World Statehood: The Future of World Politics 3031323041, 9783031323041

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World-Systems Evolution and Global Futures

Heikki Patomäki

World Statehood The Future of World Politics

World-Systems Evolution and Global Futures Series Editors Christopher Chase-Dunn, University of California Riverside, CA, USA Barry K. Gills, Political and Economic Studies, University of Helsinki Helsinki, Finland Leonid E. Grinin, National Research University Higher School of Economics Moscow, Russia Andrey V. Korotayev, National Research University Higher School of Economics Moscow, Russia

This series seeks to promote understanding of large-scale and long-term processes of social change, in particular the many facets and implications of globalization. It critically explores the factors that affect the historical formation and current evolution of social systems, on both the regional and global level. Processes and factors that are examined include economies, technologies, geopolitics, institutions, conflicts, demographic trends, climate change, global culture, social movements, global inequalities, etc. Building on world-systems analysis, the series addresses topics such as globalization from historical and comparative perspectives, trends in global inequalities, core-periphery relations and the rise and fall of hegemonic core states, transnational institutions, and the long-term energy transition. This ambitious interdisciplinary and international series presents cutting-edge research by social scientists who study whole human systems and is relevant for all readers interested in systems approaches to the emerging world society, especially historians, political scientists, economists, sociologists, geographers and anthropologists. This book series is indexed in Scopus. All titles in this series are peer-reviewed.

Heikki Patomäki

World Statehood The Future of World Politics

Heikki Patomäki Faculty of Social Sciences University of Helsinki Helsinki, Finland

ISSN 2522-0985     ISSN 2522-0993 (electronic) World-Systems Evolution and Global Futures ISBN 978-3-031-32304-1    ISBN 978-3-031-32305-8 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-32305-8 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Springer imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Preface

It may sound clichéd to declare that we are living through an era of extraordinary change. Yet, the planetary scale of changes is unprecedented. The human population growth broke out from the biological regime a long time ago. Since the industrial revolution, human growth has not only become even faster but has also been accompanied by rapid per capita growth. The twentieth century saw a four-fold increase in human numbers and an 18-fold growth in world economic output. Average human energy use has risen at a similar pace. This exponential growth continues and is at the expense of other species on the planet. The current rate of extinction is estimated to be up to 1000 times higher than the natural rate. We have entered the era of the sixth global mass extinction of species and the first era generated by human beings. Global warming is another sign of the planetary scale and impact of this growth, indicating a new geological era. These planetary scale changes would not have been possible without sweeping cultural evolution through human learning. The tumultuous history of global modernity has outdated formal class societies—kings, emperors, and nobility belong to the past—while creating new forms of inequality. “All that is solid melts into air”, Karl Marx proclaimed in the mid-nineteenth century, providing a sharp portrayal of many aspects of modern experiences. The twentieth century involved dramatic world wars, crises, revolutions in art, science, and politics, ideological extremes, nuclear weapons, space travel, the rise and fall of communism, and then neoliberal globalisation. Yet, not everything is changing rapidly. The capitalist world economy, national imaginaries, and sovereign states may have gone through various transformations, but they express a lot of continuity as well. One way of framing the problem is that global technological civilisation has left humanity’s ethical and political learning far behind. Collective learning materialises in institutions. From this perspective, we can explore, for example, the possibility that global governance involves elements of statehood and that the development of these systems of governance may breed into the process of world state formation. This may happen gradually or via major breakthroughs, perhaps precipitated by crises or catastrophes. We could even hypothesise that world history as a whole is directed towards planetary integration, although it cannot be implied that the telos (which is necessarily temporary and transitional at least in some scale of time) is known. Asking such questions and investigating such hypotheses requires delving

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into many of the underlying assumptions of contemporary political theory and practice. Progress in both philosophy and science often requires that we succeed in reframing our main questions. The most important goal of this book is to rethink the world state problematic from the point of view of process ontology. The project of World Statehood: The Future of World Politics started years ago. It was preceded by an attempt to rethink the spatiotemporal assumptions of the theory of cosmopolitan democracy in processual terms. When I was based at the RMIT University in Melbourne in 2007–2010, I was working on a book called “Global futures”. Although never completed, this book project generated several papers and ideas about the origins of cosmopolitanism, time, temporality, and the nature of processes. In the course of the 2010s in Helsinki, I continued to work on these themes, most typically from a political economy perspective, which resulted in a series of publications and arguments, some of which are now incorporated into various chapters of this book. A more detailed plan for this book started to become clear when I was preparing an application for the Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies in the summer of 2019. Partly thanks to lucky coincidences, I ended up spending two and a half years at the Collegium, from August 2020 until the end of 2022. During those productive years at what I consider the best part of the University of Helsinki, I compiled and wrote this book. I owe a great debt of gratitude to Collegium’s transnational and interdisciplinary research community and personnel, including my longstanding friend Tuomas Forsberg, who served as the Director throughout this time. Over the years, a large number of people have contributed to this book by reading and commenting on my papers or book chapters, criticising some of my claims or offering tips or ideas on which direction I could best proceed. I have received useful feedback both privately and in various workshops and seminars. The weekly seminar of the Collegium has been very helpful, but those lively discussions have involved too many people to specify anyone in particular. Two events from my Australian time are worth mentioning. The “Politics and time” workshop at Macquarie University in Sydney in March 2010 helped my attempts to conceptualise time and temporality, and I would like to single out the discussions with David Christian and Stephanie Lawson in particular. The second one took place in Europe, namely “World state futures” workshop at the University of Århus, Denmark, in June 2010, which led to a special issue in Cooperation & Conflict in 2012. I am thankful to the co-organisers and co-editors Mathias Albert, Gorm Harste, Knud Erik Jørgensen, and other participants for very useful critical discussions. Years later, a workshop on pacifism in December 2017 at the University of Antwerp, Belgium, provided an opportunity to scrutinise ideas about violence and non-­ violence, law, and institutions. I am especially thankful to the editors of the subsequent book, namely Jorg Kustermans, Tom Sauer, Dominiek Lootens, and Barbara Segaert. The May 2018 IBHA Conference “Big History, big future: a cosmic perspective” at Villanova University in Pennsylvania, USA, sparked several inspiring discussions including on the idea of a world state. Especially Lowell Gustafson’s detailed

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comments improved the first published version of my paper, on which I have built Chap. 3 of this book. The story of what is now Chap. 9, “Towards a World Political Party”, involves several phases and more people than I can name here. Teivo Teivainen co-­authored a very early version that was published in a collection edited by Katarina Sehm-Patomäki and Marko Ulvila in 2007. I presented a new and more elaborate version in a couple of panels and workshops in 2009–2010. Subsequently, the editor of Ethics & Global Politics, Eva Erman, and two anonymous referees gave useful comments. In April 2018, Paul Raskin from the Tellus Institute and Great Transition Initiative invited me to write a new essay on the topic, which became the basis of a roundtable that includes a group of scholar-activists whom I greatly respect: Vicki Assevero, Michel Bauwens, Andreas Bummel, Kavita Byrd, David Christian, Joe Camillieri, Richard Falk, Ashish Kothari, Valentine M. Moghadam, and William I. Robinson. Chapter 9 is a rewritten compilation based on all of this, including my response to the roundtable, while it includes also some new ideas. Many more people have been crucial to various chapters of this book. The following list is preliminary and I apologise in advance that the list is far from complete: Shannon Brincat, Stephen Chan, Christopher Chase-Dunn, Ian Crawford, Jennifer Gidley, Barry K.  Gills, Tapani Hietaniemi, Jan Klabbers, Martti Koskenniemi, Bice Maiguashca, Raf Marchetti, Jamie Morgan, Juha Sihvola, Pamela Slotte, Manfred B.  Steger, and Juha Vuori. In 2022, Matias Ingman and Tomi Kristeri helped a lot by acting as research assistants. I am especially thankful to Jamie Morgan and Johan Wahlsten for co-authoring Chap. 11. Although for technical reasons their names cannot appear under the chapter title, they are equal co-­ authors of this chapter. Finally, I would like to emphasise the role of my wife Katarina in the completion of this book. She has not only read, commented on, and edited versions of several chapters but also supported my work in many other ways. Just as this book was being finalised, we celebrated our silver wedding anniversary—thank you, Katarina. Two chapters are based quite closely on previously published articles, especially Chap. 8, which came originally out in Globalizations, 11(5), 2014, pp. 751–768; and Chap. 2, which was first published in the Review of International Studies, 36(S1), 2010, pp. 181–200, but lacked a couple of essential pieces of information regarding the history of the world-state idea. Some sections of Chaps. 3, 4, 5, and 12 are recognisably similar to some sections of the following papers: “Mythopoetic Imagination as a Source of Critique and Reconstruction: Alternative Storylines about Our Place in Cosmos”, Journal of Big History, 3(4), 2019, pp. 77–97; “Back to the Kantian Idea of ‘Universal History’? Overcoming Eurocentric Accounts of the International Problematic”, Millennium: Journal of International Studies, (34):3, 2007, pp. 575–95; “Problems of Democratising Global Governance: Time, Space and the Emancipatory Process”, European Journal of International Relations, 9(3), 2003, pp.  347–376; and “Rethinking Global Parliament: Beyond the Indeterminacy of International Law”, Widener Law Review, 13(2), 2007, pp. 375–93. A few other sections of the manuscript have formerly appeared in Australian Journal

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of Politics and History, Cooperation & Conflict, Ethics & Global Politics, Protosociology. An International Journal of Interdisciplinary Research, as well as in J. Kustermans, T. Sauer, D. Lootens & B. Segaert (eds.) Pacifism’s Appeal. Ethos, History, Politics, Palgrave MacMillan: London, 2019. I am grateful to publishers for allowing me to integrate pieces of relevant material here. Helsinki, Finland 20 March 2023

Heikki Patomäki

Contents

1

 Introduction: The Future of World Politics��������������������������������������������   1 The Basic Idea ������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������    2 Summary of the Contents of the Book������������������������������������������������������    3 References��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   10

Part I Cosmo-political Processes 2

 Cosmological Sources of Critical Cosmopolitanism ������������������������������  13 Introduction������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   13 Aristotle vs. Cosmopolitans: Two Different Cognitive Perspectives ��������   16 A Cosmic Perspective: The Identity of Human Beings Living on Planet Earth������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   20 Transformative Cosmopolitanism: The Rise of the Notion of a World State������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   23 The Reaction Against the Copernican Perspective: Nietzsche, etc. ����������   29 Conclusion: Towards a New Cosmological Imaginary?����������������������������   31 References��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   33

3

A Creation Myth and Origin Story Suitable to our Globalised World? A Friendly Critique of the Big History Storyline about our Place in Cosmos����������������������������������������������������������������������������������  37 Introduction������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   37 On the Narrative Dimension of Scientific Explanations and Future Scenarios����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   43 The Basic Mythologems of Contemporary Liberal-Capitalist Society������   46 A Methodological Critique of the Cosmic Mythologeme of Meaninglessness and Death������������������������������������������������������������������   49 An Alternative Mythologeme: The Power of Life and Culture ����������������   53 Analysing and Assessing the Big History Storyline����������������������������������   61 Conclusions������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   66 References��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   67

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Overcoming Eurocentrism: Towards a Universal History of the Industrial Revolution and the Peace Problematic������������������������  71 Introduction: The European States-System and Modernity Are Not Unique������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   71 Learning from Counterfactual World Histories ����������������������������������������   74 A Universal History of Humanity in Terms of Stages ������������������������������   78 The Development of the Modern Peace Problematic��������������������������������   86 Overcoming the Problematic: The Concepts of Global Security Community and Democracy����������������������������������������������������������������������   89 Conclusions������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   92 References��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   93

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Problems of Democratising Global Governance: Time, Space, and the Emancipatory Process�����������������������������������������������������������������  97 Introduction������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   97 The Model of Cosmopolitan Democracy��������������������������������������������������  100 Space, Time, and Otherness in the Model of Cosmopolitan Democracy ������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  103 A Critical Realist Interrogation Concerning the Split between Moral Reason and the World��������������������������������������������������������������������� 107 Bringing Real Geo-history Back in: Time, Space, and the Process of Peaceful Democratic Emancipation������������������������������������������������������  109 Space������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  109 Time ������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  113 A Key Presupposition: A Pluralist Security Community��������������������������  116 Conclusions������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  120 References��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  122

Part II Reflexive Futures and Agency 6

How Will the Cold War End? Non-fixed Pasts, Reflexive Futures, and the Transformation of the Temporality of Human Existence �������� 129 Introduction������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  129 On the Complexity of Time and Temporality��������������������������������������������  131 The Contingency of the Cold War and its End in 1989–1991 ������������������  134 The Meaning of the Past Is Undetermined������������������������������������������������  138 The Temporality of Human Existence Is Changing����������������������������������  141 Conclusions������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  144 References��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  145

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Resolving Problems and Overcoming Contradictions through Global Law and Institutions: A Post-Deutschian Perspective �������������� 149 Introduction������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  149 The Emergence of Common Problems������������������������������������������������������  151 A Deeper Problem: Disintegrative Tendencies and Contradictions in Global Political Economy����������������������������������������������������������������������  155

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The Problem of Fixed Identities and Hard Will: Deutsch and beyond��������  158 The Dialectic Among Three Logics of Identities in the Early Twenty-First Century ��������������������������������������������������������������������������������  161 Reflexivity, Self-Other Relations, and the Ethical Circle of Non-violence ����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  165 Overcoming Contradictions through Learning and Building Common Institutions����������������������������������������������������������������������������������  170 Conclusion: Reflexivity and the Ethos of Critical Responsiveness ����������  171 Appendix: On the Role of Religion ����������������������������������������������������������  173 References��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  175 8

On the Dialectics of Global Governance in the Twenty-First Century: A Polanyian Double Movement?���������������������������������������������� 179 Introduction������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  179 Polanyi’s Historical Double Movement ����������������������������������������������������  182 The Return to the Market: A Puzzle to Polanyians������������������������������������  186 Towards a Better Explanation of the Market-revival ��������������������������������  188 Constructing the Double Movement: The Problem of Agency������������������  190 Overcoming Contradictions in Global Political Economy������������������������  193 Collective Learning Towards Holoreflexivity��������������������������������������������  195 Concluding Remarks����������������������������������������������������������������������������������  197 References��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  198

9

 Transformative Agency: Towards a World Political Party�������������������� 201 Introduction������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  201 Different Meanings of Modern Civil Society: Four Possibilities��������������  204 The Emergence and Development of Global Civil Society ����������������������  206 Ambiguities and Limits of Global Civil Society Activities ����������������������  209 Predecessors of World Party and the Decline of Democracy Since 2000��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  212 Future-oriented Democratic Visions of Global Political Parties����������������  215 DiEM25: A Seed Crystal?��������������������������������������������������������������������������  220 Learning Lessons: A Sketch of a Possible Global Political Party�������������  225 Concluding Remarks and Two Additional Issues��������������������������������������  229 References��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  232

Part III World Statehood and Beyond 10 Emergence  of World Statehood: A Processual and Open-Ended Account ������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������ 239 Introduction������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  239 Debates About the World State in the 1940s����������������������������������������������  241 Wendt’s Argument About the Inevitability of World State������������������������  243 A Critique of Wendt’s Account������������������������������������������������������������������  246 Conclusion: A Processual and Open-ended Account of the Formation of World Statehood������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  250 References��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  253

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11 The  Transformative Potential of Responding to Climate Change: Towards a Dynamic Global Tax���������������������������������������������������������������� 255 Introduction������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  255 Characteristic Problems of Carbon Trading����������������������������������������������  259 The Clean Development Mechanism and Article 6 of the Paris Agreement: Global Carbon Markets?��������������������������������������������������������  262 An Alternative to Carbon Trading: A Greenhouse Gas Tax����������������������  264 The Case for a Global Keynesian Greenhouse Gas Tax����������������������������  268 Conclusions������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  274 References��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  275 12 Rethinking  World Parliament: Beyond the Indeterminacy of International Law���������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 281 Introduction������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  281 The Campaign for a United Nations Parliamentary Assembly (UNPA)��������  284 World Parliament: In a Search for a Third Way����������������������������������������  286 The Indeterminacy of International Law ��������������������������������������������������  288 World Parliament: Beyond the Categories of Modern Liberal-Democratic States ������������������������������������������������������������������������  291 A Feasible Process of Establishing a World Parliament����������������������������  292 Conclusions������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  294 References��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  295 13 After  World Statehood? Legitimation and Potential Conflicts in a World Political Community �������������������������������������������������������������� 299 Introduction������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  299 Materialist, Structuralist, and Functionalist Arguments for a World State����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  301 On the Elusive Nature of Overlapping Consensus and Public Opinion ������  305 On the Idea of a “Civilising Process”��������������������������������������������������������  308 Functional Differentiation, Institutions, and Ethical-Political Learning������  312 Why Higher-level Identifications and Purposes are Normatively Better������  315 Conflicts and the Potential Collapse of a World Political Community������  318 Conclusions������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  321 References��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  322

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Introduction: The Future of World Politics

Political imagination remains captive of state sovereignty. The climate movement, for instance, tends to focus on national measures and traditional international agreements, although global warming is transforming the entire planet. Climate emergency calls for a global perspective. Its effects may be uneven, but every area of the planet is part of the rapidly changing conditions. Our fates are interconnected just as deeply through the world economy. Our everyday activities are conditioned by the workings of the world economy through chains of production, division of labour, development of technologies, consequences of growth and business cycles, eruptions of financial crises, and effects of ideologies and power relations. The substance and quality of everyday life are equally contingent on processes such as virus mutations, the development of science (for example, in AI and nanotechnology), space expansionism, securitisation of issues such as migration and environment, and peace and war. These are widely seen as posing increasingly serious existential threats to humanity. For example, in January 2023 The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists set the famous Doomsday Clock at 90 seconds to midnight—the closest to global catastrophe it has ever been. There is a need for novel ideas about the future of world politics. Discussions about world unification have followed the twists and turns of recent world history. In his ISA Presidential Address, Thomas Weiss (2009, p. 253) wondered what happened “to the idea of world government, so central in the United States to public debates of the 1930s and 1940s, and why has it been replaced by ‘global governance’?” During both World Wars, hopes were raised that a world state could be established in the immediate future. Hans Morgenthau’s (1961, p.  539) classic Politics Among Nations, originally published at the beginning of the Cold War in 1948, is an argument for a world state, but based on the premise that “the world state is unattainable […] in the world in our time”. Three-quarters of a century later, we need to have a fresh look at this problematic, with the benefit of world-­ historical hindsight and new conceptual tools.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 H. Patomäki, World Statehood, World-Systems Evolution and Global Futures, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-32305-8_1

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Since the end of the Cold War, most scholars have mainly studied global governance in various functional areas rather than exploring the idea of world statehood. An exception is Chris Chase-Dunn (e.g. 1990), who has been active in world state discussions for decades.1 Alexander Wendt’s (2003) argument about the “inevitability of the world state” instigated some discussions. Scholars such as Mathias Albert (e.g. 2014), Eva Erman (e.g. 2019), Daniel Deudney (e.g. 2007), Bob Jessop (e.g. 2012), and William. E.  Scheuerman (e.g. 2011) have addressed the issue of the world state in their recent works. Although this book does not focus on discussions of these texts, I refer to all of them in at least some chapters, and some have inspired the central ideas of the book.

The Basic Idea World Statehood: The Future of World Politics combines history, political philosophy, explanatory social science, and critical-reflexive futures studies. The idea is to develop a new processual understanding of world statehood. I pose questions about world political integration, especially (1) whether and to what degree elements of world statehood exist today,2 (2) whether the development of further elements and functions of world statehood can be seen as a tendential direction of history, and (3) whether, and under what conditions, a world political community could be viable? These questions imply that the existence of a “world state” is not a categorical yes-­ or-­no question, but rather we must carefully specify the elements and functions that can be associated with stateness. Moreover, process orientation reframes normative questions about the desirability of a “world state”. Evidence about the fate of federations in the modern age indicates that the imposition of common laws and institutions, especially if combined with a capability of violent enforcement of norms, may decrease rather than increase the chances of peace. Thus, my starting point is  W. Warren Wagar, a central figure in the literature of world state, did not publish in the forums of International Relations or International Political Economy, but worked at Binghamton University and over time received ideas and influences from World System Analysis. Wagar (1961, 1963) started as a historian of ideas, focusing on cosmopolitan thinkers and especially H.G. Wells, but moved on to write more and more about the foundations of futures studies. A Short History of Future (Wagar, 1999) is still one of the most impressive scenarios of how a world state can emerge and disintegrate. I discuss this scenario briefly in Chaps. 9 and 13; on Wagar, see also note 21, Chap. 2 and note 29, Chap 3. 2  I learnt the idea that the current system of world society includes elements of statehood from Mathias Albert. In our introduction (written together with Gorm Harste and Knud Erik Jørgensen), we wrote that the existing and emerging structures of global governance, of a global public sphere, and global constitutionalism converge to form at least nascent forms of world statehood. Usefully, this idea was coupled with a dynamic German reading of the “world”. Historically, the Germanic concept of “world” finds its origins from wer (“who”) plus alt (“old”), i.e. the old German weralt and uueralt, eventually related to a creation of the world. Whereas the “global” has a closed finite form in space (“the Earth”, the “globe”), the world “world” presents a legacy of open and evolving complexity. It is in this sense that I write about the future of world politics (cf. Albert et al., 2012, especially p. 150). 1

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deliberately ambiguous. While common institutions are part of the solution, they may also aggravate the problem of conflicts and violence. A processual understanding of the evolvement of elements of world statehood must include an account of contradictory forces at play. In the twenty-first century, some forces push towards a world political community but there are also countertendencies. While the current world economy is grounded on cooperative institutional arrangements revolving around free trade and a monetary and financial system, the world economy contains contradictions that risk aggravating conflicts. For instance, only a few governments may realise that it is contradictory for states to try to export their economic problems to other countries by various means, e.g. by maximising their trade surplus through internal devaluation. Rising uncertainties and inequalities generate existential insecurity, leading to securitisation and populist, nationalist, and xenophobic politics. What is more, global warming, overpopulation, pathogens, shortage of resources, weapons of mass destruction, and so on are not only understood as risks requiring global responses, but they also feed into human insecurities. The current early twenty-first-century situation is only a moment in world history. The argument of World Statehood: The Future of World Politics builds on a processual understanding of the world or, in philosophical terms, on process ontology. Also time itself is process-based and intimately connected to causation. The moment of “now” is relative to the relevant processes. These processes may be nested or related in some other ways, and some of them endure much longer than others. The meaning of a past event—or limited process—depends on how the wider, bigger, or longer-term processes turn out. Because processes tend to be overlapping and interrelated, this can leave the meaning of an event or process undetermined even when it appears (from a less reflexive and holistic perspective) to have concluded. All this suggests that contemporary realities must be understood historically and reflexively and framed in various scales of time. Large time scales can involve reflections on the meaning and purpose of world history as a whole.

Summary of the Contents of the Book World Statehood: The Future of World Politics is organised into three parts. The first part, “Cosmo-political processes”, starts with an exploration of the meaning of the emergence of cosmopolitanism (Chap. 2). Both global governance and global government have a common background in cosmopolitan philosophies that originate in ancient science and philosophy and have existed for centuries in their modern form. However, it was during the French revolution and its aftermath that thinkers such as Jean-Baptiste “Anacharsis” Cloots (1755–1794) and Karl Krause (1781–1832) started to develop the idea of a world state systematically. It is of some significance that critical cosmopolitan orientation has usually been embedded in a non-­geocentric physical cosmology locating the human drama on the surface of planet Earth within wide scales of time and space. Astronomic theory can be isomorphic with an ethical-­ political theory, that is, a structure-preserving mapping from one to the other is

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possible. A contrast can be established between centric worldviews and non-centric critical cosmopolitanism. However, as some followers of Nietzsche illustrate, a non-geocentric physical cosmology can also have sceptical and nihilist implications, oftentimes articulated as the main secular myth of liberal-capitalist societies, while at other times encouraging territorial nationalism and geopolitics. In complex democratic (or at least pluralist) societies hegemonic struggles abound over constitutive myths—including scientific myths—shaping both explanatory stories about the past and scenarios about possible futures. I discuss the philosophical and scientific underpinnings of Big History in Chap. 3 in this spirit. One of the aims of Big History is to develop a scientific creation myth and origin story suitable to our globalised world characterised by severe global risks. Big History is also part of the movement of writing global/world history, aiming at overcoming Eurocentrism. The story of Big History is about the emergence of new layers of qualitatively distinct beings and the development of increasing complexity locally, especially on Earth, against the background of the second law of thermodynamics that sees increasing entropy rather than complexity in the cosmos as a whole. In this chapter, I explore two rather different accounts of non-geocentric physical cosmology that are compatible with established theories of science, including the theory of relativity and quantum theory. These two accounts are closely related to the two different understandings of non-geocentric physical cosmology first discussed in Chap. 2. By utilising the contrast between the two accounts, I argue that in its current form, Big History is ambiguous about its basic storyline. Many cosmopolitans have stressed coherence, wholeness, and even purpose, whereas the followers of Hume and Nietzsche seem convinced that the cosmos is purposeless and the processes of biological and cultural evolution arbitrary. By using some pragmatist and critical realist philosophical ideas, and by considering a few critical questions regarding theories of physics and cosmology, I criticise the ambiguities of Big History and argue in favour of a storyline that revolves around life and learning in a manner that induces cosmic hopefulness. A central idea is that the rational tendential direction of world history is grounded in our collective human learning, making it possible to solve problems, absent ills, and overcome contradictions through collective actions and by building better common institutions. In Chap. 4, I focus on the industrial revolution and its consequences, arguing that modern Europe is merely a possible manifestation and moment in a process that is best understood as global history of humanity. The key to understanding this transformation lies in harnessing new sources of energy, which has enabled the expansion of humanity and the world economy. Global history in this sense is part of the much more general story of increasing complexity and emerging powers. It was contingent that the industrial (or more precisely, mechanical) revolution first occurred in Europe in the late 18th or early nineteenth century; it could have happened elsewhere and at another time. To make a case for this interpretation, I discuss historical counterfactuals, including the scenario that the industrial revolution could have emerged earlier in China. While criticising all forms of centrism, I develop the idea of stages in history. The historical changes that led to the industrial revolution

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occurred in phases that can be understood as causal orders of enablement (for example, the development of metallurgy enabling the emergence of a functional steam engine) and historical orders of emergence (for example, the emergence of large markets come before industrial mass production, or some mechanisation of production occurring before the systematic use of fossil fuels as an external source of energy, and so on). Stages may co-exist, overlap, and form various constellations in context-bound ways. In any case, the industrial revolution and related fiscal and other changes generated increasing powers for states to mobilise resources for war. Soon, the shift to the use of machines based on external sources of energy generated a new practical and theoretical problematic, which I have elsewhere called “international” (Patomäki, 2002, ch 2), but which could perhaps be more appropriately called the (Kantian) peace problematic. In the universal history of humanity, the industrial revolution was bound to happen and change, among other things, the meaning of war, which has subsequently become an existential question to humanity as a whole. In the final chapter of Part I, Chap. 5 “Problems of democratising global governance”, I outline how the wobbly outcome of interactions among the fields of global political economy known as the “golden age of capitalism” (1950–73) was a result of real yet ambiguous collective learning. In this period, the world economy grew exceptionally rapidly, while thousands of new international agreements and organisations were established to coordinate and regulate the world economy and its normative and other underpinnings (human rights, security arrangements, etc.). In the subsequent neoliberal era, the concepts of globalisation and global governance became established parts of worldwide discourses. This provided the context for the rise of global civil society and the related—characteristically post-Cold War—idea of applying the concept of democracy to the systems of global governance. Probably the most articulate response to the quest to democratise global governance is the theory of cosmopolitan democracy, as developed by David Held (most notably 1995) and his associates. I discuss the problems of Held’s account of cosmopolitan democracy, focussing on Held’s spatio-temporal assumptions and then lay out a processual alternative to it. The spatio-temporal assumptions of the model of cosmopolitan democracy have problematic implications concerning self-other relations and political organisation, and in addition, the overall edifice implies a (Kantian) split between the causal world and moral reason. The alternative is a vision of an open-ended process of global democratisation produced by embodied and relational actors. This vision presupposes another project, namely that of building a global security community. Moreover, most of the existing international organisations are functional rather than territorial. Different functional organisations have different memberships, consisting mostly of states and non-governmental organisations— and also functional organisations can be democratised. Part II of the book, “Reflexive futures and agency”, focuses on the contemporary twenty-first-century processes in terms of how non-fixed pasts, changing contexts, and anticipations of the future interact. Chapter 6, “How will the cold war end?”, starts with an observation that the Cold War as we know it was only a contingent episode within a much wider process. The planetary-nuclear era of jet aeroplanes,

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rockets and missiles, satellites, and nuclear explosives would have come about sooner or later anyway, independently of the evolution of leading ideologies within states, or the precise location of the shifting centres. In terms of the planetary-­ nuclear era in general, the full meaning of the Cold War of 1947–91 remains open. The Soviet Union’s nuclear arsenal was passed on to the Russian Federation. As is strikingly evident in the early 2020s, whether the destructive powers of nuclear weapons will at some point be released is contingent—not least given the full-scale war in Ukraine (for a systematic analysis in terms of historical counterfactuals and possible futures, Forsberg & Patomäki, 2023) and the US–China trade war and tense relations. At the theoretical level, this chapter makes an argument about time and temporality. I argue that the futurised nature of the present is changing. Due to reflexive self-regulation of social systems, the future is in the process of coming to be (or at least has the potential of being) increasingly co-determined by normative discourse about its desirability, informed by adequate and plausible scenarios about possible and likely futures. This is how we can foresee the end of the cold war. Scenarios about the end of the “cold war” in the wide sense of the planetary-­ nuclear era of separate national states are intertwined with accounts of the key mechanisms and processes of the global political economy. The emergent common problems in world politics that need to be resolved through peaceful changes arise from the shared but often contradictory processes that result from the overall dynamics. However, in the absence of a pluralist security community and adequate institutions governing the world economy, the complex and dynamic global-local processes in which actors and issues are tightly interwoven and spatial scales interconnected tend not only to generate but also to aggravate conflicts, often leading to securitisation and geopolitical confrontations. In Chap. 7, “Resolving problems and overcoming contradictions through global law and institutions”, I examine the gridlock and decline of global governance in the early twenty-first century and try to show the deeper political economy underpinnings of this gridlock. Apart from the currently dominant disintegrative tendencies, also the fact that many neoliberal agreements are meant to lock in the prevailing set of institutional arrangements can in part explain the gridlock of global governance. In this chapter, I also qualify some of the earlier claims concerning complexity, law, and institutions. For example, the achievement of some closure and thus regularity is compatible with increased complexity in some dimensions, but in other dimensions it reduces complexity and that can be the explicit aim. Uncertainty can be undesirable and some aspects of complexity harmful. The extent to which law and institutions are compatible with the sustainability of a security community depends also on the constitution of agency. To analyse these dependencies, I relate reflexive identity to four overlapping and nested orders of purposes, to the three axes of self-­ other relations, and to the virtuous circle of non-violence. In Chap. 8, “On the dialectics of global governance in the 21st century”, I discuss various arguments about the so-called double movement derived from Karl Polanyi (1957). The Polanyian perspective suggests questions such as: given the socially and ecologically disruptive consequences of globalisation and uneven growth, should we anticipate “a protective response” at the level of global society, paving

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the way for new common institutions and a pluralist security community? May there be rational tendencies towards global-reflexive systems of governance, enabling new syntheses across the planet concerning the market/social nexus and processes of de/commodification? Whereas the pendulum metaphor and the simple dialectical thesis-antithesis-synthesis scheme fail to account for the real powers, mechanisms, and processes that could bring about significant global transformations, and although processes can be subject to regression, entropy, and roll-back, it would be a mistake to conclude that there is no rational tendential direction to world history. The main point of this chapter is that the rational tendential directionality of world history is contingent upon a transformative praxis. As the number of risks, problems, and contradictions multiplies, so does possible rational responses to them, constituting reasons for holoreflexivity, involving some comprehension of the mechanisms, structures, and processes of the global and planetary whole. At least in this sense, material conditions are pushing moral learning. Arguably, holoreflexivity is a condition for the rise of global movements promoting more functional and legitimate common institutions. This raises a further question: is it possible to deliberately facilitate collective learning towards holoreflexivity? The task becomes twofold: (1) to enable maximal moral learning among the world population by and large; and (2) to create adequate global institutions to ensure and facilitate planetary cooperation, overcome contradictions, and resolve social conflicts. These are two aspects of the same task. Chapter 9, “Towards a world political party”, deepens the analysis of transformative agency. For many, civil society has carried the banner of transformative hope. In 2000–2001, in response to the growing dominance of neoliberalism, the reflexively political part of global civil society formed the World Social Forum (WSF). The rise of WSF can readily be perceived in Polanyian terms: a phase of neoliberal globalisation is followed by the emergence of attempts to create new structures of global solidarity and protection of the social. Yet, this is ambiguous because the main organising principle has been that of open space and, indeed, interest in the WSF process has declined sharply. This and other dilemmas of global civil society have re-opened the question of transformative political agency. In this chapter, I analyse the dilemmas and contradictions of contemporary global and planetary civil society in the context of de-democratising tendencies and discuss a possible form of future transformative agency. Collective learning and actions are difficult in a globalised world characterised by inequalities and asymmetric power relations. I understand the world political party as an open ethical and political association constituted by a collective programme of societal re-organisation. Developing the idea of a world political party requires conceptual resources, which we can find in past attempts of imagining such a party. I sketch a possible way of organising a world political party and specifying its purposes, both grounded in lessons of past experiences and on a few thought experiments. The world party cultivates reflexive knowledge about non-fixed pasts and possible futures, compatible with non-centric critical cosmopolitanism. The party’s action possibilities may be limited at first but expand with successful institutional transformations. I conclude by discussing some key practical issues of organising such a party.

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The final part III of the book is entitled “World statehood and beyond”. Chapter 10, “Emergence of world statehood”, outlines a processual and open-ended account of the formation of interconnected elements of world statehood. I go through two discussions, which on the one hand illuminate the importance of the processual perspective, but on the other hand, also form a contrast against which I develop my own argument. First, during WWII the idea of a world state became a focal point of discussions in the USA. The realists were opposed to the idea of world constitutionalism, to the idea that liberal domestic principles are directly applicable in the world as a whole, but they shared the sense of acute importance of political integration on a global scale. Thus, they advocated gradual changes towards a world political community and state, although they often contrasted too sharply the (existing) communities and the possibility of a future world state. Second, compared to the 1940s discussions, Wendt’s (2003) scenario about the emergence of a world state is an improvement because it provides a dynamic account of community formation. I argue that Wendt’s Hegelian story about “struggle for recognition” is instructive, but its epistemological and ontological status is unclear. Wendt’s later normative reframing of the world state question is, in spirit, Kantian and would take us back to the discussions of Chap. 5. I conclude this chapter by sketching out the process-­ ontological perspective and stressing the importance of a much more comprehensive agenda, including the consequences of uneven economic growth, contradictions of the world economy, ecological crises shaping the Earth system, new problems that have arisen because of space expansionism, and other results of technological civilisation. These considerations provide the conceptual and historical context for the chapters that follow. In Chap. 11, “Towards a dynamic global tax”, I make a case, together with Jamie Morgan and Johan Wahlsten, for a planet-political approach to climate change governance based on factual evidence as well as on conceptual and theory-informed claims. We first argue that carbon taxes should be preferred to carbon trading, and second that there is a need for the organisation and coordination of this taxation at a global level. A global greenhouse gas tax is a rational global Keynesian solution to the aporia of current climate governance and the global climate movement constitutes the basis for a relevant transformative agency. In the spirit of the manifesto for planet politics (Burke et al., 2016), we develop the idea of a global greenhouse tax as simultaneously a practice of governance and of subversion, of regulation and resistance, and envision a coordinated, accountable, and democratic global machinery that is adequate for such a purpose. In concrete terms, we propose to establish a new, democratically organised yet flexibly inclusive global organisation. Building a global tax system is a process. A global greenhouse gas tax can be created by a coalition of willing states and backed by the worldwide climate movement. Because of its processual nature, a border levy against the outsiders can be defendable as a part of an increasingly inclusive global system—as that system is framed as vital for the future of life systems on Earth. Last but not least, a democratically controlled global fund can be seen as the beginning of domestic economic policy on a global scale.

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Chapter 12 is an attempt at rethinking the idea of world parliament from a novel angle. In various proposals, both in favour of and against global democracy, it is often taken for granted that global democracy will manifest itself as a world parliament or that such a parliament is at least included as a key element of a democratic world order. But what is a world parliament: a sovereign legislative body? Apart from the task of coordinating the activities of functional-democratic systems of governance, a world parliament can be seen as a response to a deep problem of international law: its indeterminacy. The contradictory system of international law stems from the understanding of states as possessive individuals. As imagined possessive individuals, sovereign states owe apparently nothing to international society, the same way possessive individuals owe nothing to domestic society. Yet, the rights and duties of sovereignty and consequent relations between states are regulated in international law, which can be conceived in various supranational ways (as natural law, world communitarianism, justice, progress, or any other universal principle). The need for a world parliament has to do with determining what international or world law is. The new body should not be conceived as a directly elected world’s Supreme Court, because its main authority stems explicitly from the processes of citizens’ political will formation rather than merely from the “highest” possible legal expertise. In addition, a world parliament could speak in the name of the world community and thus respond, among many other things, to the questions raised by space expansionism and the rise of related capabilities. I conclude by situating this proposal about world parliament in the context of an open-ended vision of an evolving world civilisation, the upper layer of which is for now organised along functionalist-­democratic lines but requires also coordination and generic rules and principles of (meta-)governance. In the final Chap. 13, I return to the larger time scales of the first part of this book. While the chapter focusses on the possibility, legitimacy, and sustainability of a world political community, it also makes an argument about the nature of world-­ historical processes. I agree with the advocates of the world state that there are critically important security and political economy reasons for furthering integration towards a world political community. However, the question is: will these reasons provide a legitimate and sustainable basis for such a community? While the standard security-military and functionalist political economy arguments for world unification may work to a certain point, they are insufficient and can easily become counterproductive. Especially if perceived in terms of the rationally calculative orientation of action, they are insufficient and may even work against the world community. There must also be a widespread belief in normative legitimacy, which may be anchored in universalising principles such as popular democracy and human rights. Yet, legitimacy requires also something more, namely a global imaginary that is compatible with ethical and political pluralism. In this light, I explore theories of civilising processes and stages of ethico-political learning. An ethical-political goal for world history as a whole can only be set from within history; it must be fallible and can only make sense in terms of a particular story or scenario on a particular time scale. Thus conceived, the process leading to an end-state is in many ways more important than the telos itself. Even more fundamentally, every telos is

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necessarily temporary and transitional in some scale of time. There are no ultimate ends in the world of multiple simultaneously ongoing processes. Independently of how dominant the layer of world statehood becomes within a system of multi-­spatial (meta)governance, that layer will require political support, authorisation, and validation in a complex and pluralistic world. By focusing on legitimacy, we can analyse the feasibility of different paths towards global-scale integration, on the one hand, and the potential for conflicts, divisions, and subsequent disintegration, on the other. Consequently, I examine normative legitimacy, functional differentiation in complex societies, the civilising process, stages of ethical-political learning, and the potential for disintegration in a future world political community. At the end of the chapter, I outline scenarios about conflicts and processes that could lead towards a partial disintegration or collapse of such a community. Such scenarios are meant to be self-defeating prophecies.

References Albert, M. (2014). A theory of world politics. Cambridge University Press. Albert, M., Harste, G., Jørgensen, K.-E., & Patomäki, H. (2012). Introduction: World state futures. Cooperation and Conflict, 47(2), 145–156. Burke, A., Fishel, S., Mitchell, A., Dalby, S., & Levine, D. (2016). Planet politics: A manifesto from the end of IR. Millennium: Journal of International Studies, 44(3), 499–523. Chase-Dunn, C. (1990). World-state formation: Historical processes and emergent necessity. Political Geography Quarterly, 9(2), 108–130. Deudney, D. (2007). Bounding power. Republican security theory from the polis to the global village. Princeton University Press. Erman, E. (2019). Does global democracy require a world state? Philosophical Papers, 48(1), 123–153. Forsberg, T., & Patomäki, H. (2023). Debating the war in Ukraine. Counterfactual histories and possible futures. Routledge. Held, D. (1995). Democracy and the global order. From the modern state to cosmopolitan governance. Polity Press. Jessop, B. (2012). Obstacles to a world state in the shadow of the world market. Cooperation and Conflict, 47(2), 200–219. Morgenthau, H. (1961). Politics among nations. The struggle for power and peace (3rd ed.). Alfred A. Knopf. Patomäki, H. (2002). After international relations: Critical realism and the (re) construction of world politics. Routledge. Polanyi, K. (1957). The great transformation. The political and economic origins of our time. Beacon Press. (Original work published 1944). Scheuerman, W. (2011). The realist case for a global reform. Polity. Wagar, W. (1961). H. G. Wells and the world state. Yale University Press. Wagar, W. W. (1963). The City of man. Houghton Mifflin. Wagar, W. W. (1999). A short history of the future (3rd ed.). University of Chicago Press. Weiss, T. (2009). What happened to the idea of world government. International Studies Quarterly, 53(2), 253–271. Wendt, A. (2003). Why a world state is inevitable. European Journal of International Relations, 9(4), 491–542.

Part I Cosmo-political Processes

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Cosmological Sources of Critical Cosmopolitanism

Introduction There are two distinct ideal-typical forms of cosmopolitanism. The first is rooted in the context of separate communities and states and asks: do we have duties to others by assisting or civilising them or at least by preventing major maldevelopments— such as massive human rights violations—within their communities or states? Cosmopolitanism answers affirmatively, yes, we do have universal duties to everyone, including foreigners,1 whereas state moralists deny the wisdom of such universalism.2 From a classical political realist viewpoint, this kind of universalism comes close to moral imperialism. Hans Morgenthau discussed moral imperialism in terms of a general temptation to see oneself as the bearer and promoter of universal values: “All nations are tempted—and few have been able to resist the temptation for long—to clothe their own particular aspirations and actions in the moral purposes of the universe” (Morgenthau, 1961, p. 11).

