Europe is at risk of war – What should we do?

[alberto]

Hmm… no

Vinay: “the customer is short-sighted” is exactly the same thing as “the vendor has a weak pitch” with a different allocation of the blame. Still, no deal.

That the government is responsible for some mess has never stopped successive governments for claiming they would go in and fix them. Discontinuities are not disallowed (in fact you might argue they are designed for) and could even earn political kudos. Of course, this works better with younger leaders, not as well with very senior people deeply embedded in the previous rule, but there you have it.

But the main point is another one: it’s not government that’s not buying, it’s people. Your debate is intellectually sophisticated and has probably reached a critical mass of enough debaters to sustain itself, but it is still confined to a tiny minority with very little social acceptability. You have content, you have deep thinking, I think it should make more of a social impact than it’s doing.

[hexayurt]

The horribly deeper background of the Resilience Story

Resilience doesn’t sell, either inside or outside of government, for the same reason that we have police offices enforce the wearing of seatbelts and crash helmets: people are programmed to ignore small-but-serious risks, it’s in our DNA. Until we actually see something happen, we pretend everything is fine, regardless of what our rational minds say. The State compensates for this “risk-blindness” by using its superior data, statistical analysis and legal force to push us into lower-risk behaviors in many areas of our lives including personal safety, drug policy and pensions. 

We can't just wave a wand and overcome our to risk: intellectual understanding of risk = no emotional response = no engagement = nothing gets done, regardless of how real the rational risk estimate is. It's only after we see somebody get saved by a crash helmet that we'll start taking precautions, but until then, for most risks, "hey buddy, everything is fine, want a loan?" is the basic tone of our discourse. 

 

We're still piling on the risk even now, rather than simplifying and untangling the financial system. Until it happens to us, or somebody we know, a market crash or a sovereign default are theoretical possibilities, things which might one day go wrong, but right now are Somebody Else's Problem, left to the State to worry about, avoiding the public panic associated with "ok, now we get it. Run."

 

What we have not seen personally, we do not count.

 

So let me get back to the "Sales Problem" for resilience. We've got four factors in the way:

 

* government is stupid and short sighted on many core risk management issues: asteroid strikes, climate change, financial markets

* when people do wake up to these kinds of risks, the response is usually panic: bank runs, shotgun purchases, fear response

* if people actually understood the risks we're running, they'd force a massive political change on society: this has been true since nuclear weapons policy framed Mutually Assured Destruction and built the huge stockpiles

* in short, it's blindness to the real risk landscape is what allows our modern society to function

 

All those poor villagers with 20% infant mortality rates and 20% HIV infection rates aren't just "at risk" they're living in our idea of a worst case scenario or something close to it and we're in real trouble psychologically because we know - we *know* - that when we actually run the numbers, a substantial part of our wealth comes from the things that cause their problems. Colonialism in its brutal older forms shaped the basic structure of many developing world societies, and those forms are maintained by modern, more subtle colonialism through institutions like the World Bank and the basic framework of capitalist financial arrangements which are, after all, directly derived from the colonial bureaucracy of the British East-India Company and other resource extraction corporations from the 16th and 17th centuries. That's where we got limited liability corporations and the basic framework of modern market capitalism.

 

Now this is not a doctrine of no hope, indeed far from it, but I want to take this apart more carefully.

 

* 16th/17th centuries we invent and deploy rapacious international corporations to make Europe rich.

* the poor have more and more military and market power

* the corporations are having problems feeding on cooperative African dictatorships and are turning on Europeans

* suddenly there's a resilience gap, a financial crisis, a political issue

 

And there *is* a material base problem here: the Greeks really can't afford to have all those Mercedes and four bedroom houses. That stuff is expensive and, bluntly, "growth is the new inflation" - growth has been the magic pixie dust which was going to eat debts, no matter how large, given time. Growth, where it really exists, is indeed magic, but in most of these places growth did not exist, what existed was capital sloshing around in the global bathtub, or a temporary improvement based on new technology which was soon adopted by competing countries and it's all back to square one.

 

The crux of our blindness is that the same forces which blinded us to poverty in Africa blinded us to the risks of poverty in Europe.

 

Let me say that again.

 

The crux of our blindness is that the same forces which blinded us to poverty in Africa blinded us to the risks of poverty in Europe.

 

To close the resilience gap - to actually see the risk and do something about it - means looking squarely at what separates us, with our expectation of plenty and our armies which ensure that plenty remains, and "them" - all the poor people in the world who live at the bottom of the collapse curve, with their traditional social resilience and protection mechanisms shattered by colonialism and market capitalism and slavery and so on, and nothing left in the barrel. The shock of Greeks becoming poor when once it was Africans is, indeed, a sign of change, but its also a sign of how comfortable we've all become with poverty in Africa, and the idea that it could never happen to us, that we are somehow magically protected from these outcomes.

