gizmo-fascination in the 1980s, and became a waste, proliferation and waistline problem in the 1990s. Arguably these displacement strategies are derailing in the early 2000s. The new movements of the Middle East might or might not themselves be successfully suppressed or diverted, and they might or might not get things right - this will emerge in the coming years. But something historic is nevertheless happening.

One lesson of our day is that chickens do come home to roost, and governments and security forces cannot really stop the tide of history - they can only complicate it. Today we have a crisis in energy, climate, oceans, species-survival, resources and population, predicted 40 years ago and then studiously ignored: this makes the clash of civilisations and the war on terror look rather small. Globally, we are faced with a challenge to get our priorities right and act on them.

A major key is the umma, the community of souls. Not just of Muslims, but everyone. The message of the 21st Century is simple: together we stand, divided we fall. What Westerners don't see is that 'Muslim extremists', in a strange and convoluted way, are pointing the way to a lot of answers, a new umma. This means a mutually-held choice of the heart, not a new treaty, agency or cooperation council. It's a statement of principle, of mutually-assured support and security. Thorough mass-psychological disarmament. A remote dream perhaps, but so was putting a man on the Moon.

The difficult bit for Westerners is that, having been top dogs, we have to re-join the human race on equitable terms before we can get our fingers back on the pulse. Our words - peace, freedom, democracy and human rights - sound good, but our actions smell badly. We continue to reserve the right to maintain our comfortable lifestyles and export our double standards, whatever the cost to others. So the world is bypassing us, and fighting to stop it is futile and to our own disadvantage. This is why we need to recognise that what's brewing in the Middle East is worth watching. Don't be deceived - it's not just bombs going off. There's much more.

America's decline

This is an article I wrote in 2004 which is becoming increasingly pertinent now. USA influences the Middle East greatly and, while this article isn't focused on the Middle East, it's relevant. And it makes more sense now than in 2004 because, then, it clashed with many Americans' feelings - now, it's different. Also, a key point here is that America's current problems aren't just about Bush & Co - they go much deeper. - Palden


Written in September 2004

What goes up must come down. Every empire suffers an urge for posterity, and every powerful, well-to-do nation and class has sought to perpetuate its position. This tendency is unique to no particular country or time. But something larger inevitably overrides it. The ascendancy of the powerful can be painful for those who are conquered, enslaved, colonised, co-opted or just affected. But a nation's descendancy can be equally tricky, for it and for them.

There comes a time when the structures, values and assets by which a great nation is built simply become outmoded by other developments elsewhere. There is choice in the manner of a nation's decline, and a graceful decline starts with a recognition that the game is changing and we've lost the plot.

Arnold Toynbee, in his Study of History, written during WW2, noted that when a culture reaches a peak of creativity, vigour and 'florescence', it is faced with an identity crisis. Where to go next? He wrote that, at such a point, a culture may opt to reproduce its successful formula, leading to an incremental loss of vigour, creativity and leadership, or to follow a path of transformation and rebirth, re-engaging the energies of new generations. It may choose, at its time of wealth, power and fortune, to create an entirely new quest. Not just a series of glitch-fixes, but a fundamental change in the aims and rules of the game it has won.

America's zenith came in the 1940s-1970s. With the 1960s came a transformative burst, born within the heart of modern American culture. It came in many forms, in culture, science, social movements and forward thinking. You Americans reached for the Moon. The heart and soul of your nation brought forth music, films and ideas to which the world paid rapt attention. Its most visionary form came as 'flower power', an outpouring which indeed could have fuelled a transformation.

This transformation was not to be, and today we pay the price. During the 1970s, vested interests clawed back control through diversion, co-option, suppression and corruption. In the Reagan period, this take-back was consolidated - a surreptitious systemic coup d'etat of which the arranged election of George Bush in 2000 was but a consequence. The powers-that-be re-captured the agenda. They resorted to increasingly formulaic reiteration of the nation's strong points, appearing innovative and radical yet really largely a multiplying and replicating what went before. A cult of consumptive materialism and hyperactive public acquiescence came to pass, in which everyone tried to rake off their cut. This doesn't work longterm. The buzz wears off, and then there's a sluggish, heavy, day-after feeling. And self-interest gets too firmly rooted, weakening the solidarity that can otherwise pull a nation through a crisis.

