Just recently, we have been experiencing growth close to trend, relatively low unemployment—about 5 per cent—and moderate inflation, about 2¼ per cent in underlying terms.

Then the first quarter figures showed us how Mother Nature had taken revenge on the Queensland coal industry, and the prospect of GFC2 grew slowly on the international horizon. As in Europe and the United States, a structural growth-through-debt problem exists in Australia. However, the mining boom has allowed the economy to keep up with its interest repayments. This places Australia in a unique position. If the current situation can persist for long enough, there will be a long-term readjustment of house prices and consumer debt, two cornerstones of the neoliberal crisis. The shock of the United States or European Union going under could still trigger the crisis, leading to unpaid debts, a writing-down of assets, and being socialised into a sovereign debt crisis. However, Asian demand mitigated our experience of GFC1, and in the meantime it has given us breathing space to think about a bigger, and in some ways deeper problem (in other ways, it is much simpler). The mining boom underscores the environmentally hazardous character of our economy, and the battle over the mining and carbon taxes has indicated the difficulty of a politics that is seen to threaten growth. Today most of the world is focused on a debt crisis: a crisis of capital accumulation, of demand deficiency, and of internal economic contradiction; of failing growth. The mining boom in Australia gives us insight into the future global crisis: of growth versus the spectre of environmental limits.

The Right adapted well to the post-GFC1 dynamic in Australia. No more talk about the ethics of capitalism, of Gillard or Rudd lamenting CEO bonuses, let alone Abbot. With the average Australian currently geared at around 150 per cent of their income, and more extreme credit expansion no longer possible, the political parties that orchestrated credit-fuelled growth in Australia have dodged a silver bullet. Politicians know that so long as growth keeps ticking over, now thanks to sectors positively exposed to the commodities price hike, the intricacies of debt-fuelled capital accumulation are unlikely to have much impact on Australian politics. The latter has been one of the preoccupations of Marxist economics for some thirty years, as explored by David Harvey in The Enigma of Capital. The problem for the Left in Australia is that the general picture of finance capitalism gone mad seems inapplicable in this peculiar outpost of the world economy, where production capital has come to the fore.

‘The miners’, even if borrowing capital from overseas, advance it in order to produce something. There are no hidden doors; no mind-bending financial calculations: commodity prices go up, the value of mining assets increase, and the physical proportions of production expand. Unlike houses built with debt traded as a security, this growth model makes sense intuitively. It may still vary with booms and busts in faraway places, but commodity prices are unlikely to fall or crash as they have previously—unless we factor in human intervention to prevent climate change (apparently not a big threat). In the twentieth century the debate over the ills of becoming a primary commodities exporter was based on real (stable) prices; the problem being that they tended to fall over time. In today’s world, even in the event of slowing global growth, or crisis, demand for energy resources and iron ore to build steel are likely to remain relatively high. The dynamic of exporting large quantities of raw materials with rigorous capital-intensity, on borrowed money, never left Australia. However, resource exports have increased from 41 to 57 per cent of total exports since 2005 (see the RBA Bulletin for digestible slabs of ABS statistics). Production capital faces a different set of challenges to finance capital abroad. With sufficient external demand, here the biggest threat to capital accumulation is not a crisis of overproduction, but the spectre of environmental limits.

In the Pilbara, iron ore output has grown by ten per cent per annum for the past five years, quadrupling total exports to some 440 million tons each year, and is set to increase another 50 per cent in the next four years. The quantity of ‘waste rock’ that has to be dug up to extract the ore, and which can become an environmental hazard in its own right, at least doubles this earth moving operation. Coal exports have been growing at around five per cent per year, and should increase by another fifth in size in three years. The uranium industry also pushes science, environmental impacts and social relations to extremes. BHP’s Olympic Dam project in South Australia sits on the world’s largest uranium deposit. According to Friends of the Earth it produces ten million tons of radioactive tailings annually, while using 35 million litres of water daily. Roxby Downs, a small town numbering around 4,500 is entirely dependent on the mine, while in the mid-nineties competing native title claims over the area of access to the Great Artesian Basin led to conflict including one death. BHP is waiting for approval, which appears likely, to now expand the mine’s operation four-fold. It will create the world’s largest open pit mine, mainly in order to sell copper and uranium to China. The company has exceptions from parliamentary acts including the SA Environmental Protection Act.

As the juggernaut roles forward, so too does the implicit logic that all this has to end somehow, for better or worse. The Greens call for a degree of sanity in environmental regulation while promising growth and jobs in green industries. This newfound hope for a political Left in parliament conjures up profitable investment in green industries. Outside parliament, the strategy seems to be the same. Before the demise of the last ETS, a range of environmental groups including Greenpeace, Environment Victoria and those to the left of the spectrum like Friends of the Earth, published a ‘Plan B’ for economic development. It also aimed mainly at regulating private capital into greener channels, creating an army of ‘green-collar workers’. In April, Paul Gilding, a former head of Greenpeace, published The Great Disruption, which draws similar conclusions. He cites steady-state economists, who take environmentalism and this type of economics to their logical conclusion, calling for a zero growth economy to be achieved largely through government regulation. Opposition to the miners has been characterised by green-politics, calling to either reinvent a green technological basis for capitalist growth, or to slow growth by regulating the portfolios of capitalists. What is missing in either case is a description of why growth is necessary in the first place, and if it is to be slowed or stopped entirely, what the necessary conditions would be.

In 1954 Sir Arthur Lewis created a dual sector model to explore the effects of investment on wages in a poor economy. In an economic development class some years ago, a modified version was used to explain why foreign investment is good for a poor, underdeveloped economy. The model can also be used, inadvertently, to explain why capitalism must grow. In the model, families own farms collectively as small-holdings, where each family member receives their ‘average product of labour’. A foreign capitalist invests by building, say, a mine, and some farmers migrate to become wage-workers, where the wage is of higher value than the average product of the farm. The capitalist hires labour up to the point that the wage is equal to the excess revenue produced by that final worker hired, which is to say where the ‘marginal benefit’ equals the ‘marginal cost’, beyond which point the capitalist will make no profit. The ‘marginal product of labour’ declines with each new worker added as the mine reaches productive capacity and as labour supply increases its price falls. Equilibrium is therefore found between the wage, the marginal product of labour in the mine, and also the average product of labour on the farms (as farmers will not migrate for lower incomes). Foreign investment has therefore ‘soaked up’ excess labour in the economy, raising productivity and living standards. In economics class, and Australian politics, that’s where the story ends; capitalist investment is good, it increases productivity and remuneration for all.

The problem is that if you then add up remuneration to farmers and workers, the total amount available for consumer demand is no longer sufficient to purchase what has been produced (at prices sufficient to pay those wages and profits). Excess demand is required, perhaps from foreign markets, perhaps from credit growth, migration, or a combination of all three. The capitalist sector charges rent, the ‘marginal product of capital’, and at least some of this return on foreign capital will not be spent inside the home economy, unless it is further investment. Repeating the model in the absence of excess demand will result in a lowering of the optimal investment level for the capitalist, leading to lower remuneration levels, and lower demand. As crisis hits, lower remuneration to workers is expressed as unemployment. Undergraduate economics and the rhetorical liberalism it underpins usually gets around this problem by pretending that the ownership of capital within any economy is completely equal. There are therefore no accumulation problems. However, the Lewis model has a class structure—the monopolised ownership of capital by the foreign capitalist (and in Lewis’ original, an ‘unlimited’ or perfectly competitive supply of labour such that the wage falls to a subsistence level; this is not carried through to the undergraduate version).

If the capitalist can be convinced that there will be an expansion of the market tomorrow, they will reinvest in expanding production today; the solution to this very basic crisis then (this is not Marx’s reasoning for the demise of capitalism) is therefore growth. Capitalist economies are in a permanent state of disequilibrium, where investment in new equipment makes up the shortfall in aggregate demand (demand to build more mines). If over-spending by governments caused the crisis in Greece for example, it is only an expression of this broader problem that the economy requires excess demand to maintain employment. Our own government and many others like it have also purposefully facilitated credit expansion over the past thirty years, replacing government debt with masses of private debt. Debt is only one, temporary, solution; but more broadly, if growth cannot occur the system will crash. At this point workers cannot simply migrate back to the family farm—as some green solutions seem to suggest—as the radical transformation of environment, capital equipment and class structures has simultaneously destroyed, and created a new way of life; the battle going on between farmers in NSW and Queensland and the Coal Seam Gas industry is just one recent example.

Australia is not an underdeveloped economy, but we are a country that is imports over thirty billion net in capital every year. Some of this is used to artificially inflate consumer demand; some is used to build mines. The ABS also says that in Australia the top 20% of households own 62% of household net worth (assets minus liabilities), while the bottom 20% own 1%. Whether viewed nationally or internationally, disequilibrium in wealth is a fundamental aspect of our economy, just as in the Lewis model. Even if the massive wealth accumulated in the system makes higher wages possible, the reality of waged employment remains just as absurd for the worker in the Pilbara on $150,000 a year as it is for the farmer-come-waged-worker in the Lewis model. Perhaps it is more absurd, because it is insufficient growth that will still lead to unemployment, where the wage falls to zero, and therefore real poverty; regardless of the absolute level of material development within the economy. Growth is more important as a distributive mechanism than in a productive sense. It provides the incentive for the super-rich to grace us with employment prospects, while also growing their own wealth. It is the money reinvested in growing capital equipment (not just in mining) that compensates an otherwise shortfall in aggregate demand, thereby preventing the downward cycle. Therefore, a failure in expected growth of the market for iron ore or coal would not only upset that balance with regard to those currently employed in production, but would lead to a complete withdrawal of funds currently invested in expanding production. Within the mining sector, how many workers are employed today not simply to produce, but in this very act of expanding the capital equipment that will be required in the future to produce iron ore and coal at the predicted, astronomical levels? Once that objective is obtained, more growth will be required to keep the same number of people employed.

In the absence of class politics, both sides of today’s debate over the mining and carbon taxes are characterised by the same radical equality at the heart of economic, neoclassical truisms. The language of utility is utilised in order to purport the myth that prices (wages, profits, or of consumer goods) are derived purely from productivity. The ideological implications are not hard to pin down. Faced with Bob Brown’s proposition that the miners should pay a higher rate of tax, mining company BC Iron’s managing director Mike Young simply responded: ‘the reason that the owner of a share gets a return is because they’ve taken a risk… go start your own mining company.’ By placing property rights outside of the equation, on which measures like the marginal product of labour or capital depend, rates of exchange (prices) become pure representations of objective conditions such as the scarcity of goods, consumer preferences, or the entrepreneurial finesse of individual capitalists. Unlike the classical economists of the nineteenth century who admitted class antagonisms, and whom Lewis in the 1950s found it necessarily to follow in order to understand developing economies, in the neoclassical worldview there is simply no structural component to wages or profits to begin with, no class antagonism; so nothing to explain.

Neoclassical economics can only thinly veil the real threat implied in neoliberal politics, which is no profits, no jobs. This is the message of the ‘Australian Trade and Industry Alliance’, which is bankrolling the anti-carbon tax campaign. Abbot is also touring coalfields, his message being that the carbon tax means you will lose your job. The miners candidly threaten their employees with unemployment if they cannot justify their existence. In this sense the miners appeal to their employees through the reality of the condition of employment; they are more pragmatists than academic economists. Whatever CEOs may believe justify their pay-packets, or the stay-at-home rich for that matter, it is secondary in the propaganda that the mining elites are funding in order to appeal to working people and prevent the spectre of environmental limits from becoming a reality.

A purer expression of utopian capitalism is the belief that a moral revolution in consumer demand can re-model supply and transform capitalism into a green economy. Gilding parodies the real economy by telling us that ‘if we all stopped shopping’ we’d be happier in a slow or zero growth economy. In reality this green-capitalist economy would collapse even faster than debt-capitalism is currently doing in Europe. In proportion with the destruction of a credible belief in future market expansion, employment in production would collapse. Consumerism is not the cause of capitalist crises and anti-consumerism is not a solution. If consumer demand really could be curtailed in this way, very quickly the social question ignored by this kind of politics will present itself—what happens when the capitalists go out on strike because they have no incentive to invest in production?

Proposals to coerce capital into green industries are more realistic. However, ‘green-collar workers’ will still need growth to maintain their numbers in employment. It is only the transition phase to green-capitalism that may average-out at zero growth as hazardous industries decline and others emerge. In the long run, a technological basis for growth would be required. Unsurprisingly, Gilding describes this future technological basis in strikingly similar terms as those of neoclassical capitalism; ‘No one can corner the market for sunshine and wind!’ Proposals that seek to encourage investment into renewable energies consistently imagine a utopian, competitive and equitable view of markets. Unfortunately, real markets may well be defined by free exchange, but it is exchange based on the real distribution of wealth, and therefore reflects the social monopoly imposed by that inequality of rights: especially in capital-intensive sectors like the energy sector. In the language of marginal utility, the price we will be asked to pay for environmentally friendly goods will reflect a rate or exchange between society’s desperate desire to survive into the twenty-second century, and a tiny minority’s control over industry, who will have houses on stilts from which they can watch the rest of us drown. Keeping this in mind we can ask more realistic questions about getting capitalism to make better investment choices. If it is necessary to grant exclusive rights to the sun in order to encourage the required level of investment in solar energy, will we refuse the market? This is precisely the logic behind intellectual property rights and investment in pharmaceuticals. Market-based approaches to environmental regulation, which leave private property rights intact, are the perfect mechanisms for transferring a monopoly of wealth from one set of technologies to another. This is what they are designed to do. We will then be asked to believe that the solar-capitalists provide the sun, just as we currently believe that the miners provide coal and iron ore, rather than the people who actually build, and work in, mines.

The environmental crisis appears as an external crisis, of the economy coming up against its physical limits. However if, as many environmentalists have pointed out, it ultimately means the end of growth, then it is also a deep, internal crisis, deeper than the one currently engulfing Europe and the United States. Unfortunately, unlike the neoliberal crisis that has at least raised the question of an internal crisis founded on gross inequality, the environmental crisis seems only to have thrown a number of confused, liberal solutions into the public domain. More often than not these ideas make ‘the system’ a layer of bureaucracy that the state imposes on private capital, rather than the system of property itself. Achieving slower growth and technological transition through secondary layers of state bureaucracy, is an extremely inefficient plan that, as the political Right correctly points out, will lead to economic stagnation and unemployment. It would retain the incentive of private capital and therefore the incessant need for the economy to grow, while denying it that right. More efficient would be simply to remove the disequilibrium in property rights in the first place, by collectivising workplaces. Proposals to divert capital into green channels contain what might be called the shadow of expropriation—to varying degrees, removing the prerogative of capitalists and using capital in the interests of the majority. As environmental conditions become increasingly harsh, and those closest to the bottom pay the highest price, expropriation of some form will be the only form of environmentalism with a hope of remaining popular. Just as the politics of growth-at-all-costs currently does, expropriation relates directly to the lived experience of most of the population, which is dispossession and consequently waged employment. The green-liberal discourse offers no such reassurance, as liberal solutions to capitalist crises past and present have used state power to reassure rather than coerce the wealthiest part of the community, and extract a higher price from those at the bottom—exactly what is happening today in Europe under austerity.

For his part, Lewis rejected the idea that ‘expropriation’ was a solution, based on the observation that in both the Soviet Union and the mixed economies nationalisation had done ‘nothing whatever to transfer this part of the surplus to the workers’. Nevertheless, the farmers in the Lewis model face a different set of costs curves, a different minimum output ‘shut down’ decision, and its members’ capacity to spend grows with their capacity to invest. Removing disequilibrium between investment and demand, and therefore forming an economy that could actually achieve something like the utopian vision of green-politics, does not necessarily imply monopolisation by the state; but it definitely implies collectivised property of some form.

By Conal Thwaite

Conal Thwaite is a member of the Melbourne Anarchist Club. Last year he completed an honours thesis in history called Anarcho-Syndicalism in Melbourne and Sydney, prior to that he studied Arts and Commerce at the University of Melbourne. He also has a day job.

You can find a fuller explanation of the Lewis model at <http://undegraduateeconomics.wordpress.com/>

Prior to Fukushima, nuclear generation of electricity had re-emerged onto the global public agenda after more than a quarter of a century of post-Chernobyl recession in the guise of a putative greenhouse gas emission mitigation strategy, heavily promoted by the nuclear industry and allies and admirers in government and academia. Even before Fukushima, the much touted ‘nuclear renaissance’ was in doubt, principally because of nuclear economics and construction times, the closing of the financial gap between nuclear and new energy sources, a decline in likely availability of government subsidies, and the wholly implausible number of nuclear power plants required in a climate change salvation scenario.

Despite Fukushima, nuclear power in Japan will not die immediately, although it is mortally wounded and will never recover. The global rise in construction costs that will follow from increased safety concerns will vitiate many of the cost-reduction benefits derived from the incremental improvement and standardisation of design and construction that have kept Japanese (and Korean) nuclear costs lower than those of other countries over the past two decades. The multiple official reviews of the causes and consequences of the Fukushima sequence of accidents will undoubtedly lead to a great deal of retrofitting and redesign of existing reactors, as well as changes in future design requirements. While the Fukushima No. 1 reactors have already been written off (with massive costs far beyond normal expensive decommissioning costs), thirty-four of the country’s remaining fifty-four commercial reactors are also offline for inspection and review. One measure of the likely complexity and duration of the reviews of some of these of apparently undamaged reactors is the experience at Japan’s largest nuclear power station at Kashiwazaki-Kariwa, where the plant’s six large reactors shut down automatically in September 2007 following the M6.8 Chuetsu undersea earthquake off the coast of Niigata. Almost four years later, at the time of the Fukushima earthquake, three of the reactors were still offline, pending further investigations. More importantly, in the wake of that earthquake, authorities repeated local seismic studies conducted almost three decades ago and discovered a range of faults undetected by the seismological studies possible at the time of the plant’s construction, leading to a comprehensive rewriting of Japan’s nuclear seismic guidelines. That process, writ large, will now start again.

Nuclear power in Japan is a product of a particular version of Japan’s doken kokka, or construction state. In it the general model of a corporate–state alliance to build largely unjustifiable expensive infrastructure projects was fused with a vision of a plutonium economy that would free the resource-poor country from dependence on energy imports. At the heart of the vision of the plutonium economy were some of the largest of Japan’s impressive white elephant population―the Monju and Joyo breeder reactors, which were to generate an endless supply of fissile material to then be used as fuel for other reactors, and the $91 billion Rokkasho Reprocessing Plant, which is planned to produce more than eight tonnes of plutonium a year. A nuclear alliance made up of nuclear plant manufacturers, electricity utilities, the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry, and national and local politicians in the Liberal Democratic Party and Democratic Party of Japan has battled with widespread and resilient grassroots campaigns against nuclear power. Despite the massive imbalance of resources, including longstanding collusive and corrupt practices that have buttressed elements of the nuclear alliance, and intimidation and silencing of even senior conservative politicians, almost as many nuclear facilities were stopped by local campaigns as were finally constructed.

Fukushima will threaten the hold of the Japanese nuclear complex on decision-making in at least three ways. Firstly, a considerable amount of previously suppressed information is coming to light―not only from the electric power companies like TEPCO, already a byword for a corporate culture of malfeasance and impunity. The regulatory agencies attached to the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry, especially the Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency (NISA), have been shown to have been grossly delinquent, and possibly actually collusive with TEPCO, in earlier seismic safety assessments. On 3 June NISA admitted that it had suppressed the fact that it had detected radioactive Telerium (Te-132) six kilometres from the reactor site on the morning of 12 March, the day after the earthquake, an indication that meltdown was already underway.