 

I discovered the field called Resilience existed when I started mapping risks to refugee populations. I started at the bottom and asked "why are these people dying when I'm safe?" and the answer was infrastructure, and beyond that, resilience. Without the focus on poverty first, any notion of deep resilience does not work because we can't actually allow ourselves to see the real risk.

 

"Collapse means living in the same conditions as the people who grow your coffee"

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EkQCy-UrLYw (a 10m talk I did a couple of years about poverty)

 

There is no guarantee that the Greeks are going to stay richer than the Tunisians. Eleven million Greeks average $25000 a year and 81 years of life expectancy. Ten million Tunisians, just across the water, average $10,000 a year and 74 year life expectancy. It’s a big drop, but what fundamentally makes these places so different?

 

And the step I’m not willing to take is to tell the Comforting Lie that gets people to do the right thing. We could sell resilience completely divorced from all notion of the real risks at the root of our society, that it rests on massive injustice in resource extraction enforced with military power, but what we’re left with that point is “Reactionary Resilience” - keeping the status quo in which we win at gunpoint - instead of what we all really want, which is “Transformational Resilience” in which our ability to cope with change actually enables change in the real, deep, structural levels of society.

 

Because this mess is not going away without change on the scale of the Industrial Revolution. Even the fiscal conservatives like the Germans are completely dependent on the international order created and maintained by the Americans for their wealth. If Germans did not trade at unfair advantage with poorer countries due to the international trade system, their standard of living would probably be cut in half.

 

So here’s what I’m saying: real resilience requires a real understanding of the real risks, and the real risks are completely unacceptable in public discourse. I’m going to be out in the cold a while longer yet, perhaps 10 years, before people can really hear the real message at the heart of my work.

 

The Comforting Lie is that it can stay this way, with us in our positions of unconscious power and privilege while the world starves and burns, and much of the Resilience Industry simply ensures that people will keep these current positions.

 

The kind of resilience that I envisage is the kind which gets real about the unsustainability of our lifestyles, both financial/trade and social justice, environmental and technological - and prepares us to watch this global order end and survive the process.

 

There is no guarantee that any given government will survive that process, or indeed that the Nation State is going to be the primary political unit of organization by the time all is said and done. We're watching cracks in the foundation of the concept of The State open up in the EU as transnational/continental integration issues break regional/national governments. America is flying apart on 200 years of buried baggage as the original cultural groups who came to America fail to resolve their cultural differences, Obama or not.

 

And a more resilient State is not necessarily the answer I had in mind. We need certain aspects of the State to function at unimaginable levels of efficiency if we're all going to survive the upheavals likely to be unleashed by large scale national bankruptcy as it arrives in places like America and possibly China. But that doesn't mean that a more resilient State is the answer: a government that survives when its people do not is not the answer.

 

This is the crux of the resilience problem in Greece: can the Government prepare the people to survive the Government's own demise through bankruptcy? That's really what we're discussing, and right now, I think the answer is no. The State cannot face its own death, so it cannot prepare people to survive that risk.

 

If you can figure out how to sell the State the concept of preparing for its own death, Alberto, you're a better salesman than me :-)

 

Of course, we have some evidence of that already, so I'm explaining where I'm stuck in the clearest possible terms, and looking for your help on this one. How do we do this? Do I just have this ass backwards and upside down? Can you imagine reframing the useful bits of this message in a form that Government can really use and understand? I've been trying: no luck so far.

 

Open collaboration and all that: does anybody else have the magic keys here?

 

PS: as I once said, "I do not fear the State, I fear the State will collapse before we have a meaningful alternative." and that's the truth.

[alberto]

Black Swan, Gray Swan

I see, you are using a Black Swan-type argument: societal resilience against collapse does not sell because collapse is a very bad event associated with a vanishingly small probability. Human psychology tends to underestimate the expected value of the damage done by this kind of event, as Nassim Taleb eloquently explained to us in his book.

I am not qualified to judge whether all-round collapse (global infrastructures from oil pipelines to interbank trading to the Internet go down, war becomes endemic, highly populated areas become incapacitated to provide the minimum caloric load, whatever) is a Black Swan, but partial collapse certainly is not. An Argentinian scenario, I would say, is a high probability event for Greece (high here means “computable by human psychology”. 10% is high). Energy crisis is a high probability event too.