After Vietnam, a new perception emerged worldwide, especially amongst its victims, questioning American hegemony. The murmuring grew in Reagan's time. It quietened during Clinton's watch: the causes had not gone away but we wanted to give America a chance. After 9/11 it erupted as a dismayed-to-angry world consensus of doubt in the American monolith.

The intense events following 9/11 turned the key: we saw a rapid transition from human pathos and family spirit in New York City to a state of accusing, hard-hearted, paranoiac warmongering. The wisdom and heart of the American people was quickly wrenched from it. The contrast was acute. The world's responses shifted rapidly. How could Americans indulge so much in the loss of their own people and security, when they didn't bat an eyelid to similar loss or devastation in Guatemala, Palestine or Bangladesh?

Salt was rubbed in when we were told that if we weren't for you, we were against you. This alienating declaration rested on an outward projection of badness on foreigners, an enemy out there. We had had enough of this in the Cold War, and here it was again. This projection was at best an exaggeration, at worst an attempted hostile takeover of the world agenda. It didn't hold water.

Over the decades, the world had looked on in horror, fascination and disbelief as we saw killers, lawyers, evangelists, executives, pornstars, rednecks, coke-sniffers and glitzy stars strutting their stuff in America. Perhaps they would come to their senses sometime. USA had wondrous aspects too, with its high ideals, its freedom ideology, technical wizardry and rags-to-riches success stories. But really, we were watching a nation ill at ease with itself, domestically and internationally violent, and we vainly hoped all this would go away.

Much of the world didn't concur with American claims that it had won the Cold War. The Soviets had had the courage to recognise something America could not. They initiated its end and became the heroes. Perestroika (restructuring) and glasnost (openness) were relevant to the West as much as to the USSR. But the 'free' West had sufficient wealth and ingenuity to carry on as if it had won. A clock started ticking in the 1990s, and the West soon showed signs of Soviet sclerosis, increasingly ruled by a nomenklatura (a privileged class of well-dressed managers) whose control and interests became all-important.

We heard the same old riffs and special effects from America, amped up higher each time. Sure, box office takings grew, as did stock market values and the millionaire class, but these are not everything. The materialism-cult of USA made it sound as if they were everything: we all bowed to trickle-down development, the 'Washington Consensus'. American power, here to save us, would be extended by innovating and investing so hard that no one else could catch up. Failing that, armed power-projection would fix things, cleanly and surgically.

The sheer creativity of America was dwindling, and its lead was increasingly propped up with tech developments, financial leveraging, marketing ploys, legal twists and immigrant labour. But these were all extensions of the same old gargantuan story - and it eventually took a little outfit like al Qaeda to puncture the glittering balloon. Something had come seriously unstuck.

Bush and the neo-cons have made America's decline blatantly obvious, but all the signs were there beforehand. The capture of democracy and freedom since the arrival of George Bush has led to serious internal schism, worrying rest-of-the-worlders more than it seems to worry Americans. The greatest threat to the world and to itself had clearly become the United States.

Here we are, watching a nation split down the middle. Whoever wins the presidency will leave half the nation angry, left out and ready for a showdown. We don't want to see a second American Civil War. We don't want to receive its fall-out. We don't want such a potential nightmare to develop. Yet we see before us the division of a manic-depressive nation talking to itself, 'doing oppo', tragically forgetting that something else is going on across the world.

The future is not one of American hegemony. The more USA tries to assert this, the more hegemony evades it. This is an historic change, quickened by near-sighted politics in DC. The perception that America has 'lost it' is now widespread worldwide, aided by USA's alienation of its own very supporters.

Now it's not that America has become our bad guy and the rest of us are good guys. The world is not as black-and-white as that. It's relative. The sheer scale on which USA makes its assertions, errors and omissions is dangerous for the world. It has the biggest arsenal of weapons, its government has lost its sense of proportion, and its tentacular hold is such that an American advance or a retreat will have an enormous effect on the world, either way. We've lost our trust. We don't believe God likes you more than everyone else.

So be it. We've had enough. We badly need America to step back and listen. Its dramas threaten to drown out the other tunes and noises going on around the world. Some of these are more relevant and important than America's pet themes. The international community, such as it is, stands at a delicate stage in which it is facing up to its interdependence. Americans want exceptionalism, as well as to interfere and dominate. Please decide: in or out! This is important, because you Gringos are outnumbered, and you need to do the right thing. We won't fight or invade you - it's just that, well, we surround you.

