The agreement, p.1
THE AGREEMENT, page 1
THE AGREEMENT
The International Conference
Richard Rowley
Copyright © 2024 by Richard Rowley.
Library of Congress Control Number:
2024906455
ISBN:
Hardcover
978-1-6698-8155-1
Softcover
978-1-6698-8156-8
eBook
978-1-6698-8154-4
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to any actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Getty Images are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.
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Rev. date: 04/30/2024
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CONTENTS
Prologue - Fear
Chapter 1 Col And Royale
Chapter 2 Jo
Chapter 3 Naman And Sha
Chapter 4 Pope
Chapter 5 Hil
Chapter 6 Roald
Chapter 7 Dalton
Chapter 8 Siatin
Chapter 9 Misu
Chapter 10 Ivy
Chapter 11 Beijing -The Conference
Chapter 12 The Conference
Chapter 13 A Kidnapping
Chapter 14 Another Kidnapping
Chapter 15 Nominations For President
Chapter 16 Ten Weeks Later
Chapter 17 And The Winner Is
PROLOGUE
FEAR
THE YEAR IS 2170. Only fifty years ago the planet was in a dire situation. Fear was rife. Fear from health pandemics. Fear from threats of war. Fear from government corruption. Fear from neighbours lying to achieve personal benefits. Fear from the impacts of greed. Fear of the failure to address global solutions to protect Planet Earth. Fear of privacy invasions. The total lack of trust in governments. The quest for money versus planned survival. Every community fearful for their own survival.
The media corporations and the political classes across the planet had lost authority and respect. Their history looks grim. Their future maybe even more so.
The first two covid health pandemics in the 2nd millennium had been managed with less than 20 million deaths. Since then, two more world-wide health pandemics left over one hundred million people dead and over four hundred million unable to care for themselves for a period of over one year.
In the 20th century there were two world wars as well as several power disputes and civil wars. During the last hundred and seventy years two more significant world wars and more than twenty internal or border wars, continued to dominate international affairs. Millions of civilians had been killed. Every government was fearful of its own people’s anger and personal greed. Fear of another world war was debilitating.
Many of these skirmishes were for control of resources that would have significant value to their protector’s populations, or to the victor’s economies. More critically, they were driven by nationalism whereby one nation believed it was more important than their neighbour and needed more resources for itself. The simplest way to achieve that was merely to take it. Nationalism was the hook that carried political power.
These hostilities opened doors for further terrorist and armed insurrection activities. The challenges were not limited to poorer nations. About sixty years ago, following the last world war, the governments of the largest economies on the planet, in Russia, North America and China, were each respectively challenged by their own people. These were civil uprisings that represented the most impossible challenges to manage. Civil unrest at an unprecedented scale.
The peoples of these nations were seeking paid work so they could feed and house and look after their families. They wanted a fair chance to be successful. Whereas the military forces of those countries had always seen their greatest threats coming from each other, or at least from other nations, they were each confronted by a population so enraged and so ungovernable as to leave them simply struggling to remain stable. Their armaments and their trained forces were not designed to be turned on their own people.
This had become an historic turning point. Fear was the operative word. The leaders of each of these countries were in fear both from their own populations and from insurgency groups, while the people themselves were in fear of their personal health risks and of their neighbour’s greed and envy. The protection and entitlement of a way of living enjoyed by a privileged minority all but disappeared. The status quo was no longer promising a hopeful future for the majority.
The failure of capitalism’s profit drivers, combined with governments’ failure to understand they had a duty to fund a defensive health strategy for their whole community, had left the world without a comprehensive health plan. They no longer had a capacity to protect people from deadly diseases. The WHO (World Health Organisation) was not funded to be proactive in this sphere. While some country’s political elite still believed health was an individual responsibility, the large majority now accepted it was in the interests of the whole community to provide investment and safeguards to protect each population from pandemics and contagious health challenges.
Investment into research was a critical part of this responsibility. Slowly, it had been recognised that governments needed to invest, in tandem with the private sector, and widely, whether the recipients could afford the cost or not, because ongoing sustainable protection for the whole community was only available if everyone was protected. The profit driver alone was too slow to accommodate this need. A key issue was gaining the trust and confidence of their populations. Governance was not possible unless a substantial majority wanted it. It could not be left to chance.