So, of course no: magic keys are currently out of stock, leave your number, we’ll get back to you as soon as possible. But if it were me, I would try unmooring the high probability components of your collapse scenario from the rest, and trying to sell those. After all, the UK Government’s idea of a Big Society with communities providing public services to themselves (with some help from the state) does increase resilience a bit, as it decentralizes capacity of provision of those services.

You rightly worry that by doing this the fundamental wrongs will not be tryly challenged. You may be right: but issues tend to be interconnected, and in today’s society systems that used to be disconnected or loosely coupled are becoming tightly coupled instead (think weather and traffic). So, once society at large starts chewing at one corner of the problem, it is likely to discover the rest of it. In other words, you would have an approach to resilience that does not need cultural change to work, but produces the cultural change it needs as it goes.

[lucasg]

Gives me some personal hope

I’ve been writing a piece of work that I can’t yet make public, but hopefully will be out soon.

My first draft included some pages about probabilities. How this particular challenge could be looked at in terms of:

• historical probability (events per century was the unit),

• present knowledge of mechanisms (a big piece of rock is falling towards me; forget about probabilities, because I trust my knowledge of how gravity works),

• and cost (three types of cost: RoboCop approach is unsustainable, unique risk is unbelievable, so stock up on ideas and easy training for the few).

In the second draft, I nixed much of all that, and ended up talking of a wide scope tool that could be used for many emergencies, and left it to the reader to imagine how many, and how likely.

So, “all hazards” resilience is a somewhat easier sell.

And now you suggest it might help produce deeper changes too? Hmm. I sure do hope so, and will have to a) think about it and b) continue to watch what people actually do and say.

Actually, “people” is meaningless. We’re all different, and some of us are already changing. My feeling is this conversation would have been difficult - impossible? - a few years ago. If you add the context (CoE), yes: impossible, I’d say. Or at least unimaginable (by me at least)!

Now, none of this addresses deeper changes. But, as Vinay well knows, London used to burn to the ground every now and then, and things changed … and I don’t know what that means in our context: Imagine The Canaries: Starting to almost get it (I clearly don’t know).

[inflector]

There are two courses for mitigating the effects of our current circumstance: pushing out the collapse, or speeding up the meaningful replacement strategies.

It is clear that a top-down structure which does not comprehend the full scope of the problem will not change and cannot be changed in time to avert the coming collapse, or even to delay it.

So the course of wisdom is to speed up the formation of meaningful alternatives.

The only way to get these alternatives to scale in time is to make sure they are ones that can be built and operated without requiring any approval or top-down planning. Thus hexayurts and other “we can do it ourselvs” alternatives.

It is time to take it to the next level. To build complete plan sets for local resilience that incorporate basic systems that do not rely on any government or institutional infrastructure like say Euro currency.

What is in the kit that a town in Greece (or Tunisia or Zambia) needs to let them be part of the global society while building a resilient and independent lifestyle that does not depend on enslaving some other people? This is a more complex problem, but one we must solve.

What are the hexayurt equivalents for the village? Steven Putter’s Imagine Zambia Water’s Edge initiative is one such attempt at building a village-level hexayurt in viral form. There are others.

Collapse of global empire does not need to be net bad for humanity, but it will be if we don’t have contingency plans at the ready real soon now.

[wildfarmer]

Have you heard of OSE?

So it seems like you are talking about very similar strategy to that of Open Source Ecology (OSE). They aim to build an open source global village construction kit and distribute plans on net. Its pretty popular in resilience circles and I’m assuming you are familar with it.

I think that systematic approach to resilience, coupled with open source means of collaboration is a compelling way to accelerate things, I’m less than certain about the ability to complete such an overarching goal.  One big problem I’ve thought about is that we really do not know what level of village tech to aim for, that depends on the idustrial resource availability, and will very depending on locality and pace of the collapse.  IMO OSE is shooting for a higher level of technology than we will likely be able to support given how volatile this next phase of industrial descent looks to be.  The base of the an autonomous village infrastructure will always be the underlying energy infrastructure as it determines how much complexity you can service, as complexity is bascially a rough proxy on entropy. So that said we need to  know what the energy source availability will look like and then adapt infrastructure accordingly. Right now the projects long term viability hinges on solar steam and biomass steam powered energy systems.  This will certainly work from a strict technical aspect, but will be very unlikely to provide the energy surplus to fuel the total infrastructure proposed.

All of that is not to say the project will not do a lot of good even if full goal is not reached, but there seems to be a need for a lower tech parallel development project with perhaps better odds of sucess. Maybe a build out of the hexayurt and super simple complementing infrastructure could be such a project??