It will all come right in the end. Though Americans might be in for a long haul. It's not just regime or policy change that will do it. The American way needs a fundamental revamp. There's just one choice: whether to de-construct it voluntarily and with foresight, or whether it horribly collapses or burns out. The worst of America needs winnowing out, and that small matter of over-consumption needs addressing. America has a future, but as a normal place. This has been done before, and my own country, Britain, is a case in point.

Britain the Great got cut down to size, and it wasn't just the Germans' fault. We went through a terrible downfall. We went from superpower to aid-recipient in 30 years (1914-1945), falling as you Americans rose up. Our country was devastated, our empire dissolved. But today we're still here, we gained something from it and life goes on. America is unlikely to be reduced by world war - it is caught in more of a 'virtual' corrosion from within, fed by obsessive self-preoccupation - with a little goading from Osama, Saddam and other global dramatists.

If we take 1989 as a starting point, rather like Britain's 1914, USA is now 15 years into its process of decline, though the shit is yet to fully hit the fan. The prosperous 1990s staved off the agony, but the can of worms writhed underneath. Today, the right is worried about loss of power, the left is worried about loss of rights and everyone is worried about loss of what is, frankly, a state of excess. It's a creeping fear of cold turkey and what the nation might do to itself while going through it.

This is potentially dangerous, though less dangerous than the addiction itself. Trouble is, affluence and consumption bury old, unresolved pain and, when decline and belt-tightening come, anger and irritation come up and out, followed by depression and disorientation. Public feelings of powerlessness amplify it. Schism and underlying dissension feed it. At present, things are held in place by a strangely complicit nation, afraid of what might happen if truth emerges and change comes. Not just truth about Bush, but truth about America - a country that permits phenomena like Bush to happen.

A recent German letter-writer to Newsweek observed that we can take Bush's first election to be an excusable accident, but re-election means American voters will be held responsible, and anti-Bush feelings abroad will become anti-American. Truth can have a redemptive effect. It just depends which way Americans as a whole choose to go, when the chips come down. America can do a managed retreat or have a big crisis. At present, it looks like a crisis is looming.

What astounds many non-Americans is that the nation is stacked with such intelligent, good-hearted people, yet it has fallen into such a dazed, sleepwalking nightmare. Right-wingers support it, liberals oppose it, democracy has become dysfunctional, and we all know that, in reality, USA is steered by a network of background interests. Yet even they are losing power.

We see a stung giant lumbering around, swatting mosquitoes and wasps, falling over things.
Meanwhile, the rest of the world is getting on with its own realities. Some people and places have had such a hard time that the only direction left is up. There is hope. Lacking wealth or facing big problems, they are innovating, evolving new strategies, sometimes painfully. But they have a future. Even hapless Iraq will emerge into a new day: in twenty years the Middle East could be a happening place. Meanwhile, America is likely to take time to adjust to its subsidence.

Yet, while 20th Century Europe's decline made it a shadow of its former self, it nevertheless survived and reaped benefits from its reduced status. Let us hope USA doesn't rip itself apart as Europe did in its two world wars.

For America there is mainly a past, sugared with glory. Its sense of future is an extrapolation of it. The initiative has already been lost. To call the 21st Century 'America's Century' was, well, wishful thinking. Two centuries ago, when USA launched itself into its future, it didn't know what was to come, but it was driven to rise to it. Today, the losers of the 20th Century movie are stepping out, heading for their future in the 21st. Necessity - hunger, disaster, poverty, hardship - is mothering invention.

They know not where exactly they go, and the nature of change itself is changing. This is new. It has something to do with global justice, equity and sense of proportion, for humans and the natural environment. Civilisation in a truer sense. The solution is a reminder of the vision first identified in 1960s America, but it is pragmatic, not idealistic. It might be a bumpy ride, but this is our trajectory.

All is not lost. Worldwide, we like Americans really. Most of you are a bunch of real nice guys. Saudis, French, Colombians and Chinese are okay too. What we like about Americans, on a good day, is their welcoming, generous, imaginative and hearty openness, and we miss it. We don't mourn your loss of greatness, but we do regret your loss of creativity, friendliness and verve.

