EU lethargy and growing irrelevance in global public affairs owes much to Eurocentric political atavism. One potential benefit of the Copenhagen debacle could be that it forces the Union to wake up to the new world of the twenty first century.

Much of the world was shaken from its lethargy on disaster preparedness by the Asian tsunami in December 2004. The following month, 168 countries adopted an international blueprint for disaster risk reduction at the World Conference on Disaster Reduction, hosted by the city of Kobe, Hyogo Prefecture, the scene in 1995 of one of Japan s worst earthquakes, with more than 5,000 lives lost.

It is the result of an international climate where the ghosts of yesteryear, of the notion of guaranteeing peace through the fear of confrontation, have once again come to haunt us, as reflected in the breakdown of the 2005 Review Conference of the Parties to the Treaty on the Non Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT) and the lethargy of the Disarmament Commission.