When the Street is the Sole Deciderator

I know, I know. Even as the Occupy Together web site edges ever closer to the magical number of 100 cities supporting the continuing Occupy Wall Street actions, it would be all too easy to be as jaded and snippy as Ginia Bellafante, telling us in the Sept. 25 New York Times that the protesters in Zuccotti Square were young, aimless, unsure of goals, and as grubby as the Liberal Hawks of the 1960s charged Vietnam protesters with being. It would be easy to place bets that most of these cities with support actions would be lucky to bring out 100 people, let alone thousands. It would be easy to let our sarcasm be as big as our despair.

And yet, and yet ... When I went to the Sept. 27 General Assembly for Occupy Denver, I saw more than 100 smart and attentive protesters in it for the long haul. We could call this a Children's Crusade of a surprising sort, because the backbone of protesters in Denver were young families in their late 20s and early 30s, dragging babies and toddlers in their wake - not a movement dominated by college students, a movement dominated by young working familes. This doesn't imply that power brokers on Wall Street and across the nation need to start trembling in their boots, but the number of people from all walks of life and every state in the nation, writing in to the New York Times to complain of Bellafante's writing, and to complain of Inspector Anthony Bologna's pepper-spraying of New York protesters, indicates that the protesters speak for a whole lot of people who are fed up beyond fed up. Fine, the jaded say, but does that translate to votes? Maybe not.

And yet, and yet.... the students in Spain, Greece, Israel and elsewhere who are bringing traffic and urban business to a stop do not speak for a particular political party. They simply want to make the economy unmovable and their particular nations ungovernable. More power to them. It's no accident that Occupy Wall Street originally was promoted by Adbusters magazine, which doesn't really promote a left or right line per se. It plays the somewhat nihilist refrain that the entire society and culture is ailing, and needs to fall. This attitude was reflected in a big, sprawling front-page article in the Sept. 27 New York Times (perhaps paying penance for Bellafante's terrible hatchet job), in which the author saw the Arab Spring, Occupy Together, and movements in India, Greece, Spain, Israel, and dozens of other nations as a flat and simple rejection of the electoral process in its entirety, and a desire to take back public space.

Let's look at the >75 cities of Occupy Together in the context of the increasingly irrelevant 2012 elections. Obama's approval rating has now dipped below 40 percent and is heading lower. Meanwhile, each new savior from the Republican Party is pilloried before getting to the second level. Bachmann? Still tied to the Palin-Santorum nutter wing. Perry? At turns, too rash and Texan or too flat to be acceptable as a candidate. Christie? Too overweight, let's face it. We need a buff president to take on a Mayan calendar. No one is electable in 2012. Sound familar? That is what Spain, Greece, and so many other countries are finding.

If the Occupy Together momentum keeps up, I'm not anticipating any major urban area shuts down, or that there will be localized general strikes that will even approach the limited ones of the 1930s. But I do see a melding of street-occupation movements worldwide that will make 2012 a modern equivalent of 1968, a year in which politics as we know it simply won't matter. If the U.S. economy continues to tank, if the Euro stops being a unified currency by year's end, then time will be up for central banks and international institutions and political parties as traditionally defined in any nation, not just the U.S. At that point, the street will be the sole remaining source of legitimacy.

The China That Can Say "Feh"

Anyone remember those heady days of late-1980s Japaranoia, when high-tech execs in the U.S. read The Japan That Can Say 'No', fully anticipating a semiconductor economy run from Tokyo? What a farce. Two lost decades have left the island nation more insular and less influential than ever, and no one really cares if Japan says "no," or much of anything else, these days.

Would that this were true of China, but there is little on the horizon suggesting that China's current trajectory as emerging power will change. Google took the brave and very overdue step Jan. 12 of threatening to pull out of China completely. When human rights violations and net access issues were not enough to "put the skeer" in Google, cyberassaults on its sites made the company recognize the downsides of continuing to work with China.

Consider this event together with the Dec. 25 conviction in Beijing of Liu Xiaobo, a leading Chinese dissident, and we see the fruition of what Korean analyst Sung Won Kim calls "Eastphalia Rising." Last summer, Kim argued in World Policy Journal that China and India would form a new Asian bloc that would reject the Western world's 20th-century decision to abandon sovereignty terms of the Treaty of Westphalia. In the post-Bosnia, post-Kosovo world, the U.S. and European Union, speaking through the UN Security Council, decided that the notion of "national sovereignty above all" must be abandoned for what the French government called the "responsibility to protect."

Only one problem, said Kim and co-authors David Fidler and Sumit Ganguly: China and other Asian nations, as well as Russia to some extent, did not give a shit about the "responsibility to protect," and insisted on the notion that some subjects regarding human rights and computer use were simply internal affairs, and were not subject to critiques from the West. We see an extreme example of this in Sri Lanka, where the government has turned from defensiveness to pride regarding the way it has repressed the Tamils after the war with the Tamil Tigers ended. This is the new reality - the state that shows hubris about being dictatorial and authoritarian.

Not only did these states represent the new centers of economic power in the 21st century, but the attitudes did not reflect merely the thought of the Chinese Communist Party or Indian Congress and BJP parties. Indeed, they reflected a populist belief among common Chinese and Indian citizens that, "whatever my country does is right, and screw the world's interpretation." Thus, China and Russia find it easy to assemble legions of hackers to attack Western sites while preserving plausible deniability.

What Kim predicted would happen is already taking place. The US and Europe shuns Guinea and Myanmar, so China waltzes in and makes deals galore, because China doesn't care about a government that kills its own people. Google leaves China and China says "feh," because it's sure its own search engines will leave Google in the dust.

Now obviously, the Western industrialized nations have been pretty hypocritical about their use of power in the past century, so there is little reason to listen to US or EU clucking about treatment of dissidents. But the "Eastphalia" bloc does represent a scary new reality of nations that have increasing economic clout, but do not care about universal notions of good behavior. Nevertheless, I remain somewhat optimistic about limits to Eastphalia, for the same reason I don't see Wahhabist influence growing in the Islamic world beyond a certain point:

The U.S. and the English-speaking world remain the primary cultural referent for all nations. Everyone wants to emulate the U.S., and even as our towering deficits make us an economic flunkie, our cultural values will continue to make Google and Apple and U.S. celebrities and concepts of human rights and civil liberties the new golden mean. China, Russia, and South Asia
will no doubt say "feh" more often, and will gain some temporary accolades from the small states who have always felt overwhelmed by US and European dominance. But concepts of civil rights and cultural plurality have lives of their own, and China and Russia will begin to take more and more abuse from the world community at large as they stick noses in the air and snub the rest of the world. I'm not worried about how to cope with government leaders in the new Eastphalia. I'm worried about how to deal with populist, conservative jerks that are emergent in all nations right now, convinced that their particular nation is Number One, and that any other nation or corporate source of power deserves a cyber-attack.