Needless to say, public trust in nuclear power and its regulation has been shaken. More importantly, it is clear that the trust mainstream politicians had vested in the nuclear complex has been badly shaken. While his opponents in his own party and in the opposition LDP are eager to bring down Prime Minister Kan Naoto, very few would have wanted to swap places with him in the months after the earthquake as his administration was blindsided by TEPCO and NISA, and as a result he looked, as he actually was, virtually powerless to affect events significantly.

Secondly, even before Fukushima the strength of local opposition throughout the country was such that there was almost no likelihood of new nuclear facilities receiving local government planning permissions. Onsite spent nuclear fuel storage has reached capacity at most Japanese nuclear plants, and the Mutsu Interim Spent Nuclear Fuel Storage Facility will not open until at least 2012. There is no prospect of permanent spent nuclear fuel storage facility being constructed in Japan, or anywhere else. Spent fuel was stored in eight different locations at Fukushima No.1 NPP―in six reactors’ spent fuel storage ponds, an independent spent fuel pool, and an independent dry cask facility. With frequent substantial aftershocks continuing in the region, the greatest ongoing danger remains the possibility of a structural collapse of the earthquake-, blast- and fire-damaged spent fuel storage pond above Reactor No. 4, with complete loss of coolant to the large amount of spent fuel in the pond.

Thirdly, as noted, nuclear power in Japan is a product of a particular version of Japan’s construction state, and its vision of a plutonium economy. That dream, always a matter of fantasy, is shattered. The immediate alternative is for ‘once-through’ use of nuclear fuel, from which the waste is then stored forever, without reprocessing. The real question is how long this fall-back position itself will be viable in Japan.

Not surprisingly, the nuclear industry in Japan displays many of the characteristics of the wider social formation, now several decades into a state of disarray as the postwar social structure of accumulation―summarised as ‘Japan Incorporated’―continues to lose its mojo, and the outline of a new order remains elusive. While the most obvious examples of this are the lack of political and bureaucratic effectiveness and coherence in decision making, the dirty secret of Japanese labour is being played out once again at Fukushima, through the use of day-labourers. The great majority of workers recruited to work in the highly dangerous environment at Fukushima since the earthquake have been contract employees (hiseisha’in), hired for about AUD 100 a day by a subcontractor to work for TEPCO. Historically, much of Japan’s postwar construction depended on the labour of men hired by labour-bosses, often with yakuza links, from highly depressed areas of big cities, such as Tokyo’s San’ya and Osaka’s Kamigasaki, from backgrounds of unemployment, mental and physical ill-health, family breakdown and social isolation. These days an SMS message on a mobile phone replaces the early morning labour call in the yoseba.

Radiation levels inside the reactor and turbine buildings of Units 1, 2 and 3 are extremely high, and a fifteen minute exposure, even in a completely sealed suit, is equivalent to the maximum exposure for a US nuclear worker over five years. In other places on the site, while radiation levels remain high, they are probably not lethal if proper procedures are followed and repeat exposures restricted. The problem is that in recruiting day-labourers the nuclear industry is repeating its earlier history of hiring ‘nuclear gypsies’, whose exposure levels are not properly monitored as they move from job to job, and whose work situation is such that they may rapidly accumulate dangerous levels of radiation exposure. Even before Fukushima, nuclear contract workers routinely had the highest monitored levels of exposure. SMS and Twitter messages calling for Fukushima day-labourers after the earthquake were offering 10,000 yen a day. One forty-eight-year-old worker living nearby declined an offer which went: ‘We are looking for people over fifty who could intervene in the reactor; the pay is much higher than usual’. As the sociologist Paul Jobin remarked in Japan Focus, ‘The wording “over fifty” suggests that in order to come work on the site, you must be ready to die …’

Five Nuclear Questions for Japan

The answers to five questions will indicate just how long the mortally wounded Japanese nuclear industry will take to finally die.

1. Will the liberalisation of Japanese energy markets be extended to the nuclear industry, allowing the market realities of nuclear power generation without subsidy shape decision making?

2. Will the electric utilities, now so reliant upon nuclear power generation, remain committed to it? After the German electricity sector’s sudden conversion to a non-nuclear future following the lead from Chancellor Angela Merkel, questions may begin to be asked in Tokyo boardrooms.

3. Can elected politicians form a Japanese government that will take control of nuclear policy? Here the nuclear sector is a canary in the coalmine for the wider key issue of Japanese politicians wresting control of policy from unelected bureaucracies, and hence being capable of taking responsibility for policy.

4. Can an elected government admit the failure of the chimera of the plutonium economy? Minimally, this would be the reconstruction of a system-rational mode of Japanese capitalist democracy that does not waste billions of tax-payers’ dollars on white elephant infrastructure. Beyond that is the darkest side of the plutonium economy, the other chimera of nuclear power, the not-so-hidden fantasy of indigenous nuclear weapons development.

5. Can a Japanese government break through encrusted, vested interests to direct a new energy policy? Ideally, this should be based on a mix of high energy efficiency, renewable energy sources and a mix of centralised and distributed power generation. In late May, Prime Minister Kan announced a target of 20 per cent of electricity generation by 2020, a decade ahead of pre-Fukushima plans.

Five Questions for Australians

1. Will Australia resist the temptations of high-level nuclear waste disposal and uranium enrichment, the pathway to the bomb?

2. Can the push-back by the Australian nuclear power boosters in government, business and academia be resisted?

3. Will the Fukushima disaster lead to more than just another round of cost increases; will it lead to a more fundamental, informed critique?

4. Will social movements be able to generate adequate pressure to erode the hidden financial protections that sustain the nuclear state–corporate complex?

5. Contra the current trajectory for planetary disaster, will the collapse of the illusion of the nuclear option as a fallback strategy generate sufficient psychic and political pressure for potentially viable climate change action?

By Richard Tanter

Richard Tanter is Senior Research Associate at the Nautilus Institute for Security and Sustainability.

*An extended, footnoted version of this article will be available at <www.nautilus.org/about/associates/richard-tanter/publications>.

References:

E. Fowler, San’ya Blues: Laboring Life in Contemporary Tokyo, Cornell University Press, 1998.

J. Harding, ‘Economics of Nuclear Power and Proliferation Risks in a Carbon-Constrained World’, The Electricity Journal, vol. 20, no. 10, December 2007, pp. 65–76.

D. von Hippel et al., After the Deluge: Short and Medium-term Impacts of the Reactor Damage Caused by the Japan Earthquake and Tsunami, Special Report, 17 March 2011; and The Path from Fukushima: Short and Medium-term Impacts of the Reactor Damage Caused by the Japan Earthquake and Tsunami on Japan’s Electricity System, 11 April 2011, Nautilus Institute for Security and Sustainability, <www.nautilus.org>.

I.N. Kessides, ‘Nuclear Power: Understanding the Economic Risks and Uncertainties’, Energy Policy, vol.38, no. 8, August 2010, pp. 3849–64;

J. Kingston, Japan’s Quiet Transformation: Social Change and Civil Society in 21st Century Japan, pp. 122–56.

G. MacKerron, ‘Nuclear Costs: Why Do they Keep Rising?’, Energy Policy, July 1992, pp. 641–52

G. McCormack, The Emptiness of Japanese Affluence, M.E. Sharpe, 2001.

‘Nuclear Power Economics’, The Future of Nuclear Power: An Interdisciplinary MIT Study, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2003.

D. Schlissel, M. Mullett and R. Alvarez, ‘Nuclear Loan Guarantees―Another Taxpayer Bailout Ahead?’, Union of Concerned Scientists, March 2009.

Tadahiro Katsuta and Tatsujiro Suzuki, ‘Japan’s Spent Fuel and Plutonium Management Challenges’, Proceedings of the Carnegie Non-Proliferation Conference, 2007, p. 6.

Tanaka Yuji, ‘Nuclear Power Plant Gypsies in High-Tech Society’ in J. Moore (ed.), The Other Japan: Conflict, Compromise, and Resistance Since 1945, M.E. Sharpe, 1996.

Tatsujiro Suzuki, Global Nuclear Future: A Japanese Perspective, Nautilus Institute RMIT, Melbourne, September 2006, <www.nautilus.org>.

In one sense the moment is unique―with three reactors having suffered partial core meltdowns and hydrogen explosions rupturing or destroying their outer containment buildings, an apparent breach of the primary containment in at least one unit, a series of fires in a spent fuel storage pond, as well as radioactive plumes emitted with radiation levels sufficient to stand in reasonable but still debateable comparison to (and probably less than) those from the Chernobyl accident.

In another sense the moment has a haunting familiarity. As long ago as 1977, Arena ran a special issue with a focus on nuclear power. 1 In one of the contributed articles,

noting the increasing opposition to the industry worldwide, I commented on the rapid drop in nuclear reactor orders and the industry’s expectations over the previous few years.2 In particular, in the six years from 1972 to1978 the industry’s expectations of the amount of nuclear power to be generated in the world in 2000 dropped by 72 per cent (from 3450 GWe to 728 GWe). In the United States nuclear reactor orders plummeted from thirty-five in 1973 to three in 1976, with the US Deputy Energy Secretary worrying in 1977 that the nuclear option in the United States ‘has essentially disappeared’.3

That same year, as the Arena issue appeared, Amory Lovins, a well-known energy analyst (and for many years now, director of his successful Rocky Mountains Institute), memorably testified to a US Congressional committee that

It is my considered judgement that nuclear power is dead, in the sense of a Brontosaurs that has had its spinal cord cut but because it’s so big and has all those ganglia near the tail some place, can keep thrashing about for years not knowing it is dead yet.4

Shadows from the Past

While the industry never actually died, it certainly remained remarkably stunted against its earlier aspirations, largely living off existing new, replacement and maintenance contracts. As it turned out, compared to the 1972 expectation of 3450 GWe, actual world nuclear capacity in the year 2000 was only 350 GWe. Eleven years later, in April 2011, generating capacity was not much bigger, at 370 GWe, and the number of operating reactors was seven fewer than in 2002.5

In relation to the current moment, there is much to be learned from what has come before. We should note that the strong downturn in nuclear expectations was not caused by the accidents at Three Mile Island (1979) and the subsequent fire at Chernobyl (1986). The downturn had already begun over the previous decade, with plummeting orders and expectations. As Craig Severance put it, looking back at Three Mile Island, ‘If anything the accident simply capped off a trend which was already occurring. Utility executives and Wall Street financiers were the ones who stopped nuclear power’s expansion in the 1970s’.6 A simple explanation offered by Lovins, continuing his 1977 testimony, was that the more than tenfold decline in nuclear expectations was ‘due to straight forward market forces: as Adam Smith might have said, the Invisible Fist strikes again’.7

Powerful though the image is, the dynamics of ‘the invisible fist’ require analysis. The key underlying mechanism was clear for those who were open to seeing it in the late 1970s. As a landmark study by Bupp and Derian at Harvard Business School showed, the nuclear industry was beset by rising costs, centred on the overall cost of building nuclear reactors (capital costs).8 For nuclear reactors built between 1966 and 1977, actual realised nuclear construction costs on average overshot by 209‒380 per cent (almost four times as much) the original cost estimates offered at the start of construction.9

The central point is that these costs were associated with greatly lengthened licensing times―the time between commitment to embark on a reactor project and the moment it actually started putting electricity into the commercial grid. These extended times of

course represented increased interest payments. But they were also a proxy for much else, including delays due to changes to reactor design consequent on new emerging problems; tightening of the regulation environment; and an associated widespread pattern of local, national and global opposition to nuclear power. Opposition was particularly intense wherever reactors were contemplated; it was fuelled by the risks revealed with every successive reactor incident. This in turn led to pressures for increasing elaboration in the design, extension of construction time and the escalating costs of building reactors.10

A key to the nuclear industry has been the featherbed of subsidies on which its economics have rested since its inception.11 It is reasonable to argue that the key economic role of the global opposition to nuclear power has been to provide a boundary condition to the extent to which further subsidies could be extended to the never fully economic, but politically highly influential, nuclear industry. Historically, the opposition was assisted in this by the increasing emphasis within the broader global economy for economic rationalisation, deregulation and privatisation. Taken together, these have been an important factor in strengthening the impact of the ‘invisible fist’ upon the nuclear industry, notably in the United States and United Kingdom.

The factors shaping the increases in reactor costs are thus complex. The case of France is particularly interesting because the French program is usually considered the success story of the industry. Yet even there, with the benefits of a highly centralised and determined state-sponsored nuclear program that was prepared to run roughshod over the initially substantial opposition, costs were not contained in the long run.

In a study published in Energy Policy, Grubler reports that the ambitious French building of nuclear reactors, over the period 1980‒96, exhibited a ‘negative learning curve’ with costs rising rapidly in real terms.12 A subsequent analysis by Komanoff, using Grubler’s data, shows that over that period the program’s electricity costs grew by about 60 per cent in real terms (inflation adjusted). Most importantly, in the end the program departed from a deliberate process of producing reactors which avoided innovation. Once the design was changed (to the larger 1.5 GWe ‘N4’ reactors), the cost to build the reactors rose to twice as much per GWe as the previous fifty-four reactors already built.13

Here the causes are telling. It was the interests of the two central agencies―EDF (Électricité de France) and the CEA (le Commissariat à l’Énergie Atomique)―combined that pushed the program in the direction of higher costs. As Grubler puts it,

These endogeneous non-safety drivers of design changes can be summarized simply as: ever larger scale and more output (the interest of the EDF), more French equipment and components (the interest of the nuclear equipment industry), and finally technological leadership (the interest of the CEA).

Here we see the extent to which the economics of nuclear power can be determined by extrinsic factors, which in large part derive not from the market but from the insulation of the industry from it. Where a program is bureaucratic in its nature, bureaucratic interests can profoundly shape its apparent economics.

This draws our attention to an endemic characteristic of the nuclear industry. While many renewable technologies (for example, solar cells, windmills, biofuel units) can be constructed as large numbers of small units and thus enjoy economies of scale from mass production, nuclear power shows no such tendency. Rather, the tendency has been that attempting economies of scale through building larger units has only added additional complexities that in the end rebound in more unexpected outcomes and thus greater costs and economic risk.14

The Invisible Fist Post Fukushima

Fukushima takes us forward a quarter of a century to what is in some telling ways a similar moment to that of the end of the 1970s. The nine year period prior to the Fukushima accident, from 2002, was once again a moment when the nuclear industry aspired to raise its fortunes, especially in the face of climate change. In this context there was much marketing of a supposedly already occurring ‘nuclear renaissance’. While there are reasons to doubt much of the supporting rhetoric and the marketed vision itself, Fukushima is now widely believed to represent a significant obstacle in the way of its realisation.

At the very time the industry thought it might have achieved at least a moral edge in arguing that nuclear power is an essential component of meeting greenhouse gas reduction targets, the risks of nuclear power are again featuring highly in debates about its future. Once more, despite the apparent capacity of the nuclear industry to make some contribution to a lower carbon trajectory, and much stronger rhetoric around this, this came at a time when the industry’s position was actually still quite delicate. Here the twin invisible forces―of ionising radiation and the market’s invisible hand―have combined to seriously undermine, at least potentially, the fortunes of the nuclear industry.

There are a range of reasons for this, which are very nicely summarised in a recent Worldwatch Institute report by Schneider, Frogatt and Thomas.15 Crucially, as they note, in most countries the capital costs of nuclear reactors continue to increase rapidly. Thus before 2007 estimated costs for new nuclear reactors proposed for construction in the United States were cited at USD four billion for a typical 1 GWe reactor. Now costs of USD five–six billion are being cited by Moody’s Investment Services, while the Florida Public Service Commission concluded that two new units would cost USD 5.5–8.1 billion per GWe.16

According to one report, Areva now quotes the cost of a new nuclear reactor at USD eight billion. Toshiba has raised its quote to San Antonio for a twin reactor from USD thirteen to seventeen billion, while a quote to Ontario of USD 10.8 billion per GWe. In both cases interest in building the units was killed.17

The United States continues to be a disaster story for the nuclear industry, with no new nuclear reactors actually ordered and built for more than thirty years, and with many cancelled orders. Here, the invisible fist has been more obviously at work,

strengthened by potent local citizen opposition, which has tended to inflict bruising deterrence on those who might otherwise seek to achieve further protection for the industry (whether through monetary subsidies or the externalisation of risk).

A careful 2009 study by Craig Severance uses statistical analysis of the relationship between forecasts made for costs of future reactor projects and the actual final costs

when they finally start generating electricity. On the basis of this study, taking into account full costs, but assuming the most optimistic schedule is put forward in new US nuclear plant proposals, he concludes that the most likely cost of building a nuclear reactor is USD 10.5 billion per GWe.18

Severance concludes that the business case for installing a nuclear reactor is confronted with a uniquely perilous set of business risks potentially arising from escalating costs, construction delays, changing financial circumstances over the at least ten year construction period, changes to the regulatory environment, unresolved costs of nuclear waste disposal, the ‘wildcard: organized opposition’, all in the context of the issues of nuclear proliferation, terrorist attack and the impacts of the plutonium economy; and the consequent danger of a plant never being completed or not being allowed to run its intended generating lifetime after enormous investment.

Fallout from Fukushima

While the radioactive fallout from Fukushima is still being generated, with serious consequences especially for vulnerable exposed sub-populations (such as children in ‘hot spots’), it is the economic fallout which may, in the long run, have more global implications. To the extent that electrical utilities considering a nuclear project are required to consider business risks (which are not taken over by consumers or government), these risks will shape the vulnerability and fortunes of the project. Fragile as the industry is in the face of such considerations, Fukushima adds considerably greater stress.

Reactor operating extensions under pressure

Ironically, the industry’s tendency to blame the serious situation at Fukushima on the fact that those reactors are very old creates a further economic risk.

Of course it is not necessarily the case that recent design decisions for new reactors would have precluded this particular sequence of events. The key proximate cause of the partial meltdowns was the inability to supply adequate cooling water primarily

because power failed. Power failed because the external supply was destroyed, with the backup generators flooded and thus rendered useless. The flooding occurred because the walls surrounding the generators were not high enough to prevent flooding. As has been pointed out by numerous observers, the height of the tsunami surge (fourteen metres) has precedents in the history of the area, including a thirty metre surge in Onagawa in 1993, among a history of other such surges, including the giant Jogan tsunami of 869 CE.19 It was a commercial decision not to mitigate this known risk by building higher walls.

Even taken at face value, however, the argument that old reactors are not as safe as new ones puts considerable pressure on the industry to replace old with new. But this is a big task because as there have been low order rates in the last several decades; as Schneider and colleagues note, the average age of the world’s operating reactor ‘fleet’ is old―twenty-six years―with some having operated for more than forty years. The average age of the 130 reactors already closed is twenty-two years, and this casts a dark shadow over older plants still operating and proposals by governments and industry to extend the permitted lifetimes of existing plants. As the Fukushima crisis began, the German government’s early decision to suspend the operation of reactors

over thirty years old was the first step in their decision now to phase out nuclear power and move to renewables.

