Arriving in Hamburg this week
feels like entering a dystopian nightmare. As the city prepares to host the G20 summit this Friday and
Saturday, many roads are blocked and high-security zones have been established.
More than 20,000 police, many heavily armed, are patrolling the streets, backed
up by drones and the latest
surveillance technology. Helicopters are permanently “parked” in the
clouds, so the sound of their rotors becomes a sort of background music you
soon stop noticing. Perpetual police and ambulance sirens, emergency lights and
water cannons accompany the orchestra of power.
Walking on through the streets
– I am here as part of the DiEM25 (Democracy
in Europe Movement), which I co-founded with Yanis Varoufakis
and thousands of progressive Europeans – this dystopian scene starts to feel
surreal. It is as though you are trapped in a “post-truth” hallucination.
Beside roadblocks and police checkpoints, I stumbled across a new
ad for a popular German cola, depicting Donald Trump, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan
and Vladimir Putin calmly sleeping – with the inscription “Mensch, wach auf!”
(“Man, wake up!”).
The message is an appeal to
the politicians who have supposedly closed their eyes to global wars, terrorism,
the refugee crisis and climate change. On the other hand, it is a wake-up call
to all citizens of Hamburg and beyond to organise and stop sleepwalking into a
postmodern 1930s.
The current Hamburg
incarnation of G20 is very
different to the two most significant G20s so far – in 1999, which was an
attempt to create global governance after the Asian crisis, and in 2008, in
response to the financial crash.
While the “traditional” G20
was unified in either promoting or implementing the so-called Washington Consensus,
it seems the new G20 can only agree to disagree.
Perpetual police and ambulance
sirens, emergency lights and water cannons accompany the orchestra of power
When it comes to
globalisation, Angela Merkel continues to push the idea of free trade, while
Trump hews to protectionism. At the same time, even China’s “panda
diplomacy” reveals that those who are supposed to be main allies can’t
agree on the meaning of globalisation in the first place. Or as Merkel put it
herself, after the Chinese gave Germany two giant pandas just ahead of the G20
as a token of friendship: “Beijing views Europe as an Asian peninsula. We see
it differently.”
And then there’s the fact that
after Trump’s
withdrawal from the Paris agreement, there is clearly no consensus on how
to finally tackle climate change. And even if the rest of the G20 seems in
agreement, as nations they still provide four
times more public financing for fossil fuels than to renewable energy.
The recent escalation
in the Gulf is another source of incongruity. Despite the fact that
everyone, from Trump to Theresa May, supports the “fight against terrorism”,
they continuing to make lucrative arms deals which then subsequently fuel Isis.
The Saudis themselves have booked the entire Four Seasons hotel in Hamburg,
behaving like kings even in Europe.
Myriad contradictions are
evident in Merkel’s policies: she prevents Erdoğan giving speeches to his
supporters in Germany, while at the same time is not ready to stop the
controversial EU-Turkey
refugee deal. Or Germany complaining over Trump’s isolationism while it
imposes its own EU financial policy without coordination with others.
And here we come back to what
is still missing in the German wake-up ad. The problem is not that the leaders
of the authoritarian world – Trump, Erdoğan and Putin (plus the Saudis and
Chinese) – are asleep: they know very well what they are doing – and they
continue nonetheless.
The real problem is the
dogmatic slumber of the leaders of the free world, represented at this G20
summit by Merkel, May and others, which is the origin of our current dystopian
nightmare (wars, terrorism, the refugee crisis and climate change). In this
sense, the current G20 is not just a demonstration of disagreement on all
fronts, but – after Hamburg – whether the G20 can continue to exist at all.
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