[edwin]

this is being discussed elsewhere too

i was discussing the exact-same dynamic elsewhere (relating to cultural, rather than material production), and we discussed the same OSE project (which crosses both, being fundamentally about intellectual property and its role in material production). noemi posted a link to an article which i found really fascinating, though i didn’t agree with all of it. what i found most interesting was the idea about the move from economies of scale to economies of scope - ideas which draw power from their immediate widespread replicability, like a village in a box (or, as has been mentioned elsewhere, a state in a box)…

[matthias]

Ah yes OSE

Thanks for providing the pointer to OSE Would’ve done just that otherwise, being a big fan of their work. As I understand it, the best benefit of their project might be the DIY civilization movement that they kickstarted with their bold ideas. Marcin is a visionary thinker, and visions need that ingredient of being ahead of their time (a bit) to inspire people for practical action. I doubt they would’ve got the TED publicity etc. if they had framed it as a more modest approach …

That said, I agree that there will be much benefit from their work even if the result is not the ultimate success of DIY civilization that they work for. It’s an experiment after all, and experiments are for learning, by both success and failure.

The GVCS-50 is their construction kit for DIY civilization … and personally, I work on a system that collects and orchestrates all the free and open products you would build with that kit to create a small civilization. It’s likewise an experiment, likewise a bit utopian, and likewise meant to be useful even if not ultimately successful. To my knowledge, it is the first collection of all the open source, open design and sharing economy projects that are going on these days and would be useful for autarkic, DIY civilization. And I’m still astonished what is going on these days, as I found a project for nearly everything from open source drug discovery (malaria drugs etc.) to open data collections for all varieties of food plants … . Here’s a list of some of these projects, from another discussion here on Edgeryders.

It’s all like … well, think about Linux and Wikipedia. Back then, it was utopian madness to start writing a kernel in your free time, and madness to try competing with Britannica. In my view, we’re at the brink of another such shift to the free and open, this time encompassing all the physical tech.

Last note, as the discussion was also about OSE’s energy concept: OSE is collaborating with SolarFire, a small project started in India that builds impressive open design solar concentrators. (They have a donation campaign right now to fund the full documenting of their smaller concentrator … maybe somebody wants to chip in.)

[lucasg]

Toolbox and our thinking

You’re reading today’s newspaper. In a tablet. While the train takes you to your usual destination.

Something happens, the train stops, and you have to decide what to do.

You need to reassess the situation, how much weight you’re carrying, what your strength is, wether the walking is going to be uphill or downhill, and a number of other things.

In OODA terms, you need to reorient. OODA loop - Wikipedia

Orientation is a combined look at priorities and tools, as in “yes, I can walk, but where to?” and “ok, I can phone, but saying what and to whom?”.

I’m extremely biased, and others probably have something that’s as good as that or better, but I tend to favour SCIM, at least for the hard disruption situations: pandemics, economic crashes and others. Imagine The Canaries: Why I love SCIM, and what to do about it

Not sure what would work if the problem is, like now, a problem with money allocation. See, people still need food and shelter and meds - but we look to existing systems of provision: money, grid, etc.

Do we put money in people’s hands (alt currencies, of which the Drachma might well be a tough experiment), do we make it easy to live on less money, or both, or other ways?

[lucasg]

MACC

This may sound or be a bit out of context, but let me put it forward as an extreme reference of sorts:

http://vinay.howtolivewiki.com/blog/other/how-to-reboot-civilization-1816 (by Vinay)

"Municipal Administration of Cities in Crisis

MACC is a project I’m trying to get off the ground. The basic notion is that in any substantial crisis, municipal authorities will bear the brunt of the load. In a local (“point”) crisis, national agencies can come to the assistance of the troubled region. In a “systemic” crisis, national agencies may hit a few trouble spots, but will be generally ineffective. However, the mayor and the fire department and the chief of police are going to be right there, on site, weathering the storm or failing to do so.

Therefore any planning for really severe scenarios needs to focus on the individual at home, and the mayor’s office / local council. There’s no central government support, they’re spread too thin. And, generally speaking, there’s only a limited amount of utility in planning for specific scenarios – too much could happen. The trick is not planning for disasters, it’s planning to keep people fed and watered and on their medicines afterwards. The real dieoff is usually not the event, it’s the aftermath."

I even started a (so far empty) wikipage over at appropedia: http://www.appropedia.org/MACC

---

Now, with that said, why do I bring it here? Because I think there will be a “substantial crisis”, a “really severe scenario” in Europe soon-ish? I don’t know. I stopped predicting very early in the game. I prefer to build double-use tools. Something that will make sense now, in good situations, and in bad situations.

Part of the reason for doing it that way is because selling very bad situations has proved really difficult - the “high-impact unknown-probability event” that’s perceived as a “so-low-as-to-be-neglegible-probability why-even-care-about-impact event”.