A postscript to a 2011 report by MIT, ‘The Future of the Nuclear Fuel Cycle’, added hastily as it was going to press the following likely implications: ‘costs are likely to go up’ because of new safety design requirements; ‘the relicensing of forty year old nuclear plants for another twenty years of operation will face additional scrutiny’ and some licensing extensions already granted may ‘be revisited’; the entire spent fuel management system ‘is likely to be revaluated’. Finally, it notes, ‘How these and other post-Fukushima issues are resolved will have major implications for the future of nuclear power …’20

New generation reactors

It is also useful to comment on the potential role of and constraints on the so-called new generation reactors. While there has been much marketing of the claimed virtues of new designs, the safest and cheapest nuclear reactors are always those still on paper. In the same way that armies are only in danger of defeat when mobilised in battle, it is when new designs begin to be deployed in practice that the unanticipated threats can appear. Because reactors are extraordinarily complex, the room for the unexpected to undermine confident predictions is wide.

Many innovations follow an economist’s ‘bucket curve’, with early high incidents of the unexpected, a slow stabilisation as time progresses and more copies and improvements are made, followed in due course by an increase in incidents as such innovations start to approach their design lifetime. The old reactors are in this latter stage; the new ones in the former.

One example of how horribly wrong a design ‘reform’ can be was provided by Fermi I Fast Breeder reactor at Laguna Beach, Michigan, in 1963. When it was started up it rapidly went into a partial core meltdown. The cause: a blocked cooling channel obstructed by a piece of a safety device intended to reduce the likelihood of a meltdown leading to nuclear explosion.21

With any new design there is always the likelihood that events will follow sequences which have not been anticipated, however extensive the preparatory analysis. As the Generation IV reactors largely remain on the drawing board, it is sufficient to say here that there are a number of concerns about their actual safety that remain to be addressed, despite their apparent (on paper) advantages.22 One only has to focus on one issue raised by Koomey and Hultman, who have analysed past trends in reactor costs, especially as new designs lead to new complexities but without economies of scale and the consequent mass production that might make ironing out the associated problems economically possible. They note that while the ‘policy and design changes represented by Gen III+ and Gen IV reactors do represent improvements over the current fleet’,

the interlinked issues of reactor scale, customization of site-built technologies, slow electricity demand growth, intense competition from other energy sources, deregulated electricity markets, slow speed of industry learning, nuclear waste disposal, terrorism, and proliferation remain potential impediments to the cost competitiveness of next-generation nuclear power in the 21st century.23

In short, the Gen IV reactors, like the N4 reactors in the French program, may bring some interesting or even exciting improvements, but at the same time they may create significant new business risks.

The case of a new Gen III EPR (European Pressurised Reactor) being constructed by the French company Areva in Finland is suggestive. Six years after commencing construction the reactor is ‘about four years behind schedule and at least 97 percent over budget, with the loss for the provider estimated at Euro 2.7 billion ($3.9 billion)’.24

Fukushima and Renewables

The events at Fukushima thus limit the ways in which the nuclear industry can maintain momentum in a time of escalating costs. Notably, they undermine a series of industry strategies: stretching out reactor lifetimes; decreasing costs with economies of scale (which, as with Fukushima, one of the world’s largest nuclear reactor complexes, showed large vulnerability when something went wrong); the offer of investment in future technologies unproved yet by the rigours of construction and operation.

At the same time, the moment for larger scale use of renewables is upon us. Unlike nuclear power, some of these (for example, photovoltaics) can already be seen to exhibit exactly the learning curve of decreased costs with increasing production that would be expected of mass manufactured technologies.25 Already, as Schneider and colleagues report, by 2010 worldwide total installed capacity of wind turbines (193 GWe), biomass and waste-to-energy plants (65 GWe), and solar power (43 GWe), had risen to 381 GWe, exceeding the worldwide installed nuclear capacity of 375 GWe. Total investment in renewable energy technologies was estimated at USD 243 billion and the US share of renewables (with no new nuclear energy coming on line). Globally, annual additions to the world’s renewables capacity have outpaced nuclear start-ups for fifteen years.26

Fukushima highlights the value of building rapidly on these developments of renewables capability. As noted, the German government has already announced an intention to phase out reliance on nuclear power and to profit from becoming a world leader in renewables.27 The Japanese government, as it faces up to the costs of Fukushima (including establishing a publically funded compensation fund to both assist victims and save TEPCO, the company operating the Fukushima reactors), is also reviewing its energy policy. It has announced it will seek to secure electricity without depending on nuclear power too much, and in particular to front-load its target of expanding the renewable energy market to ten trillion yen by 2020. Under the revised growth strategy, it has been reported that Japan will put more emphasis on the development of renewable energy such as solar, wind and geothermal heat generated power, as well as the enhancement of electric accumulators.28

Not Just Economics

In conclusion to his comment on the nuclear industry’s economic future, Joseph Romm notes that ‘New nukes have gone from too cheap to meter to too expensive to matter for the foreseeable future’.29 Amory Lovins, consistent with his 1977 remarks, explains in a preface post Fukushima that even before events there, ‘nuclear power was dying of an incurable attack of market forces’.30 He continues,

Since new nuclear build is uneconomic and unnecessary, we needn’t debate whether it’s also proliferative and dangerous. In a world of fallible and malicious people and imperfect institutions, it’s actually both. But even after 60 years of immense subsidies and devoted effort, nuclear power still can’t clear the first two hurdles: competitiveness and need. End of story.31

Yet it is not quite the end of the story.

The nuclear industry may not be economic, but arguably it never has been. Indeed as Lovins notes, ‘every nuclear power plant under construction in the world was chosen by central planners: not one was a free-market purchase fairly competed against or compared with alternatives’.32 However, there is nothing to say that this will not continue, unless countered politically.

The nuclear industry has been developed because there was a political commitment, one way or another, from government to either build it directly or pay others to do so. In short, as noted earlier, there is an important political dimension to the implications of the economics for the industry’s future. The political dimensions of the impetus to subsidise and promote the industry are multiple: military considerations and pressures, national pride and assertions of sovereignty, the bureaucratic interests of government agencies (for example, in France), and the interests of large corporations (and energy corporations can be extremely powerful).

Further, it is important to note that I have not referred at all to the Asian markets, which have, in particular, been the hope for the nuclear industry. In a sense Fukushima is the Asian Three Mile Island/Chernobyl. For example, many of the reactors constructed or planned for Asia are on the coast and vulnerable also to storm surges or tsunamis. But the consequences will be harder to pick than in Europe and North America. We should recall that countries with strong states, firmly focused on developing long-term nuclear programs, not too fussed about local opposition from residents, and in a compliant relationship with the nuclear industry (whether because of its military role or otherwise), are in a better position to contain costs and prop up the industry’s economic base. In this sense the future of nuclear power remains, as it always has, conditioned in the end by an economics which is shaped by political forces. Therefore, in each case the outcome will be, at least in part, politically determined.

Clearly, Fukushima has implications also for the political contest. In Japan, whatever the posturing of the government and the industry, the already well-developed local capacity for opposition will be sharpened and focused by events at Fukushima.

Japan has fifty-four reactors that up until the events of Fukushima generated some 30 per cent of Japan’s electricity. Some believed it would not be long before that reached 50 per cent of electricity generation.33 Yet it is hard to believe that we will see many, if any, new reactors seriously put forward for construction in Japan given the existing strength, and likely exacerbation, of ‘nuclear allergy’ across the country. In India and China, and other parts of Asia, such as Indonesia, the situation remains more fluid. In India, opposition is intense around the proposed nuclear park in Jaitapur, but the government, while creating an independent regulation agency for nuclear power, has indicated it intends to continue with plans to increase nuclear output from 4.7GWe to 20GWe by 2020.34

China, with thirteen reactors and a further twenty-eight under construction, took some actions in response to Fukushima. Premier Wen Jiabao announced the temporary suspension of approval of nuclear projects, including those in a preliminary stage of development.35 China also initiated a comprehensive safety inspection of its nuclear facilities and updated its safety regulations; nuclear projects that do not comply will be suspended or terminated.36 Nevertheless, and even though China has ambitious renewables and energy efficiency programs, the example of France suggests that with a significant capacity to insulate a program from both its intrinsic economics and public concern, it may be some time before or until the program is seriously undermined.

In short, the implications of Fukushima are, as with other nuclear crises, to raise the stakes for opposition and industry alike. Certainly in most if not all countries, the balance of opinion will have shifted in a more critical direction by what has occurred. It would, however, be premature to say, as do some analysts, that this is the end of nuclear power. Whether it is the end, or the beginning of the end, or merely an interregnum, will depend not merely on what has happened but on how communities around the world will respond. One thing does appear certain. However the political contest over nuclear power eventually plays out, the events at Fukushima are certainly a wake-up from the industry’s more recent dreams. Others (not the least in Japan) will see this more like a reprieve (whether temporarily or, hopefully, more permanently) from a nightmare.

By Jim Falk

Jim Falk is a Professorial Fellow at the University of Melbourne, a United Nations University Visiting Professor, and a Director of the Climate Research Program of the Association of Pacific Rim Universities. His most recent book (with Joseph Camilleri) is Worlds in Transition: Evolving Governance across a Stressed Planet, Edward Elgar, UK, 2009.

Endnotes:

1 Arena, Special Double Issue, nos 47‒48, 1977.

2 J. Falk, ‘Australia, the New US Nuclear Policy and the International Contestation over Nuclear Power’, Arena, Special Double Issue, nos 47‒48, 1977, pp. 32‒3.

3 J. Falk, Global Fission: The Battle over Nuclear Power, Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 1982, pp. 23‒7.

4 A.B. Lovins, ‘Invited Testimony for Hearings on the Costs of Nuclear Power’, reprinted in ‘Alternative Long-Range Energy Strategies’, Joint Hearing before the Select Committee on Small Business and the Committee on Interior and Insular Affairs, US Senate, 94‒47,1977, p. 1463.

5 M. Schneider, A. Froggatt and S. Thomas, The World Nuclear Industry Status Report 2010–2011, Nuclear Power in a Post-Fukushima World: 25 Years After the Chernobyl Accident, Worldwatch Institute, Washington DC, Paris, Berlin, April 2011, p. 7.

6 C.A. Severance, ‘Business Risks and Costs of New Nuclear Power’, 2 January 2009.

7 Lovins, ‘Invited Testimony’.

8 I.C. Bupp, J.C. Deria et al., ‘The Economics of Nuclear Power’, Technology Review, February 1975, p. 15.

9 Severance, ‘Business Risks and Costs of New Nuclear Power’, p. 11.

10 Falk, Global Fission.

11 See Falk, Global Fission, pp. 75‒85; J. Romm, ‘The High Cost of Nuclear Power’, Testimony to the Committee on Environment and Public Works, Subcommittee on

Clean Air and Nuclear Safety, US Senate, 16 July 2008; and D. Schlissel, M. Mullett and R. Alvarez, ‘Nuclear Loan Guarantees: Another Taxpayer Bailout Ahead?’, Union of Concerned Scientists, Cambridge, MA, March 2009.

12 Cited in J. Romm, ‘Does Nuclear Power have a Negative Learning Curve?’, 6 April 2011, <www.grist.org>.

13C. Komanoff, ‘Cost Escalation in France’s Nuclear Reactors: A Statistical Examination”, January 2010, <www.komanoff.net>.

14 J. Koomey and N.E. Hultman, ‘A Reactor-level Analysis of Busbar Costs for US Nuclear Plants 1970‒2005’, Energy Policy, no. 35, 2007, pp. 5638‒9.

15Schneider, Frogatt and Thomas, The World Nuclear Industry Status Report 2010–2011.

16 Schneider, Frogatt and Thomas, The World Nuclear Industry Status Report 2010–2011.

17 Romm, ‘The High Cost of Nuclear Power’.

18 Severance, ‘Business Risks and Costs of New Nuclear Power’, p. 18

19 C. Perrow, ‘Fukushima, Risk, and Probability: Expect the Unexpected, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, 1 April 2011, <www.thebulletin.org>; AAP Reuters, AP IMPACT: Asia Nuclear Reactors Face Tsunami Risk’.

20 Massachusetts Institute of Technology Study Group, The Future of the Nuclear Fuel Cycle, 2011, Postscript, p. xv.

21 See Falk, Global Fission, pp. 43, 53.

22 See, for example, H. Hirsch, O. Becker, M. Schneider and A. Froggatt, ‘Nuclear Reactor Hazards: Ongoing Dangers of Operating Nuclear Technology in the 21st Century’, Report Prepared for Greenpeace International, April 2005; see also updated material provided by Froggatt, ‘Potential Environmental Risks of the Next Generation of Nuclear Power Plants’, Briefing Note, October 2006, <www.no2nuclearpower.org.uk>.

23 Koomey and Hultman, ‘A Reactor-level Analysis of Busbar Costs for US Nuclear Plants 1970‒2005’, p. 5640.

24 Schneider, Frogatt and Thomas, The World Nuclear Industry Status Report 2010–2011, p. 60.

25 See, for example, P. Hearps and D. McConnell, ‘Renewable Energy Technology Cost Review’, Melbourne Energy Institute Technical Paper Series, May 2011, available from <www.earthsci.unimelb.edu.au/~rogerd/Renew_Energy_Tech_Cost_Review.pdf>.

26 Hearps and McConnell, ‘Renewable Energy Technology Cost Review’, p. 7.

27 ‘Merkel Takes First Steps toward a Future of Renewables’, Spiegel Online, 15 April 2011, <www.spiegel.de>; P. McGroaty and J. Hromadko, ‘Update: Germany to Drop Nuclear Power by 2022’, The Wall Street Journal, 30 May 2011.

28 ‘Japan to Review Energy Policy’, MYsinchew.com, 5 May 2011, <www.mysinchew.com>.

29 Romm, ‘The High Cost of Nuclear Power’.

30 Lovins, in Schneider, Frogatt and Thomas, The World Nuclear Industry Status Report 2010–2011, p. 5.

31 Lovins, in Schneider, Frogatt and Thomas, The World Nuclear Industry Status Report 2010–2011, p. 6.

32 Lovins, in Schneider, Frogatt and Thomas, The World Nuclear Industry Status Report 2010–2011, p. 4.

33 P. Kuznick, ‘Japan’s Nuclear History in Perspective: Eisenhower and Atoms for War and Peace’, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, 13 April 2011, <www.thebulletin.org>.

34 R.Devraj, ‘India: Fukushima Won’t Stop World’s Largest Nuclear Facility’, Inter Press Service, 29 April 2011, <www.theglobalrealm.com>.

35 Quoted in Schneider, Frogatt and Thomas, The World Nuclear Industry Status Report 2010–2011, p. 42.

36 Yun Zhou, in ‘The Global Future of Nuclear Power after Fukhushima’, Power and Policy, Harvard Kennedy School, Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, 6 March 2011, <www.belfercenter.ksg.harvard.edu>.

From the early 1990s, India’s parliamentary communist Left gained influence in national politics and consolidated its strength in three states governed for long periods by communist-led coalitions―Kerala, West Bengal, and the small north-eastern state of Tripura. In 1996, Jyotu Basu, a leading figure in the largest of the Left parties, the Communist Party of India (Marxist) (CPM), and then Chief Minister of West Bengal, was offered the prime ministership of India by the then majority coalition in New Delhi. But the CPM politburo baulked at the prospect of accepting governmental responsibility in the absence of full control, a decision subsequently regretted by Basu and many CPM supporters. Communist prestige and influence in national politics peaked at this point. The Left regained national influence between 2004 and 2008, but more recently has suffered electoral defeats including

winning only twenty-four seats (sixteen for the CPM) in the 2009 national Lok Sabha (lower house) elections, down from sixty-one seats in 2004.

The CPM’s commitment to Leninism, democratic centralism, and revolutionary transition, while de facto pursuing social democratic reforms, make for occasionally fraught relations with India’s social movements. Yet communism and Marxism remain powerful reference points for Indian intellectuals and popular movements to a greater extent than in any other parliamentary democracy. Extreme poverty, and the divide between rich and poor, made worse by India’s neo-liberal development trajectory, ensure that ideologies of resistance, including communism, will retain strong appeal. Where deprivation is worst, armed struggle against corporate predators and the state is widely seen as a justifiable response.

In elections in April–May this year, communist-dominated Left coalitions lost government in the important states of Kerala and West Bengal. In Kerala the Left fell short of a majority by 3 seats, gaining 45.13 per cent of the vote. It remains in a strong position to set the policy agenda and to return to government at the next election, in line with the Kerala pattern of Congress- and CPM-led fronts taking turn in office. In West Bengal the circumstances are much different. In this state of more than eighty million people, the Left Front, dominated by the CPM, was elected seven times in succession from 1977, a unique record in the history of parliamentary democracy. Defeat for the Left after thirty-four years, preceded by violent confrontations with populist, anti-communist forces, and hundreds of political killings, points to big changes and uncertain times in West Bengal.

India’s polity is one of incessant turmoil and colourful public squabbling, in the regions as well as in the national capital. In a federation of twenty-eight states (and seven union territories), the states have jurisdiction in many public policy areas, including agriculture and education. The financial resources and constitutional supremacy of the Centre, however, impose severe constraints on state governments. The Left consider states a kind of municipal government which can at best implement limited reforms in the interest of the poor and working people, but not build socialism. Unlike in Australia, the states in India are not constitutionally safeguarded and can be reorganised by the Union government, which has power to dismiss state governments through the imposition of so-called President’s Rule. But the line between national and state politics is blurred, with the states in some respects having gained in importance. None of the national parties can expect to form government on its own in New Delhi. The Indian National Congress and the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) is each at the centre of complex and fractious multi-party coalitions. Most parties in these coalitions have a regional base, reflecting the ethnic, social, cultural and political conditions of particular states. It is the concentrated strength of the Left in Kerala and West Bengal which has enabled the CPM to momentarily exercise influence in New Delhi.

The cultural, political and economic differences between the states have become more accentuated since India in the early 1990s embarked on a neo-liberal transformation. High growth rate conceals an uneven process of development and growing inequalities. There is stagnation in much of the agricultural sector, continued weak employment generation, rapid urbanisation, with growth concentrated to the services sector rather than manufacturing. Large-scale capitalist agriculture and modern infrastructure have developed in states such as Punjab and Gujarat while extreme poverty and exploitation is in the states of central India sustain the Maoist armed struggle. Yet parliamentary democracy is well entrenched; lower castes and poorer sections of society generally participate strongly in democratic politics. But the substance and meaning of democracy differ across states and regions. Corruption, clientelism, caste and communal violence, and a weak civil society are predominant in many

states and regions. Where the Left has held state government, particularly in Kerala, democracy has gained more substance in terms of genuine local government, better education and health services, a more vibrant civil society, and generally better protection for workers and peasants than in other states. The highest electoral participation rates are also recorded in Kerala, West Bengal and Tripura, suggesting that the Left has brought the vast majority of people into the democratic process.

Since 2004, the United Progressive Alliance (UPA), led by Congress―which is presided over by Sonia Gandhi and her family―has formed government in New Delhi. Congress is a ‘catch-all party’ with no distinct ideology, supported by landed and capitalist classes across much of India, but also by Muslim and other minorities fearing BJP’s ‘communal’ program of Hindutva (‘Indianness’). Until 2008, the Left supported the UPA government in parliament, without joining the government. The CPM abandoned the UPA on the issue of a US–India agreement on nuclear co-operation and an increasingly close strategic relation with the United States. Whatever one’s assessment of the CPM, the party’s anti-imperialism is indisputable, and for that reason alone remains a major irritant to the US-oriented political elites in New Delhi. The United States also does not look favourably at the CPM and the Indian parliamentary Left. Recent WikiLeaks documents showed US diplomats relishing the anticipated end of the Left Front government in West Bengal, advocating that the US government cultivate relations with the anti-communist opposition (now government) and its autocratic leader, Mamata Banerjee.