Your humanness is becoming concealed behind a defensive barrier, sharing some characteristics with Russians' former concealment behind the Iron Curtain. We're losing contact with you. Brilliance still emerges, but it has lost its edge. Meanwhile, the stuff that lights people up now comes from elsewhere. Uzbekistan, Uganda and Uruguay are interesting places. Youngsters don't do pilgrimage to USA any more.

Some Americans say the world is ungrateful for the help you have given it. Well, it came at a price, so we have mixed feelings. Voicing mixed feelings is taken to be an expression of antipathy, so balanced views are difficult to utter. Many Americans at home feel ill-judged and misunderstood, yet exile and emigre Americans cringe at this angry defensiveness - they see more of the American impact on the world. Out here, we know you quite well: you have broadcast your lives and values to us for decades. But now our attention is elsewhere.

So we don't sound grateful. Nevertheless, we thank you for Thoreau, Startrek, Tamla Motown, Abe Lincoln, Coca Cola, Windows XP, Martin Luther King, Ginger Rogers, the Apollo mission, Disney, burgers and Jeeps. Now something else is happening - Bollywood, Daewoos, world music and fair trade. We know some Americans support these changes too, but your dominant culture is taking things the other way. This is making life difficult for us, acting as a drag factor - and there's a whole lot to do.

We'd prefer you to subside with grace, have a soft landing and rejoin the human race. Globalisation is now genuinely global, without a centre. Y'know, it's Vanuatu, Venezuela and Finland. This is the 21st Century, and the game is a world community game. We're all in it. In Americanese, we hang together or we hang separately. Ever shall it thus be so.

Climate Change - the tide turns in the Holy Land

In the last few years, I have been predicting a change of fortunes for Israel. This was detailed in my blog entry 'Why I sympathise with Israelis' (July 2006). Quite a few people have put me in the 'daft', 'idealistic' or 'anti-Semitic' category for that. Well, I'm persevering because I now believe, after a pause for reflection after the Lebanon war, that the signs of this change of fortunes are even more apparent. Perhaps people and governments need to start looking at this.

We’re talking here about the 'law of paradoxes', not about logic or the facts and behaviour of the past. This is known more fashionably as 'the law of unintended consequences'. Or perhaps it's just the prevailing winds of the emergent 21st Century - the future asserting an increasing effect on the present.

The overriding factor determining this sea-change is wider world conditions. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict has been going on so long, and positions have become so fixed – delaying tactics and no-budge positions have become habitual - that it risks being swamped and overtaken by events and trends in the wider world.

Not least the risk of widespread civil war across the Middle East, as warned about by Abdullah, king of Jordan on 26th Nov 2006. Currently, things could not look bleaker in the Middle East, with rising heat in Palestine, Lebanon and Iraq. This is a definite risk, but I do not believe it will happen. There are elements definitely trying to ignite it, and plenty of trip-wires, but this is partially to settle old scores and block reconciliation, and partially because conflict has become an addiction - and some fear going through cold turkey.

But the Big One comes from a variety of sources:
1. a globalising imperative arising from planetary environmental and resource issues;
2. a re-balancing of world power away from the West and toward the 'majority world'; and,
3. an underlying shift of world values away from conflict, exploitation and insensitivity toward peace and increasing cooperation.

The stakes are so high, globally, that our priorities must shift, for pragmatic reasons. We're all in the same boat, and people who rock it risk being sacrificed for the survival of the majority.

It comes from more local factors too. They are outlined in previous blog-postings. On the Israeli side, weaknesses in its position, dating back to the nation’s founding and more recent behaviour, are coming home to roost. These include Israel's dependence on American support and on military might, its weak social cohesion (glued together mainly by shared Jewish victimhood in the past), rampant individualism and social militarisation, its inattention to the social welfare of its own people and to environmental issues, its geopolitical exceptionalism (flouting of international law and values) and its inherent confusion between democracy and control, liberalism and racism.

On the Palestinian side, prolonged hardship and loss has pushed the Palestinians through social and psychological experiences that have toughened their resistance, making them bizarrely stronger in the longterm. This is currently demonstrated in the new non-violent social resistance taking place right now in Gaza - to some extent a spontaneous revolt even against existing paramilitary groups. Living for decades without effective government, the social glue that governments customarily weaken or destroy has grown strong. Palestinian population growth, outstripping that of the Israelis and outstripping population loss as a result of emigration, lends an inevitable numbers formula to the longterm game. In a strange way, the Palestinians are coming out stronger at present - precisely when they never seemed so weak.

