Awful Diplomacy and Bad Politics
In recent years conducting politics has become as volatile as trading stocks on Wall Street; you can find yourself succumbed by the fear of opening the eyes to a brisk morning, as tumbling off the ‘status quo’ ladder can happen before your conscious gets out of pajamas. One would think that we have more than enough centuries on our shoulders to be able to negotiate with other human beings; that we should have developed adequate skills by now to articulate in a calm and clear manner what are our desires and requirements - but the truth is that it is not just a complexity of human nature that makes a diplomacy such a difficult instrument of foreign policy, but also the growing economic and political interdependence where the questions over the collective goods problems can develop into the nauseating migraine attacks.
Is it even possible in today’s society to be truly a free rider and benefit from everybody else’s provisions without inflicting a slow, poisonous death on yourself? The presupposition that one has to negotiate the agreements to strengthen their own state while neutralizing the opponents has evolved into the treaties for common good where, instead of backstabbing, you are supposed to collaborate with your rivals to reach a political and economic prosperity. The world is waking up to a dawn of sustainable development and consolidation of peace, but there are still plenty of those who are obstinately in touch with their egocentric side and disregard the inclination of most of the rivers to flow into the ocean; and forget that by ignoring the existence of the rest of the world by building a dam on it will not make their world more luscious, but instead the surrounding grass would wither and become more bitter.
Maybe we all are just too critical over political currents or how the diplomacy is conducted. Our society, simply, is not ready yet to be diplomatic when the good of humanity comes into question. In this race of globalization that the twenty-first century brought on us, the technological advancement is dragging the almost breathless economy with it, but our intelligence is still a round or two behind and will need a good training camp in Mount Everest to be able to catch up with it. That is why there are so many international disputes and crises, and it would be paradoxical to hope that tomorrow everybody will stop protecting his or her country's interests and become a pacifist. More now than ever we have to admit that the Political Maybach is speeding towards the trough, and it is not just a recession in the diplomatic relations that worries us, but its tendency to grow into the Great Depression.
Most of us expect the people who represent the states to acknowledge the basic guidelines of morality, like resolving conflicts of interest justly and promoting the survival of society, thus there should be enough lights beckoning the willingness of mankind to survive as a group and co-exist with each other. The question that continues to pester us is, if we believe in cultural relativism, that different people around the world have a right to their own moral code, or do we decide to be ignorant and believe that only our values are the right ones? In that case, there is no room for amiable foreign relations, since it is almost impossible to compromise with a country that believes in ethical relativism. There would be no considering what will be best for humanity as a whole, no willingness to share your resources with other countries, and no need for concessions. Hence, there would be nothing to negotiate over and the existence of multilateral frameworks, like the UN or the WTO, would become a subject for history books that nobody would ever get to read.
Diplomacy is supposed to help us achieve the goal of bringing a better life, or as Socrates has said “Good life,” to our next generations. However, the way it looks today, there would be left only an echo of the most intelligent species in this solar system, who were not only awful in diplomacy, but also really bad in politics.
Is it even possible in today’s society to be truly a free rider and benefit from everybody else’s provisions without inflicting a slow, poisonous death on yourself? The presupposition that one has to negotiate the agreements to strengthen their own state while neutralizing the opponents has evolved into the treaties for common good where, instead of backstabbing, you are supposed to collaborate with your rivals to reach a political and economic prosperity. The world is waking up to a dawn of sustainable development and consolidation of peace, but there are still plenty of those who are obstinately in touch with their egocentric side and disregard the inclination of most of the rivers to flow into the ocean; and forget that by ignoring the existence of the rest of the world by building a dam on it will not make their world more luscious, but instead the surrounding grass would wither and become more bitter.
Maybe we all are just too critical over political currents or how the diplomacy is conducted. Our society, simply, is not ready yet to be diplomatic when the good of humanity comes into question. In this race of globalization that the twenty-first century brought on us, the technological advancement is dragging the almost breathless economy with it, but our intelligence is still a round or two behind and will need a good training camp in Mount Everest to be able to catch up with it. That is why there are so many international disputes and crises, and it would be paradoxical to hope that tomorrow everybody will stop protecting his or her country's interests and become a pacifist. More now than ever we have to admit that the Political Maybach is speeding towards the trough, and it is not just a recession in the diplomatic relations that worries us, but its tendency to grow into the Great Depression.
Most of us expect the people who represent the states to acknowledge the basic guidelines of morality, like resolving conflicts of interest justly and promoting the survival of society, thus there should be enough lights beckoning the willingness of mankind to survive as a group and co-exist with each other. The question that continues to pester us is, if we believe in cultural relativism, that different people around the world have a right to their own moral code, or do we decide to be ignorant and believe that only our values are the right ones? In that case, there is no room for amiable foreign relations, since it is almost impossible to compromise with a country that believes in ethical relativism. There would be no considering what will be best for humanity as a whole, no willingness to share your resources with other countries, and no need for concessions. Hence, there would be nothing to negotiate over and the existence of multilateral frameworks, like the UN or the WTO, would become a subject for history books that nobody would ever get to read.
Diplomacy is supposed to help us achieve the goal of bringing a better life, or as Socrates has said “Good life,” to our next generations. However, the way it looks today, there would be left only an echo of the most intelligent species in this solar system, who were not only awful in diplomacy, but also really bad in politics.
Häly Laasme
posted by Häly Laasme at 1:29 AM
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