In Kerala, West Bengal and Tripura, the power of the CPM is partly explained by the party giving expression to regional cultural and social aspirations against Congress and New Delhi. In this perspective, its orthodox Marxism-Leninism appears somewhat anomalous. The party’s ideology also appears not to capture what many observers and left critics characterise as its social democratic orientation. A leading analyst argued long ago that the CPM ‘is communist in name only and is essentially social-democratic in its ideology, social programme, and policies’.

The characterisation of Indian parliamentary communism as social democracy should not necessarily be understood as pejorative. Enhanced literacy and health, democratic local government, land reform (which brought an end to feudal exploitation), and a secularist stance against communal (inter-religious) and caste violence are surely significant achievements. The Left also, at the national level at least, strongly opposes neo-liberal de-regulation. The CPM in West Bengal from 1977 instigated a major land reform program, pioneered effective and democratic local government, and brought peace and stability to a state historically racked by feudal oppression and political violence. In every election since 1977, the Left Front in West Bengal has gained no less than 40 per cent of the vote at any time. Its record is even more convincing in Kerala, which is often showcased for remarkably good social policy and educational and democratic achievements. While the Left cannot take sole credit, the CPM in Kerala, growing out of powerful social and class movements, has made a key contribution to the success of social and economic reform in this part of India.

But Kerala, and more starkly West Bengal, also demonstrate the limits of social democracy in what Sandman, Edelman et al. describe as the ‘global periphery’. In Kerala, good social policy has been implemented in the absence of a strong economic base. There is high unemployment and little industry, and millions of people from Kerala have been forced to go overseas for work, particularly to the Gulf countries. Their remittances sustain a high level of consumption (by Indian standards) by a large minority of Kerala households. Common to both Kerala and West Bengal is that support for the CPM is strongest among the peasantry,

liberated from feudal exploitation through reforms instigated by the Left. Land and local government reforms have transformed rural life and given dignity and political power to previously marginalised rural populations. But giving land to the tillers does not ultimately resolve the conundrum of low productivity and poverty, and all the social and economic distortions generated by capitalism. Socialism has a historically mixed and in part dreadful record of addressing this dilemma. In the Soviet Union agriculture was collectivised through coercion from the late 1920s; in the 1950s China unsuccessfully sought to take a Great Leap Forward through people’s communes. As emphasised, state governments in India lack the power of national states, but even so the Left in Kerala, and particularly West Bengal, has proven ineffective and lacking in imagination in addressing the deep-seated problems of agriculture and economic development. In West Bengal, growing rural prosperity in the first decades of Left Front government turned in the 1990s to an economic and social crisis, and ultimately a dead end in overall development. Progressively smaller land holdings caused a decline of agricultural growth, and the growth of population, and of educated young people in the villages, a crisis of employment. Big business had largely abandoned West Bengal after the 1977 election of the Left Front government and the state acquired a reputation as an economic backwater.

Following New Delhi’s turn to economic liberalisation from 1991, the Left Front in West Bengal abandoned the public sector as its principal focus for industrialisation. The new direction was formalised in an industrial policy in 1994, aimed at attracting capitalist investments by domestic and foreign big business, in competition with other states. But results were meagre in terms of investments and new jobs, notwithstanding claims that Kolkata was emerging as an important information technology centre. From 2006, compromises with the neo-liberal development model opened up a serious rift between the CPM and sections of its social base and many of its intellectual supporters. The Left Front had just won a big election victory in that year―the CPM alone won 234 of 294 seats in the state Assembly. But violent events in the rural areas of Singur and Nandigram triggered an anti-Left Front movement which peaked in 2011, when the CPM won only forty Assembly seats.

‘Singur’ and ‘Nandigram’ have become symbols throughout India for the failure of the CPM’s economic development strategy for West Bengal. Of course other state governments pursue similar policies on a larger scale and more viciously, but the Left is held to different standards. Singur was the site chosen by the Tata conglomerate, on the invitation of the West Bengal government, for the construction of a manufacturing plant for the new Nano car. The government endorsed this choice without consultation with affected peasants and the local government, and ferocious local opposition followed. After historically instigating land reform, the Left was now seen as taking fertile land from poor peasants without consultation and adequate compensation. The drive for industrialization took an even worse turn in 2007, after the appropriation of land at Nandigram for an Indonesian company to construct a chemical hub. In March that year, fourteen unarmed protesting villagers in Nandigram were shot dead by police. The anti-government and anti-CPM movement now escalated into open revolt by peasants supported by armed Maoists and the Trinamool Congress, the anti-communist opposition.

Until Singur and Nandigram, opposition to the Left Front had been fragmented and ineffective; now it gained powerful momentum. Trinamool, using left populist rhetoric, was able to build an anti-CPM movement which defeated the Left in both the national elections in 2009 and in the recent Assembly elections, where Trinamool alone won 184 out of 294 Assembly seats. There was massive political violence in rural areas in the years leading up to

this election―hundreds of local CPM leaders and activists were killed by Maoists and Trinamool thugs. In turn, the CPM was accused of operating armed squads at times using lethal force. In Netal village of Lalgarh district, nine villagers were killed on 7 Jan 2011 by armed CPM activists. Immediately following the election, the CPM reported ‘widespread attacks on … the Left Front in different parts of West Bengal’ and the murder of at least two local CPM leaders.

Academic analysts and leftist commentators have generally credited the CPM with providing disciplined leadership for a broad-based movement for social, economic and political reform in West Bengal from 1977. More recently, however, not only did its development strategy reach a dead end but its style of political leadership has been attacked ferociously from all quarters. By critics from the Left and the Right, the CPM was now depicted as corrupt, authoritarian Stalinists. Suggestive of the overwrought tone of the English-language media is the following: the people of West Bengal ‘for three decades lived through violence in all spheres of life. The party-state not only controlled political power but ruled through the various quasi-judicial structures of unions, political henchmen in every service sector, local clubs, citizens’ committees, institutions of local self-governments in rural areas, social ostracism, fear of dispossession, suspension of civil rights and torture by the political police’. More plausible analysts describe West Bengal under the Left Front as a ‘party-society’ in which identity and even survival in rural areas came to depend on party political affiliation.

In recent interviews undertaken in India, political scientists and Left sympathisers often expressed the view that it will be good for the CPM in West Bengal to go into opposition after thirty-four years. This will be an opportunity for review of policies and for shedding careerist and corrupt members attracted to the party when in power. Though much of the criticism of the CPM is absurdly overstated, some party activists undoubtedly engaged in corruption and undisciplined behavour. The least corrupt states in India are the ones with a powerful Left but, again, communists are held to different standards. Moreover, opposition should enable reconsideration of its overall strategy. The party’s bewilderment in terms of the basic dilemma of development is given expression by the convenor of the CPM’s Research Unit:

What can be the contours of an agrarian strategy in West Bengal, which can consolidate the gains of land reforms and increase the productivity of small peasant-based agriculture? How can non-agricultural employment be generated in a productive and sustained manner? What possible role can the public sector play in the states’ industrialisation effort, given that the resource constraint confronting the state government is real and hard? To what extent can it address the problem of unemployment? Can planning play a more important role at the state level? Should private corporate investment in capital-intensive sectors be shunned completely? If not, on what terms can private investments be invited? What policies can the state government adopt to determine or influence the choice of techniques? What should be the role of small and medium enterprises in the industrialisation strategy? What can the state government do to promote innovations? Should industrialisation be based on the home market alone or should exports also be promoted? What is the best way to promote rural industrialisation? What provisions should a progressive land-use policy as well as land acquisition and rehabilitation policy comprise of? There is a need for the debate on the left in India to move beyond polemics into these substantive domains, for a clearer left alternative on development and industrialisation to emerge in the near future.

The revolutionary communist Left, the Naxalites, do have an answer to these questions: armed struggle, as in China under Mao before 1949, to liberate territories from which to build a people’s army to surround and conquer the urban centres. This struggle has received a fillip from the success of the Maoist party in Nepal. The Naxalite movement, led by the Communist Party of India (Maoist) (CPI(Maoist)), has significant support in poor rural areas of central India with a high concentration of tribal people. Its armed squads operate in at least nine states, and state governments in Chattisgarh and elsewhere, supported by central government forces, apply vicious repression and violence in ‘Naxal-infested’ areas.

The parliamentary and revolutionary wings of Indian communism have a common history and belong within the same family, notwithstanding their deep enmity. The CPI(Maoist) was formed in 2004 through a merger between two groups which both trace their origin to the Marxist-Leninist faction which broke with the CPM in 1967 in the wake of a peasant uprising in Naxalbari in the Darjeeling district of northern West Bengal. The history of Indian Maoism is one of splits and violence and a type of left politics known from Pol Pot’s Cambodia and the Shining Path of Peru. The first general secretary of the CPI(ML), formed in 1969 and later fracturing into many groups, Charu Mazumdar, gained legendary status as proponent of the policy of ‘annihilation’:

Only by waging class struggle—the battle of annihilation—the new man will be created, the new man who will defy death and will be free from all thoughts of self interest. And with this death defying spirit he will go close to the enemy, snatch his rifle, avenge the martyrs and the peoples army will emerge’.

Violence remains central to CPI(Maoist) strategy, including violence against the parliamentary Left, particularly in West Bengal. Extreme poverty and exploitation ensure that armed struggle will have continued appeal. There is every reason to pay attention to the Maoist movement but its violence should not be romanticised. Parliamentary democracy, notwithstanding conspicuous distortions and massive corruption, since independence in 1947 has gained deep roots in this huge country. The revolutionary route taken by peasant societies in twentieth century, such as China and Vietnam, is most unlikely to be repeated in India.

The CPM has been weakened by election defeats and strategic uncertainties but retains a mass base in several states. The result in West Bengal is widely depicted as a devastating defeat from which the CPM is unlikely to recover. Yet the Left Front polled 40 per cent of the votes and retains strong roots in rural West Bengal. Communism is part of the mainstream of Indian politics and society, particularly in states with long periods of Left governments. Neo-liberalism will continue to wreak social havoc and there is no reason to expect the communist Left in India, in either its parliamentary or revolutionary form, to fade away any time soon.

By Hans Lofgren

Hans Lofgren is senior lecturer in politics and policy studies at Deakin University. His particular research interest is the political economy of pharmaceuticals and biotechnology in Australia, India and globally. He co-edited The Politics and Culture of Globalisation: India and Australia (2009) and Democratising Health: Consumer Groups in the Policy Process (forthcoming 2011).

References:

S. Basu, ‘Tryst with Destiny: For Better or Worse in Bengal, The Statesman, 2011.

D. Bhattacharyya, ‘Party Society, its Consolidation and Crisis: Understanding Political Change in West Bengal’, in A. Ghosh, T. Guha-Thakurta and J. Nair (eds), Theorizing the Present: Essays for Partha Chatterjee, Oxford University Press, New Delhi, 2011, pp. 226–50.

P. Bose, ‘Verdict 2009: An Appraisal of Critiques of the Left’, Economic and Political Weekly, vol. 44, no. 40, 2009, pp. 32–8.

Communist Party of India (Marxist), Polit Bureau Communique, 16 May 2011.

M. Desai, State Formation and Radical Democracy in India, Routledge, London, 2007.

A. Kohli, ‘From Breakdown to Order: West Bengal’, in P. Chatterjee (ed.), State and Politics in India, Oxford University Press, New Delhi, 1997, pp. 336–6.

C. Mazumdar, ‘Hate, Stamp and Smash Centrism’, Charu Mazumdar Reference Archive, 1970.

R. Sandbook, M. Edelman et al., Social Democracy in the Global Periphery, Cambridge University Press, Leiden, 2007.

Why is the anti-nuclear movement so strong in Germany?

The burden of history hangs heavily over every country, but perhaps none so more than Germany. Unified as a single nation-state for the first time in 1871, the country has since lived through defeat in the First World War and the subsequent end of its imperial monarchy; a failed experiment with liberal democracy and the rise of National Socialism,

catastrophic defeat in the Second World War; and the partition of the country during the Cold War, where it was the main front in the stand-off between NATO and the Warsaw Pact and dominated on the respective sides by the opposing superpowers within those blocs. The effects of these twentieth-century episodes have left indelible marks on Germany’s political landscape, and have given impetus to numerous social movements that have reacted to conditions or events within the context of, and fully aware of, this history.

The anti-nuclear movement emerged out of the broader peace movement that became strong during the turbulence of the late 1960s and 1970s, a generation after the end of the Second World War. Growing up surrounded by the physical and psychological scars of war as a reminder of what can happen if strategic policy decisions are not made in the interest of protecting peace, the (predominantly) young members of the anti-nuclear movement reacted to the stationing of nuclear weapons and the construction of nuclear power plants on German territory as if they were working to avoid a ‘nuclear Auschwitz’, as was articulated by leading member of the student protest movement and future Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer.

The connection between nuclear power and nuclear weapons was a strong element of the early anti-nuclear movement―a natural association which given the dynamics of the Cold War. Since the Chernobyl disaster of 1986, which sparked an even fiercer anti-nuclear backlash in Germany than the Fukushima crisis has, the anti-nuclear movement has relied less on the connection to nuclear weapons to advance its arguments and instead uses the fear of nuclear accidents (from both power plants and waste storage sites) and the salient language of environmental protection to gain support from the mainstream. This has been a remarkably successful tactic: recent Infratest poll results indicate that 80 per cent of Germans oppose the extension of the operating lives of the nuclear plants and that just over 50 per cent want all of the country’s nuclear plants shut down as soon as possible. However, although the anti-nuclear movement has evolved along with the historical events of the last four decades, its roots are without doubt to be found in the post-war generation’s reaction to the horrors of National Socialism and their determination to avoid future catastrophes on German territory.

The anti-nuclear movement also benefits enormously from the political opportunity structures that exist for such social movements in Germany. Not only does the movement appeal to the aforementioned values that are held by a large section of the German population, nuclear issues are so well researched and debated that they also have an ability to disseminate information through the media that few other social movements can boast (the images of nuclear reactors exploding at the Fukushima plant are very effective campaign advertisements). Yet as much as this publicity forms the basis for mass mobilisation, truly successful social movements also need access to political decision-making as is determined by the institutional rules of the state, for example electoral laws. The anti-nuclear movement is fortunate to have the world’s most successful Green political party, Bündnis 90 / Die Grünen, as its standard-bearer in the corridors of political power in Germany.

Die Grünen, which later merged with the East German civil rights movement Bündnis 90 to create today’s party, was formed out of the extra-parliamentary opposition milieu in

the late 1970s as a vehicle for bringing the fight against the established powers in West Germany, including the fight against nuclear power, inside the system. The party was originally conceived as a platform for expressing the views of the protest movement without participating in government, but Germany’s electoral laws, which stipulate that parties that receive at least 5 per cent of the national vote are represented proportionally in the federal parliament, have enabled Die Grünen’s participation in all but one Bundestag since 1983. Although divided by factional fights in the 1980s, Die Grünen have since orientated themselves as a progressive, ecologically orientated alternative to the Social Democratic Party (SPD) and have successfully gained power through coalitions in eleven of Germany’s sixteen states as well as at federal level.

As part of their coalition deal with the Social Democrats after the 1998 federal election, Die Grünen negotiated for the phased shutting down of old nuclear plants and a shift away from nuclear power by 2020, shaping nuclear energy policy from the highest level with a Green Minister for Environment, Nature Conservation and Nuclear Safety, Jürgen Tritten. Since losing government at the federal level in 2005, which saw the (until recently) pro-nuclear Christian Democrats and Free Democrats take power, the Greens have continued their anti-nuclear campaigning from the parliamentary opposition and at protests across the country. The party recently won the right to head their first ever state government in Baden-Württemberg, the bastion of German high-tech and automotive industries and previous heartland of the Christian Democrats―and if current opinion polls are any guide, the prospect of a Green chancellor is not entirely out of the question.

Recent developments: genuine change in thinking or response to electoral pressure?

There is much scepticism in Germany as to whether the governing coalition has had a genuine change of heart regarding nuclear power generation, and the general consensus seems to be that the decision to review the extension of the nuclear plants’ operating lives was a tactic to try and shore up declining support in the electorate for the Christian Democrats and Free Democrats at both the federal and state level. Commentators have noted that the science behind nuclear power hasn’t changed since the Fukushima crisis, which suggests that Merkel, a physical chemist by profession, is reacting to political pressure rather than genuine belief that nuclear power is an unsafe power source for Germany. Nonetheless, this shows that organised social movements can influence government policy directly, which is unquestionably a sign of a functioning democracy.

The stated reason for the decision to shut down the seven ageing plants was to allow for a full safety review to be conducted in the wake of Fukushima, but there is no doubt that the pressure being piled on governments by Wutbürger (‘enraged citizen’) movements have played a fundamental role in the astounding policy reversal. The phenomenon of the Wutbürger movements is causing major shifts in the German political landscape and is widely seen as being a challenge to previous models of governance. How governments and political parties respond to the heightened expectations of organised and educated groups of ‘enraged citizens’ while balancing economic and other political interests is going to be a defining feature of German politics in the immediate future, with the nuclear issue being the most prominent case to watch.

Nuclear power generation is an incredibly lucrative industry in Germany, generating billions of euros for the major energy companies every year. The influence of the energy generators in setting energy policy is accordingly huge, which leaves the already fractious black–yellow coalition in a real dilemma. Neither the CDU/CSU nor the FDP have any ideological problem with nuclear power generation, and it would seem that the decision to stop supporting the nuclear industry was a doomed attempt to avert losses in the recent state elections. The coalition parties have now trapped themselves with this issue for the time being, because to reverse their reversal would be disastrous for their already battered images in the public mind and would spell trouble for their re-election chances in 2013. Some commentators have interpreted Merkel’s new anti-nuclear stance to mean she has abandoned hope of forming another coalition with the FDP and may be considering a coalition deal with the Greens after the next election.

The future of nuclear power in Germany

The current situation leaves the future of the German nuclear power industry, which supplies around one quarter of the country’s electricity requirements, at a crucial juncture; yet many questions remain unanswered. Given the passion that this issue generates, and the electoral results that it is helping to deliver around the country, it is perhaps unsurprising that Merkel is stalling on this issue, not wanting to make a firm commitment either to or against maintaining the extended nuclear plant life spans. Rational debate over nuclear energy policy is increasingly clouded by the passions aroused by the Fukushima incident and political manoeuvring from the centre-right political parties, and it is hard to predict whether the current federal government is just biding its time to see if the issue settles down or whether there is to be a genuine cross-party agreement on an accelerated phasing out of nuclear power in Germany.

Whatever happens, Germany will not be able to extricate itself from the nuclear issue in the future. Even if all of its seventeen nuclear reactors were turned off tomorrow, Germany would not be any safer from the threat of fallout from a nuclear meltdown, as many of the countries surrounding it have a strong reliance on nuclear power―France generates over 75 per cent of its electricity from fifty-eight nuclear power plants―while others are planning to build new nuclear power stations. The Netherlands, Belgium, France, Switzerland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Sweden and Hungary all currently use nuclear power for electricity generation and Poland is the process of building a nuclear energy program. (It is interesting to note that the generation of electricity from nuclear power plants is illegal in Austria.) With the exception of Belgium and the Netherlands, which only has one nuclear plant, there is no real prospect of these countries phasing out nuclear power in the foreseeable future.