There is something else too. Potentially, it leads toward eventual peace. It's the greatest peacemaking force of all: weariness. There's a deep tiredness in both and all communities - in Lebanon and Iraq too. This brought de facto peace to Northern Ireland, regardless of what politicians and paramilitaries thought - and Northern Ireland is an uncanny model for what is unfolding in Israel and Palestine.

Then there’s that 'law of paradox'. It has a levelling effect. Things always, always, turn around, sooner or later. It happened for the British empire, and now it is visibly happening for USA - the price of greatness, especially when injustices, violence and dominance are involved, is the building up of forces which brings down that power. This is happening worldwide, but it is very apparent in Israel and Palestine. Here, many would disagree - and they might be right. But they might also be wrong, and in places riddled with certainties, right and wrong have strange ways of reversing. Especially when God is called upon on a regular basis.

We're not talking about a victory of Palestinians (or Arabs) over Israelis. We're talking of a levelling of differences which put both sides on a par, bringing about a necessary restitution of imbalances and a dawning of peace and realism. The idea of driving Israelis into the sea undoubtedly strengthens the hearts of some Arabs, but it is neither likely nor advisable for Arabs themselves. The Israelis have already demonstrated, tragically, that the sins brought to bear on them during the Nazi period and before, have become internalised and applied to Israeli treatment of Palestinians.

The same would happen if Arabs landed up as Israelis' oppressors - they would start oppressing one another too, in ways which could make today’s civil strife in Iraq look small. The only factor which would drive Israelis into the sea would be a mass disaffection and emigration amongst Israelis themselves, deeply disappointed in the capacity of their own state to provide safe haven for the Jewish people.

So, the tanks and shellings have now stopped on Israel's part (well, in truth, not quite). On the part of the Palestinians, Fatah and Hamas have committed to hudna or ceasefire - which Hamas have proposed all along - but the decisive factor will be their capacity to rein in their militants. This highlights a factor which holds for both sides: their societies are deeply damaged and hurt, and it’s difficult to let go of the pain of the past. It's a perverse comfort-zone, a known evil which looks easier than peace.

This is why hudna is currently so necessary - to give a chance for heated feelings to subside, and for normal life to take hold. When I was in the West Bank in 2005, I could sense a buildup of a relaxation amongst Palestinians, which now has been buried. But it’s still there - a deep desire for a normal, reasonable life.

The ceasefire might or might not hold, but this does not detract from the underlying trend currently emerging. It's to do with 'asymmetric warfare'. That is, all Palestinians need to do to achieve their objectives is simply to survive. Meanwhile, Israelis need outright victory to succeed. Some extreme Israelis regard that as possible only through a 'final solution' involving the 'transfer' of Palestinians out of Gaza and the West Bank, by force if necessary. In other words, the Palestinians can achieve their objectives easier than the Israelis. The conflict thus turns against the Israelis, because Israel has a case of 'mission impossible' - and a sinking capacity to achieve it. As was the case in its conflict with Hezbollah in summer 2006.

In this dark hour, I believe peace is potentially looming. This could be challenging. It means that Israelis must cultivate a new national attitude and make friends with their neighbours – only this will guarantee security. It means that Palestinians must drop the past, push for reasonable objectives to make their lives more liveable and workable, and drop some past objectives such as the repossession of the whole of the former Palestine and the right of all Palestinian refugees and exiles to return. Morally, return might be justified, by practically it is unlikely.

This means forgiveness - that teaching which Christians have advocated so long yet failed themselves to demonstrate. It means reconciliation - a reconciliation mainly with current hard facts.

I believe we shall see a big sea-change in Israel and Palestine in coming years. It will take time. It might or might not involve further conflict. But it is coming - and, to some extent, no one can stop it. It won’t be idealism that does it, but realism. Backed up by a new realism that the wider world, the 'international community', needs also to develop and apply. Since it is the international community which has permitted this conflict to go on for so long.

Me and My Shadow - behind the post-Lebanon mess

The aftermath of the Lebanon war

In the relative quiet following the recent war in Lebanon and Palestine, a potent fermentation is bubbling up. In the war we saw an orgy of accusation and projection, in which inaccuracies, judgements and propaganda noise fatally obscured the picture. In the shock following the war, all parties – close-in and more distant – ringing ears are giving way restored hearing. Attention is curving back like a boomerang on all contributors to this devastation. We're back to Bertrand Russell's truism that war isn't about what is right, it's about what is left.

