The U.N. and the Radical Middle. What is this all about and what does it have to do with us?

Date:   8/17/2005 7:26:51 AM ( 19 y ago)

I hardly read the newspaper,
and I have not paid attention
to what is happening in the U.N.
for years.

Mark Satin, author of "Radical Middle"
has caught my eye with this article
on Kufi Annan and his reform package
for the U.N.

I remember Mark from the early 80's when
we would meet at various Conferences
during the time the Holistic Movement was
being born.

I remember Donald Keys as well.
I still haven't fully gotten a sense of
what Mark is up to in his Radical Middle
on-line newsletter. The U.N. has always
been an interest of mine because of my
personal connection with Robert Muller,
who was once an Undersecretarty General.

I know there have been some incredible Peacemaker
Sages who have been involved in the U.N.
Robert Muller is one of them.

I sense there is something here to explore:

http://www.radicalmiddle.com./x_annan_report.htm

your eg
___


"One of Annan’s final suggestions harks back to a idea once promoted by Donald Keys, head of the idealistic Planetary Citizens group from the 1970s. Let’s create a “Council of Development Advisers” -- in effect, a council of wise men and women from all over the world. Let’s turn the U.N. into the council house of the emerging global village.

That is more than a nod to the political left. It’s a nod to all those idealists whose energies have maintained the U.N. in the popular imagination through thick and thin. And it’s a wonderful idea, too: the Council could speak to the world’s peoples on a level deeper than that of mere politics.

First great radical middle political document?

As you can tell from the above, the Annan Report is an almost unparalleled combination of the pragmatic and the visionary. That is no accident. “[W]ithout implementation, our declarations ring hollow,” Annan cries in the middle of the Report. “Without action, our promises are meaningless. Villagers huddling in fear at the sound of bombing raids or the appearance of murderous militias on the horizon find no solace in . . . unimplemented words.”

When I was in international law class in law school (essentially, Int. Law 101), I had that same terrible insight. I was repelled by the stories my professor always told of being flown into this war-torn area or that. I imagined him with his fine moustache and tailored suit staying in fancy hotels and dispensing learned, unimplementable words to people who might very well be killed the next day. The vision paralyzed me. I wasn’t going to be a bringer of meaningless promises, I wasn’t going to turn myself into a hard-boiled world-traveling pragmatist. I never took another international law course.

Kofi Annan persisted. Like a stubborn Icarus, he kept putting his wax-fastened wings back on again. And he eventually discovered the right relationship of pragmatism to vision. He demonstrates that relationship throughout the Report, and makes it explicit at the very end. “What I have called for here is possible,” he says. “[All my proposals] are within reach. From pragmatic beginnings could emerge a visionary change of direction in our world.”

Romantic visions -- abstract theories -- political “ism’s” -- do not generate positive change. But real, practical, helpful first steps can generate grounded, life-giving vision. That is the central lesson the Annan Report has to teach us, and that is why it is the first great radical middle political document.

FURTHER RESOURCES

For the United Nations as an institution: Linda Fasulo, An Insider's Guide to the U.N. (Yale Univ. Press, 2004).  For a history of the U.N. up to Kofi Annan's tenure: Stanley Meisler, United Nations: The First Fifty Years (Atlantic Monthly Press, 1997).  For the larger global context seen through radical middle eyes: Walter Truett Anderson, All Connected Now: Life in the First Global Civilization (Westview / Perseus, 2001).

The Annan Report is in part a synthesis of several path-breaking reports Annan commissioned after the Millennium Declaration revealed what he was up against.  The best of them -- all available online -- are Commission on the Private Sector & Development, Unleashing Development: Making Business Work for the Poor (2004);  High-Level Panel on Threats, Challenges and Change, A More Secure World: Our Shared Responsibility (2004); and U.N. Millennium Project (Jeffrey Sachs et al.), Investing in Development: A Practical Plan to Achieve the Millennium Development Goals (2005).

