Yesterday,
new capital disclosure templates were published for comment by the members of
Basel III, the latest in international regulatory standards for banking,
requiring banks in more than 30 countries to use a common format for disclosing
the size and quality of their capital safety margins to investors.
Last week, the COP17 summit gave birth to a new agreement that commits all signatories to developing a future framework for legally binding carbon emission reductions, bringing hope of an eventual remedy to one of the key deficiencies of the Kyoto protocol.
However, in the same week, Britain elected to abstain from participation in a treaty intended to protect to the European market, leading to wholesale domestic re-evaluation of Britain’s role in an evolving European Union.
The debates will continue in 2012 with the evolution towards intergovernmental co-operation being resisted by nationalists sounding somewhat outdated calls for increasing independence in an increasingly inter-dependent world. Because rationalism tends to favour harmonisation, trends towards integration are seldom opposed on rational grounds but rather through messages of sound and fury, fear and loathing.
When Southern States began advocating for secession from the United States to preserve their "economic interests", Abraham Lincoln famously pointed out, three short years prior to the commencement of the US Civil War, that “a house divided against itself cannot stand”.
Provided that the slow evolution of international co-operation and regulation never comes at the expense of freedom of culture or expression, or the principal of subsidiarity (a principle that affirms that a more centralized level of government should exercise only those responsibilities that cannot be more effectively handled at a local level) then latter day nationalists should hopefully, ultimately, and without necessity of war, come to understand that they have little to fear from a more co-ordinated approach to solving the big problems that affect everybody equally.
Last week, the COP17 summit gave birth to a new agreement that commits all signatories to developing a future framework for legally binding carbon emission reductions, bringing hope of an eventual remedy to one of the key deficiencies of the Kyoto protocol.
However, in the same week, Britain elected to abstain from participation in a treaty intended to protect to the European market, leading to wholesale domestic re-evaluation of Britain’s role in an evolving European Union.
The debates will continue in 2012 with the evolution towards intergovernmental co-operation being resisted by nationalists sounding somewhat outdated calls for increasing independence in an increasingly inter-dependent world. Because rationalism tends to favour harmonisation, trends towards integration are seldom opposed on rational grounds but rather through messages of sound and fury, fear and loathing.
When Southern States began advocating for secession from the United States to preserve their "economic interests", Abraham Lincoln famously pointed out, three short years prior to the commencement of the US Civil War, that “a house divided against itself cannot stand”.
Provided that the slow evolution of international co-operation and regulation never comes at the expense of freedom of culture or expression, or the principal of subsidiarity (a principle that affirms that a more centralized level of government should exercise only those responsibilities that cannot be more effectively handled at a local level) then latter day nationalists should hopefully, ultimately, and without necessity of war, come to understand that they have little to fear from a more co-ordinated approach to solving the big problems that affect everybody equally.
For all the
contemporary criticism leveled against the European Union, none of these
critics lived through the continents’ great wars and nothing in their criticism
can trump the truth: from the time European supra-nationalism was first
introduced, major warfare amongst member states became unthinkable.
Let’s hope
2012 sees our global body politic keep moving in the right direction.
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