From the terrorist attacks on the twin towers in New York on September 11 in 2001 to the Arab Spring of 2011, no one can doubt that the first decade of the 21st century has presented a raft of new challenges for governments and governance around the world. Ross’ thesis is that in managing crisis situations, the capacities of government or states are limited so the people have to take the initiative to manage the problems they face.
He sets the scene in the first chapter, covering events that have global ramifications – 9/11, the 2008 economic meltdown, the Chechen war and so on – to highlight the proven failures of traditional approaches by state functionaries in tackling crises. “This new world requires something else beyond mere promises, something beyond new theories of interpretation, something that might, just might, make us feel at least that the tools fit the job. This new world requires a new politics,” Ross writes.
His central argument is not for a “new world order” but a “new world disorder”, an alternative model of governance that offers radical solutions to the problems that nation-states and supra-national organisations like the United Nations (UN) face today.
First, Ross argues that globalisation of the economy and society has resulted in the sharpening of social divisions between and within countries. It is not only in America that social inequality has increased, he writes. “In China, the introduction of free-market economics … has created the worst inequality in Asia, apart from Nepal….”
Second, the first decade of the 21st century has seen not only wars, like those involving Iraq and Afghanistan, it has also experienced a situation in which the well-equipped armies of powerful countries have failed to achieve results. In Afghanistan, “allied war planners preparing the 2002 invasions expected a more irregular resistance” but were surprised to find “the Taliban fighters were extremely hardy and able to endure long periods without logistical support”.
The phenomenon of professional armies failing to crush the spirits of “suicide squads of people with deep faith” needs to be recognised, as was the fact that Nato armed forces failed to establish governments of their own choice in either Iraq or Afghanistan. The suicide attacks were made under the influence of religious ideology, as a result of which professional standing armies of the world’s most powerful countries were made to confront a completely new kind of enemy whose driving force was faith based on religion.
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Third, the author focuses a lot of attention on the decline of the appeal of democracy. He refers to well-known criticisms levelled against democracies: in reality they are controlled and guided not by the interests of common people but powerful transnational corporations and professional lobbyists.
Fourth, Ross says diplomacy at international fora, including in the UN, has been reduced to rhetoric, and that elaborate resolutions made by world leaders are merely ritualistic. When diplomats and politicians return to their own countries, they have to adjust to domestic political compulsions and not to international pacts. The author, on the basis of his own vast experience in diplomacy, observes that it is fundamentally an “amoral” activity. The best illustration of the “amoral” practices followed by diplomats is to be found at discussions on climate change, where rhetoric is always at variance with commitments.
So to what disorder does Ross allude as a solution? He offers a hint in the chapter titled “The means are the end”. He discusses Gandhi’s model of non-violent protest or Satyagraha (insistence on truth) against British colonial rulers, juxtaposes it with the May 1968 movement, and concludes that action is necessary to challenge and change the system.
A chapter is appropriately devoted to the power of the Internet and the reach of Google. But Ross is rightly sceptical of its powers as a transformational tool to alter the essence and quality of democracy.
The quest for new alternatives of governance, however, leads him to “voluntarism, people’s initiatives, local agency action groups”, where people take their responsibilities on their own shoulders because, “as the realisation of government’s dwindling power spreads this new form of politics will become less about protest or petition and more about action”. This manifesto for a new, local action-based politics is like the many utopias presented by philosophers from Plato, Rousseau, Marx and Tolstoy to Gandhi. And like all utopian philosophies they are, at best, moral scriptures and, at worst, forgotten.
Ross’ utopia is “not anarchy, an absence of order”, but a society that for a period has decided to govern itself “led by values of equality and mutual respect”. It is, in short, wishful thinking. Well-organised democratic state systems will always be needed to manage normal and crisis situations. Humans cannot discard institutions of the state, which is the only agency for ensuring an orderly social existence. It is fine to democratise existing institutional arrangements for better governance, but scrapping them amounts to throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
THE LEADERLESS REVOLUTION
How Ordinary People Will Take Power and Change Politics in the 21st Century
Carne Ross
Simon and Schuster; 261 pages; Rs 699