I am spending most of my weekend in Waterloo, Ontario at the Centre for International Governance Innovation’s (CIGI) annual conference. For a multilateralism geek like me, CIGI is a wonderful place.

Waterloo is also the headquarters of Research in Motion (RIM), the Blackberry people. And indeed, CIGI exists largely because of the vision and generosity of RIM co-CEO Jim Balsillie. Like Balsillie, CIGI is interested in improving our world’s system of multilateral cooperation.

CIGI ‘09 is titled “Towards a Global New Deal: Examining the Systemic Impacts of the Global Economic Crisis.” The opening night speech came from Nobel Prize winner and prolific author Jagdish Bhagwati of the Council on Foreign Relations and Columbia University.

Bhagwati gave a cheerful upbeat speech about the need for even more multilateral trade liberalization (and less protectionism) as we work our way out of the global financial crisis. For the record, he only mentioned Smoot-Hawley once. See a summary of the speech from Alan Alexandroff.

This morning’s speaker, Roberto Mangabeira Unger, is one of the smartest people in the world today. I had the pleasure of meeting him last year in his office in Brazil where he was the minister of strategic affairs, and we were producing the Stanley Foundation documentary “Brazil Rising.” Unger is now back to his full time post at Harvard University.

“The world is bent under the yoke of the dictatorship of no alternatives,” is how Unger began his remarks. Among other quotes (perhaps a bit paraphrased) I scribbled down during his dynamic speech:

• The global financial crisis gave us a chance to overthrow the dictatorship of no alternatives. But the opportunity has now largely past.
• Many countries today are ruled by people who want to be Franklin Delano Roosevelt but don’t know how.
• There are two main kinds of progressives and leftists in the world today. First, the recalcitrant left with no real alternative to globalization. They just want to slow it down. Second, the resigned and surrendered left who accept globalization but propose to humanize it with the sugar of tax and transfer.
• We need a third kind that proposes to fully reorganize the global economy with the aim of more socially inclusive arrangements.
• Humanity cannot establish the creative growth it desires within international institutions as they currently exist.
• We should not depend on crisis for advancement. The task of imagination is to do the work of crisis without the crisis.
• See a summary of the speech from Alan Alexandroff and a CIGI video blog with Unger.

I agree with much of Unger’s critique and proposed solutions… in my heart. No doubt the dream of the world Unger envisions animates my professional work. But in my head, I am convinced progress is only possible through the evolution of the current structure. Meanwhile Unger only sees success coming from broad, transformative structural change. And so it goes.

Evidently my view of more evolution than revolution is fairly widespread. As evidence, Unger’s inspirational speech was followed by planned panels largely focused on improving rather than throwing out existing systems. This is not a critique. Rather it is an acknowledgment that our more mundane work is best done when we remember the larger context of why we care about these issues in the first place. And Unger delivered that reminder.

One final note. In the Q and A session Unger also reminded us of some truths about Brazil and how similar it is to the United States. These bear repeating here as we lick our 2016 Olympic wounds. Brazil and the U.S. share common colonial roots, westward expansion, the shame of slavery and mistreatment of indigenous people. Plus, Unger says, these are the two most unequal countries in the world when it comes to income distribution. Yet, in both countries people at every point in society continue to believe “everything is possible.”

Tonight, another Nobel Prize winner: Paul Krugman. (See CIGI ‘09 post #2 here.)

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I hope to have some thoughts on Obama’s speech to the UN a little later today, but right now I want to focus on what may be the most underreported story of the day:  what’s happening in Australia.

Take a look at this.  It’s not Mars.

Sydney woke up this morning to a massive dust storm that turned the sky red and sent hundreds to hospitals with breathing problems.  The Associated Press, via the NYT:

Australia’s worst dust storm in 70 years blanketed the heavily populated east coast Wednesday in a cloud of red Outback grit, nearly closed the country’s largest airport and left millions of people coughing and sputtering in the streets.

