Quote of the Day: "Let us recognise that national and global media not only report on change, but are themselves agents of change."
Kofi Annan, United Nations secretary-general, quoted in Irrawaddy, (Burma), 11 May 2006
When Charter 88 was set up in 1988 one of its banners was "Three Hundred Years Are Enough" three centuries of the United Kingdom's early-modern parliamentarism standing in for democracy. Eighteen years on, very recent events have shown that "enough" has still to catch up with it. The thing standeth yet, albeit shakily: weaker at the knees, and more addicted to compensatory bombast like Tony Blair's world-power parades and Gordon Brown's campaign for New (i.e. Old) Britishness. But still re-mortgaging the present, and still poised to punish all defaulters and detractors in 2007 and later whether in Tower Hamlets, Tehran or Cardiff: the living past not dead and indeed "not even past", in the sense of William Faulkner's famous Southerner's quip.
So has nothing changed? Well yes: the whole world, from West Bromwich to West Papua. Marx's mighty Sorcerer of Modernity is adding to his workload, not relinquishing it. But in rat-holes like Westminster and Capitol Hill, such labours can only be seen as tributes to former glories, the heirloom "values" of 1688 and 1776. Their pasts never will be past. "Globalisation" was never meant to change them, but the others: those awaiting redemption from free trade, with democracy as an eventual added extra. openDemocracy, has consistently taken a stand against such hidden-hand complacency, by arguing that capitalism's post-1989 supremacy can only be a prelude to a wider revolution democracy not as a bonus but as the foundation of a tolerably unified world. And of course it starts at home: as Todd Gitlin demanded in 2004 when George W Bush finally got himself elected. "Democracy in Baghdad and Washington". That's what global "democratic warming" is about: the humanisation of capitalism through inspiration and example, not its imposition by military means.
Tom Nairn is professor of globalisation at the Globalism Research Centre, RMIT University, Melbourne, Australia.
Among Tom Nairn's articles on openDemocracy,:
"Pariah Kingdom"
(May 2001)
"The party is over"
(May 2002)
"America vs Globalisation"
(a five-part essay, January-February 2003)
"Britain's tipping-point election" (June 2005)
"After the G8 and 7/7: an age of democratic warming'" (July 2005)
"On the beach: a bonfire of monarchies in Melbourne"
(November 2005)
"Ending the big ism" (January 2006)
This formula needs new media that are Annan's "agents of change", on the banks of the Thames and the Potomac as well as of the Irrawaddy. openDemocracy has helped lead the way in this direction, and will go on doing so. It stands for the development of open societies, through democratic-constitutional conflict for nation-states awakening and changing their skins, not "withering away" or being guided by closed élites, still largely in bemedalled uniforms. Subsidised mainly by George Soros and the United States's National Endowment for Democracy, Burma's Irrawaddy gets published just across the border in Thailand, in the same spiritual country as openDemocracy.
As Newsweek's southeast Asia correspondent Joe Cochrane noted recently: "The magazine is published in English a deliberate strategy to reach the widest possible audience about Burma's plight. Its Website, www.irrawaddy.org, is in English and Burmese and garners an impressive 47,000 unique visitors each month. The junta, which monitors e-mail and Internet content, has banned the site, but Burmese can still access it using proxy servers..." (Joe Cochrane, "Burma's river of news", Foreign Policy, May-June 2006 [subscription only]).
openDemocracy's not-so-secret plan is to manoeuvre the British-Isles nations towards this same country of the future. Hence its problems of survival. Without being proscribable for Terrorism by the un-uniformed Thames-side junta, it offends warders and trusties alike. Contemporary in style and delivery yet not dismissably postmodern, it's like a standing application to get the Westminster Constitution "listed" status with English Heritage, in the "Virtual, Grade 1, exceptional interest" category (See "Pavilions of Splendour" at www.heritage.co.uk).
Democratic warming is dangerous: international minus the "-ism", an unfond farewell to the early-modern, to fossilised pastness, to US neo-conservatism and the Blair-Brown Third Way. You vote for it each time you visit the site: the editors have recently described what you're voting and subscribing to:
"Are people ready for open-minded, democratic citizenship? One answer came on 15 February 2003 when millions demonstrated against the proposed invasion of Iraq supported by majorities in many countries. This widespread anti-war sentiment was not the craven appeasement of a dictator whose downfall was welcomed. It was not (on the whole) a celebration of populist simplicities by the unwashed. It was a wise, well-judged refusal of a war of choice and its likely consequences. The leaders of Anglo-Saxon power who had led the world since 1945 proved less far-sighted than their citizens. This moment should be seen as historic." (Anthony Barnett & Isabel Hilton, "Democracy and openDemocracy", 12 October 2005).
As Paul Rogers regularly reminds visitors to this site, plenty more historic moments are on the way, probably too close for comfort, and calling for the same refusal, and the same deeper affirmation.