 Martha Nussbaum traces cosmopolitanism back to the Cynic/Stoic tradition and especially to Cicero’s De Officiis (On Duties), “perhaps the most influential book in the Western tradition of political philosophy” (2019, p. 19). While agreeing that moral duties do not stop at national boundaries, she criticises the cosmopolitan tradition for neglecting social and economic rights and offers her version of “the Capabilities Approach” as a remedy. 2  In IR theory, the distinction between state-moralism and cosmopolitanism was popularised in the UK by Chris Brown (1992). In this and related works Brown has assumed that cosmopolitanism usually comes in a rather parochial form: “Most accounts of the universal values that might underlie a cosmopolitan ethic seem suspiciously like inadequately camouflaged versions of the first ten Amendments of the Constitution of the US of America”. (Brown, 1988, p. 106). For an analysis of how these two positions are defined negatively against each other, while circularly presupposing the other’s position, see Patomäki (1992). In that paper I argued, furthermore, that Hoffman’s cosmopolitanism is at once too modest (it leaves many, perhaps most problems unanswered) and too strong (in some historical contexts Brown may well be right about the imperialist implications of Hoffman’s view on human rights). 1

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In the second sense, however, cosmopolitanism has been used to take distance from any particular “us” and criticise “us” as a particular community, nation, or state. Prior to the modern era, this criticism was usually confined to negative distance-­taking, but since the late eighteenth century, critical cosmopolitanism has explored the possibility of creating better global institutions (becoming more political and transformative a century later). In this chapter, I leave the non-detached forms of both imperialism and cosmopolitanism aside and focus on explaining the possibility and emergence of detached—or what I also call critical—cosmopolitanism.3 What is it that has made critical cosmopolitical thinking possible and plausible? From ancient proto-cosmopolitans to the twenty-first-­century transformative globalists, critics have challenged parochial ideas by re-contextualising particular histories, identities, and moral understandings in broad, holistic terms. Somehow, at least since the fifth century BCE, human imagination has had the capacity to overcome its particular communal conditions and transgress existing divisions and boundaries. Does this mean that man is not a political animal in the Aristotelian sense? Is it not part of human nature to live in particular communities? Are ethical and political meanings not tied to specific languages, and thereby to specific human groups and communities? And has it not been risky, and often outright dangerous, to question the understandings and values of the community backed up by state powers? World Statehood: The Future of World Politics explores critical cosmopolitanism and its relationship to the notion of world statehood. In this first substantial chapter, I try to explain the historical emergence of critical cosmopolitanism in terms of collective learning of humanity. In particular, I argue that critical cosmopolitan orientation has usually been grounded on a non-geocentric physical cosmology (to be explained below) that locates the human drama on the surface of planet Earth within wide scales of time and space. The word “cosmos” originates from a Greek term κόσμος meaning “order, orderly arrangement, ornaments”. From Pythagoras onwards, the term “cosmos” has been applied to the visible, physical universe including planets and stars. This is of course not the only meaning of the term. There have been numerous mythical and religious attempts to understand the

 The two cosmopolitanisms are of course often intertwined. Many thinkers have oscillated between: (1) a view that justifies “our” imperial interventions or expansion and, (2) a view that denies that “we” should have any specific position, rights or duties in the order, or city, of the universe. This applies of course to contemporary critical cosmopolitans as well. Even when arguing for just or democratic global institutions, cosmopolitans may still be embedded in a particular cultural and ethico-political context in a way that escapes their conscious attention. In other words, even the critical cosmopolitan sentiment may lack in self-reflexivity. For a recent attempt to carefully balance between the two distinct forms of cosmopolitanisms and elements of communitarianism or state-morality, see Erskine (2008). Also in this account, however, there are others who emerge as enemies (even when seen as “fellow members of overlapping communities”); and thereby, the rules of just war becomes a key issue. 3

Introduction

15

implicit order within the whole of being.4 At any rate, the term cosmopolis can also be translated as world-city (Wagar, 1963, p. 15). Cosmopolis as a “world-city” (or as a world political community) is a boundless and non-centric community, which is equal in its form and shape to non-geocentric physical (NGP) cosmology. The latter is built upon a scientific account of the distances and nature of the solar system and interstellar space and of the cosmic conditions of life and society on planet Earth. NGP cosmology can of course be given meaning—framed and conceptualised—in a variety of ways (see Kragh, 1996; North 2008; Narlikar & Burbridge, 2008). My point is only that scientific NGP cosmology provides a clear contrast to the underpinnings of ego-, ethno-, and geo-­ centric cosmologies, which see the world as revolving around a particular observer, theorist, and/or communal identity. As we will see, although the contrast is clear and often sharp, it does not have to be absolute. Moreover, a non-geocentric physical (NGP) cosmology may be neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition for critical cosmopolitanism. Yet, I maintain that the two are closely related. Given a series of possible further assumptions (which I try to explicate below), NGP cosmology makes it plausible to envisage all humans as part of the same species. Humans have the shared potential for interbreeding, communication, and learning. Furthermore, the connection works also through homology and analogy. There is an important similarity between the perspectives of NGP cosmology and cosmopolitanism. The similarity of perspectives explains their shared classical and modern ancestry. It also explains why an astronomic theory can be isomorphic with an ethical-political theory, that is, why a structure-preserving mapping from one to the other is possible. The connection works also through the substance of ethical-political theories, which give meaning to the NGP cosmology. Many cosmopolitan theorists have made explicit links between the two. My discussion proceeds as follows. First, I summarise the difference between centric cosmologies and NGP cosmology in terms of Aristotle versus his opponents. I survey ancient proto-cosmopolitanism, compare developments in ancient Greece with those in other main hubs of the Old World, and suggest a link between the first emergence of NGP cosmology and critical cosmopolitanism. Next, I explore early modern and Enlightenment cosmopolitanism in Europe, stressing the role of the new scientific framework of time, space, and humanity and then shed light on the nearly simultaneous emergence of the idea of world state since the late eighteenth century in Europe, Persia, China, and elsewhere.  Cultural theorists and social scientists discuss cosmologies in this sense, referring to the basic world views of various human groups (cultures, nations, civilisations) (for example, Galtung, 1996, pp. 211–22; Ossio, 1997 and Martin, 2008). Horizontal comparisons of cosmologies may easily lead to the conclusion that cosmologies are enduring cultural deep-structures that do not change easily. Furthermore, cosmologies may be depicted as being “just myths” or at least outside the realm of validity claims such as truth and good. This would imply a version of the thesis of cultural relativism. From Giambattista Vico, we have learnt that myth—or cosmology in the cultural sense of the term—should not be opposed to abstract rationality or scientific truth; myths are narratives that can have truth-value and be based on the results of science, although myths themselves are not established scientific facts or theories (Mali, 1992). See Chap. 3. 4

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However, the final argument of this chapter is that the ethical-political implications of the NGP cosmology are ambiguous. While enabling cosmopolitanism, it has also generated scepticism and nihilism, encouraging self-regarding and short-­ sighted practices. In the conclusion, I tentatively suggest that critical cosmopolitical orientation should now be grounded on the notion of cosmic evolution, which is not only contextual, historical, pluralist, and open-ended but also suggests that humanity is not a mere accident of the cosmos. This is a theme I will explore more in depth in Chap. 3, where I critically analyse alternative cosmic storylines.

 ristotle vs. Cosmopolitans: Two Different A Cognitive Perspectives Aristotle (384  BCE—322  BCE) collected and synthesised the best astronomical theories of his day.5 Following Plato’s (427 BCE–347 BCE) teachings, it was clear to Aristotle that the Earth is a sphere. For Aristotle, however, the question was whether he should put the Earth or Sun at the centre of the planetary and, by implication, stellar system. From an empirical point of view, a key consideration was the lack of parallax. If Earth moved around the Sun, then one ought to be able to observe the shifting of the fixed stars in a half-a-year cycle—say from spring to autumn—in relation to the background of other stars. The difference in angle from one side of the Earth’s orbit around the Sun to the other side is called parallax. The shapes of star constellations should change considerably over a year; otherwise, the stars are so distant that this motion remains undetectable. Aristotle ignored the possibility of real cosmic-scale distances. The parallax angles are so tiny that they are measured in arc seconds where one second is 1/3600 of a degree (for Alpha Centauri, with a 4.3 light-years distance from the Earth, the parallax is 0.75 seconds). Therefore, stellar parallax was not detected until the early nineteenth century, when developments in optics and time-keeping created sufficient technological capacity for detecting effects so subtle. There were, however, other empirical anomalies in the Aristotelian system. For example, it could not explain the changes in brightness of the planets caused by a change in distance as they orbit the sun. Over time, some of Aristotle’s and his followers’ objections to the heliocentric model started to appear increasingly superficial and confused (North, 2008, pp. 82–4, 101–5, 429–31, 473–4; Dreyer, 1958, pp. 310–412). The Copernican revolution occurred centuries before it was possible to detect and measure parallax empirically. Arguably, Aristotle’s and his followers’ preference for a geocentric model had roots in the cognitive perspective they took for granted. In short, Aristotle assumed 5  Aristotle’s astronomical theories were developed in his On the Heavens and to an extent in Meteorological, rather than in his famous Physics (which is about meta-physics). J.  L. Stocks’ translation of On the Heavens is available online at the Internet Classics Archive at: {http://www. classics.mit.edu//Aristotle/heavens.html} accessed on 28 June 2022). For a detailed account of Aristotle’s cosmological system, see J. L. E. Dreyer (1958; and also North, 2008, pp. 80–4).

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that he has a privileged position to observe the world. The starting point is that the observer-theorist is at the centre of the world and that the world revolves, literally or metaphorically, around him. In terms of figure-ground distinction, the observer-­ theorist forms the ground, and everything else is figures that move, or are being caused, in relation to it. Sometimes, common sense misleadingly supports this assumption. If you stay awake overnight looking at the stars and planets, they indeed seem to revolve around you—even though this is merely an illusion of perspective caused by the rotation of the planet Earth. By way of metaphoric extension, society too can be seen through an observer-­ centric cognitive perspective. Accordingly, Aristotle’s geocentric astronomic theory is isomorphic with his ethical-political theory, that is, a structure-preserving mapping from one to the other is possible. There is a centre and a hierarchical system of layers. For Aristotle, natural slaves, women, and lower-status men are essentially meant to serve the purpose of the good life of the aristocracy and free men (this is the centre, to which Aristotle himself belonged). And the outside world forms concentric circles of increasing barbarity. The further you go, the more barbarity you should expect to find.6 Like the apparent rotation of planets and stars around the Earth, this kind of ethnocentrism is essentially an illusion of perspective stemming from being familiar with things that are close; from social practices that are structured to serve the purpose of a few and their sense of community; and from asymmetrical relations of power.7 It is noteworthy that Aristotle did not support democracy—in our sense—even among the free male citizens, but rather argued for a compromise between what he called polity and aristocracy (aristoi means literally “best persons”). For Aristotle, the true centre consists only of the central observer and of the few that are equal to him. In the fourth and third century BCE Hellenic world, Aristotle was not quite as dominant as he may now seem to us. Aristotle was arguing against distinguished thinkers who held different views. For instance, he was opposing the influential theory of Pythagoreans that the Earth is orbiting a central fire (which would explain day and night). He was also against the atomism of Democritus (c. 460  BCE–c. 370 BCE), abhorred by Plato, but a possible source of inspiration to the Cynics, the early cosmopolitans. Democritus held that the earth is spherical and maintained that at first the universe comprised of nothing but separate tiny atoms until they collided together to form larger units and structures, including the Earth and everything on it. Democritus also suggested that there are many worlds, some growing, some  For relevant passages about the nature of slaves (note that for Aristotle not all actual slaves are natural slaves), women, and barbarians, and differences among these categories, see Aristotle (2000, pp. 1252b, 1254b, 1255b, 1260b; 1999, pp. 1158b, 1160b–1161b, and 1177a). For a general discussion, see J. S. McLelland (1996, pp. 59–67). 7  Aristotle’s perspective is in many ways structurally similar to world religions that assume a particular chosen people, or God’s son, or the prophet, or anything equivalent, to have a special privileged place in the universe, that is, to constitute the ground around which everything else revolves. This explains the popularity of Aristotle among Christian and Islamic theologians. For an explanation of why Aristotle’s theories did not allow him to look critically into his own conceptual metaphors and cognitive unconsciousness, see Lakoff and Johnson (1999, pp. 373–90). 6

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decaying; some with no sun or moon, and some with several. Thus for Democritus, the Earth is just a world among many worlds. By a rather anti-Aristotelian implication, no Earthly observer of the universe can be privileged. No wonder Aristotle found this doctrine objectionable. While the basic ethical-political sentiments of Democritus seem to have been more democratic than those of Aristotle, the evidence of his precise ethical and political views is scant. As far as we know, it was the Cynics (from the late fifth century BCE onwards) that challenged the importance of being a politēs, that is, of belonging to a particular polis, of being a member of a specific society with all of the benefits and commitments such membership entails (Sabine, 1961, p. 130). For the Cynics, being a kosmopolitēs meant more than just being a citizen of the world, it meant also being a part of the natural order of the universe (cosmos). The Cynics took God-nature as a source of guidance—even as a norm—about how to live. This may now appear as a fallacy, but what is important is that the Cynics adopted a different cognitive perspective from the ego-, ethno-, and geocentric perspective of Aristotle. For the first time, the cosmos provided a non-privileging perspective on human societies and thus enabled critical and self-reflexive conclusions. Aristarchus of Samos (310 BCE—ca. 230 BCE) was probably the first to propose a fully-fledged heliocentric model of the planetary system. The later summary of Aristarchus’ theory by Archimedes is our most direct evidence of it: […] But Aristarchus of Samos brought out a book consisting of some hypotheses, in which the premises lead to the result that the universe is many times greater than that now so called. His hypotheses are that the fixed stars and the sun remain unmoved, that the earth revolves about the sun in the circumference of a circle, the sun lying in the middle of the orbit, and that the sphere of the fixed stars, situated about the same centre as the sun, is so great that the circle in which he supposes the earth to revolve bears such a proportion to the distance of the fixed stars as the centre of the sphere bears to its surface. Now, it is easy to see that this is impossible; […] (The Works of Archimedes, ed. by Heath, 1897, pp. 221-2)

Aristarchus’ theory was tolerated but not accepted by his contemporaries—and despite Archimedes was soon all but forgotten until the Copernican revolution. Why did not a basically correct theory gain more popularity and support? The lack of adequate techniques to make sufficiently accurate observations was not the only reason. It was probably more decisive that the perspective of Aristachus’ NGP cosmology had the potential to challenge the moral principles of societies built upon the observer-centric horizons of (1) the relatively few free men of republican or oligarchic communities; or (2) the privileged groups and strata within hierarchical empires; or, later, (3) religious and political leaders of the communities founded on grand messianic religions such as Christianity and Islam that promised after-life redemption for believers. Some scholars maintain that it was Stoicism, or the Stoic-Christian tradition, that first articulated universal moral principles in terms of laws of nature.8 Stoicism was  Andrew Linklater’s claim about a long-standing and unified “Stoic-Christian tradition” that believes in the unity of mankind is based merely on one quotation from Sabine’s dated history of 8

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initiated by Zeno of Citium in the early third century BCE and subsisted until the collapse of the Roman Empire. However, Zeno’s ideas were originally developed from those of the Cynics. Stoicism can be seen as a de-radicalised version of the Cynic idea that cosmos—the order of nature—guides as to how to live and what the laws valid for all human beings are. The Stoics believed in something reminiscent of an NPG cosmology, but in more poetic-religious and compromised terms than the followers of atomists (and possibly Aristarchus). Occasionally, they delighted, or found comfort, in the idea of a city of all humankind, but the real, practical question for Roman Stoics was how far citizenship should be extended to the subjects of the Roman Empire. The ethics of Stoicism was based on the idea that wisdom is about an obligation to do one’s duty in a world that is more or less unchangeable, especially concerning hierarchical relations of power.9 It is no coincidence that Stoicism preaching indifference to the world did not generate a research programme or develop a realist scientific theory of the cosmos and its true proportions, mechanisms, and processes. There were parallel developments in the other main hubs of the Old World. In India and China, there were sporadic atomists, heliocentrists, cynics, sceptics, democrats, and cosmopolitans in various forms of manifestation, but hierarchical agrarian-­military empires tended to adopt and enforce ideologies that were in important ways similar to the worldviews of Plato, Aristotle, and/or Stoics.10 For instance, despite noteworthy differences between Greek and Chinese cosmologies, the Chinese too were tied to a geocentric perspective. They depicted the Earth as being surrounded by heavens, including stars and planets, and then at times added an infinite space behind the heavens (they also talked about infinite time) (Needham, 2004, pp. 22–35; North, 2008, pp. 134–49). Confucians have usually concurred with Plato and Aristotle in that everyone has a given, rightful place in society; and with the related ideas of applying the principles of freedom and tolerance to the privileged few, and of governance by virtue and Western political theory (Sabine, 1961, pp. 148–41; Linklater, 1990, p. 22). J. S. McLelland (1996, p. 85) gives some support by arguing that “what Stoicism did was to connect the idea of individual character to the idea of cosmos”. For an argument that Roman Stoicism did shape Kant’s thinking, see Martha Nussbaum (1997, also 2019). 9  Hegel’s (2003, pp. 119–30) famous discussion of Stoicism as “unhappy consciousness” has been summarised and up-dated neatly by Roy Bhaskar (1994, p. 3): “The Stoic affects in-difference to the reality of the difference intrinsic to the power2 relation in which she is held. The Sceptic even denies that it exists. The Unhappy Consciousness either (a) accepts the master’s ideology and/or (b) compensates in a fantasy world of, for example, sport, soap or nostalgia”. 10  For similarities between Confucian schools and Roman Stoicism, see Warren W. Wagar (1963, pp.  18–22). Hegel’s and Bhaskar’s criticism of “unhappy consciousness” is mutatis mutandis applicable to much of classical Indian and Chinese philosophy as well. For a general account of similarities, parallels and differences among the philosophies of the main hubs of the Old World, see Ben-Ami Scharfstein (1978, pp. 118–27). For an interesting contrast to Scharfstein’s point that explicitly political thinking was mostly lacking in India, see Amartya Sen’s (2005, pp.  25–32) argument about the relevance of India’s ancient culture of disputation for democratic theory and Steve Muhlberger’s (n.d.) somewhat speculative claim that in India in the Buddhist period, 600 BCE–200 CE, republican policies were common and vigorous.

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practical reason rather than by force (Sen, 2001, pp.  234–5). The characteristic Confucian emphasis on the authority of the ruler, father, and husband is similarly Aristotelian—or vice versa, whichever tradition should be seen as prior.11 In these systems of thought, there is always a centre around which the whole world revolves and a hierarchy that places the centre at the top. The centre is occupied by the aristocratic (free) male who can read and write—literacy was still rare—and articulate speculative theories about nature, ethics, and politics. Most ancient philosophers and scholars were beneficiaries of the rulers and aristocracy.

 Cosmic Perspective: The Identity of Human Beings Living A on Planet Earth In 1543 CE, Nicholas Copernicus proposed to increase the accuracy and simplicity of astronomical theory by (re-)setting the Sun as the centre of the solar system. This implied a far-reaching shift of perspective: we are not observing the universe from a special position. However, the Copernican revolution—a starting point for the scientific revolutions of the 16th and 17th centuries—did not automatically generate cosmopolitanism. Rather the Copernican shift in perspective created a non-centric frame for reflexive self-observation. Moreover, by challenging the established tradition, it also constituted a space for spontaneous moral learning that often resulted in tolerant cosmopolitanism and, over time, also to more critical forms of cosmopolitanism. The scientific revolution was a dialectical historical process. The Renaissance revival of ancient philosophies—including Stoicism—and the Atlantic voyages widened the prevailing terrestrial horizons, preparing the ground for both the new Copernican cosmology (Kuhn, 1957) and related planetary geography (Cosgrove, 2003). Although the Copernican cosmology was thus neither a strictly necessary nor a sufficient condition for cosmopolitanism, it provided a clear alternative to Aristotelian centrism. Also, the meanings and values ascribed to the NGP cosmology are important.12 The knowledge of basic physical laws and real cosmic  More interestingly, perhaps, the Confucian Golden Rule (“what you do not wish for yourself, do not do to others”) echoes the teachings of Christianity, as do manifold debates on the real source of morality. As I have elsewhere argued, the realisation that there have been similar kinds of debates over language and reality in other times and places may also open up a more fruitful space for thinking about East and West. It is simplistic to imagine that it would be possible to synthesise either the East or the West into a coherent set of doctrines; rather there is global diversity of philosophical positions (Patomäki, 2002, pp. 100–1). 12  “Men who believed that their terrestrial home was only a planet circulating blindly about one of infinity of stars evaluated their place in the cosmic scheme quite differently than had their predecessors who saw the earth as the unique and focal centre of God’s creation. The Copernican Revolution was therefore also part of transition in Western man’s sense of value”. (Kuhn, 1957, p.  2). The importance of the consequences of the Copernican revolution are stressed also by Norbert Elias who distinguishes between the narrow scientific interpretation of the Copernican world-image and its impact on people’s image of themselves and their place in the universe, especially in terms of emotional detachment (Elias, 1987, pp. 68–9). 11

A Cosmic Perspective: The Identity of Human Beings Living on Planet Earth

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dimensions and relations does not in itself impose cosmopolitanism; for instance that an object at rest tends to stay at rest and that an object in uniform motion tends to stay in uniform motion unless acted upon by a net external force; that F = ma (force equals mass times acceleration); that the distance of the Earth from the Sun is 150,000,000  km; that the Sun is a main sequence G2 star that contains 99.86 percent of the system’s known mass and thus dominates it gravitationally; or that the Sun is only one of the copious billions of stars in the galaxy and that galaxies themselves are equally numerous in the observable universe. With emerging concepts such as “interest” (closely connected to the rise of markets and orthodox liberalism), the new cosmology formed also the basis of practices of modern power-­ balancing in 18th and 19th centuries Europe (Allan, 2018, pp. 98–102). However, when enmeshed with a variety of alternative concepts and cultural and ethical assumptions, the new Copernican and Newtonian theories of the cosmic dimensions, laws, and relations together formed an anti-centric myth about “us” in the universe. Since then, this new planetary cosmology—in the cultural sense—has grounded criticism of the prevailing ego-centric imaginaries and related divisions and conflicts. Perhaps the best-known revolutionary proponent of Copernican cosmology was Giordano Bruno, who argued in the sixteenth century for an infinite universe in which every star is surrounded by its own solar system. Among other dissident ideas, Bruno also believed in cosmic pluralism, in the possibility and actuality of sentient life on other worlds, thus suggesting that humanity is a relatively insignificant part of the universe and thus creation. In 1600, in the aftermath of the French wars of religion, he was burnt at the stake as a heretic by the Roman Inquisition (Dreyer, 1958, pp. 351, 410–11, 416–7). However, the attitude towards the new science was soon reversed. Already in the late seventeenth century Holland, Christiaan Huygens (1629–1695) crowned his celebrated career as a modern astronomer, mathematician, and physicist by writing Cosmotheoros. The celestial worlds discover’d: or, conjectures concerning the inhabitants, plants and productions of the worlds in the planets (Huygens, 1698). In this book, which was published posthumously just months after Huygens’ death, first in Latin and then in translations to several European languages, Huygens imagined a universe brimming with life both within our solar system and elsewhere. Humanity is not unique and Earth is just a planet among many. Among a few other works, this book paved the way for Kant’s mid-eighteenth century astronomical speculations and for the Enlightenment pluralist cosmopolitanism. A good example of the Enlightenment leaps of cosmic imagination is Voltaire’s Micromégas (1752), a story of a 36,000-metre tall alien Micromégas who travels from a planet circling the star Sirius and almost by coincidence realises that there is life on our insignificant planet (Voltaire, 1752).13 Through the perspective of  The tradition of science fiction novels that use a human from an alien culture or an alien stranded on Earth as a device for critiquing various aspects of society has continued since Voltaire, and Montesquieu, and Jonathan Swift. For social scientists, an especially interesting example is the humorous sci-fi book by the well-known socialist historian, social theorist, and peace campaigner E. P. Thompson (1988). 13

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Micromégas, Voltaire laughs at us silly humans who are killing each other in wars over religion. Voltaire’s proto-science fiction satire thus takes moral distance from Earthly disputes and wars. This kind of cosmic perspective enables and encourages distance from one’s own identity and the prevailing ideas and practices of one’s society. Of course, the cosmopolitanism of European Enlightenment was not based on merely a cosmic viewpoint, but also on the increasing familiarity with the existence and perspective of non-European others. Voltaire was influenced by the image of “noble savages” by Baron de Lahontan’s Curious Dialogues Between the Author and a Savage of Good Sense Who Has Travelled from 1703, on the one hand; and by invocation of China as an ancient and sophisticated civilisation, on the other (Muthu, 2003 24–7). It is no coincidence that Kant the cosmopolitan started his intellectual pursuits as a cosmologist. In his Universal Natural History and Theory of Heaven (1755), Kant explains how one can explain the formation of the solar system from an initial state, in which matter is dispersed like a cloud, solely in terms of the interaction of attractive and repulsive forces (Kant, 1755/1905). In essence, Kant’s view is accepted by today’s astronomy. Kant is also well-known for being one of the first to develop the concept of the galaxy. Drawing on an earlier work by Thomas Wright, he speculated that a galaxy might be a rotating disk of a huge number of stars, held together by gravitational forces akin to the solar system but on a much larger scale (North, 2008, pp. 444–9). Cosmopolitanism is not only tied to the idea of order in nature but also to a very wide cosmic perspective on one’s identity and place. Near Kant’s tomb in Kaliningrad is the following inscription in German and Russian, taken from the “Conclusion” of his Critique of Practical Reason: “Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing admiration and awe, the oftener and the more steadily we reflect on them: the starry heavens above me and the moral law within” (Kant, 1952/1788, p. 360). In the Critique, Kant explains further that neither of these things is beyond his horizon. On the contrary: “I see them before me and connect them directly with the consciousness of my existence” (Kant, 1952/1788, pp. 360–1). He also talks about “universal and necessary connections” (Kant, 1952/1788, p. 361) between the starry heavens and moral law, thus maintaining that consciousness, morality, and reason—far from being arbitrary—have cosmic grounds. But, may cosmically grounded morality fail on the planet Earth? Kant was at pains to show that although there is no guarantee since we cannot have certain knowledge about the future, world history can move towards perpetual peace and human perfection. It is possible, he argued, that in the future reason and universal moral maxims will be realised through human freedom (Kant, 1784, 1793, pp.  29–40, 61–92; see O’Neill, 2008). For many Enlightenment thinkers and their followers, the cosmic viewpoint puts the drama of life and human history on the planet in a very wide perspective. In one sense this is an optical effect: the longer the distance, the smaller the within-the-­ humanity differences appear. Moreover, distance and the non-centric Copernican perspective encourage judicious and at times ironic sentiment towards one’s own particular identity, and this sentiment is a key part of critical cosmopolitanism. In

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Kant’s case, critical cosmopolitanism also opened up a new temporal horizon by constituting an interest in exploring possible futures that can be different—and perhaps better—than the current realities. The cosmic vision also suggests that humans are not only dependent on each other but also on the physical processes of the planet, solar system, and the universe as a whole; and the thin sphere of life on planet Earth. Thus, the new cosmological perspective encouraged scientists, philosophers, political theorists, and novelists to think of all humans as part of an interdependent and fragile whole, the development of which has also given rise to consciousness, reason, and morality. Awareness of human interdependency and shared fate suggests widening the sphere within which the basic moral principles apply. Further, the idea of possible cosmic pluralism can also contribute to extending the variety of living and sentient beings with which we can identify. Any adequate form of morality has to do with the capacity to generalise normative claims in an acceptable way and, most importantly, with the ability to see things from others’ points of view.14

 ransformative Cosmopolitanism: The Rise of the Notion T of a World State Probably the most radical idea of the French Revolution was that laws and institutions are man-made, not natural.15 The Revolution demonstrated that new institutions can be created and old ones abolished. Solidarity acquired a new meaning: all together for social changes! But at that stage, only a few people imagined global changes. Even Kant in 1795 was envisaging a mere league of nations in Europe, realised through a quasi-constitutional treaty signed by the heads of states.16 Jean-­ Baptiste “Anacharsis” Cloots (1755–1794) went further than Kant. A Prussian who became involved in the French Revolution, acquiring French citizenship and gaining a seat in the National Convention, by late 1792 Cloots started to argue that the American and French revolutions had paved the way for a universal world republic of humanity. Cloots argued that “as long as there was no bridge to other  Kant’s categorical imperative is critical of all forms of ego-centrism and thus treats ego and alter in strictly similar terms. Arguably, however, it still represents inadequate ethico-political learning because it cannot imagine others as different from oneself and sees no need for a democratic dialogue with concrete others (See Kohlberg, 1973; Habermas, 1990). Habermas’ criticism of Kant’s and Rawls’ monological reasoning is in important ways similar to Jacques Derrida’s (1992) discussion of the universal in terms of exemplarity that always inscribes the universal in the proper body of singularity and particularity. 15  This was of course ambiguous. A good example is the 1792 trial of Louis XVI, where the Jacobins, still in fear of the king’s mystical persona, wanted to move quickly to execution, whereas the de facto more revolutionary Girondins were in favour of using legalistic method and argued that Louis was a citizen subject to ordinary justice (How, 2001). 16  Hedley Bull, for instance, is sometimes read as suggesting that Kant was making an argument for an arrangement that in effect comes close to a world state, but also Bull clarifies that in Perpetual Peace Kant in fact turned to “the negative surrogate of a league of republican or constitutional states” (Bull, 1977, p. 244). 14

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planets—and, presumably, intelligent life there—sovereignty resided in the entirety of mankind” (Bevilacqua, 2012, p. 555). Cloots believed that in the universal republic, the Golden Rule applied to all human beings in an equal manner would and should dictate morality. He ended up being briefly the president of the Jacobin club before he was triad and executed in March 1794—also because of his apparent lack of patriotism. Cloots was more radical than most, but he was not alone in assuming that universal rights will provide the basis for a world community. (Bevilacqua, 2012, pp. 560–2). In the case of Cloots, however, there was also a blueprint for the institutional structure of that community. “The national assembly of the world” would be sitting in Paris. The deputies would come from everywhere, including Africa and the Indies. There would be an executive council, seven ministries, ministers elected by the legislative assembly, and a president. (Bevilacqua, 2012, pp. 563–4). In a peaceful world community, one could abolish the ministries of war, navy, diplomacy, and colonies, which covered the vast majority of states’ expenditures in the eighteenth century. Moreover, Cloots seems to have assumed that also several other state functions were unnecessary (like Kant, Cloots was a strong supporter of private property and the free development of commerce). While the prototypes, metaphors, framings, and related conceptions of time and space stemming from the new Copernican science and other emerging conceptual resources suggested critical cosmopolitanism, the social conditions were not favourable to their widespread distribution and adoption in their cosmopolitan form. One-­ way communication or transportation within Europe took weeks and across the planet months. Constant warfare—or at least the threat of war—favoured the adoption of prototypes, metaphors, and framings based on the category of the nation during the French Revolutionary Wars (1792–1802) and Napoleonic Wars (1803–1815). Subsequently, in the 19th and 20th centuries, various struggles against asymmetrical relations of power—not least those of the capitalist market economy—were framed in terms of the rights and will of the people as a nation (see Patomäki & Steger, 2009). In this kind of context, critical cosmopolitanism could easily be—and often was—categorised as a form of betrayal of the patriotic cause, if not as treason. Against all the odds, however, the idea of a global state formation emerged also elsewhere in Europe during the Napoleonic Wars. In 1811, a German philosopher Karl Krause, who developed a cosmo-theological philosophical system positing progress from the lower to the highest unity or identification, proposed a world federation divided into five regional units of Europe, Asia, Africa, America, and Australia. He renewed the proposal in his appeal for a united Europe in 1814. Krause was a romantic and mystical thinker that had some influence in the late-­ nineteenth century and twentieth-century Hispanic world. His ideal of Humanity and proposal for a Universal State extending over the whole planet stems from a cosmological framing of the human condition: For although our earth is only a small part of the world, yet it is a complete image of the universe, and its dignity and beauty are founded primarily on its organism of life, the num-

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ber and measure of its parts, and their reciprocal relation, and not on its mere individual magnitude (Krause, 2009, p. 105).

Ideas travelled while parallel learning processes occurred in diverse parts of the globalising nineteenth-century world. In the mid-nineteenth century, Baháʼu’lláh, the Persian founder of the Baháʼí Faith, developed ideas similar to those of Krause. While claiming to be a messenger of God, Bahá’u’lláh advocated religious freedom and fundamental unity of all religions. Bahá’u’lláh was familiar with the ideas of European radical and utopian writings and advocated ideas of science, democracy, and peace in the multicultural religious setting of the Ottoman Empire. What is especially noteworthy, however, is that he adopted cosmopolitanism and the idea of a world state (Cole, 1998, esp. ch. 4). For Bahá’u’lláh, humanity is a single race. Human improvement is dependent on the evolution of all humanity, and it is time to start to unify humanity into a single society and state. Among other things, Bahá’u’lláh proposed a representative body called Supreme Tribunal, the idea being that “questions both national and international must be referred thereto, and all must carry out the decrees of this Tribunal”.17 A fate not that dissimilar from that of Cloots, Bahá’u’lláh spent the last 24 years of his life in a prison of the Ottoman Empire. Perhaps the first to develop a systematic-looking account of the process that could lead to a future world state was K’ang Yu-wei (1858–1927), a Chinese scholar and public intellectual who was decisively involved in the Hundred Days’ Reform in 1898 and had to flee China after the conservative coup organised by Empress Dowager Cixi. Like Bahá’u’lláh, K’ang Yu-wei was a well-known moderniser, whose public mission originated in a mystical vision (that occurred to him during Buddhist meditation). Among various sources, the limited Western literature that was available in Chinese translation influenced K’ang.18 K’ang’s book Ta T’Ung Shu (or Datong Shu (大同書))19 is not so much a religious text, but rather combines autobiography, philosophy, science, social sciences, and law. Ta T’Ung Shu—variously translated into “The Book of Great Unity” or “The One-World Book” (here K’ang, 2005/1913)—was first drafted in 1884–1885 and completed in 1901–2 while

 A number of Bahá’u’lláh’s sermon-like texts are available in English at: {https://bahaullah.com/} and {http://www.gutenberg.org/browse/authors/b#a6767} accessed on 30 June 2022. The quote is from Compilation on Peace, §20 “So long as these prejudices [religious, racial, national, political] survive, there will be continuous and fearsome wars”, downloaded from the Gutenberg site. 18  Dmitry Martynov (2015) stresses the role of Edward Bellamy (1850–1898) and his utopian novel Looking Backward: 2000–1887: “The plot of “Da Tongshu” demonstrates Kang Yuwei’s familiarity with the ideas of E. Bellamy’s novel Looking Backward first published in Chinese translation in 1889 or 1892. Adjusted to Chinese peculiarities, the main features of the lifestyle of Kang’s utopian society match Bellamy’s ones.” (Quote from p. 238). It should be noted, however, K’ang had been curious about the West since the late 1870s and studied Western sources through available Chinese translations, which included a few works in fiction, geography, and astronomy, but nothing in politics. 19  W. Warren Wagar (1963, p. 20) points out that the expression ta t’ung, “the great unity”, originates in Confucious or at least in Confucian tradition (the expression appears only in materials composed after Confucius’ death). 17

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K’ang was in exile in India. The first two parts were published in 1913, but the book as a whole did not come out before 1935, some 7–8 years after his death. K’ang developed a three-stage scheme for building a strictly egalitarian world federation ruled by a global parliament. In the first stage, “The Age of Disorder at the Time the First Foundations of One World Are Laid”, territorial states remain sovereign and law-making powers reside with them, yet “the laws made by international conferences, being public law, are superior to the laws of the individual states” (K’ang, 2005/1913, p. 107). Functional cooperation has evolved in various issue areas, but some states may still decide to be out of any particular arrangements. There are global legal processes, however. “All cases of international litigation are sent to the international conferences for litigation” (K’ang, 2005/1913, p. 122). In K’ang’s terms, one could argue that the “The Age of Disorder at the Time of the First Foundations” still continues in the 2020s and that the currently prevailing disintegrative tendencies (Patomäki, 2018) are regressive. In K’ang’s hypothetical stage two, in “The Age of Increasing Peace-and-Equality, When One World Is Gradually Coming into Being”, the states are gradually subsumed under the authority of global bodies. “The laws made by the public parliament certify the laws made by the individual states” (Patomäki, 2018, p. 107). Parts of the world such as the high seas—amounting to areas of the planet that Ambassador Arvid Pardo of Malta half a century later, in his 1967 speech at the UN, called “the common heritage of mankind”20—would be at this point directly governed by global public bodies. Furthermore, “there is the public government and the public parliament to deliberate on cases of undecided and divergent laws of the individual states, including cases in which the laws are defective or erroneous” (K’ang, 2005/1913, p. 109). K’ang’s stage three, “The Age of Complete Peace-and-Equality When One World has been Achieved” is a detailed description of a world state, run by a global parliament elected through universal “one person-one vote” elections. K’ang envisages a Jacobinite world from which all borders and differences have been eliminated. All humans would be equal, all property held in common, and all citizens cared for by the twenty ministries of the omnipotent world bureaucracy (Wagar, 1963, 1999).21

 Pardo’s concept was embodied in the now ratified Law of the Sea Treaty. In the Preamble of the 1982 UN Convention for the Law of the Saw, it is stated: “Desiring by this Convention to develop the principles embodied in resolution 2749 (XXV) of 17 December 1970 in which the General Assembly of the UN solemnly declared inter alia that the area of the seabed and ocean floor and the subsoil thereof, beyond the limits of national jurisdiction, as well as its resources, are the common heritage of mankind, the exploration and exploitation of which shall be carried out for the benefit of mankind as a whole, irrespective of the geographical location of States”. 21  Warren W. Wagar (1963, p. 52) commented “K’ang’s vision of world order may seem nightmarish in Western liberal eyes, but much of the Chinese way of life since 1950 under communist rule bears a startling, even a disquieting, resemblance”. Ironically, Wagar’s (1999) own later scenario about a socialist democratic world state that would be established in the 2060s is not so dissimilar from K’ang’s vision, yet appears as much less nightmarish—and in some ways even utopian—in his story, although it eventually collapses because of its inflexible bureaucracy and bigness. 20

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What is especially interesting from the point of view of my main thesis, however, is the way K’ang frames his three-stage model of movement towards a unified world state. K’ang starts with an ethical discussion on how he has been touched by slaughters in wars ranging from a battle in the era of the Warring States to the Franco-­ German war of 1870–1871. He then moves on to a Confucian discussion of how everything—Air, Heaven, Earth, and Human—is connected. “[T]hey are all but parts of the all-embracing ch’i of the ultimate beginnings of the universe”. (K’ang, 2005/1913, p. 64). The ensuing brief discussion is not only compatible with some readings of quantum mechanics (articulated as a scientific theory only decades after Ta T’Ung Shu was written), but K’ang’s related account of the need for an ever-­ widening horizon of moral identification is explicitly based on modern cosmology and also refers twice to the hypothesis of cosmic pluralism. K’ang was struggling with how to be able to act on his cosmic identification: How about the living creatures on Mars, Saturn, Jupiter, Uranus, Neptune? I have absolutely no connection with them; they are too distant and obscure to expect it. I wish to love (jen) them, but they are so far off I have no way to do it. The size of the fixed stars, the numerousness of the galactic clusters, the nebulae and the globular clusters, the aspect of all of the heavens, my eyes themselves have seen, and my spirit has often roamed among (literally, with) them. Their states, men and women, codes of social behaviour (li), music, civilized pleasures, and their ways, must be vast and boundless. In the heavens as among men: although I have no way to see them; yet if they have creatures possessed of knowledge, then they will be no different in nature than we humans of this, our earth (K’ang, 2005/1913, pp. 66–67; see also Cosgrove, 1994, pp. 272-3).22

In Victorian England, similar ideas were maturing, perhaps especially through the persona of H. G. Wells. In his “scientific romances” of the 1890s such as The Time Machine (1895), The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896), The Invisible Man (1897), and The War of the Worlds (1898), Wells stretched out and expanded upon the prevailing sense of time, space, and evolutionary and technological possibilities.23 In The Time Machine, Wells takes his readers’ hundreds of thousands and, then, millions of years ahead in time—in a setting of the solar system as a whole. The Island of Doctor Moreau discusses the ethics of biotechnologies, and The Invisible Man suggests the possibility of a fifth dimension. The War of the Worlds envisages a planetary invasion by desperate Martians whose own planet is dying.24 These works popularised modern scientific ideas in an exciting and easily understandable way,  K’ang refers to an experience of actually seeing the stars and (probably also) our planet from the outside. He may have interpreted this as a mystical experience, but in fact there are many pre-space age descriptions of how moons, planets, and stars look from the space. The Copernican perspective and knowledge of the cosmic dimensions and relations enabled human imagination to envisage how things look from a cosmic viewpoint long before outer space photographs. 23  All of these books are easily available in several different editions; moreover, they are in the public domain and can be freely accessed at: {http://www.gutenberg.org/browse/authors/w#a30} accessed on 17 June 2009. 24  The story was an ambiguously ironic reversal of the fate of Tasmanians in the hands of the British colonialists. While the British were kind of Martians and Earthlings Tasmanians, in Wells’ story viruses kill the “British”, not those being colonised. And yet there were elements of simplistic 22

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by giving specific—even if somewhat sceptical—cultural meanings to the non-­ centric cosmology and evolutionary account of the planet. At the dawn of the twentieth century, Wells’ worldview changed somewhat, from the sense of a rather purposeless NGP cosmology, gloomy cosmic predictions, and the idea of arbitrary evolution; towards a sense of some sort of coherence and purpose in the processual cosmos (MacKenzie & MacKenzie, 1973, pp. 161–5). This shift instigated his idea of futures studies. Wells’ 1901 bestseller Anticipations of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon Human life and Thought was probably the first work in systematic and analytical future studies (a few months later, he gave the famous lecture “The Discovery of the Future” at the Royal Institution, arguing that the future can be systematically anticipated). While discussing manifold social and technological trends and possibilities, ultimately he wrote Anticipations for the political end of “developing New Republic—a Republic that must ultimately become a World State of capable rational men, developing amidst the fading contours and colours of our existing nations and institutions” (Wells, 1902, p.  51). This became the key theme of the bulk of Wells’ writings throughout the catastrophes of the first half of the twentieth century.25 In The Outline of History (originally published in 1920, here Wells, 1931), which was written immediately after, and in response to, the First World War, Wells summarised his vision of the philosophical and religious spirit of a world state, almost verging on desperation: Our true state, this state that is already beginning, this state to which every man owes his utmost political effort, must be now this nascent Federal World State to which human necessities point. Our true God now is the God of all men. Nationalism as a God must follow the tribal gods to limbo. Our true nationality is mankind (Wells, 1931, p. 1157).26

Unlike his predecessors from Cloots and Krause to Baháʼu’lláh and K’ang, Wells was not executed, imprisoned, or exiled. Rather, from 1901 to 1946, he was an economically well-off celebrity in Britain and elsewhere. Wells took part in social struggles in his local context, e.g. through the Fabian Society, but ultimately he was a cosmopolitan socialist, who had access to some of the most famous people of his time27. (I will discuss Wells’s transformative ideas in more detail in Chap. 9). Manichean thinking in the story (the Martians as “others”). For a discussion of the moral of the story, see Wagar (2004, pp. 54–58) 25  In many of writings, Wells stressed that a world state does not have to resemble existing territorial states. Often Wells had in mind functionalist systems of global governance rather than a centralised state, although a key point was to transfer the legitimate monopoly of violence to a world body. For a good analytical discussion on Wells’ political theory, see Partington (2003). 26  All together the book sold over two million copies. Characteristically, Wells explained in the revised edition that “The Outline of History the writer would far prefer to his own would be the Outline of 2031; to read it and, perhaps with even more curiosity, to pour over its illustrations” (Wells, 1931, p. 6). 27  Wells met many world leaders during his time, e.g. in the USA and in the Soviet Union. On 23 July 1934, he interviewed Stalin in Moscow, challenging Stalin in his own office. Wells started the interview by saying: “I am very much obliged to you, Mr. Stalin, for agreeing to see me. I was in

The Reaction Against the Copernican Perspective: Nietzsche, etc.

