Tag: United States

We are used to a small group of like-minded democracies calling the shots, but these democracies now have increasingly less influence over world politics, We are heading toward no-one’s world, a world of multiple modernities, interdependent and globalized without a dominant political center or model.

- Charles Kupchan, a professor of international affairs at Georgetown, cited by Roger Cohen in How Bad Are Things, Really?

Above and below.

Globally, the Pax Americana is breaking up (that’ts why we aren’t keeping the peace in Somalia or Myanmar, or all the other economically unimportant, dusty, hot, and impoverished ‘nations’). The West is falling, and the current round of the European debt crisis, and the failure of developed nations to rein in carbon emissions are just two of the two dozen or so hypercritical issues confronting us that the ‘leading nations’ are seemingly incapable of fixing.

At the other end of the scale, more and more people are living in ungoverned areas, like favelas, squatter towns, and slums. 

We have the loss of governing at all scales. 

The Occupy movement and related dissent and unrest elsewhere are a partial response to this growing void, but I wonder if it is beyond us to solve everything at once.

Perhaps we will have to restrain our governments at the international level, become closed protectionist states, in order to end globalism. Then each region can apply more resources to conquering its own local problems, and redistributing the wealth so that the 1% are left without an oligarchic government to do their will.

We have to look to the cities as the battleground to cure the world. Instead of building countries into amalgamated states — like the United States of America or the European Union — we need to break our enormous problems into smaller, regional ones, and solve those independently.

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

from The Second Coming, William Butler Yeats

(via underpaidgenius)

We have to look to the cities as the battleground to cure the world. Instead of building countries into amalgamated states — like the United States of America or the European Union — we need to break our enormous problems into smaller, regional ones, and solve those independently.