G-8 protesters are their own worst enemies
You have to give it to Greenpeace: their speedboat stunt at the G-8 summit was truly spectacular. If climate-change campaigners ever tire of trying to save the world, a lucrative career in Hollywood surely beckons.
But just as Tinseltown must conjure up ever-more dramatic special effects to capture jaded audiences’ attention, media-savvy protesters have become victims of their own success: high-jinks that only recently might have captivated viewers scarcely cause them to bat an eyelid these days. Greenpeace’s coup de théâtre this week is simply the exception that proves the rule.
Even violent protests do not have the impact they once had. When a WTO meeting turned into the Battle of Seattle back in 1999, many sensed a turning point: veteran campaigners felt rumblings of 1968, while a younger generation of revolutionaries dreamed that global capitalism might crumble as communism had done a decade earlier.
When a protester was killed by riot police at the G-8 summit in Genoa in 2002, the anti-globalisation campaign claimed its first martyr. But despite their scale and violence, the riots in Rostock last weekend had lost much of their power to shock.
The Iraq war is no doubt partly responsible, both because the anti-war movement has absorbed much of the energy that was once devoted to protesting against globalisation, and because it has inured people to seeing much worse carnage on the news each day.
But perhaps the biggest reason why people switch off during the now-ritual protests at the G-8 is that the protesters themselves never concede that they achieve anything useful.
For the second year running, I have been invited to participate on BBC World’s Have Your Say programme to discuss the G-8. Each time, the substance of the debate was not what the G-8 was doing but whether the G-8 served a purpose at all. And each time critics queued up to say that the G-8 was a pointless talking shop. Why, then, should people care about the protests?
Undeniably, the G-8 is flawed: Canada is a member but not China, Italy but not India; grand ambitions have to be watered down to reach a consensus; governments often do not follow through on what is agreed.
But the G-8 is not useless. If it did not exist, it would need to be invented.
It is surely helpful that Presidents Putin and Bush met and tried to defuse the growing tensions between Russia and NATO. It is important that G-8 governments reaffirmed their commitment to help Africa tackle AIDS. And by putting global warming at the top of the G-8 agenda, Germany’s Angela Merkel has successfully pressured President Bush in to taking the first step on the long road to a post-Kyoto agreement.
That is a bigger achievement than Greenpeace’s eye-catching, but ultimately vacuous, stunt.