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However, after the Second World War, and after decades of trying his best to convince people about the necessity of a world state, Wells was giving up. He receded to the Darwinist pessimism inherent in some of his early “scientific romances”. 28 Talking about the divergence between his own aspirations and actual world history, he declared that “the more he weighted the realities before him the less he was able to detect any convergence whatever” (Wells, 1945, p. 5). Perhaps humanity is indeed just an accident that will be wiped out by its own stupidity and short-sightedness.

 he Reaction Against the Copernican Perspective: T Nietzsche, etc. The story of the cosmological sources of critical cosmopolitanism would be incomplete without at least a brief discussion on the nineteenth and twentieth-century reaction against critical cosmopolitanism and its interpretation of the meaning of the new Copernican horizon. For example, Cloots argued that in the absence of a bridge to other planets and, possibly, intelligent life there, sovereignty resides in the entirety of mankind. Krause, Bahá’u’lláh, K’ang, and (most of the time) Wells, as well as Kant before them, ascribed positive and forward-looking cultural meanings and values to the NGP cosmology. They all agreed that humanity is a morally significant part of a very wide whole; that morality is not an accident but has somehow emerged from cosmic evolution, as an essential part of it; and that our fate is shared and lies in the possibility of collective progress. However, these meanings and values do not follow from empirical science. On the face of it, the value-neutral technical procedures of modern science would seem to entail thorough scepticism. David Hume explained that we should trust only our sense perceptions and be sceptical about anything else.29 Friedrich Nietzsche was the United States recently. I had a long conversation with President Roosevelt and tried to ascertain what his leading ideas were. Now I have come to ask you what you are doing to change the world…”. In the course of the interview, Wells (1934) states, for instance, that “they regard your simple class-war antagonism as nonsense” and that “[t]he big ship is humanity, not a class”. 28  In the early stories, evolution is seen as possibly implying the degeneration of the human species; the ultimate fate of the solar system is death as the sun becomes a red giant; and monsters, aliens, and mad scientists run amok against the humanity. A gloomy section from the 11th chapter of the serial version of The Time Machine published in New Review (May, 1895) was deleted from the book. This section, “The Grey Man”, is available at: https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Grey_ Man (downloaded 1 July 2022). 29  According to a common interpretation, Hume mounted a sceptical attack on all forms of design arguments and teleological reasoning, in effect denying that the universe would have any meaning or purpose whatever; it just happens to be; see, for example, Barrow and Tipler (1988, pp. 69–72). However, Hume was not consistent on his attitude towards objective morality or religion and also wrote things like “the whole frame of nature bespeaks an intelligent author”; quoted in J. C. A. Gaskin (1993, p. 320). Although the fear of censorship and consequences might have made Hume write contradictory statements, it seems clear that as a consistent sceptic Hume was unable and unwilling to deny the existence of God. It should be noted that for the same reason he was far

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among the first to fully articulate the devastating impact of the positivist or empiricist sentiment (while being an empiricist himself, at least in the letter). (For a detailed analytical overview of Nietzsche’s three phases and his diverse and ambivalent pursuits, Clark, 2005). God is dead! We are alone on this insignificant planet. Nietzsche proclaimed, moreover, that no universal perspective is possible. Christianity, Kantianism, and utilitarianism are mere slave moralities; we should be looking for something better. What is coming in the history of the next two centuries is the “advent of nihilism” (Nietzsche, 1968, p. 3). However, Nietzsche took a critical distance from the nihilism implicit in the new Copernican cosmology and the nineteenth-century Darwinian framework of explaining the origins of humanity. A view of a planet orbiting sun in a huge void, in which the sun itself is located and moving, makes us lose our sense of direction and place. This is spatial nihilism. “Are we not straying as if through an infinite nothing?” (Nietzsche, 1961, p. 14). At times Nietzsche displayed nostalgia for the world of ancient Greece; at other times, he was suggesting the possibility of new values of life and vitality and introduced concepts such as “overhuman” and “will to power”. Either way, Nietzsche’s reaction was basically about going back to the ego- and geo-centric perspective of Aristotle, albeit in a more desperate way and at a new level of critical reflexivity. Nietzsche’s reflections centred on the vitality, values, and will-to-power of the aristoi (“best persons”). The perspectives of those who can differentiate themselves from the “herds” must define relevant knowledge. Moreover, by being critical of the “spatial nihilism” of the NPG cosmology, Nietzsche evoked a desire for a concept of worldliness, or being-in-a-place, which would overcome that nihilism. In the twentieth century, this idea has been explored by various phenomenologists, Heidegger, later Wittgenstein, and their followers. These explorations have at times resulted in the construction of a terrestrial ontology of earthliness that involves a territorial conception of politics, oftentimes connected with nationalism or racism (Turnbull, 2006). The effects of the implicit nihilism of Copernicus and Darwin have not been confined to those who have read and reflected upon Nietzsche. Rather, Nietzsche provides insights into the cultural undercurrents of modernity. The subjectivist value theory of neoclassical economics, for instance, comes close to what Nietzsche meant by nihilism (the marginalist theory was articulated at the time of Nietzsche).30 Another illuminating example of the sense of nihilism is Louis Althusser, a key ideologue of the French Communist Party in the 1960s and 1970s, whose life turned into a disaster when he killed his wife in Paris in 1980. Althusser’s commitment to

less opposed to causal realism than what is often thought (for a provocative discussion of Hume as a causal realist, see Wright, 2007). 30  The originators of marginalism such as Alfred Marshall and Leon Walras cultivated progressivist ethical and political ideas, but the Humean scepticism implicit in their mathematical models— involving instrumentalism, empiricist ontology, and abstract, spatial conception of time—became increasingly dominant later in the twentieth century through the selectivity of US-based mainstream economics (see Morgan & Patomäki, forthcoming).

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the true meaning of Marx’s theory, his “anti-humanism”, and his loyalty to the Communist Party (see Althusser, 1969, pp.  9–15, 21–39) despite its hierarchies, exclusions, and violence can be plausibly read as a desperate existentialist commitment in an otherwise nihilist world.31 Althusser’s life struggle was about trying to sustain hope by cultivating a rather orthodox, scientistic Marxian reading of societal developments that will inevitably lead to socialism and communism—to be realised through the institutions of a territorial state.

Conclusion: Towards a New Cosmological Imaginary? In the early twenty-first century, popular imagination is filled with metaphors that envisage the human world as a whole—from the “global shopping mall” or “global village” to the “spaceship Earth”. The emergence of the planetary dimension in the everyday life of many makes it increasingly easy to identify with the cosmopolitan interpretation of NPG cosmology. Outer space pictures of the Earth are now routinely used to stress the global nature of products, corporations, and ideologies. Nietzsche, Heidegger, and other sceptics notwithstanding, the blue planet “straying as if through an infinite nothing” can be, and often is, conceived of as a home. Moreover, global warming has made it clear that the planet’s cultural and ecological elements form a singular and vulnerable cosmological embrace (Turnbull, 2006; see also Steger, 2008). And yet, the permeation of the popular mind with commodified images of the planet does not resolve the underlying scientific, philosophical, and ethical-political issues. What are the meanings and values that should be ascribed to the NGP cosmology? The precise nature and meaning of the NGP cosmology is something that scientists are also hotly debating. This is the topic of Chap. 3, where I state that in complex pluralist societies, there are hegemonic struggles over constitutive myths about the cosmos and our place in it. Suffice it to say that the Copernican principle that we are not observing the universe from a special position has been challenged. No scientist is arguing for a return to Aristotelian cosmology. Nothing except the moon and a few artificial satellites are revolving around the Earth. Our planet is but a speck in the vastness of the cosmos. However, there are senses in which our position is special and in which life and our consciousness can be quite central to the cosmos. Already in the early 1960s, Robert Dicke noted that the age of the universe as seen by living observers is not random, but is constrained by biological factors that require it to be roughly a  Five years after killing his wife, Althusser wrote his memoirs where he repeats, in a Freudian language, many of the points made by Nietzsche. “Does one have to point out that, in addition to the three great narcissistic wounds inflicted on Humanity (that of Galileo, that of Darwin, and that of the unconscious), there is a fourth and ever graver one which no one wishes to have revealed (since time immemorial the family has been the very site of the sacred and therefore of power and of religion). It is an irrefutable fact that the Family is the most powerful ideological State apparatus”. (Althusser, 1993). In many ways, these memoirs constitute a tragic story of modern Europe in 1914–1989. 31

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“golden age” (Dicke, 1961, pp. 440–1). For life to evolve, the cosmos and many of its basic laws and mechanisms must have been stable for a long time. For billions of years, the early universe was too simple for life as we know it to evolve, but much later the main sequence stars and stable planetary systems would have already come to an end. The term “anthropic principle” was first coined by the theoretical astrophysicist Brandon Carter, in his contribution to a 1973 Kraków symposium honouring Copernicus’s 500th birthday. Carter articulated the Anthropic Principle as a reaction to over-reliance on the Copernican Principle, which states that we are not in a special position in the Universe. “Although our situation is not necessarily central, it is inevitably privileged to some extent” (Carter, 1974, p.  291). Carter defined two forms of the anthropic principle, a weak one that referred only to the anthropic selection of privileged space-time locations in the universe, and a more controversial strong form that referred to the fundamental parameters of physics. According to the strong principle, supported by many apparent large-number coincidences, the universe must be such as to admit the creation of observers within it at some stage (ibid. 294).32 On this basis, it is possible to build new metaphors and symbols to make sense of our special place in the universe (e.g. Primack & Abrams, 2006; Gidley, 2006). Similarly, the standard Darwinist interpretation of the evolution of life has been challenged. Charles Darwin himself gave some credence to the Lamarckian theory and qualified his theory by arguing that “I am convinced that Natural Selection has been the main but not exclusive means of modification” (Darwin, 1998/1859, p. 7). When read from the perspective of the new theories of complexity, Darwin seems to have concurred that in addition to the blind mechanisms of short-term natural selection, also a generative diversity- and order-building mechanisms seem to have been at play, co-responsible for the order that is not accidental in terms of large timescales and wide categories and layers of the emergence of order upon order. Randomly mutating genome is unlikely to have been able to produce viable complex organisms within the known timeframes (this is one of the numerous points made by Ervin Laszlo in favour of what he calls an “integral” cosmology, Laszlo, 2006, pp. 16–7). The search for causal forces and mechanisms of complexity and emergence in open systems is now on (Kauffman, 1995, 2000). In some ways, early twenty-first-century science appears to be moving towards the worldviews of Kant, Krause, Bahá’u’lláh, K’ang, and Wells. There seems to be more coherence and connectedness to the universe than previously appreciated. Morality has emerged from the process of cosmic evolution. In philosophy and social theory, ethics and normative theory are back. Post-Kantian critical theories are practised and taught widely. Moreover, since the 1980s, globalisation has been a key area of research and public discussion. There has been a lot  Probably the most thorough analysis of different versions of the anthropic principle is Barrow and Tipler (1988). See also the diversity of analyses in, e.g., Chaisson (2001), Davies (2006), Gardner (2003), and Klapwijk (2008). 32

References

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of talk about global governance, sustainability, justice, and democracy. While the future is of course open, and while disintegrative tendencies have prevailed in the 2010s and 2020s, the overall developments have created a space for the re-­ articulation of cosmopolitical visions of change in dialogical, pluralistic, and open-ended terms.

References Allan, B. (2018). Scientific cosmology and international orders. Cambridge University Press. Althusser, L. (1969). “To my English readers” and “Introduction: Today”. In For Marx. (B. Brewster, Trans.). Verso. Althusser, L. (1993). The future lasts forever. A memoir. (R. Veasey, Trans.). The New Press. Archimedes. (1897). The works of Archimedes. T. L. Heath, (ed.). C. J. Clay and Sons. Cambridge University Press Warehouse. Retrieved (15 July 2009) from http://www.archive.org/details/ worksofarchimede029517mbp. Aristotle. (1999). Nicomachean ethics (T. Irwin, Trans., 2nd ed.). Hackett Publishing. Aristotle. (2000). Politics. (B. Howett, Trans.). Courier Dover Publications. Barrow, J. D., & Tipler, F. J. (1988). The anthropic cosmological principle. Oxford University Press. Bevilacqua, A. (2012). Conceiving the republic of mankind: The political thought of Anacharsis Cloots. History of European Ideas, 38(4), 550–569. Bhaskar, R. (1994). Plato Etc. the problems of philosophy and their resolution. Verso. Brown, C. (1988). Cosmopolitan confusions: A reply to Hoffman’. Paradigms, 2(2), 102–111. Brown, C. (1992). International relations theory: New normative approaches. Harvester Wheatsheaf. Bull, H. (1977). The anarchical society. A study of order in world politics (p. 1977). Macmillan. Carter, B. (1974). Large number coincidences and the anthropic principle in cosmology. In M.  S. Longair (ed.), Confrontation of cosmological theories with observational data (pp. 291–298). Retrieved June 10, 2023, from https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/symposium-international-astronomical-union/article/large-number-coincidencesandthe-anthropic-principle-in-cosmology./86E47CDB369FD658C6BDC1DFEC77 EDE4 Chaisson, E. (2001). Cosmic evolution. The rise of complexity in nature. Harvard University Press. Clark, M. (2005). Nietzsche, Friedrich. In E. Craig (Ed.), The shorter Routledge encyclopedia of philosophy (pp. 726–741). Routledge. Cole, J. (1998). Modernity & the millennium. The genesis of the Baha’i faith in the nineteenth century Middle East. Columbia University Press. Cosgrove, D. (1994). Contested global visions: One-world, whole-earth, and the Apollo space photographs. Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 84(2), 270–294. Cosgrove, D. (2003). Globalism and tolerance in early modern geography. Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 93(4), 852–870. Darwin, C. (1998/1859). The origin of species. Oxford University Press [World’s Classics]. Davies, P. (2006). The Goldilock’s enigma. Why is the universe just right for life? Allen Lane. Derrida, J. (1992). The other heading. Reflections on today’s Europe (P-A. Brault, Trans.). Indiana University Press. Dicke, R. (1961). Dirac’s cosmology and Mach’s principle. Nature, 192, 440–441. Dreyer, J. L. E. (1958). A history of Astronomy from Thales to Kepler (2nd ed.). Dover Publications. Elias, N. (1987). Involvement and Detachment. Basil Blackwell. Erskine, T. (2008). Embedded cosmopolitanism. Duties to strangers and enemies in a world of ‘disclosed communities’. Oxford University Press. Galtung, J. (1996). Peace by peaceful means, peace and conflict, development and civilization. PRIO & Sage.

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Gardner, J. N. (2003). Biocosm. The new scientific theory of the universe: Intelligent life is the architect of the universe. Inner Ocean. Gaskin, J. C. A. (1993). Hume on religion. In D. F. Norton (Ed.), The Cambridge companion to Hume (pp. 313–344). Cambridge University Press. Gidley, J. (2006). Spiritual epistemologies and integral cosmologies: Transforming thinking and culture. In S. Awbrey, D. Dana, V. Miller, P. Robinson, M. M. Ryan, & D. K. Scott (Eds.), Integrative earning and action: A call to wholeness (Vol. 3, pp. 29–56). Peter Lang Publishing. Habermas, J. (1990). Justice and solidarity: On the discussions concerning “stage 6”. In M. Kelly (Ed.), Hermeneutics and critical theory in ethics and politics (pp. 224–253). The MIT Press. Hegel, G.  W. F. (2003). The phenomenology of mind. (J.  B. Baillie Mineola, Trans.). Dover Publications. How, A. R. (2001). Habermas, history and social evolution: Moral learning and the trial of Louis XVI. Sociology, 35(1), 177–194. Huygens, C. (1698). Cosmotheoros. The celestial worlds Discover’d: Or, conjectures concerning the inhabitants, plants and productions of the worlds in the planets. (Trans. Unknown). Retrieved June 10, 2023, from https://webspace.science.uu.nl/~gent0113/huygens/huygens_ct_en.htm K’Ang, Y. (2005). Ta T’Ung Shu. The one-world philosophy of K’Ang Yu-Wei (L. G. Thompson Trans. and Introduced). Routledge. First published in Chinese partly in 1913 and fully in 1935; in English in 1958. Kant, I. (1784/1988). Idea for a universal history with a cosmopolitan intent. In Perpetual peace and other essays (T. Humphrey, Trans.). Hackett Publishing. Kant, I. (1793/1988). On the proverb: That may be true in theory but is of no practical use. In Perpetual peace and other essays (T. Humphrey, Trans.). Hackett Publishing. Kant, I. (1905/1755). Universal natural history and theory of Heaven. (I. Johnston, Trans.). (Based on Georg Reimer’s 1905 edition of the complete works of Immanuel Kant, orig. published 1755). Retrieved 12 August 2008 from http://www.mala.bc.ca/~johnstoi/kant/kant2e.htm. Kant, I. (1952/1788). Critique of practical reason (T. K. Abbott, Trans.). Encyclopædia Britannica. Kauffman, S. (1995). At home in the universe. The search for the Laws of self-organization and complexity. Oxford University Press. Kauffman, S. (2000). Investigations. Oxford University Press. Klapwijk, J. (2008). Purpose in the living world. Creation and emergent evolution. Cambridge University Press. Kohlberg, L. (1973). The claim to moral adequacy of a highest stage of moral judgment. Journal of Philosophy, 70(18), 630–646. Kragh, H. (1996). Cosmology and controversy: The historical development of theories of the universe. Princeton University Press. Krause, K. (2009). The ideal of humanity and universal federation. (W.  Hastie, trans.), LLC, BiblioBazaar. Kuhn, T. (1957). The Copernican revolution. Planetary astronomy in the development of Western thought. Harvard University Press. Lakoff, G., & Johnson, M. (1999). Philosophy in the flesh. The embodied mind and its challenge to Western thought. Basic Books. Laszlo, E. (2006). Science and the reenchantment of the cosmos. The rise of the integral vision of reality. Inner Traditions. Linklater, A. (1990). Men and citizens in the theory of international relations (2nd ed.). Macmillan. MacKenzie, N., & MacKenzie, J. (1973). H.G Wells. A biography. A Touchstone Book. Simon and Schuster. Mali, J. (1992). The rehabilitation of myth. In Vico’s new science. Cambridge University Press. Martin, D. (2008). Maat and order in African cosmology a conceptual tool for understanding indigenous knowledge. Journal of Black Studies, 38(6), 951–967. Martynov, D. (2015). Edward Bellamy and Kang Youwei’s utopian society: Comparative analyses. Journal of Sustainable Development, 8(4), 233–238. McLelland, J. S. (1996). A history of Western political thought. Routledge.

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Morgan, J., & Patomäki, H. (forthcoming). Timeless Economics. Bringing Real Time Back In, a work in progress. Morgenthau, H. (1961). Politics among nations. The struggle for power and peace (3rd ed.). Alfred A. Knopf. Muhlberger, S. (n.d.). Democracy in ancient India. Retrieved June 10, 2023, from https://iks.iitgn. ac.in/wpcontent/uploads/2016/01/Democracy-in-Ancient-India-S-Muhlberger.pdf Muthu, S. (2003). Enlightenment against empire. Princeton University Press. Narlikar, J.  V., & Burbridge, G. (2008). Facts and speculation in cosmology. Cambridge University Press. Needham, J. (2004). Science and civilization in China volume 7. Part II general conclusions and reflections. Cambridge University Press. Nietzsche, F. (1961). Thus spoke Zarathustra (R. J. Hollingdale, Trans.). Penguin Classics. Nietzsche, F. (1968). The will to power (W. Kauffman & R.J. Hollingdale, Trans.). Vintage. North, J. (2008). Cosmos. An illustrated history of astronomy and cosmology. University of Chicago Press. Nussbaum, M. (1997). Kant and stoic cosmopolitanism. The Journal of Political Philosophy, 5(1), 1–25. Nussbaum, M. (2019). The cosmopolitan tradition. A noble but flawed ideal. Belknap Press (of Harvard University Press). O’Neill, O. (2008). Historical trends and human futures. Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A, 39(4), 529–534. Ossio, J. M. (1997). Cosmologies. International Social Science Journal, 49(4), 549–562. Partington, J. S. (2003). Building cosmopolis. The political thought of H. G. Wells. Ashgate. Patomäki, H. (1992). From normative utopias to political dialectics: Beyond a deconstruction of the Brown-Hoffman debate. Millennium: Journal of International Studies, 21(1), 53–75. Patomäki, H. (2002). From east to west. Emergent global philosophies – Beginnings of the end of Western dominance? Theory, Culture and Society, 19(3), 89–111. Patomäki, H. (2018). Disintegrative tendencies in global political economy: Exits and conflicts. Routledge. Patomäki, H., & Steger, M. B. (2009). Social imaginaries and big history: Towards a new planetary consciousness? Futures, 41(10), 1056–1063. Primack, J., & Abrams, N. (2006). The view from the Centre of the Universe. Discovering our extraordinary place in the cosmos. Fourth Estate. Sabine, G. H. (1961). A history of political theory. Holt, Rinehart and Winston. Scharfstein, B.-A. (1978). Three philosophical civilizations: A preliminary comparison. In B.-A.  Scharfstein (Ed.), Philosophy east philosophy west. A critical comparison of Indian, Chinese, Islamic and European philosophy (pp. 48–127). Basil Blackwell. Sen, A. (2001). Development as freedom. Oxford University Press. Sen, A. (2005). Argument and history. New Republic, 233(6), 25–32. Steger, M. B. (2008). The rise of the global imaginary: Political ideologies from the French revolution to the global war on terror. Oxford University Press. Thompson, E. P. (1988). The Sykaos papers. Bloomberg. Turnbull, N. (2006). The ontological consequences of Copernicus. Global being in the planetary world. Theory, Culture & Society, 23(1), 125–139. Voltaire. (1752, original date uncertain). Micromégas histoire philosophique. Paris: Firmin Didot. Retrieved June 10, 2023, in French with the 1829 preface by Beuchot at the project Guthenberg from https://www.gutenberg.org/files/30123/30123-h/30123-h.htm Wagar, W. (1963). The City of man. Houghton Mifflin. Wagar, W. (1999). A short history of the future (3rd ed.). University of Chicago Press. Wagar, W. (2004). H. G. Wells. Traversing time. Wesleyan University Press. Wells, H. (1902). Anticipations of the reaction of mechanical and scientific progress upon human life and thought (2nd ed.). Chapman & Hall. Wells, H. (1931). (The new and revised) outline of history. Being a plain history of life and mankind. Garden City Publishing Company.

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Wells, H. (1934). Marxism versus liberalism. An interview with H.  G. Wells and J.  Stalin. Conducted on 23 July 1934, available at https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/stalin/ works/1934/07/23.htm (downloaded 1 July 2022). Wells, H. G. (1945). Mind at the end of its tether. William Heinemann. Wright, J. P. (2007). Hume’s causal realism. Recovering a traditional interpretation. In R. Read & K. A. Richman (Eds.), The new Hume debate. A revised edition (pp. 88–99). Routledge.

3

A Creation Myth and Origin Story Suitable to our Globalised World? A Friendly Critique of the Big History Storyline about our Place in Cosmos

Introduction In Chap. 2, I argued that critical cosmopolitan orientation has usually been grounded on a non-geocentric physical cosmology that locates the human drama on the surface of planet Earth within wide scales of time and space. The evolution of life and society on planet Earth have cosmic conditions. This wide perspective suggests a universal or cosmopolitan history of humankind. It comes as no surprise that H. G. Wells was a pioneer in this area. Wells worked on the idea of a common history of humanity during and after the First World War. While the non-geocentric physical cosmology was the basis of his two-volume Outline of History, first published as a single volume in 1920, Wells’s history project was ethically and politically motivated. Wells (1920, pp. v–vi) argued for the importance of shared historical ideas. “There can be no common peace and prosperity without common historical ideas”. He continued by talking about “a sense of history as the common adventure of all mankind” being necessary for peace. Before Wells, there had been a few universal histories, i.e. presentations of the history of mankind as a whole and as a coherent unit. These predecessor texts included (in some sense) Denis Diderot’s Encyclopédie, which Wells used as a partial model, and especially Alexander von Humboldt’s widely read Kosmos, which however limited its human history to the history of science. In Britain, also Robert Chambers’s Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation was well-known. Yet, the overall prevailing tendency before Wells had been to tell the story in Christian or Eurocentric terms, earlier usually assuming the truth of the Bible and its eschatology and later, in the nineteenth century, positing a particular Western society as the standard for evaluating the rest. In contrast, Wells framed world history in cosmic terms and imagined a future world society, indeed a world state, thus providing a new vantage point. In book I of the first volume, Wells narrates the origins of planet Earth before moving gradually to the history of humankind as a whole in book II. Wells’s non-Eurocentric and holistic angle remained rather unique for most of © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 H. Patomäki, World Statehood, World-Systems Evolution and Global Futures, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-32305-8_3

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the twentieth century. Arnold Toynbee was perhaps the most important partial exception, known especially for his 12-volume A Study of History (1934–1961). The later volumes include discussions on the evolutionary emergence of a worldwide civilisation and federal world government (for Toynbee, the world is becoming “one city” that can be organised “on a non-local basis”; quoted in Wagar, 1963, pp. 230–231). Things started to change later in the twentieth century. Dependencia theory arose in the 1960s and world-systems analysis in the 1970s. The 1980s saw the rise of a systematic globalist critique of Eurocentrism. The colonisers’ model of the world— Eurocentrism—is based on a simple and yet false assumption: all important concepts, practices, technologies, and capacities have emerged from Europe or Europeanised parts of the world. Originating in Europe, the central concepts, practices, technologies, and capacities have subsequently diffused to the rest of the world. Thus, world history is presented as the history of how the central dynamics of cultural evolution moved gradually from Mesopotamia westwards via Greece and Rome towards North-West Europe and, later, towards the United States of America. The decisive achievements of the great Eurasian civilisations of Arabia, China, India, Japan, and Persia have thus been largely neglected and the parallel developments in Africa, the Americas, and the Pacific are mostly ignored (Blaut, 1993, 2000). The critics of Eurocentrism have made a strong case for thinking that this is a biased and one-sided account of what Wells called the common adventure of all mankind (Amin, 1989; Frank, 1998; Hobson, 2004; Needham, 2004; Pomeranz, 2000). The Greco-Roman civilisation was not unique—the Han Dynasty China and parts of India went through similar developments roughly at the same time—and after the collapse of the Western part of the Roman Empire, the areas north of the Mediterranean formed an outlying part of Eurasia for a millennium. Until “the long 16th century” (to paraphrase world-systems analysis, see, e.g., Chase-Dunn, 2012), most important concepts, practices, technologies, and capacities originated in China, India, and Arabia and were slowly diffused to and modified in Europe. From this perspective, we can also write counterfactual scenarios about how the Industrial Revolution could have taken place elsewhere on the Eurasian continent, most plausibly in China, with far-reaching world-historical consequences (e.g. Tetlock et al., 2006). Neither the time nor place of the Industrial Revolution was predetermined, although globally the shift to industrial production as such might have been inevitable (this is the topic of Chap. 4). The rise of the concept of globalisation (see James & Steger, 2014) prompted a boom of global/world history aiming to overcome Eurocentrism (Conrad, 2017). Even more in line with critical cosmopolitanism than global history is the idea of Big History (BH) that first emerged in the 1980s and became somewhat more widely known in the 1990s and 2000s (Christian, 2018a; Spier, 2015, Chap. 1). William McNeill (2004, pp. xvi-xvii) summarises the basic idea: while natural sciences have been historicised at many levels, it is now the task of historians—and social scientists—to generalise boldly enough to connect their area of study with the history of the cosmos, solar system, and life. Human societies remain part of nature, “properly

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at home in the universe despite our extraordinary powers, unique self-­consciousness, and inexhaustible capacity for collective learning”. In his programmatic statements in the second volume of the then-new Journal of World History, David Christian (1991), the originator of the concept of BH, articulated the task in terms of spatio-temporal scale. What is the scale on which history should be studied? The establishment of the Journal of World History itself implied a radical spatial answer to that question: in geographical terms, the most appropriate scale may be the whole of the world. But what about time? […] I will defend an equally radical answer to the temporal aspect of the same question: what is the time scale on which history should be studied? […T]he appropriate time scale for the study of history may be the whole of time. In other words, historians should be prepared to explore the past on many different time scales up to that of the universe itself – a scale of between 10 and 20 billion years. This is what I mean by “Big History”. (Christian, 1991, p. 223).

David Christian’s (2004) Maps of Time. An Introduction to Big History is a unified story of developments of the whole universe from the Big Bang about 13 thousand million years ago through the present into its distant future. Maps of Time has been followed by several similar overviews covering the whole of time1 and a few theory-­oriented works in a similar vein.2 The story of Big History is about the emergence of new layers of qualitatively distinct beings and the development of increasing complexity locally, against the background of the second law of thermodynamics that sees increasing entropy rather than complexity in the cosmos as a whole (see, e.g., Kauffman, 1995; Wheeler, 2006). A particular mammal species that emerged biologically some 200,000 years ago, Homo sapiens, acquired the first elements of oral language c. 70,000–50,000 BCE and—albeit at first only very rudimentarily— started to transmit increasingly complex cultural learning to the next generations (see Patomäki, 2020a). Humanity acquired the “capacity to share information precisely and rapidly so that information accumulates at the level of the community and species giving rise to long-term historical change” (Christian et al., 2014, p. 90). One of the aims of BH is to develop a creation myth and origin story suitable to our globalised world characterised by global risks such as (1) economic growth and ecological deterioration and (2) by the existence of weapons of mass destruction  McNeill and McNeill (2003) is timewise limited as it starts from Homo erectus; Brown (2007), however, is a history of all of time and space; Christian et al. (2014) is a beautifully illustrated textbook outlining the basics of BH; and Spier (2015) is an attempt to systematise the theory behind BH, with a strong environmentalist emphasis. Christian (2018b) sketches eight “thresholds” of cosmic, biological, and human history, the most recent of which is “The Antropocene”: “Like it or not, we are now managing an entire biosphere, and we can do it well or badly” (p. 289). 2  Chaisson (2001) focusses on the physical aspects of cosmic evolution without ignoring life and humanity. Hands (2016) has roots in chemistry and human sciences, but covers all fields including cosmology and theoretical physics. Volk (2017), written by a biologist and environmentalist interested in human sciences, develops a theory of 13 levels of combogenesis from fundamental quanta via cells, etc., to geopolitical states and potential world political community. This is compatible with the perspective of Spier (2015, e.g., p. 67) that stresses energy flows through matter under “Goldilocks circumstances” that can preserve complexity and enable new forms of complexity. 1

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and other risks. An origin story based on the currently prevailing Big Bang cosmology provides some sense of coherence and wholeness in the cosmos. The Big Bang cosmology provides BH with a scientific creation myth, and the metatheory of emergence and complexity fills in the rest of the story (Christian, 2004, especially pp. 1–20, 505–511). The basic idea is summarised neatly in a 2014 textbook: […] there is a single thread that runs through the whole story: the emergence, over the 13.8 billion years since the universe appeared, of more and more complex things. Complex things have many diverse components that are arranged in precise ways so that they generate new qualities. We call these new qualities emergent properties. (Christian et  al., 2014, p. 4).

This definition, however, lacks the possibility of de-complexification. Fred Spier (2015, p.  45, italics HP) thus complements this definition by stressing that BH “deals with the rise and demise of complexity at all scales”—as forms of complexity can also disintegrate. The basic methodological idea of BH is that the overall story must accord with modern science and scholarship and their most recent findings. The story must also be open to critique, revision, and improvement. A difficulty with the BH project is that modern science has been set against all myths. The standard modern meaning of myth has been that of a narrative that has no basis in reason and cannot be true. Mythos is seen as opposed to logos. This binary opposition is problematic. Giambattista Vico argued already in the eighteenth century that human civilisation is based on the emergent capacity to imagine, through complex language, and thus to create something new (see Mali, 2002). Since humans transcended basic physical impulses with the help of language, we have been making our own cultural and social worlds. From a Vicoan perspective, consciousness, society, and history are mythopoetically constituted. If a myth is lived by people in their everyday practices and institutions, the resulting social order testifies to the truth of that myth. Hence, to know the reflectively conscious and meaningful human world, we must know also its constitutive myths. For Vico, mythos and logos are mutually implicated and they should be studied as such. Big visions of reality can play an important role in holding and responding to the complexity of the twenty-first century. The project of Wells and BH can be understood in terms of an attempt to establish a constitutive myth and common history for a world political community. From this perspective, the purpose of Big History is to establish a sense of belonging to a wide planetary whole: the hope is that the modern origin story will forge global we-feeling and cooperation in our world plagued by global problems. However, a closer look reveals ambiguities: the apparently simple modern scientific story involves contradictory interpretations and various methodological and philosophical problems. Each grand vision, such as that of BH, may not be as well-grounded, complex, or realistic as its advocates may think. Conversely, it can become more mature, comprehensive, and nuanced over time, through criticism, change, and learning. (Cf. Esbjörn-Hargens, 2016, pp. 102–104). In this chapter, my starting point is the idea that the BH viewpoint can be enriched by employing critical reason and epistemological, ethical, and political pluralism. For the critical reason, any belief can turn out to be (partly) wrong even when based

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on science or serving as a constitutive myth of a society and its characteristic practices and institutions. Pluralism means deep respect for other points of view, without relativism. As Nicholas Rescher (1993, pp. 119–120) explains: There is no good reason why a recognition that others, circumstanced as they are, are rationally entitled in their circumstances to hold a position at variance with ours should be construed to mean that we, circumstanced as we are, need feel any rational obligation to abandon our position. In so far as one is rational (and no doubt not all of us are) one cannot see the alternatives as indifferent.

Temporal reflexivity sensitises us to recognise that the constitution of consciousness and society involves mythopoetics. Social evolution is to an important degree reflexive and thus Lamarckian. This means that the mutation conditions of scientific theories, origin myths, etc. are in part intrinsic to philosophy and science. However, both mutation and selection conditions are also connected to wider social contexts (on social mutation and selection conditions, see Harré (1993, pp. 238–51); on the overall late twentieth and early twenty-first-century context understood in terms of intra- and interacting and evolving fields of global political economy, see Patomäki, 2022, especially chs 6–8). Also BH historians acknowledge the role of social, and especially power relations in this process. For example, Fred Spier (2015, pp.  10–11) points out that when state societies emerged, “elites began to promote their favored origin stories, while competing versions were often marginalised”. Moreover, the Eurocentric globalisation process that started in the fifteenth century “has led both to the worldwide dissemination of the privileged origin stories, all of which had become supported by large and powerful state societies and to the marginalization, if not extinction, of most other such accounts”. From a critical theoretical point of view, we may presume, at least tentatively, that similar forces and processes have been at play also in the 20th and 21st centuries, providing context for the rise of the Big Bang cosmology and theory of emergence and complexity. This is in line with what Spier (2015, p. 17) suggests: “trade communities, and especially the financiers who find themselves at the heart of their trade hubs, may feel a need for global views”. In the current world context, this tends to mean support for projects such as global history and Big History.3

 The appeal of global and cosmic perspectives may be linked to the fact that in the capitalist world economy, command over space and time means power as transformative capacity in social relations. In the twentieth and twenty-first century circumstances, farmers, workers, employees, civil servants, entrepreneurs, and citizens have been less mobile than goods, financial capital, wealthy individuals, and megacorporations. It may thus be interesting to note that according to Bill Gates (2011), “my favorite course of all time is called Big History, taught by David Christian. I wish everyone could take this course”. Together with Christian, Gates has founded the Big History Project to facilitate worldwide teaching of BH. Spier (2015, p. 28) notes that “in addition to Bill Gates, big history has attracted the attention of influential people and organizations including among others highly ranked Chinese politicians, the World Economic Forum, former US vice president Al Gore, US comic Stephen Colbert and the History Channel 2, which produced a big history series that has been broadcast not only in the USA but also elsewhere around the globe”. 3

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In the period of great acceleration since 1945 involving secularising intellectual contexts, new stories about the origins and ends of the cosmos and life have evolved, though often these stories have historical roots in the 18th and 19th centuries philosophy and science. In this chapter, I argue that mythopoetic imagination can also be a means for a critique of the prevailing and hegemonic myths (cf. Bottici, 2007). In complex pluralist societies, there are hegemonic struggles over constitutive myths, shaping both our explanatory stories about the past and scenarios about possible futures (Cox, 1996, e.g., p. 131). These myths can be critically addressed in various ways (empirical, theoretical, methodological, philosophical, etc.) and at various levels of abstraction. The ultimate point is that to be rational, the stories we tell—that involve anticipations of possible futures—must be open to criticism and revisable in a systematic fashion. From this point of view, I explore two rather different accounts of non-geocentric physical cosmology that are compatible with established theories of science, including the theory of relativity and quantum theory. These two accounts are closely related to the two different understandings of non-geocentric physical cosmology discussed in Chap. 2. By utilising the contrast between these two accounts, I argue that in its current form, BH is ambiguous about its basic storyline. Many cosmopolitans have stressed coherence, wholeness, and even purpose, whereas the followers of Hume and Nietzsche seem convinced that the cosmos is purposeless and the processes of biological and cultural evolution arbitrary. At the heart of BH is the common modern idea that with the development of science, God has been moved further and further away from the story of the origins of the cosmos (not to speak of causal interventions in it). In particular, I hypothesise that a basic underlying myth of the twentieth and early twenty-first-century liberal-capitalist world society consists of three temporal tiers that include the following tenets: 1. deep cosmic scepticism if not desperation in the philosophical, Nietzschean sense,4 involving the Copernican principle of no privileged position and various narratives about how the story of humanity will inevitably end up in death, at some scale of time,

 For “desperation” in the Nietzschean, philosophical sense, see section “The reaction against the Copernican perspective: Nietzsche, etc.” in Chap. 2. It should be stressed that the term “desperation” does not refer to the mental state of those who are committed to this worldview. The mental state of any person is a result of highly complex processes, where reflections on higher-order purposes may play only a relatively limited role (cf. Lupisella, 2021, who argues that only for some people some, or most, of the time the universe could suffice as a basis for a worldview). People may also be indifferent to—or Stoic—about the alleged arbitrariness and meaningless of the cosmos and humanity’s fate in it. The mystery of being can also be aesthetisised, as by the Nobel Laureate in Physics Brian Schmidt: “I have no idea why we are here, but I do know that the Universe is beautiful” (quote from the cover sleeve of Lewis & Barnes, 2016). 4

On the Narrative Dimension of Scientific Explanations and Future Scenarios

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2. various lessons drawn from this scepticism and related ideologies, such as Darwinism,5 which can be applied to the fields of market competition and interstate competition, 3. and the capacity of technological powers and economic growth to bring some comfort and enjoyment to our short lives. An alternative cosmic storyline centres on the prospects of life, rather than death, and the promises of our common evolvement especially through processes of collective learning. In my ideal-typical schemes, I associate the life- and learning-­ oriented ideas with two philosophical positions, namely pragmatism and critical realism, although these kinds of ideas are in no way limited to the adherents of these philosophical schools of thought. Pragmatism refers first and foremost to the philosophies of Charles Peirce and William James and their followers, and critical realism to those of Roy Bhaskar and the network of scholars who have been active in the International Association of Critical Realism (IACR). There are many commonalities but also some differences between the two.6 To reiterate, my argument is that BH is ambiguous about its basic storyline. Based on the two ideal-typical storylines, I examine, compare, and assess claims made within BH in terms of their scientific and philosophical (logos) and narratological (mythos) plausibility. I not only show ambiguities in the currently prevailing BH narrative but also envision a way forward.

 n the Narrative Dimension of Scientific Explanations O and Future Scenarios To elucidate the importance of the basic storylines of non-geocentric physical cosmology, I first make a couple of observations about the role of human temporality. Temporality is fundamental to social actions and scientific explanations alike.  Darwin’s theory of evolution is subject to many interpretations and it has been adopted to diverse purposes. Some Darwinists may stress that “the struggle for existence” often brings about adverse consequences and is thus not good as such; or that “survival of the fittest” is not the only mechanism of evolution but rather evolution is also about emergence of new forms of complexity. In this chapter, however, I purposefully associate Darwinism almost exclusively with those doctrines that tend to reduce evolution to blind mutation and “struggle for survival” or some such. Darwinism either accepts this mechanism as “natural” also in society (or as given in some other manner) or elevate it to a principle that generates normatively good or “optimal” outcomes (for instance, some neoclassical and Austrian doctrines of free markets come close to social Darwinism in this sense). 6  It is important to bear in mind that concepts such as emergence, causation, learning, and normativity are best understood as open sites of discussions and developments, neither originating nor ending in any particular philosophy or theory, including critical realism (Patomäki, 2019a). In International Relations, Hamati-Ataya (2012) maintains that pragmatism covers much of the same ground as critical realism. For those wishing to explore the differences and similarities in more detail, I recommend the 2022 special issue “Pragmatism and Critical Realism” of Journal of Critical Realism, especially the Roundtable (for an introduction to the issue, see Elder-Vass & Zotzmann, 2022). To make all this compatible with the BH perspectives of, say, Spier (2015) or Volk (2017) might require, among other things, a systematic re-analysis of causation and emergence in terms of energy flows through matter. I outline the basic idea—how energy and the socalled INUS components are related in causal complexes—in note 12 of Chap. 4. 5

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According to Paul Ricœur, there is a unity of having-been, coming-towards, and making present, since these are thought and acted upon together by the actors. This is the temporality of practical experience and action. The making-present of practical action stems from the anticipation of possibilities of transformative action producing outcomes based on understanding that which has been (history). The horizon of action is thus inherently temporal (Ricœur, 1984). Many scientific and normative projects derive their motivation from the sense they render to our and others’ lives. It is not only that we constantly encounter multiple stories in everyday contexts and that emotional stories can be appealing and ethically and politically motivating, but also that actors form reflexive narratives out of their own and others’ lives. Similarly, the appeal of grand narratives is reinforced by an awareness of our own mortality (see Alker, 1984, pp. 105, 269–270). Scientific explanations, too, have a temporal dimension, especially whenever the explanandum is conceived as historical in some sense—as is increasingly the case also in natural sciences from cosmology to geosciences and evolutionary biology. A researcher draws a meaningful story from a diversity of temporal events that are constitutive of episodes and processes. Emplotment combines two temporal dimensions. By stipulating causal hypotheses, one captures the episodic dimension of temporality and creates components of explanation that go beyond mere chronicle. By grasping together the whole of the episode occurring in open systems, one constructs a narrative or a story proper, a story that has a counterfactual sense of an ending. As processes continue and their historical development remains open, this sense of ending must be artificially created (the end is unreal as processes continue). Every story locates the present context as part of a wider and structured temporal whole, thus organising our anticipations of possible futures at different scales of time. When put together, lesser-scale stories can form or imply a grand narrative of the origins, possibilities, and outlook of humanity. In our practical understandings and actions, grand stories become part of the Ricouerian triad of having-been, coming-­towards, and making present. Grand stories are in effect myths in the Vicoan sense, i.e. narratives explaining how the world and humankind came to be in their present form and what their future possibilities are. Stories have motivating power or charisma because they can give (though they may also fail to give) meaning to the lives of individuals, groups, and/or humankind. It is therefore important to recognise the deep structures in our cultures according to which we tell stories and construct myths. Together with the overall social context, structures of meaning determine our capacity to generate stories. Structures of meaning may be relatively enduring and widely shared across cultures, even though they are subject to cultural variations, historical change, and learning. What is more, value-laden narratives and related meanings affect our perceptions also in scientific contexts. The claim that scientific expert opinion is driven by sense-making and story-telling is evident in human sciences (e.g. Tetlock, 1999), but it is true also for natural sciences (see, e.g., Laudan, 1984). The plausibility of theories, successful tests, or predictive success does not unequivocally determine the rational adoption of theories in sciences, not even in physics or chemistry. Although many established textbook-level theories are beyond a reasonable doubt in the sense that they have

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passed all tests and work well for practical purposes, the frontiers of science in theoretical physics and cosmology involve high degrees of uncertainty and ambiguity. The scientific process involves debates about cognitive values and philosophical theories. Cognitive values and philosophical theories are connected to our worldview more generally. Scientific (logos) and narratological (mythos) are intertwined also in the critical sense that stories can be treated as hypotheses and assessed in terms of critical argumentation and available evidence. Understood this way, sense-­ making and story-telling are part of science, too, although many scientists do not pay enough attention to the philosophical, religious, or ideological implications of their theories. Like any hypothesis, a hypothesis concerning emplotment should be made vulnerable to refutation and qualification and open to the probative force of arguments and evidence. The narrative hypothesis involved in scientific explanations and anticipations can also be assessed by various empirical and conceptual means. Do the elements of the story and their order correspond to what really has happened, is happening, or will happen? Hypotheses can be also tested at a more generic level, in terms of coherence and conceptual and theoretical plausibility, or in terms of their existential hypotheses (e.g. do the assumed entities, relations, and mechanisms exist?). Hypothesis testing is not mechanistic but requires interpretation and situated judgement.7 Because hypothesis testing is dependent on interpretation and judgement, what is required is a strong ethos and ethics of scientific research. The basic realist manifesto is that “as scientists, that is members of a certain community, we should apportion our willingness or reluctance to accept a claim as worthy to be included in the corpus of scientific knowledge to the extent that we sincerely think it somehow reflects the way the world is” (Harré, 1986, p. 89). Science follows critical public procedures of verification and falsification, which are different from those of mere speculative imagination. Mythos and logos are intertwined, but science is opposed to mere superstition. Typically there can be no single decisive test between theories, especially in contexts where artificial closure in a laboratory is not possible.8 Thus, rationality and openness to learning become ethical and political matters also in a sense that  A further complication is that it is possible that the same material can be ordered according to different actual or potential terminal consequences. All these temporal interpretations can be true with regard to the causal powers and sequences upon which they are elaborated. There may thus be many coherent and plausible stories to tell on the basis of the same material (see Patomäki, 2002, p. 141). 8  Although in science it is at times possible to produce decisive test situations, also many natural sciences have no alternative but to study unique historical processes in open-systemic contexts (think about the formation of planet Earth and life on it, or the history of the cosmos). In the absence of closure, decisive tests between theories are hard to come by. Ideological positions evolve easily and tend to fortify themselves rapidly. If this is coupled with one-sided allegiance to a mere predictive rather than explanatory and other criteria, the methodology on which one’s research relies gets mystified; entrenched or otherwise privileged theory is protected; alternatives are stunt; and/or there is an encouragement to think that theoretical conflicts are unresolvable— which, in practice, means their resolution in favour of the status quo or the currently prevailing orthodoxy. See Bhaskar (1998, pp. 51–2, 142, etc.). 7