Before the last world war, there had been a side-show of power between the holders of veto powers at the United Nations and those who were buying military strength from those vetoing powers. The UN had become irrelevant in managing conflicts between nations. Their capacity to use armaments to challenge oppressive regimes of any sort was virtually excluded by the powers of the veto. In addition, their failure to agree on common actions to restrain recalcitrant actions was negated by the rights of veto.
Extremist religions, extremist nationalistic and tribal leadership, and extremist power imbalances within communities were the cause of many people losing faith in their governments and therefore their hopes for a better future. Religious leaders pounced on these opportunities to strengthen their power base. Their impact was to encourage people to ignore their political leaders and seek survival, faith and hope from their communal beliefs. Fear was encouraged to persuade allegiances.
Even more communities were no longer willing to stand up for the oppressed. Rather, they sought shelter and protected themselves and their own positions. The easy acquisition of arms and weaponry made it difficult to police and impossible to stop insurrections without risking the lives of many more innocent people. Survival was a daily challenge for most people.
The constant fear of another world war was pervasive.
At the same time many countries on the planet were not able to recover from the weather storms and droughts and resulting flooding, destruction, and mayhem. Particularly with the changing climate and its impact, both on the coastal communities with sea levels rising, and the hinterlands with droughts and wildfires, all over the planet. Despite international conferences and agreements to confront climate change that was then mostly attributed to the people living on this planet, they had made little difference. The conclusion had to be that climate change was substantially a natural phenomenon which they needed to manage. It had taken more than a century of time to reach this position. The human cost as well as the financial cost was enormous.
These “challenges” at last, focused most leader groups on the planet to realise they needed to work together to maintain a balance and ensure all their activities are conducive for establishing long-term needs for a healthy planet as a permanent environment for every living thing. Although not secure, the international focus on protecting the planet and working together is now more widely accepted. Notwithstanding this general agreement, there continues to be substantial disagreement and debate about how to ameliorate the damage, how to fund it, and how to reach agreements that could be trusted and binding.
As one leader described this situation, it was finally making the populations on this planet realise they needed to collaborate and assist each other to survive over the next millennia as if they were being attacked or infiltrated from a distant planet by a civilisation that sought to take this planet for their own use. He had drawn a parallel between the challenges we were now actually fa
That reality is not as farfetched as it was once believed. The recent discovery of several individuals whose bodies had been taken over by a process whereby their understanding of space and of the universe we live in was so superior and unknown to ours that they were suspected to be the subjects of some incredibly progressive experiment from another world. Many denied this possibility. The fear was that it was just the tip of an iceberg which we could never confront. However remote in our lifetimes, it makes us realise that this danger will require all of us to be vigilant and to work together to defend planet earth. Retreating into our national borders is now seen as fraught. One nation could not succeed on their own.
Consequently, and probably foreseeably, many leaders of countries, of religions, of ethnicities, and of communities now understand that acquiring an advantage by hoarding resources and defending them with armaments is a travesty. Making your tribe controllers of their geographic footprint will not protect them. Building walls and buying weapons will not protect them. Weaponizing trade to prevent food from being grown and harvested and sold to the people who need it is problematic. Their real enemies are themselves unless they learn to work collaboratively. Whether the resources are land, water, air or even people, these are not capable of being owned or even retained for another generation at the expense of the present population on the planet.
This conundrum was realised as pivotal. National boundaries are one major barrier. Unfortunately, we will and must continue to argue and debate and challenge every move we make. Fortunately, there is now agreement to do so. But failing agreement, the need for a process that is binding and fair and accepted by everyone is critical. No group can have a veto right to prevent a solution.
Hence the existence, in the last fifty years of a dominant international governance authority, simply called “The Agreement.”
Fifty years ago, the United Nations organisation was wound up. It was integrated into The Agreement; in particular, its governance was totally changed to ensure that the weight of voting represented both the population of each member and the size of their respective economies. The veto control by the few large countries who retained that power over the UN’s proceedings, thus preventing actions even against the wishes of the great majority of members, was cancelled. This was one key factor. The other main one, was the need to value proportionately, the countries who paid the most to make the organisation work, to ensure they hold representative power. The structural changes of national governance during the decades starting in the year 2120 was pivotal.