No one was hurt as a result of the pall that swept in overnight, bringing an eerie orange dawn to Sydney, but ambulance services reported a spike in emergency calls from people with breathing difficulties, and police warned drivers to take it easy on the roads.

Dust clouds blowing east from Australia’s dry interior — parched even further by the worst drought on record — covered dozens of towns and cities in two states as strong winds snatched up tons of topsoil, threw it high into the sky and carried it hundreds of miles (kilometers).

The Australian provides an idea of how bad the air quality was:

Paramedics were called to help 469 patients suffering from breathing problems from 6am yesterday — 218 of them in Sydney, where particulate matter brought by the dust storm peaked at more than 15,500 micrograms per cubic metre of air.

A reading of more than 100mcg/m3 is normally taken to indicate poor-quality air, and more than 200 is ranked as hazardous to human health under the air quality index used by the [New South Wales] government.  Yet officials said readings yesterday were “off the chart” and throughout the day remained several times higher than the worst levels that would normally be seen in a bushfire, of 300 to 500mcg/m3.

Last night, even as the dust began to disperse, the readings were still more than 3000 in most parts of Sydney, reaching 4750 in the lower Hunter region and 4231 in the central tablelands.

To give you an idea of how bad this is, people were worried in the leadup to the 2008 Olympics that Beijing would have particluate matter levels of between 200 and 300 mcg/m3.  Here are the readings taken by the BBC in the days leading up to the Opening Ceremonies:

During the storm today Sydney was 550 times worse than the worst pre-Olympic reading.

As Jared Diamond noted in his book Collapse, Australia is one of the most fragile modern societies in existence.  Although this video (from Phillip Adams of the Australian Broadcast Corporation) is two years old, it provides a pretty good idea of the challenges the country faces:

As Adams notes, Australia is “looking down the barrel of a disaster.”  He talks about the potential of a Katrina in Australia, but as today’s events show, there are multiple potential crises.  Right now, the biggest challenge the country faces is not water, but the lack thereof.  Its entire infrastructure is predicated on a water table that, given weather patterns, is unsustainable.  The country is quite literally drying up.

Before the day was over, the Australia’s red dawn had passed.  Below are two shots of downtown Sydney.  The lower one was during the storm; the upper one was taken from the same spot later that afternoon:

The dust storm may be over, but Australia’s more fundamental climate challenges aren’t going anywhere.

The Big Picture has an amazing roundup of photos taken during the storm — well worth your time.

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Yesterday, after his speech, Obama did a presser (h/t Marc Lynch via his Facebook feed) with journalists from Muslim-majority countries (and not just those from the Arab world).  The whole thing is worth reading, but I was particularly struck by the following exchange with an Indonesian journalist:

Q . . .I read your book, “The Audacity of Hope,” and I had a very great hope that you can reach the Muslim community because it seemed to me your understanding of a relationship between faith and politics, especially in black churches is very much — I can imagine someone who is a Hamas or, you know, maybe radical Islamist would probably, if you take away the word “Islam” and change it with, you know, “black Christian,” it’s exactly the same.  Do you feel that way also?

THE PRESIDENT:  Well, you know, I think it’s interesting — obviously I’m a person of faith, and as a Christian, but also as somebody who believes very strongly in democracy and human rights and I’m a constitutional law professor, so I have some very strong ideas about how a pluralistic society lives together — these are things that I do spend time thinking about.

What I tried to communicate in the speech and what I believe very strongly is that in an interdependent world like ours, where the world has shrunk and different peoples with different faiths and different ideas are constantly having to coexist, that we have to have a mature faith that says “I believe with all my heart and all my soul in what I believe, but I respect the fact that somebody else believes their beliefs just as strongly.”  And so the only way that we are going to live together, or operate in a political system that can work for everybody is if we have certain rules about how we relate to each other.