But another part is because of timing. We build the tools in times of “peace” and use them in times of “war”. So, if they are not useable in times of piece, they get all rusty. They need to be double-use!

---

So, double-use MACC? Sure. It’s useful now. It could be a wiki-centered repository of useful tips and tools. Useful for any given percentage of municipalities (for the people living in those municipalities) during the present economic crisis, and more so if things get widely worse.

---

What would it look like? Not sure, and we need everyone’s input here. I tend to frame it in terms of Why, What, How, What-if (as I was taught by a friend). So, here I go:

1. Why? MACC is needed now in Greece, parts of Spain (there’s a province where a number of kids get their only meal at school, and Summer is here), and surely in many other places in the world. It could be needed in any kind of “war” or “revolution”.

2. What? I think we need both the engineering and the governance.

Regarding engineering, a polished subset of appropedia would give us the printable PDFs for stoves and water filters and toilets and transport and communication. Some of that is in lowtechmagazine.com and notechmagazine.com and in several other places. The guys at opensourceecology.org and wikispeed.com and solarfire.org are all doing their part - and I agree we might need hexayurt.com and star-tides.net and other things … distilled for two (at most three) degrees of complexity. OSE is too big and too slow for certain scenarios, and there may be blood if and when they start to take other player’s piece of pie.

Regarding governance, Municipalities have their area of influence. I don’t know if there would have to be any fixes here. Surely we could learn how things look like, and how they would need to be improved to make space for doing whatever’s best in a range of circumstances. I’m pretty sure there needs to be room for non-governing entities (a citizen, a group, or whatever) to start things up with a minimum of bureaucracy. We need to look into how to “differentially empower the incumbents”. Being able to get things done probably requires a range of strategies, depending on how willing and able everyone else is.

3. How? A wikipage-centered approach looks good to me, so it probably wouldn’t work <grin>. It appears to be deeply intertwined with the “governance” side of things.

4. What-if? This would include the possibility that the toolset is not fully developed when the real mess starts. So we’d need some kind of contingency plans to spread it far and fast. Because we know crisis fuel preparedness best when it’s too late, so we need to prepare for that. (For a flu pandemic, it was suggested there was need to research the best treatment, but it couldn’t be done before it started, so a research protocol would be put in place before the pandemic, and enacted at the onset of the pandemic. Get ready for not being ready, sort of.)

All of this needs muscle and time. I don’t know if we have that.

[lucasg]

i support that question

I’ll love to know what “civil servants, elected politicians and policy advisors” (in Strasbourg and elsewhere) have to say about resilience.

My guess is no-one wants to talk openly about dangers unless they are pretty formalised - and that’s not the kind of danger we’re talking about here, is it? Yes, you can speak out about putting out fires, which is a subject there are protocols and legislation for. But 21c war? Not in the manual!

Sure there’s private talk about some things, in some silos, but even there I suspect communication tends to be hard. Nothing personal, or it’s always personal, but in any case - hard. (Unless in some spheres where people are brutally frank. We can imagine. I don’t know.)

You see, if you take out all emotions, it’s like - say - a health problem. There’s this and that theoretical risk, this is what we know and don’t know about your particular circumstance, these are the options available, and this is what I (your healthcare advisor) would suggest for you personally, right now. Right?

Wrong. Emotions are there.

A friend of mine was my friend before becoming a politician. After he went in, two months passed and I stopped understanding what he said. From what I half-understood, he had to cover his back, speak vaguely, and never speak his own true mind in full, specially in important matters. I found that troubling.

The game is wrong. If the ring through which the ball has to enter is up there, only tall players can play. In politics, those without the right skills are out of the game fast. And if they have hidden skills they must be kept hidden much of the time.

We need to play outside that playground.

Or, at the very least, we need to play from outside that playground. Engage them from outside, creating new rules of the game, and hence new games.

How to do that I have no idea - ah, wait, yes, open source politics? The people at http://www.appropedia.org once suggested environmental policies should be wikified. We could do that for Europe - a huge hack in which all law becomes wikified, referenced, crosslinked, compared, commented on. Maybe that’s a next-step for Pirates and Non-pirates who are into open-gov, and for citizens who take the internet for granted.

Then, voters would have a reference for “what can be done”. An honest, clear reference. Like you would get from a good healthcare advisor.

I’d go even further. Forget voters. Think about doers of all kinds. People who build and use, sell and buy. If there’s a catalog of “ways out”, real options, that will help.

There’s this notion of “differential empowerment”. We, as citizens, want to empower those insiders who are willing, eager even, to do what we think needs doing. So let’s keep doing that, and do it in a larger scale.

And yes, keep asking. But without hope that they will be able to tell the whole story, because most likely they can’t.