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goes beyond the mere virtue of truth. Science is an open-ended process, which involves conceptual work and unexpected changes. This is a further reason to be sceptical of dogmas and orthodoxies. The future is real but not yet determined and our activities—including scholarly activities—take part in co-determining the future. Reflexive involvement implies also ethical and political responsibility for the potential consequences of the theories we hold and the stories we tell. The recognition of our ethical responsibility for the choice of theories and narratives is compatible with the scientific realist manifesto.

 he Basic Mythologems of Contemporary T Liberal-Capitalist Society In both natural and human sciences, the more canonical or dramatic the outcome of the story, the more appealing the story usually becomes. We know from psychological and social-psychological studies of lay actors and scientists alike that missing links are quickly filled in with elements adopted from the pre-existing mythical and ideological scripts. More often than not, anticipations based on simple canonical or dramatic stories vastly inflate the likelihood of the expected course of events and processes (Gilovich, 1991; Tetlock, 2005, chs. 2 and 3). Misleadingly canonised, generalised, and inflated stories can serve as constitutive mythologem of a given social order where researchers operate, though in pluralist contexts theories and stories are openly contested. To reiterate, I hypothesise that the basic myth of liberal-capitalist society of the late twentieth century and early twenty-first century consists of three main mythologems and temporal tiers: (1) the theme of cosmic arbitrariness and meaninglessness; (2) the theme of Darwinism or some similar or related system of ideas applied to market society and interstate relations9; (3) and the theme of technology and economic growth bringing some comfort.10 These ideas have deep philosophical and scientific roots. The allegedly value-neutral technical methods of empiricist science entail scepticism about anything metaphysical or normative. Thus conceived, gods or values have no place in science, even though many important scientists from Newton to Einstein have been trying to “read the mind of God”. As discussed briefly in Chap. 2, Friedrich Nietzsche was among the first to articulate the devastating impact of empirical science on culture and civilisation as it had been conceived especially in Europe until the nineteenth century.11 Nietzsche proclaimed that no  In popular imagination, this mythologem is evident, for instance, in popular Hollywood fictions about encounters with extraterrestrial others depicted as evil beasts. In these stories, the cosmic world is Darwinist and ETs are either slaves of their passions or mindless followers of their genetically programmed codes of behaviour, independently of how technologically advanced they may in some ways be (for a critical analysis, see Patomäki, 2008a). 10  Recently, this optimistic tier of the liberal-capitalist worldview has been defended for example by Steven Pinker (2018) and Rosling et al. (2018). 11  For Nietzsche’s three phases and his diverse and ambivalent pursuits, see Maudemarie Clark (2005) 9

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universal perspective is possible and that an era of nihilism is beginning. Starting with WWI, the disasters of the twentieth century have strengthened Nietzschean sentiments, resulting in various versions of relativism and nihilism articulated in the context of philosophy, cultural studies, and social sciences. While the cosmic myths of meaninglessness are told in terms of contemporary theories of astrophysics, chemistry, and biology, the hypothesis of the heat-death of the universe emerged in the nineteenth century,12 and the underlying philosophical scepticism can be traced back to Hume and empiricism. In a rather common anti- or irrealist version, a scientist can state calmly that nothing really matters, because most of the things we see and experience are mere illusions. Even time and causation are ultimately unreal. In typical 20th and 21st centuries versions, this is because the world is mathematical. Mostly only claims that can be expressed in the language of mathematics are truly scientific. The language of mathematics is technical, neutral, and value-free. A far-reaching implication is that time becomes spatialised and disassociated from real historical processes. The Big Bang cosmology is a possible solution to the field equations of Einstein’s general theory of relativity. To solve these equations is difficult, so scientists have resorted to such simplifying assumptions as isotropy (the universe appears the same in all directions) and omnicentrism (it is isotropic no matter where the observer is), thereby ignoring large-scale structures in the universe (Hands, 2016, pp.  22–38). Moreover, there are many possible solutions to the equations of general relativity, and depending on the chosen parameters and their values, different stories about the evolution of the cosmos can be told (ever-expanding, steady-state, or cyclical universe). The Big Bang cosmology was adopted because it accords with some important observations, including the observed redshift that seems to indicate that the universe is expanding and the perception that the early galaxies are simpler than those that have evolved later. The Big Bang, the origin of everything, is itself a meaningless event.13 Most scientists seem to think that the universe may have emerged from nothing at all, for instance, due to arbitrary quantum effects. The universe as a whole may be moving towards a heat-death or some other ultimate end-as-death, perhaps due to the  German scientist Rudolph Clausius claimed in the 1860s that everything will end in “heat-death” (Wärmetod). The second law of thermodynamics says roughly that entropy within closed systems should gradually become maximal and disorder should eventually reign. Entropy is a measure specifying the amount of disorder or randomness or something similar in a system that contains energy or information. The meaning and scope of the second law is ambiguous. Entropy has many meanings and we do not even know whether cosmos is a closed system. For a good critical discussion on the development of the second law of thermodynamics, see Peter A. Corning and Stephen Jay Kline (1998). 13  It would be of course a gross over-simplification to claim that the assumption of meaninglessness as such implies cosmic desperation, nihilism, and/or death orientation, or bleak hopelessness about the future. Apart from the possibilities discussed below in the main text, it is possible to argue that no matter what the origin of the cosmos is and however blind and Darwinist the process might have been until very recently in human cultural evolution, rational values are an emergent phenomenon and as such can guide our lives in a meaningful way, perhaps also give value to the cosmos itself, of which we humans and other potential intelligent beings are a part (Lupisella, 2015). 12

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e­ver-­accelerating expansion of space. However, cosmic desperation operates on various scales of time and the end looks inevitable also in the much shorter runs. The solar system will come to an end with the life cycle of the Sun; the Sun may collide with some other cosmic object; and the Earth may have only 500 million years left in the habitable zone of the system. Meanwhile, our planet seems constantly vulnerable to all sorts of cosmic and intrinsic natural catastrophes. Finally, it seems increasingly likely that we humans will destroy ourselves, possibly already in the course of the twenty-first century (Rees, 2004). The story is the same epic tragedy—without heroes—at all scales of time, from cosmic to human. The currently prevailing scientific story about the origins and likely ends of the cosmos, and humanity’s place in it, relies on empiricist ontology.14 Empiricism (positivism) involves instrumentalism about knowledge. Knowledge is seen as something that can be used to control the world. Cosmic hopelessness, which is associated with empiricist philosophical doctrines, encourages short-termism and technical and preference-maximising orientation. Causation understood in terms of empirical regularities enables technical control, while cosmic meaninglessness provides at least indirect legitimation to technical-instrumentalist orientation to knowledge and optimisation orientation in society. Moreover, empiricism tends to go hand in hand with reductionism (e.g. physicalism and biologism, implying individualism).15 Repeatedly the theme of cosmic meaningless if not desperation has been linked with Darwinist ideologies. However, cosmic desperation may also trigger an existentialist (and in that sense consciously arbitrary) commitment to any ideology—such as nationalism or statist socialism—providing at least some hope about a better world, however unrealistic that may be given the underlying premises.16

 Empiricism is usually associated with the Lockean idea that all knowledge of “matters of fact and existence” derives from sense-experience alone, although empiricist ontology can be disassociated from this epistemic requirement (especially when mathematical modelling replaces empirical research). Empiricism assumes that observed (or perceived) empirical regularities or instrumental successes are conditions for causal laws; and causal laws are analysed as dependent upon, or just as, constant conjunctions of events. Empirical regularities and constant conjunctions presuppose some variation of atomism (typically it is assumed that the inner structures of atom-like entities are unchanging) and closed systems both intrinsically (no qualitative changes) and extrinsically (no external forces). At the emergent level of society, empiricism tends to imply individualism, where the inner structures of individuals are habitually taken as given. This kind of individualism has, in turn, been historically associated with the emergence and evolvement of the “capitalist conception of man” (for a summarising discussion, see Patomäki, 2002, pp. 24–26). 15  For a consistent empiricist, what exists is “my sense-experiences”. The objects of these senseexperiences are atomistic events. Other perceiving individual minds may be allowed to exist as well. This kind of empiricist ontology tends to involve epistemological reductionism (e.g. physicalism, biologism, individualism). For example in neoclassical economics, there is a tendency to reduce macroeconomics to microeconomics focussing on individual decision-makers; to use psychology to explain why individuals are what they are; and to use neuroscience or evolutionary biology or both to explain psychology. 16  In Chap. 2, note 31, I discussed briefly the interesting case of Louis Althusser, who added Freud (unconscious determination) and Marx (structural determination) to his list of sources of nihilism and desperation. 14

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Characteristically the modern cosmic myths of desperation and their sceptical and empiricist underpinnings are connected to ideas about competition as the foundation of modern market-societal relations.17 Applied to international relations, on the other hand, the same assumptions suggest that while a nation may contingently provide some (illusionary) sense of identity and purpose, the field of interstate relations is characterised by the reason of state and geopolitical competition, where the powerful prevail. A market globalist may counter that geopolitics can be tamed by mutually beneficial economic competition in the world economy and related systems of global governance, but these are debates within a shared worldview. The basic theme of the prevailing myth comes with variations. Nonetheless, scepticism, combined with the reduction of the necessary and the possible to the actual, generates among other things “there is no alternative” thinking18 and the tendency to write Whig histories about the inevitable progress towards the present.19 Reductionism evokes either value subjectivism or outright moral nihilism, though individuals may of course behave morally for whatever arbitrary reasons (and in a Humean manner, it may be possible to outline the psychology and social conventions of doing so).20

 Methodological Critique of the Cosmic Mythologeme A of Meaninglessness and Death The main contrasts between two ideal-typical philosophical worldviews are summarised in Table 3.1. From a methodological point of view, the prevailing scientific stories about the ultimate fate of humanity seem to involve various fallacies and misleading assumptions. The most common are (1) the assumption of closed systems and (2) overconfidence in the currently prevailing or preferred scientific theories. Both are rooted in the empiricist (positivist) philosophy of science, which is moreover self-defeating in denying causal agency and its role in science (see  This attitude is formalised in mainstream neoclassical economics, which revolves around the concept of “perfect competition”. Ben Fine summarises its development: “[All t]his was done through an extraordinary reductionism in which all else was sacrificed in order to obtain the desired results, an implosion of homo economicus upon itself” (Fine, 2015, p. 186). 18  As Roy Bhaskar explains: “Ontological reductionism transposed to the human zone has particularly damaging consequences. In perfect resonance with the empiricist concept of science as a behavioural response to the stimulus of given facts and their constant conjunctions, society is conceived as composed of individuals, motivated by given desires and conjoined (if at all) by contract. Reason is reduced to the ability to perform an optimizing or satisficing operation and freedom consists in its unimpeded exercise. [….] It is the ideology of the market place and more generally of the established order of things, of TINA (there is no alternative)”. (Bhaskar, 2011, p.10). 19  Herbert Butterfield developed this concept in his The Whig Interpretation of History (1959/1931). According to Butterfield, the Whig history leads very quickly to the division of the world into supporters and opponents of the story of progress towards the present, goodies and baddies, and the narrative of heroes from this perspective. Pinker (2018) and Rosling et al. (2018) are contemporary examples of Whig histories. 20  See also note 13 above. 17

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Table 3.1  Ideal-typical philosophical differences (logos) Empiricism/positivism/Nietzsche • Value-neutral technical methods of empiricist and mathematical science → scepticism about anything metaphysical or normative, but often “scientist” certainty about science • God is dead! We are alone on this insignificant planet! • Knowledge is a tool of control and power • Changes are non-real, illusionary, or minimal • Reductionism → tendency towards atomism • Reason is reduced to the ability to perform an optimising or satisficing operation, and freedom consists in its unimpeded exercise

Critical realism/pragmatism • Systems are open & emergence is real → history is open-ended    – Science itself is an open-ended process • Change is real: Reality is evolving and it includes our agency, will, and intentions    – Rationality is normative & things matter → ethical and political learning • Knowledge concerns freedom, which can be increased by replacing unnecessary sources of causal determination with more wanted and needed sources of determination   – Self-determination – Good life

Bhaskar, 2009, pp. 8, 16–19, 32, 71, 153). Moreover, over-reliance on mathematics can further feed the sense of certainty encouraging dogmatism. Outside laboratory contexts, systems are open. Open systems involve qualitative changes and emergence, and they interact with causal processes not confined within them. The openness of systems means that reality is historical and evolving—and at least in theory, changes may concern even the laws of physics (Unger & Smolin, 2015).21 At any rate, new constellations, properties, and powers can and do emerge at different layers of reality. A further methodological problem concerns the application of theories tested in limited scales only (quantum and relativity) to the whole of the cosmos. Indeed, for example, Lee Smolin argues (in ibid.) that what he calls the “Newtonian paradigm” is not suitable for the study of the cosmos as a whole. On fundamental scales, events are idiosyncratic. The Newtonian paradigm looks only at isolated and stable (non-­ changing) subsystems of the universe, where laws can be identified as repeatable regularities. In critical realist and pragmatist terms, what Smolin’s points indicate is that the universe as a whole is not a closed system. The fundamental constituents of this universe are unique; its initial conditions and laws have come from somewhere and are not self-sufficient; and the universe is changing qualitatively, also in unpredictable ways, thus constantly creating new out of the old. This is a process that has resulted in the evolutionary process of life that has generated ourselves as cultural beings and our creations, with causal and constitutive consequences across layers of reality. Smolin argues further that intermediate-scale physics—at the level to which the prevailing Newtonian paradigm applies—must neglect information. Therefore,  This raises the question that if the constants and laws of nature can change within our cooleddown universe, why are they so stable? Unger’s answer is that the underlying structures are homogeneous (composed of parts or elements that are all of the same kind) and isotropic (uniform in all directions) at that level of reality. 21

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it must be statistical. “It is interesting to wonder whether this might be the origin of quantum uncertainty. That is, the hidden variables needed to complete quantum theory, if we are to explain why individual events take place, must be relational”. (Unger & Smolin, 2015, p. 392). From an epistemological viewpoint, science itself is historical, processual, and open-ended. It is dependent on the antecedently established facts and theories, paradigms and models, methods, and techniques of inquiry. For a particular scientist or school, these provide the material from which new ideas, theories, etc. are forged. On that basis, researchers produce—in a particular geo-historical context—new facts and theories, paradigms, and models. The process of scientific change does not leave earlier conceptualisations intact. In the scientific process of collective learning, something is lost and something new is created (for a deeper and more sophisticated account, see Bhaskar, 2009, pp. 47–62). For example, in some sense, Newtonian mechanics may describe a special case of the theory of relativity, but the latter includes also a novel conception of space-time (in general relativity, the effects of gravitation are ascribed to space-time curvature instead of a force). The enduring discrepancy between quantum mechanics and the theory of relativity indicates that the ultimate nature of space and time remains disputed in contemporary science. The current scientific orthodoxy relies on the hypothesis of a Big Bang, which maintains that our expanding universe can be traced back in time to an originating single point that existed some 13.8 billion years ago. Based on this hypothesis, many contemporary scientists proclaim that there is nothing special about our universe. The multiverse (and perhaps this universe as well) can generate numerous Big Bangs. The nature of our universe is a mere result of a cosmic lottery or some sort of Darwinist selection. There are countless (if not an infinite number of) disconnected universes; this one of ours just happens to be life-friendly, and only for the time being. The emergence of life just happens and the process of biological evolution is contingent and arbitrary; humanity is a mere accidental outcome. The idea of arbitrariness and death orientation seem closely connected. Leaving aside the basic hypothesis of the Big Bang for a while, an obvious problem with speculations about cosmic selection or lottery is that these presuppose the existence of something that can never be observed or tested, namely the existence of other universes. Thereby these conjectures radically multiply beings, thus violating even the most cautious and qualified interpretation of Ockham’s razor (to which empiricism and positivism themselves are committed, see Patomäki, 2010a, pp. 81, 83–4). Although it cannot be excluded in principle that this line of research will yield falsifiable hypotheses at some point (perhaps in a distant future), a further problem is that the failures of theory’s “predictions” can be easily explained away at no cost to speculative reason, given the indirect nature of possible hypotheses (Smolin, 2014). Applications of the Copernican principle or Darwinism to imaginary universes can thus be quite misleading. A risk of relying on speculations about countless universes is that science comes to be replaced, quite unreflexively, with stories derived merely from conventional myths and ideologies of contemporary society.

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These remarks alone should suffice to cast a shadow of doubt on scenarios concerning the inevitable end-in-death of the universe. The appeal of this storyline may stem from Judeo-Christian meaning structures, quite independently of whether many contemporary scientists are agnostics or atheists. According to Isaac Asimov “the conviction that the whole universe is coming to an end […] is an old one, and is, in fact, an important part of the Western tradition” (Asimov, 1981, p.  13). Scenarios about what will happen in the next thousands, millions, or billions of years are speculative and the more so, the further we reach. There are two main reasons for this: (1) the openness of systems (ontology) and (2) the open-ended nature of the process of scientific learning (epistemology). There are thus ontological limits to the predictability of cosmic futures: some of the powers of the existing structures of the universe may have been unexercised, and new structures and powers may emerge affecting the way the cosmos as a whole evolves. Epistemologically, the purpose of science is not to produce unchangeable dogmas; rather science is an open-ended process characterised by differences of opinion, pluralism, and further learning. In both ways, the future is open and our capacity to anticipate the end (if any) of the cosmos remains very limited.22 A highly problematic assumption in projecting long-term futures on the basis of currently prevailing scientific theories is that time will leave those theories intact. Many scientists seem unable or unwilling to take on board the lessons of the history of science as a changing and evolving social practice; they fail to see themselves as part of a long process of scientific development. And yet, in a mere 1/1000 of a million years—a twinkling in biological and cosmic scales of time—our science and technology are bound to look very different. Even if future changes are slower than what they have been during the past 100 years, just imagine how science and technology will look, say, in the thirty-first century. The future developments are likely to accord with Arthur C.  Clarke’s famous three laws (discussed in Clarke, 2000, pp. 16–26): 1. When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, she is almost certainly right. When she states that something is impossible, she is very probably wrong. 2. The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible. 3. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. When new scientific possibilities are opened up and new advanced, “magic-like” technologies developed, they also enable new paths of research, involving conceptual work with potentially far-reaching consequences. Thereby, scenarios about the fate of humanity at different scales of time are likely—or even bound—to change.  Systems are always open and closed only to a degree. Future can be analysed in terms of conditional and more or less likely possibilities of becoming. The closer we get to a given point in the future, the more shaped and structured it is. Meanwhile, it is possible to revise our scenarios in light of new evidence and developments (Patomäki, 2010b). 22

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To reiterate, the process of our collective learning about the cosmos must remain open-ended, which limits our capacity to extrapolate from the current theories.

An Alternative Mythologeme: The Power of Life and Culture We can use our imaginative capacities to develop alternative scientific but mythopoetically more plausible storylines. In this section, I present a life- and culture-­ oriented storyline that accords with the established theories and findings of contemporary science at least as well as the prevailing liberal-capitalist storyline. Like the latter, the alternative can be understood as an attempt to build a coherent and plausible story out of diverse but well-established scientific elements. As such, it is an abstract ideal type. Philosophically, this alternative is based on critical theoretical and pragmatist ontological and epistemological conceptions (for an overview of the cosmic and evolutionary accounts developed by Kant, Hegel, critical theorists, and pragmatists such as Peirce and James, Stein, 2015). The contrastive accounts about the beginning and nature of cosmos are summed up in Table 3.2. To begin with, the current standard version of the Big Bang hypothesis is unlikely to be the last word. The Big Bang hypothesis is a plausible solution to the equations of general relativity and explains some important observations, but many key parts of the theory are conjectural and probably unfalsifiable, including hypotheses about the inflation field, dark matter, and dark energy. Much of the evidence concerning, for instance, redshifts and the expansion of the universe is theory- and technology-laden. Moreover, many “predictions” are achieved by imputing parameters to a model to make it accord with observations, so in fact, they are no predictions at all but rather instances of circular reasoning (Hands, 2016, chs. 5–6). Many other predictions are untestable. For example, the homogeneity of the cosmic background radiation is habitually interpreted as evidence for a singularity at the Table 3.2  Contrastive accounts about the beginning and nature of cosmos Account 1: Meaninglessness and illusions prevail • Big bang: Original singularity, possibly coming out of nothing, was also the beginning of time • The big bang itself is a meaningless and arbitrary event     – The universe may have emerged from nothing at all, due to arbitrary quantum effects     – Numerous big bangs → multiverse/cosmic Darwinism • Cosmos is indifferent or hostile to us humans • Ultimately time and causation are illusions; and agency is illusionary, redundant, or marginal

Account 2: Reality involves life, consciousness, and active agency • There is only one universe at a time; reasons for the choices of initial conditions and laws lie in the world before the big bang • Time, causation, emergence, and change are real; and these make life possible • Cosmos is hospitable to life, although interpretations about the meaning and extent of this hospitality vary • Emergent layers such as conscious experience, agency, will, and intentions are real and causally efficacious as well

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beginning of space-time and the subsequent period of huge cosmic inflation. The inflation theory solves some problems (the so-called horizon and flatness problems), yet there is no evidence that such inflation has occurred. It is difficult to imagine how solid evidence about such inflation could be mustered. Moreover, there are alternative explanations for the homogeneity of the cosmic background radiation that do not imply that space-time started at some sort of singularity (and what is more, new explanations can be created in the course of future scientific processes). For instance, at the beginning of this universe, the continuity from a predecessor universe could explain the specific characters and nature of this universe.23 Indeed, from a realist ontological perspective, it seems plausible to think that time is real, continuous, non-finite, and also global, and irreversible. The preferred cosmic time is not absolute (like it was for Newton) but relational. Cosmic time in this sense is consistent with the relativity of simultaneity in any local regions of space-time (Unger & Smolin, 2015, pp. 188, 240–1).24 A possible alternative story starts with the idea that our cosmos is singular and unique. There is only one universe at a time. According to Unger and Smolin (2015), while laws of physics may appear very stable in the contemporary cooled-down universe, they are not immutable (if and when the relational structures change, so do laws). The universe seems to have developed in the opposite direction than what the second law of thermodynamics claims, that is, towards more complex structures (e.g. Hands, 2016, pp. 141–151; Volk, 2017, pp. 150–156). What this means is that the universe as a whole is anti-entropic. The high-entropic hot plasma of the “big bang” has developed into increasingly complex atoms and molecules, and these have evolved through gravitation into the complex large-scale structures of galaxies, local clusters, etc. Within this whole, the Earth’s biosphere is an open system, and within this local system, the increase in order is driven principally by the heat and light energy from the sun. Organic molecules become more complex, evolving into cells and increasingly complex life forms. The most complex things in the universe that we know of include the human brain and the current technological civilisation of humanity, organised into separate territorial states and the world political economy. Overall, the cosmos is historical and evolving; through manifold processes, it is creating new qualities and powers. Philosophically, these processes indicate that causation,  “If the singularity is absent, then the sufficient reason for choices of initial conditions and laws may lie in the world before the big bang”. (Unger & Smolin, 2015, p. 402). 24  In a relational spacetime theory space is dependent on the relations between bodies; and time is dependent on events and processes. The preferred cosmic time is determined through the shape dynamics of the whole. Shape dynamics is an approach that has advanced during the 2010s and has a physical arrow of time due to the growth of complexity and the dynamical storage of locally accessible records of the past (Barbour et al., 2014). Carlo Rovelli accepts that it is possible to distinguish the time that guides the rhythm of processes from a real universal time, and thus writes that “the point of view of Smolin, Ellis and Maroun is defensible”. Rovelli, however, accuses Smolin of forcing the world to adapt to our intuition and contrasts that with “what we have discovered about the world”. (Rovelli, 2018, pp. 190–1, n.14). This is a petitio principii, however. The question that remains open is: what is it that we have discovered about the world? 23

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emergence, and change are real. From a pragmatist and critical realist perspective, also the layers that have emerged very recently involving conscious experience, agency, will, and intentions are real and causally efficacious (cf. Patomäki, 2020b). Thus, the current complex and multilayered reality cannot be reduced to physics, but rather physics and chemistry could well learn a few things from historical sciences such as geology, life sciences, and human sciences (Unger & Smolin, 2015, pp. 13–14, 42–43, 258). The universe has made life possible at least on planet Earth and possibly in many other places as well. Life is not only real but it has also generated new emergent causal powers on Earth and probably elsewhere. Cosmologists have come to realise that complexity, life, and billions of years of evolution in a stable environment require very specific circumstances. For instance, all four basic forces of nature are in many ways implicated in the life story. Changing the strength of any of them, even by a small amount, could render the universe sterile and there are other contingencies as well. To give a specific example, if certain very specific resonances in the nuclear physics of carbons were a little different, then the heavier elements could not build up in the interiors of red giant stars. The universe would contain only hydrogen and helium, and life would be impossible. The list is long (e.g. Barrow, 2003, esp. chs. 8–9; Davies, 2006; Lewis & Barnes, 2016; Rees, 2017). Overall, our singular and unique cosmos seems hospitable to life, although interpretations about the meaning and extent of this hospitality vary.25 The two ideal-typical contrastive plots are outlined in Table  3.3.  A plausible alternative storyline about the future of the cosmos revolves around the life and its possibilities rather than death. This account does not exclude individual death or the possibility of tragic catastrophes, but it stresses critical reflexivity about the poetic aspect of catastrophe stories. The Greek word katastrophē meant “to overturn” or “turn upside down”. In dramas, the catastrophe is the final resolution or climax in a poem or narrative plot, which brings the piece to a close. Although the word “catastrophe” has come to be associated with tragic endings rather than with happy ones, in a comedy the climax is a happy ending. It is only in a tragedy that the climax of the story means the death of the hero (possibly together with many others). What is also important is that tragedy has a future-oriented purpose. The unexpected discoveries and sudden turns can generate a purifying or clarifying katharsis among the audience,26 perhaps even some metaphysical comfort through experiencing human  Interestingly, Unger and Smolin (2015, pp. 531–2) disagree amongst themselves about the extent to which the universe can be seen as hospitable to us. They agree that mostly nature is indifferent about us; that each individual is going to die; and that reverence for the universe is unhealthy power worship. Smolin stresses, nonetheless, that their “natural philosophy” is also a bearer of good news. Neither we nor the universe is computational and our experiences accord with the nature of reality. We are part of the whole of nature and cosmos. Christian de Duve (2008) shares the agnosticism of Unger, yet argues that “available clues support the assumption that our universe is such that generation of life was obligatory, probably in many sites and at many times”. Our universe is “pregnant with life”. 26  Aristotle was of the opinion that tragedy must be simple and thus a well-constructed plot involves only a single catastrophe. “In the second rank comes the kind of tragedy which some place first. 25

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Table 3.3  Ideal-typical contrastive plots (mythos) Preferred storyline 1: tragedy (end) • The story is the same epic tragedy without heroes at all scales of time   – Tragedy without katharsis • A possible interpretation of katharsis: Some (desperate) metaphysical comfort through experiencing human sacrifice in art (as in early Nietzsche) • The sense of tragedy is typically combined with a Whig history about short-term inevitable progress to the present (a typical story involves instrumentalist accounts of science and rationality as optimisation, hedonism, and consumerism) • Short-term comforts or solace in nationalism notwithstanding, the ultimate end lies in death

Preferred storyline 2: (tragi)comedy • Explanations of different outcomes, episodes, and processes call for different plots and their combinations • Katharsis is a form of comfort; correction to excessive emotions such as pity or fear; or restoration of mental and social health • Tragicomedy: Contingent developments & happy end involves unfulfilled desires and a sense of the impossibility of a fully happy ending • Comedy is humane because it involves the possibility of a good end, but does not exclude unfulfilled desires or tragic outcomes (and thus katharsis) • History is open, and stories continue

sacrifice in art.27 Katharsis can thus be seen as a form of comfort; correction to excessive emotions such as pity or fear; or restoration of psychic health. As a genre of narratives, comedy is life- and future-oriented. Comedy can be understood as the mythos of spring: the story of a new, better society replacing the old, absurd one. In comedy, there can be misunderstandings, illusions, and actions with unforeseen consequences and some characters can also be represented in a satirical or critical light, but in the end, things tend to turn out fine. Moreover, tragedies and comedies can also be mixed in various ways. (See Kuusisto, 2018). Although nothing truly terrible usually happens in a tragicomedy, the end often involves unfulfilled desires and tragic feelings about the impossibility of a fully happy ending. This may bring tears— perhaps amid laughter—to the eyes of the spectator. For these reasons, comedy is perhaps the most humane of the three main genres of narratives and plays. It involves the likelihood of a happy ending, but often stresses the possibility of unfulfilled desires or tragic outcomes.28 This seems realistic as multiple processes continue and bring about various outcomes that may involve disintegration or collapse of complexity (and not all forms of complexity are good).

Like the Odyssey, it has double threat or plot, and also an opposite catastrophe for the good and the bad”. (Aristotle, 1961, pp. XXIII, 77) 27  This was early Nietzsche’s interpretation of Greek tragedy, which he proposed as a solution to the question “how can we overcome nihilism?” (Young, 2003, pp. 44–56). 28  I compare different possible storylines concerning the future of global political economy and security in Patomäki (2008b, pp. 217–21)

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Consider, for instance, planetary catastrophes (violent earthquakes or volcanic eruptions, major asteroid or comet impacts) that seem to threaten our future. These are very rare phenomena. Their risks can be addressed and reduced through future-­ oriented planetary cooperation. Over time, our technological and organisational capacities to tackle these and other dangers will increase. The danger of self-­ destruction in the twenty-first century seems more serious, for instance by means of weapons of mass destruction or ecological collapse. As I will argue in Chap. 6, the possibility of a tragic global military catastrophe is real and once again looks, after the end of the era conventionally known as the Cold War (1947–1991), increasingly likely. In Chaps. 7 and 8, I discuss the disintegrative tendencies and processes of conflict escalation that prevail due to the current constellation of forces in the global political economy. They have been gradually assembling conditions for a large-­ scale crisis or a full-scale global catastrophe. Yet, there is also a rational tendential direction to world history, more firmly based than contingent events and processes. The rational tendential direction is grounded in collective human learning (Chaps. 10 and 13). Finally, the ideal-typical ethical and political differences are summarised in Table 3.4. Our collective learning and cultural evolution have generated new problems. Since the industrial revolution, human activities have affected the biosphere and climate on a planetary scale. So far, the consequences have been overwhelmingly negative, as shown by the mass extinction of species and anthropogenic global warming. Yet, the role of humanity may well be more life-promoting and ethical in the future. A global climate regime has been in the making for a quarter of a century

Table 3.4  Ideal-typical ethico-political differences There is no alternative (TINA) • Scepticism, combined with the reduction of the necessary and the possible to the actual (“actualism”), generates “there is no alternative” thinking    This is also the origin of Whig histories • Reductionism suggests either value subjectivism or outright moral nihilism, though individuals may behave morally for whatever arbitrary reasons • Reductionism is turned into the ideology of markets and established order of things (framed as TINA = there is no alternative) • Life and society revolve around competition → Darwinism—Market society—Capitalism • Some improvements may be possible, but only within the prevailing institutional liberal-capitalist order

Emancipatory transformations are possible • The rational tendential direction of world history is grounded in collective human learning; we learn also from the problems generated by humanity itself • Elements of rationality constitute the tendential directionality of world history, including:    1. Truth, involving criticism of falsehoods and attitudes that sustain falsehoods    2. Normative universalisability and our capacity to resolve social conflicts    3. Overcoming lacks, contradictions, etc. through collective action and common institutions (revising old and building new institutions) • The possibility of development of new cooperative capacities, needs, and ethical-political horizons (“new dimensions of mind and spirit that we cannot now imagine”)

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now. The flaws and deficiencies of the Kyoto Protocol and Paris UNFCCC Agreement notwithstanding, the gradual and troubled evolvement of climate governance indicates how the futurised nature of the present is changing. Reflexive selfregulation occurs through increased knowledge about the way natural and social systems work and generate effects, not only now, but also in the future (for a general account of how the futurised nature of the present is changing, Patomäki, 2011). Global climate governance is an attempt at reflexive self-regulation that consciously aims at homeostasis by regulating the planetary environment. The aim is to maintain a relatively constant temperature to counter the effects of greenhouse gases. This process will take time; a lot depends on the timing of adequate responses. Chapter 11 develops a case for a global greenhouse gas tax. Through learning, levels of reflexivity, and higher-order purposes, new problems can be resolved. In the alternative story (which can come in many concrete variations) future possibilities are constrained by real natural processes and existing social structures, yet the planetary future does not just happen but becomes increasingly something that actors—including “we”, whoever this we may refer to—make of it. There is also a deeper, more cosmic aspect to this transformation. James Lovelock developed a controversial hypothesis in the 1960s and 1970s according to which the systems of life form a complex interacting system that maintains itself in the long run, through homeostatic feedback loops, life-friendly climatic and biogeochemical conditions on Earth (see Lovelock, 1984; also 1990). However, both Gaian (negative) and non-­ Gaian (positive) feedbacks are likely to evolve in response to global warming. Hence, there is no automatic homeostasis, at least not on the scale of ~102 years (Kirchner, 2002). If there is to be homeostasis, it must be created employing conscious, future-oriented interventions into how our socio-economic systems work and are shaping the Earth’s climate and biosphere. We, reflectively conscious humans, have become deeply involved in the future developments of the Earth. The Earth has nurtured life for a long time, continuously for more than three billion years. From the point of view of account 2, the planet is becoming conscious of itself through the gradual rise of human reflexive self-­ regulation aiming at maintaining life-friendly climatic and biogeochemical conditions. What is more, reflexive self-regulation may contribute to improving the underlying social conditions of ethical and political learning. Collective learning shaping reflexively our common planetary conditions and the direction of world history as a whole can mean, among other things, that the sphere of human freedom is gradually widening—a process that may have much wider significance, even on a cosmic scale. Our degree of freedom can be increased by replacing particular unnecessary and often misrepresented causal sources of determination with more wanted, needed, and better-understood sources of causal determination, classically implying attempts to increase one’s autonomy as self-determination (Bhaskar, 2009, p. 115). From the point of view of grand narratives, what is interesting is the possibility that emergent layers of life and culture may gradually assume an increasingly important role in the process of cosmic evolution. Biological reality is multilayered, hierarchically organised and involves interdependent functional synergies and

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higher-level controls, making purposive behaviour and, ultimately, also culture and consciousness possible. Complex systems of life have shaped the chemical composition and development of planet Earth for more than three billion years. Increasingly complex forms of life have set the planet on a current path of development that is systematically off its non-living physical state of existence. The Earth is blue because it is teeming with life. By cautiously generalising from the experiences of the Earth, it is conceivable that in the future life and consciousness will play a (co-)formative role in our galaxy and possibly even in the universe as a whole. From this perspective, British-born theoretical physicist and mathematician Freeman Dyson has proposed a long-term vision at larger scales of time that is best read as a plausible counter-hypothesis to the heat-death scenario: The greening of the galaxy will become an irreversible process. […] The expansion of life over the universe is a beginning, not an end. At the same time as life is extending its habitat quantitatively, it will also be changing and evolving qualitatively into new dimensions of mind and spirit that we cannot now imagine (Dyson, 1979, pp. 236–7).

This scenario of the greening of the galaxy sets a future project for humanity; the expansion of life and culture into space may be one of the chief tasks awaiting humankind. However, the plausibility of this story depends decisively on the intended scale of time. What may be true in the scales of thousands of years or more can be highly problematic in the short run. Daniel Deudney’s (2020, p. 57) Terra Hypothesis designates that “the human future for at least many centuries will be determined primarily by what humanity does—or does not—do on Earth”. Currently, the dominant forms of space expansionism are largely based on concerns of profit-making, national security (military Darwinism), and elite escapism (related to cosmic desperation). The greening of the galaxy can become a meaningful project only to the extent that humanity succeeds in restoring and maintaining the richness and complexity of life on this unique planet Earth. Meanwhile, scientific research and peaceful and cooperative space explorations will continue and they can in their part pave the way for future endeavours. Even if there are other reflectively conscious beings in the galaxy, the greening of the galaxy will occur through cultural and technological means in a post-biological (cultural) universe (Dick, 2009). This implies that the future of the cosmos is not only about the expansion of life but also about society and culture, and ethics and politics. More than that structures and processes at that level of reality can create new dimensions of mind and spirit, through the collective learning of humankind (and/ or possibly other species) (Table 3.4). Understood in this manner, the proposed pragmatist and critical realist interpretation of current scientific theories and their limitations and implications can encourage cosmic hopefulness, thereby facilitating collective human learning and enabling ethical and political progress (Patomäki, 2010c; in response to Hostettler, 2010). The more we learn about the cosmos through scientific research, the better situated

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we are to make judgements about the plausibility of different storylines. Astrobiology will be a key area of learning in the next few decades and centuries in terms of understanding the conditions and determinants of life in the universe (Dick, 2018; cf. Crawford, 2021). This learning will shape our future scenarios and assessments of their plausibility. Whereas the prevailing mythologeme of liberal-capitalist societies is characteristically associated with parametric (environment is seen as fixed in relation to one’s individual choices) and strategic modes of consciousness (other subjects are recognised only as strategic players and the point remains to optimise under constraints, for these modes, see Elster, 1978, ch 5.); in this alternative mythologeme, actors: • recognise each other as equal subjects positioned in social relations, • are capable of identifying social ills and contradictions at the level of wholes, • and are capable of organising collective actions and building common institutions to absent ills and overcome contradictions. Cosmic hopefulness encourages attempts to build trust, solidarity, and ethical-­ political commitments. We know that successful organisation of collective action requires communication to nourish the development of trust and solidarity. Success in these endeavours is contingent on agency, ethical and political struggles, and eco-­ socio-­historical circumstances involving power relations. Because of contingency, negative outcomes (disintegration, collapse, catastrophe in the tragic sense) are possible at different scales of time. In this alternative mythologem, types of plots can be combined in many ways to understand particular episodes or processes. A happy ending at any given time scale is in no way guaranteed yet achievable, even if it is likely to involve unfulfilled desires, tragic feelings of loss, and unintended consequences. Hopefulness can exhibit itself at different scales of time. Some outcomes may be negative, tragic, and even terminal with regard to a particular process or processes, while wider processes will always persist. However, herein lies also a danger of immoral consequences. The more such a hopeful story stresses the negative, tragic, and terminal phases, the closer it may get to Christian or Marxian eschatology, or something analogical; thereby it may also become more liable to approving unnecessary suffering and violence.29

 For example, Wagar’s A Short History of the Future (1999) involves a nuclear war in the 2040s and the death of seven billion people. The scenario is based on the assumption that only a tragic global catastrophe can spell an end to the system of nation-states and capitalist world economy and lead to global-democratic transformation. Ironically, the nuclear war of 2044 means a happy ending to the process of global warming. In this story, transformative agency lies in a world political party. In the 2050s, there is a debate in the party between the pluralists, preferring non-violent methods and the possibility of staying outside the World Commonwealth, and the Leninists. The Leninists carry the day. The world is united under a democratic socialist world state, but at the expense of an additional three million casualties. See also Chap. 7 on the roles and importance of pacifism and pacific-ism. 29

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Analysing and Assessing the Big History Storyline I will now return to the ambiguities of BH and its stories about humanity and its place in the cosmos. At first look, the current version of BH appears consistent with the life- and learning-oriented storyline. Christian’s grand narrative about our origins is meant to stand in for the role played by mythical narratives in early human societies. The idea is that deep stories are important in establishing meaning and identity. Ethical and political projects derive their motivation from the sense they render to our lives. The explicit purpose of BH is to help to establish a widespread awareness of belonging to a planetary whole. The hope is that the modern cosmic story of our origins will forge a global we-feeling and cooperation in a world plagued by global problems. The bulk of this narrative concerns increasing complexity on the exceptionally and perhaps uniquely life-friendly planet Earth. New properties and powers have come and will develop through major turning points. BH not only frames world history in cosmic terms and imagines a future world community, but it is also explicitly critical of Eurocentrism as well as other forms of centrism. By evoking innovative myths about shared human existence and destiny, BH helps to articulate a rising global imaginary for transformative and progressive politics in the twenty-first century (Patomäki & Steger, 2010; Patomäki, 2017). BH appears thus committed to a transformative planetary vision and stresses the role of biological and cultural evolution and increasing complexity. However, a closer look reveals ambiguities. BH contains some elements from both storylines—and not in an entirely unproblematic way. This raises the question of whether it is possible that the BH tale could turn out to be counterproductive. Christian and his co-authors seem committed to the standard version of the Big Bang cosmology as the last word of science so far, even if they are agnostic about the details of the origins of the universe: “We don’t really know what [the universe] came out of or if anything existed before the universe”. What is more certain is that when the universe emerged from “a vast foam of energy, it was extremely simple” (Christian, 2018b, p.  11). These reservations and qualifications notwithstanding, Christian, Brown, and other BH authors affirm the notion that the original singularity, possibly coming out of nothing, was followed by cosmic inflation. The wider cosmic context of the Big Bang is a multiverse or Darwinist selection of universes (Christian, 2004, pp. 22–25, 2018b; Christian et al., 2014, pp. 14–20; Brown, 2007, pp.  4–7). This is the first tier of what I have in this chapter called the liberal-­ capitalist myth. For non-experts in cosmology and other sciences, it is of course reasonable to rely on the currently prevailing scientific opinion, even when the prevailing opinion remains controversial. Moreover, I concur that it seems beyond reasonable doubt that the early universe was smaller and simpler than the current universe. Reliance on the standard Big Bang theory satisfies some requirements of a reasonable appeal to scientific authority.30 However, claims about the beginning of time, multiverse  Out of the six requirements for a plausible appeal to scientific authority specified by Douglas Walton, two seem particularly problematical, namely consistency (“is the claim in question consistent with what other experts assert?”) and evidence (“is expert X’s assertion based on solid evi30

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and Darwinist selection of universes are conjectural. Whatever evidence there may be is usually circumstantial and indirect at best. The hypothesis of cosmic inflation seems to accord well with some of the evidence (especially background radiation), but rival hypotheses can explain the same evidence (e.g. Unger & Smolin, 2015, p. 402). Moreover, we know that also evidence-based scientific theories are open to change and that scientific expert opinion can be driven by sense-making and story-­ telling. While it is evident that we cannot settle scientific disputes at the methodological and mythopoetic levels only, differences at those levels matter, especially in contexts where there are competing hypotheses, theories, and speculations; where evidence is ambiguous, scant, or nonexistent, and where many claims appear untestable in principle. BH is an impressive achievement, and yet it seems that the theoretical and practical commitments of BH are not entirely consistent. Firstly, BH is in an important part motivated in terms of countering the “sense of disorientation, division and directionless” that characterises our modern world (Christian, 2018b, p.  8). BH criticises excessive specialisation and fragmentation of sciences and humanities. Christian writes daringly about “a return to the goal of a unified understanding of reality, in place of the fragmented visions that dominate modern education and scholarship” (Christian, 2018b, p. 4). However, many prevailing theories and speculations about the origins and nature of the universe stem from theories that contradict the views and aims of BH.  In its current mainstream form, the pursuits of science are habitually premised on reductionism. This is evident, for instance, in numerous attempts to develop a theory of everything (“a set of equations capable of describing all phenomena that have been observed, or that will ever be observed”, see Laughlin & Pines, 2000, pp. 28–31). What is more, the abstract logical time of mathematical theories in fields ranging from physics to economics turns time into a quasi-spatial (i.e. timeless) dimension and in effect come to represent reality as atemporal or at least ahistorical. Second, and perhaps even more importantly, BH, as articulated so far, seems to share several end-in-death scenarios with the liberal-capitalist worldview. Entropy will increase and space expand until a few “lonely beacons of light will find themselves in a galactic graveyard” (Christian, 2004 p. 489)—and finally, these lonely beacons will perish too. The end of our solar system will come much sooner and well before that, the Earth will become uninhabitable. “It will be as barren as the Moon is today” (Christian, 2004, p. 487). The account of possible and likely human futures at the scale of hundreds of years is more balanced but still ambiguous. Colonisation of other worlds—if humans ever succeed in reaching other solar systems—may make humanity less dependent on Earth. It is unclear whether this idea is consistent with the Terra Hypothesis or whether, in contrast, it might render support for projects of elite escapism (notably, Spier, 2015, pp. 311–312, argues that space travel to other stars is impossible and prohibitively difficult even in our solar dence?”). In the frontiers of cosmology, experts tend to disagree, often wildly so, and evidence is typically circumstantial and theory-laden, often based on mere speculative theories and highly abstract mathematical models (Walton, 2008, pp. 217–22).

