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The impending failure of the international climate conference at Cancun is the latest in a string of failures going back 20 years, to the negotiations that crafted the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC).
I was at the UN Conference that agreed to the UNFCCC. I was dismayed that the Convention and its subsidiary agreements such as the Kyoto Protocol, would all be non-binding treaties. Any knowledge of international relations - or human nature - should tell us that a non-binding treaty on climate change is about as effective as a peace vigil in a bombing raid.
Let us contrast the climate treaty fiasco with that ancient, discredited treaty process which formed the beginnings of international public law.
The Vienna Peace Congress of 1814 was disparaged at the time but historians now agree that it set the tone and procedure for subsequent international law and prevented European wars from escalating into world wars, for 100 years. (In his PhD thesis, Henry Kissinger declared this the longest period of ‘peace’ that Europe has ever had.)
The goal of the Congress was to restore stability after the upheaval of the French Revolution. For war-torn Europe in the Age of Revolution, the order of things seemed as fragile as our future looks as we stand at the precipice of climate catastrophe.
Vienna’s agreements mediated two opposing principles. Balance of power was the principle that the Great Powers should enforce peaceful order by redrawing national borders so that no state was powerful enough to successfully wage war on its neighbours. Sovereign equality between states was the principle all other powers pleaded, hoping to influence consensus.
Contemporary wits called Vienna the ‘Dancing’ Congress, in reference to the frivolous socialising and official entertainments that went on in what was the cultural and geographical centre of old Europe, a decadent, cosmopolitan city of palaces, parks, mansions and salons.
In a blow against sovereign equality, the Congress never even met in the form we would recognise, of a plenary assembly of states. Formal negotiations were exclusive affairs hosted by Prince Klemens von Metternich, the Austrian foreign minister, in his apartment.
The bulk of diplomacy at Vienna took place at night, during social events. As Counte Auguste de La Garde-Chambonas observed, “A kingdom was cut into bits or enlarged at a ball... a constitution was planned during a hunt.”
The Festivals Committee kept delegates entertained with a roster of extravagant social events. There were operas in the city parks and artificial forests installed inside palaces. Delegations and various aristocratic hangers-on took day trips outside the city for vast hunts. Ludwig van Beethoven gave a concert. Schönbrunn Palace Zoo showed a collection of ‘New Holland’ (i.e. Australian) kangaroos.
The Central Committee was a self-selected group, the Great Powers that had defeated France in 1814: Britain, Russia, Prussia and Austria. (Rather like the UN Security Council of Great Power allies who defeated Germany and Japan in 1945: USA, UK, China, France and Russia nee USSR).
As in our times, the Great Powers were variously disposed to appear fair and in accord with public values. The opinion of the public (and the excluded sovereigns in the salons of Vienna), was each state was equal, but eternal truth of international affairs is that some states are always more equal than others.
After months of debate, the Peace Congress had still not resolved the outcome of the last war and a new war broke out. Napoleon escaped from the island prison that the allies had banished him to after his first defeat. The allies made what historian David King calls the first ever declaration of war against an individual; ‘Napoleon Bonaparte has placed himself outside all human relations and that, as the enemy and disturber of the peace of the world.’ Napoleon was soon defeated utterly, at the Battle of Waterloo.
As in Vienna in 1814, the UN climate treaty negotiations are dominated by Great Powers. The plenary meeting to ratify the text of the climate treaty (the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change) was held during the Earth Summit (UNCED), in Rio de Janeiro in June 1992. All the serious decisions had already been made, in a series of bilateral and multi-lateral caucuses between states and the PrepCons (Preparatory Conferences).
But unlike the treaties at Vienna, the climate treaty is non-binding. Vienna’s Final Act treaty (and its 11 subsidiary treaties) drew on the military dominance of the Great Powers to impose peace on France and quash the territorial ambitions of small states. As the ubiquitous Prince de Ligne said at Vienna, “Politics is the art of making war without killing anyone”.
The fatal compromise of the climate treaty is that subservient to free trade doctrine. Free-trade denies climate treaty states the right to impose legitimate economic sanctions on recalcitrant states. Good states may move ahead, imposing emissions standards on their own industries and citizens, but this gives bad states an immediate competitive advantage.
Consider what Vienna would have been like if it took the non-binding approach. Russia, Britain, Austria and Prussia would have decided that war was bad, laid down their arms and issued some strongly worded statements calling on France to follow their moral leadership.
In the 19th century the idea of an unenforceable Peace would have been discounted, as the diplomatic equivalent of group suicide. Placing all our international hopes on voluntary climate agreements such as the UNFCCC, the Kyoto Protocol and the Copenhagen Pledge is a planetary suicide pact. From this perspective, Japan is quite right to be tearing up hopes of an extension of the Kyoto Protocol at Cancun.
If we are to make peace with the climate we must first win the struggle against the carbon-industrial complex and its proxy wars (over climate science and renewable base-load electricity). We only deserve to win if we are prepared to enforce climate security through trade sanctions or ultimately force itself. We need a powerful international environment court to remove the social licence to pollute. The climate polluter who undermines clean technology is, for our era, ‘the enemy and disturber of the peace of the world’, to use the language of Vienna.
We can justify the clean technology revolution on the principles of climate responsibility and national energy security. This recognises that defeating fossil fuels is an existential, strategic necessity, of the same gravity as war and peace. We accept that violent nations cannot be trusted to make peace unless there is enforcement behind the rhetoric. We must accept that polluting nations cannot be trusted to invest in a clean economy unless they can be forced to do so.
All the clever people at Cancun should direct their energies towards a new era of treaty-making. When our diplomats are done with WikiLeaks, they should be put to work designing the carrots and sticks of a new, ecological order in international relations.
A coalition for climate protection will be able to take action without waiting endlessly for an impossible, 100 per cent consensus. Our best and brightest economists will be able to redesign trade law to fairly reward those inside and penalise those outside, in the most economically efficient way possible.
The benefits of the new paradigm will start to emerge immediately.
The clean technology allies will reward each other with the free flow of intellectual property, goods and services that are climate positive or neutral.
Economic wealth generated by a clean-tech boom will create employment and consolidate domestic political support.
Belligerent polluters can be punished with economic and cultural exclusion.
Developing nations inside the alliance will have the chance to go straight from energy scarcity to reliable renewable energy, without the costly detour of coal dependence.
Nothing short of this will generate momentum towards zero emissions in the OECD and low emissions in the developing world and China. An enforceable regime of climate law will, like 19th century treaties of Vienna, require an alliance based around at least some Great Powers. But staying with a non-binding treaty model means we are all unhappy and the planet is doomed. Good diplomacy is, as always, about taking what you can get.
Dan Cass was the Australian Conservation Foundation’s official observer at the Earth Summit (UNCED) in Rio in 1992. He is a lobbyist.
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