Regardless of its stated agenda, the real substance of the G20’s Toronto meeting is the relationship between power and paranoia.
How else to make sense of the preparations so extreme they have turned downtown Toronto into an armed camp?
The ostensible reason, of course, is security, but that doesn’t begin to explain what’s happening. If security were the issue, the meeting would not have been held in downtown Toronto, or any other city for that matter.
One can only understand the fencing now in place around the city as a symbolic gesture rather than a response to a practical concern. It is the metaphorical line in the asphalt, but made real. It is fear made manifest.
Given the nature of 21st-century political leadership, which finds itself challenged at every turn, such a response should come as no surprise. This is a siege mentality acted out in steel and concrete. We question not just the decisions of the ruling elites, but their very existence and certainly their right to make decisions. That is true across Europe, North America, and here in Canada, where our prime minister enjoys the support of less than one third of the population.
As novelist and semiotics theorist Umberto Eco would remind us, the fences and the disappearance of much the infrastructure of urban life can be interpreted as a sign.
“A sign,” he writes, “is everything which can be taken as significantly substituting for something else. This everything else does not necessarily have to exist or to actually be somewhere at the moment in which the sign stands in for it.”
As Eco goes on to argue, if something can be used to tell the truth, it can also be used to tell a lie.
Writing recently in these pages, Michael Byers, Canada Research Chair in Global Politics and International Law at the University of British Columbia and a member of the 2010 Vancouver Olympics Civil Liberties Advisory Committee, said, “If Vancouver can teach Toronto anything about protests, it’s that police must exercise restraint, especially when provoked. The vast majority of protesters do not wish violence. Treated well, they are the most valuable asset that security planners have.
“Well-intentioned protesters can exercise peer pressure on potential perpetrators of violence, as occurred in Vancouver. They know that law-breaking can impede or distract from their message — if the message is in fact getting through.”
But Byers assumes that the purpose of the G20 preparations is, in fact, security. Suppose it isn’t. Suppose the real intention is to create a sign, an indication of a crisis so dire it overshadows the issues people expect the G20 to solve. Certainly, it signals a perceived threat too overwhelming to allow anyone to get anywhere close to the leaders, the targets of this potential violence.
And yet surely the average citizen in any of the G20 nations wishes their leaders well. Surely they hope that the crises that have devastated so many lives will be dealt with once and for all. Surely they hope the economic downturn, environmental degradation, and the whole agenda of woe will be addressed.
But we know better.
The G20 has become an obstacle like the one it was intended to eliminate back in the days of the G6. With its paraphernalia of bureaucracy and trappings of power, it has grown heavy and cumbersome. It has taken on a logic that overshadows its original purpose.
The leaders have disappeared behind a fortress of three-metre-tall walls, concrete buttresses and the whole infrastructure of paranoia.
With this G20 meeting, the biggest and most expensive ever staged, semiotics may finally have overwhelmed content. The more optimistic interpretation is that face time is desirable even at such a heavily scripted event. Though undoubtedly true, it would be an added bonus, not part of the plan. The semiotic subtext is the reaffirmation of power. And who’s more anxious to make such a statement than our own prime minister, Stephen Harper, a leader whose grasp on power has always been shaky at best. He, as much as any other, would feel the need to send a signal.
The result cannot be ignored, especially in Toronto, a city as open and accessible as any. Seen through the eyes of G20 organizers, however, it becomes an endless source of unintended weaponry and possible violence. Garbage bins must be removed, parking ticket dispensers, bus shelters . . . Even a lowly sapling cannot be left in place lest it be turned into a killing device by some crazed protester.
The city has been revealed to be other than what we thought. The decorative has become deadly, accessibility a liability. Thanks to the G20, we have a new interpretation of the urban condition; we now see the city through different eyes. This is the world according to the paranoid. As usual, things weren’t what they seemed.
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