Reflections on a vacation tinged by global governance

I rented a car this last week. I drove up to the annual meeting of the United Nations Association, then northwards to visit a friend in Princeton, then down to Liberty Mall in Philadelphia & the large Friends Meeting Library there; as well as taking in Annapolis & the Woodrow Wilson museum in Staunton.

So I had a lot of time to drive. I listened primarily to two books:
• Six Frigates, a history of the US Navy from 1787 to 1814 or so
(which was about how the US stopped the pirates of the Barbary Coast from bullying trade in the Mediterranean)
• Paris 1919, by Margaret McMillan, about the Versaille Treaty.
The Wilson museum, with it's handout of Wilson's Fourteen Points, turned out to be a good break from listening to the book.

What strikes me about the Paris 1919 conference is it's large scope-- the most powerful nations in the world-- the US, Britain, France and Italy (Italy?? Even then clearly the weakest of the four) holding court deciding the most important decisions-- • the boundaries of European countries, the Ottoman Empire, and even parts of East Asia & Africa
• German reparations & peace [surrender] treaty
• the League of Nations

The book is long-- 26 hours on 20 DVDs. The author tells us about Ruthenians, Moravians, and all the details of the boundaries of Europe. It seems boring and exhaustive in a way (and as of DVD 12, we haven't gotten to the Mideast and Palestine yet), but what strikes me is that THESE were the details of what was the predecessor to the League and UN. And they are amazingly complex and inter-connected.

And what occurred to me in the midst of driving is that the 1992 Earth Summit essentially was the post-Cold War peace conference. It's not that I never had that thought-- to the contrary, I had it in August 1989 and it was my motivation for being involved.

But I had never stopped to think about the Earth Summit as a successor, not just to the 1972 Stockholm conference, but also to
• the 1815 peace conference after Napolean was defeated
• the 1884 Berlin Conference in which Africa was divvied up
• the 1900 Conference in which China was divvied up
• the 1919 Conference
• the World War II summits of FDR, Churchill and Stalin
• the 1945 founding of the UN

But it IS-- and should be viewed in that light-- as an expression not just of what science demands, but in the light of realpolitik. Not because I enjoy that, but because those are real parameters.

Today I downloaded a number of papers on the concept of governance vs. government, and hope to read them tomorrow.