Ukraine: The Real Power Games

As Russia consolidates its hold on Crimea, there are some very odd features to the response to the crisis by the West. On the one hand they are trying to use the established forums to push Russia into an uncomfortable position, while probing for the response to Russia that does not look like climb down and which doesn't cause financial and economic disruption. On the other hand they are proceeding with a takeover of Ukraine, taking advantage of the countries weak position to tie it to the West. However the real objective of the West's moves is probably part of another chess game.

The West is ultimately concerned about the unknown implications of a powerful, rich and well organised China. The US is the sponsor for a number of Pacific rim countries with residual disputes with China. An emergent and confident China will want to resolve these disputes in its favour, but if it does, it will show the West to be weak, opening the way for China to push the West to obtain better access to trade and natural resources. It is this chess board that is dictating the choice of games the West is choosing to play at a more local level. The results for many countries and their people are often awful.

This is no-where more true than for Syria. Syria is sponsored by Russia and the West wants to remove Russian sponsorship for states that oppose it. It has failed to use isolation and sanctions to bring down the governments in Iran and Syria, so now it is seeking to isolate their Russian sponsor. This is not a strong strategy as the Russian government already has a nationalist and despite appearances, isolationist remit. While Russian businessmen have invested around the world, they have done so in ways that have left the West more vulnerable to financial sanctions than Russia. Europe's dependence on Russian energy means that Russia has the freedom to run many isolationist strategies and policies (including on internal issues), without losing its major sources of revenue. Keeping Syria in a state of chaos is protection for the continued dependence of Europe for gas, as it prohibits the building of new gas pipelines through Syria to bring alternative supplies from the Gulf.

Similarly, the Russian support for Iran is enabling Iran to supply China with oil outside of the dollar trading system. This is exactly the kind of practice the US is keen to stop, as it undermines its economic stranglehold on the world's economies. 

So there is a convergence of interest between Europe's concerns regarding energy vulnerability and the US's concerns about growing Chinese power and its ability to clip the wings of US power, both in the far east and its hold on trade and finance. This has led to the US's other strategy: to bind its 'friends' into closer trading agreements that will in effect define the borders of the US Empire. Exploiting regional insecurity, the US is effectively subjugating both Europe and its Pacific allies. Creating insecurity in Eastern Europe will no doubt help doubting European governments consider this all to be necessary.

What is far from clear is if this strategy will actually work. While increasing the depth of US power might mean that China will not risk pushing its case on land disputes, equally it may make no difference. The likelihood that Russia and China will further explore common ground in how to thwart the West is very high. 

The longer term danger in all this is that the world becomes dominated by a number of big power blocks that are held in balance to each other, but are unable to reform themselves internally without becoming vulnerable to the others. It was this sort of structured instability that underlay the other causes of the First World War.

Ordinary people struggle to affect decisions on keeping a local hospital open. Helping our leaders not to plot the way to unavoidable conflict is something that would require a global movement with a clear vision for managing the world's affairs in the interests of us all. Now That's a tall order.

Family and Clan: Refuge from the Failed State

The failure of our civilisation is likely to be when it fails to address the challenges of working as one people to survive climate change, resource depletion and how to live sustainably when there are so many of us. As much as these are very difficult challenges, the failure will ultimately be due to our inability to work together and to avoid the invitations of the powerful to turn us all against each other. To avoid this failure, we need to look again at the role and potential of family and clan.

Family is the basic political unit of our society. It has an economy, a social and cultural purpose and a role in the defence of its members from disease, hunger and violence. Families have networks of related families and family friends, together forming clans, but beyond clan, this intimate political system has no existence.

It is the life that we each lead outside of family that feeds, forms and shapes the other political system. This is civilisation. We go to school, we work for companies or the state and in return companies and the state provide the resilience to disease, hunger and violence, enabling the family structure to change and more flexible roles to develop.

This has been enormously liberating. Men's lives are no longer committed to the physical protection of women, children and the elderly. Freed from the daily fending off of rampaging neighbours, men no longer qualify for a full-time unpaid nurse waiting at home. People who want same sex relationships are no longer weak links in the family. Priests can no longer call on family leaders offering God's protection for their charges. The creative energy of everyone has the potential to contribute to the greater good.