Now, there’s also the receiving end. Are citizens ready to listen to their friendly healthcare advisor? Some are. In times of trouble, my guess-hope is more ears will open. But there’s also more noise, so I don’t know what will happen.

[lucasg]

The case for resilience

With the above said, there’s clearly a case for resilience.

Call it what you wish: economic volatility, climate change, energy supply, all of them at once. Are these things starting to get into everyday conversations? I’d say yes.

So maybe now things will be pretty different.

Someone has to start.

Yes, let’s ask the people at or around the CoE.

Let’s ask everyone we can, locally.

The question is simple, and I think should be framed openly x 2 (“speaking out” and “without a yes/no answer”).

“There’s a chance that the population in this territory may have to go through this and that and who knows what. How do you plan to help us now, and later? How can we help you help us?”

Keep asking.

[edwin]

WAR (what is it good for?)

i haven’t been able to take part as much as i’d have liked to over the past few weeks (i have to pay the bills too!) but i’ve been keeping up. there’ve been a couple of discussions i thought were particularly interesting, and this is one of them.

i don’t think ‘war’ is a good descriptive term here. it might possibly be a good analogy, i don’t know, but i don’t think it describes what europe is at risk of. i have such massive respect for several of the people who’ve argued otherwise, so i’m willing to give it a chance (“give war a chance!”), but here’s my thought:

europe stands a pretty decent chance of undergoing a revolution. it is incorrect to say that the action in a revolution occurs within a nation - this has never been the case, and all well-known historical revolutions saw significant pan-national action. it’s not just that the bolsheviks were formed and came to power from exile: the russian civil war basically wouldn’t have happened were it not for (outside) western powers. che guevara was an argentinian, who didn’t originally plan to hold his revolution in cuba. the american revolution was a battle against, and between, the old imperial powers, who were based on foreign shores.

significant revolutions have also always had the explicit aim of ‘exporting’ change across continents. this has been only partly ideological - it also makes strategic sense. a soviet state surrounded by other soviet states faces less threat than one surrounded by hostile regimes. this has been true of every ‘revolutionary’ trend, from europe’s 1848 uprisings to pan-arabism; from bolivar, to a post-colonial free africa, to the arab spring.

my intention isn’t to write a piece of historical opinion. it matters because of why revolutions have always spread, or sought to spread themselves. i believe in resilience (the ‘hard’ kind, when we’re talking about ‘hard’ issues), and also the (related) principle of subsidiarity. it’s worth remembering that this doesn’t mean everything happening at the lowest level: it means everything happening at the lowest level at which action is effective. so whilst individuals will ultimately be required to act regardless of who makes the decisions (individuals, local council, nation state, europe), an ‘individuated plan to fight climate change’ is a waste of time, in the same way that a ‘pan-european strategy to cook my lunch’ is a waste of time.

europe is a large enough structure to deal with many of the large threats we face, and we should take full advantage of this. resource shortage and depletion is a challenge where a structure that large is in a really great position to be of use. even on climate change, europe can make an impact that its’ member states simply cannot. on smaller, traditionally ‘state-level’ issues such as social security, europe wouldn’t need to act were it not for things like the european single market and shared currency, which push these challenges up to the european level.

a practical example: what’s happening in greece right now isn’t the fault of greeks, and the greek government was only one party in its creation - it was a pan-european problem. greeks did not simply ‘borrow too much money’ - the whole of europe took part in either borrowing too much, or lending too much to others. and lending wasn’t a philanthropic act - every single lender did so because they thought they’d get a really great return.

northern europeans had insisted on an initial exchange rate that priced themselves over-competitively, on the introduction of the euro. they then lent heavily to southern europeans, who used a lot of that money to buy goods and services from the north, propping up northern wages and profits. so when it all falls apart, a lot of greeks owe a lot of germans a lot of money. but an argument could easily be made that german banks were really just lending money to germans, and simply doing so via greeks - with the greeks left holding the can when it all fell apart.

the reality is probably that greeks and germans (and every other european nation) were borrowing too much (or lending too much) - and laying responsibility with individuals or groups is pointless, because no group was powerful enough to have single-handedly changed the situation. the solution would have been collective action - and it still is. i really disagree with the methods being advocated by western european banks, but there is no solution to this that isn’t collective. revolutions don’t have to involve bloodshed, famine or whatever, and i’m not calling for revolutionary leaders, flags and long marches, but we must solve this together, and it will involve substantial political upheaval. since our current model is broken, this could be a good thing.

the choices are these: either planned upheaval, that we’ve all signed up to, or individuals (and individual states) will take their own actions, and we’ll end up with a situation that no-one would have chosen, even they. this goes well beyond greece’s current crisis - it’s true of every pan-european problem, from social security to finance to energy security.