While there are of course strong anti-nuclear movements in many European countries, the global trend seems to be going in the opposite direction. There are now over 440 nuclear reactors operational in thirty-one countries, which together generate around 14 per cent of the world’s electricity needs, and there are plans for this number to more than double over the next fifteen to twenty years, with China, India, Russia and the United States all planning large expansions of their already considerable nuclear programs. Any move away from nuclear power in Germany would undoubtedly have a significant impact around the world, but in the face of the challenges posed by climate change and peak oil,

which make nuclear energy an increasingly attractive option for cheap, low-carbon base-load electricity, it seems unlikely that the future of nuclear power in other countries, particularly in the developing world, is likely to be so dramatically threatened.

For Germany to completely renounce nuclear energy, a massive investment in coal, gas and renewable energy sources will be required―meaning higher electricity prices or higher taxes, which will affect many of Germany’s energy-intensive industries―as well as a reduction in overall energy consumption through energy efficiency programs. The potential costs to the German economy, the ‘engine room’ of Europe, in terms of driving manufacturers overseas are significant, meaning that this is a high-stakes game that politicians are playing.

The coalition government is due to release a plan for Germany’s new ‘energy concept’ in June after it reviews the reports from both the recently-appointed safety and ethics commissions, and it is widely expected that a date around 2022 will be announced for the final nuclear plants to be shut down. There is debate as to whether this date is realistic, but if this early nuclear exit becomes law (again), Germany will be the scene of one of the most ambitious energy transformation projects ever seen. If successful, this would serve as an example to the world of what can be done when both political and popular will is directed towards achieving a certain goal. The amount of political and economic capital that is to be invested in research and development as well as subsidies for wind and solar energy projects is truly remarkable, and Germany looks set to maintain and even enhance its position as a leading proponent of renewable energy technology.

The reality of implementing such a dramatic shift in energy policy will however likely be even more fraught than the debate over whether nuclear power is right for Germany, and the powerful vested interests in the pro-nuclear lobby are likely to resist these changes with all of their substantial resources and influence. Whether Germany will follow down a nuclear Sonderweg and abandon nuclear power early under pressure from the electorate or whether there are more twists to come in this long-running saga is still unclear, but it is certain that this issue is driving the core of the Merkel government to dangerously high temperatures.

*The Merkel government has since announced its decision to phase out nuclear power plants in Germany by 2022.

By Jay Watkinson

Bio: Jay Watkinson is an Australian living in Germany where he is undertaking a Masters of Public Policy. His specific research interests are trade and energy policy, and he has experience working in these areas for various government agencies. He holds a Bachelor of Arts (Hons) from Melbourne University.

Inside, however, something different has been done, for the central atrium is vast: ten, fifteen stories high, and irregularly shaped, with jutting angles, narrowing at the top—as if a cavern has been hewn from the finished skyscraper. At its base, lush trees and plants soften out the look, crisp and perpetually watered amid the air-conditioned chill. A vast, steep escalator takes you to the top. It seems unsupported. Near the apex, it’s dizzying, vertiginous—near successful in its attempt to imitate a sense of the sublime found in nature. Then you step off, into the multiplex cinema.

The multiplex is always at the top of malls. Perhaps for reasons of space, or perhaps it is part of the marketing. Cinemas remain, despite (or because of) the spread of the DVD and direct download, the primary modern manner in which an escape from the bounded ego is possible—the body dissolving into the dark, the two dimensional image rendered three dimensional by our projection into it, the manufactured dream state that plays at the boundary between the head and the world. To place them at the very height of malls seems a reward, an endpoint to the pilgrimage of consumption. Working your way up the levels, you become steadily more loaded with anxiety, frustration and dissatisfaction until, as a reward for your labours, you can dissolve entirely for a couple of hours at the point nearest the sky.

Curiously, though it is an art film, The Tree of Life seems made for this multiplex experience. The fifth film—in forty years—from legendary director Terence Malick, it is the most unusual of things, a genuine, audacious, ambitious work of art (as opposed to that distinct genre, the ‘art film’, of middlebrow psychologistic drama) with a mainstream release. Malick’s previous films, such as the thrill killer movie Badlands and the early twentieth-century historical epic Days of Heaven, were concerned with matters of existence and being, rather than psychology—as befits a former philosophy professor and Heidegger scholar. Thereafter he took a near two-decade break. After two successful relatively conventional films gained him a degree of latitude, The Tree of Life represented an uncompromising go at making not a bolder statement about life, but a different sort of encounter with it. Using the frame of psychological drama and memory, the film busts open into something entirely other.

Ostensibly, The Tree of Life is a memory film. An architect (Sean Penn) working on a large skyscraper project, a building of cold monotony even by contemporary standards, recalls his childhood growing up in Waco, Texas. In reality, most of the film is taken up with this, the family’s story told backwards, from the news of the death of the architect’s brother in Vietnam in the late 1960s, to their childhood in the 1950s. Such a precis doesn’t capture it of course—Malick’s style is a film essay, memories and moments, montage and deep focus, reminiscent of the classic Soviet filmmakers. More importantly, in the middle of the film is a third section which sets all on its head, for an extraordinary near half-hour sequence. Rendered in CGI graphics, it essentially tracks the history of the universe, from an abstract rendering of the sudden beginning everywhere (erroneously, usually described as the big bang) of the universe, via the formation of stars and galaxies, the planet, the seas—and then, suddenly, a jellyfish-like creature seen from the underside, swimming through the deep ocean, distant light perfusing the surface. If description of the other sections falls short, here it is actively misleading—using up-to-the-minute HD vision, the sequence is continually arresting, astonishing, even when it teeters on the edge of self-parody—as when, emerging from blackness again, we realise we are looking over the sleek back of a brontosaurus-type dinosaur. Taking the risk that the audience’s mind might wander in the direction of Monty Python, Malick’s cinematic intent is nothing other than to be present not to Creation in any limited sense, but to Being. The movie that surrounds this sequence is entirely resituated by it—both the architect remembering his childhood in the throes of a mid-life crisis, nor the fraught psychological drama of an angry mid-century father, squeezed by industrial work, threatened and rivalrous with his growing sons.

Without the ‘third sequence’, the film would be no more than another memory film, better than most. The sequence centres it instead on the pure process of life, running beneath the particular, the historical, the encultured. The psychological drama of the film is a giant McGuffin, a false lure to draw the attention while the movie does its work. The film is a general critique of the idea that meaning could be found in existence simply as the summed product of a series of meanings, of intention and desires, without a ground beneath. This is given form in the very different look of the present-day and 1950s sequences, and with a gesture to Heidegger’s fundamental notion of the Earth and the Sky, as separate realms and orders. The silver and blue of the present-day, the reflected emptiness of the skyscrapers, is contrasted with a 1950s shot in earthy, brown tones, of a drama taking place in low-slung single storey houses in a small regional city. One of the most quoted parts of the film in reviews is a rapturous sequence in which the mother lifts one of her children up, and points to the sky. ‘See that—that’s where God lives’, she says. Reviewers have assessed that for religious sentiment, but it is equally interpretable in an a-theist fashion—the Sky is the realm of God, or the idea of God. The Earth is where we live. Trying to live in the Sky—the architect’s buildings with their mirrored surfaces look like nothing less, spaces carved into the heavens—is worse than hubris. It’s an error.

There’s no way of knowing what The Tree of Life will look like in ten years time—either a classic or period kitsch. But coming out of the cinema, staring down the escalator into the fake cavern, the world was thrown into sharp relief. Beneath lay the Kowloon streets, arrayed much as towns and cities have been for seven thousand years, the intersection of people in tight spaces, engaged in the business of life. Beyond, visible out the windows, was Shenzen, the companion city to Hong Kong, which the Chinese government has put up in a quarter century. Pretty much a fishing village the day before yesterday, it now sprawls hugely, mega-block on mega-block of new skyscrapers, a 400 square kilometre supercity. Hong Kong has a compactness to it, shaped by the natural focus of the harbour. Shenzen is a city on a plain. There was nothing to stop it continuing across the earth forever.

Good place to see The Tree of Life. A good time too. After six weeks travelling down through China, Shenzen stood as a continuing reminder—most especially of the inadequacy of most accounts of the place. Endless colour supplement articles about the place joining the world, cranes on the horizon, don’t really capture the categorical nature of what is happening; that China is embarked on the largest-scale transformation in human history, something of another order entirely to the relatively piecemeal way in which it occurred in the nineteenth-century West. Financial journalists and the like write of the vast pace of new building and urbanisation, but they cannot capture how that feels or means—that cities of two, three, five million people have been, in effect, entirely demolished and rebuilt, soaring into the sky and doubling their size in the process, as people come in from the country. It has been done before, elsewhere, this shift from the horizontal to the vertical, with all that that entails, but not on this scale or even at this magnitude. Even for a stranger, with no knowledge of what was there before to compare it to, it is a confronting experience, unquestionably unprecedented.

To travel down the middle of the country from Beijing was to move in a state of double ignorance—cities of which one had never or barely heard of, yet larger than all but the half-dozen Western mega-cities, arose ahead, entirely new-minted, yet with thousand-year histories that nothing in the city disclosed. Wuhan, Chengdu, Chongking … it was impossible to know what had been there before. What is there now is mile on mile of apartment towers, business hotels, shopping malls—Western-style in origin, but only in the sense that the West had got there first. Once you take-as-given that modernity—capitalist, socialist, or mixed—will focus on urbanisation, industrialisation and consumption, then skyscrapers and malls follow automatically, accumulation patterns written down in concrete.

Nor was there much mystery about how this categorical shift had come about. For three decades after the 1949 victory, the Chinese had experimented with radical models of social transformation, drawn from the wildest dreams of pre-Marxist utopian socialists. In the late 1970s they had changed direction. To the outside world that looked like a capitulation to a set of unquestionable rules about modernity—markets, property and eventually liberal parliamentarianism—when in fact it was a transformative plan as radical as those that had preceded it. The Cultural Revolution had been directed towards one type of transformed society; its successor was directed towards another, but with a similar determination to sweep away pre-existing structures with resolute lack of sentiment. Cultural icons, symbols of ancient privilege, had been smashed in the Cultural Revolution, but what came after it would level whole cities, annihilate villages in their thousands, and rupture the pattern of life—of the hutong—that went with them. Because the country remained a planned society, in which the planning was overwhelmingly concerned with directing how and where market forces would flow—while also preparing the way with state-inaugurated projects far beyond the capacity or imagination of the post-Keynsian West—China’s progress was essentially super-charged by this dual effect, modernity’s transformative capacity refined and distilled.

Planning mitigated the anarchy of capitalist production, its flow towards consumer goods; property and the market kicked a high-growth high capitalist economy into top gear. Western Thatcherites and neo-liberals visited over the decades to hold the country up as an example of the existence of enduring economic laws—even as the application of such laws in the West were draining it of industry, coupling growth to consumption, and turning the entire region from creditor to debtor status. Arriving in Shanghai weeks earlier had been propitious, because it coincided with celebrations for the ninetieth anniversary of the Chinese Communist Party. At night, on the front of the largest skyscraper in Pudong, the massive financial district built across the river from the old European Bund, the hammer-and-sickle was projected thirty storeys high on a background of red, the whole thing reflected, shimmering in the river. For a moment one felt science-fictive, caught up in the familiar plot of a time-traveller waking in an alternate reality—like Francis Spufford’s recent Red Engineers, the documentary novel in which it is imagined that Khruschev’s USSR, steered by technocrats, races ahead of the West. Then one remembered—this was real; something had happened that could not be easily assimilated to simple models of privatisation. Capitalism was the means; the re-engineering of being—Chinese in particular, human in general—was the aim. Amid the pitiless skyscrapers, the vanishing hutongs and courtyards, brown, earthy, had the same look of ground-hugging closeness as the low, plain houses of The Tree of Life. China was the project to make such a transformation into humanity’s unquestioned path; the film’s power arises from its understanding that that historical moment has occurred, and that, under its sway, life—its character, its qualia—becomes the thing in question.

Throughout that journey—which in retrospect would feel like a journey to the film—the world outside China provided a descant of sorts. While the Middle Kingdom appeared to have entered a sustained period of post-histoire—reading modern histories, one’s attention wandered after the Cultural Revolution, because there seemed little further history to tell—the West seemed to be coming apart at the seams. In the United States, a President both diffident and stymied was unable to articulate any notion of how the nation might either regain its dynamism, or change its idea of what counted as success. Meanwhile his opponents in the Republican Party left the sphere of modern politics altogether—the organisation, driven by its radical wing, became the political expression of a cult, fusing not merely distrust but hatred of government with literalist Christian beliefs.

By this conception, America’s woes were the result of error in heaven and on earth, turning away from both God and the sovereign individual. Though they paid obeisance to the Founding Fathers—indeed fetishised the Constitution—their beliefs were no longer grounded in Jefferson or even Hamilton. Instead the discourse of the newly-elected Republican Congress was dominated by one thinker—Ayn Rand, inspiration not merely to marginal figures such as Ron Paul, but also to principals such as Paul Ryan, the man charged with drafting Congress’s 2011 budget. Filled out by a Tea Party movement, inaugurated by right-wing media, but now ranging free of it, the American Right has essentially taken a fundamentalist turn, a hysterical reaction to a national and economic decline rooted in larger global trends. Like all fundamentalists, from Calvinists to Wahhabists, it had honoured its founders by wholly replacing their ideas. Christian grace became Calvinist predestination, Mohammed’s radically universal monotheism became Wahhabist disdain, and the American founders’ notion of a balanced polity reflecting human multiplicity has become Rand’s manic and nihilistic gospel of self.

In Europe there was equal and opposite reaction to the same stimulus, the official acknowledgement of what had been obvious for half a year—that there had been no real revival after the crash of 2008, that what commentators were describing as a ‘double dip’ was simply the evaporation of the minimal funds directed towards recovery, and the re-emergence into visibility of a deep stagnation. There was no revival because there was little to revive. The states of southern Europe were effectively broke—having got short-term benefit from the euro, they were now constricted by the EU’s tight control of the money-supply—and the whole of European economic policy tilted towards Europe and the North. In Britain the past three decades’ evisceration of manufacturing, the reliance on banking, intellectual property and other services—like rents—made any simple re-starting of the economy difficult; and the cuts imposed by the Tory-Libdem government rendered it impossible.

In one corner of Europe, Greece’s agony became an emblem of the contradictions faced by the West—bowing to every austerity demand, its ruling socialist party managed to contract the economy by 7 per cent. Still, neither its interest rate nor its credit rating improved and it moved inexorably towards default. The familiar image of its black-clad koukouloforei—the hooded ones, a mix of political anarchists, petty criminals and a middle section of semi-politicised disaffected youth—were played gleefully on China Broadcasting’s English-language channel (often as not fronted by former ABC newsreader Edwin Maher).

In August they were joined by images from Britain, as first London and then cities of the North and West erupted with unrest, uprising, rioting. Triggered by the police killing of a black man in a suburb where riots had erupted a quarter century before, they rapidly became something else—fluid, separate breakouts targeting shopping high streets, mixing confrontation with looting. Some of them were kickstarted by professional anarchist activists—someones’s gotta break the first window—but they kicked on as kids from the city’s public housing estates poured into the streets. The riots were a testament both to the postwar Labour settlement—the idea that public housing should commingle with private areas rather than be ghettoised—and the post-1979 abandonment of it, as inequality soared between people living cheek-by-jowl. Thatcherite culture had—unwittingly—elevated personal consumption to the apex of British values; unlike the Reagan revolution, no spiritual dimension partnered the new invitation to define your worth by your wealth.

As the high streets filled with chain stores offering the sort of goods that were as much symbols of meaning as objects of utility, a ghastly social experiment was inaugurated. How long can you sustain a population of millions of people—unemployed, semi-employed, untrained—on the bare means of life offered by benefits, while around them a privileged class enacts the idea that consumption is life? The answer was: until August 2011, when masses of such people attacked not police stations, MPs’ offices or the like, but Footlocker (a shoe chain specialising in trainers) and Currys (a TV/computer/electronics chain). They looted them, then they burnt them down, a double-whammy whose significance would be hard to miss.

Pundits of both Left and Right struggled to assimilate the rioters into a framework. That they related to the cuts—and the sense that even New Labour’s limited attempt to address poverty had been abandoned—was obvious; there had been no riots in Scotland or Wales, where cuts had been limited by regional governments. But the actions had no recognisable political content—even the vestigial one of smashing up a McDonalds. Essentially it was the other of the autonomous processes by which the Western economy was run—any sense of property or propriety had been abolished at the highest levels of the Western economy, well before 2008. In a world where money, production and opportunity are mysterious, inexplicable flows, bearing no relation to work, worth or effort, the looting of one branch of a 300-strong chain store, the removal of goods from China—they may as well be from space—seems a mere continuation of a process. A glass window, in that respect, becomes not a mark of ownership, but a barrier of no reason or right, like the invisible impediments encountered in dreams. Smashing it, in that respect, is a sudden return to the real, a bringing of the impossibly immaterial, skyward trending economy back to earth.

Such an act resonates. Watching it on TV in Hong Kong—the island proper, that charming imperial remnant daily leaching energy, opportunity, life, to Kowloon and Shenzen—it appeared to be, in its inchoate way, a rupture of the same order of Malick’s film. The riots combined protest, criminality and amorality in equal measure, but at their core was the desire to interrupt, to record a dissent from a totalising system, even if those carrying away plasma TVs did not present it to themselves in such a way. From the Tea Party, through the riots, to The Tree of Life, there was a common sense—that this could not go on. The Tea Party’s answer is to retreat so deeply into fantasy as to be lost to dialogue; the rioters were excluded even from the purposeful language of political manifestation of a generation ago. Malick’s film proposes that the breach has occurred within our lifetimes, that the error is not departing from God, or Jefferson, or Hayek—or Keynes for that matter—but from a primordial truth, that we cannot live in the Sky.

China has gathered the twin forces of modernity—the Will of Communism and the Prometheanism of the market—and put itself at the head of humanity in seeking to refute this idea. Malick’s film—journeyed to in a fake cavern, amid manicured and tamed foliage, at the top of an escalator to nowhere—was an argument against such a thing, drawing on an idea of life, of being, sprung from insights prior to modernity’s prejudices and assumptions. Did the times produce it now, this meditation Malick has struggled with for decades? Did they ensure that it would be the first great ‘transcendental film’—cinema that tackles Being in the manner of Dreyer, Bresson, Antonioni—to achieve multiplex success? Does one’s conviction, leaving it, that a social irruption both political and beyond-political may be closer than one had hitherto suspected testify to the power of its rhetoric, or the fatal conceit of revolutionaries, that the absurdity of the present is a guarantee of its imminent crisis? Or is it the world speaking through the artist, opening both creator and audience to a more radical vision than they could otherwise conceive, with all the possibilities that that suggests?

Today cities are at risk of losing this capacity and becoming sites for a whole range of new conflicts, such as asymmetric war and ethnic and social cleansing. Recent events give us a mixed message: the protests in Tunisia’s and Egypt’s cities succeeded to a large extent, but this was not so in most of the other Arab countries. Further, the dense and conflictive spaces of cities overwhelmed by inequality and injustice can become the sites for a variety of secondary, more anomic types of conflicts, from drug wars to the major environmental disasters looming in our immediate futures. All of these challenge that traditional commercial and civic capacity that has allowed cities to avoid war when confronted with conflict, and to incorporate diversities of class, culture, religion, ethnicity.

