trends and future of sustainable development - TransEco

COPENHAGEN FAILURE AND NORTH-SOUTHDYNAMICSTeea KortetmäkiUniversity of Jyväskyläteea.kortetmaki@jyu.fi1. IntroductionThis study is a rhetorical-philosophical analysis of select Copenhagen Climate Convention publicspeeches. I chose the most important speeches covering different kind of participants from major tominor economies, from developed to developing countries and from statesmen to organizationrepresentatives. In this paper, the concept of North refers to UNFCCC's so-called Annex I group(developed nations) while South refers to non-Annex I countries (developing nations).When I chose the speeches, the most important criterion was to get material that covered bothwealthy and poor nations (North and South) and those in the transitional stage. For these reasons theUnited States (Barack Obama), the African Union (Meles Zenawi) and China (Jiabao Wen) were naturalchoices. As the African Union represents a group of nations from South (a unit representing acompromised interest of its members), I decided to include an example of a smaller South negotiator toget material that may accentuate ”the voice of South”: Zimbabwe (Robert Mugabe) is a very minornegotiator, but for that very reason, its rhetoric is very illuminating for this analysis. To balance this withanother voice from North, Tony Blair was an interesting choice because of his dual linkage, as herepresented his own non-governmental organisation (The Office of Tony Blair) but has been politicallyassociated with the Great Britain in the media.This paper aims at answering the following questions:What sort of North-South dynamics can be revealed from the chosen Copenhagen ClimateConvention’s speeches? How is the possibility for ”crossing the North-South gap” enhanced or impairedin the speeches?Thus far, studies of climate rhetoric have been rather scarce, while ethical questions have dominatedphilosophical climate change discussions. Rhetoric studies can help reveal closed discourses and toexplicate them. Further understanding of rhetoric could help illuminate the problems of the publicenvironmental discourse, while also giving ideas of how to enhance it (Bruner & Oelschlaeger 2008, 216-221). These revelations may also benefit the social sciences by approaching climate change from otherperspectives: rhetorical studies, for example, illustrate the prevailing conceptions of ethical concepts andenlighten the dynamics and relations between different participants.138