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system). What BH stresses, however, is that although it is “easy to imagine catastrophic scenarios brought about by nuclear or biological warfare, or ecological disaster, or perhaps even a collision with a large asteroid”, also a progressive outcome of history is possible. “It is the in-between scenarios that are both most likely and most difficult to imagine”. (Christian, 2004, p. 482, 2018b, p. 289, formulates the same point in perhaps slightly less pessimistic terms and mentions, on p. 294, also the possibility of the emergence of a “new world society that preserves the best of the Good Anthropocene”). The problem is that even a hesitant commitment to the unfounded cosmic mythologeme of meaninglessness and inevitable end-in-death can become counterproductive regarding the ultimate aims of BH. Thirdly, at a practical and ideological level, the problem lies in the presumption that despite all the specialisation and fragmentation, science is on the side of an enlightened and progressive cosmopolitan vision. In reality, science is interwoven with global problems, both practically (e.g. as part of a military-industrial complex or ecologically unsustainable systems of production and consumption) and ideologically (including through the propagation of mythologems that directly or indirectly encourage or legitimise consumerism and competitive behaviour).31 To use Thomas Kuhn’s terminology, a typical scientist does “normal science”, working within a settled—and typically empiricist—framework, and leaves the conceptual, social, and political framework unchallenged. The results of his or her work can easily be adapted to any technical purpose, including profit- or war-making.32 This is especially true in a world where the university has been repurposed in terms of success in the global competition of corporations and states; usefulness for money-­ making; and corporate-style efficiency (e.g. Mittelman, 2018; for an alternative possibility, Patomäki, 2019b). The repurposing of the university has deepened these problems. According to, for example, Martin Rees, a British cosmologist and Astronomer Royal, many plausible twenty-first-century catastrophe-scenarios stem from scientific developments. “In the present century the dilemmas and threats will come from biology and computer science, as well as from physics”, (Rees, 2004, p. 40). Among other things, this raises the question of whether ethical constraints should be set on science and whether science should be slowed down. An instrumentalist and acquiescent science should not be trusted uncritically, especially under the current political circumstances. Frederick Jameson has remarked that it seems easier nowadays to imagine the end of the world than the end of a historical social system, “capitalism” (Jameson, 2005, p. 199).33 BH appears to be rather close to the mainstream also in this regard.

 Cosmic desperation associated with empiricist (positivist) doctrines encourages short-termism and technical-utilitarian orientation to the world, clearly against the point of Big History. 32  In his interesting book, Steve Fuller portrays Kuhn as the official philosopher of the US militaryindustrial complex (Fuller, 2006, pp. 32, 123). 33  Unlike Christian, for instance, Brown does not even mention capitalism in her future-scenarios (although discusses capitalism in the historical part). With regard to the future, she focusses entirely on environmental questions abstracted away from political economy institutions (Brown, 2007, pp. 230–46) 31

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Interpretations of recent and contemporary history reinforce constraints on imaginative capacities. The history of the Soviet Union, for instance, suggests “that overthrowing capitalism may be an extremely destructive project” and unlikely to succeed in its own aims (egalitarianism, ecological sustainability). While Christian is genuinely concerned about rising inequalities and the possibility of ecological destruction, he also assumes that inequalities will remain a problem as long as capitalism remains dominant. Moreover, inequalities can “generate conflicts that guarantee the eventual use of the destructive military technologies now available to us” (Christian, 2004, pp. 479–81). The hope lies in mitigating some of the consequences of capitalism. Taxes and subsidies can be used to steer economic activities towards more sustainable directions. The living standards of subordinate classes may rise in even the world’s poorest countries. Perhaps capitalist peace will prevail in the end (for critiques, e.g. Weede, 1995; Patomäki, 2020c). The argument seems to rely, after all, on economic growth. I am not suggesting that BH must include a story about the end of capitalism and the beginning of something different that will replace it. That kind of scenario indicates a commitment to Marxism or some other deep-structure social theory implying a belief in a compulsive, world-historical sequence of stages of social organisation (perhaps even following the Christian sequence of Armageddon → Millennium → New Jerusalem), with each stage representing a type of society from a closed list of possible frameworks (such as feudalism, capitalism, and socialism).34 It is more reasonable to understand historical development and change in terms of collective learning, transformative agency, experimentation, and concrete eutopias35 (Chaps. 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11 and 13). A problem is that currently, BH appears rather cautious and ambivalent about rational ethical and political direction. Our current institutional arrangements are not the necessary outcomes of some (unspecified) organisational, economic, or

 For a criticism of the “closed list of possible frameworks” assumption, see Unger (1997).  The term utopia means literally “place nowhere”. Plausible scenarios about possible future vary from eutopias to dystopias, eu-topia is a good “place” and dys-topia a bad “place”. As will be discussed in Part III, with several concrete examples, a concrete eutopia is a model of practical and institutional arrangements that does not currently exist, but should be politically possible to achieve and feasible as an alternative way of organising social practices and relations. The realisation of a concrete eutopia involves practical wisdom; lessons drawn from past or contemporary models; counterfactual reasoning about the possible effects of an altered context; as well as thought experiments about the consequences of the transformed practices and systems (see Sayer, 2000, pp. 160–5; Patomäki, 2002, pp. 158–160). These models may be conservative and exclusive, if they take the existing institutional arrangements and social and technical division of labour for granted. Institutional conservatism leads each group to identify its interests and ideals with the defence of its particular niche. (Unger, 1997, pp. 11–12; 44–8, 109, 164–9). Reform proposals may also be transformative and solidaristic. They propose ways of realising the interests and ideals through the step-by-step change of a series of arrangements (Unger, 1997, pp. 11, 222–3). At face value, institutional conservatism may appear more “realistic”. This may be an illusion, however. Some institutional innovations can overcome the politics of compromises between narrow and short-sighted group interests. This is something that cannot be decided a priori, but has to be analysed concretely and in a detailed manner, case by case. 34 35

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psychological constraints. Rather new ethical and political solutions are likely to emerge in response to various problems that have emerged because of the acceleration of our cultural evolution. How will the future then turn out? Many key questions are pushed aside or left unanswered. Will production be robotised and automatised entirely; or will production be based on the free voluntary association of citizens, perhaps serving purposes we cannot anticipate now? Does money or property continue to exist?36 How will increased longevity and our moral learning shape intimate relations?37 Will the ever more sophisticated technologies be put in the service of some dystopian purposes or do they open up new possibilities for democratic participation? What about the future of war and violence? If the post-­ WWII trends continue, war and violence could become virtually absent already in the 2200s, if not sooner.38 Can nuclear weapons and other weapons of mass destruction be abolished? Will there be any need for people specialising in violence? Will geopolitical states be replaced by a world state or a new functionalist system of governance—or will all states wither away, as also some cosmopolitans have suggested? Concrete eutopias establish a direction and normative telos to history. At any given world-historical moment, there are certain possible rational directions of world history. Over time, there will be a succession of such moments. Setting a direction is a matter of public discussions and debates, taking place under concrete and unique world-historical circumstances. This is what the openness of world history means. Any claim about the rational tendential directionality of world history has to be understood as a dialectical argument within the meaningful human sphere (see Chap. 8). If positive developments dominate and progressive changes cumulate, creating new possibilities, the end result may start to approach the high-spirited world-­ historical visions of H. G. Wells. Wells formulated his future orientation in a manner that accords with the basic tenets of pragmatism and critical realism and claims by prophetic thinkers such as Freeman Dyson: “The past is but the beginning of a beginning, and all that is and has been is but the twilight of the dawn” (Wells, 1913 p. 60). A story portraying the present as “the twilight of the dawn” is more hopeful and inspirational than gloomy stories about us humans marching towards some inevitable end-as-death at some scale of time. Real developments are likely to be complex and mixed, but hope and a pluralist sense of direction are decisively important for the future of world politics.

 For an example of a serious contemporary proposal to make property conditional, temporary, and democratic, see Unger (1997, pp. 306–95). Unger has been an influential politician in Brazil. Also, the idea that there is no money resonates with popular imagination, even if unnoticed in mainstream politics. For instance, for a discussion about the ambiguous politics of the post-capitalist Star Trek, see Hassler-Forest (2016, pp. 47–66). 37  For some speculations, see, e.g., Wagar ( 1999); Halpern (1998). 38  The claim about the declining role of violence is nowadays most often associated with Steven Pinker (2011). About actual and potential countertendencies, see Patomäki (2018); and about the causes and consequences of the war in Ukraine, Forsberg and Patomäki (2023). 36

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Conclusions In this chapter, I have argued that contemporary science is consistent with at least two different cosmic storylines. The basic themes of liberal-capitalist myth—cosmic meaninglessness if not philosophical desperation, Darwinist ideologies, and short-term comforts of life—provide underpinnings for the contemporary competitive society organised in terms of geopolitical states and world markets (for closer analysis in terms of fields of global political economy, especially the fields of economic liberalism and state reason, see Patomäki, 2022, chs. 3 and 5). This myth involves instrumentalism and can easily submit to any demands to provide means for some ends (or be simply indifferent about the uses of scientific knowledge). The prevailing narrative is in most time scales oriented towards a tragic end, thus undermining hope for long-term collective learning and progress. Empiricist science tends to feed into a sense of disorientation, division, and directionless. Attitudes can vary from indifference to reality to outright scepticism and escapism to fantasy worlds such as imagined parallel quantum worlds (or sport, soap, and nostalgia). Freedom in this myth consists of the unimpeded exercise of optimising behaviour. Consumerism results from the absence of hope for good life. The alternative storyline—revolving around the life and learning in a manner that induces cosmic hopefulness—starts from the idea that time, space, causation, emergence, and change are real. Cosmos is historical and evolving, and it is also hospitable to life. Over time, life has generated new emergent powers on Earth; it may have done so also elsewhere in the universe. A key point is that emergent cultural layers such as conscious experience, agency, will, and intentions are real and causally efficacious. This makes both scientific practices and transformative ethical-­ political activities possible. The rational tendential direction of world history is grounded in our collective human learning, making it possible to solve problems, absent ills, and overcome contradictions through collective actions and by building better common institutions. While the storyline of Big History is ambiguous in problematic ways, I have also stressed that not all ambiguities and ambivalences are undesirable. Explanations of different outcomes, episodes, and processes call for different plots and time scales and their combinations. The point is that the life-oriented storyline includes the possibility of happy endings and new beginnings, even if each such ending or beginning is likely to involve various absences, lacks, or contradictions, which in turn are likely to drive future history in new directions. The life-oriented storyline cultivates the idea that the past as we know it may be a mere beginning of beginning. In this epic story concerning humankind, the Earth as a whole is now becoming conscious through the gradual rise of reflexive self-regulation aiming at maintaining sustainable life-friendly biogeochemical, climatic, and socio-economic conditions. Moreover, the conditions of free development of all humans are social and exhibit deep interconnectedness. Collective learning has the power to shape our common planetary conditions and the direction of world history as a whole and thereby can expand the sphere of human freedom. What is more, reflexive self-regulation may contribute to improving the social conditions of ethical and political learning. The

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process of human emancipation is not meaningless but may have significance also on a cosmic scale because the expansion of life and culture into space beyond Earth is a long-term task awaiting humanity.

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Lupisella, M. (2015). Life, intelligence, and the pursuit of value in cosmic evolution. In S. Dick (Ed.), The impact of discovering life beyond earth (pp. 159–174). Cambridge University Press. Lupisella, M. (2021). Is the universe enough? Can it suffice as a basis for worldviews? In I. Crawford (Ed.), Expanding worldviews: Astrobiology, big history and cosmic perspectives (pp. 217–237). Springer. Mali, J. (2002). The rehabilitation of myth: Vico’s ‘new science’. Cambridge University Press. McNeill, W. (2004). Foreword. In D. Christian (Ed.), Maps of time. An introduction to big history (pp. xv–xviii). University of California Press. McNeill, J.  R., & McNeill, W. (2003). The human web. A bird’s-eye view of world history. W. W. Norton. Mittelman, J. H. (2018). Implausible dream. The world-class university and repurposing of higher education. Princeton University Press. Needham, J. (2004). Science and civilisation in China. In K. Robinson (Ed.), Part 2: General conclusions and reflections (Vol. 7). Cambridge University Press. Patomäki, H. (2002). After international relations: Critical realism and the (re)construction of world politics. Routledge. Patomäki, H. (2008a). Dialectics of civilizations: A cosmic perspective. In Marlin-Bennett (Ed.), Alker and IR: Global studies in an interconnected world (pp. 87–101). Routledge. Patomäki, H. (2008b). The political economy of global security: War, future crises and changes in global governance. Routledge. Patomäki, H. (2010a). After critical realism? The relevance of contemporary science. Journal of Critical Realism, 9(1), 59–88. Patomäki, H. (2010b). Exploring possible, likely and desirable global futures: Beyond the closed vs. open systems dichotomy. In J. Joseph & C. Wight (Eds.), Scientific realism and international relations (pp. 147–166). Palgrave. Patomäki, H. (2010c). How to tell better cosmic stories: A rejoinder to Nick Hostettler. Journal of Critical Realism, 9(1), 104–111. Patomäki, H. (2011). On the complexities of time and temporality: Implications for world history and global futures. Australian Journal of Politics and History, 57(3), 339–352. Patomäki, H. (2017). On the possibility of a global political community: The enigma of ‘small local differences’ within humanity. Protosociology. An International Journal of Interdisciplinary Research, 33(1), 93–127. Patomäki, H. (2018). Disintegrative tendencies in global political economy: Exits and conflicts. Routledge. Patomäki, H. (2019a). The promises of critical realism in the 2020s and beyond. Teoria Polityki, 3, 189–200. Available at http://www.ejournals.eu/TP/2019/Nr-­3/art/14197/ Patomäki, H. (2019b). Repurposing the university in the 21st century: Toward a progressive global vision. Globalizations, 16(5), 751–762. Patomäki, H. (2020a). Appendix: Stages of development from the era of archaic humans to the axial age. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.3984609. Patomäki, H. (2020b). On the historicity of social ontology. Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour, 50(4), 439–461. Patomäki, H. (2020c). Political economy dynamics of global disintegration and its implications for war, peace and security in 21st century. In S. Hosseini, B. Gills, J. Goodman, & S. Motta (Eds.), The Routledge handbook of transformative global studies (pp. 151–164). Routledge. Patomäki, H. (2022). The three fields of global political economy. Routledge. Patomäki, H., & Steger, M. (2010). Social imaginaries and big history: Towards a new planetary consciousness? Futures, 42(10), 1056–1063. Pinker, S. (2011). The better angels of our nature: The decline of violence in history and its causes. Allen Lane. Pinker, S. (2018). Enlightenment now. The case for reason, science, humanism and progress. Penguin Books. Pomeranz, K. (2000). The great divergence. China, Europe and the making of the modern world economy. Princeton University Press.

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Rees, M. (2004). Our final century: Will civilisation survive the twenty-first century? Arrow Books. Rees, M. (2017). Our cosmic habitat. Princeton University Press. Rescher, N. (1993). Pluralism. Against the demand for consensus. Oxford University Press. Ricœur, P. (1984). Time and narrative, vol. 1 (K.  McLaughlin & D.  Pellauer, Trans.). The University of Chicago Press. Rosling, H., Rosling, O., & Rönnlund, A. (2018). Factfulness: Ten reasons we’re wrong about the world – And why things are better than you think. Sceptre. Rovelli, C. (2018). The order of time. Allen Lane. Sayer, A. (2000). Realism and social science. Sage. Smolin, L. (2014). Time reborn. Penguin Books. Spier, F. (2015). Big history and the future of humanity (2nd ed.). Wiley Blackwell. Stein, Z. (2015). Beyond nature and humanity. Reflections on the emergence and purposes of metatheories. In R. Bhaskar, S. Esbjorn-Hargens, N. Hedlund, & M. Hartwig (Eds.), Metatheory for the twenty-first century: Critical realism and integral theory in dialogue (pp.  35–68). Routledge. Tetlock, P. E. (1999). Theory-driven reasoning about plausible pasts and probable futures in world politics: Are we prisoners of our preconceptions? American Journal of Political Science, 43(2), 335–366. Tetlock, P. E. (2005). Expert political judgement: How good is it? How can we know? Princeton University Press. Tetlock, P., Lebow, R. N., & Parker, G. (Eds.). (2006). Unmaking the west. ‘What-if’ scenarios that rewrite world history. The University of Michigan Press. Unger, R.  M. (1997). Politics: The central texts: Theory against fate (C.  Zhiyuan, Ed. and Intro.). Verso. Unger, R.  M., & Smolin, L. (2015). The singular universe and the reality of time. Cambridge University Press. Volk, T. (2017). Quarks to culture. How we came to be. Columbia University Press. Wagar, W. W. (1963). The city of man. Houghton Mifflin. Wagar, W. W. (1999). A short history of the future (3rd ed.). Chicago University Press. Walton, D. (2008). Informal logic. A pragmatic approach (2nd ed.). Cambridge University Press. Weede, E. (1995). Economic policy and international security: Rent-seeking, free trade, and democratic peace. European Journal of International Relations, 1(4), 519–537. Wells, H.  G. (1913). The discovery of the future. B.W.  Huebsch. Available at: https://catalog. hathitrust.org/Record/001188090 Wells, H. G. (1920). The outline of history. Being a plain history of life and mankind. The Waverley Book Co. Wheeler, W. (2006). The whole creature. Complexity, biosemiotics and the evolution of culture. Lawrence & Wishart. Young, J. (2003). The death of god and the meaning of life. Routledge.

4

Overcoming Eurocentrism: Towards a Universal History of the Industrial Revolution and the Peace Problematic

I ntroduction: The European States-System and Modernity Are Not Unique In Chap. 3, I discussed how both global history and Big History have attempted to overcome Eurocentrism characterising much of modern scholarship and lay thinking, especially in Europe and North America. The focus of my overall analysis was on attempts to connect the history of the cosmos, solar system, and life and create a common history of humanity that remains part of nature and is at home in the universe. I delineated two different storylines and used methodological arguments and mythopoetic imagination as a source of critique and reconstruction in line with critical social sciences. From an epistemological perspective, this analysis can be seen as a step in the process of Lockean underlabouring to clear “the ground a little, and remov[e] some of the rubbish that lies in the way to knowledge” (Locke, 2019/1690, 13). Here, I concentrate more specifically on the industrial revolution and emergence of the planetary economy (cf. Patomäki, 2022, ch. 3) and the parallel rise of the field of interstate relations and the peace problematic (cf. Patomäki, 2002, ch. 1; Patomäki, 2022, ch. 5). One well-known line of criticism of Eurocentrism is based on post-structuralist philosophy and social theory. Post-structuralist genealogy is opposed to assumptions of trans-historical essences and linear and necessary developments. It emphasises particular trajectories and constellations, accidents, and non-teleological successions. Genealogy seeks to show the plural and sometimes contradictory past and tries to reveal traces of the effects that power has had on accepted truths of different epochs. (Foucault, 1986). From this perspective, there is nothing teleological about the contemporary condition of humanity; slightly different accidents and non-teleological successions could have produced a rather different outcome. Implicitly, this kind of post-structuralist critique builds on the idea of counterfactual possibilities: world history could have been otherwise.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 H. Patomäki, World Statehood, World-Systems Evolution and Global Futures, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-32305-8_4

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I agree with the basic idea. At any geohistorical moment, the future is not yet fully determined and thus involves different possibilities, only some of which will become actual. The future unfolds through various transformative events and nodal points that stem from particular concept- and action-dependent historical social structures and systems (Patomäki, 2006). However, in this chapter, I also question the Foucauldian underpinnings of genealogy and defend the possibility of writing universal histories of humankind. When we look at the industrial revolution and the emergence of a truly planetary economy and the parallel emergence of the peace problematic from the point of view of global or Big History, we can see that the European states-system and modernity are not as unique as routinely assumed. On the other hand, it is also true that not everything is arbitrary or accidental. Rather, we can detect some coherence, wholeness, and even purpose in world-historical processes, especially when bearing in mind that while complexity may tend to rise, it can also decline or collapse. For instance, there is evidence that the processes of monetisation and marketisation did not emerge only once, but several times in world history in different parts of the world, though these processes were partly or in some cases almost wholly reversed after some time (Lucassen, 2013, esp. 21–3). Moreover, we also now know that many of the key technologies and ideas of early modern Europe were transmitted via the Islamic world and/or originated from various Eastern centres of intense trade and proto-industralisation,1 particularly from China (this is one of the key points of Hobson, 2004). It is also possible that Europe bypassed the much more populous China in per capita income and in the production of, e.g., iron and steel only in the early nineteenth century. Until that time, the Asian part of the world economy was not only bigger but also otherwise more attractive to long-distance traders than the European part (Frank, 1998; Pomeranz, 2000). Moreover, the European interstate system was not unique either. For example, in some regards, it may have been similar to ancient China in the Spring and Autumn and Warring States periods (656–221 BC) (see Hui, 2005, esp. chs. 2 and 3). Also, for example, the Song era China involves a system of competing states or empires. Although the details of these comparisons are contentious, it seems evident that the core states of (especially Western) Europe did not become globally dominant in terms of their productive and destructive capabilities before the late 18th or early nineteenth century, and even then only for a relatively short period. Not only was Europe not as unique as has often been assumed, but it is also significant that a number of contingencies have shaped the trajectory of European history and thus global modernity. The Industrial Revolution began to increase productivity and economic growth significantly after the Napoleonic wars, in the

 This is somewhat imprecise. Already Wells (1931, pp. 964–5) made a distinction between industrial and mechanical revolution. Industrial production and factories were the products of the division of labour and could be found already in classical antiquity. In that sense industrial production was widespread, for example, in Song China. Mechanical production arose out of the development of organised science and engineering and was built upon cheap mechanical power, at first fossil fuels. When I am talking about “industrial revolution” I mean mechanical revolution in this sense. 1

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1820s, and at first mainly in Britain.2 Until that time, the Europeans were facing a serious trade deficit with China, finding it difficult to sell items other than illegal opium (Chinese regulations also played a role). In a possible counterfactual scenario, Napoleon wins and Europe becomes unified in the early nineteenth century and thus in some regards reminiscent of the Qing Dynasty China (before Napoleon, Habsburgs had attempted the same).3 The peace problematic (to be specified below) would have remained in the margins for some time to come and the process of worldwide industrialisation would have been both slower and/or have assumed a different path. The competitive era of new imperialism (1870–1914), or what we know as World War I, would not have occurred as such.4 The Opium Wars demonstrated later in the nineteenth century the superiority of the European navies over the fleets of the Chinese and other large empires (the British navy was widely feared and respected already in the eighteenth century). However, Napoleonic France sided with anti-colonial forces in India. The East India Company would not have remained the same—or positioned in the same way—if Europe had become a Francocentric Empire (opium and Chinese trade were the keys to the Company’s hold of India until the Opium Wars). Europe would likely have turned inwards. Britain could not have provided a model for the English-­ speaking former colonies in North America and elsewhere, and other parts of the world would have had more time to industrialise on a par with Europe and North America. In this chapter, I explore the consequences of these and other contingencies. If modern Europe is merely a possible manifestation and moment in a process that is best understood as the global history of humanity, what consequences does this have on our understanding of international relations? I maintain that world-historical contingencies reveal something general about the history of humanity and its current global condition and that this provides a more adequate ground for understanding the future of world politics than Eurocentric histories of the world economy and field of state-reason—or mere negative critiques of various expressions of  Although many technological breakthroughs were made in the late eighteenth century, the mobilisation of resources in the war against France inhibited investments and civilian accumulation in Britain until the 1820s (Williamson, 1984; see also Crafts, 1998). Of course, the industrial use of machinery had already started by that time and, for example, the Luddite rebellion coincided with the last years of the Napoleonic wars. 3  The French Revolution greatly increased the administrative and military capacities of the French state, while France was also the most populous country of Europe. During the Napoleonic Wars 1804–13, some 2.4 million men were drafted in the French Army, at the time when the whole population of Britain was less than ten million. I owe this counterfactual scenario to Hui (2005, pp. 127–136). For very helpful discussions on the logic and problems of the use of counterfactuals in historical explanations, see Elster (1978, pp. 175–218; Tetlock & Belkin, 1996; Tetlock, 1999). 4  It is also worth noting that the Taiping Civil War in China, which lasted from 1851–62 and resulted in the loss of 20 or 30 million lives, is not usually called a “world war”, even though both the Opium Wars with the Western powers and Western ideas—including Christianity—contributed to its inception, and even though the geographical area of military operations was as large as that of Europe. Perhaps World War I should similarly be called a European civil war, as Keynes suggested already in 1919 in his The Economic Consequences of Peace? 2

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Eurocentrism. A key question is whether global history in this sense implies a universal history with a cosmopolitan intent (to paraphrase Immanuel Kant), perhaps even in terms of something akin to the grand historical stages of classical political economy. Stages mean that there is a series of abstract positions or stations in a logical order, historical order of emergence, and/or causal order understood in terms of enablement. Stages may co-exist, overlap, and form various constellations, just as relational practices and structures can form manifold heterogeneous groupings and constellations. I argue that the key to understanding the industrial revolution lies in harnessing new sources of energy, which has enabled the expansion of humanity and the world economy. Global history in this sense is part of the much more general story of increasing complexity and emerging powers. The basic formula is that energy is transformative capacity is power, implying that the amount of power is not constant in social systems. This formula illuminates also the international problematic (a.k.a. the peace problematic) and why it has become an existential question for humanity and a constitutive issue of cosmopolitanism. At the end of this chapter, I will introduce the concepts of the global security community and democracy. These concepts, which I will develop further in Chap. 5, enable critical temporal re-­ orientation by combining abstract directionality with the open-endedness of processes.

Learning from Counterfactual World Histories The presumption that all relevant modern concepts, technologies, and transformative capacities originate from within Europe may be taken to imply that had capitalist market society, industrialisation, and international relations not emerged in Europe, they would not have emerged elsewhere either. At a closer look, neither conjecture is particularly convincing. Most of the key components of European civilisation were first developed elsewhere in the Old World and many of them were imported to Western Europe much later. These include the famous inventions of ancient China, namely the compass, gunpowder, papermaking, and printing.5 In addition, the basic principles of steam power were known already in ancient Alexandria, as well as in China. Similarly, the basic ideas of calculus—the fundamental mathematical tool of Newtonian mechanics—were developed in various  Their exact route to Europe remains uncertain, while it is also true that Europeans may have developed some key inventions partly independently. For example, the first movable type printing technology for paper books was invented around AD 1040 in Song China. These types were made of wood or porcelain. Metal characters were first used in Korea in the 13th and 14th centuries. In Europe, Johannes Gutenberg may or may not have been aware of the Chinese and Korean inventions. In any case, in the course of adopting these technologies for their own purposes, the Europeans made technical improvements in the context of their customs (e.g. the use of alphabets in the case of printing) and resources (developments in metallurgy may have been critical for Gutenberg, although he basically combined many existing technologies). The Chinese first used metal movable type (made of bronze) in 1490, four decades after Gutenberg’s innovation. 5

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places since the classical antiquity of Greece and China, culminating in the works of the Kerala School in southern India that flourished between the 14th and 16th centuries (although it seems that these Indian or related Chinese breakthroughs were not known to Leibniz or Newton). In the second millennium, much of what J. R. and William McNeill call the old world’s web was the site of metal-equipped states and empires, some of them on the threshold of industrialisation (McNeill & McNeill, 2003, chs. 5 and 6). Western Europe remained a rather insignificant part of the world economy until the time of colonisation of the Americas. Whether Western Europe surpassed Chinese levels of production and welfare already in the fifteenth or sixteenth century or only much later, in the nineteenth century, remains controversial. There is some evidence for both interpretations.6 Population growth was somewhat faster in Europe than elsewhere. In some areas, such as printing and shipping, in 1500–1800 productivity seemed to have grown more rapidly in Europe than elsewhere. Printing provided the basis for European scientific culture and shipping for long-distance trade and colonialism. What we know, however, is that Britain reached Chinese twelfth-century levels of iron production no earlier than in the nineteenth century. We also know that a large portion of the silver appropriated from the Americas eventually ended up in China. This suggests that China remained for a long time a surplus country in world trade, perhaps until the early nineteenth century. However, the magnitudes and their changes as well as the role and importance of this silver in the Chinese economy are another disputed issue, partly due to the lack of solid and systematic documentation. A decline in the silver imports in the Chinese economy—leading to the contraction of the volume of money circulating—may have contributed to the end of the Ming Dynasty in the 1640s (see Atwell, 2005). What we also know is that in 1773–1833, British trade with China was based mainly on opium produced in India, which led to the Opium Wars of 1834–43 and 1856–60 (and contributed to the Taiping Civil War of 1851–62). In this light, and leaving the protests of actualists aside,7 I discuss two counterfactual scenarios. According to the first scenario, the Industrial Revolution emerged  The standard Eurocentric interpretation has been defended particularly by liberal economists, sometimes relying on apparently precise quantitative evidence that is nonetheless based on qualitative judgements and estimations and usually difficult to verify (for instance, Landes, 1999; Maddison, 2005; for historians’ critique of using conceptions drawn from neoclassical economics to interpret history, see Boldizzoni, 2011; Guldi & Armitage, 2014, chp. 3). The critics of Eurocentrism tend to be global historians and critical political economists. Often they rely (almost) exclusively on the primary research of others (e.g. Christian, 2004, pp.  335–439; Frank, 1998; Hobson, 2004; McNeill & McNeill, 2003, pp. 116–212). 7  Actualism is a philosophical doctrine that reduces the necessary and the possible, constitutive of the domain of the real, to the actual. According to Bhaskar (1994), actualism is inherently dilemmatic since these reductions cannot be consistently carried out. In open systems, actualism can be sustained only at the price of science, because science relies on producing closed systems in laboratories in order to identify mechanisms that operate transfactually in open systems, where their actual effects are contingent. David Landes reduces historical counterfactual to “accidents” in history and on that basis argues that counterfactuals are meaningless. The West was culturally superior and thus the Industrial Revolution was bound to have started in Europe. Moreover, he 6

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first in China (or elsewhere in the Eastern parts of the Eurasian continent), perhaps already before the European Renaissance (see Tetlock et  al., 2009; Yates, 2009; Pomeranz, 2009). In the second scenario that I have already introduced, if Europe had become a Bonapartist Empire at the turn of the nineteenth century, the process of industrialisation would have slowed down, and non-Europeans would have had more time to adapt by learning and developing new technologies and scientific theories. Of course, the plausibility of both scenarios depends on many assumptions. The first scenario presupposes that there was real potential for an industrial revolution in China at some point either before the Mongol era or before a peasant called Zhu Yuanzhang overthrew the Mongols in 1368 and founded the Ming Dynasty.8 The conventional story has been that in 1433 the Ming emperor suddenly banned Chinese merchants from going abroad. Although we now know that trade continued and China remained a surplus country for a long time, the official inward orientation may have had some important effects on the particular trajectory of Chinese developments. The second scenario is built on the assumptions that France was lagging behind Britain in industrial innovations in the eighteenth century and that Europe under Napoleonic rule would not have achieved rapid industrial growth from the 1820s onwards. The most generic claim that can be made is that large territorial empires of the military-agrarian kind tend to slow down developments through various mechanisms (more on this below). Although this is a possible partial explanation of why China did not industrialise after the Ming Dynasty reunified it, the reality is contingent and nuanced, and often also contradictory. As far as Napoleon is concerned, he claims the Industrial Revolution had to happen in England instead of France because the British were technologically more innovative. However, critical realist ontology explains why there are always multiple possible futures in any given point in geohistorical time. The actual is only a part of the real world, which also consists of non-actualised possibilities and unexercised powers of the already existing structures and mechanisms that are transfactually efficacious in open systems. These structures and powers are themselves historical and changeable and could be—could have been—otherwise. The real issue is the extent to which we would need to assume many counterfactual components in order to get a particular counterfactual X (cf. Landes, 1994 and Patomäki, 2006). 8  The Northern Song China (960–1127) developed an urbanised, proto-capitalist, and to a significant degree marketised society that cultivated innovations such as printing, paper (fiat) money, joint stock companies, the use of coal, construction of channels, and the magnetic mariner’s compass. Robin Yates (2009, pp. 215–220) argues that the Song Dynasty—“the scientific and technological achievements of which could not be matched by any other state anywhere”—failed on the military front, which has been a common pattern in world history (relatively simple nomadic and tribal organisations, while parasitic on more complex societies, have on many occasions been able to attain military advantages and gain upper hand militarily, first conquering the more complex society and then adopting some or many but not all of its ways). The question, however, is whether it is conceivable that the systematic use of fossil fuels as an external source of energy in industrial production could have kicked off in the Song China, say, in the 12th or 13th centuries. The decisive obstacle may have been the stage of metallurgical development. Useful steam engines, due to the heat and pressure of steam, require strong metal fittings, etc., which (to the best of my knowledge) was technology not available anywhere for centuries. In this context it is interesting that Joseph Needham (1965, pp. 225–226) mentions that in the early 1670s, a Jesuit showed the young KhangHsi emperor a model steam-carriage and a model steamboat.

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initiated several economic reforms in France and across Europe, grounding future transformations, and encouraging the use of machines. On the other hand, the French economy relied on agriculture. Napoleon’s expansionary wars were based on acquiring land and at first, this turned out highly profitable. The “Continental system” set up regulations systematically restricting trade. As Alexander Grab (2003, x, see ch. 2) states, “the Napoleonic regime possessed a Janus face: reform and innovation combined with subordination and exploitation”. A Europe ruled by a single Emperor could have been a relatively efficient agrarian empire and military might, yet exhibiting only a slow transition to production based on external sources of energy (fossil fuels, water- and wind-power transformed into electricity, etc.).9 In that case, the industrial revolution would probably have been postponed by decades or more and may have occurred elsewhere, for example in the late nineteenth century USA. Recent discussions have highlighted especially the first scenario. In his The Eastern Origins of Western Civilisation, John Hobson (2004) concurs for the most part with Andre Gunder Frank’s (1998) book ReORIENT. Global Economy in the Asian Age: the East was neither despotic nor antithetical to commercial and industrial activities. They both argue that China achieved an industrial miracle already in the eleventh century, during the Song era. William Thompson (2010, p. 9) concurs, calling the 11th–twelfth century Song China the first “modern” economy. Accounts of an early industrial miracle can be read as claims about Chinese potential to industrialise fully, though a lot depends on the definition of “industrial”. Mechanical production and machinery were used in many places well before the beginning of the use of fossil fuels as a major source of energy. Thus, there was some mechanisation of the textile industries and significant developments in iron- and steel-making techniques in China. This mechanisation took place even though the main sources of energy remained human and animal muscle, wind and water flows, and wood for fire. Coal and oil were used for certain domestic and task-specific purposes. To the extent that this is not considered as yet fully industrial, we can at least say that given the available techniques and practices of production, Song China was close to and had the potential for an industrial revolution, yet that potential did not actualise sufficiently beyond a critical point (for a possible partial explanation, see note 8 above; see also Patomäki, 2022, ch. 3). After the Mongol era, the famous treasure fleets of Chinese Admiral Zheng He in the early fifteenth century remained motivated more by the desire to gain imperial recognition and tributes than by attempts to establish “free trade” or mutual diplomatic relations, although the treasure ships carried also large quantities of silks,

 During the Napoleonic era, there was an ongoing discussion about the possible need to return to the guild-system in some form. Those advocating resumption were arguing that guilds had been more effective at achieving such goals as worker discipline and product quality, whereas those defending their abolition maintained that guilds in any form would hinder economic development, especially the mechanisation of production. (Fitzsimmons, 2008). Only a relatively small shift towards a more conservative direction would have made the Napoleonic Empire quite resistant against industrialisation. 9

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porcelain, and other items of merchandise.10 For centuries after Zheng He, China remained the biggest and, especially for long-distance traders, apparently the most attractive part of the world economy. Kenneth Pomeranz, for instance, maintains that “the great divergence” between East Asia and Western Europe did not become observable or significant before the mid-eighteenth century. The great divergence can be largely explained in terms of benefits from trade with the colonised Americas and the abundance of coal in deforested Britain. Pomeranz also gives credit to the European scientific culture. (Pomeranz, 2000, pp.  42–68; see also Frank, 1998, pp. 202–203, who agrees with this assessment).11 Small initial differences may lead to large divergencies and major transformations over time without the contemporaries even noticing them. For example, Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations (1776) paid no attention to fossil fuels or “industrial revolution”. It took another 60 years before the importance of the new industrial powers and sources of energy was widely recognised in Europe. The main point is that in the absence of the great divergence, the waves of globalisation and the burst of the planetary economy could either have emerged from East Asia or at least occurred in a much less Eurocentric way. In actual history culminating in the nineteenth century, however, the dynamics of political economy centred in Western Europe and North America, though only for a while.

A Universal History of Humanity in Terms of Stages What we can learn from counterfactuals concerning industrialisation is that European modernity was merely a possible manifestation and a moment in the process of collective learning and development of humanity. The historical changes that led to the industrial revolution occurred in phases that can be understood as causal orders of enablement (for example, the development of metallurgy enabling the emergence of a functional steam engine) and historical orders of emergence (for example, the emergence of large markets come before industrial mass-production, or some mechanisation of production occurring before the systematic use of fossil fuels as an external source of energy, and so on). Stages may co-exist, overlap, and  In his bestseller, Gavin Menzies (2004) claims that Zeng He’s fleet actually reached America seventy years before Columbus and had circumnavigated the globe a century before Magellan. Many professional historians, such as Robert Finlay, have disputed both Menzies’ dogmatic attitude and the quality of his evidence. What is more interesting, however, than these kinds of highly speculative claims is that the early fifteenth century Chinese treasure ships were many times bigger and in some ways technologically more advanced than the ships of Columbus (although less apt for sailing against winds and currents than the European ships of the late fifteenth century). They also covered large part of the world and sailed at least up to East Africa and carried perhaps as many as 25–30,000 men and all the supplies they needed, including animals for meat and milk, rice, vegetables, and water (see, e.g., Finlay, 2004). 11  There was coal also in China, but apparently located far from the centres of its potential industrial use. Something similar may apply also to Japan and India. In India in the 1790s, steel making remained at the level of best European (Swedish) practices, while cheaper than British steel. However, the situation changed in the nineteenth century. 10

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form various constellations in context-bound ways. From a scientific or critical realist perspective, emergence means that elements are combined and organised in a novel way, resulting in new qualities and causal powers. The process of emergence takes time. In the process, the pre-existing elements may assume new functions. Hence, the causes of their development can be different from the causes of their reproduction and development in a new context. To illustrate, the concept of combined and uneven development in the world economy (Rosenberg, 2013), particularly if abstracted from the teleology of the standard Marxian theory, covers some though not all of these complexities. Translocal or global interactions among unevenly developed and growing parts of the world economy produce mutations within a wider historical logic of development and an asymmetrically structured whole (i.e. world political economy in a given world time). Thereby various causal and historical orders may come in new mixes. One of the implications of this is that abstract stages or phases are limited in their descriptive and explanatory power: they can explain only some parts or aspects of some geohistorical episodes and processes. They may evoke a sense of teleology, but at a relatively high level of abstraction and retrospectively more than in terms of prediction. In contrast to the usual “stages” from classical political economists to Walt Rostow (1960), the stages of a universal history of humanity should be conceived in neither Eurocentric nor one-dimensional terms (the same spatio-temporal area may involve many distinct eras and/or stages simultaneously). From a Big History perspective, the core of the industrial revolution lies in harnessing new sources of energy, which has enabled the expansion of humanity and the world economy. Every act of causation is a matter of energy flowing through matter. Nothing can happen—including no social action can occur—without energy.12 In the context of the second law of thermodynamics, which states that entropy tends to increase in closed systems of energy and matter, energy intensity is associated with complexity. From this viewpoint, global history is part of the much more general story of increasing complexity. Erik Chaisson (2001, pp. 132–145) has estimated levels of  Although this is not the place to develop theory of causation, causation in general can be understood in terms of energy. (Available) energy is the capacity of a system to perform work and all causation involves work in this abstract sense. John Mackie (1974) has developed an account of cause as an INUS condition (an insufficient but non-redundant part of an unnecessary but sufficient condition). Mackie’s standard example concerns a fire that has partly destroyed a house. Experts conclude that the fire was caused by an electrical short-circuit within the house. A number of other INUS-conditions were involved in generating the fire, such as the presence of flammable material and oxygen, and the absence of adequate sprinklers. This causal complex can easily be redescribed in terms of energy. The redescription explains what it is that actually causes the fire. Fire is a chemical reaction between oxygen in the atmosphere and some sort of flammable material or fuel. It converts a fuel and oxygen into carbon dioxide and water and produces heat. This reaction and the resultant heat can destroy human-built structures (the building and maintenance of those structures requires energy) and thus increase entropy. A short-circuit means the flow of a large amount of energy in a short period, releasing a lot of heat causing damage by starting a fire. The shortcircuit presupposes an electronic current flowing through a system built for a human purpose. The driving force of causation is energy. 12

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complexity in nature by roughly calculating free energy rate density (units of energy per time and mass) for various generic structures of the universe. For galaxies, this density is approximately 0,5, for stars 2, for Earth’s geosphere 75, for plants (biosphere) 900, for animal and human bodies 20,000, and human brains 500,000. The estimations for human society are not meaningful on the same scale, because the energy no longer flows only through human bodies (Spier, 2015, p. 57) but increasingly through what Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen (1975, p. 369) calls “exosomatic instruments”, i.e., of instruments produced by humans but not belonging to their bodies. With relatively modest instruments, complex societies based on cooperation can achieve significant material transformations by building, say, irrigation channels or pyramids, but it takes new sources of energy to operate instruments beyond that level of technical complexity. So far, the development of humanity has proceeded through three different stages: 1. The stage of hunter-gatherers, who can handle fire and simple tools but have no other sources of energy than nutritious substances feeding their muscles and brain and the burning of wood that brings some extra warmth and protection and is useful in cooking. 2. The stage of agricultural civilisation involves a new energy system, where the sunlight is converted into food energy by the green fields of crops now inside the cultural system (Volk, 2017, p. 135), and where some domesticated animals provide additional muscle power and nutritious substances. Increasingly, also coal, wind, and water flows and, later, chemical explosives are utilised mechanically in production, transportation, and destruction (war). 3. The stage of mechanical civilisation is based on the work of machines operated with external sources of energy. Historically, this started with fossil fuels (coal, oil, gas). The conversion of the energy of wind or water flows into electricity started in the late nineteenth century. Since the mid-twentieth century, electricity has been produced also through the release of the binding energy of atomic nuclei in a fission reaction and by converting the energy of sunlight through the photovoltaic effect. Industrialisation in the sense of stage (3) was an inevitable result of the collective learning of humanity, even though it could have happened elsewhere than in Europe, or at another time, or assumed somewhat different forms. Multiple processes may exhibit a variety of different ways of arriving at roughly the same end-point (note that this possibility does not imply that there are no unique processes that are contingent at all scales of time). A lot depends also on our choice of scale of time and space. What may appear as unique and contingent at spatio-temporal scale S may be less clearly so at scale S + 1 or S + i. It would be unscholarly to deny the possibility of framings at scales of time and space within which aspects of coherence and direction can be identified; and once one’s eyes are open, various new interpretative possibilities come to view. The rest is up to critical research. These are issues of falsifiable research, not of philosophical speculation, although it is also important to recognise that all research involves interpretation, metaphors, conceptual work, and story-telling.