It was all too much, disproportionate, mad – the sledgehammer was far too big, and the nut could have been cracked by other means. The message was 'there is no other way', but there is another way. Problems existed, and now there are new ones. But this, this was the stuff of nightmares, of personal dramas fatefully dumped onto others.

Why do we project our fears, ambitions and nightmares on others? To avoid looking at our own sludge-heaps of unprocessed anxieties and unresolved questions. For the future, one message has emerged: this cannot go on – it leads not to resolution but to deepening consequences.

So, Israelis are now distraught over the failure of their military prowess. Their horrors, usually outwardly projected, are increasingly internalised, aimed at their political and military top brass but exposing a deep, dark, heaving morass underneath. Hezbollah can claim a kind of victory, and Nasrallah has said they had not anticipated such a strong Israeli response to its capturing of two soldiers – this might be sincere but it excuses nothing and exposes a confusion of sense and priorities. The people of Lebanon, cruelly reminded of the shadow of their 1980s civil war, are under extreme strain, their patience and perseverance sorely tested. Palestine faces collapse, contemplating yet also doubting the value of resorting to its repeated strategy of inviting punishment on itself in the hope of attracting the world's support.

USA faces hiatus, having again proven the futility of its ill-considered geostrategic impositions on other countries. Europe faces its sitting-on-hands tendency, trying to be the Good Samaritan while exposing itself as the one who passed by on the other side. Middle Eastern countries utter mixed messages, trying not to invoke the wrath of Israel and USA but possibly as guilty as the West of double standards. Iran puffs up its chest, worthy of greater respect than it gets but not as much as it believes it deserves.

What a mess. Will everyone learn and come clean? Or will this all be stuffed down yet again for another day? Are we heading for further conflict, or have we had sufficient lessons by now? This all depends on the extent to which all these parties, and the international community, are willing to lift the carpet and look underneath at their own dust and demons hiding there.

Here come some awkward truths. They illustrate how the war's consequences are greater than anyone would like them to be. We'll start with my own country.

Britain sits on a time-bomb. It thinks it's bigger than it is and that its wealth and comfort will go on forever. Its armed forces are tainted by Iraq, it stays dreadfully quiet about its enormous weapons industry, it has an affluence it doesn't know what to do with, and a profound lack of direction. Most of its European partners suffer a similarly hollow comfort, stability and quiet hypocrisy which they maintain at great cost, for want of anything better to do. Europeans have relatively fine and humane values, and genuinely get upset at seeing Lebanese bombed to bits, but our attachment to our comfortable status quo makes us seek change as long as nothing really changes. This will one day tip over and cause a landslide. Everyone quietly knows it, hoping it won't be soon, affecting our pensions and property values.

USA has had its time and passed its peak. It has developed enormous armed might and indebted, leveraged prosperity to protect its status, but these make it vulnerable too – it's Chairman Mao's classic 'paper tiger'. When Ayatollah Khomeini called it the 'Great Satan', Americans gave it a Christian interpretation (Satan as the Evil One) when the Muslim Satan that Khomeini referred to is a Great Deluder – a master of appearances and falsities. Addicted to an increasingly obsolete, oil-dependent technology, it resorts to superpower dominance to keep that oil flow guaranteed, against growing odds.

This is selfish and short-sighted, but there is a more genuine fear here too. The international community, such as it is, has not pulled together to make the necessary global decisions we're faced with today, so America feels obliged to lead, as if to save the world from itself. The problem is that this leadership tilts at windmills, over-fills its belly, favours false friends and tries to prove its point by creating diversionary crises like the 'war against terror', insisting it knows what to do. It doesn't. America is struggling to stay up.

The international community reluctantly plays along with USA while bluffing, furtively heading in other directions and hoping America won't notice. So busy is USA with its own movie-script that it hardly does notice. This co-dependent avoidance is gutless, though there's some wisdom to it: first, individual countries don't want to be singled out by America as the enemy and, second, the world fears plunging into a heated community-building and global squaring-up process which would be inevitable in the absence of superpower domination.

