Nathan Gardels is the editor-in-chief of Noema Magazine.
At the Berggruen Institute’s Planetary Summit at Palazzo Diedo in Venice at the end of November, Nils Gilman argued that it is way past time for a new world-ordering paradigm that transcends the nation-state to cope with common challenges from pandemics to climate change that entangle humans in one interdependent planetary habitat.
“Recognizing our planetary condition simply acknowledges a longstanding reality,” he told the gathering. “Human beings have always already been part of the planet. We have never been masters of it. Unfortunately, post-Enlightenment epistemologies, and the systems of governance derived from them, have for too long disavowed both these facts. The longstanding — in fact eternal — reality is that the flourishing of human societies is impossible without the flourishing of the multifarious lifeforms of our planet.”
He continued: “In the face of this condition of planetarity, the impotence of national-level responses and the limitations of supranational bodies like the World Health Organization or the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change have become painfully clear. The actions of sovereign nation-states are by definition demarcated along territorial lines and therefore cannot translate to a planetary scale.”
What is needed, says Gilman, “is a radical rethink of the very architecture of planetary governance in light of this condition of planetarity.” Or, as I put it in my remarks in Venice, what is now called for is not the old “realpolitik” that seeks to secure the interests of nation-states against each other but a “Gaiapolitik” that aims at securing a livable biosphere for all.
As logically compelling as this case may be, the paradigm shift underway is going in the opposite direction. Instead of the global interconnectivity forged in recent decades maturing into a planetary perspective, it is breaking up into a renewed nationalism more emphatic than before the advent of globalization.
In short, as I pointed out in Venice, the present political temper across the world is out of sync with the planetary imperative.
The Politics Of Planetary Realism
All of this makes the politics of what can be called “planetary realism” a vexing endeavor. It entails both a recognition of the interdependence of the planetary condition as well as a realistic grasp of what it will take to navigate through what remains a world of nation-states.
This is where such alternative notions as decision-division allocated among appropriate scales of governance, sub-national as well as non-state networks of the willing, and a “partnership of rivals” come in.
For example, when President-elect Donald Trump formally pulled the U.S. out of the Paris climate accord during his last administration, then-California Governor Jerry Brown intensified the state’s cooperation with China’s provinces on de-carbonization strategies, including efforts, among others, to align the metrics of their carbon-trading markets so they could one day be integrated with each other. The present governor, Gavin Newsom, also visited China last year to meet President Xi Jinping to enhance and deepen that collaboration even as U.S.-China relations worsened at the national level.
Acting as a new breed of subnational statesmen, both Brown and Newsom have understood that while the U.S. and China may well survive the decoupling of their economies from each other, the world will not survive the decoupling of climate cooperation between the two largest carbon emitters on the planet. “Divorce is not an option,” Newsom declared in Beijing last year.
Despite all other tensions between these two incommensurate political systems, what Newsom calls the “fundamental and foundational” climate summons must bind the two together in partnership despite rivalry in other realms. This climate cooperation embodies the idea of “a partnership of rivals.”
California is just one case among many where trans-localism can circumnavigate geopolitics. We don’t have to wait for the nation-state as the cumulative causation of local, regional and non-state actors can move the needle. One saving grace of the climate challenge is that, as a distributed reality, it can be addressed in a distributed way.
Doing The Right Thing For Other Reasons
While climate action does not have to wait for the nation-state, the capacity of nation-states to mobilize domestic populations and resources to shape outcomes remains decisive for crossing the threshold of effective mitigation.
Here, something new is emerging — “green nationalism” — that, in essence, does the right thing for other reasons. Or, to put it another way, it paradoxically advances the planetary agenda on nationalist grounds.
Industrial policies designed to make the green energy transition across America, Europe and China are all competing to protect and promote national self-interest vis-a-vis each other rather than collaborating as a species facing a common threat. Subsidies here are put in place to counter subsidies there. Tariffs or outright bans are blocking the spread of electric vehicles, batteries, solar panels and critical supply-chain minerals across borders. All these policies are aimed at building homegrown industries of the future.
Recently, Italy’s right-leaning prime minister, Giorgia Meloni, put a new twist on the issue. She argues that her country must implement serious climate policies as a key way to keep migrants from the Global South trekking north as climate refugees.
At the COP29 meeting in Azerbaijan, Viktor Orbán, declared Hungary was positioning itself to become “a significant player in electric vehicle development and electricity storage” as a basis for bolstering and sustaining national strength in the fiercely competitive times ahead. Unlike other Western nations, the pugnacious autocrat intends to do so through collaboration with his Chinese friends to leverage their prowess in green-tech development.
It is entirely conceivable that Elon Musk can sell the climate-denier-in-chief on the need for a robust EV industry and infrastructure in the U.S. as the best way to stay ahead of China and, for the same reason, Big Tech can sell him on a revival of non-fossil fuel nuclear energy to power its data centers as part and parcel of national security.
On the face of it, all this may seem a fatal fragmentation. But there may be another way we are compelled to look at it. We have the legitimacy framework we have — the nation-state — not the one we wish we had.
The hard truth seems to be that competitive green nationalism in the realpolitik mold possesses the kind of political legitimacy required for effective action that would take Gaiapolitik generations to achieve at the planetary level.
As the climate clock is ticking, green nationalism is beginning to appear as the most politically organic way to move forward as fast as possible at this historic juncture. In tandem with subnational and non-state networks, it in some ways manifests the very kind of distributed action that decision-division according to scale envisions. Though each may be going it alone, all are going in the same direction.
That is not an endorsement, but simply a recognition of the best we can probably hope for in the intermediate term.
