Pick of the Web
Making a new world - Part Four: From the US to West Papua
The global movement for change – decentred, multivocal, democratic – has a right to expect the same approach from those who seek to understand it. Paul Kingsnorth has travelled the world, to track the ways that diverse social, political and environmental struggles combine into the search for a world of fairness and freedom. Here, he talks to Caspar Henderson of openDemocracy about American consumer culture and the struggle for freedom in West Papua – seemingly disparate issues connected by the thread of global corporate power.
The Venezuelan road to!where?
The five-year presidency of Hugo Chavez has given Venezuela, long one of the most reliably conservative and pro-United States countries in the hemisphere, an unlikely reputation for political radicalism and social upheaval. Chavez, himself a former military coup-leader (in 1992) turned populist politician, was elected president of Venezuela in a landslide victory in 1998 (reconfirmed in another election in 2000 after Chavez introduced a new constitution). But his flamboyant attempts to set the country on a new economic and social course, allied to his radical rhetoric and grandiose political gestures, have mobilised both passionate loyalty and bitter hostility among the Venezuelan people.
Sceptic on the cancer table
In the aftermath of a cancer operation, inveterate sceptic and openDemocracy columnist Dave Belden is treated by a healer. Might his sickness really have roots in his childhood? Can she address its cause at the level of ‘energy’? If so, what else might she heal? Is she a cheap gypsy or the real thing? What does he believe?
Iran: letter from a frightened man
This letter from Tehran tells of the arrest of a man who lived quietly by renting out copies of the world’s great cinema classics. This arrest is part of a wider purge of film journalists over recent months.
Your TV isn't watching you
David Burke is wrong to associate interactive TV with more power for corporations, politicians and advertisers. Legal and practical safeguards protect viewers’ rights, and people will continue to select and filter the material they encounter. The heart of the new technology is communication, diversity and choice – and, if anything, the empowerment of the viewer rather than the ‘monitors’.
Why Europe needs referenda
The European Union faces a legitimacy crisis. Elites and publics are moving in different directions. The way to respond is to allow all EU citizens to vote on matters affecting their future, even across national boundaries. The two Irish referenda on the Nice treaty, and those on accession, illustrate the potential of this form of direct democracy to reinvigorate public engagement.
The 'Axis of Anarchy'
If any continent deserves intervention, it is Africa. In the Democratic Republic of Congo and East Africa a devastating human crisis – failed states, ethnic violence, rampant disease and endemic insecurity – presents Bush and Blair with a moral as well as a political challenge.
The globalisation of migration control
As migration increases around the world, both international organisations and states seek tighter regulation and control over workers, asylum-seekers, and refugees. These forceful attempts to manage free movement in the interests of economic growth and social engineering inspire in response a radical defence of global social justice and equality – and an end to all restrictions on migration.
Open borders: a future for Europe, migrants, and the world economy
The controversy over People Flow reflects a major tension of globalisation: between the opening of national economies and restrictions in the world’s labour markets. Government attempts to fix labour movement in static patterns fail to register either migration’s fluid, dynamic aspect or its benign economic effects. The way forward for Europe is to integrate the continent within the evolving world labour market – and move towards free migration and open borders.
Africa: rushing for the exit
Africa’s economic collapse and corruption mean that Europe’s efforts to stem immigration from the continent will remain futile until the underlying causes are addressed.
Jayson Blair for President!
He lied, he cheated, he fantasised – now he confesses. After two years of glorious columnar insouciance, Dominic Hilton bares his soul, sells his editors’, and shakes openDemocracy to its foundations. Can a publishing mega-deal be far behind?
American Empire: history and future of an idea
The current debates over both American global power and its quasi-’imperial’ character, and the new strategic doctrines and ambitions of its political leadership, need to be informed by a particular kind of historical thinking which has been too little in evidence so far. The consideration of parallels between old European empires and contemporary developments – such as the central question of the US empire – would benefit from four fresh elements.
A step in the wrong direction
The argument of Tony Klug for an international protectorate to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is flawed by unrealism. In particular, external forces would be incapable of the detailed military planning and enforcement necessary to ensure security in the contested territories. The way ahead, rather, starts from practical day-to-day cooperation between Israeli and Palestinian security forces. This is the cumulative, difficult, but unavoidable route to an internal settlement.
Global comparisons in policy-making: the view from the centre
The principle guiding successful governance is changing. Until recently, policy ideas evolved (and too often failed) within a vacuum of national experience and cultural superiority. Today, the global commons – a shared space of experience, knowledge, and experiment – is transforming the way political systems think and operate. One of the architects of the New Labour reform programme in Britain, writing in a personal capacity, maps a key transition.
Afghanistan and Iraq: regroupment or insurgency?
The ‘war on terror’ is in trouble in its two largest theatres of operation. Resistance to security forces is intensifying in the Afghan and Iraqi hinterlands, even reaching into Kabul and Baghdad themselves. In both countries, a long-term military campaign is in sight.
Kim, Colin, Football and Pizza
North Korea’s nukes, Mauritania’s mystery, Pizza politics
Afterwards
Yesterday Omer sent me, in an email attachment, some of the pictures he took with the digital camera I gave him. They were from the road between Kirkuk and Baghdad; pictures he’d taken as we drove down it about ten days after Baghdad fell. A long straight road through the flat, beige landscape, through low mean mud villages; quiet or empty, past Arab shepherds with their faces swathed in red and white checked headscarves and abandoned Iraqi positions, dry dust trenches like scars; burnt out APCs like weals.
There were no Americans.
A new way for British government?
In advance of a global summit of centre-left leaders in London, Geoff Mulgan has mapped a vital cultural shift in the inner life of British governance – from ‘we know best’ to ‘we learn best’. The openness and practicality of his argument make it both welcome and deceptively radical, says Anthony Barnett; but does it, like Tony Blair's 'Third Way' itself, also carry some Old Britain paternalism into the new media age?
The US and global democracy: the test case of Central Asia
From 19th century imperial rivalries to Soviet communism and now the ‘war on terror’, the states of Central Asia have been targets of manipulation in the great games of superpower politics. Today, the domestic impact of US strategic ambitions is increased repression and denial of human rights. America may secure short-term political influence, but the lasting achievement of its current policy will be radical disaffection among the region’s people.
GM and the intensification of farming
The argument over genetically-modified organisms (GMOs) needs to be seen in the context of wider agricultural policy. In itself, the technology is neutral and may even have possible benefits. But the use of GMOs by farmers tied to the distorting economics of the EU’s Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) will only intensify the latter’s disastrous environmental impact. Rather than ban GMOs, it would be better to reform the CAP and tax agrochemicals.
This week's editor
Europe from the bottom up
European debate
Democratic Wealth
Nuclear non-proliferation
oDRussia at journalismfestival .com
Mali - the plot thickens
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Remote control war
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Articles exploring the themes of the fourth international Nobel Women's Initiative conference May 28-31. Jennifer Allsopp and Heather McRobie will be reporting for 5050
Articles exploring the themes of the fourth international Nobel Women's Initiative conference May 28-31. Jennifer Allsopp and Heather McRobie will be reporting for 5050
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Markha Valenta Inter Alia: religion, politics, culture
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