This places an enormous responsibility on the companies and the state. Not only must people believe that companies and the state can be trusted to act for the common good, they do have to act for the common good if the civilisation is not to fail. This is why symptoms of serious corruption and collusion against the common good are such a serious concern. Where family is still strong, the instinct is to use it to protect its members when civilisation is failing. Where family is weak the vulnerability of individuals to the failure of civilisation to protect is a betrayal. Inevitably this is felt most by the poor, many of whom have learned from bitter experience that companies and the state are always willing to betray them if they are failing.

A result of this is that families and clans living on the edge of our civilisation, herded into social housing estates, struggle to reconcile the rules, obligations and values of family and clan with those of a wider society that tenuously supports them, but offers no right to participation.

Faced with the consequences of years of growing corruption and conspiracy to enrich the few, David Cameron's government has in effect started pogroms against this marginalised minority. Companies and the state have failed to manage our country so that it can offer everyone meaningful work, good housing, good education, good health services, secure pensions and a general sense of secure prosperity. Their response has been to decrease wages while forcing people to work. The persecution of the marginalised poor has little to do with saving money, but everything to do with forcing others, who previously had access to better jobs to accept what ever they can get, rather than be unemployed.

For many individual people who would otherwise have been stuck in the world of the marginalised poor, this policy presents them with a more accessible society. Staying on the margins is no longer as viable and the needs and expectations of family and clan can have less hold. For the majority of the marginalised poor though, these are years of real hardship. They are socially vilified for their poverty and for their culture. If they are of immigrant decent they are vilified for that too. Not being one of them is more important than asking why our civilisation is being managed by a complacent, self-interested elite, at a time when the people of the world need leadership with intelligence, courage and compassion, committed to working with the great challenges we face.

It is tempting to think that reform of the state is what is required. Conviction that the election of a better group of people into the high offices of government could ensure the reforms needed, is the rational for participation in democratic processes. There is in fact very little reason to have any such conviction. No political party can be said in any sense to have a power base that is built from the ground up. They are funded by the rich and powerful for the most part. They do not have a role in our communities. They do not have a place in our clans. They do not know our families. It is up to each of us to join them as individuals. They are not of 'us', but we can be of 'them', on their terms, with their rules, their power system. However, even if the political parties did and could reflect our interests and concerns, do they have the power? The answer of course is that they can not in a world where we are one inter-dependent family, all facing climate change, resource depletion and the challenges of being so many in a finite world.

What we can do is to change our culture and our values to recognise both our shared reality and our need to address it together. We have a corrupt system of money, administration and international relations and although we depend on it, it is a threat to us. Our response needs to be to develop alternative ways of working together where the rules and values are ours. We must again look to family and clan, but with an open mind and an open heart, seeking to build a society of clans that reaches across the world in a spirit of mutual support and tolerance.

This means taking back a level of responsibility we have delegated. It is not OK to have friends and relatives who are sexist, racist and homophobic. Its not OK to have friends and relatives who work in corrupt organisations and the organisations that dis-empower us. If we have money and resources we should invest them to benefit family and clan, but only where we know our family and clan are committed to working for our common good. People think of family and clan as being a problem, but it is being closed that is the problem. It is developing meaningful relationships that reach into all areas of our lives that is a problem. It is not respecting the values and ways of others that is a problem. If we think that humans can ever survive our current challenges without dealing with these responsibilities, we have a problem. What we all need is the opportunity to participate, fully and meaningfully and without compromise, in making so that we each belongs to a participatory society committed to the common good. If we can't entrust this to companies and the state, we must work with who we know. 

This though should not be to abandon the kind of political processes we are familiar with, but rather should aim to see the emergence of a political party of the clans. This party should demand of its member clans a commitment to principles and values and in return give true representative power to the elected spokespersons for the clans. Such a party could never go to war without the consent of the clans. The party could never work for others against the interests of the clans. In turn the clans could not conspire against the interests of the families without appeal to the party. All this would of course make daily life highly political, but that is the cost of being in a responsible society.