World on Fire: This week just shows how important empowered local government and international cooperation really are

Ada Colau, the Mayor of Barcelona, and Barcelona En Comu are the most recognisable face of the municipal movement. Photograph: #‎PrimaveraDemocratica‬ amb Pablo Iglesias i Ada Colau by Barcelona En Comú (License) (Cropped)

The last week brought another of those sad and scary moments we're becoming dangerously accustomed to. What 2016 taught us was that we can always find something bad happening somewhere if we have broad enough news coverage.

But in the past week the most powerful man in the world escalated tensions, with a much smaller country, to the brink of a nuclear war. He then failed to identify and condemn fascist terrorism occurring right under his nose, virtually in his own back yard.

These things cannot become a new normal.

We are living in a fragmented and further fragmenting world. The far right are not ascendant, but they are flourishing, and the most powerful man is acting like a lone wolf - in all of the worst possible meanings of that phrase.

These are exactly the reasons why we so need municipalism and internationalism. We need real and empowered local democracy, coupled with a sense of international cooperation, in order to change our perspective - and fight off the dying embers of the nationalist conflagration that so many times has nearly burned our world.

It can be understood why people feel so attached to nations and flags and the pride they inspire, but nationalism has taken us all to some very dark places. And in the present, that means far right terrorism - near indistinguishable, whether Islamist fundamentalism or white supremacist and Christian nationalist - and raised the spectre of a limited exchange nuclear war.

For more than a century and a half, nationalism has been a poison in our veins. Domestically, our lives and the wealth we create is directed away from our wellbeing and progression, into the service of destruction - even while some are left completely without.

Abroad, people - ordinary citizens - are reduced unfairly, unjustly and inaccurately to being colluders in the deadly games of tyrants and terrorists. And it is these people, usually the frontline of victims for these criminals, over whose head the Sword of Damocles dangles. They deserve compassion, but get the point of a spear.

The big challenges of our time - environmental, energy, economic, population - are the problems of the whole world. No zealous corner, putting itself first, can address these issues alone. Cooperation is the best strategy.

But cooperation between who? For more than a century, people have been rendered synonymous with their nations - for better and mostly worse. That has to stop. People need to be empowered in their communities and have a voice through them.

The last few years, the past few weeks in particular, make it hard to believe, but the great trend of history is that things get better. That is the lesson of the work of the late Hans Rosling. And even our empathy too is widening.

There was a slogan in the sixties: "Think globally, act locally". It's never been more relevant. We need to see that our problems don't respect artificial borders. We need to pitch in and make change happen on our own doorstep, in cooperation with our neighbours and neighbouring communities.

We can take back control, but it isn't achieved by falling back into nationalism. It doesn't involve drawing crude borders between territories, drawing crude distinctions between peoples - looking always for difference rather than commonality.

We need to give people real power over their lives. We need to give people consent over their lives and how their communities are shaped. We need to build bridges within communities and between them. And, from the bottom up, reshape our perspective.

Closed or Global - is that the only choice? South America's political tides hold an important lesson for Europe

Mauricio Macri, Argentina's new globalising President, casting his ballot in 2015. Photograph: Mauricio Macri vota by Mauricio Macri (License) (Cropped)

Europe, after nearly a decade of economic turmoil, seems to find itself on a precipice. Behind lie the shattered ruins of the social democratic consensus and the overbearing shadow of its failing replacement globalisation. Ahead in the darkness is sectarianism: populist, nationalist and authoritarian.

Populism in South America

While wrestling with this seemingly polarised and precarious position, Europe should look to South America. After its own struggles to shake off America imperialism, the Regan-Thatcher neoliberal doctrine, a crisis of poverty and, in parts, conservative authoritarianism, South America saw a popular electoral revolt in favour of populist parties offering social rights.

In obviously varying circumstances, but with some common discontents, from Hugo Chavez's Bolivarian Socialists in Venezuela 1998, to Nestor Kirchner's Peronist Justicialists in 2003, and Evo Morales' Campesino Socialists in 2005, and others in between, a so-called pink tide overturned the neoliberal status quo.

Despite the obvious allusions to socialism, the popular campaigns for social rights where fought within an increasingly closed state system, with overtly nationalist overtones - and frequently at the cost of political rights and transparency. Those who began as reformers faced accusations of endorsing narrow and unshakeable parties of power, with the "typical vices: personalism, clientelism, corruption, harassing of the press" (Bosoer & Finchelstein, 2015).

Populist-Globalist Revolving Door

As social conditions have undermined the globalist response to Europe's crisis, economic conditions have undermined South America's closed populist system. Weak exports have led to a continuing downturn (The World Bank, 2016) - exposing the fact that it is easier to maintain repression if social rights keep being extended along with the money to fund them.

As Europe is increasingly turning from globalism to find populism ahead, South America is doing the opposite. Mauricio Macri, for Republican Proposal party and Cambiemos coalition, presented Argentina with an open globalised alternative to the closed populist nationalist government of the Justicialists in 2015 and was elected President.

But there is little reason to believe that South America's new open global option is likely to meet any less dissatisfaction than it has in Europe, where the 2008 financial crisis, and the sovereign debt accrued in managing it, was seen as an opportunity by the globalised financial sector - ostensibly pressing the idea that governments are not above the law, in order to effectively claim rent on state debt.

Argentina itself already has long experience of wrangling with this system, that has used American courts to try and force state policy on repayment of national debts, accumulated through bond sales. The power of that global finance sector and its power to shape fiscal policy, in effect essentially shaping the economics of entire states, is all too familiar a subject of exasperation in Europe.

The Role of Social Democracy

While South America has struggled for stability between populism and globalism against a back drop of military juntas, in Europe, for a time, there was shelter to be found within social democracy. The social democratic project provided safeguards against either extreme, closed and global, while trying to include the benefits - like social rights and widespread access to capital and investment.

However, the 2008 crisis undermined social democracy. Its adherent parties have been severely weakened, perhaps fatally. Too many times, social democracy chose to back the alienating establishment instead of reforming it and the moderate left, in Europe and South America, found itself shackled to neoliberalism as part of a desperately defended mainstream.

South America's leaders responded to economic pressures by advancing a closed system. Leaders in Europe, after 2008, embraced the global system to overcome its problems. Now, with both under pressure, they seem ready to swap. But neither have proved to be a sound solution.

What is needed is a 'new' social democracy, a replacement for the old and worn out system. But a new balance has to be found. It isn't enough to be a part of the establishment, to be an insider, taking the edge off of its worst extremes. A consensus that recognises the demand for political liberties, civil rights and pluralism alongside social rights, that embraces an open society through internationalism rather than globalism.

Right now, the choice presented to the people of South America and Europe is between closed and global. But it doesn't have restricted to these exclusive polar positions. It is a false and exclusionary dilemma. A better consensus is possible.