[alberto]

Great comment!

TOOLosophy and Edwin, these are excellent contributions, thank you both. I am awarding each of you +100 reputation for careful, insightful comments.

[edwin]

sweet!

thanks a lot, alberto - i’ll spend mine wisely

[toolosophy]

Absolutely Nothing!

I’ve followed the discussion thread so far and it is splendid. Well grounded opinions, daring affirmations, interesting debates. There are several pointes that I also wanted to add to it. First of all, after reading through Vinay’s post and through the comments I have this slight feeling of Euro-centrism concentrated in here

There are so many potentially dangerous/destructive things going on in the world right now.  I will outline just a few examples. China has announced a double-digit increase in military spending in March while India recently became the world’s number one arms importer. This triggered reactions in neighboring Pakistan, test-launching their new missiles. North Korea is going ‘bunkers’ after its failed rocket launch. Let’s not mention the growing tension around Iran and the continuing bloodbath in Syria. This all go on top of unending tension, violence, insecurity and underdevelopment in Africa (the current hot-spots being Nigeria, Sudan and South Sudan, Kenya and the Mombasa region, Mali and the Tuaregs among many others)

If Europeans are so concerned about irregular migration, and the growing inflow of asylum seekers, security at the EU borders, multiculturalism and culture and identity issues, I think they should also be concerned about Detecting, Avoiding, Mitigating and helping others Recover from violent conflict.

I think war is a deplorable thing. It doesn’t matter where, when or by whom it is waged, any form of violence should be condemned and stopped. Therefore, I think that the (potential) war in Europe is important and should be dealt with preemptively, by building the necessary capacities and infrastructures for prevention, early-warning mechanisms, ‘hard’ resilience tactics, and peacebuilding strategies. BUT the war in Europe should not be treated or perceived as being more important than the current crises going on in the world, be it Africa, Asia or the Americas.

I also thought that if we really want to look for resilience models, we might as just take Iraqis, Pakistanis or citizens of Afghanistan as examples, the very people that the Europeans (Westerners) are waging wars against.

I don’t think that the M.A.D. doctrine is dead. I believe Europeans will do everything in their power to avoid a war within their borders as a defense mechanism againt the other world powers. I just wish that every conscious man, every politician, every military commander has read Kropotkin’s Mutual Aid [full book in pdf format] to undestand that cooperation is a stronger and more desirable factor of evolution than competition.

Every conflict is born equal, should be treated with equal respect to the matter and with equal dedication to the cause of making and maintaining peace and triggering socio-economic development.

Now, resilience is a great thing and we need more of it in the world. I hope I understood it correctly and I would like to connect it with a very similar (new wave) concept called I4P [Infrastructures for Peace]. There is an international core group of researchers, activists and experts working on developing the concept and giving it shape and structure. Here’s a 2-pager concept note on the I4P. And here you can find the laterst issue of the Peace Praxis newsletter sent out by the PATRIR (Romanian Institute for Peace), where I volunteer at, with a special focus on I4P with key info and publications attached.

Hope you guys enjoy it. If this is of interest to you, I could also prepare a 10-15 minute presentation on the Infrastructures for Peace, say during the breakout session on Resilience or during the unconference. Keep in touch and looking forward to interesting discussions at the conference.

[simanda]

Gira il mondo, gira la terra, tutti giu per terra documento?

Ma il cambiamento più grande che dobbiamo fare è dal consumo alla produzione di cibo, anche se su piccola scala, nei nostri orti. Se anche solo il 10% di noi lo facesse, ce ne sarebbe a sufficienza per tutti. Da qui deriva la futilità dei rivoluzionari che non hanno un orto, che dipendono dal sistema stesso che attaccano e che producono parole e pallottole e non cibo e protezione.

Talvolta sembr…a che sulla terra tutti noi siamo irretiti, coscientemente o incoscientemente, in una cospirazione che ci mantiene impotenti. E tuttavia, tutte le cose di cui le persone hanno bisogno sono pur sempre prodotte da altre persone: solo insieme possiamo sopravvivere. Noi stessi possiamo porre rimedio alla fame, all’ingiustizia e a tutta la stupidità del mondo. Possiamo farlo comprendendo il modo in cui funzionano i sistemi naturali, attraverso l’attenzione alla forestazione e alla coltivazione in generale e attraverso la contemplazione e la cura della terra.

Le persone che forzano la natura, in realtà, forzano se stesse.

Quando coltiviamo esclusivamente frumento, diventiamo pasta.