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In the processes of evolution, possibilities are structurally limited. In similar contexts produced by evolutionary processes of increasing diversity and complexity, similar solutions tend to emerge. In biology, examples of this include structures known as statocysts for achieving balance, and camera- and compound-eyes for seeing (see, e.g., Morris, 2003). Evolution has resulted in increased diversity and complexity. Yet, in parallel lines of evolution, functionally equivalent types of species have emerged, for example, many mammals in the Old World and similar marsupials in Australia. In cultural evolution, the diversity among groups of homo sapiens was negligible until the development of complex language c. 50,000–15,000 years ago. (Cf. Patomäki, 2020). Just focusing on the past 10,000 years, it is striking how parallel different lines of cultural development have been. For example, when Pizarro, Cortes, and other conquistadors encountered the Incas, Mayas, and Aztecs, they in effect found their own past, i.e. variations of the substance of the early civilisations of Mesopotamia and Egypt, although developments in America were uneven and involved manifold combinations. Here, my focus is on the industrial revolution. The possible sources of energy on planet Earth are limited. The technical, scientific, and social organisations are subject to causal orders of enablement and historical orders of emergence. Green plants store part of the solar radiation arriving on Earth. That is why humans at stage (1), covering most of the time of the existence of homo sapiens, could release a little extra energy by burning (remains of) trees. At stage (3), humans have been systematically burning the solar energy saved from entropy millions of years ago in the form of coal, oil, or gas (Georgescu-Roegen, 1975, p. 353). The fact that the industrial revolution was at first based on fossil fuels is likely no coincidence. At some practical level, many of the technical principles of fire, burning, and heat have been known for thousands of years. Early and ancient civilisations mined coal for local purposes and metalworking and used oil for heating, for example, in the context of salt-making. In contrast, the notion of electricity started to advance only in the context of the eighteenth and nineteenth-century science. Although many technological choices have been path- and context-dependent, it was nonetheless inevitable that humanity would reach the threshold of stage (3) somewhere at some point in terms of mass production by machines operating with external sources of energy—most likely featuring fossil fuels in a central role. Regarding social organisation, the argument about inevitability is more complicated and conditional. The critics of the idea that all relevant modern concepts, technologies, and transformative capacities originate from within Europe typically presuppose that similar developments either already did or could have occurred also elsewhere. In most counterfactual scenarios that have been developed, the possibility of the industrial revolution is associated with some form of a capitalist market economy. For example, Song China innovations included printing, paper (fiat) money, joint stock companies, the use of coal, the construction of roads and channels implying the extension of markets, and so on (see note 8). Thus, Song China was not only approaching stage 3 but can also be seen as proto-capitalist. Does this imply that capitalism in some sense was inevitable? The most famous critics of capitalist market society seemed to have thought so. According to an established

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interpretation, Marx and Engels contended that the development of human society occurs through stages of development in the division of labour and different forms of property, from tribal and ancient to feudal and capitalist societies.13 It is of course possible to complicate this scheme of history by adding more variations (Marx himself added later the category of the Asiatic mode of production) or stages within stages. I agree with Roberto Unger14 that the problem with much of social theory has been its high level of abstraction, which encourages deep-­ structuralism. Deep-structuralism subsumes each formative social context under an indivisible and repeatable type and searches for general laws governing such types. A formative context15 is something looser and more singular than a universal  To the extent that this interpretation is correct, Marx and Engels would have taken the idea from Adam Smith (1723–1790), who was borrowing it from A.R.J. Turgot (1727–1781), who in turn developed the idea as a conservative response to the indigenous critique of European societies and their lack of freedom and equality (Graeber & Wengrow, 2021, pp. 59–61). The established interpretation is based on the idea that “although various modifications—particularly important in respect of the so called ‘Asiatic Mode of Production’—were introduced by Marx later in his writings, he upheld the general outline of social evolution laid down in The German Ideology throughout his career”. (Giddens, 1981, p. 69). The German Ideology was published in the 1930s, almost a century after it was written. It may well be that the theory of history part of this text was forged, or even created, afterwards by the Marx-Engels Institute in Moscow, on the basis of a set of manuscripts written by Marx and Engels. However, some evidence that Marx adhered to the stagestheory can be found in the 1873 “Afterword” to the second German edition of Capital 1. Marx (2013) does not express the stages-theory in his own words, but cites approvingly a summary of his key ideas published in The European Messenger of St. Petersburg. The concept of stage is also prominent in Grundrisse, albeit in a more abstract philosophical (Hegelian) sense—also Grundrisse remained unpublished until 1939. 14  Unger’s best-known work in social and political theory is Politics: a work in constructive social theory, which was originally published in 1987 in three volumes. Here, I use the somewhat more accessible 1997 abridged one-volume edition edited by Zhiyuan Cui entitled Politics. The central texts; theory against fate (Unger, 1997). For three decades, I have been returning to False necessity and other Unger’s texts every now and then, in spite of reservations about some aspects of his thinking. For instance, there is more than a residue of romantic nationalism in Unger’s politicoeconomic project. Despite his wide and deep world-historical perspective, Unger seems to downplay the extent to which our fates have been interconnected and interwoven across the planet and, with some partial exceptions, shies away from considering alternative institutional arrangements on a global scale. Unger (2022), which came to my attention only after I had completed this manuscript, addresses the grave dangers that humanity now faces, but although this small contains some insights, its vision remains explicitly centered on preserving state sovereignty. 15  For Unger (1997), formative context is a fundamental institutional and imaginative framework of social life that is distinguished from the routine activities—or more generally, practices—the framework helps reproduce. Formative contexts differ by their degree of openness to revision. The concept of formative context is somewhat different from the social-theoretical and ontological concepts I have developed in my other works, yet is closely related. For example, the mythopoetic critique I advance in Chap. 3 concerns, albeit at a rather abstract level, the imaginative framework of contemporary world society led or dominated by the West (itself a historical metaphor and part of an imaginary). Unger’s distinction between formative contexts and routine activities is related to the distinction between (1) the taken-for-granted background and (2) social practices and actions that the background enables and shapes. The concept comes close to that of “field” developed by Bourdieu and others (see Patomäki, 2022, esp. chp. 2). A social field is bending social space-time and thus enabling and defining the obvious or relatively effortless direction of social activities in 13

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trans-historical type—an “accidental” institutional and ideological cluster that regulates both normal expectations of identities and how things are to be done and routine conflicts over the distribution of key resources. Unger’s key point is that formative contexts can be distinguished by their degree of revisability or disentrenchment. This indicates, however, that institutional and ideological clusters are not merely accidental. Rather some coherence and direction can be identified: the general direction of history is from less to more revisability (what Unger also calls “plasticity” and “negative capability”). From this perspective, Unger argues that the reason why the industrial revolution happened in Europe is not that the Europeans saved more or appropriated a larger amount of surplus coercively (likewise, the above-mentioned claim that the abundance of coal in deforested Britain was a decisive factor is probably an overstatement). Rather: [t]he main point about nineteenth century England in contrast to, say, Ch’ing China, is not that the English saved or skimmed off more than the Chinese but that they used resources, performed activities, ran organizations, and recombined factors of production in different ways. (Unger, 1997, p. 180).

Occasionally Marx and Engels (2010/1848, p.  15) made similar points, for instance when they wrote “[c]onstant revolutionising of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones”. They continue by proclaiming that “[a]ll fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify”. From this perspective, it is plausible to maintain that the shift to stage (3) was a matter of collective learning of humanity, which was facilitated by the increasing revisability of social contexts. The connection between the two does not form a universal regularity. The formative contexts of military-agrarian empires did not prevent technical or practical experimentation or the development of new ideas. Even in tradition-bound, coercive, and hierarchical contexts, institutional and ideological clusters vary and leaders may perceive that their current forms of technology or organisation may be ill-suited to their aims (Unger, 1997, p. 222). Actors have to improvise, at least occasionally, and they can experiment with different or new ways of doing things. Learning can occur in different kinds of social contexts. There are no law-like regularities in societies (for example: “social organisation O → learning of type L occurs at speed V”). It is nonetheless plausible to argue that a unified and hierarchical power structure generates epistemic restrictions and tendencies towards homogenisation of knowledge. Therefore, a more decentralised system may, in pursuit of the desirable values and things characteristic to that multidimensional field. Sociohistorically, the concept of field comes close to a “game” or “battlefield”, in which actors struggle not only over resources and positions but also over the constitution and formation of aspects of the field. The latter is especially important in contexts where a heterodoxy can openly contest the prevailing meanings—where the degree of revisability is high—and/or where different fields coexist and interrelate in spaces of social organisation. In a somewhat similar manner, Unger’s formative context regulates normal expectations and routine conflicts over the distribution of key resources.

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general, be better for the development and propagation of new ideas and experimenting with new possibilities although, one must add, decentralisation comes in diverse forms (the categories we use to describe these forms are liable to geohistorical changes as well). Even the most centralised and coercive system must count on voluntary collaboration. In a large number of geohistorical contexts where social positioning is determined by tradition and the prevailing rule is legitimised by a mandate from heaven or divine rights,16 the upper layers of society appear to have been keen to preserve the essentials of their worldview, identity, and privileges against all challenges. A new idea or technical or practical experimentation may be and often has been perceived as a threat and punished as such (e.g. some sixteenth-century European scientists were silenced or burnt at the stake, whereas several seventeenth-century European philosophers, scientists, and social theorists spent years in exile). Similarly, also the more disentranched and revisable contexts tend to accommodate inherited privileges in various ways, though perhaps in somewhat more nuanced ways. In research on modern organisations, related tendencies have been analysed in terms of group thinking, conformist pressures, “mindguards”, self-censorship, organisational stupidity, and so on. A somewhat commercialised, money-based society has arisen in many places and at many times, but typically, this development was occasionally, recurrently, or in some cases cyclically reversed at least to some degree. The partial or total reversal means that the part of agricultural production sold in fairs and towns declines. The class of small independent cultivators tends to lose a large part of their independence to the great landholders. Money rents and wages are to a large degree replaced by rents in kind and corvée labour. The large estates become increasingly separated from each other. Urban trade, artisan work, and manufacture shrink. Taxation becomes indirect and the central government becomes dependent on intermediaries, which may eventually take over, which means that the central government becomes  The expression “mandate of heaven” comes from the Chinese notion that heaven (tian) conferred directly upon an emperor, the son of heaven (tianzi), the right to rule. A similar idea can be found in most large-scale military-agrarian empires (the post-republican Rome was at best only a partial exception). Likewise, the European sovereign states from the sixteenth century until the revolutions of 1789 and 1848, and in some cases until WWI, were ruled on the basis of the divine right of kings or queens, which in turn legitimised a hierarchy of distinct groups or estates having unequal rights and duties. In addition, most hierarchies have also involved other categories of lower beings, including women and slaves. In Chap. 2, I analysed the formations of these kinds of epistemic systems through of an observer-centric cognitive perspective, which typically involves spatial distances identified on the axis civilised—barbarian. The collective learning that was taking humanity to stage (3) occurred mostly in these kinds of formative contexts. However, modern scientific and political revolutions questioned the “mandate of heaven” and led to the abolition of the estatist society—not only in Europe but also soon globally. Only a few examples of the divine right to rule (e.g. Saudi Arabia) and estatism (e.g. the de facto caste system of India) remain in the twenty-first century. Autocrats have to justify their rule by other means (e.g. through defining a state of exception, securitisation, enemy construction, defence of fundamental principles such as private property rights or socialist solidarity, or by appealing to some sort of real or manufactured popular mandate). Similarly, in contexts where citizens are recognised as equal, socio-economic inequalities cannot be legitimised in terms of divine will or “blood”. 16

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virtually nonexistent. The economy becomes demonetised (consider Europe after the collapse of the Western part of the Roman Empire in the fifth century CE). The economy becomes “renaturalised” in the sense that transactions are increasingly in kind and social organisation is built on local production for immediate use and expropriation of surplus by local masters and warlords. A renaturalised social economy is unlikely to develop such technical and organisational innovations that would lead to fossil-fuels-based mass production. Thus, marketisation and commercialisation seem prerequisites for a shift to stage (3). Nonetheless, there is no indivisible and repeatable type called “capitalism”. I have discussed this issue elsewhere as the historical emergence of the field of orthodox liberalism (Patomäki, 2022, ch. 3). Here, it suffices to point out that in European early modernity, some conceptions and practices (e.g. profit-seeking, wage labour, and commodity production for world markets) were gradually becoming increasingly acceptable and central to social organisation. Moreover, these conceptions (e.g. finance based on probability calculus, new forms of governance based on ideas emanating from the political economy) and practices (such as credit-based financing of investments and legal ways of forming a corporation, later with limited liability) evolved further since the seventeenth century, until today (the early 2020s). As there are always a variety of institutional and ideological elements that can be clustered in different ways in any given world time, there is nothing inevitable about the particular combinations or clusters that emerged in different locations in Western Europe and then across the world in these centuries. Moreover, both the actual and potential differences can be specified in different ways. Unger, for instance, stresses varieties of, and conflicts over, the work-organisation complex, private-rights complex, and governmental-organisation complex, yet fails to see the relevance of the politics of scale and levels of organisation beyond the national state. Hence, while the move to the stage (3) was an inevitable result of the collective learning of humanity, the corresponding form of social organisation is more indeterminate. Money-based economy and some degree of marketisation and commercialisation may have been necessary for a shift to stage (3), given the forms of social organisation that preceded this shift, but there is a variety of ideological and institutional possibilities that could have served the same function of extending the division of labour. More possibilities were appearing soon with the emergence of critical responses involving (partly) new democratic and socialist ideals (Patomäki, 2022, chp. 4). What is just as important is that the impetus for the development of money-­ based commercial society was more an unintended result of animosities and warfare among the European states than of any deliberate plan (until works such as Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations, first published in 1776, which started to approximate such a plan and was used as one in the nineteenth century). Competition and constant warfare among relatively equal collective entities such as states or limited-­ scale empires can generate a social-evolutionary logic of institutional and technological experimentation, which is repeatedly subject to resistance by the upper class and elites in hierarchical class societies. Moreover, the decentralised state system—together with the mass printing of books and new levels of literacy and practices of reading—provided some protection for scientists, scholars, and dissidents. This indicated learning about the importance of learning. Since the early

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eighteenth century, some princedoms and states started to grant exceptional freedoms for scientists and scholars based in academies or universities. The freedom of teaching was established by the University of Göttingen, founded in 1734, and gradually the successful innovation spread to other places.

The Development of the Modern Peace Problematic In Europe during the agricultural era of the stage (2), colonial encounters, interstate competition, and war played an important role in pushing humanity towards stage (3). As discussed in Chap. 2, the new cosmological theories decentred the planet Earth, while printing and the new practices of reading silently shifted the background encouraging learning and a new kind of critical orientation (e.g. irony, satire). Many Enlightenment figures developed a critique of their society written from the perspective of some imagined or real outsider. These others, whether real or imagined, might have romanticised their society against the European invasion, but what is important here is that the ideas of freedom and equality came to a significant degree from the outside (see Graeber & Wengrow, 2021, ch. 2, for illuminating stories, details, and evidence). These developments and the ensuing ethical, social, and political critique boosted the self-transformative capacity of European contexts. Simultaneously, improvements in agriculture resulting in developments such as importing new plant species or guano from the Americas or improving technology or social organisation led to population growth, which was also a factor in struggles over military superiority. Until the nineteenth century, the bulk of European states’ finances was directed to war and the military, including operations and bases outside Europe. Especially in the eighteenth century, there was a period of almost constant warfare, and war-­ making in turn shaped political economy developments. The early modern states supported colonial ventures, trade, and new financial practices to raise funds for war and celebrate the glory of the autocrat and those around him or her. The growing cost of armies and navies had to be financed. Each war tended to increase public expenditures, which rarely, if ever, returned to their pre-war levels. The early modern states introduced new taxes—prompting the development of tax collection capacities—and new financial practices and institutions (Sánchez, 2009). These fiscal innovations had worldwide significance, increasing the power of, for instance, the Dutch and British states and trading companies for instance vis-à-vis Qing China (thus began the Chinese “century of humiliation”—the term emerged in 1915 with the rise of nationalism opposed to Western and Japanese imperialism). As the modern abstract state established new practices and institutions to finance its wars and expansion, it was creating space for financial innovations with unintended consequences such as boom-and-bust cycles. Overall, these changes contributed significantly to the monetisation of society and expansion of markets, stimulating the expansion of production and trade, at the time when the circuit of capital was becoming or had become established.

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World history is and must remain open-ended, but it does not mean that it is directionless. States and their “reason” (raison d’état) contributed to commercialisation of practices in the expanding Eurocentric world system. Thereby it pushed for the shift to stage (3) in a context that was increasingly frequently characterised as “capitalist” (for a history of the concept of capital, see Boldizzoni, 2008). The increasing power of states to mobilise resources for war and, soon, the shift to the use of machines based on external sources of energy generated a new practical and theoretical problematic, which I have elsewhere called “international” (Patomäki, 2002, chp 2), but which could perhaps more appropriately called the peace problematic (Polanyi, 2001, pp. 7–20, talks about the rise of “peace interest”). The peace problematic cannot be reduced merely to the growth of destructive powers; it originates also from collective moral learning. This learning was facilitated by changes in the background, such as silent, asocial reading that helped to enlarge the space for inner conversation and stimulate introspection (Saenger, 1997) and legal changes guaranteeing growing space for free speech (parliamentary privileges, academic freedom, and freedom of speech as such). In the eighteenth century, the peace problematic arose from these elements as well as from the new cosmological imaginary about humanity’s place in the wider scheme of things, as explained in some detail in Chap. 2. This problematic is often associated with Immanuel Kant, although he had predecessors and contemporaries, some of whom suggested more radical solutions than Kant himself (see Chap. 2). Kant’s articulations of the problematic in the 1780s and 1790s would not have been possible without thinkers such as David Hume (1711–1776) and Adam Smith (1723–1790). Hume laid down the basis for this problem field with his empiricism and scepticism, and together with Smith developed ideas about political economy and peace and war. Kant forged these conceptions and his own cosmology and critical philosophy into an acute social problem of war and peace. Kant thought the problem of war can and should be overcome by an arrangement of a “league of nations”, free trade, rule of law, and republicanism. In this sense, Kant is the beginning of a common saga. Since the mid-nineteenth century, political realists have criticised Kantian “idealists” or liberalist and cosmopolitan reformers for advocating dangerous actions based on misleading assumptions. Liberalists may respond there is more room for ideas, reforms, and peaceful change than political realists think, but realists too have advocated reforms (see Chap. 10). Every problem, whether practical-political or more theoretical, has a set of presuppositions. Put together—to the extent that there is some consistency—these presuppositions form a theory and give rise to a characteristic set of problems and plausible answers to them. The many rounds of debates after Kant about the conditions of peace and war stem from a particular theory/problem-field solution set, or in short, a problematic (about the concept of theory problem-field solution set, see Bhaskar, 1994, pp. 10, 215–6, 224). The presuppositions of the international problematic include: (i) conceptions, opportunities, and problems associated with the rise and expansion of capitalist market society,

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(ii) practical and theoretical problems stemming from the emergence and consolidation of the modern state, (iii) the problem of order, which emerged with (i)-(ii) and the erosion of the authority of the Christian church, and particular solutions to this problem such as power-balancing, (iv) positivist interpretation of the new natural sciences, in particular Newton’s mechanics, and the related idea that it is possible to find formulas to describe the laws of human understanding or behaviour such as those related to power-­ balancing, perhaps expressible in terms of differential calculus or otherwise mathematically. As a meticulously coded diplomatic practice, the international problematic came to be fully established in Europe only after 1815. European industrialising states expanded and built worldwide empires. Had Napoleon been able to establish a European-wide empire, the other states and especially empires would have been outside Europe, and the problem of peace in Europe less acute, at least for a time. The Napoleonic Empire may have turned, at least partly, inwards and slowed down the shift towards stage (3). However, for any particular expanding and globalising identity and community there would have been others outside, i.e. other, different, and separate political communities. As diplomacy is mediation between estranged communities (Der Derian, 1987), concrete diplomatic relations and regulations would soon have evolved anyway. Similarly, a counterfactual Sinocentric expansion starting at some point in the twelfth or fifteenth century would have been equally imperial, despite some possible differences. Expanding China would have encountered other states and empires and been forced to organise relations with them (compare this, for example, to the treaty between the Dutch East India Company and Koxinga, a Chinese prince and general, concerning the company leaving Taiwan in 1662). Perhaps the only alternative to the emergence of the modern international problematic would have been a rapid transformation towards a universal empire dominating the world, or towards a world state based on mutual recognition. Despite thinkers such as Baptiste “Anacharsis” Cloots and Karl Krause discussed in Chap. 2, that possibility was far-­ fetched in the early nineteenth century and remained so in the twentieth century. The logic of the emergence of the peace problematic can be summarised as follows: • A new outlook on life and the world (human potential & place on Earth and in cosmos). • Separate and alienated communities (states or empires). • Increasing destructiveness of wars as a consequence of shifts towards stage (3). __________________________ • New temporal horizon as technological and institutional changes become visible in a single lifetime (future orientation; linear time; the possibility of secular progress). • Moral principle, according to which killing and violence are wrong (“Golden Rule”). __________________________ The peace problematic

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The inevitability of the emergence of the peace problematic in some specific form is based on the assumption that moral learning is universal and occurs in stages (learning concerns the logic of reasoning rather than substance; e.g. Kohlberg, 1973; Habermas, 1990; Patomäki, 2022, Appendix). Were moral and scholarly learning—and related background changes—occurring at this time also elsewhere than in Europe? A systematic attempt to answer this question is beyond the scope of this chapter. Moreover, I must again limit myself to a couple of comparisons with China, although one could argue that the Islamic Arab world came close to achieving the threshold in the fifteenth century (an indication is that Ibn Khaldūn’s (1332–1406) texts convey issues of monetary economics, marketisation, and commodification, Khaldūn even developed the basics of the labour theory of value). Mass printing, new practices of reading, and growing rates of literacy were among the key conditions of many of the transformations in modern Europe and, soon, in the Americas. Similarly, in the Qing China (1644–1912) woodblock printing expanded, scholars corresponded semi-publicly, and many individuals had large libraries. Texts were scrutinised critically and new techniques of research were developed, for instance, in history writing. Parallels to the Renaissance and Enlightenment developments in Europe are clear (Woolf, 2011, pp. 318–26). What we also know (Chap. 2, note 11) is that the Confucian Golden Rule (“what you do not wish for yourself, do not do to others”) echoes the teachings of Christianity, as do debates on the real source of morality. Kant’s categorical imperative is basically a philosophical improvement on the golden rule. It is not difficult to imagine a Chinese (or Arab) version of critical philosophy cultivating similar or parallel ideas (see Chap. 2 on K’ang Yu-Wei and his book Ta T’Ung Shu).

 vercoming the Problematic: The Concepts of Global Security O Community and Democracy With the transition to stage (3), humanity—by this time spread all over the planet and divided into numerous languages, cultures, and communities—was set to experience the problem of war and related moral questions concerning global relations and the future of our species-being. The evolvement of industrial warfare and especially the rise of the planetary era of jets, missiles, satellites, and nuclear weapons have turned the peace problematic into an existential question to humanity. Arguably, Kant’s articulation of the peace problematic was based on the anticipation of the increasing destructiveness of war. At this time, technical changes within one’s lifetime were becoming visible to many. Kant foresaw also the negative consequences of technical and scientific progress. Thus, he followed his predecessors in advocating an international social contract to avoid a situation where “perpetual peace [would] occur only in the vast graveyard of humanity as a whole” (Kant, 1983/1795, p. 110). In the eighteenth century, three social “mechanisms”—besides state coercion—were developed to explain the possibility of a peaceful order: the invisible hand of markets; checks and balances within a state; and the balance of power between states. Kant criticised power-balancing and agreed with the invisible hand,

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but added a mechanism of collective learning. The process of learning—aided by a republican order within states that facilitates the use of critical reason publicly— should eventually result in a European-wide social contract (“league of nations”) to overcome the problem of war and ensure perpetual peace.17 After having reached stage (3), humanity faces the choice of either learning new ways of dealing with conflicts and organising its ethical-political relations, or else experiencing, sooner or later, the Kantian fate of eternal peace in a graveyard of its own making. Even if we were willing to grant some (partial) truth to Hegel’s idea (“cunning of reason”) that war brought—together with other processes—a movement to history and often pushed progress in collective learning during stage (2), we should conclude that in the industrial era war has ceased to be conducive to human progress also in this indirect sense. Although concerns about military security and war continue to drive technological developments, war has the potential to threaten any further human development. Moreover, like Kant, we should not be looking only at what is possible now but also at where we are heading. We should not mistake any particular moment in stage (3) as the final point in the collective learning of humanity. Focussing on the use of energy, further possible stages can be distinguished. Following Russian astronomer Nikolai Kardashev, Princeton physicist Freeman Dyson has distinguished between hypothetical Types I, II, and III civilisations (Dyson, 1979, p. 212). Type I civilisation masters all forms of terrestrial energy; their energy needs are so large that they must harness all the potential resources of the entire planet. With a simple 3% annual growth rate in global energy consumption, this stage will be reached in 100–200 years.18 Type II civilisation would have mastered stellar energy, and Type III civilisations would have exhausted even this source of energy and must reach even further. Growth in energy consumption is not only quantitative, however, but requires scientific and technological innovations that will make it possible to release ever bigger amounts of energy in one place at one time and thus destroy other living beings massively and in novel ways. Also in the basic sense, Kant’s problem will only get worse. Although Kant articulated a genuine problem and posed some important questions, he was not able to answer them because of his assumptions and contentions.

 Kant remained ambiguous about the need for coercion. In response, later Kantian theorists have often emphasised collective security; some other have argued for a world state. For an illuminating discussion of this question, see Williams, 2012. I will return to this question in chapters 6 and 7, and in Part III. 18  Two hundred years of growth at the rate of 3% will yield an overall growth by the factor of 370. That is, the world would consume and produce 370 times more energy in 2200 than at the moment. The idea that this would amount to reaching the level of Dyson’s Type I civilisation is from a popular science author Michio Kaku (1998, p. 18). To make this point and the related estimation sound less speculative, let me use another example from the past. Simon Kuznets has estimated that, in 200 years from 1776 to 1976, the US economy grew by the factor of about 1000, with the average growth rate somewhere between 3–4% a year (including relatively high population growth that has characterised the USA, which in 1776 had only c. 2.5 million inhabitants). (Kuznets, 1977). Here I am leaving aside the ecological question, to which I will return later. 17

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Elsewhere I have analysed Kant’s ontological and epistemological contentions (Patomäki, 2002, ch. 1; for a more systematic discussion, see Bhaskar, 2009, ch. 1). Here a few words on his substantial views must suffice; I will elaborate upon these points in later chapters. Kant tried to find a third way between the pre-contract Hobbesian “state of nature”, which is also a state of war, and a world government, which in his view is likely to lead to tyranny. For him, the solution was a rather loose federation of free nations, whose peace-proneness is based on the shared understanding of the human and economic costs of increasingly destructive war; on the “spirit of commerce” and economic interdependence of nations; on the inherent peacefulness of republican states; and the rule of law. Kant’s dilemma was: if these (in themselves homogenising) conditions are enough for guaranteeing peace, why is there a need for a league of peace as some kind of social contract in the first place? If these conditions are not sufficient for peace, is there then not a need for a world government exercising a monopoly on the control of the means of violence? But if there is such a world government, is there not a danger of it being just an expression of a desire of a particular nation (or its rulers) to dominate the entire world? In that case, is it not possible that the final result of global integration may turn out a form of “soulless despotism” that may also “finally degenerate into anarchy” (Kant, 1983/1795, p. 125)? The most fundamental assumption in Kant’s vision is that we can devise an unchanging order, built on some universal law-like mechanisms that should be able to guarantee perpetual peace. However, if society consists of formative contexts understood as clusters of institutional and ideological elements regulating (1) expectations of identities, (2) how things are to be done, and (3) routine conflicts over the distribution of key resources, and if no general laws governing such contexts exist, then Kant’s fundamental assumption is misleading. The evolution of society is not only accidental as some abstract directionality can be detected also within open-ended processes, yet the idea of unchanging order—perhaps conceived as a harmonious utopia—is unfounded. Things do not stand still and politics is about conflicts, as has been stressed by well-known twentieth-century International Relations scholars such as E. H. Carr and Karl Deutsch. In his work dealing with the crises of the first half of the twentieth century, Carr (1946) attacked the idea of harmony as a utopia. No set of “law-like mechanisms” such as the invisible hand or balance of power can guarantee order or peace. Carr goes further and argues that actions grounded on assumptions of utopia and harmony of interests tend to take part in creating, reinforcing, or deepening conflicts. This is because utopias of harmony are not only naïve but also ideological, usually masking particular identities and interests as universal (Carr, 1946, pp. 22–88).19 According to Carr, there would

 Carr was not saying that claims of the harmony of interests are always totally false. On p.81, for instance, he wrote that “in the nineteenth century, the British manufacturer or merchant, having discovered that laissez-faire promoted his own prosperity, was sincerely convinced that it also promoted British prosperity as a whole. Nor was this alleged harmony of interests between himself and the community entirely fictitious”. 19

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have to be political mechanisms for resolving real conflicts by means of peaceful changes (Carr, 1946, pp. 208–223; on peaceful changes, Patomäki & Wæver, 1995). Karl Deutsch developed further the idea of peaceful changes in the late 1950s (Deutsch et al. 1957, for a lucid discussion, see Lijphart, 1981). According to the empirical-historical studies of Deutsch and his associates, the imposition of any “order”—particularly if the enforcement of norms is backed by threats of violence—may well decrease rather than increase the chances of peace. In contrast, a pluralist security community is one in which there is a real assurance that the members of a community will not fight each other physically, but will settle their disputes and conflicts through peaceful changes. This notion can be developed further in terms of degrees of revisability or disentrenchment of social contexts. The basic idea is that social contexts vary in their openness to transformation. To this can be added a further idea, namely that often (though not in all contexts) democratisation increases this self-transformative capacity.

Conclusions Although the past could have been otherwise in many important ways, it is nonetheless plausible to argue, as I have done in this chapter, that the emergence of certain kinds of generic entities, mechanisms, or problematics was bound to happen. In the context of commercialisation of society, and the gradual development of technical know-how, a shift to stage (3) in energy use was inevitable somewhere at some point, implying ever-increasing amounts of energy available for production and destruction. Moreover, in the context of new scientific theories, universalising moral principles, and alienated communities, also the peace problematic—now associated with Kant—would have appeared anyhow, articulated by others somewhere else. These are examples of the dialectic of open-endedness and inevitability at various scales of geohistorical time. This suggests a universal history of humanity. Every human being on the ecosphere of the planet is the blood descendent of distant ancestors in Africa. Recent evidence suggests that there never was anything like a small original population. Rather homo sapiens was born of the occasional mixing of many isolated populations in various parts of Africa (see Scerri, 2018). Moreover, when anatomically modern humans moved out of Africa, they mixed to some extent with other hominins. As humans, we are essentially beings who must also be productive, i.e., must use energy to interact with nature and other human beings to make things and effect changes in the world around us. Unlike other animals, however, humans can causally produce, in social cooperation, many kinds of artefacts, from social and symbolic goods to shelter and tools and, more recently, machines using external sources of energy. The success of humanity has meant its expansion. As the powers generated by social communication and learning have enabled the development of ever more powerful technologies based on novel sources of energy, Earth is now totally dominated by humans—at the expense of other species.

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The modern Eurocentric waves of globalisation—starting with the imperial reintegration of the American continent with Europe and ending with the late nineteenth and early twentieth century waves of imperial expansion—meant a new coming-­ together of humanity, even if often under violent, oppressive, and tragic circumstances (cf. Robertson, 2003). In the twenty-first century, the epoch of military-agrarian empires may be more or less over, although the fields of industrial capitalism and the interstate system continue to include mechanisms and processes that generate analogical outcomes, including imperial projects and wars, though usually in a less territorially oriented way (cf. Forsberg & Patomäki, 2023 for discussions on the implications of the 2022 war in Ukraine in this regard). Acknowledging that the peace problematic has certain trans-historical validity does not mean that we should ignore its specific presuppositions. Every problem, whether practical-political or more theoretical, has a set of presuppositions. Put together these presuppositions form a theory and give rise to a characteristic set of problems and plausible answers to them. If the universal problem now is to find innovative ways to organise a viable, sustainable, and legitimate planetary civilisation, the task involves transcending the limitations of mere European philosophies and Eurocentric histories. Underlabouring for ideas about a more integrated and cooperative world system, I have argued in this chapter that humanity was approaching the stage of industrial civilisation independently of specific developments in what we now call early modern Europe. It only so happened, due to a variety of contingent reasons, that the threshold was first crossed there. Moreover, independently of location, industrialisation would likely have generated a version of the peace problematic, even if that world had been some other X-centric (e.g. Arabcentric). The Kantian attempt to overcome this problematic by using law-like mechanisms for creating an unchanging order is misleading though. I concluded this chapter by introducing the concepts of peaceful changes, the security community, and global democracy—these form the topic of the next chapter.

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[proofed and corrected in 2008-2015]. Available at https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/ works/1867-­c1/. Marx, K., & Engels, F. (2010). Manifesto of the Communist Party. Progress [proofed and corrected in 2008-2010; originally published in 1848]. Available at https://www.marxists.org/archive/ marx/works/download/pdf/Manifesto.pdf. McNeill, J. R., & McNeill, W. H. (2003). The human web: A bird's-eye view of world history. WW Norton & Company. Menzies, G. (2004). 1421. The year China discovered America. Harper Perennial. Morris, S.  C. (2003). Life’s solution. Inevitable humans in a lonely universe. Cambridge University Press. Needham, J. (1965). Science and civilisation in China. Volume 4, Physics and physical technology. Part II: Mechanical engineering. Cambridge University Press. Patomäki, H. (2002). After international relations: Critical realism and the (re) construction of world politics. Routledge. Patomäki, H. (2006). Realist ontology for futures studies. Journal of Critical Realism, 5(1), 1–31. Patomäki, H. (2020). Appendix: Stages of development from the era of archaic humans to the axial age. Appendix to the article “on the historicity of social ontology”, https://doi.org/10.1111/ jtsb.12254. Permalink: https://zenodo.org/record/3984609#.YviHKt9RWMr. Patomäki, H. (2022). The three fields of global political economy. Routledge. Patomäki, H., & Wæver, O. (1995). Introducing peaceful changes. In H. Patomäki (Ed.), Peaceful changes in world politics, TAPRI research report no. 71 (pp. 3–27). TAPRI. Polanyi, K. (2001). The great transformation. The political and economic origins of our time (2nd paperback ed.) Beacon Press. Pomeranz, K. (2000). The great divergence: China, Europe, and the making of the modern world economy. Princeton University Press. Pomeranz, K. (2009). Without coal? Colonies? Calculus? In P. Tetlock, R. Lebow, & G. Parker (Eds.), Unmaking the west. ‘What-if’ scenarios that rewrite world history (pp. 241–276). The University of Michigan Press. Robertson, R. (2003). The three waves of globalization: A history of a developing global consciousness. Zed Books. Rosenberg, J. (2013). The “philosophical premises” of uneven and combined development. Review of International Studies, 39(3), 569–597. Rostow, W. W. (1960). The stages of economic growth. A non-communist manifesto. Cambridge University Press. Saenger, P. (1997). Space between words: The origins of silent reading. Stanford University Press. Sánchez, J. (2009). Military expenditure, spending capacity and budget constraint in eighteenth-­ century Spain and Britain. Revista de historia económica. Journal of Iberian and Latin American economic history, XXVII(10), 141–174. Scerri, E. (2018). Origin of our species: Why humans were once so much more diverse. The New Scientist, 238(3175), 34–37. Available at https://www.newscientist.com/article/ mg23831750-­200-­origin-­of-­our-­species-­why-­humans-­were-­once-­so-­much-­more-­diverse/ Spier, F. (2015). Big history and the future of humanity (2nd ed.). Wiley Blackwell. Tetlock, P. E. (1999). Theory-driven reasoning about plausible pasts and probable futures in world politics: Are we prisoners of our preconceptions? American Journal of Political Science, 43(2), 335–366. Tetlock, P. E., & Belkin, A. (Eds.). (1996). Counterfactual thought experiments in world politics: Logical, methodological, and psychological perspectives. Princeton University Press. Tetlock, P. E., Lebow, R. N., & Parker, G. (2009). Unmaking the middle kingdom. In P. Tetlock, R. Lebow, & G. Parker (Eds.), Unmaking the west. ‘What-if’ scenarios that rewrite world history (pp. 1–13). The University of Michigan Press. Thompson, W. (2010). The lead economy sequence in world politics (from song China to the United States): Selected counterfactuals. Journal of Globalization Studies, 1(1), 6–28.

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Unger, R.  M. (1997). Politics. The central texts. Theory against fate. Edited by Z.  Cui. Verso. Available at https://robertounger.com/wp-­content/uploads/2017/10/politics-­the-­central-­ texts.pdf Unger, R. M. (2022). Governing the world without world government. Verso. Available at https:// www.robertounger.com/progessive-­alternatives Volk, T. (2017). Quarks to culture. How we came to be. Columbia University Press. Williams, H. (2012). Kant and the end of war. A critique of just war theory. Palgrave Macmillan. Williamson, J. G. (1984). Why was British growth so slow during the industrial revolution? The Journal of Economic History, 44(3), 687–712. Wells, H. G. (1931). Outline of history. Being a plain history of life and mankind. New and revised. Garden City Publishing. Woolf, D. (2011). A global history of history. Cambridge University Press. Yates, R. D. S. (2009). The Song empire. The world’s first superpower? In P. Tetlock, R. Lebow, & G.  Parker (Eds.), Unmaking the west. ‘What-if’ scenarios that rewrite world history (pp. 205–240). The University of Michigan Press.

5

Problems of Democratising Global Governance: Time, Space, and the Emancipatory Process

Introduction The history of international organisations is well known. With the rise of planetary economy after the Industrial Revolution, the problem of coordinating movements and activities across time and space became critically important. The Universal Postal Union (UPU) was established in the 1870s, simplifying and unifying communication via letters across Europe and the world. The International Meridian Conference was held in Washington D.C. in 1884, setting up a prime meridian for worldwide navigation purposes and unifying local times for railway timetables. Meanwhile, the peace problematic became ever more acute due to the increasing destructiveness of wars, moral learning, and the development of medicine. The Geneva Convention was adopted in the 1860s to help those wounded on the battlefield (the term Red Cross was adopted in the 1870s). The Hague Conferences of 1899 and 1907 included negotiations concerning disarmament, the laws of war, and war crimes. A key aim was to establish a binding international court for compulsory arbitration to settle international disputes, but due to the opposition of some countries, only a voluntary court was attained. Rapid technological changes and industrial and population growth changed the nature and destructiveness of war. By 1914–18, the warring states were capable of mobilising more than 60 million men for industrial-mechanical war, with the result of 30  million military casualties (ten million dead and 20  million wounded). As discussed in Chap. 4, Immanuel Kant thought the problem of war can and should be overcome by an arrangement of a “league of nations”, free trade, rule of law, and republicanism. The catastrophe of the First World War instigated critical reflections on the basic institutions of the world economy (e.g. Hobson, 1988; Keynes, 1920) and prompted the founding of the League of Nations in 1920 (for a contemporary cosmopolitan democratic criticism of the actual outcome, see Wells, 1931, pp. 1118–1121). The World War brought about the Russian Revolution and various socialist experiments in Europe and accelerated democratisation in the core areas of © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 H. Patomäki, World Statehood, World-Systems Evolution and Global Futures, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-32305-8_5

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the world economy. The attempt to return to the nineteenth-century order—including the Gold Standard—failed. The Great Depression was a typical crisis of the capitalist market economy, but the counterproductive policies and interactions of states in the 1930s seriously strengthened its effects (Moser, 2015). The dynamics of the world economy, violent reactions to socialist experiments, and competitive interstate relations spawned the rise of fascism and Nazism, including in Japan, pushing world history towards the Second World War. A chief result of the two world wars and the experiences of the 1930s was a reversal of rising inequalities characteristic of liberal-capitalist economic processes (e.g. Piketty, 2014). This reversal lasted until the 1970s and 1980s. Governments learned to control and run the economy by Keynesian and other means and also in terms of planning (e.g. Nakano, 2021). The Bretton Woods system was an unstable compromise while it also exhibited collective learning from the experiences in 1914–44. On the whole, the “golden age of capitalism” (1950–73) was a contingent and wobbly outcome of interactions among the fields of global political economy (Patomäki, 2022, esp. ch. 6). Also, it was a result of real yet ambiguous collective learning from the consequences of those interactions. In this period, the world economy grew exceptionally rapidly, while thousands of new international agreements and organisations were established to coordinate and regulate the world economy and its normative and other underpinnings (human rights, security arrangements, etc.). The re-liberalisation and reintegration of the world economy especially through trade and later also through production and finance was built into the post-war arrangements (General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), Bretton Woods institutions, and other agreements). Re-liberalisation and reintegration entailed an increasing discrepancy between territorial states and spaces of the globalising economy, shaping relations of power (e.g. Gill & Law, 1989; Bell, 2012; cf. Holappa, 2020). The notion that the stability of self-adjusting markets requires worldwide legal-institutional arrangements started to gain prominence in the 1970s and became hegemonic in the 1980s (Slobodian, 2018; Wasserman, 2019). It was in this context that the concepts of globalisation (Levitt, 1983) and global governance (Rosenau & Czempiel, 1992) were established (for a conceptual history, James & Steger, 2014). This provided the context for the rise of global civil society (the concept was first used by Gill, 1991) and the spread of the related idea of applying the concept of democracy to the systems of global governance. Criticism of the prevailing forms of global governance is linked to the search for alternatives. What should these alternative principles be? Since the 1970s, various answers have been given. For example, the Independent Commission chaired by Will Brandt—active through 1977–83—sought solutions to various problems common to both North and South, including the environment, the arms race, population growth, and the uncertain prospects of the global economy. The Commission asked: would it be possible to make systems of global governance more responsive to the most salient problems of humanity such as poverty and underdevelopment, ecological threats and disasters, and the enormous destructive powers of modern weapons systems? In the immediate post-Cold War world, similar questions were reframed in

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a context-specific way: would it be possible to break the dual hegemony or dominance of neoclassical economics and the US and refashion the principles of global economic governance? Some may conceive the problem of responsiveness only at the level of substantial policies. If we only could change the priorities of and available resources to, for instance, developmental or environmental policies, things would turn out much better. Or, perhaps the main problem is to substitute a better economic theory for the false orthodoxy of free market economics? However, there seem to be obstacles to change. Not everything is possible. This raises the question of change (which I will address in a more causal-explanatory fashion in Chap. 7). Decades of reports on better global governance have not resulted in better governance. Perhaps at the heart of the problem lie relations of domination and mechanisms of power that would somehow seem to prevent changes from happening? Perhaps those social forces arguing for changes are not powerful enough? Perhaps the relevant relations of power should be restructured to make actors more equal? Perhaps the weaker actors should be empowered? How could the systems of governance be made more responsive to the concerns of (world) citizens? These kinds of questions suggest that perhaps the systems of global governance should be democratised. Many also realised that the reforms of the 1980s and 1990s—including making the United Nations (UN) system financially accountable, turning the GATT into the WTO, and using the debt problem to consolidate the supremacy of the Bretton Woods institutions—amounted to further deepening and entrenchment of free market economics. By regulating and controlling governments, global governance can delimit the area of democratic decision-making within states. If this is seen as a problem, there are two main possibilities. Either global governance should be reduced in scope and power, democratised, or both. Thus, the quest to democratise global governance emerged as the key issue of world politics in the post-Cold War world of the 1990s. However, this quest involves deep conceptual problems. What does democratic governance mean? How could we get from the current situation towards a more democratic system of global governance? How could we maintain and develop the would-be democratic system of governance? Indeed, who are “we”, where should “we” be going, and what should “we” do to get there? Probably the most articulate response to the quest to democratise global governance is the theory of cosmopolitan democracy, as developed by David Held and his associates (Held, 1991, 1995, 2009; Archibugi & Held, 1995; Archibugi et al., 1998; Koenig-Archibugi, 2010; McGrew, 1997; Holden, 1999; see also Scholte, 2014). Held has developed in detail an institutional model of cosmopolitan democratic governance to be realised in multiple layers (from global to local) and exercised by democratised, overlapping authorities. In the following, I discuss the problems of Held’s account of cosmopolitan democracy and lay out a processual alternative to it. Although Held’s way of framing the problem and in particular some of his concrete proposals are useful, the spatio-temporal assumptions of his model are flawed. What is needed is an ontological realist theory of peaceful democratic emancipation as an open-ended process with multiple possible aims. After having tackled the territoriality, Eurocentrism, and linearity of the vision of cosmopolitan democracy, I shall

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argue that a necessary condition for a global movement towards something better is the development of a global, and pluralist, security community. The development of a pluralist security community and global democratisation are closely linked. However, an attempt at global democratisation may not be conducive to the development of a global security community. This is one of the reasons why it is so important to tackle the questions of who “we” are and where are “we” heading and address explicitly also the problem of cultural violence. In this chapter, I also argue against totalising blueprints that are not grounded in realist analysis of relevant processes and contexts that include concrete embodied actors, social relations and mechanisms, and specific transformative possibilities. “We” is relational. In any concrete context, self-other relations are both materially grounded (i.e. embodied and presuppose material resources) and dynamic (i.e. learning and changes take place in interaction with others). Both explanatory criticism and the design of concrete eutopias have to take this general condition as their starting point, together with the openness of social systems and uncertainty regarding the future.