 NEW! Respond to our articles and view others' responses HERE.
THE RADICAL MIDDLE CONCEPT:

Why "Radical Middle"?

Over 40 Writers Describe the Radical Middle

25 Best Radical Middle Books of the '00s (so far), ANNOTATED!

Five Best
Radical Middle Magazines, ANNOTATED

Websites of  Arguably
Radical Middle POLITICIANS!

GREAT RADICAL MIDDLE BLOGS AND WEBSITES

Great Radical Middle Weblogs, WITH ALL BLOGGERS NAMED AND DESCRIBED!

Over 300 Great Radical Middle Websites, Part One: World Order, Business, Energy, and the Environment, UPDATED & ANNOTATED!

Over 300 Great Radical Middle Websites, Part Two: Society, Education, Politics, and the Professions, UPDATED & ANNOTATED!

NOT JUST RADICAL MIDDLE:

Ten Best U.S. Political Novels, ANNOTATED

Over 100 21ST CENTURY MANIFESTOS to Pick From, UPDATED

12 RED- HOT RADICAL MIDDLE ORGANIZA- TIONS:

Centrist Coalition

Centrists.Org

Communitarian Network

Future 500

New America Foundation

New Democrat Network

Politics of Trust Network

Progressive
Policy Institute

Republican Main Street Partnership

RESULTS

Search for Common Ground

Third Way

PRECURSORS:

50 Best "Third Way" Books of the 1990s

"Road to Generational Equity" and " Communitarian Platform," 1990s

25 Best "Transformational" Books of the 1980s

U.S. Green Party's "Ten Key Values," 1980s

25 Best "New Age Politics" Books of the 1970s

New World Alliance, 1970s

Civil Rights Movement, 1960s (your editor is HERE, 6th from bottom)"



Mark Satin (1979):

http://www.radicalmiddle.com./writers_n_pols.htm

The basic approach to politics that this book takes has always been with us here in America, in bits and pieces at any rate. The beauty of the social movements of our time is that each of them represents one of those pieces -- and if you put them together, you are able to see clearly and coherently, maybe for the first time, what I like to call the perpetual “third force” in American politics.

Third force politics is a radical politics, not so much in the sense of radical versus liberal as in the sense of going to the roots of things. Specifically, third force politics goes to the psychocultural roots of our problems. It does not concentrate exclusively on the institutional and economic symptoms of our problems.

It is a radicalism that is neither of the left nor right -- a radicalism that is modest enough to borrow what it needs from each of the old political “ism’s” but bold enough to transcend them. (It is not a wimpy “mean” between the so-called “extremes” of American power politics.)

It is a radicalism that is more interested in healing society than in championing the exclusive claims to rightness of any one faction or segment of society; a radicalism that is more interested in reconciling people to each other’s needs and priorities than in winning people over to its side (and so producing a losing side, poised for revenge). . . .

It is a radicalism that acknowledges and accepts complexity, irony, paradox, and ambiguity -- a radicalism that acknowledges the richness of life even when aspects of that richness are not particularly politically “correct." . . .

It is a radicalism that recognizes the existence of a force in all things that is God or Truth or Love, and that derives its guiding ethics and values from that recognition or worldview or sensibility; or from a passionate commitment to life in all its forms, which amounts to the same thing in the end.

Above all, perhaps, it is a radicalism that understands that the real problem is not how to get people, groups, and governments to agree on the “one best way” to do things, but how to get them all to agree to live and work synergically together ("synergically" is when you get more by cooperating than you can by competing).

-- from Mark Satin, New Age Politics: Healing Self and Society (1979, orig. 1976).  Satin is an attorney and the editor of Radical Middle Newsletter.  He co-founded the Toronto Anti-Draft Programme in 1967 and the New World Alliance in 1979.  His most recent book is Radical Middle: The Politics We Need Now (2004).



 

Popularity:   message viewed 1123 times
URL:   http://www.curezone.org/blogs/fm.asp?i=970200

<< Return to the standard message view