Private Power [antikvár]

Introduction All power is private. Power means authority, power to decide, to say yes or no. Decisions are made by people, whether they sit in the Kremlin or midtown Manhattan. When we read planning, our inner eye begins to imagine the faces of the planners. Power is fascinating, but as any screenwriter knows, power has to be attached to somebody. Our everyday lives and mental landscapes are filled with its —governments, OPEC, political parties, multinational corporations, the Pentagon. A government is the ultimate incarnation of power. Whether monolithic or pluralistic, it recognizes no law superior to the one it chooses to write. It holds sway over all and everything within the realm. It is almighty. The United Nations is not the supreme world order; it is an association of sovereign states. But power is fleeting. Governments are voted out of office; dictators die. We may be at the tail end of the century that cut up all landmass except Antarctica into nation-states—at last count 152 flags flutter in alphabetic order in front of the UN, and seven more are waiting to be hoisted—but we're also living at the dawn of interdependence and global concerns. By force of habit and familiarity of politics, we tend to. look for national solutions to energy, overpopulation, and development. But our aspirations, both latent and official, are changing. We begin to realize that threats to peace and internal order may have little to do with any nuclear standoff, that the new menaces are economic, biological, and environmental. Runaway population growth can destroy a country's ecosystem and disrupt its social structure more ruthlessly than a foreign adversary; encroaching desert may pose a greater danger than invading armies. Economic isolation can leave a country backward and uninspired.