Part 2. These points on the Great Transition have been excerpted from the email/web discussion. Which of these statements do you support?
Please check off all points where you agree, and offer an edited version where you would agree if the wording were slightly amended.
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The Great Transition Initiative and the Tellus Institute have published an essay by Robert Paehlke entitled "Global Citizenship: Plausible Fears and Necessary Dreams". It is available in .pdf here.
This survey is addressed to readers of this essay, and excerpts many points from the email commentary. The survey is intended as a helpful and illuminating exercise in itself, but it is also an exploration of digital methods for convening agreement on complex high-dimensional issues that must be resolved in a collective context -- perhaps the very sort of thing that must be addressed if the Great Transition Initiative is to be successful.
This is Part 2, and includes points introduced by Richard Falk.
Thanks for your participation or comment!
GTI: Great (or Global) Transition Initiative GCM: Global Citizens Movement GJM: Global Justice Movement
Select ALL statements that are true for you (perhaps more than one).
If the options appearing here do not express your own view, you can add new options, which will be available to all participants.
If the meaning of any concept or term seems uncertain, follow your own personal interpretation.
Answer
1
[From Paehleke] The planetization of citizenship is an indispensable precondition for the establishment of global governance in forms that are both effective and fair. (Richard Falk)
2
[from Paehleke] Global governance, to be legitimate, must address ethical issues as well as functional ones associated with sustainability. (Richard Falk)
3
[From Paehlke] We should advocate the formation of a global citizens movement (GCM) that takes advantage of the networking and mobilizing potential of the Internet, combining an initial focus on local challenges while nurturing a global perspective. (Richard Falk)
4
[From Paehlke] A pluralistic and decentralized GCM that operates, at least for the foreseeable future, without leaders or a common program of action is likely to be “less threatening” to the established order. (Richard Falk)
5
If a transformative global movement is to emerge from current ferment, then it seems strategic to become more threatening, not less. Flying below the radar is not the kind of praxis that will awaken the human species from its long and increasingly dangerous world order slumber. (Richard Falk)
6
[From Paehlke] With enough patience and persistence we can get to the ‘there’ of effective and equitable global governance from the ‘here’ of neoliberal globalization and state-centrism that is accentuating inequality and human insecurity within and between states. (Richard Falk)
7
The spread of a GCM will likely occur “as crises mature and more people appreciate that global governance is where the long arc of human history is taking us—and has been for centuries.” (Richard Falk)
8
Just as the small kingdoms of feudal Europe became too small to handle the expansion of productive capacities and the enlargement of the market, so in the 21st century has the state become no longer able to respond to the magnitudes of the challenges facing humanity. (Richard Falk)
9
[From Paehlke] Advocacy of global citizenship does not imply either a prediction or prescription that the only appropriate form of global governance is world government. (Richard Falk)
10
[From Paehlke] There are alternative paths to optimal forms of future global governance and that history encourages the confidence that needed adjustments will be forthcoming. (Richard Falk)
11
[From Paehlke] A robust GCM will tend to shift political consciousness from the competitive logic of a world of states to the communal logic of a world of people. Such a shift, should it occur in relation to the agenda of global policy bearing on human security, would indeed go a long distance toward satisfying the ideational prerequisites of the Great Transition Initiative. (Richard Falk)
12
It is hard to believe that this shift in outlook [described by Paehlke] could come about unless it is actualized by a prior radical and worldwide social movement that shakes the foundations of the established political and economic order. (Richard Falk)
13
At stake, also, is whether there exists enough common global ground to overcome the geographic locus of global policy that has up to this point in modern times given us a world of competing national and transnational interests. (Richard Falk)
14
How these tensions can be overcome by approaching policymaking from the perspective of shared challenges and opportunities seems daunting. (Richard Falk)
15
[Without taking a different approach] The GCM, despite being oriented by Paehlke toward the local, will fail to exert much transformative leverage. (Richard Falk)
16
To exert transformative influence, a GCM would have to reorient political consciousness toward the North Star of human interests, which presupposes a qualitative departure from the bounded space of territorial sovereign states. (Richard Falk)
17
National political leaders must hide the extent to which they are captives of entrenched economic elites and thus need to deceive the citizenry as to why certain policy adjustments cannot even be proposed. (Richard Falk)
18
A robust GCM would benefit greatly from the establishment of some form of global parliament. (Richard Falk)
19
[A global parliament,] depending on how it emerged, could begin to articulate global policy from contrarian perspectives to those associated with the outlook of leading states. (Richard Falk)
20
To develop a transformative consciousness, we must first understand the wide gaps between a nationally oriented political consciousness and one that is humanly oriented. (Richard Falk)
21
[The emergence of a transformative consciousness] cannot be assumed to follow from the mere establishment of a global parliament. As soon as such an institution achieves gains in stature, it would almost inevitably become a site of struggle for competing worldviews, including class conflict and a variety of culture wars. (Richard Falk)
22
A reformist outlook, while useful, is not mobilizing in relation to the deeper concerns about the human future. Such a more relaxed outlook toward the global setting implicitly believes that there is ample time and political space for the transformative forces of humanism to work their magic. (Richard Falk)
23
We are living in a time of emergency as far as the human species is concerned. (Richard Falk)
24
The apocalyptic realities of the current challenges make the claim of emergency the only responsible reaction due to the evidence surrounding growing risks of species collapses. (Richard Falk)
25
We must orient praxis toward the real if we wish to act with sanity and in an aroused spirit of dedication. (Richard Falk)
26
The world has had several decades to react and adapt, but has not done so. (Richard Falk)
27
[The collective human failure to respond] to such fundamentally threatening developments disclose, above all, is a biopolitical uncertainty about whether the human species as a species has a sufficient will to survive. (Richard Falk)
28
Our hopes for the future depend on determining whether this apparent weak will to survive at the level of the human species is hard-wired into our collective mental processes or is a contingent byproduct of modernity encased in a state-centric and neoliberal world order that can be reconfigured for survival and justice, but not without a difficult struggle. (Richard Falk)
29
Even those with some sensitivity to gravity of the challenge, such as Barack Obama, are so constrained by the practicalities of politics that they continue to limit recommended solutions to those that are market-based and have already been demonstrated to be ineffective. (Richard Falk)
30
Restoring confidence in citizen efficacy and the encouragement of working within the system to be the wrong way to go given what we know, fear, and hope. So conceived, a GCM is likely to divert our attention while we as a species move ever closer to a nightmarish future. (Richard Falk)
31
To approach the Great Transition of happier dreams we must begin by distinguishing between ‘us’ and ‘them.’ This may seem divisive, but in a world so hierarchical and divided by class, race, and gender, to do otherwise is to retreat disastrously from the realities of political life. (Richard Falk)
32
It is fine to crave unity, but in the meantime, we are entrapped in a series of structures that reward conflict and exploitation and take disunity and enduring division as endemic to the human condition. (Richard Falk)
33
At best, we can affirm dialogic modes of being in the world, an engagement with ‘otherness’ in all its forms, but also with the humbling recognition that there are radically different appreciations of what needs to be done. (Richard Falk)
