We need all the governance, flair and innovation we can muster to climb out of the economic crisis
JACQUES DELORS, former French minister for finance and president of the European Commission from 1985 to 1995, must be a proud, and perplexed, man. Proud because his daughter, Martine Aubry, has "just" been elected leader of the French Socialist Party (PS) and one of his protégées, Ségolène Royal, is now positioned as its likely presidential candidate for 2012.
The qualification "just" refers to both the timing, last Tuesday, and to the margin of victory. Martine defeated Ségolène by 102 out of the 134,800 votes cast. His perplexity could flow from the inadvertent, yet determined, decision by France's main opposition party to mark the 80th official anniversary of a major US movie character by organising an election that was most decidedly Mickey Mouse.
The fact that around 40 per cent of the party's paid-up members abstained speaks volumes about its problems. The other 60 per cent, and those who followed the election, were treated to a particularly "Mousey" spectacle of homemade ballot boxes, missing papers, erroneously recorded votes, challenges and counter-challenges.
The party's election system was designed to acclaim the agreed leadership candidate, while the left-wing outsider clocked up a respectable 20 per cent or so. It was never meant to function as an accurate, transparent, verifiable and irreproachable democratic exercise - and it most certainly didn't. The electoral system was asked to compensate for the failure of the party's collective leadership, and finally managed to do so by a highly questionable 102 votes.
Personalities played a significant role in that collective failure as a clutch of ageing and increasingly irrelevant party bigwigs manoeuvred to keep their diminishing chances of ever running for the presidency open by blocking the "upstart" Ms Royal. Underneath this clash of egos and traditions lies a deep pool of ideological self-deception.
That the party dislikes the world it is confronted with is more or less de rigeur for a political party - if you don't want to change things, then why bother? The fact that it persists in refusing to recognise the republic it inhabits is more worrying.
France's presidential fifth republic dates from 1958, making the presidential election the country's pivotal ballot. Since 2002, French parliamentary elections immediately follow the presidential bout. Win the presidential elections and you win the second round, lose the first, and you almost automatically lose again.
Electing a president largely involves choosing a person - a reality the PS refuses to recognise. It prefers the intellectually pleasing notion that the policies advocated are more determinant. It's a nice, even an attractive idea, but while an exceptional candidate may compensate for some policy shortcomings, it just doesn't work the other way round.
The French PS is by no means alone in preferring familiar belief systems, however archaic, to far less comfortable global realities.
Our species now faces its first ever global transformation without the comfort of what we once held to be, or were constantly told were, self-evident truths. We need to act and react without any comprehensive belief systems to guide us.
We need to act collectively, on a planet where we are all part of a global market-centred economy, to prevent a profound and prolonged economic depression. At the same time our very survival depends on our ability to switch from carbon-spewing fossil fuels to less polluting and more sustainable energy sources. These issues are no longer about tomorrow's world, they are concerned with this afternoon's.
In 2007 experts warned that the Arctic could become ice-free during summers towards the end of the century. Scientists now say this will happen by 2015 at the latest. Tough and all as that might prove for polar bears, it gets dangerously near to being a death sentence for the rest of us.
White ice reflects solar heat, darker water absorbs it. A recent Geophysical Research Letters paper points out that a warmer Arctic Ocean will quickly thaw permafrost up to 1,500km inland. These frozen Arctic bogs lock in as much carbon as the entire planet's atmosphere currently holds. If they melt, climate change immediately runs exponentially amok.
Investment, jobs, salaries, consumption and saving our planet are all synonymous - if you stop to think about them long enough to shed outmoded ideological baggage. We need more, far more, electric and hybrid vehicles on our roads, electrified rail systems, and new grid capacity, particularly direct current lines capable of long-distance electricity transmission.
In a world where shareholders only buy less than a quarter of 1 per cent of the Royal Bank of Scotland share issue, governments are the only bodies capable of making the massive capital investments these and similar programmes require. Deficits will have to explode in the short term if we, and our societies, are to survive. Yesterday's economic orthodoxy has become today's suicidal heresy. There are those who continue desperately to cling on to what they once believed.
At one end of the spectrum there are a handful of delusional communists who mutter about the death of capitalism as if the Soviet Union still thrived. There are also the equally deluded who continue to claim that freewheeling markets are the only sustainable path to salvation. They would do well to read Liar's Poker (1989), Michael Lewis's description of his passage through Salomon Brothers. An equally amusing and more terrifying up-dated account is to be found in the current edition of Portfolio magazine*, where John Gutfreund, Lewis's erstwhile CEO once described as "The King of Wall Street", offers a pithy epitaph for such markets - "It's laissez-faire until you get in deep shit."
Which is exactly where we are, and we need all the incisive governance, entrepreneurial flair and scientific innovation we can muster to climb out. Otherwise, like the French socialists, we'll wind up celebrating Mickey's birthdays dans la merde.
http://www.portfolio.com/news-markets/national-news/portfolio/2008/11/11/The-End-of-Wall-Streets-Boom