THE SECOND SUPERPOWER: AN AWAKENED GLOBAL PUBLIC

THE SECOND SUPERPOWER: AN AWAKENED GLOBAL PUBLIC
By Mark Sommer
IPS COLUMNIST SERVICE, MARCH 2003

If George W. Bush has achieved no other constructive act in his calamitous two-year tenure, he has unwittingly triggered a global tectonic shift: a new citizen superpower is emerging to challenge the primacy of global elites, writes Mark Sommer, journalist and director of the Mainstream Media Project, a syndicated radio programme.

In this article for IPS, Sommer writes that the global argument over whether to allow the Bush administration to attack Iraq is accelerating citizen alienation from leadership elites and stimulating among disparate publics worldwide a supranational solidarity that transcends geography, ethnicity, and ideology.

Yet before they celebrate this breakthrough moment, citizen activists must confront the continuing weaknesses in their new-found strength. Sustaining a democratic and enduring ''citizen superpower'' capable of tempering the excesses of the elite superpower will require steady effort, clarity of purpose, and eternal vigilance against a totalitarian temptation arising from within as well as without.
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