The United States, the largest and most powerful economy on the planet, had restructured into three politically separate groups of states. They remain fully aligned and powerful working conjointly in defence and foreign affairs but are still becoming more independent of each other in defence and in domestic concerns. The Cantonese speaking Chinese had rejected the very staunch communist construct, after a century of warring, and were now non-aligned with the remainder of China. Their position was decided within their democratic community rather than for them by an absent elite Communist Party in Beijing. The southern cities in China, aligned with Taiwan and Hong Kong, were also now separated from northern Chinese Communist Party governance.
The Chinese states are still a very powerful and important. As with the American states, the Chinese states are strongly loyal to each other in foreign affairs and boundary defences.
The United Arab Emirates changed its membership. Countries such as Egypt, Iran, and several African states had joined together to support their populations. In Europe, Russia and Germany and several previously non-aligned countries have regrouped to support each other’s resource needs and manufacturing productivity.
All of these changes were a direct result of the understanding that the traditional national boundaries designed when the mobility of people was constrained, had become irrelevant or at the very least, less important. Those boundaries had been critical in the management of economic and political power between nationalities. Using regulatory and trade sanctions as well as negotiating trade preferences, governments had previously stopped companies trading when they determined these companies were not aligned with their national principles or strategies.
The underlying strategy that changed this historic dependence on strict boundaries related to the need to create a global economy that was more efficient in looking after everyone. The need to provide a basic level of access for everyone, including provision of food and shelter, but also looking after the planet for all its inhabitants, human or other, had been recognised as too important. On the other hand, the need for nations to compete and succeed was still protected. Everyone could never be equal.
The failure of many members to accept they needed to contribute to the solutions with financial support proportionate to their GDP combined with a recognition of their population size had been another critical challenge. Importantly, there was the underlying realisation, especially by the larger powers, that controlling armaments and selling them to any buyer who afforded them, was suicidal. At least three of that group of countries had been protecting their power and their financial strength by this warfare manufacturing support process. They would, at the United Nations, veto any actions that might prevent another “arms deal” or that might challenge their control of essential resources. Although they had nuclear energy, they sought to limit the distribution of that technology to others. In addition, it had always been understood that interfering in the governance and policies of other countries was generally not acceptable. The global strategy required change.
However, this protection of national interests would no longer be tolerated. If there were serious offensive actions and activities occurring inside another country, rather than taking unilateral actions, the proper course now was to file a case with the governance of The Agreement where all parties, including the offenders, would be bound by their determinations. Failure to adhere to these would invite a concerted action from the whole international community to seek correction of the position, notwithstanding the inconvenience. This was the agreed process but in practice, it has not yet needed to be fully implemented. The realisation that war had become too destructive was now looking more ingrained and so far, at least, the members were seeking a managed solution to any international issues.
At last, the old order of power broking by the best armed against the weaker is unacceptable. There is a clear need for and acceptance of this latest effort to protect the planet and all inhabitants, including all-natural life on it. This is a key purpose of The Agreement. It has taken hundreds of years, far too many for most people, to reach this point, and consequently the damage is nearly irreversible. Some life forms will still die, and some inhumanity will still occur, but on a global scale, the potential for change is immense.
The Agreement design is intended to sideline some national competitiveness. In addition, many who were most recalcitrant argued they were still playing “catch-up” and felt they would be disadvantaged by the change. The events of the last hundred years had eventually culminated in multinational commitments. That included acceptance that we needed to adapt to the climate changes and not cling to the belief we can reverse them.
It had been agreed that in principle there was no future in a competition between nations for absolute control. The powerful economies would still deliver better outcomes, but the planet needed to provide for and cope with the ten billion people as well as the animals and plants. It was going to require trust and perseverance. History suggested, very strongly, that this was an impossible dream. Many scientists suggested the planet would not support more than half that number of humans.
The counterfactual is unknown, but best guessed as being catastrophic. In reality, no one wants to find it. The Agreement is now their best hope.