The question I examine here is whether this emergent future of expanding conflicts and racisms contains within it the conditions that have historically allowed cities to transform conflict into the civic. What are the challenges today that are larger than our differences, our hatreds, our intolerance, our racisms? I do not think it can be what made European cities historically spaces for the making of a civic sensibility—commerce and the fact that the powerful found in the city the strategic space for their operations and for their self-representation and projection onto a larger stage.

The unsettling of the urban order is part of a larger disassembling of existing organisational logics. This disassembling is also unsettling the logic that assembled territory, authority and rights into the dominant organisational format of our times—the nation-state. All of this is happening even as national states and cities continue to be major markers of the geopolitical landscape and the material organisation of territory. The type of urban order that gave us the open city in Europe, for instance, is still there, but increasingly as mere visual order, and less so as social order.

In what follows I first elaborate on dynamics that are altering the familiar urban order and then argue that this is also a moment of challenges which are larger than our differences. Confronting these challenges will require that we transcend those differences. Therein lies a potential for reinventing that capacity of cities to transform conflict into openness rather than war. But it is not going to be the familiar order of the open city and of the civic as we have come to represent it, especially in the European tradition.

The Urbanising of Governance Challenges: Disassembling the National?

Some of what are usually understood as global governance challenges are increasingly becoming particularly concrete and urgent in cities. They range from environmental questions to the flight of war refugees from and into cities. This urbanising of what we have traditionally thought of as national/global challenges is part of a larger disassembling of all-encompassing formats, notably the nation-state and the inter-state system. It could explain why cities are losing older capacities to transform potential conflicts.

In the last two centuries the traditional foundations for the civic in its European conception has largely been the ‘civilising’ of bourgeois capitalism; this corresponds to the triumph of liberal democracy as the political system of the bourgeoisie. Today capitalism is a different formation, and so is the political system of the new global elites. These developments raise a question about what might be the new equivalent of what in the past was civic.

Cities are going to have an increasing prominence given a multiplication of a broad range of partial—often highly specialised or obscure—assemblages of bits of territory, authority and rights once firmly ensconced in national and inter-state institutional frames. These assemblages cut across the binary of inside and outside, ours and theirs, national versus global. They arise out of, and can inhabit, national institutional and territorial settings; they can also arise out of mixes of national and global elements and span the globe in what are largely trans-local geographies connecting multiple subnational spaces. Cities, particularly global and globalising cities, are a very complex type of this dis- and re-assembling.

We can organise the urbanising of these various challenges along three axes.

Global warming, energy and water insecurity

These and other environmental challenges are going to make cities frontline spaces. Such challenges will tend to remain more diffuse for nation-states and for the state itself. One key reason is the more acute and direct dependence of everyday life in cities on massive infrastructures and on institutional-level supports for most people—apartment buildings, hospitals, vast sewage systems, water purification systems, vast underground transport systems, whole electric grids dependent on computerised management vulnerable to breakdowns. We already know that a rise in water levels will flood some of the most densely populated cities in the world. The urgency of some of these challenges goes well beyond lengthy negotiations and multiple international meetings—still the most common form of engagement at the level of national politics and especially international politics. When global warming hits cities it will hit hard. New kinds of crises and the ensuing violence will be particularly and preparedness becomes critical. A major simulation by NASA found that by the fifth day of a breakdown in the computerised systems that manage the electric grid, a major city like New York would be in an extreme condition and basically unmanageable through conventional instruments.

These challenges are emergent but before we know it they will become concrete and threatening in cities, contrasting with possibly slower trajectories at the national level. In this sense cities are in the frontline and will have to act on global warming whether national states sign on to international treaties or not. Because of this, many cities have had to develop capabilities to handle these challenges. The air quality emergency in cities such as Tokyo and Los Angeles as long ago as the 1980s is one instance: these cities could not wait until an agreement such as Kyoto might appear, nor could they wait till national governments passed mandatory laws (for car fuel efficiency and zero emissions, for example). With or without a treaty or law, they had to address air quality urgently. And they did.

Asymmetric wars

When national states go to war in the name of national security, nowadays major cities are likely to become a key frontline space. In older wars, armies needed large open fields or oceans to meet and fight, and these were the frontline spaces. The search for national security is today a source for urban insecurity. We can see this in the so-called war on terror, whereby the invasion of Iraq became an urban war theatre. But we also see the negative impacts of this war in the case of cities that are not even part of the immediate theatre—the bombings in Madrid, London, Casablanca, Bali, Mumbai, Lahore and so many other places. The traditional security paradigm based on national state security fails to accommodate this triangulation. What may be good for the protection of the national state apparatus may come at a high (and increasingly higher) price to major cities and their people.

New forms of violence

Cities also enter the domain of global governance challenges as a site for the enactment of new forms of violence resulting from these various crises. We can foresee a variety of forms of violence that are likely to escape the macro-level normative propositions of good governance. For instance, Sao Paulo and Rio have seen forms of gang and police violence in the last few years that point to a much larger breakdown than the typically invoked fact of inadequate policing. So does the failure of the powerful US army in Baghdad; to call this anarchy is too general. In terms of global governance questions, one challenge is to push macro-level frames to account for and factor in the types of stress that arise out of everyday life violence and insecurity in dense spaces. Some of these may eventually feed militarised responses, and this may well be inadequate or escalate the conflict. The question of immigration and the new types of environmental refugees are one particularly acute instance of urban challenges that will require new understandings of the civic.

Urban Insecurity: When the City Itself Becomes a Technology for War or Conflict

The pursuit of national security has become a source for urban insecurity. This puts the traditional security paradigm based on national state security on its head. What may be good to protect the national state apparatus may come at a high(increasingly high) price to major cities. Since 1998 most terrorist attacks have been in cities. This produces a disturbing map. Access to urban targets is far easier than access to planes for terrorist hijacking or to military installations. The US Department of State’s Annual Report on Global Terrorism allows us to establish that today cities are the key targets for asymmetric attacks, a trend that began before the 9/11 attacks on New York. According to this report, from 1993 to 2000 cities accounted for 94 per cent of the injuries resulting from all terrorist attacks, and 61 per cent of the deaths. Secondly, in this period the number of incidents doubled, rising especially sharply after 1998. In contrast, hijacked airplanes accounted for a larger share of terrorist deaths and destruction in the 1980s than they did in the 1990s.

The new urban map of war is expansive: it goes far beyond the actual nations involved. The bombings in Madrid, London, Casablanca, Bali, Mumbai and so on each have their own specifics and can be explained in terms of particular grievances. These are localised actions by local armed groups, acting independently from each other. Yet they are also clearly part of a new kind of multi-sited war—a distributed and variable set of actions that gain larger meaning from a particular conflict with global projection.

Asymmetric war found one of its sharpest enactments in the US war on Iraq. The US conventional military aerial bombing took only six weeks to destroy the Iraqi army and take over. But then asymmetric war set in, with Baghdad, Mosul, Basra and other Iraqi cities the sites of conflict. And it has not stopped since. Asymmetric wars are partial, intermittent and lack clear endings. There is no armistice to mark their conclusion. They are one indication of how the centre no longer holds, whatever the centre’s format—the imperial power of a period, the national state, even in powerful countries.

A second set of features of contemporary wars, especially evident in the less developed areas, is that they often involve forced urbanisation. Contemporary conflicts produce significant population displacement both into and out of cities. In many cases, in African conflicts or in Kosovo, displaced people swell urban populations. At the same time, the warring bodies avoid battle or direct military confrontation, as Mary Kaldor has described in her work on the new wars. Their main strategy is to control territory through getting rid of people of a different identity (ethnicity, religion, politics). The main tactic is terror—conspicuous massacres and atrocities pushing people to flee.

These types of displacement—with ethnic/religious cleansing the most virulent form—have a profound impact on the cosmopolitan character of cities. Cities have long had the capacity to bring together people of different classes, ethnicities and religions through commerce, politics and civic practices. Contemporary conflicts unsettle and weaken this cultural diversity of cities when they lead to forced urbanisation or internal displacement. Belfast, Baghdad or Mostar each is at risk of becoming a series of urban ghettoes, with huge implications for infrastructure and the local economy. Baghdad has undergone a deep process of such cleansing, a critical component of the (relative) ‘peace’ of the last two years.

The systemic equivalent of these types of cleansing in the case of very large cities may well be the growing ghettoisation of the poor and the rich—albeit in very different types of ghettoes. It leaves to the middle classes, rarely the most diverse group in cities, the task of bringing urbanity to these cities. The risk is that they will supplant traditional urban cosmopolitanisms with narrow defensive attitudes in a world of growing economic insecurity and political powerlessness. Under these conditions, displacement from countryside to town or within cities becomes a source of insecurity rather than a source of rich diversity.

A Challenge Larger than our Differences?

The particularity of the emergent urban landscape is profoundly different from the old European civic tradition, even though Europe’s worldwide imperial projects remixed European traditions with urban cultures that belonged to other histories and geographies. It shares with that older time the fact of challenges which are larger than our differences. Therein lies a potential for reinventing that capacity of cities to transform conflict into (at least relative) openness rather than war, as is the case for national governments. But it is not going to be the familiar order of the open city and of the civic as we have come to represent it, especially in the European tradition. My sense is rather that the major challenges that confront cities (and society generally) have increasingly strong feedback loops that contribute to that disassembling of the old civic urban order. Asymmetric war is perhaps one of the most acute versions of this dynamic. And so is climate change. Both of these will affect both rich and poor, and addressing them will demand that everybody joins the battle. Further, while sharp economic inequalities, racisms, and religious intolerance have long existed, they are becoming activating political mobilisers in a context where the centre no longer holds the way it used to hold, whether it be the imperial centre, the national state or the city’s bourgeoisie.

Against the background of a partial disassembling of empires and nation-states, the city emerges as a strategic site for making elements of new, perhaps even more partial, orders. In Territory, Authority, Rights I identify a vast proliferation of such partial assemblages which re-mix bits of territory, authority and rights once ensconced in national institutional frames. Mostly these continue to exist within the nation-state, but this fact in itself entails a partial denationalising of what was historically constructed as national. These assemblages are multivalent in the normative sense. For instance, in my interpretation World Trade Organization (WTO) law and the new International Criminal Court (ICC) are two of the hundreds of such assemblages. Their normative stances are clearly very different. A final point that matters to elaborate on the question of the city is that since these novel assemblages are partial and often highly specialised; they tend to be centred in particular utilities and purposes, often with extremely narrow scopes (see chapters 5, 8 and 9).

The normative character of this landscape is, in my reading, multivalent—it ranges from some very good utilities and purposes to some very bad ones, depending on one’s normative stance. Their emergence and proliferation bring several significant consequences even though this is a partial, not an all-encompassing development. I see in this proliferation of partial assemblages a tendency toward a disaggregating and, in some cases, global redeployment, of constitutive rules once solidly lodged in the nation-state project, one with strong unitary tendencies (see chapters 4, 5 and 6).

These developments signal the emergence of new types of orderings that can coexist with older orderings, such as the nation-state, the interstate system, and the city as part of a hierarchy dominated by the national state. Among these new types of orderings are complex cities which have partly exited that national, state-dominated hierarchy and become part of multi-scalar regional and global networks. The last two decades have seen an increasingly urban articulation of global territory, and an increasing use of urban space to make political claims not only by the citizens of a city’s country, but also by foreigners.

Conclusion

In this context the city is an enormously significant assemblage because of its far greater complexity, diversity, and enormous internal conflicts and competitions. Rather than the univocal utility logics of WTO law or the ICC, the city forces an elaborating of multiple and conflictive utility logics. But if the city is to survive—not become a mere built up terrain or cement jungle—it will have to find a way to triage at least some of this conflict. It is at this point that the acuteness and overwhelming character of the challenges I described earlier can serve to create conditions where the challenges are bigger and more threatening than the internal conflicts and hatreds.

Responding will only work if it is a collective process. We are in it together and we can only overcome it together. Thereby that response can become a new platform for the making of open cities, or at least the equivalent of the traditional civic, the cosmopolitan, the urbane. All of these features will probably have different formats and contents from the iconic European version. My sense is that the formats and the contents of this new possibility will be so distinct from those traditional experiences of the civic and the cosmopolitan that we will need a different language to describe them. But these formats and contents may have the power to create the open cities of our future.

At a time when the open city is under attack from so many sides, one question we might ask is whether there are challenges we confront in cities that are larger than the hatreds and racisms and inequalities that beset our cities. Yes, both the urbanising of war and the direct threats to cities from climate change provide us with powerful agendas for change. The urban consequences of asymmetric war are a major call to stop war, to rethink war as an option. The disarticulation between national security and human security is becoming increasingly visible. And the direct threat of climate change will affect us all, regardless of religion, class, race or whether we are citizens or immigrants. Cities face challenges that are indeed larger than our differences. If we are going to act on these threats, we will have to work together, all of us. Could it be that here lies the basis for a new kind of open city, one not so much predicated on the civic as on a new shared urgency?

Saskia Sassen  is the Lynd professor of sociology and co-chair of the Committee on Global Thought, Columbia University. She is the author of several books, most recently Territory, Authority, Rights: From Medieval to Global Assemblages(Princeton University Press, Princeton, 2008) and A Sociology of Globalization(W. W. Norton & Company, New York, 2007). In late November she will be conducting a visiting tour of seven Australian universities. Further details can be found at www.saskiasassen.com.

Utilising CTBT monitoring data, the Austrian Central Institute for Meteorology and Geodynamics calculated that in the first three days after the meltdown, the levels of iodine-131 (I-131) emitted was 20 per cent and caesium-137 (Cs-137) 20–60 per cent of the entire Chernobyl emissions of these isotopes. Although Chernobyl emitted significantly more fallout than Fukushima has to date, it was the I-131 and Cs-137 that accounted for most of the terrestrial human and environmental hazard, and these are Fukushima’s main fallout components. Indeed, as of June 2011, 770,000 terabecquerels (TBq) of atmospheric fallout had occurred, roughly 20 per cent of the total Chernobyl fallout.

There has also been extensive contamination to the nearby coastline, with approximately 170,000 TBq of radioactive elements discharged into the sea and groundwater. A further 800,000 TBq of contaminated seawater (120,000 tonnes), used for cooling at the height of the emergency, is still contained within the reactor buildings. Concentrations of radioactive iodine off the coast have been measured at over 4300 times the legal limit, making this the worst maritime radioactive accident in history. Seawater contamination has compromised the fish stocks along the local coast and destroyed any remnants of the fishing industry that were not wiped out by the tsunami. The longer term consequences on sea creatures and vegetation are unknown.

France’s Institute for Radiological Protection and Nuclear Safety (IRSN) estimated in the first week after the disaster that within 20 km of the plant the levels of contamination would exceed that of Chernobyl, and there would be ‘a strongly contaminated zone’, extending to 60 km in which there would be ‘measurable impacts but not dramatic impacts’ less than the comparable area around Chernobyl. Beyond this zone contamination would be measurable as far as 250 km but with health impacts not able to be determined. This situation has indeed eventuated.

Shortly after the explosions, a 20 km exclusion zone was established and residents between 20 and 30 km were advised to remain indoors. The IAEA and US Nuclear Regulatory Commission (US NRC) suggested this was inadequate and advised an 80 km exclusion zone, which the Japanese government ignored. As of June, airborne radiation mapping confirmed that a broad plume of contamination extending 80 km northwest exceeded the levels of the Chernobyl exclusion zone, with a larger area at its periphery exceeding the Chernobyl agricultural restriction zone. In certain ‘hot spots’ 40 km from the plant, the IAEA found levels over fifty times their ‘operational criteria for evacuation’. The consequences would have been worse if the prevailing winds in the first week of the disaster were not offshore.

* * *

Radioactive fallout from a nuclear reactor mainly consists of the radioactive isotopes of iodine, caesium and tellurium. These elements form fine suspended particles in the air (aerosols), which due to their weight will fall to the ground gradually, with their distribution consequent on meteorological conditions. Although we speak of radial zones from the plant, the shape of the fallout represents a directional plume or plumes. Such particles contaminate all vegetation, clothing and any other surfaces including water sources within their path. Those that pose the greatest health threat are Cs-137 (with a half-life of thirty years) and I-131 (eight days). Iodine is absorbed into the bloodstream through inhalation and ingestion, concentrated by the thyroid gland, whereas caesium is deposited throughout the body. Caesium takes between ten and 100 days for half of it to be excreted from the body, so it poses a significant hazard once absorbed. Unlike iodine, which loses most of its potential for harm in a few months, caesium remains hazardous for several hundred years.

Although there is effectively an ‘air curtain’ at the equator that prevents contamination from reaching the southern hemisphere, minimal amounts have been detected in northern Australian monitoring stations.

There are two types of recognised ionising radiation (IR) health effects: deterministic and stochastic. The severity of deterministic effects is directly proportional to the absorbed radiation dose. These include skin damage and blood disorders due to bone marrow effects. The higher the dose the worse, for example, the skin radiation burn. These have a threshold below which they do not occur (although this may vary between individuals), which around 100 millisieverts (mSv), at which point blood cell production begins to be impaired. Deterministic effects exceeding 1000 mSv induce acute radiation sickness—with vomiting, diarrhoea and shedding of mucosal linings of the gastrointestinal and respiratory tracts—bone marrow suppression and sterility. Once the dose exceeds more than 3000–5000 mSv, death is likely in a matter of days to weeks.

Stochastic effects are ‘probabilistic’ in nature; in other words, the higher the dose the greater the chance of them occurring, although their eventual severity is the same, irrespective of the original dose. The main stochastic effect is cancer; however, because it is indistinguishable from other unrelated cancers, attribution is very difficult. The current risk coefficients for the development of cancer are approximately 8 per cent per 1000 mSv (a one in twelve chance) and 5 per cent for cancer fatality (one in twenty). The US National Academy of Sciences reviewed the effects of low-level IR (defined as less than 100 mSv) in their seminal 2006 report, concluding: ‘there is a linear dose-response relationship between exposure to ionizing radiation and the development of solid cancers in humans. It is unlikely that there is a threshold below which cancers are not induced’.

Ionising Radiation imparts its deleterious carcinogenic health effects via damage to the cell’s genetic blueprint (DNA), leading to genetic mutations. This then predisposes the initiation of cancer when the regulatory mechanisms of the cell fail. Most solid cancers do not appear for at least ten to twenty years, although some may take many decades, and leukaemia can arise in as little as five years. IR is classified as a Class 1 carcinogen by the International Agency for Research in Cancer (IARC) of the World Health Organization (WHO), the highest classification consistent with certainty of its carcinogenicity.

We can consider two broad groups at risk. Firstly, emergency workers at the plant, unlike the general population, are at risk of developing deterministic effects as their upper allowable occupational doses have been increased to 250 mSv from the original international maximum of 100 mSv in an emergency, and up from the 100 mSv total occupational dose limits for nuclear workers over five years, and the 1 mSv per annum dose allowable to the public. One incident induced radiation burns to two emergency workers’ legs after they stepped in highly radioactive water in reactor two, with each worker receiving a calculated total dose of 600 mSv. By mid April over thirty workers had received doses in excess of 100 mSv, although the average dose was only 7 mSv per worker. In order to limit occupational doses, workers have been recruited on a rotating basis from a large pool. A temporary base of 2000 workers, composed largely of itinerant contractors from around Japan, has been established at the nearby resort town of Iwaki-Yumoto. They are referred to as nuclear gypsies, the name writer Kunio Horie gave to workers who have traditionally performed the dirtiest, most dangerous jobs for Japan’s power utilities.