The Model of Cosmopolitan Democracy What is democratic governance? David Held (1995, pp.  145–6) maintains that essentially democracy is about collective self-determination by equal and free citizens, about “autonomous determination of the conditions of collective association”. Citizens “should be able to choose freely the conditions of their own association” and determine the “form and direction of their polity”. This implies certain rights and obligations from the side of citizens and “a common structure of political action” that is a “neutral” basis of relations and institutions which can be regarded as impartial or evenhanded with respect to their ends, hopes, and aspirations (Held, 1995, pp. 153–6). Held’s (1995, p. 99) basic argument for extending the reach of the principles of democracy beyond state governance is that “there are disjunctures between the idea of the state as in principle capable of determining its own future, and the world economy, international organizations, regional and global institutions, international law and military alliances which operate to shape and constrain the options of individual nation-states”. Over time, due to globalisation, the discrepancy between (1) the idea of democratic self-determination within a nation-state and (2) the realities of regional and global flows and transnational sites of power has grown worse. Moreover, state capabilities have also been undermined. Territorial boundaries are therefore arguably increasingly insignificant in so far as social activities and relations no longer stop—if they ever did—at the ‘water’s edge’.… The intensification of regionalization and globalization, particularly in the post-Second World War era, has contributed simultaneously to an expansion of the liberal democratic state’s functional responsibilities and to an erosion of its capacity to deal effectively alone with many of the demands placed upon it. (Held, 1995, p. 121).

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Decision-makers

Accountability

Output (decisions and their consequences)

Citizen-voters

People in a bounded territory

Source: Held 1995, p. 224

Fig. 5.1  Assumptions of symmetry and congruence

Figure 5.1 illustrates the assumptions of traditional democratic theory and makes the fundamental problem of national-territorial democracy very clear (Held, 1995, pp. 224–5). Mainstream democratic theory has assumed a symmetrical and congruent relationship between the allegedly representative political decision-makers and the recipients of political decisions, at two crucial points. The assumption is that both accountability of decision-making and the consequences of decisions are confined to citizens in a delimited territory. In other words, democratic theory has been based on the metaphor of a territorial state as a spatial container, with a clear-cut inside/outside distinction. Held sets the contemporary realities against this metaphor.1 In most cases, most states are rule-takers rather than rule-makers (see Braithwaite & Drahos, 2000). In the multilateral and often hierarchical systems of regional and global governance, decision-makers are legally and/or politically accountable for their decisions not only to their citizens but also to international organisations such as the Bretton Woods institutions and the WTO or manifold regulatory bodies or to other states or NGOs and international public opinion. There are also crude power-political forms of de facto accountability, such as those based on the institutions of great powers and spheres of influence (e.g. Central American and other states such as the Philippines vis-à-vis the US or, during the Cold War, Eastern European and other states vis-à-vis the Soviet Union); and de facto accountability based on financial dependency (e.g. governments vis-à-vis the credit rating agencies and short-term financial investors). Many international organisations have direct, agenda-setting, cultural, or structural power over local and national political processes. Moreover, the territorial borders of states do not stop the impact of decisions or their often unintended consequences. (Inter)dependencies of all sorts ensure that many decisions have impacts across borders, some on neighbouring states (e.g. a nuclear power station next to a border or a war at the heart of Europe  or Africa), some regionally (e.g. the Hidrovía Paraguay-Paraná, a navigation project along the rivers that flow across various boundaries between Mercosur countries or pulp mills on the  I have slightly amended Held’s analysis by interpreting “accountability” from a wider perspective of critical power analysis in global political economy and by using also other examples and concepts than his. 1

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Uruguay River that is on the border of Argentina), some globally (e.g. US Fed or ECB monetary policies). Many states or their central bank and other actors such as transnational banks and corporations are positioned in such a way that whatever they do will have widespread impacts independently of their intentions (this is one of the senses of the term “structural power”). Under these circumstances, it seems evident that the ideals of autonomy and democracy can be realised to a reasonable degree only in a cosmopolitan setting. Since many sites of power are transnational or international, “democratic public law within a political community requires democratic law in the international sphere” (Held, 1995, p. 227). Inspired by Kant, Held (1995, p. 227) calls this cosmopolitan democratic law, which he conceives as a “necessary complement to the unwritten code of existing national and international law, and a means to transform the latter into a public law of humanity”. Held develops a detailed model of cosmopolitan democracy. It “is a system of diverse and overlapping power centres, shaped and delimited by democratic law” (Held, 1995, pp. 234–5). The first step towards making this model real would be to develop the UN system to live up to its Charter and also beyond, by extending the mandate of the Charter. The main point would be to cultivate the rule of law and impartiality—thus challenging the current prevalence of double standards—in international affairs. (Held, 1995, p.  269) The first step is, however, clearly insufficient: This governance system would. … remain a state-centred or sovereignty-centred model of international politics, and would lie at some considerable distance from what might be called a “thicker” democratic ordering of global affairs. Furthermore, it would lie at some distance from an adequate recognition of the transformations being wrought in the wake of globalization—transformations which are placing increasing strain on both the Westphalenian and Charter conceptions of international governance. (Held, 1995, p. 270).

Thus, more generally, the first priority is to establish components of cosmopolitan democratic law, for instance by extending the reach of international courts and changing the constitutions of national and international assemblies. Moreover, Held also envisages the widespread use of transnational referenda and the establishment of a global assembly (a world parliament), first alongside the UN system. Although only a “framework-setting institution”, the global assembly could become “an authorative centre for the examination of those pressing global problems which are at the heart of the very possibility of the implementation of cosmopolitan democratic law”, such as health and disease, food supply and distribution, the debt problem, and the instability of global financial markets (Held, 1995, p. 274; see Chap. 12 for an alternative vision concerning world parliament). Held’s plan also includes the strengthening of civil society and regional organisations as well as democratisation at various sites of power, including those of the global political economy. Last but not least, Held also argues that “it is dangerously over optimistic to conceive the cosmopolitan model without coercive powers, because tyrannical attacks against democratic law cannot be ruled out” (Held, 1995, p. 276).

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 pace, Time, and Otherness in the Model S of Cosmopolitan Democracy Held’s model of cosmopolitan democracy is based on the liberal distinction between rightness (justice) and goodness: “Democracy has an appeal as the ‘grand’ or ‘meta-­ political’ narrative in the contemporary world because it offers a legitimate way of framing and delimiting the competing ‘narratives’ of the good” (Held, 1995, p. 282). In fact, he goes even further and claims that: [...] without a politics of coercion or hegemony, the only basis for nurturing and protecting cultural pluralism and a diversity of identities is through the implementation of cosmopolitan democratic law: the constructive basis for a plurality of identities to flourish within a structure of mutual toleration, development and accountability. (Held, 1995, p. 283, italics added).

But this “only basis” would presuppose that cosmopolitan democratic law is neutral with respect to different values. This kind of procedural universalism is problematic (for a debate about this and related issues, Held & Patomäki, 2006; for a critique of the liberalist idea of neutrality, O’Neill, 1998). There is no neutral procedure and thus the idea of cosmopolitan democracy as the “grand meta-narrative” appears somewhat suspicious in terms of self-other relations. First, the project of cosmopolitan democracy involves the building of a sense of identity for a citizenry as a whole. Then the problem becomes one of transforming people and collective actors to accord with the preferred democratic world order. There will be differences between the states and areas concerning their progress towards the requirements of the model of cosmopolitan democracy. Moreover, many actors including states would straightforwardly oppose such a development. These kinds of differences may result in unnecessary and unwanted exclusions and/or hierarchy. This criticism can be articulated in terms of otherness (= identifying other human beings in their differences from the self). Because of differences in terms of progress towards the model, the ideal of cosmopolitan democracy may give rise to a definition of higher and lower beings—others—located territorially in different parts of the world. This implies moral and political distance from others (on the axes of self-other relations, see Todorov, 1984, p. 185). The others may then be treated as innocents to be converted, as amoralists to be excommunicated, or simply as outsiders (the far-away anti-democrats) who can impose a threat of violence on us, i.e. the potential enemies (cf. Connolly, 1989, p.  325). Hence, there arises the perceived need for coercive powers to “protect” the territory of cosmopolitan democracy. The idea has the potential for becoming divisive rather than unifying. Moreover, although the move from a national-territorial definition of democracy towards the all-affected principle2 seems in principle right, the principle can easily  The principle, first proposed by Robert Dahl (1970, p. 64), says that all who are affected by a decision should have a right to participate into making it. A key purpose of the principle has been to determine the boundaries between democratic political communities. As also the critics of the principle emphasise, “in the present interconnected world, the principle is likely to undermine the 2

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Fig. 5.2  The hierarchy of territorial layers in the model of cosmopolitan democracy

GLOBAL Regional National Local

take the territorial form of instituting new, permanent layers of government—adding regional (e.g. the European Union) and global (e.g. a reformed and democratised UN) to local and national layers (see Saward, 2000, p. 34). This may not be wrong per se, but it nonetheless organises political time and space in a particular way with potentially undesirable consequences. It is for this reason that Walker (1995, p. 34), for instance, complains that the edifice of cosmopolitan democracy is based on a simplistic hierarchical account of layers, giving rise to a “great chain of beings” metaphor, but at first assuming the form depicted in Fig. 5.2. In this model, the principles of representation and accountability remain territorial, although the territorial scope is expanded to cover the world as a whole—or at least the democratic part of the world. The hierarchy of territorial layers in the model of cosmopolitan democracy is also the logical outcome of conceiving democratic representation exclusively in the modern European way. In this conception, representatives can only be elected from and by a population of a well-defined territorial area. The wider the spatial reach of the democratic community, the more there must be constituencies. These can then be combined into bigger communities only by forming hierarchically higher layers of organisation corresponding to the wider territorial area (e.g. municipal council— national parliament—regional parliament—world parliament). However innocent this may sound if we take the modern European conception of democratic representation for granted, the standard territorial conception of political space can have undesirable consequences. This conception excludes, for instance, overlapping relations of authority or cross-cutting political spaces. It establishes clear-cut boundaries between groups of people and has thus potential for becoming divisive. While it is not true in all contexts that “to territorialize anything is to establish exclusive relevance of the existing boundaries of states and other decision-making units” (Lagerspetz, 2015, p.  7). A problem is that the content of a decision may ultimately establish which interests are affected by it. This not only creates certain circularity with regard to the applications of the principle but also makes boundaries unstable and volatile—or alternatively, when interpreted in terms of potential effects, there can be no boundaries at all. Sofia Näsström (2011) argues for a processual understanding of the all-affected principle. For her, the all-affected principle serves three distinct roles, that of diagnosing, generating, and justifying boundaries. Thus conceived, the allaffected principle can be used as an argument in processes oriented towards redrawing boundaries or constructing new contexts of participation and decision-making. While this orientation may often involve a rational tendential direction towards a borderless world political community, it is also compatible with many forms of multispatiality (perhaps organised function-wise) and multilevel governance (the latter can be organised territorially or non-territorially).

Space, Time, and Otherness in the Model of Cosmopolitan Democracy

The era of centralised nation-states -centralised control of means violence & territory -clearcut inside/outside Westphalenian system

105 The era of cosmopolitan democracy

Globalisation erodes nationstates (UN Charter as a transition era)

Modernity emerges Medieval era -multiple overlapping authorities with weak administrative capabilities

Fig. 5.3  Linear time in the theory of cosmopolitan democracy

boundaries around it by warning other people off” (as Connolly, 1995, p. xxii claims), the territorial way of organising identities involves the potential for such exclusivity. There is a further problem. Held’s model of cosmopolitan democracy also makes assumptions about linear world historical time. The assumption of linear time can be explicated as follows. There are three universal primary metaphors that conceptualise states of affairs and changes in terms of basic spatial movements: (1) Remaining In A State Is Going In The Same Direction; (2) Changing Is Turning; and (3) Long-Term Activities (Projects) Are Journeys.3 At the time of the French Revolution, an additional deep assumption emerged: History is expected to be a movement towards something better, perhaps towards the ultimate destination (for conceptual history, see Koselleck, 1983). Together these three primary metaphors and the deep Enlightenment assumption constitute a vision of a linear world historical time (contrast this to the myriad of possibilities discussed in Chaps. 3 and 4). The specific form that this vision assumes in Held’s model of cosmopolitan democracy is depicted in Fig. 5.3. Note that as Better Is Up, the movement is also from lower to higher levels. This also gives rise to the hierarchy of beings (“great chain of beings”). A consequence of this conception of linear time is a twofold Eurocentrism. Firstly, the history of Europe is simply presented as the history of the entire world. It is not only that the great American or African or Eastern—including Chinese and Indian—civilisations have no role to play in this account. It is also that the “era of  George Lakoff and Mark Johnson (1999) argue that reason is based on prototypes, framings, and metaphors, which have a material basis in our body and neural structures of our brains. “The mind is not merely embodied, but embodied in such a way that our conceptual systems draw largely upon the commonalities of our bodies and of the environments we live in” (Lakoff & Johnson, 1999, p.  6). Cultural differences stem from the particular, historically variable common sense knowledge associated with specific cases and complex metaphors. A metaphor is notified “X Is Y”. 3

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centralised nation-states” is an abstraction and idealisation of some selected European and, later, American experiences (for critiques of the myth of Westphalia in international theory, Osiander, 2001; Beaulac, 2004; Kayaoglu, 2010).4 The expansion of the capitalist world economy and the complicated colonial practices of divide and rule are ignored, although they were essential parts of the complexes that led to the original European expansion and the gradual and dialectical transformations elsewhere on the planet (Barkawi & Laffey, 2001). Secondly, as a special late twentieth-century instance of this Eurocentrism, cosmopolitan democracy comes to be modelled on—and is also idealised and abstracted from—the process of European integration. Indeed, Held’s model has been explicitly inspired by the European integration process, although he does not always acknowledge this in his theoretical texts.5 By exposing these simple assumptions of time and space, post-structuralist interrogations have shed a shadow of suspicion over the model of cosmopolitan democracy. However, William Connolly, R.B.J.  Walker, and other post-structuralists do not necessarily oppose the idea of global democracy per se. Connolly (1991, 1995, Ch. 5), in particular, has been among the first to question the territorial assumptions behind the standard accounts of democracy, arguing that democracy should be de-­ territorialised and globalised; also Walker (1993, ch. 7) has explored these issues. Moreover, Connolly has also taken some steps towards outlining a more concrete alternative. Instead of providing a detailed blueprint of future institutional arrangements, Connolly advocates a strategy based on (1) democratic politics of disturbance of the relations of identity and difference on which any territorial state is founded; and (2) mobilising and legitimising those “democratic energies already exceeding the boundaries of the state” for some transformative purposes (Connolly, 1995, p. 149). Connolly thus focuses on the ethical-political problems of the open-­ ended process of global democratisation. He also emphasises that democracy is also a cultural condition that “encourages people to participate in defining their own troubles and possibilities” (Connolly, 1995, p. 153). Democratic theory cannot stay outside this open-ended process, imposing its categories and visions upon others (including those literally or metaphorically outside modern Europe), instead of engaging with the categories and aims of situated people and concrete movements.

 The authors criticising the Westphalian myth follow the Enlightenment tradition of opposing mythos and logos. The incoherence with historical evidence suggests that the myth does not correspond to the way things really were in the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries. Given different aspects of truth in social sciences, the origin myth can be true and false at the same time (true as a set of constructed practices based on the myth and false as a description of the past). In the same manner, Chap. 3 too is a critique of the prevailing interpretation of an origin myth, constitutive of practices. 5  In passing, Held (1995, p. 113) does compare the conditions of Europe and the rest of the world: “Although the challenge to national sovereignty has perhaps been more clearly debated within the countries of the European Union than in any region of the world, sovereignty and autonomy are under severe pressure in many places”. On the EU as an ideal, see also Archibugi (1998, p. 220). 4

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 Critical Realist Interrogation Concerning the Split between A Moral Reason and the World From a critical realist perspective, there is a further problem in the cosmopolitan theory of democracy. Although institutionally much more ambitious than Kant’s notion of the league, as a normative theory Held’s account of cosmopolitan democracy updates and complements Immanuel Kant’s moral theory of peace and human development. Thus, Held has inherited the Kantian dichotomy between moral reason and the phenomenal world (Bhaskar, 2010, 156, argues that Kant’s empirical realism necessitates the placing of “free man” outside the world conceived in empiricist terms; more on this below). Held’s basic argument can be summarised as follows: HELD: RG (reality of globalisation) and IA (ideals of autonomy) → CD (cosmopolitan democracy)

In this inference, the implication (→) also includes a moral obligation to realise the model of cosmopolitan democracy. The argument is similar to Kant’s argument for perpetual peace: KANT: SW (Hobbesian “state of war”) and IA (ideals of autonomous reason) → PP (perpetual peace)

Logically, this seems to imply the need for a new social contract that once and for all would establish the desired state of global affairs (perpetual peace or cosmopolitan democracy). Kant had the idea that an international conference should be convened to establish the legal principles of perpetual peace and the league of nations. Although Held distinguishes between short- and long-term objectives, he must have something similar in mind, for at present only sovereign states can enact international law. Kant’s ontological dilemma stems from his acceptance of the empiricist account of social reality. Although trying to provide a philosophical alternative to the empiricism of David Hume, Kant nonetheless concurred with Hume that empirical science is basically about a systematic analysis of regular senseimpressions of contiguity and succession between some A and B. Kant thus assumed that the world of phenomena consists of constant conjunctions or empirical regularities between As and Bs (both usually seen as events or external things, although in principle empiricism denies that we could know that there is anything beyond our perceptions). In contrast, Kant’s moral and critical reason is autonomous and free and, by implication, disembodied. There is thus a split between the world and moral reason. Kant’s problem was that this kind of moral reason can do very little to change causal-determinist chains of constant conjunctions in the world of phenomena. So what practical use was his argument for perpetual peace? Kant was thus at pains to demonstrate that it is at least possible to assume a teleological “cunning of nature” (to use a Hegelian expression) that will lead towards the formation of a league of nations and that there are all kinds of “secret mechanisms” that would eventually

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help to establish and maintain the legal order of perpetual peace. At least to some degree, Held seems to be repeating the fundamental antinomies of Kant.6 In one sense, however, his theory is thinner than Kant’s in its response to the suspicion “that may be true in theory but is of no practical use” (cf. Kant, 1988, where he develops a kind of proto-scenario of a possible future). Held is concerned with detailed prescriptions about how global governance should be organised but has relatively little to say about who could (or would like to) realise his vision, under what circumstances, and with what consequences. There are only two brief passages in his Democracy and the Global Order that would seem to address this problem. They make essentially the same argument: To lay out the objectives of a cosmopolitan model of democracy is not to claim that they can all be immediately realized—of course not! But who imagined the peaceful unification of Germany just a few years ago? Who anticipated the fall of the Berlin Wall and the retreat of communism across Central and Eastern Europe? The political space for a cosmopolitan model of democracy has to be made—and is being made by the numerous transnational movements, agencies and institutional initiatives pursuing greater co-ordination and accountability of those forces which determine the use of the globe’s resources, and which set the rules governing transnational public life. (Held, 1995, p. 281).

This argument consists of two parts: (1) surprises are possible; and (2) there are already actors who are pursuing goals compatible with those of the model of cosmopolitan democracy (in the 1990s, there were more reasons to be optimistic in this regard than in the early 2020s; see Chap. 7). However, besides being rather vague about the reasons to believe that a fundamental global transformation towards the desired direction is possible, Held also remains silent on how his vision could or should be realised in practice. Held’s silence is not accidental, but a direct consequence of the Kantian antinomies inherent in his account. A criticism of these antinomies is not an argument against global democracy per se. It is, however, an argument against totalising blueprints not grounded in realist analysis of the relevant processes and contexts and their concrete embodied actors, social relations and mechanisms, and transformative possibilities.

 There are some interesting tensions, however. By applying Kantian arguments in an intellectual context of the critical theories of the Frankfurt School (cf. Held, 1980), Held (1995) recasts them and at times approaches scientific realist lines of argument. In particular, in Chap. 11, Held argues against many liberal theories of democracy because they ignore or marginalise the importance of the effects of real power mechanisms of global political economy. After this discussion, the somewhat legalist (Kantian) discussion of the last Chap. 12 seems a bit surprising, though in an e-mail exchange in 2007–8, Held denied any contradiction between the two chapters (see also Patomäki, 2008). 6

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 ringing Real Geo-history Back in: Time, Space, B and the Process of Peaceful Democratic Emancipation Held’s starting point is well-taken. Democracy is about collective self-­determination by equal and free citizens, about “autonomous determination of the conditions of collective association”. As Held says, the conventional assumptions of symmetry and congruence do not hold. Territorial states have never been spatial containers, with a clear-cut inside/outside distinction. Territorial societies and states have developed as parts of wider wholes, in particular, the international society (field of state reason and interstate relations) and expanding capitalist world economy (the field characterised by the momentum and energy of economic liberalism), both subject to the effects of crises, critique, and learning (Patomäki, 2022). Moreover, Held seems right in claiming that also recent developments—often associated with the somewhat vague catchword “globalisation”—have made a real qualitative difference (see for example the debate between Hirst & Thompson, 2000, stressing continuities, and Perraton, 2000, highlighting open-ended processes of globalisation and changing contours of the world economy). As discussed above, Held’s model of cosmopolitan democracy is nonetheless built on misleading, even if deeply rooted, accounts of time and space, which tend to give rise to problematical self-other relations. Moreover, repeating the antinomies of Kant, the model does not include any account of transformation from here (= somewhere in between the mythical Westphalian and the still-not-yet-fully-realised Charter systems) to there (= cosmopolitan democracy). Next, I argue that there is an alternative. A critical realist conception of time, space, and peaceful process of democratic emancipation can overcome the simple territorial spatiality, linear history, potentially divisive if not dangerous self-other relations, and Kantian antinomies of the model of cosmopolitan democracy. What emerges instead of a model of cosmopolitan democracy is a vision of an open-ended process of global democratisation produced causally by concrete—embodied and relational—actors, who will also have to address the problem of violence in their own categories and being. This vision presupposes another project, namely that of building a global security community. It also presupposes the possibility of world politics in the wide sense of the term.

Space The first notion to be overcome is what some scholars call the Westphalian myth, namely that since 1648, the world (or at least Europe) has been governed by exclusive and administratively competent sovereign states, which are like spatial containers, with strict inside/outside borders. This myth is inconsistent with historical facts regarding developments in Europe, but it is also Eurocentric in that it does not take into account developments elsewhere in the increasingly interconnected world. At best what can be said is that a few modern “sovereign” states with increasing administrative powers evolved gradually in Western Europe in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (with parallel but dependent developments especially in North America). In the nineteenth century, a few others followed suit. In the wake of the

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global dominance of European states, some non-European formations in decline such as the Ottoman Empire and China or feudal societies such as Japan started to mimic selected European developments and build similar state structures in the nineteenth century and early twentieth centuries, also to gain access as full members to the institutions of the international society. Already at the time when Kant articulated the international problematic, and especially in the aftermath of the industrial revolution, the principle of free trade was legitimising the further expansion of both the liberal-capitalist world economy and the British Empire and other European empires. Power-balancing continued to dominate the field of interstate relations, although it assumed new meanings in new contexts. After the industrial revolution, also free trade, the Gold Standard, and the transnationally operating European financial system maintained the nineteenth-­ century order (see Chap. 8 for a full discussion of the Polanyian analysis of the nineteenth-century order and its dynamics). Moreover, the concert of conservative great powers now meant, significantly, the disciplining and marginalisation of actual or potential European revolutionaries and nationalists. Hence, even within Europe, the very basis of the fragile nineteenth-century “order” was built on social relations that in no way followed the neat inside/outside distinction. Besides, most sovereign states emerged in the twentieth century, due to the disintegration of the European Empires. The disintegration of these Empires was prompted by world wars and the subsequent processes of decolonisation. This did not, however, create a world of exclusive spatial containers called “nation-­ states”. It is generally the case that rules, relations of authority, and systems of domination do not follow the principle of territoriality (the concept of a field as developed in Patomäki, 2022 captures the topology of the world system better). In existential and causal terms, many of the essential social relations and causal mechanisms have never followed legal definitions of sovereignty or been contained by the borders of the territorial nation-states. The immediate aftermath of the Second World War was an exceptional era, due to the disintegration of the world economy, the climax of nationalism, and the wartime (including Soviet) planning techniques applied by states. Also many of those who take the Westphalian origin myth as given argue that the late 20th and early 21st world does not accord with the myth. John Ruggie (1998, pp. 192–7) describes the late twentieth-century non-territorial economic “region” of the world and its social relations vividly. The historical details of this description are less important than the big picture. States have continued to engage in external economic relations with each other. The terms of these engagements are largely set in systems of multilateral governance: In the nonterritorial global economic region, however, distinctions between internal and external once again are exceedingly problematic, and any given state is but one constraint in corporate strategic calculations. This is the world in which IBM is Japan’s largest computer exporter, and Sony is the largest exporter of television sets from the United States. It is the world in which Brothers Industries, a Japanese concern assembling typewriters in Bartlett, Tennessee, brings an antidumping case before the US International Trade Commission against Smith Corona, an American firm that imports typewriters into the

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United States from its offshore facilities in Singapore and Indonesia. It is the world in which even the US Pentagon is baffled by the problem of how to maintain the national identity of “its” defense-industrial base. (Ruggie, 1998, p. 196)

The non-territorial economic “region” of the world is rule-governed. Some fundamental rules, such as those regulating contracts and private property rights, originate in the European medieval trading practices and were formalised and universalised during the expansion of the Europe-based world economy. Other rules and principles are sedimented in various historical layers. Free trade and internationally regulated monetary arrangements emerged in the eighteenth century and were spread and consolidated in the nineteenth century. The Bretton Woods system, which was created during the Second World War, regulated economic activities in detail and also created new organisations, the IMF, the World Bank, and the GATT. At times the economic policies of many dozens of countries, particularly in the Southern hemisphere, have been controlled by the IMF and the World Bank. The GATT has been turned into the WTO, which holds, despite widespread resistance since Seattle 1999 and the failure of the Doha round, an expanded mandate to regulate the terms of a wide range of economic activities across the world. The global financial markets re-emerged in the 1970s and have consequently given rise to new heteronomic relations of domination, which have also been rendered into the service of reviving the hegemony of the US and restoring the position of the City of London. The global financial markets are also governed multilaterally, in part by the IMF, but also by the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) (see, e.g., Patomäki, 2000, 2001, ch. 3). Complex global regulatory systems have been developed also in areas such as environment, consumer product safety, food standards, occupational health and safety, transport safety, chemicals, prescription of drugs, illicit drugs and tobacco, discrimination in employment, freedom of association, child labour and slavery, accounting standards, corruption, securities, and money laundering, just to name a few (for a systematic account, Braithwaite & Drahos, 2000). Many or most parts of contemporary contexts of action across the globe are causal products of relational complexes that exist neither merely inside, nor merely outside, the state borders. Modern sovereign states are thus best seen not merely as actors but also as open social systems with structural differences and asymmetries, co-constituted and determined by relational complexes that are often difficult to locate exclusively on the inside or outside. The past, outside, and relations to other beings are in a complex manner present in any social being, including both embodied actors and collective actors such as states (see Bhaskar, 1993, pp. 54, 199–200). Hence, mutual interconnectedness and collective self-determination are much deeper problems than indicated by the model of cosmopolitan democracy. The idea of territorial levels is only a possibility of organising democratic systems and as such it is too restrictive, limiting our imagination about real possibilities. Moreover, there is no reason why the all-affected principle should take only the form of instituting new, permanent, territorial layers of government—adding regional (e.g. the EU) and global (e.g., a reformed and democratised UN) to local and national layers.

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As depicted in Fig. 5.4, there are alternatives to this way of thinking about the spatiality of global democracy. Saward (2000) has argued that there are many possible mechanisms of democratic governance, permanent territorial layers being only one of them. Figure 5.4. distinguishes between four different possibilities. In Fig.  5.4, the vertical axis accounts for whether decision mechanisms are enduring or temporary; the horizontal axis for whether the mechanism concerned is primarily informal and non-­ governmental or formal and governmental. For instance, global parliament and courts would fall within category B (see Chap. 12). Cross-border referenda could be employed as a type B or type D mechanism, depending on the issue and legal framework. Some of the special UN conferences are typical type D mechanisms. However, the more intensive and extensive the involvement of non-governmental organisations and movements is, the closer these would get to A and C. Both A and C may also be taken to mean the democratisation of the workplace and organisations of political economy, including the modern corporation, which is arguably the site of a mechanism of global social change that is out of democratic control in the early twenty-first century, but which could be subjected to democratic control (Lawson, 2019). Importantly, Saward (2000, pp. 40–4) also discusses deliberative forums (involving a microcosm of a larger political community meeting to deliberate in-depth on issues and also having a formal say in decision-making); reciprocal representation (of national or regional parliaments); identity-based representation (seats allocated to identity-categories such as language or religion, rather than people within territorial areas); and complex accountability (separating participation and accountability and respecting organisational autonomy) as devices that would “enshrine the all-­ affected principle further than Held envisages”. These arrangements are attempts to mix and fuse territorial areas in complex and innovative ways. The latter two, in particular, are also non-territorial forms of democratic accountability and representation. However, perhaps for that very reason, they do not fall neatly into any of the Enduring

A Nongovernmental

B Governmental

C

D

Temporary

Fig. 5.4  Mechanisms of democratic governance. Source: Saward (2000, p. 39)

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categories of Fig. 5.4. They may be permanent but they do not seem to fit anywhere in the governmental–non–governmental axis, at least if “government” is understood in the contemporary sense of the government of a territorial state. To stress, “nongovernmental” can also mean the economy—constituted by private property rights—as a site of democratisation. Moreover, although useful to a point, Fig. 5.4. is too simple also for other reasons. There is no reason to think that (semi-)permanent governmental structures (B) must be inclusive territorial layers (the lower ones adding up to and being included in the higher ones). Complex social worlds are functionally differentiated and most of the existing international organisations are functional. Functional organisations have different memberships, consisting mostly of states and non-governmental organisations. In other words, their membership may be overlapping but it is not identical, inclusive or exclusive, territorially or otherwise. Also, new organisations can be founded. As will be discussed in detail in Chaps. 11 and 12, whether old or new, any of these organisations can be (re)constructed on various democratic rules and principles. Logically, what ensues is a non-centralised, non-territorial, and non-­ exclusive system of complex global governance. It is possible to think about coordinating, say, global economic policies of states and these organisations without creating an over-arching territorial layer above all these other spaces and layers of global governance. Yet, the coordinating body could be a globally elected representative assembly, with only limited and relational (i.e. non-sovereign) powers. The constituencies of this body may be defined in terms of identity and/or functional areas rather than territorial location—or a combination of these. An ancient idea that I utilise in Part III of this book is that a part of the seats could be allocated by means of lottery among those non-governmental organisations interested in taking part in the functioning of this body. Institutionalised opt-­ out mechanisms could ensure that not everybody would have to follow (all) the rules and principles of this assembly all the time. And so on. Once we have relieved our institutional imagination from the standard categories of territorial representation all kinds of possibilities are worth exploring and may be well justified.

Time The critical realist conception of causation takes as its point of departure the idea that real causal powers produce effects in open systems. While the fact that all systems are open and closed to a degree allows for some context-bound regular patterns and possibilities for anticipating things, the net outcome of many processes and mechanisms can often be known only after the event. This seems to establish an asymmetry between explanation and prediction and suggests that we may be able to explain the past, but not predict the future. What is more, reflexivity involved in social changes can contribute to making the future even more uncertain and open. For instance, an announced policy change by a public authority can become a self-­ altering prediction (or involve such a prediction), which is subject to contradictory and complementary determination, resulting either in net self-fulfilling or

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self-­denying tendency (Patomäki, 2018). All this would seem to imply that the future—including the future of humanity—must remain open. However, as argued in Chap. 4, this does not exclude the possibility that some things in history, at some (typically high) level of abstraction, can be inevitable. In open systems, this inevitability has to be understood in a nuanced way, as apparently inevitable outcomes can be subject to various contingencies. For instance, the argument about the inevitability of the industrial revolution presupposes the continuation of stable life-friendly conditions on planet Earth and the absence of such ecological collapses or pandemics that could have led to the collapse of the human population and/or social complexity. Moreover, formative social contexts do not come as indivisible and repeatable types with general laws governing such types. Rather, causal complexes consist of in some sense “accidental” clusters of ideas, forms of agency, practices, and institutions. These clusters generate social fields, which do not determine events or outcomes as such. Rather the main regularities come at the level of characteristic situations and the formation of motivations, values, and dispositions (Martin, 2003, pp. 35–7). All these ontological characteristics tend to reinforce the idea that there is an asymmetry between explanation and prediction. These characteristics also undermine belief in any particular account of linear world history. The linear “history” proposed by Held and depicted in Fig. 5.3. is not a prediction. It is simultaneously a sketch of the past and an attempt to envisage a possible and desirable future. Together the past and the future are conceived as a continuous single-path journey from one location to another. Is this scheme plausible? Before the Eurocentric expansion starting in the long sixteenth century, there were multiple parallel or separate paths for diverse parts of humanity, cultivating different but also parallel and interacting cultures or civilisations. When these paths came increasingly together over the centuries of expansion of the world economy and imperial states, it did not result in a simple imposition of the abstracted and idealised system of mutually exclusive nation-states, i.e. “the Westphalian system”. Different development processes as part of the formation of the same totality have not disappeared without leaving a trace. Rather, many historical layers still shape processes and can be mobilised for various ethical-political purposes. The history of the past few centuries can be read as a complex dialectical interplay of resistance and attempts to appropriate and modify European—and later Western, after that category emerged in the nineteenth century—modernity to fit various local circumstances, sometimes with disastrous results. One of the reasons for the spread of nationalism and state sovereignty was that they provided a legitimate platform for fighting the imperial rule and capitalist and other forms of exploitation that humanity experienced outside the core regions of the world economy (Linklater, 1990, pp. 67–72). Instead of an inevitable and universal “phase” in the single path of human development, the spread of state sovereignty was thus an outcome of the first coming-together of humanity under the rule of industrialising European empires that since the rise of nationalism framed themselves at home as “national sovereign states”. Multiple paths remain open for various local parts of the interconnected whole also in the twenty-first century. Past struggles can always be

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re-opened in new present contexts which may be more favourable to the possibilities that were previously suppressed; new combinations of the existing elements of social contexts can be invented and innovated; new social forces can emerge; and also genuinely novel elements may be innovated and fed into the processes of present and near-future political struggles. Arguably, it is slightly megalomanic to impose one single future upon all the transformative possibilities that are open in the current stage of development of world history. From this point of view, it seems that Fig. 5.3. fails also as a prescription for the future. Figure 5.5. is an attempt to outline a slightly more realistic and plausible picture of world history, although admittedly also this picture is a somewhat superficial and sketchy. The grey ellipse represents the coming-together of separate paths of humanity (cf. the philosophical argument about the beginnings of the end of Western dominance in Patomäki, 2002a), though the figure fails to display the asymmetry of this integration. It can only represent the separate timings of integration and metaphorical ups and downs of different parts of interconnected humanity. As discussed in Chap. 4, location-specific developments tend to be uneven and combine elements, functions, and phases in dissimilar ways. However, the thickest arrow in the middle represents the path around which there has been some convergence in terms of the evolving world industrial civilisation, which, however, has not eliminated differences or conflicts, or the possibility of escalation of conflicts. In a way, the figure is built around a hindsight bias, because the past is depicted as more linear than the future, while the future is simultaneously both common to all and includes many possible partly separate paths as well. The colliding paths may produce a global military catastrophe, but world history can also end in disaster along many other routes. World history should be analysed as an open process, in which choices of actors do make a difference, sometimes to the intended direction, while unintended consequences often dominate. Many world order models and their structural underpinnings have had far-reaching—and sometimes destructive—unintended consequences (cf. Alker, 1981; Alker et al., 1989). As the future is open, there can be an overall movement upwards or downwards (understood as metaphors). Within any wide,

Fig. 5.5  Possible paths of world history

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overall path, there are possible criss-crossing paths for separate yet deeply interconnected cultural parts of this whole (which of course would not remain unchanged through these journeys). A totally (self-)destructive conflict or ecological or some other collapse is possible, as is the development towards better. A particularly apt metaphor to grasp the possible development towards better might be that of the gradual unfolding of progress. While the social world is frequently dilemmatic (Sayer, 2000, p.  163), and while we usually cannot see very far from any given point, in the ideal world of mutually reinforcing and cumulative reforms, humankind may triumph over anything we can now imagine (as argued in Chap. 3). Progress—also in terms of global democratisation—is thus possible without any linear conception of time or final destination.

A Key Presupposition: A Pluralist Security Community The model of cosmopolitan democracy attempts, in effect, to create in two phases something approximating a democratic world government. There are reasons to suspect, based on systematic studies of past states and federations, that the imposition of a common government, with its capability of violent enforcement of norms, may well decrease rather than increase the chances of peace (original study Deutsch et al., 1957; for discussions and further developments, e.g. Adler & Barnett, 1998; Patomäki, 2002b, ch. 8; Nathan, 2006; Pouliot, 2008; Ditrych, 2014; Koschut, 2014a; Stullerova, 2014). Peace is linked with the concept of a security community. The existence of the state is not a necessary or a sufficient condition for peace, nor is the non-existence of the state a necessary or a sufficient condition for the prevalence of the acute threat of political violence. These connections are contingent. A security community is a political community characterised by processes of communication, the existence of some shared rules and practices, and integration. The key assumptions are (1) that there will always be disputes and conflicts between social forces and (2) that problems and conflicts cannot be resolved without at least some changes. By integration is meant the attainment of a sense of community and of institutions and practices strong enough and widespread enough to assure dependable expectations of the possibility of peaceful change among the members of the community; and by peaceful change is meant the resolution of common problems or social conflicts by institutionalised procedures without resorting to large-scale physical force. The basic idea (explicated also in Deutsch, 1968, p. 92) is that it is easier to establish a pluralist security community than an amalgamated security community, which presupposes some sort of permanent and centralised governmental structure—such would also be a global law-making assembly elected from territorial constituencies. A pluralist security community does not require unitary or universal governmental bodies, decision-making centre, or machinery for enforcement (Deutsch et al., 1957, pp. 3–11; Lijphart, 1981). In both cases, however, the building of a security community can be a long and complicated process of institutionalisation of mutual acceptance, trust, and procedures and practices of peaceful change. This process is vulnerable to an escalation of conflicts. The more centralising an attempt in this direction is, the more risks there may be.

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The conditions for collective context transformation are not only local or regional but also global due to the interconnected world economy and its dynamics and variety of related  multi-spatial including global systems of governance. Drawing on Roberto Unger’s (1997) social theory (see Chap. 4), it can be argued that the key to understanding and explaining the possibility of security communities lies in the self-transformative capacity of contexts, generating dependable expectations of peaceful changes and integration (Patomäki, 2002b, pp. 200–2). To put it as simply as possible: contexts differ in their openness to change, and this is crucial for the emergence and maintenance of a security community. Characteristically, the opening up of various contexts for peaceful changes—for increasing their self-­ transformative capacity—amounts to democratisation. However, the two are not synonymous. While democratisation and the development of a security community can be and often are mutually supportive, this is not necessarily or always the case. An indicator of openness to peaceful change is whether preparations are made for violence against (potentially) deviant or context-­ challenging actors within the relevant community. It also matters whether individual or collective actors or groups see and categorise themselves as parts of a wider whole. Among the relevant actors, given their primary identity or identities, is there a shared belief in the existence of a larger community (much more on this in Chap. 13)? How legitimate are the demands of others perceived to be? It is also worth stressing that the current governance systems are typically either non-democratic or democratic only in the sense of formal equality of states. The latter translates into the principle of one vote/one country, independently of the size of countries, in a system where decision-making is typically “consensual”, yet in practice dominated by one or a few great powers or blocs. Under these kinds of circumstances, to what extent are the aims, rules, and relations of the systems of global governance open to revisions? How much self-transformative capacity do they have? The key dynamics of a given world-historical context  are interwoven with changes in self-other relations. In open systems, neither the intrinsic (no qualitative changes within the system) nor the extrinsic condition of closure (no outside forces have effects on outcomes) apply. However, all systems are open and closed to a degree and many systems such as people (individual human beings and social actors) and organisations (collective actors) can become, in the course of some historical processes, more closed than before. Karl Deutsch, 1963, p. 111-) has developed the concept of will to depict the outcome of processes leading to a closure. A will is fixed in terms of its inner structures (approximating an atomist entity), implying that only a little learning can take place. Extrinsically, Deutschian will means “the ability to talk instead of listen” in a context, which involves such power relations that the actor does not have to give in but can rather can “force the environment or the other person to do so”. A will in this sense can develop also under relatively democratic circumstances, for example, when political economy dynamics generate existential insecurity among the citizenry in liberal-democratic states or regionally, leading to more antagonistic self-other relations and consequent disintegrative tendencies in many contexts of global political economy (Patomäki, 2018; 2020).