I can’t force my religion on you.  I can’t try to organize a majority to discriminate against you because you’re a religious minority.  I can’t simply take what’s in my religious beliefs and say you have to believe and abide by these same things.  Now, that doesn’t mean that I can’t make arguments that are based on my belief and my faith — right?  If I’m a Christian, I believe in the Ten Commandments.  And it says, Thou Shalt Not Kill.  If I’m a politician and I say I’m going to pass a law against murdering somebody, that’s not me practicing my religious faith; that’s me practicing morality that may be based in religious faith, but that’s a universal principle — or at least one that can translate into a principle that people of various faiths can agree on.

I think it’s very important for Islam to wrestle with these issues.  Now, I recognize that not all religious beliefs are going to be exactly the same in how they think about politics.  And so in Islam there’s a debate about sharia and how strict an interpretation or how moderate an interpretation of that should be; or should that be something that is not part of the secular law.  I don’t presume to make that decision for any country or any groups of people.  But I do think that if you start having rules that guarantee other faiths and other groups, or in the case of the United States, people with no faith at all, are somehow forced to abide by somebody else’s faith, I think that is a violation of the spirit of democracy and I think that over the long term, that’s going to breed conflict in some way.  It will lead to some sort of instability and destructiveness in that society.

But, as I said, I think this is a important debate that has to take place inside Islam.  I think in the meantime, the one thing I can say for certain is that people who justify killing other people based on faith are misreading their sacred texts.  And I think they are out of alignment with God.  Now, that’s my belief.  And that, I think, is a debate that I think is settled for the vast majority of Muslims, but we have a very small minority that can be very destructive, and that’s part of what I tried to discuss in my speech.

Obama’s answer reinforces the three themes in his speech that I highlighted in one of my posts yesterday:  pragmatic globalism (”in an interdependent world like ours. . .different peoples with different faiths and different ideas are constantly having to coexist”); hard-headed realism (”the only way that we are going. . .operate in a political system. . .is if we have certain rules about how we relate to each other”); and democracy advocate (”as somebody who believes very strongly in democracy and human rights and I’m a constitutional law professor, so I have some very strong ideas about how a pluralistic society lives together”).

I’m going to assume that you didn’t just go back to read my previous post, so I’ll acknowledge that I’ve dropped the word “cautious” in my description of Obama’s support for human rights and democracy.  That’s because this answer is a far more forceful statement of his belief in the value of these ideals than anything in his speech.

Perhaps the most interesting part of Obama’s answer is his passing reference to debates over sharia law in the Muslim world.  But it also highlights a missed opportunity:  had he used his speech to cite those Islamic scholars who have rejected the fundamentalist interpretations of sharia (including the precise meaning of jihad), it would have reinforced the case those who have rejected extremist interpretations of Islam’s most important texts.

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If you believe the hype, the G-20 summit in London on Thursday could make or break the global economic recovery.  Last week, George Soros told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that “[u]nless [the G-20] comes up with practical measures to support the countries at the periphery of the global financial system, markets are going to suffer another sinking spell.

Such anxieties may be legitimate, but not merely because less developed countries don’t have a seat at the table.  Proposals to triple the funds available to the International Monetary Fund remain in limbo, in large part because China and other export-oriented governments want concessions on how the IMF is governed.  In addition, the EU strongly disagrees with the Obama Administration’s contention that further fiscal stimulus can reignite global consumption, preferring instead to focus on greater regulation of hedge funds and other highly speculative financial instruments.

But even those disagreements are little more camouflage for the real conflict.  Export-oriented governments — most notably China — appear to regard Obama Administration’s efforts to stimulate consumer spending as little more than an attempt to recreate the consumption bubble that drove global economic growth over the past two decades.

The end result is that export-oriented governments may decide that they no longer can depend on the U.S. consumer to drive their own prosperity.  As Sherle Schweninger noted in The Nation, they may choose to sustain their own export-driven policies in the mistaken belief that it will sustain their own growth.  Instead, it may spark a new global depression.

To put it another way, the real threat of neo-Hooverism is not from the Republican Party, but rather from China and other export-oriented (and low-consumption) economies.  Americans may all (or mostly) be Keynesians now, but we have yet to convince the rest of the world that they should be as well.

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