The industry has relied on temporary workers for maintenance and repair work since the nuclear plant construction boom in the 1970s. Now, as then, those from the lowest rungs of Japanese society work for meagre wages, with little training or experience of hazardous environments. It is questionable whether proper monitoring of so many workers can be thorough enough. TEPCO, the plant owner, has already confessed to inadequate internal dose monitoring of workers in the first few months. Even if the doses they receive are below reference limits, it is highly likely that some of these workers will die of cancer. No cases of acute radiation sickness have been reported to date.

The general public is also exposed to radiation from the deposition of fallout, predominantly I-131 in the first few weeks and then Cs-137 and Cs-134 subsequently. The eventual contamination plume has extended beyond the initial 20 km exclusion zone, thus putting at risk many who were not evacuated or subject to adequate counter-measures. Potential annual doses for these residents, according to the French ISRN, may eventually reach up to 200 mSv.

It is not clear to what extent counter-measures were adopted for the populace beyond the immediate evacuation zone. It is of note that the US NRC and the Australian government had shortly after the commencement of the disaster advised their citizens within an 80 km radius to evacuate. There are of course other considerations before an evacuation is contemplated as a mass evacuation in such a heavily populated region would not be without risks of its own. Nevertheless, the Japanese government failed to even advocate a simple counter-measure such as advising the public to stay indoors beyond 30 km which would have minimised the risk to these people. More cynically perhaps is the observation that increasing the exclusion zone also massively increases the compensation bill which will be ultimately paid by the government.

The Japanese authorities have shown questionable regard for the safety of children, including pre-schoolers, infants and the unborn, by raising the ‘acceptable’ public dose to children in the Fukushima prefecture from 1 mSv per annum to 20 mSv, which corresponds to the occupational limit of adult nuclear workers. We know that children are at up to five times more risk of developing radiogenic cancer than adults. As a consequence, Professor Toshiso Kosaku, a senior prime-ministerial nuclear adviser, submitted his resignation on April 29, saying could not stay and allow the government to set what he called improper radiation limits for primary schools near the plant. Concurrently, a worldwide medical campaign was instituted to reverse this decision, and it appears that this is in the process of being redressed. Targeted evacuations of the most highly contaminated areas are proposed, and personal dosimeters are to be given to 34,000 children in Fukushima city 65 km from the plant to monitor their cumulative doses.

Caesium contamination has been identified at levels exceeding acceptable limits in spinach, mushrooms, bamboo, tea leaves, dairy and fish from the regions surrounding the plant. Contaminated hay has been found as far as 120 km away, raising concerns about the true extent of fallout. In July, beef from over 1000 herds of cattle with from contaminated feedstock was found to have been sold throughout much of Japan, with caesium levels up to six times higher than the regulated maximum. Although eating such meat on a few occasions is not likely to be hazardous, it underscores the difficulties inherent in the food-testing regimes designed to protect the public over the longer term. This minimal public health service should be functional several months after the worst nuclear accident since Chernobyl, and yet it appears the Japanese simply don’t have the time, money or capacity to accomplish it in the midst of such a large disaster.

In the longer term, excess cancer cases will be much harder to define given the relatively high background incidence of cancer and the long latency period of its appearance. It took at least twenty-five years for the excess cancers to become statistically evident in the Hiroshima and Nagasaki atom bomb survivors. The prompt evacuation of people from the immediate surrounding environment of Fukushima, notwithstanding the insufficient exclusion zone, and other counter-measures will also have significantly mitigated the development of cancer. Even though risk models of cancer induction can be used to predict the likely cancers over the next six decades, it is possible that we will never know the true number of actual excess cancers in the general population due to inherent statistical limitations and large uncertainties, even several decades after the event, unless appropriate large-scale population studies are implemented and adequately resourced. Excess thyroid cancers are a rare malignancy and hence more easily statistically detected. The Japanese government has just announced lifelong thyroid monitoring of some 360,000 Fukushima prefectural residents aged eighteen years and under to detect thyroid cancer.

There are broader social and psychological implications of nuclear catastrophes that are difficult to accurately assess, much less predict. The zones most severely affected by contamination will remain no-man’s lands for one to two hundred years. Assurances that these large areas can be adequately rehabilitated to any significant scale seem wildly overoptimistic. The fact that people from these highly populated areas will never return home again is traumatic enough; the social dislocation and fragmentation of once tightly knit communities will only serve to exacerbate psychological alienation, leading to the increased levels of depression, substance abuse and other psychiatric disorders.

Nuclear disasters are unique in their potential for devastating social, economic and health outcomes, the reach of which can be international and the consequences profound. As UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon stated in April, on the twnty-fifth anniversary of the Chernobyl disaster:

To many, nuclear energy looks to be a relatively clean and logical choice in an era of increasing resource scarcity. Yet the record requires us to ask painful questions. Have we correctly calculated its risks and costs? Are we doing all we can to keep the world’s people safe?

The unfortunate truth is that we are likely to see more such disasters.

Dr Peter Karamoskos is a nuclear radiologist, a public representative on the Radiation Health Committee of ARPANSA (Australian Radiation Protection and Nuclear Safety Agency), and treasurer for MAPW (Medical Association for the Prevention of War) and ICAN (International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons). 

A majority of readers would certainly remember the giant physical, commercial and political presence of Kerry Packer. They may, however, have been too young or not yet born when his father Frank (known and feared as ‘God’) exercised his media and political power in the decades before his death in 1974.

Between the Depression of the 1930s and the election of the Whitlam government in 1972, Australian print and electronic media were subjected to a lengthy process of monopoly concentration in the hands of the Fairfax, Murdoch and Packer stables. Before the rise of the media barons, various businesses and organisations such as trade unions and state Labor Councils also owned newspapers, magazines and radio stations. Most were run as commercial entertainment, sports and news media but were eventually sold to the large private companies. The Australian Workers Union (AWU) owned the World, a struggling newspaper in Sydney. In 1931 the AWU sent their former Queensland president ‘Red Ted’ Theodore to report on the paper’s prospects. Immortalised as ‘Red Ted Thurgood’ in Frank Hardy’s novel Power Without Glory, Theodore had recently been forced to resign in 1930 as Federal Labor Treasurer in Scullin’s Labor government following corruption allegations involving his part ownership of the Mungana mine.

Theodore’s media and gold mine connections with John Wren and Frank Packer were ‘consolidated’ in subsequent years. Together with Frank Packer, he purchased the World from the AWU in 1932 and they went on to found the Australian Women’s Weekly (1933) as well as adding the Daily Telegraph (1936) and Sunday Telegraph (1939) to their new company called Consolidated Press Ltd.

Although Theodore died in 1950, the Theodore family interests continued in partnership with ‘God’. Television now beckoned and it was Packer’s television station (TCN9 Sydney) that was the first to officially broadcast in Australia on 27 October 1956. Shortly after, in 1957, Frank Packer renamed the company Australian Consolidated Press (ACP) after buying out the Theodore family interests and gaining majority control of the company. Always on the lookout for new money making media vehicles that would beat his corporate media rivals, Packer took a controlling stake in GTV9 Melbourne in 1960. With the opening of the Sydney–Melbourne coaxial cable in 1963, ‘God’ launched the Nine Network which remained the dominant TV business long after his death and up until the death of his son Kerry in 2005.

Sir Frank Packer’s increasing media power was also vital for the Menzies Coalition government and conservative anti-Labor politics. It is legitimate to ask whether Tony Abbott could have become leader of the Liberal party without Packer’s earlier contributions to preventing Labor from winning office. It would, for example, have been impossibly expensive for Bob Santamaria and the National Civic Council to pay commercial television rates if Santamaria had not been given a free weekly show on the Nine Network. ‘God’ was thus instrumental in helping to ensure that a whole generation of right-wing Catholic voters made the transition from Labor to the Liberal Party via the Democratic Labor Party. Once well known as a non-Catholic and even anti-Catholic party, the Liberal Party today is packed with Catholic politicians and directly attracts the votes of many conservative Catholics.

Just as the Packer stable bolstered conservative political and social causes, so too were Fairfax media outlets equally anti-Labor, as was the Melbourne Herald and Weekly Times empire (not yet controlled by Rupert Murdoch). It was the rise of Rupert that posed an increasing threat to Frank. In the suffocating Australian conservative climate, the launch of The Australian in 1964 was a breath of fresh air. While Packer was a strong Menzies supporter, Murdoch’s Australian criticised everything from Menzies’ state aid for Catholic schools to neglectful socio-economic policies, conservative cultural attitudes and Australia’s involvement in the Vietnam War. After Robert Menzies retired in 1966, The Australian dismissed his government’s record as ‘17 Wasted Years’. It is hard to reconcile the younger reformist Murdoch with News Limited’s aggressive right-wing papers that have dominated the Australian media since Rupert changed his political views during the 1970s.

How does my experience intersect with this narrative? My first media job was in 1960 as a fourteen-year-old copy boy in the sub-editors’ office at the Herald and Weekly Times fortress in Flinders Street, Melbourne. Apart from witnessing the almost daily antics of the subs—throwing paper planes at each other for instance—my brief stay was notable for two events. The first was tripping and breaking a fine china cup while clearing away managing director Sir John Williams’ morning tea tray. The fact that Sir John was another knight of the realm indicates that in those days nearly all the media barons were made knights for services rendered in defence of the status quo.

The second event was more fortuitous. I entered a footy tipping contest run by radio 3DB (which operated downstairs in the Herald building) that required entrants to name not only the winners of the main matches but also all the winners in the reserves. Confirming my belief that sporting bets have little to do with expert knowledge, I fluked the jackpot that had not been won for three weeks. Winning the Phoenix Biscuits football jackpot of seventy-five pounds was a relative fortune given that I was on a weekly wage of four pounds, seventeen shillings and sixpence.

After leaving the Herald I worked for almost six years in a range of factories, department stores and offices while attending night school for five years in order to finish high school. After enrolling full-time at Monash University in 1966 and completing a combined honours arts degree in history and politics in November 1969, I awaited news as to whether I would get an academic job or a post-graduate scholarship. I was told that I would probably get a post-graduate scholarship and part-time tutoring at Monash beginning in March 1970. In the meantime, and given this was a period of full employment, I took the path taken by thousands of others: I joined the public service.

At the time, the Commonwealth Public Service was eager to recruit honours graduates. As I had a good honours degree, I didn’t have to pass elaborate qualifying public service exams. Instead the officer in charge offered me a choice of jobs in several departments. I was not inspired. Sensing my lack of enthusiasm, he came back with another option— a job in the Postmaster General’s Department. ‘Not the PMG’, I moaned. ‘No, this is a special job’, he assured me. ‘You will be the first “humanist” working on projects with our leading team of engineers and telecommunication planners,’ This sounded more appealing and so, just before my 24th birthday, I began work in December 1969 at the PMG offices in William Street.

There were virtually no other institutions in the world like the PMG, except geographically small-scale versions in the United Kingdom or New Zealand. As a large government department, the PMG employed hundreds of thousands of workers, either directly in public postal services and telecommunications, or indirectly through all the private contractors in the manufacturing and service sectors providing materials and supplies. As private companies in North America dominated telecommunications, this meant that the geographical size of continental Australia gave the PMG a territorial sweep unrivalled by other public telcos in Western Europe. In contrast to mass poverty in Asia, Africa, Latin America and the Soviet Union, the affluence of late 1960s Australia meant that the PMG had unique political pressures placed upon it to provide egalitarian public services at standard affordable postage and phone rates across a giant continent. It also had a world-class, high-powered team of engineers, technicians and planners working to devise innovations and major national infrastructure programs.

I had little idea of what I was supposed to do working as a ‘humanist’ alongside these planners and engineers. After formal introductions and a briefing about the work being undertaken by these senior second and third division officers, I was asked by my superior to prepare a report on whether cable TV was needed in Australia and, if so, what should the PMG’s position be in relation to this technology. ‘Cable TV’, I exclaimed. ‘What is it and where does it operate?’ My superior replied that he didn’t know much about it but that Sir Frank Packer had made an application to start a cable network. My task was to analyse the social, economic and cultural aspects of cable TV and whether or not the PMG should grant a license to Packer’s ACP.

One thing was certain. I was not alone in my ignorance of cable TV. The more I researched it, the more I realised that most Australians had never heard of it. What also became clear was that most politicians, policy makers and business leaders— apart from a handful of people— also knew nothing about the potential of cable TV or, very importantly, that ‘God’ wanted to introduce it to Australia. Remember, this was 1969 and there were hardly any computers, no internet and no Google. The news came to Australia by camel. How was I to write this report?

I began asking some of the PMG engineers about cable and searching for relevant information in university and public libraries. Initially I discovered that cable had been used since the late 1940s in North America and Europe primarily as a technical device for communities to gain good free-to-air TV reception in those cities or regions affected by environmental obstructions such as mountains or city buildings. It was even called CATV or Community Antenna Television. I also visited a number of foreign consulates and embassies to learn about different national communications policies. Little new information was gained from the diplomatic officers or their small embassy libraries apart from greater familiarity with various national communication legislation and regulatory statutes.

The US and Canadian telecommunications scene nevertheless did provide hints of the potential attractiveness of cable TV. As an alternative counter-cultural option to the big TV networks, US radical media advocates were beginning to explore the possibility of using cable TV as a narrow-casting device to give voice to community groups, sub-cultures and others excluded from mainstream broadcasting. Politically, Frank Packer would certainly have not been interested in giving a platform to these alternative voices. In fact, to this day the use of cable TV as alternative news and cultural media has never emerged or flourished in Australia.

However, ‘God’ (or somebody else in ACP) may have been aware that local TV stations in the United States and Canada were upset that cable TV stations were transmitting CBS, NBC and ABC network programs into US and Canadian regions, thus taking local advertising dollars away from the free-to-air local stations, which were dependent on a mix of network and local regional programming. Could it be that ‘God’ was planning to increase competition with other TV operators by indirectly overcoming or bypassing Australian federal media regulations and penetrating capital cities and regional towns with a multi-channel pay TV cable network? Or was I imputing too much forward thinking to Packer and ACP? Perhaps they were just interested in providing better TV reception in Sydney and other places? After all, no cable network existed in the United States in 1969 (this only emerged in the late 1970s) and cable stations were still relaying existing network material rather than producing their own programs. Today, with hindsight, it is possible to see that it was only in 1972 that the Home Box Office (HBO) became one of the first cable companies to produce original programs. US rival cable TV networks with multiple pay TV channels and future hits such as The Wire, Mad Men or Curb Your Enthusiasm were inconceivable as models for extending media power at the end of the 1960s.

While researching and writing this report in 1969 and early 1970, I was also gaining a valuable insight into the political divisions of the upper echelons of the PMG. First, it was clear that many in telecommunications wanted to have their own department or statutory body separate from the postal services. Second, a more profound division existed between those who wanted to retain the provision of egalitarian national public services and those senior officers who favoured the adoption of market-based efficiency practices. These divisions were a dress rehearsal for future telecommunications policies that still divide Australia this present day. Many pro-market senior people expressed a profound dislike of Country Party politicians regularly lobbying to have expensive telecommunication infrastructure connected to isolated regional communities and the farms of wealthy ‘cocky’ mates. In contrast, they loved the ‘rivers of gold’ of the Sydney–Melbourne phone networks that earned the PMG a fortune. They told me how inflated phone call pricing disguised the reality that calls in these two cities could actually be provided free to the public or for a nominal 1 cent a call, as the infrastructure had long been largely paid off by taxpayers.

Within five years, the senior levels of telecommunications had their wishes fulfilled. The Whitlam government broke up the PMG in 1975 and divided it into two statutory bodies: Australia Post and Telecom Australia. Whitlam, like others (particularly many working at the The Australian in the 1960s), advocated a mixture of a modernised social democracy and economic rationalism. The two elements proved incompatible during the 1980s and 1990s as neo-liberal market values swamped social democracy.

While the break-up of the PMG into Australia Post and Telecom Australia may have sounded logical on paper, it was a prime example of what happens when public sector reformers adopt business practices and pander to the market’s definition of ‘efficiency’. If service was not very good prior to 1975, it deteriorated in later decades as staffing numbers were drastically cut back and the weaker and poorer members of society were neglected. The narrow focus on market definitions of productivity also resonated in cultural analysis. Far too many Australian cultural studies papers and media commentary continue to emphasise content and software while neglecting the vital issue of local and global hardware, especially the issue of who creates and produces communication hardware and how it either enables local autonomy or guarantees future social dependence.

The year 1975 marked the beginning of the end of the PMG’s high-powered centre of technological knowledge. Although initially retained by Telecom, it was eventually heavily scaled back under subsequent corporate and privatising managers. Telecom and Telstra increasingly outsourced or contracted off-shore at the expense of local jobs and innovation. A near fatal blow was struck against key sections of Australian engineering, electronics and other parts of the manufacturing industry, as well as against skill formation and apprenticeship training. Despite all the nationalist fantasy talk about the ‘knowledge economy’ promoted by the ALP and Liberals in recent decades, actual industry, education and trade policies told an entirely different story. By the year 2000, there was such a loss of vital skills and technical knowledge that there was not a hope in hell that Australian manufacturing could give rise to a local giant such as Finland’s Nokia, let alone end its heavy reliance on imported IT and electronic goods.

It was Margaret Thatcher who recognised the market value of Whitlam’s break-up of the PMG. This was the model she adopted in dismantling Britain’s PMG (1981) and then fully privatising British Telecom in 1984. By contrast, it was almost thirty years after 1975 before the Howard government fully privatised Telstra. Telecom and Telstra, unfortunately, had long operated as ruthless businesses rather than organisations providing essential public services for all Australians.

In my March 1970 report about cable TV I advised that Sir Frank Packer’s application be rejected, as cable was too valuable a media platform to be handed over to private companies before the PMG had even worked out the future of public broadcasting or its own future media policy. I do not know what ever happened to my report. It may have been accepted as PMG policy or pigeonholed like so many others. Whatever its fate, two things were confirmed by history: ‘God’ never opened a cable TV network and it was a quarter of a century before cable or pay TV began operating in Australia between 1993 and 1995.

Today, pay or cable TV is relatively stagnant in terms of household penetration. It has been weakened by the internet and will be overtaken by new media platforms when the National Broadband Network is completed. However, one thing has remained constant: the complete lack of desire by Coalition and Labor governments to democratise news and cultural production by breaking the power of the media monopolies. Paul Keating and John Howard especially left contemporary Australia with disastrous telecommunications and media legacies.

My short few months’ experience at the PMG had an eventful conclusion. After handing in my report I gave notice that I was returning to academia. In our office section there was an elderly, well-groomed senior clerk who had probably been with the PMG most of his life. He fussed about and regularly irritated the senior engineers and planners by enforcing bureaucratic rules such as requiring them to sign on or off if they were late for work or out of the office. On my last day he surprised me by coming up and giving me a gift in a large package. ‘Don’t thank me and don’t open it until you get home. If you don’t find it of interest, please pass it on. Good luck.’ Curiosity got the better of me and on the train home I opened the package to find two large volumes of The Secret Doctrine by Madame Helena Petrovna Blavatsky (1831– 91), a founder of the Theosophical Society. The following week I asked my history professor, the late Alan McBriar, what he knew about Madam Blavatsky. He told me that she was known as ‘HPB’ and was famous for her seances and her recruitment to theosophy of prominent Fabians such as women’s rights activist Annie Besant. The Theosophical Society had active branches in India and in Sydney. From the 1930s prominent spiritualists moved to Melbourne where the Theosophical Society still owns very valuable real estate in the heart of the city. Alan McBriar also said that I had probably been selected as a potential valuable recruit, hence the gift of the books.

