The Best of a Bargain in Copenhagen: Diplomacy, Power Contest and Global Governance.

• Author: Smolnikov, Sergey

Editor's Note: Specializing in environmental diplomacy, the author of this study looked at the recent Copenhagen climate change conference from the perspective of power politics. -The Editor

Introduction

Purportedly, to the outside world the climate negotiations in Copenhagen last December were what they were promulgated to be - multilateral talks with a noble objective to come to an agreement on climate change that would announce measures to prevent further deterioration of the global environment. This is why the inability of the negotiators from almost 200 countries to come to a meaningful solution appeared to be bewildering. However, the genuine essence of the diplomatic showdown in Copenhagen turned out to be somewhat elusive.

This article attempts to look into the international political and security dimensions of the talks, and explore the Copenhagen congress in terms of its ramifications for a number of popular International Relations (IR) notions and concepts: globalization, multilateralism, transition of power and global governance. The thrust of the paper is the thesis that the negotiations turned out to be a litmus test in measuring change in the world power order. Of course, the international climate talks are not the only detector of shifts in leverage among the major powers. The ongoing financial and economic recession has already revealed that the major world powers are unequally positioned to deal with its daunting implications.

Pointing to U.S. problems at home - unemployment and financial debt, as well as abroad - Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iran, North Korea and, most recently, Yemen - would it be fair to say that Copenhagen added to the list of factors that risk further downgrading of America's international status? Would it be correct to contend that the first--and apparently tumultuous - decade of this century has already produced an anticipated and prophesized rearrangement at the top of the world power hierarchy with the U.S. being cramped by "new superpowers"--the European Union and China? And, in this context, has Copenhagen indeed exemplified that the power transition had already taken place? And, if so, what is the role of American diplomacy in arresting unfavorable trends and developments?

To address these questions, the paper will first explore the bargaining positions of the world's major actors--the United States, the European Union, China and Russia during the negotiations in Copenhagen of December 7-18, 2009. (1) Next, the climate talks will be examined in terms of their impact on power transition and realignment in the international order. Finally, the validity of global government concepts will be analyzed in the context of the ensuing post-Copenhagen world system. The article will conclude by elucidating the role that self-interest plays in precluding formation of a constructivist democratic international order and the role that skillful diplomacy can play in arresting or mitigating external trends and processes that could otherwise damage an individual state's status-quo.

The Constrained Bargaining Positions of the United States

In Copenhagen, the bargaining positions of the major players, except Europe, were ambiguous. Symptomatically, except for the EU no other participant had mitigation commitments written into their national legislation and nor was prepared to sacrifice their economic growth by curbing pollution. The U. S. delegation came to the conference with a mandate not to sign any legally binding document in the view of the specificity of the national legislative process. The U.S. position on any legally binding international agreement on greenhouse gas emission cuts, under the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, is determined by a 1997 Senate decision known as S. Res. 98, the Byrd-Hagel resolution. The document outlines the Senate's principle position on the issue by emphasizing that "the United States should not be a signatory to any protocol to, or other agreement regarding, the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change of 1992, at negotiations in Kyoto in December 1997, or thereafter, which would--(A) mandate new commitments to limit or reduce greenhouse gas emissions for the Annex I Parties, unless the protocol or other agreement also mandates new specific scheduled commitments to limit or reduce greenhouse gas emissions for Developing Country Parties within the same compliance period, or (B) would result in serious harm to the economy of the United States." (2)

The Senate, which has a final say in the national legislation, was an invisible but salient actor in Copenhagen and whose decisions were by no means supposed to be defied or challenged by any real or hypothetical supranational decision-making body. In the view of the document proposing an utmost 17 percent of carbon emission reductions under consideration in the upper house on the Capitol Hill, U.S. envoys simply could not bargain for any curbs that could exceed this threshold. This was a "secret" that all other delegations were aware of and that was significantly limiting the maneuverability and diplomatic leverage of the United States in Copenhagen. At the same time, unable to demand from other delegations more than America itself could deliver, U.S. negotiators had a task to compel the developing countries to take on definite mitigation obligations. On its part, the U.S. pledged an unspecified share in a $10-billion Western aid package by 2012-an amount ridiculed by many as money "not even enough to buy coffins" in case of the impending global warming repercussions in the Third World. (3)

The U. S. delegation initially was implacably stuck to this figure. This policy appeared to be producing an undesired impression among other participants, as there could be only two rational explanations for America's intransigence. The first supposition could be that the financial situation at home is really too bad (and in this case the U.S. would have to be written off as a serious international player at least in the realm of climate diplomacy). The second interpretation could be that the U.S. is trying to relocate the burden of donorship on other developed countries - the European states and Japan--a perception that risked diminishing Washington's authority within the club of the rich nations.

As outlined by Todd Stern, the head of U.S. negotiators team, the United States intended to curb their green gas emissions by 17, 30 and 42 percent respectively by 2020, 2025, and 2030 in comparison with the 2005 level. These figures looked much less impressive if compared with the obligations of EU countries that insisted on a different basis of cuts--to be made in comparison with the 1990 level. Using the latter methodology, U.S. mitigation would be respectively around 4, 8 and 13 percent below the 1990 benchmark. (4)

Under these circumstances, the tactics of the U.S. delegation was to renounce claims of China and other major non-Western polluters that the United States had a historic and moral responsibility to finance the global anti-warming project in the developing world. To accept the morality argument and recognize the historic "guilt" of the U. S. in the global warming would mean that the United States would have to pay reparations to the Third World on the conditions of the latter. Therefore, from the very outset of the negotiations, the U. S. delegation had reasonably repelled any demands and accusations that could lead the talks to a contentious moral venue. Remembering that the best defense is offense, the U.S. diplomats pointed out that in 2009-2020, 98 percent of emissions would originate from the developing countries with China alone accounting for 50 percent of the global CO2 ejection. Moreover, they also emphasized that China's refusal to allow verification of its mitigation pledges would be detrimental to any effective global climate change accord. (5)

The Sino-American showdown has revealed that all other participants of the conference were at some point in time de facto hostages of the two major contenders. The intransigence of the two was effectively blocking any attempt to reach a meaningful agreement. The Americans made it clear they were not intending to pay, while the Chinese stated that they were not going to agree to be verified. Negotiating their brinkmanship intentions as a currency in the diplomatic trade-off, the Americans and the Chinese were using the tactics of what I call negative diplomacy. By negative diplomacy I mean creation or utilization of obstacles to the ends of reaching an agreement, while positive diplomacy precipitates formation and trading of rewards.

Apparently, with an ambiguous mandate to propose to the others and limited funds to share, the U.S. had very moderate bargaining power in the negotiations. As soon as it was realized in Washington, the American delegation increased its stakes 10 -fold. As it was announced by Secretary of State Clinton just two days before the conference was supposed to be wrapped up, the U.S. would contribute to collecting $100 billion a year by 2020-an impressive increase of the aid's total amount from a projected $30 billion in 2010-2012 to approximately one trillion dollars in 2020-2030. (6) These specific obligations took the form of a collective commitment by the West that was included in the text of the final accord. In return, the U.S. succeeded in securing China's reluctant consent to embody a rather vague wording on verification in the Copenhagen agreement. (7)

In Copenhagen, major world actors were pursuing different and sometimes substantially realigned foreign policy approaches. Thus, the United States, which, with the ascendance of Barack Obama, has abandoned its unilateralist neoconservative strategy, has resorted to a new foreign policy model that can be defined as "accommodationist realpolitik." Not renouncing America's strife to maintain strategic supremacy, its authors put forward open...