Se cerchiamo solo quattrini, diventiamo denaro; se restiamo ancorati agli sport di squadra dell’adolescenza, diventiamo palloni gonfiati.

Attenzione ai monoculturalisti nella religione, nella salute, nell’agricoltura o nell’industria. La noia li conduce alla pazzia: possono dare inizio a una guerra o impadronirsi del potere proprio perché sono persone incapaci o inermi".

Bill Mollison

E possibile che si tratti di comunità evolute, parliamo di valori, L’ acqua e la terra libera …

SimoneMuffolini

[thejaymo]

a new kind of ‘war’ ?

really great article vinay,

you make some excellent points about it not being about shelling & air strikes but a new type of ‘war’. entire regions of people simply claiming independence/autonomy from within their current national boundaries is an expected and logical one. at the same time however, these regions would still be tied to/within the ‘super state’ of the eurozone - as all critical supporting infrastructure, power grids, water, transport (to some degree) that has been built since the the formation of a united europe would still continue to exist in some form or another.

edwin too makes some really good points below about ‘war’ as a descriptive term and the nature of revolutions in world history.

-0-

holding our futurist hat in one hand, and our armchair historian hat in the other. i wanted for a brief moment to explore what type of war are we looking at?

in the short term, if the banking crisis goes nuclear what are we looking at? maximum withdrawal/transfer limits imposed on banking transactions? armed state actors at national borders preventing the movement of physical capital out of the country? gold, diamonds, art etc. But when things get this bad, are we also talking manufacturing equipment - if it’s big enough to fit on/in the back of a lorry, someone is going to try to move it somewhere else - lathes, industrial sewing machines, cloth cutting machines etc - these are ‘war’ conditions.

the ‘cold war’ was also a ‘war’, although not one the world had ever seen before.

in relation to your post, i’m thinking about the eastern block - these countries were at ‘war’ with the west for years. no bloodshed, no air strikes, no shelling. they were regions within the russian superstate administered ultimately by bureaucrats back in moscow. after hearing the stories about this period whilst travelling, and from older friends/friends parents; it seems some towns and cities at the time weren’t much different then from how things are beginning to look in greece.

from under the brim of my futurist hat, the superstate administrators to come look like eu-wide technocrats representing the industries that have called in their debts. within many global business the euro region is seen as one place already, they operate across national boundaries - i see no reason why they would respect them if things went south.

the eastern block is important due to another single important word

‘police’

i cannot believe that the ‘find on page’ function of my browser only finds two instances of the word in this entire thread.

perhaps it’s just my political point of view / my own experiences talking but i am quite happy to make the statement that the police are the the most important and dangerous army in the arena you mention above. post 9/11 the anti-terrorism strategies have had ‘militarisation’ written all over them - and this seriously needs to be factored in.

it was the police states of the eastern block that kept its population in order during the cold war and they will be dispatched to do the same here too. already the escalation of force and techniques across europe show signs of what’s to come. dan hancox’s piece “Kettling 2.0: The Olympic State of Exception and TSG Action Figures” is a fantastic exploration of what kind of road we might be heading down in the UK post olympics.

the reason i think we must make a distinction between the ‘policestate’ military war and what we think of as traditional war with ‘armies’ in terms of the above is as follows:

the armed forces from the point of view of a state (and superstate) are a programmable asset. they are feet on the ground with strong backs and two hands to do the things they are told to do with them. usually we think of them as carrying guns - but during states of exception and emergency who is on the ground doing things? - the army.

when rural parts of the uk flooded and whole towns need sandbanging, who gets mobilised to deliver and build them? - the army.

during the fuel strike of 2001, who were driving the tankers and delivering petrol to key service areas? - the army.

when the firefighters go on strike who puts out the fires? - the army.

in the kind of situation you describe, soldiers will be put to use guarding things and ensuring infrastructure keeps moving when the planes, trains and automobiles stop arriving for lack of profit or return.

i believe its the decade old militarized police forces of europe who will be on the borders stopping the capital from flowing, stopping the protests, and attempting to stop the formation of breakaway regions.

indeed, the british troops sent to america pre revolution were sent there so as police to prevent break away states - and not as an army.

i’m not sure how many edgeryders have seen this video: but its a video and related article of police literally “walling up immigrants” inside a squatted building in a northern Greek city - posted to twitter by @teacherdude with the comment “The police are out of control here in Greece”  - everyone please DO watch it.

is this not the beginnings of a new kind of ‘war’ ?

[alberto]

How to prepare?

Jay, assuming you are right (I am not really qualified to make that call), what would you suggest to prepare for the event?

[alberto]

How to prepare?

Jay, assuming you are right (I am not really qualified to make that call), what would you suggest to prepare for the event?