The Emerging Global Citizens Network There is a newly emerging social movement taking place throughout the world today. For want of a name let us call it the international coalition of responsible citizens. Characteristic of this movement is its lack of centralized guidance. On the contrary, a strong feature is its spontaneous and decentralized nature, spanning all peoples, cultures and social classes. Another key feature is the diversity of issues which serve as the particular catalysts for action, whether it be economically dispossessed workers in Argentina taking control of production facilities in their bankrupted economy, local fishing communities protesting about the destruction of their fishing environments, or the young people of the West protesting against the secretive dealings of global economic summits. All of these people have a sense that they have been 'pushed too far' and that if they do not start to organize themselves and push back they will loose whatever cultural, political and economic independence and freedom they have. At the root of this movement is the direct experience felt by countless millions of people throughout the world that local community life, with all its attendant benefits,  is collapsing under pressure from hugely resourced organizations, which operate according to very narrow definitions of self-benefit. At root it is a dispute of ownership. Is the earth owned by all of its people, and should it be managed for the benefit of all its people, or is it the legal property of those few who have been clever enough to devise a system of distribution which transfers ownership to themselves. Another fundamental issue is the management of the earth and its resources. Do we want to manage things in such a way that the biological systems, on which we all depend for life, are able to perpetuate themselves indefinitely, or are we prepared to see them 'mined' to the point where they collapse in order to feed our short-term self-indulgence. At best our current habit of converting natures capital into short-lived product, is impoverishing the quality of life for all for ever, at worst it is destabilizing the earths living systems to such an extent that human life may become impossible in the not too distant future.

Riga, Latvia 1991

So enormous are the stakes in this struggle and so immediate are many of the problems, in their impact upon peoples every day lives, that there is a growing sense that action must be taken now. Waiting for the earths political mechanisms and structures to solve the problem is no longer an option. The politicians have had several decades to take the necessary action and, apart from generating countless words and documents, have done virtually nothing or any real substance. In the mean time much of the responsibility for enforcing international law has passed into corporate hands, through processes such as the GATT. In many countries, including those in the West, politicians are sponsored by business interests, which have a very limited definition of what constitutes the common good. This only seeks to further undermine the ability of politicians to respond to the will of the citizenry whom they nominally represent.

We may think that social legality rests with governments. Historically governments undertake to protect the lives and liberties of their citizens in return for a consent to govern. In a modern democracy this is taken further, in that the general citizenry is considered mature enough to periodically review the government and to change it, if not satisfied with the general state of society. In such a situation the government produces law on behalf of its people, which means that ultimately it is the people who make the law. The law is there to protect the common good from those who would abuse others for their own selfish ends. If the law ceases to protect the common good but instead begins to protect the rights and privileges of a small minority it increasingly ceases to be regarded as legitimate in the eyes of the majority of citizens. It would now seem that in the face of the global threats facing the planet as a whole and the sustainability of healthy local community life, a significant cross-section of the global citizenry is out-evolving its own government institutions and challenging the law through direct action.

If a people are ruled by a dictatorship, suffering severe oppression, there will be times when the people refuse to be ruled by such regimes, as happened, for example, during the fall of the former Soviet satellite regimes. In such moments the people take back the right to define what is and what is not legal and just. A similar situation is now beginning to take place on a global scale in all manner of circumstances and in the face of a diverse multitude of different threats, but with one idea in common, namely that there is something seriously wrong with the direction in which human society and our current economic system is taking us.

This flow diagram indicates the general social dynamic determining the ratio of citizen loyalty to government and the law. Click on the diagram for a more detailed version

Further Contents and Links

Snapshot Earth: A visitors analysis of the current state of our planet

New Page 1Civil Society and the collapse of the WTO Agenda in Seattle by Nicanor Perlas http://www.info3.de/English/e-0100perlas.html

http://www.earthcharter.org/

http://www.peoplesearthdecade.org/

http://www.earthchartersummits.org/

http://www.earthshare.org/about_us/aboutus.html

http://www.peopleandplanet.org/

http://www.zmag.org/prashcalam.htm

http://www.join-me.co.uk/

http://www.michaelmoore.com/

http://www.tnews.com/ecotopia/

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