There are so many global questions to sort out that the international community doesn't know where to start. So it holds things back to a manageable, damage-limiting trickle, applying band-aid where possible and muttering about USA when things go wrong. But a gaping, hidden crevasse is close, and no one really wants to take the initiative or catch the blame for rocking the boat. So the UN, WTO and other transnational organisations hobble along, hoping nothing big will happen, while perhaps secretly wishing it would, just to loosen things up. It's a mutualised game of omission and commission, a false calm and an unwritten treaty of denial.

Arabic nations, meanwhile, keep their heads down. Their governments depend on maintaining a status quo, anticipating that Islamic social movements could bring chaos and bloodshed rather than a new order. Deeply regretting what Israel has done, they feel impotent against Israel's virulent sense of rightness and punishing rage. Arabic countries try to keep the temperature down, yet pressure builds for change – not just for a return to the good old days before the West started interfering, but for an entirely new formula. They're stuck: traditional Islam resists insidious Western amorality and domination, but it is itself a thing of the past, needing social and cultural re-evaluation. This is too long delayed, too held back and too large-scale, so, like Europeans but for different reasons, Muslim countries tend to want change as long as nothing really changes. Yet a tipping-point is close.

This is embodied in social movements such as Hamas and Hezbollah, but they have a problem too. So embroiled are they in resisting Israel and the West that initiating and guiding a new social fermentation has become difficult, thanks to the risk of foreign interference. Hamas is intent on reforming Palestinian society but, refusing to recognise Israel or make concrete peace-building overtures, it has lost foreign funding, thereby hobbling itself. Hezbollah seeks to benefit Shi'a Lebanese, but it has inadvertently devastated them. The Islamic movements must carry their constituency of support with them, yet loud interests in their midst are stuck in an oppositional position, diverted by a notion of jihad that has gone rather wrong.

Jihad is a purificatory spiritual struggle to root out the demons and shadows in ourselves that create difficulty in the world, but an oppositional mentality leads people to see it as a struggle against the bad guys over there, a role amply filled by Israelis and Americans (but it could be anyone). Jihad is a self-correcting quest which brings us to the truth of our situation, in our own lives, societies and terms. It concerns our own behaviour – only secondarily that of others. This pinpoints the deep transformation Muslim society is yet to make. Instead of blaming Israel and the West, they need to outclass and overtake them through self-generated reform and effort. But Israel and the West must reciprocate, re-examining their part in the much-vaunted 'clash of civilisations', otherwise Muslim countries make themselves vulnerable to yet more foreign manipulation and intervention. It's a loop.

Then we come to Israel. The path it has followed since its founding around 1948 is ending, though many Israelis fail to see this. The recent war has, like a heart attack for a fiftysomething, rudely stopped it in its tracks. Israel has fallen upon a big truth: imposing its will on others gains little except the need to impose more. It's Macbeth's dilemma, and it leads to disaster. The possible collapse of Palestine after decades of hardship means that Israel might have to rescue it, killing the two-state solution, undermining Israeli democracy and society, costing vastly and reinforcing military dominance of Israeli life. This is a lose-lose situation.

Israelis are a hotchpotch of people from diverse origins. Jewish individualism and exceptionalism mean that national unity exists only when there is something to unite against, not necessarily because of durable, shared social love and consensus. National unity is therefore conditional and can turn ugly. Tribal tensions between Israel's different communities of faith, interest, politics and origin are complex and dissonant – and this small nation has only one third of the population of Cairo.

Without external conflict and victory, domestic conflicts tend to emerge. This is avoided by a kind of societal truce but, when things heat up, vehement mutual cross-fire can lead either to self-harming or to a paralysis in which too many questions are shelved. Israel has no constitution – at its founding, disagreement over national purpose meant that a constitution was set aside for another day that never came. Other issues – social welfare, settlement-building, the Palestinian occupation, international law and the nation's future – lie there festering. This is dangerous.

It leaves a heap of unattended issues which, at times like now, risk escalating into pyroclastic torrents, relentlessly burning everything in their path. This is Israel's domestic nightmare and, in the strange psychology of nations, the habit of fighting Palestinians and Arabs, or accusing gentiles of anti-semitism, takes over as a diversionary mechanism. This no longer really works – it has gone on sixty years. It demands a deep soul-searching for a new national spirit and attitude. Fear of Israel's demise drives this forward – a demise which cannot really be done by Israel's enemies, only by Israelis themselves.