Although I was not attracted to theosophy I kept the two volumes. While writing this article and refreshing my memory about ‘Red Ted’ Theodore of the AWU and the young Frank Packer, a strange experience occurred. Something prompted me to take the Secret Doctrine down from the bookshelf. While reading Volume One, I suddenly heard a women’s voice calling my name. I turned around but nobody was there. Then I heard the faint voice saying, ‘Paul Howes loves Bill Shorten’. Startled, I called out, ‘Is that you, HPB? And why are you telling me that Howes loves Shorten?’ ‘No, Boris, you misheard me. Not “loves” but “Ludwig”. I said, “Paul Howes, Bill Ludwig and Bill Shorten”. Beware the AWU and the mining industry for the danger they pose to the environment’. Before I could ask HPB another question, my phone started ringing. I picked it up only to hear not a spiritual voice, but the familiar and annoying echoing sound of a person in a faraway Indian call centre: ‘Mr FrAankeel’. ‘Yes’, I answered. ‘As a former Telstra customer we have a very good deal for you …’ ‘Sorry’, I interrupted, ‘not interested’, and slammed the phone down. Alas, by the time I regained my composure, HPB had disappeared into the ether and I have not heard from her since.

Boris Frankel will sing the lead role of Rupert Murdoch in the forthcoming New York production of the new Philip Glass opera ‘The Alchemist’.

Any high-profile Chinese who effectively tells the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) to get fucked is unlikely to stay free of persecution for long. Ai Weiwei, the world-famous artist and designer who is best known for his international exhibitions and as a co-designer of the iconic ‘Bird’s Nest’ sports stadium in Beijing, ran the gauntlet of criticising, or even ridiculing, the CCP for longer than most people, including his friend the literary critic and Nobel laureate Liu Xiaobo, who has been in prison (again) since 2009 for also advocating basic human rights and freedoms. But on 3 April 2011 the CCP took Ai Weiwei off the street and into secret detention, stopping him at Beijing airport as he prepared to fly out to Hong Kong. He was held for over eighty days, and finally released on 22 June, just a few days before Premier Wen Jiabao flew to Britain for a high-profile state visit and to sign a series of major economic deals.

The secretive machinations of Chinese official politics, and the opaque nature of China’s tightly controlled legal system, mean the reasons for Ai Weiwei’s arrest remain open to speculation, although the official accusation was tax evasion. But behind the stony facade of economic crime it seems obvious that the CCP could no longer tolerate Ai Weiwei’s attempts to embarrass Chinese officials and hold them to account. Vaccinating ordinary Chinese people against contamination by the Arab Spring was also a likely factor in Ai Weiwei’s arrest.

For some time before his arrest Ai Weiwei had lambasted official censorship and popular apathy, and had spoken out in defence of individual rights and against official corruption and abuses of power. Since the Sichuan earthquake of 2008 he had campaigned against a system that led to children being crushed to death in poorly constructed schools. Increasingly his artworks were being viewed as too provocative and impertinent, and the CCP does not respond kindly to direct challenges or satire.

Histories of Threat and Iconoclasm

Ai Weiwei may be a troublesome individual, but actions against him should be understood in the broader context of Chinese history and the CCP’s attitude to dissent. 1 July 2011 marked the 90th anniversary of the CCP. At its inception it was a tiny underground movement predominantly composed of urban intellectuals inspired by foreign ideology. This clandestine circle of librarians, academics and literary critics eventually rose to complete domination of the world’s most populous nation, speaking on behalf of the mass of peasants, workers and soldiers, and today also representing China’s bureaucratic elite, entrepreneurs and the new rich. From a total of approximately twenty members in Beijing and Shanghai in 1921, the CCP has grown to a current membership of roughly 75 million, with members in every province, city, township and village.

The CCP has internalised its own experience of suffering as an underground organisation for many years in its torturous growth to achieving power. It also remains conscious of imperial China’s long history of secret societies and popular rebellions. As a result of these visceral personal and historical resources, the CCP deeply suspects the threat posed to established authority by small, secretive and religiously motivated or ideologically inspired movements and charismatic leaders.

To contemporary Western observers of China, the CCP overacts appallingly and counter-productively to qigong practitioners and self-cultivators in the syncretic religious movement known as Falun Gong; to Christians in underground churches; to human rights lawyers or activists such as Liu Xiaobo; to ordinary citizens petitioning for justice; and to netizens (online activists), sympathisers with the Arab Spring, ethnic minorities and iconoclasts or provocative artists such as Ai Weiwei. But the CCP remembers what it achieved as a determined minority after decades of suppression by warlords, Nationalists and Japanese invaders. The historians and theoreticians within the CCP also know that emperors in past dynasties were shaken or dethroned by religious fanatics, bands of sworn brothers or peasant rebels who harnessed widespread despair or dissatisfaction. The Ming dynasty fell to a peasant rebellion, and both Buddhist and Muslim uprisings rattled the Qing. In the mid-nineteenth century, Hong Xiuquan, the self-proclaimed younger brother of Jesus Christ, led the Taiping Rebels in a mass movement against the Qing. That civil war alone resulted in more than ten million casualties.

The CCP views sectarian movements like Falun Gong in the context of previous religious, superstitious and millenarian movements within China. It was shocked in April 1999 when Falun Gong suddenly appeared at the gates of the Central Committee’s residential compound of Zhongnanhai as a broad-based movement willing to agitate for the interests of its leader Li Hongzhi and its many adherents. Ten thousand protesters materialised on the Party’s doorstep in the largest public demonstration in China since the 1989 Protest Movement on Tiananmen Square. When the CCP investigated this phenomenon it found to its horror that Falun Gong had adherents across the nation and inside the Party itself. Falun Gong emerged in the Chinese ideational and belief vacuum created by the discrediting of Maoism in the Cultural Revolution, the killing of protesters in 1989, and the demise of official Marxism in the ruins of world communism in the 1990s. Falun Gong was swiftly banned and labelled a ‘heretical organisation’.

When considering other threats to its hegemony and survival, the CCP―which in its first decades of existence relied so heavily on European socialist texts, Soviet Party models of organisation and Comintern advisers and support―views human rights, religious freedom, democracy and even iconoclastic or ‘indecent art’ as foreign-inspired (or specifically Western-led) attacks on the CCP and China itself.

In a country with over 450 million internet users and literally billions of micro-blogs each year, traditional Chinese censorship cannot cope with the traffic of information or work with the efficiency of the Maoist period. This is despite the notorious Great Firewall of China, the fact that Ai Weiwei amongst others had his popular and critical blog closed down on sina.com, and despite the allegedly state-sanctioned hacking as well as the official licensing problems and censorship constraints that necessitated Google’s withdrawal from China’s mainland in 2010. Nonetheless, the Chinese state monitors carefully and censors when it can. On 23 May 2011, for example, my television screen in Tianjin repeatedly went blank when the BBC World Service interviewed Lobsang Sangay, the political successor to the Dalai Lama for Tibetans in exile. Each time the interview was repeated, the screen suddenly went blank again and the sound went off.

Despite its extensive and expensive surveillance network, the Chinese state cannot censor or monitor every micro-blog, text message or mobile phone call, but the state does ensure that it acts decisively and with a massive show of force when users of new social media attempt to move into the physical world of organising rallies or public acts of defiance. This was seen when huge numbers of police and internal security forces appeared at a meeting point for a few Chinese individuals inspired to gather in the street by Tunisia’s Jasmine Revolution of February 2011. What is considered an overreaction in the West is a necessary security measure to the CCP. Their logic is that there will be no Jasmine Revolution if all buds are carefully and systematically nipped before they can bloom. They do not want a repeat of the Taiping Rebellion, the Protest Movement of 1989, or a civil war like the current conflict in Libya.

China’s New Social Contract

Ai Weiwei is no Mao Zedong. He acts openly and peacefully, blogging rather than blasting. His international supporters (and the media who report on his art, his social activities and his problems with Chinese officials) are not secret revolutionaries or clandestine organisations like the Comintern funnelling guns or ideological weapons to programmatic, disciplined and nationally coordinated subversives. Ai Weiwei’s activism exposes the abuses of the Chinese state system, such as the official corruption and shoddy work that led to the deaths of thousands of children in the Sichuan earthquake. He printed the names of the dead children on the walls of his Beijing studio, and sought legal redress on behalf of grieving parents. In return for Ai Weiwei’s artistic independence and peaceful social criticism of the Chinese system, he has been abused by that system, beaten up while trying to speak to a Sichuan court, denied a permit for his Shanghai studio (which was then demolished), constantly monitored and then held in secret custody for eighty days.

After Ai Weiwei’s detention and the subsequent search of his home and Beijing studio, he was confined in a secret location and vilified in the pro-Beijing press of Hong Kong’s Wen Wei Po as a ‘plagiarist’, ‘bigamist’, ‘fraud’, disseminator of ‘indecent images’ and perpetrator of unspecified ‘economic crimes’. His wife, Lu Qing, was allowed only limited access to him to provide medicine for his diabetes and hypertension. On his release the normally outspoken Ai Weiwei was subject to a gag order preventing him communicating with the media, and his movements were prescribed. He is not allowed to leave Beijing and he has reportedly agreed to pay the Chinese government 12 million yuan (AUS $1.8 million) in taxes and fines.

In addition to the modern weapon of arbitrarily enforced tax law, the CCP uses tactics against religious groups, democracy advocates and individuals like Ai Weiwei based on models from pre-modern China or from the time of the CCP’s own clandestine and violent rise to power. But conditions in China today are completely different. Since the suppression of the Protest Movement of 1989 and the instructive collapse of the Soviet Union into poverty and crime in the early 1990s, and with the rapid expansion of China’s economy and improvements in the standard of living for most Chinese in the past two decades, there has been a tacit agreement between the Chinese people and the CCP. Ordinary people can pursue private wealth, but they cannot directly challenge CCP authority. This implied social contract has been stunningly successful.

If China is taken completely out of the equation, in the past thirty years the world has achieved very little in alleviating absolute poverty. The hundreds of millions who have risen above bare subsistence in this period are overwhelmingly Chinese, and anyone familiar with China recognises the extraordinary and impressive transformations achieved since the death of Mao Zedong in 1976. China has a great deal of which to be proud, and ordinary Chinese people have much improved calorie intakes, housing conditions, employment opportunities, transport and communication networks, travel options, and education facilities and pathways than ever before. But Chinese society is far more unequal than societies such as Australia’s, and the costs of rapid development have been extremely high in terms of pollution, environmental degradation, inadequate social welfare, the ubiquity of fake (and often dangerous) goods and corruption.

China is making important strides with solar energy and other green practices, but as more coal-fired generators are built to meet the needs of rapid urbanisation and increased consumption, and as more cars pour out of the factories and onto the newly built roads, China faces intense pressures from the weight of its own development. China is a land of billionaires, luxury goods, and conspicuous consumption, with China’s economy now the world’s second largest after the United States. But the ordinary Chinese person’s standard of living is well below the OECD average, and to reach that level would take an enormous toll on the planet and is inconceivable given present circumstances and population size. Moreover, many of the ‘sustainable’ initiatives across China are more assertion than reality, just as equality and constitutional rights are more theory than fact. Tensions and fault lines exist in the Chinese polity, but the lack of such things as critical and independent media, an independent judicial system, and the opportunity to stand freely for election and to vote, mean that China does not have the pressure valves of civil society or a history and culture of public scrutiny of the CCP and accountable government.

China’s tensions and fault lines occasionally burst into protest or even violence, including the murder of brutal or corrupt local officials who expropriate land, extort taxes, solicit bribes or harshly enforce birth control policies. Nonetheless, despite tens of thousands of annual protests that take place across China at the grassroots level, there is no social movement or political organisation that seeks to unify these small acts of resistance into a coherent, ideologically driven and oppositional force to the CCP. The people largely accept that things have improved for China as a whole and in most cases for themselves as individuals or as families. They believe that disunity, widespread violence and chaos are to be avoided. Peasants are not rallying around a new Mao Zedong to surround and defeat the cities, they are moving in great numbers to the cities to make the most of opportunities to advance themselves and their families, contributing to the greatest and most rapid mass urbanisation movement in human history.

Killing a Chicken to Scare the Monkey

Ai Weiwei has never advocated turmoil or violence. But he is, in Chinese official minds, an impudent monkey who has too openly and directly affronted and insulted the CCP. Unlike many Chinese people from both imperial times and today, Ai Weiwei did not self-censor. As he said to the documentary filmmaker Alison Klayman: ‘If you’re too afraid to turn on your camera, it’s like they have already taken it away’.

Before being seized at the airport, Ai Weiwei was a friend and collaborator of the jailed human rights gadfly Liu Xiaobo who also spoke out against the CCP imprisoning Liu. Ai Weiwei tried unsuccessfully to represent Liu at the Nobel ceremony in Sweden, delivering a major slap in the face to the CCP. Not only did Ai Weiwei out-Spielberg Steven Spielberg by pulling out of the organisation committee of the Beijing Olympics in 2008, but as a co-designer of the Bird’s Nest, his withdrawal and subsequent public criticism delivered another slap in the face to the CCP on the eve of its biggest global event of the decade. He aggressively publicised the death toll from the Sichuan earthquake and held authorities responsible for the criminal state of the infrastructure, thereby delivering another slap in the face to the CCP when the avuncular premier Wen Jiabao had been personally visiting and showing sympathy to the earthquake victims and expressing the Party’s care and compassion to the ordinary people. In his own art practice Ai Weiwei also produced works considered indecent or insulting, such as the statue of a strong arm (currently exhibited in Hong Kong, reportedly the only Chinese territory where his works are on public display) with a hand giving a middle finger salute.

In a further (and perhaps decisive) insult to the CCP, anyone familiar with homophones in the Chinese language will note the way an Ai Weiwei text has found its way into popular parlance. This subversion of the language may be intolerable to the CCP, a self-important party that shares the authoritarian’s lack of humour and a complete refusal to tolerate satire or impudence. A common insult in Chinese is Cao ni ma: ‘Fuck your mother’. But very similar sounds can mean ‘Grass mud horse’ or alpaca.

 A photo of a naked Ai Weiwei with a toy alpaca blocking his penis from public view has the phrase, Cao ni ma dang zhongyang, ‘The alpaca blocks the middle’. But these basic sounds, with different characters, mean ‘Fuck your mother, the Party Central Committee’.

The Chinese have a phrase expressing the exemplary nature of punishment designed to keep people in line: to kill a chicken to scare the monkey. To mix animal metaphors, we can see that Ai Weiwei is no chicken. In recent years he has spoken out at great personal risk in the interests of transparency, accountability and justice. He has done this repeatedly and bravely, having seen his own father, the poet Ai Qing, ‘reformed through labour’ in remote regions and officially silenced by the CCP for twenty years because he defended the writer Ding Ling in the Anti-Rightist Movement of 1957 and because his own literary works were then deemed unacceptable. Shortly after his father’s official rehabilitation and return both to Beijing and to print after decades of enforced silence, Ai Weiwei wrote posters on the short-lived Democracy Wall of 1978. (This rallying point for the views of ordinary people became famous for the ‘Fifth Modernisation’ of democracy, demanded on behalf of all Chinese people by the Beijing electrician and former Red Guard Wei Jingsheng, who ended up in prison for fifteen years.) Ai Weiwei has continued his social critique despite the state suppression of his blog and the beating he suffered in 2009 which necessitated an operation to relieve a brain hemorrhage. So he is not a chicken. But he is a naughty monkey.

Like the mischievous monkey Sun Wukong in the classic Chinese novel Journey to the West, Ai Weiwei did not have as much freedom or immunity as his talent, wealth and status as an internationally recognised artist may have suggested. Sun Wukong could leap 1000 miles, but when he thought he had flown to the edge of the world he realised that he had not even jumped out of the Buddha’s palm. When Sun Wukong behaved too independently, spontaneously or facetiously, a priest’s controlling prayer could tighten the golden bands on monkey’s skull, rendering him speechless and immobile. Despite Ai Weiwei’s international profile and his years living in New York in the 1980s, he remained Chinese and subject to Chinese control. Despite his wealth and exhibitions scheduled for London, New York, Berlin and Hong Kong in 2011, when it came time for the CCP to tighten the bands on Ai Weiwei he realised that he could not leave China or determine his own fate.

When Ai Weiwei was one year old, his father Ai Qing was labelled a Rightist. He accompanied his parents into internal exile in Manchuria and then to the remote western region of Xinjiang. He learnt at first hand the extremes of China’s temperatures and the depths of Chinese poverty. He saw how his father, one of China’s most famous writers, was denied the right to publish for twenty years. In the dangerous craziness of the Cultural Revolution Ai Weiwei even helped Ai Qing burn the poet’s prized collection of books, because Chinese classics and foreign ideas were deemed enemies of the revolution. Like his father, who was imprisoned both by the Nationalists (who he opposed) and by the Communists (who he supported), Ai Weiwei is known as someone who smiles and laughs a great deal. But both know personal pain and the suffering of their societies. Ai Weiwei also feels responsible for the suffering of others, including friends and associates detained during his arrest. On 9 August he broke his silence (outside China) by tweeting details of the incarceration and subsequent heart attack of the designer Liu Zhenggang. At the time of writing, it is yet to be known if he will suffer retribution from the Chinese state for this act.

Avoiding Mistakes of the Past

While Ai Weiwei remained hidden away in detention, China was suffering its worst drought in fifty years. If China can escape this drought without mass starvation, this will be a significant milestone in Chinese history, where more than 1830 major famines have struck the people since 108 BC, including the worst famine in recorded history, which killed more than thirty million people from 1959 to 1961. If China succeeds in addressing the current drought’s ravages, the Chinese will again be justly proud of their social and economic transformations achieved in the past three decades. At present, despite hardships confronting the people, the land, and the rivers of China, there are no signs of mass starvation in mid-2011. China is not doomed to repeat its past; not from the imperial period and not from the famine years that immediately succeeded Chairman Mao’s Great Leap Forward.

China need neither repeat its past concerning its treatment of religious minorities, democracy advocates, iconoclasts or artists. Conditions have changed markedly since imperial China and since the heyday of Maoist orthodoxy, including access to information and education, the relationship between the individual and the state, and the relationship between China and other states. Avoiding violence and the collapse of China’s economy is in the interests of all Chinese and most foreigners, not least of all Australians. Ai Weiwei does not advocate the violent dissolution of China; he seeks China’s peaceful extension of rights and opportunities. In the year of its 90th anniversary, if the CCP can help to steer China through a course of economic development without famine, and without ecological degradation that threatens China’s rapid expansion, then in ten years’ time the CCP will be able to look forward to a glorious centennial. But where will Ai Weiwei be in a decade from now, and will he be able to speak freely?

Glen Jennings previously studied in China, was an Asialink fellow in 2009, and currently works with international students for Trinity College Foundation Studies at the University of Melbourne.