The current bogey-man is Iran, dangling its threat of developing nuclear weapons. This threat is part genuine, part bluff and part misunderstanding. Iran is assertively Muslim. Jerusalem is one of Islam's holiest sites and the Palestinians' preferred capital. Israel is a small nuclear target, with millions of Muslims living in it or nearby. Would Iran nuke such a target? Doubtful, unless it breaks with its faith and reason. Iran knows that, if Israel went down, it might take down others with it, using its own nukes. Israel's massive response to Hezbollah's border provocation suggests this: in a fit of madness, we now know Israel can go wild.

So Iran probably isn't quite as dangerous to Israelis as they anticipate – except through proxies such as Hezbollah and Hamas. Yet both of these would really prefer to concentrate on their social agendas and are stuck in a dilemma – they value Iranian support because no one else really seems to care, but this support charges its price and could also evaporate. Whatever is the case, Israel needs seriously to re-examine its approach to its neighbours, gradually developing its much longed-for security by making friends with them.

Then we have Lebanon. Roughly half of Lebanon's non-Shi'a population is critical of Hezbollah, but national unity rates higher. This is positive in general, but tricky. The Lebanese cannot force Hezbollah to scale down its armed militancy, so a resolution of national tensions will be slow and risky. But the Lebanese have developed some immunity to civil war – and Israel can no longer easily provoke domestic conflict in Lebanon to protect itself. The Lebanese have had enough of foreign interference. Lebanon is thus paralysed by its national consensus for peace and also blessed by it. Depending as it does on international visitors and business, it is caught in a fix. But its future chances are more promising than those of most of its neighbours.

Hezbollah, meanwhile, has emerged victorious yet troubled. Is it a social welfare party or an armed militia, a proxy for Iran and Syria or a guardian of its long-suffering people? Has it gained or lost respect? To resolve these questions it must now be socially and democratically minded, yet it relishes its military power and the options this offers. It enjoys getting back at Israel, and many Arabs, hurt by the past, rather enjoy it too. But this is like a gall-stone, manageable perhaps for now, but potentially deadly. Irrespective of pressures from outside, for its own sake Hezbollah must resolve its inherent contradictions – or stumble and die.

Palestine has gained nothing. Humbled Israel is less willing to talk than before. The international economic blockade is crippling Palestinians, and the relative merits of resisting and outlasting all presented hardships are wearing thin. The Palestinian Authority could collapse, inviting either Israeli re-occupation or foreign intervention, and neither option is rosy. The prospect of a third intifada is uninviting – Palestinians just want a decent life and to work out their future, in their own way. They have the skills and people but no funds and materials. Israelis take Palestinians' hapless fate to constitute proof that they cannot manage their own affairs, but this is untrue since Palestinians have never had a fair chance to do so.

A reconciliation of the old order, Fatah, with the newer order, Hamas, has been set aside yet again thanks to recent Israeli bombardment. Fatah holds many of the business and diplomatic strings that keep the nation ticking – but with this come the preferential inequalities and corruptions of the past. Meanwhile, Israel's recent incursions into Gaza and the West Bank have strengthened Hamas' position and the logic of its programme of resistance to Israel, social reform and elimination of corruption. Yet Hamas' resistance is judged abroad to be terrorism – whatever happened to freedom fighters? Reform is much needed, but this means loss for some people, systemic change and the end of old habits. So Palestine is stranded, unsupported. Lebanon can rebuild itself, but Palestine cannot. It's tragic, and it is everyone's fault.

So it's all a big mess. The easy option is for everyone to continue as before. But this isn't an easy option: it means hardship for Palestinians, pariah status for Israelis, continued conflict and delay for Arabic neighbours, and the uneasy sound of ticking detonators for the rest of the world. This mess, like a secret mass grave, cannot be buried once again: the 'easy' path of avoidance is really a difficult path with the highest costs and damages. Taking the 'difficult' path is not just a matter of moral principle: it's a pragmatic issue. But it involves a restoration of truth and integrity by everyone, and root-and-branch self-correction.

The poison has to come up and out, sooner or later – it won't go away. It will happen by choice or by accident. If by choice, it involves taking a pause to let the dust settle, then making a new start and engaging in a genuine peace-building process lasting a generation – each nation willingly raising the rug on its hidden agendas. Soul-searching is painful: it means all nations confronting their ghosts and ghouls. But it is less painful than the alternative. There is no choice, except on the timing and whether it is voluntary or forced by further doses of devastating truth.