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The definition of a security community includes a sense of community and (institutionalised) practices that generate the dependable expectation of the possibility of a future peaceful change. In the theory of security communities, it is an open question whether an agreement on the possibility of peaceful changes is sufficient or whether an agreement must be achieved on many other things as well. To what extent does the sense of community imply a process of collective identity formation? The history of federations and the characteristics of the existing pluralist security communities can provide some limited insight towards the future. It is indicative that the evidence tends to be somewhat ambiguous and inconclusive, as there is also uncertainty about what countries or regions should be included in contemporary security communities. For example, Deutsch et al. (1957, p. 66) concluded that for a pluralist security community, three things are required: (1) the compatibility of major political values, (2) responsiveness to one another’s messages and needs, and (3) partial mutual predictability. In slight contrast, Andrej Tusicisny (2014) finds that (especially comprehensive) security communities are characterised by high interpersonal trust and tolerance towards out-groups, but does not find support for the hypothesis that shared values such as democracy, free markets, or social participation is required (it is worth noting that Deutsch wrote about the compatibility of values rather than of shared values). On other hand, Simon Koschut (2014b) takes NATO as concomitant with a transatlantic security community. It is difficult to take out-of-area military activities by NATO—such as the so-called conflict management operation in Afghanistan—as a sign of tolerance towards out-groups and their purposes. Koschut argues further that these kinds of activities may reveal or lead to drifts apart on a normative level. Moreover, it should be added that a military alliance indicates an insecurity community on a wider scale. The ambiguity of existing evidence is, however, consistent with the idea that the openness to change and the widely shared expectation of peaceful changes can be generated by a variety of ideological and institutional complexes regulating identities, normal expectations about how things are to be done, and routine conflicts over the distribution of key resources. On the other hand, a Eurocentric blueprint of cosmopolitan democracy, based on a linear conception of time and progress, has the potential to justify exclusions and antagonisms—particularly in contexts characterised by various insecurities and asymmetric privileges. A rigid model of global democracy may thus, under particular circumstances, even contribute to the escalation of violence rather than to global democratisation. This is because any sense of community or identity can develop and harden into a will. The preparedness to use violence is typically based on the necessitarian assumption about the unchangeable essence of both oneself and others (often seen either as threats or enemies). A particular manifestation of such essentialism is the notion that others are essentially atom-like beings who can be treated unproblematically in utilitarian terms by teaching them lessons of obedience using sanctions and painful experiences. Another manifestation is Manicheanism: a dualistic cosmology exhibiting the struggle between good and evil; evil must be contained so that light and darkness can finally be separated over time through battles. In sum, the notion of a security community is simultaneously a response to the modern peace problematic and a condition of global democratisation. Attempts at

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global democratisation cannot succeed without an underlying security community, while democratisation may contribute, in a contingent manner, to the formation of such a community by increasing the self-transformative capacity of the context in question. In a world of complex and dynamic glocal processes, actors and issues are tightly interwoven and spatial scales are interconnected. Processes are open-ended and flowing, with one process capable of sliding into another, and with smaller processes combining to form larger processes. Entities such as states and regional organisations are not only products and manifestations of processes, but they are also relational, and many or perhaps nearly all relevant relations concern the political economy directly or indirectly. Integration, which can generate the non-preparedness for the use of political violence, is hence contingent on manifold relational processes involving identities, values, memories, expectations, political economy, and other mechanisms. Self-transformative capacity can generate dependable expectations of peaceful changes by qualifying the sense of community and by fostering malleable, tolerant, and pluralist group identities—assuming sufficient socioeconomic security, fair absence of privileges, and several other contextual features and background factors. Figure 5.6 situates critical social sciences in the complex that is capable of generating a security community. For example, the self-transformative capacity of contexts is not compatible with illusions and mystifications about, or reifications and naturalisations of social realities.7 Conversely, the denaturalisation of understandings can contribute to the openness and responsiveness of the community, including a world political community (see Chap. 13 for a detailed analysis of the viability of such a community). Critical social scientific explanations work for enhancing the self-transformative capability of contexts by criticising untrue naturalisations, reifications, and fetishations of social being and related mystifications of knowledge; by explaining social processes and their outcomes; by making arguments for peaceful transformations; and by creating mechanisms of reflective and reflexive learning. At a deep level, criticisms may also concern, say, the alienation and oppression characteristic of various manifestations of capitalist market society and the essentially related peace problematic (Chaps. 4 and 6). Any relevant relations and practices can be revised. More straightforwardly, social scientific research can also propose

 The term illusion refers to a misinterpretation of a true sensation or observation (cf. various optical illusions). Mystification creates confusion that can involve category mistakes (e.g. capitalist market mechanisms as natural laws) and/or perplexed understandings (e.g. human-made technology as magical or supernatural). Reification is an act of misrecognition whereby social relations or other human-made entities are transformed into independent entities, which can govern human activities and social life on their own (e.g. commodities in Marx’s theory of commodity fetishism or, in a different sense, the price mechanism in neoclassical economics). Here, “naturalisation” does not refer to the process of acquiring citizenship but rather to the process of imagining social relations and beings as “natural” and thus presumably unchanging and beyond human influence. All these moves amount to necessitarian assumptions about the unchangeable essence of both oneself and the others. Naturalisations, reifications, and mystifications of social structures tend to support the (re)production of those very structures (Bhaskar, 1986, p. 194). 7

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INTEGRATION

Security community

Consists of geo-historical and in many respects interdependent social systems, actors which do May develop into of a will not prepare for the use of collective violence against each other

Dependable expectation of peaceful changes May develop into a will

Sense of community

generates

qualifies

THE SELF-

EMANCIPATORY RESEARCH

No general necessary or sufficient conditions can be given

contributes

TRANSFORMATIVE CAPACITY OF CONTEXTS

Fig. 5.6  Generation of a security community. Source: Patomäki (2002b, p. 204)

concrete eutopias (reform proposals)8 that presuppose a security community or concern the process of building or sustaining such a community. Characteristically, the opening up of global contexts for peaceful changes—by increasing their self-­ transformative capacity—amounts to or involves global democratisation, even when the main aim is related to some other purpose.

Conclusions Criticism of the prevailing forms of global governance is linked to the search for alternatives, raising the question: what should the alternative rules, norms, and principles be? The recognition of obstacles to changes raises the question of change and  The term utopia means literally “place nowhere”. Plausible scenarios about possible future vary from eutopias to dystopias eu-topia is a good “place” and dys-topia a bad “place”. As will be discussed in Part III, with several concrete examples, a concrete eutopia is a model of practical and institutional arrangements that does not currently exist, but should be politically possible to achieve, and feasible as an alternative way of organising social practices and relations. The realisation of a concrete eutopia involves practical wisdom; lessons drawn from past or contemporary models; counterfactual reasoning about the possible effects of an altered context; as well as thought experiments about the consequences of the transformed practices and systems (see Sayer, 2000, pp. 160–5; Patomäki, 2002b, pp. 158–160). These models may be conservative and exclusive, if they take the existing institutional arrangements and social and technical division of labour for granted. Institutional conservativism leads each group to identify its interests and ideals with the defence of its particular niche (Unger, 1998, pp. 11–12; 44–8, 109, 164–9). Reform proposals may also be transformative and solidaristic. They propose ways of realising the interests and ideals through the step-by-step change of a series of arrangements (Unger, 1998, pp. 11, 222–3). At face value, institutional conservativism may appear more “realistic”. This may be an illusion, however. Some institutional innovations can overcome the politics of compromises between narrow and short-sighted group interests. This is something that cannot be decided a priori, but has to be analysed concretely and in a detailed manner, case by case. 8

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whether the existing and future forms of global governance should be made more open to changes. To what extent and in what ways can democratisation contribute to this kind of openness? What does democratic governance mean? Held’s model of cosmopolitan democracy is a particularly important and well-articulated answer to this question. Held has developed in detail an institutional model of cosmopolitan democratic governance to be realised in multiple layers (from global to local) and exercised by democratised, overlapping authorities. I concur with Held that the ideals of autonomy and democracy can only be realised to a sufficient degree  in a cosmopolitan setting and that this requires a series of transformations. However, the basic point of this chapter has been to develop a processual alternative to Held’s model. Critical lines of argumentation concerning, for instance, the lack of symmetry and congruence and the related all-affected principle can be used as premises in transient and context-bound arguments oriented towards redrawing boundaries, revising existing systems of global governance, and constructing new global systems of participation and decision-making on a global scale. More generally, in terms of time and space, this is an argument for re-setting the coordinates for the emancipatory process of global democratisation. “We” are not somewhere between the Westphalian and the Charter models, moving towards the model of cosmopolitan democracy. Rather, world history should be understood in non-­ Eurocentric and complex, and nuanced terms. The first global coming-together of humanity occurred on asymmetric terms and is closely related to the history of the industrial-mechanical revolution (Chap. 4). Industrialisation in the core areas of the increasingly interconnected world economy yielded unprecedented productive and destructive capabilities to some “sovereign” states and colonial companies and capitalist corporations. This coming-together of humanity meant, however, that a multiplicity of different times—both as developmental ups and downs and as identity-constituting narratives—began to exist in the shared geohistorical space. Interconnectedness assumed a new global reach but involved uneven developments and imperial relations of domination. The first universal recognition of equality and autonomy of all humans in the twentieth century should be seen as the beginning of world history proper. The struggles over agency and autonomy continue, in constantly changing world historical settings. This is where we are at the moment. Global democratisation is best understood in contextual and processual terms, by revising social frameworks of meanings and practices in terms of cumulative but contingent and revisable reforms, also to induce learning and openness to change. Furthermore, in this chapter, I have criticised the idea that global democratisation should follow exclusively or primarily the logic of territoriality. This is not an argument against all forms of territorial representation, but it is important to acknowledge that many or most parts of contemporary contexts of action across the globe are causal products of relational complexes that exist neither merely inside, nor merely outside, the state borders. There exist various possibilities for non-territorial participation and representation—and new ones can be developed. Moreover, instead of writing straightforward blueprints, the task is to analyse realistically the transformative possibilities of different world political contexts as well as the feasibility and real consequences of concrete proposals for change.

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In this chapter, I have outlined the role of critical social sciences in working towards the increased self-transformative capacity of contexts, integration, peaceful changes, the security community, and global democratisation. The final destination of the process of building a global security community and democratising global systems must remain open. I have argued that world history should be understood as an open process, in which choices of actors do make a difference, sometimes to the intended direction. Many attempts to create particular “world orders” have nonetheless had far-reaching—and not infrequently destructive—unintended consequences. As the future is open, there can be overall movements either towards metaphorical up or down. Within any wide, overall path, there are possible criss-­ crossing paths for separate yet deeply interconnected parts of this whole. Also, a totally (self-)destructive conflict, or ecological or some other form of collapse is possible. However, as I will further argue in parts II and III, world history is not arbitrary in all respects, but there are good reasons to believe that history can have a rational tendential direction.

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Part II Reflexive Futures and Agency

6

How Will the Cold War End? Non-fixed Pasts, Reflexive Futures, and the Transformation of the Temporality of Human Existence

Introduction While the nature of time has been theorised in philosophy, social theory, and (world) political theory, in practice historians and social scientists tend to equate time with the modern linear conception of time, some forms of which I have criticised in Chaps. 3, 4, and 5. Over large scales of time and space, some developments such as the industrial revolution can be in some sense inevitable (though not totally unconditionally so), but in general, systems are open, history is open-ended, and contingency prevails. In Chap. 4, I argued that the evolvement of mechanical warfare and especially the rise of the planetary era of jets, missiles, satellites, and nuclear weapons have imposed the peace problematic as an existential question to humanity. After having reached the stage of accessing easily exploitable external sources of energy, humanity faces the choice of either learning new ways of dealing with conflicts and organising its ethical-political relations, or else experiencing, sooner or later, the Kantian fate of eternal peace in a graveyard of its own making. Here, I pursue this line of reasoning further and introduce ideas such as non-fixed pasts, reflexive futures, and the transformation of the temporality of human existence. In particular, I focus on the Cold War which has a dual meaning. In one sense, the Cold War ended in 1989–1991 (Cold War spelled in capital letters); in another sense, the cold war has not yet ended (spelled in small letters). A key point is that the meaning of the former depends on how the era of cold war in the wider and deeper sense will come to an end. From experimental psychology and other sources, we know that knowledge about the actual outcome affects perceptions about what is possible, contingent, and necessary. A thing, event, or process that beforehand may have seemed perhaps possible, but contingent and rather uncertain, appears ex post inevitable in our minds. We must beware of reading history backward and of the hindsight bias, meaning that realised outcomes are seen as more likely than they were. (See Tetlock, 1999; Pohl, 2004).

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 H. Patomäki, World Statehood, World-Systems Evolution and Global Futures, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-32305-8_6

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This is also true for the Cold War (1947–1989), which was to some extent constituted by the double practice of the socialist states of the Soviet bloc. These states were both (1) part of the interstate field characterised by state-reasoning and international institutions and (2) part of the worldwide (militarist) revolutionary movement acting against the capitalist principles of the world economy and its governance, trying to realise Leninist socialism within states across the world (cf. Patomäki, 1992, pp. 212–4). In the course of the Cold War, political antagonism became reified and as time passed by, it seemed increasingly easy to misunderstand the conflict as a bipolar system of power-balancing following the deep-seated laws of power politics or something along those lines (most famously, Waltz, 1979). Assumably, what apparently made this conflict “cold” was the existence of nuclear weapons and to a lesser extent, other weapons of mass destruction (although there have been dissidents such as Mueller, 1988, and in a different way, Lebow & Stein, 1994). The prevailing background assumption is that because of the “mutually assured destruction”, it was not rational for either side to start a hot war except indirectly in what was then called the Third World (China’s changing positioning complicated matters in a system that we could also call the Sino-Soviet-American triangle and modern security problematic; see Ashley, 1980). As I explain in this chapter, the Cold War and its end were contingent in manifold ways. Nonetheless, the emergence of the cold war in the deeper sense may have been almost as inevitable as the industrial revolution and the rise of the peace problematic. Once it became possible to release the binding energy of atomic nuclei in a fission reaction, it became possible to build nuclear weapons. Albert Einstein published his famous eq. E = mc2 in 1905. Already in 1913, H. G. Wells coined the term “atomic bomb”. In his book called The World Set Free (Wells, 1971/1914, quotation p. 7), Wells saw “the history of mankind [a]s the history of the attainment of external power” and anticipated an atomic war in the mid-twentieth century. In his story, most of the world’s cities are destroyed by atomic bombardment in 1958–59. The war ends at a conference where a world republic is established. The World Set Free gave the idea for an atomic bomb to Leó Szilárd, a Hungarian nuclear physicist, who in 1939 shared his thoughts with Einstein. Together they drafted a letter to President Roosevelt, urging the US to secure a supply of uranium and to speed up the experimental work on uranium fission.1 This led to the Manhattan Project. Four years after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Soviet Union succeeded in conducting a test of an atomic bomb. Three years later in 1952, the US detonated its first thermonuclear device in the Pacific. In the immediate aftermath of WWII, there was a small window of opportunity to avoid the cold war. The US proposal for a global system of control of the mining of uranium and thorium and the production of fission power, known as the Baruch Plan, was presented to the United Nations Atomic Energy Commission (UNAEC) during its first meeting in June 1946. A key problem was that the plan would have given the US monopoly over atomic weapons for an undetermined time. The Soviet  The letter, dated 2 August 1939, was signed by Einstein alone. The letter includes a warning that Germany is working on the idea. The letter is available at https://www.atomicarchive.com/ resources/documents/beginnings/einstein.html 1

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leadership did not trust the US or the UN (as it was dominated by Western powers). It wanted to retain its veto power also on issues of atomic energy and defended the institution of state sovereignty. (The story is told in many places, e.g. Siracusa, 2008, pp. 30–39). In this chapter, I discuss the end of the cold war from various angles in terms of the complex temporality of the human condition. My starting point is that the present cannot be punctual. Rather, the present is a moment of becoming and refers to an ongoing process. Moreover, especially via intentional agency, the present is always futurised, i.e. the future is always present in the moment of action. For example, Bernard Baruch anticipated the future when he declared in presenting his plan to the UN in 1946: “Let us not deceive ourselves: We must elect World Peace or World Destruction”. He continued: “Now, if ever, is the time to act for the common good”.2 Nearly eight decades later, at the time of the war in Ukraine (2022-), the spectre of world destruction is once again seen as acute. Many speculate about nuclear war and a “new Cold War” (e.g. Bandow, 2022). That actors anticipate the future in their actions may be self-evident, but in this chapter, I also develop the idea that the meaning of the past is, in part, undetermined, and at some level will remain so. Because “now” is relative to the relevant processes, its meaning depends on how these processes turn out. This is also true for the Cold War (1947–1991). Furthermore, I argue that the futurised nature of the present is changing. Critical social sciences are reflexively involved in this transformation. We can talk about reflexive self-regulation when knowledge about the way a social system functions is applied recursively in interventions, aiming at avoiding unwanted or achieving desired outcomes. Future-oriented reflexive self-regulation may also intervene—recursively—in the social conditions that constitute and shape the sphere of human freedom. I take all this to mean that the future is in the process of coming to be (or at least has the potential of being) increasingly co-determined by normative discourse about its desirability, informed by adequate and plausible scenarios about possible and likely futures. This is how we can foresee the end of the cold war.

On the Complexity of Time and Temporality My arguments depend on a process-ontological conception of time, so I need to explain something about the nature of time and temporality. Time is an abstract category. Time itself cannot be observed any more than we can observe “furniture”. We reason about abstractions in terms of prototypes and metaphors (Lakoff & Johnson, 1999). A chair, for instance, can serve as a prototype for furniture. Each category is lodged in people’s minds as an example case, which characterises the entire category and serves as a point of comparison for other cases. The example  The speech where Baruch outlined his plan was presented to the UN Atomic Energy Commission on 14 June 1946. It is available at https://www.atomicarchive.com/resources/documents/deterrence/baruch-plan.html 2

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cases are clear to the eye (“chair”), whereas categories are not instantly perceptible (“furniture”). We can see a river flowing and a clock ticking and moving, but not time itself. We also reason in terms of metaphors. A basic metaphor is Time as Spatial Location or Movement, but there are many others as well (for example, Time is Money). As an abstraction, time does not have a single meaning. Its meaning is dependent on prototypes, metaphors, and contexts, which in turn are anchored in our changing practices and worldviews (think about Time is Money as constitutive of wage labour). We spatialise time and measure it with clocks, but both ways of thinking about time result easily in various paradoxes. As already Augustine (354–430 CE) realised, a moment conceived as a point on a continuous line disappears into nothingness. If time consisted merely of separate points that either have no duration at all or very short duration (such as the Planck time, i.e. the time required for light to travel, in a vacuum, a distance of one Planck length, which is the basic unit of quantum mechanics), causation and processes would disappear.3 There is, however, a plausible alternative. From a realist ontological perspective, linking the reality of tense, causation, and processes, “now” is not a point on an abstract segment of a line, but an indefinite boundary state of a process that is happening. Several processes may not only occur simultaneously but coalesce and interact in various ways. The duration of the present depends on the event or context which is happening. (Bhaskar, 1994, pp. 67–72). While different presents intersect, some of them may last only a few minutes, others up to millions of years. This is the process-ontological conception of time. For instance, consider a social scientist who is enjoying a cup of tea in the morning and intends to stay at home reading and writing. He has two daughters, but there  Some like Carlo Rovelli (2016) argue that the flow of time is a useful metaphor at the macroscopic level of reality, but fundamentally, the world is made entirely of quantum fields. At that level, time melts into the quantum foam of spacetime. As time disappears from the fundamental equations, it does not exist. However, there are more realist views. In particular, the de Broglie–Bohm theory (see Bohm & Hiley, 2005) involves determinate sub-quantum-scale processes and a three-dimensional world populated by particles which move according to a non-Newtonian law of motion. This theory holds that the wave-like characteristics of quantum phenomena stem from a real field of quantum potential. The quantum potential depends only on the form, and not on the intensity of the quantum field. The motion of particles produces the overall material structures and processes we happen to recognize in the world we live in. Similarly, the recent and related but different theory of quantum evolution developed by Wojciech Zurek (2009) and others revolves around the idea that decoherence is a real process. Through decoherence quantum becomes stable and macroscopic. It is a structured and evolutionary process of selection. Out of the many possible quantum states are selected those that accord with a stable pointer state. Pointer states spread and evolve in a continuous, predictable manner. Successive interactions between pointer states and their environment enable only those states to survive which both produce multiple informational offspring and conform to the predictions of classical physics within the macroscopic world. Rovelli (2016, pp. 179–80) himself points out “that thanks to quantum mechanics, matter is stable”. He continues: “Without it, electrons would fall into nuclei, there would be no atoms and we would not exist”. These remarks are steps forward, but Rovelli remains ambiguous. His ambiguity seems to stem from an empiricist and (implicitly) reductionist philosophy that underpins his particular interpretation of quantum theory. Rovelli acknowledges his affinity to Bas van Fraassen’s “constructive empiricism”, which espouses agnosticism about the reality of unobservable entities. 3

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is uncertainty—due to extreme weather conditions—about whether their school is open today. The extreme weather conditions are, at least in some part, due to the process of global warming, which is indicative of a new period in the Earth’s history, the Anthropocene.4 Our researcher is working on a text that is intended to make a modest contribution to learning to respond to global problems more adequately and responsibly. The text also argues against the nineteenth-century-style reductionist (positivist) research programmes in sciences and social sciences, thus possibly making a small contribution to the process of their decline in the twenty-­first century. In this case, relevant processes include having a cup of tea before taking children to school, working on a scholarly text, the rise, and decline of a research programme, global warming, and a long-term geological epoch. The example provided by Bhaskar (1994, p. 68) develops this point further: Spaces and times intersect and overlap. Consider a welfare queue deafened by the noise of an overhead low-flying supersonic aeroplane in a shut-down hospital site strewn with fashion magazines and with a video portraying a sporting contest in Dubai in a Labour borough in contemporary England governed by antiquated constitutional system. This example illustrates the way in which overlapping, elongated, truncated, spatio-temporalities may coalesce. But it also illustrates the constitutive dependency of entities (natural as well as social) on their geo-historical process of formation.

This line of reasoning leads to a typology of different cases in which the past or outside may be said to be present, namely (1) existential pre-existence, (2) existential constitution, (3) lagged, delayed efficacy, and (4) co-inclusion also through reflexive consciousness (Bhaskar, 1994, pp. xx-yy). We are “thrown” into a world created by the past and everything from the infrastructure and buildings of cities to educational systems, technologies, and institutions pre-exist any given person who is born into that kind of society (1). Within this kind of world, a person is existentially constituted by layers of experiences and learning and by her relations to “significant others”, occupation, possessions, and so on (2). Lagged, delayed efficacy follows from the fact that processes take time. Often the potential inherent in particular causal powers are actualised only after a delay (e.g. pregnancy, education, global warming) (3). Co-inclusion follows from the process-ontological conception of time: causal processes are interwoven and may interact, interlope, clash, etc. (4).

 The term was coined by Paul Crutzen and Eugene Stoermer (2000), who regard the influence of recent human behavior on the Earth as so significant as to constitute a new geological era. Some scholars argue that a better term would be “capitalocene”, as it implies a particular mode of production (capitalism) as the nest of conditions for this geological shift and thereby re-historicises geological change by placing it within the social relations that brought about the conditions for this shift. For a debate on this issue, where my standpoint is largely based on the argument developed in Chap. 4, see Brincat & Patomäki, forthcoming. 4

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The Contingency of the Cold War and its End in 1989–1991 The present not only refers to an ongoing process in the context where many processes are interwoven; the present is also futurised via intentional agency. Consider the case of the Russian revolution. After the failed Russian Revolution of 1905, WWI provided Russian radicals with a new opportunity in 1917. Lenin developed the idea that imperialism and war constitute the final historical stage of the development of capitalism, characterised by parasitism and decay. When the late 1917 revolution started, the Bolsheviks expected either an immediate worldwide revolution or an end similar to the fate of the short-lived Paris Commune of 1871. Their anticipations did not fail entirely. The Russian revolution inspired many in the turbulent aftermath of WWI.  Other revolutions and a few short-lived socialist regimes emerged especially in Central and Eastern Europe. Soon, however, it became clear that an immediate worldwide revolution is not happening. When the Bolshevik regime survived in one country against all the odds, most commentators outside Russia expected its rapid demise. “Probably no other regime has ever survived so many prophecies of inevitable catastrophe” (Dziewanowski, 1972, p. 367). Numerous social and economic theorists maintained at the time that an all-encompassing state bureaucracy led by a single, hierarchically organised party is likely to lead to inefficiencies, maldevelopments, repression, and alienation.5 This expectation might have been on the mark in some or many important ways, but what also happened was that after the initial collapse of the Russian economy, the centralised planning system achieved high levels of economic growth, especially in sectors of heavy industry—and perhaps most notably during the first three five-year plans (1928–40). While unfavourable economic development eventually turned out to be a key reason for the collapse of the Soviet Union, from 1928 to 1970, the Soviet Union was arguably the second most successful economy in the world in terms of rates of growth (though less so in providing welfare or well-being for its citizens). While the demise of the USSR may have been overdetermined, Robert Allen (2001) reasons that the main causes of the decline in growth after 1970 were disastrous investment decisions, especially the increasingly impairing overand misinvestment in capital goods and heavy industry, and the excessive diversion of research and development resources to the military. Maldevelopments included not only repression and mass terror but also famines and forced displacements of people on a large scale, especially in the 1930s and 1940s. Economic growth may have been fast, but the starting point was low after the Russian civil war 1917–1923. One reason for the forced industrialisation in the 1930s was the spectre of a major war in Europe, perhaps targeted particularly against the Soviet Union. Society was mobilised violently to prepare for a coming war. Thus, it can be argued that the “Great Patriotic War” (1941–45) not only boosted Soviet industrial developments from the 1930s onwards but also provided  The list is long and includes, for instance, Erich Fromm, Friedrich Hayek, Rosa Luxembourg, Robert Michels, C.Wright Mills, David Riesman, Joseph Schumpeter, and Max Weber. These discussions are summarised and discussed in Lipset and Bence (1994, pp. 193–200). 5

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unexpected legitimacy to the Soviet system and leadership, especially after 1945, thus postponing the foreseeable implosion (cf. Karl Deutsch’s, 1954, analysis of “cracks in the monolith”). This suggests a moderately plausible counterfactual scenario: in the absence of Nazi Germany and World War II, the antagonism between the Soviet Union and the West ends already in the 1950s or 1960s before the deployment of nuclear weapons in any country, likely because of the implosion of the USSR. In other words, there would have been no Cold War as we know it. From this perspective, the “now” of the Cold War can be decomposed into various parts, each of which is in reality a composite process in need of further decomposing, including: 1. The processes, including especially WWI, which made the 1917 Russian Revolution possible and instigated it 2. The conditions and processes including the rise of fascism and nazism and subsequent WWII, which led to the continued existence and expansion of the Soviet Union within the international society and capitalist world economy 3. The emergence of nuclear weapons, jet planes, satellites, etc., in the 1940s and 1950s The Cold War 1947–1991 was characterised by (3). As is well known, the world wars sped up military-technological developments. The “planetary-nuclear era” (Deudney, 2008, p. 60) started in 1945–57. As argued, even in the absence of the World Wars, this era is likely to have begun at some point in the twentieth century: the Cold War as we know it was only a contingent episode in this wider process. And as anticipated by H.G. Wells, this era would have likely come about eventually anyway, independently of the evolvement of leading ideologies within states, or of the precise location of the shifting centres, given scientific and technological developments at the stage of industrial civilisation and the continued existence of the international (peace) problematic. It is conceivable, however, that under different political circumstances, something like the Baruch Plan could have succeeded in creating a common global system of control over atomic power.6 Those living in the 2020s (and beyond) are thrown into a world shaped by the Cold War and its contingent end. It is easy to read this history in terms of the hindsight bias by seeing its peaceful end as more likely than it really was. Leaving aside the believable possibility of a nuclear war against China in the 1960s,7 several counterfactual histories (CF) are plausible, in particular:  Other official initiatives have included a series of studies commissioned in the mid-1960s by The Arms Control and Disarmament Agency in the US Department of State in view of complete disarmament requiring elements of a world security state; and the Reagan–Gorbachev initiatives and “new thinking” in the late 1980s. Deudney (2008, p. 246, 368). 7  One Cold War scenario is the nuclear bombing of China by either the Kennedy or Khrushchev administrations (or both). Both had plans for this and even made enquiries about each other’s attitude towards a pre-emptive strike. I do not know of a scenario about how this would have affected the Cold War or whether it could even have ended the cold war by triggering radical nuclear disarmament. I am thankful to Juha Vuori for bringing this point to my attention. 6

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(CF-1) A nuclear war breaks out either during the Cuban missile crisis of October 1962, which was preceded by the two Berlin crises; or at some point later in the 1960s before the beginning of the sub-era of détente (1969–1981) • during the Cuban crisis, President Kennedy estimated the probability of a nuclear war to be somewhere between one in three and a half, while other participants in the crisis thought the probability was lower (Avenhaus et al., 1989, p. 91) • Richard Lebow and Janice Stein (1996) have analysed the counterfactuals on which the decision-makers during the crisis acted, arguing that the counterfactuals about the missile crisis were theory-driven (usually based on deterrence-theory or Marxist–Leninist theory), relying on assumptions about the motivations and calculus of Soviet or American leaders; in the light of later evidence, these theories and assumptions have mostly turned out to have been either misleading or false, which can be taken as indirect evidence of a relatively high probability (CF-2) The sub-era of “the second Cold War” (1981–85) ends in a nuclear war, for example during the Able Archer military exercise in November 1983 • possible escalatory actions resulting from miscalculation, misperception, or misjudgment are especially likely in the context of high tensions and alert, as was the case also during the second Cold War • there are many recent accounts of the Able Archer episode, some claiming that the danger was less imminent than thought (e.g. Barrass, 2016), others claiming that the world came much closer to nuclear war than commonly thought (e.g. Kaplan, 2021) • based on the available evidence, the probability is hard to estimate; it was certainly less than in 1962, but still considerable, perhaps between 5% and 10% (the risk was higher because in 20  years the Soviets had built a huge stockpile of nuclear weapons and reached parity with the US) (CF-3) A nuclear war breaks out because of human or technical error. In the absence of a proper basis for estimation, if we set this probability at 1/1000 per annum, the probability that a nuclear war occurs in 35 years (in 1955–1990) is 1−P(Ā) = 1−(0.999)35 = 3.4%.

Leaving aside the question whether it is reasonable to assign quantitative probabilities to unique episodes such as CF-1 and CF-2,8 if we add these up, it seems plausible to maintain that the probability of the Cold War ending in a nuclear war was in the order of one in three. This is comparable to playing two rounds of Russian

 In terms of subjective Bayesianism, the idea may be to take the probability estimates of participants or later researchers as priors that can be revised by taking into account new evidence about the same historical episode in accordance with the Bayesian theorem. Thus, I have not accepted Kennedy’s estimate as correct but revised it in light of other (lower) estimates. However, the question is whether this is the most reasonable approach. J. M. Keynes’ (2008) theory of probability does not require assignment of numerical probabilities. For Keynes, probabilistic knowledge concerns the bearing of evidence (e) on conclusions or hypothesis (h). Keynes’s formula h/e = x reads “the probability of h on e is x”. Relative frequencies constitute only a type of relevant evidence and are of limited applicability. The h/e relationship is something that we can rationally argue about in social contexts. The point is that we can have qualitative knowledge about probabilities without numbers, indeed without an adequate basis for making claims such as that “this is three times as likely as that”. Even when also approximate comparisons (“X is more or less likely than Y”) are impossible, we can still talk about probability. From this point of view, my argument can be taken to mean that qualitative historical evidence indicates that the probability of the Cold War ending in a nuclear war is comparable to playing two rounds of Russian roulette. This is not precise but suggests how close to a total catastrophe the world was. 8

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roulette. Moreover, also the events and episodes in 1989–91 could have resulted in violence and war. The end of the Cold War took experts and participants by surprise. Most pundits at the time ignored the possibility of peaceful change, particularly a drastic change due to popular movements and upheavals. In the June 1989 semi-free elections in Poland, the Communist Party lost almost  every contested seat (the majority was still reserved for them) and all of its remaining legitimacy. A couple of months later, a representative of the Solidarity movement, Tadeusz Mazowiecki, became the Prime Minister of Poland. The upheavals continued in Hungary and then led to a surge of mostly peaceful revolutions in East Germany, Czechoslovakia, and Bulgaria. In Romania, there was some violence. Perhaps the deepest puzzle about the end of the Cold War lies in the way it started as a revolution from above: a Gorbachev,9 then to be followed by a Yeltsin (Galtung, 2003, p. 132). It seemed unlikely that leaders who had risen through the hierarchical and tightly controlled Soviet system would be capable of new thinking and radical reforms (e.g. Lipset & Bense, 1994). More than that, the learning process at the top of the Soviet hierarchy involved transnationally circulated ideas. A significant role was played by ideas developed by Western liberal internationalists (supporters of disarmament in particular), peace researchers, and Western European non-communist parties of the Left (Risse-Kappen, 1994). A transnational disarmament community was influential in the early Gorbachev years, despite the resistance of the mainstream military and Soviet conservatives. This transnational community consisted of scientists—many of whom were taking part in Pugwash conferences, continuing the work of Bertrand Russell and Albert Einstein—and disarmament experts. The hierarchical system ensured the temporary consolidation of the new ideas adopted by the leadership (Checkel, 1997, p. xiii), but it did not ensure wider collective learning in society. The Cold War (1947–1991) ended in a surprisingly peaceful manner. The final episode occurred in August 1991, when a group of hardliners staged a coup attempt in Moscow, the failure of which resulted in the disintegration of the USSR.  The Russian Federation inherited the nuclear weapons of the USSR.  The 1990s saw nuclear disarmament, but not the end of the planetary-nuclear era.

 The election of Gorbachev as the General Secretary of the Communist Party by Politburo on 11 March 1985 was at the time uncertain, as he was nominated only after some hesitation of the remaining members of the old guard, especially Andrei Gromyko. Moreover, election of 1985 resulted from a series of coincidences, especially of the natural death of three old-guard leaders of the USSR in just over two years. It may be argued that these coincidences and contingencies sped up a process that was likely to happen anyway. However, it is equally possible that an alternative path of history could have resulted in a nuclear war or, perhaps more likely, in a much less peaceful end of the Cold War, perhaps with the main dynamics taking place in the southern parts of the USSR. Timing matters. 9

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The Meaning of the Past Is Undetermined Next, I am going to argue that it is not only that the outcome of the Cold War that started in 1947 was contingent, but also that its meaning remains undetermined. This argument is based on the general claim that the meaning of the past is, in part, undetermined, and at some level of abstraction, will always remain so (Weberman, 1997). This follows from the argument that “now” is relative to the relevant processes. Some of these processes may endure for a long time. The meaning of a past event or limited process depends on how the wider processes will turn out. Because many processes are overlapping and intra-related, this may leave the meaning of an event or process undetermined even when it appears, from a less reflexive and holistic perspective, to have concluded. If the meaning of the past X depends on how these processes turn out, its full meaning can only be known in the future, sometimes only in the distant future. This can be illustrated with a simple example: “The Thirty Years War began in 1618” is a sentence typical of historical inquiry but unavailable to a chronicler because it goes beyond what could have been known at the time it occurred, that is, that the war was to last thirty years (Weberman, 1997, p. 749). To the extent that events can only be identified in terms of a process (or processes), of which they are part, the earlier events or limited processes can take on properties they did not have before as the wider process unfolds. The earlier events are causally fixed and they cannot be uncaused or changed by later actors or processes. However, the “now” of any act or event is an indefinite boundary state of a process that is happening. What is more, history is also meaningful. Past events can only be identified in terms of social meanings making references to processes. The identity and meaning of earlier events can thus change with the relevant process. When such a change occurs, the earlier events have taken on (relational) properties they did not have before. All contemporary presents are open-ended in this sense. The properties of the actions and events happening “now” depend, in part, on the processes that are gradually unfolding over time. When we are describing those events, we are making assumptions about possible and likely futures. From this perspective, the actual Cold War was only an episode in a much wider and deeper process. In terms of the planetary-nuclear era, the full meaning of the Cold War remains open. Following the end of the Cold War, China and Russia agreed to a bilateral no-first-use policy on nuclear weapons, formed a “strategic partnership” in 1996, and concluded a “Treaty of Good-Neighbourliness and Friendly Cooperation” in July 2001. At that point, Jiang Zemin, the leader of China from 1989 to 2003, started to criticise the reappearance of Cold War mentality and thinking in the West. This has remained a key theme in the Chinese foreign policy discourse since then (Vuori, 2023, ch. 4). In the 2020s, more states possess nuclear weapons than during the Cold War. The war in Ukraine (starting in 2014, and on a large scale in 2022) has generated a new crisis involving references to a “new Cold War” and the use of nuclear weapons (for discussions, see Forsberg & Patomäki, 2023).

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Whether the destructive powers of nuclear weapons will be released is contingent in the same way as many past events and episodes have been contingent. For example, in October 2022, Matthew Bunn estimated that the probability of the war in Ukraine turning nuclear is 10–20%.10 As a rule, in any given situation, a large number of non-redundant components form a causal complex producing a particular outcome, such as a catastrophic war. Any geohistorical outcome is contingent on several activity- and concept-dependent conditions as well as manifold actions. At another level of generality, however, the relevant processes may have the inherent potential for, or disposition towards, a particular orderly or patterned outcome. Thus, a process may be path-dependent in the sense that its precise trajectory is not replicable, yet the likely outcome is foreseeable at some level of abstraction. As already argued, there may have been good reasons to expect the implosion of the Soviet Union, but its timing was contingent and the end could have come about in different ways. The end could also have involved a nuclear war. Something similar holds also for the planetary-nuclear era as a whole. It can be seen as a process that will come to an end—but how exactly? Consider three scenarios (S) on how this era will come to an end: (S-1) The conditions will gradually or suddenly build up for a legitimate global monopoly of means of mass violence and destruction. By the 2040s or, perhaps, 2070s, the collective nuclear arsenal will be reduced to a bare minimum and put under common control, one way or another. In this scenario, the Cold War—and the subsequent crises including in the early 2020s—was just a tragic and dangerous accident in generally progressive human history. The era will end in the absenting of social conditions for large-scale collective violence and the institution of war (which does not mean that there will be no collective violence). • in a subscenario of (S1), a strike with weapons of mass destruction triggers global changes, as even a single nuclear explosion or the use of tactical nuclear weapons in a conflict would have catastrophic humanitarian and ecological effects. (S-2) Business-as-usual prevails at first. Several states will continue to possess and develop nuclear weapons, although their nuclear arsenals have been reduced through disarmament and non-proliferation treaties. Business-as-usual continues until changes in the background conditions—crises in the capitalist world economy, rapid ecological and climate changes, conventional wars, and/or new religious-political antagonisms—will worsen the conditions of global security. At one point, a major nuclear power considers the unthinkable: the use of tactical nuclear weapons on a battlefield or even a pre-emptive strike “before it is too late” (dependency on satellite systems makes everyone highly vulnerable). A large-­ scale nuclear war breaks out. A part of humanity may survive. If so, this scenario is likely to converge with S-1, the emergence of a legitimate global monopoly of means of mass destruction. (S-3) After the Cold War, the planetary-nuclear era will continue until new and even more destructive means of violence are innovated, based on AI, nanotechnologies, biotechnologies, and perhaps even on the manipulation of the structure of space-time. The ever-­  Bunn is Professor of the Practice of Energy, National Security, and Foreign Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School. This view was expressed in an NPR interview broadcasted on 4 October 2022, summary available at https://www.npr.org/2022/10/04/1126680868/putin-raises-the-specter-ofusing-nuclear-weapons-in-his-war-with-ukraine. NPR (National Public Radio) is an American privately and publicly funded non-profit media organization headquartered in Washington, D.C. and established by an act of Congress. 10

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more efficient means of destruction will be increasingly accessible to many, and not only to states. Therefore, something akin to the Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) nuclear strategy of the Cold War will start to characterise the universal condition of humanity across all divisions and partitions. In this scenario, the Cold War turns out to have been a mere prelude in the tragic process that will eventually lead to human self-annihilation.

Rudolf Avenhaus et al. (1989) call attention to the fact that if there is a constant probability of a nuclear war per year, as the number of years goes to infinity, the overall probability approaches 1, no matter how small the initial probability per year may be. However, if the annual probability is reduced by a constant reduction factor, no matter how small this factor is, then nuclear war is not a certainty. In world politics, we do not have constant frequencies or probabilities (probabilities change with historical situations), yet Avenhaus et  al.’s observation is important in indicating how unstable S-2 (or S-3) is over time. The business as usual of the planetary-­ nuclear era cannot prevail for a long time. Importantly, Avenhaus et al. also note that the main danger lies in a conflict-prone situation, which is preceded by a steady erosion of trust (think about Russia-NATO in the 2010s and especially in the 2020s; Forsberg & Patomäki, 2023). In this kind of situation, a crisis “may precipitate the first use of nuclear weapons, particularly if the initiator faces a desperate situation and believes that only nuclear weapons might provide an escape from certain defeat” (Avenhaus et al., 1989, p. 91). This possibility accentuates the instability and irrationality of S-2 and S-3. These three possible futures illustrate how we must rely on future-oriented narratives to describe contemporary events and ongoing processes, the end of which can only be seen from a vantage point later than the moment of reflection or action within that process. These three possibilities also demonstrate the way the meaning of the Cold War (1947–1991) is dependent on how the open-ended process of the planetary-nuclear era will turn out in the twenty-first century, and beyond. S-1 implies at a minimum something like a Baruch plan, namely a common global system of control over atomic power. However, the expression “a legitimate global monopoly of means of mass violence and destruction” alludes to Max Weber’s (1978, p. 54) definition of the state. Weber’s definition has two parts: (1) the existence of a regularised administrative staff, which has (2) the ability to uphold successfully the legitimate monopoly of control over the means of violence within a given territorial area. Upon a closer examination, these features are labels for complex sets of historical relationships in processual contexts that cannot support a clear demarcation between what is “in” and what is “out” of relevant entities. For example, “regularised administrative staff” requires a separation of private life and the office (bureaucratic position) and presupposes a monetised economy providing a secure foundation for a stable system of taxation and money-creation because professional office-holders must be paid a regular salary. Similarly, depending on how the “inside” and “outside” of a system are demarcated, the complex and relational processes of legitimation can have primacy over the control of the means of violence. The latter in turn tend to include a set of legal rules and principles, divisions of power, and mechanisms of checks and balances.

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The allusion to the Weberian definition of the state notwithstanding, the idea is not that S-1 involves the establishment of a world state understood as a replicate of the (early) modern European nation-states based on territoriality and control of violence (on the historical emergence of the concept and practices of the state and related global political economy field, Patomäki, 2022, pp. 59–62). As will be discussed in more detail in part III of this book, what “statehood” means changes with relational properties and contexts. The condition of having properties and elements of world statehood is thus best understood in terms of clusters of functions and institutional and ideological elements that evolve from the existing and emerging systems of global governance. This is roughly compatible with, but in no sense reducible to, what Daniel Deudney (2008, pp. 254–9) calls republican nuclear one-­ worldism, in which the territorial state system is not as much replaced as complemented with a nuclear containment and restraint system. In Deudney’s scheme, nuclear capability is seen as a particular function that is separated from state control and then frozen. This can be understood as an extrapolation from the theory and practice of nuclear era arms control, i.e. from a particular existing system of global governance (for examples of analyses of the current problems of nuclear arms control, Cronberg, 2021; Pearson & Simpson, 2022).

The Temporality of Human Existence Is Changing In the final step of my argument, I discuss the notion that rational anticipation of the future is essentially connected to the possibility of change-oriented reflexive self-­ regulation of social systems (to be elaborated further in Chaps. 7 and 8). The starting point here is that the horizon of causally efficacious action is inherently temporal and involves considerations about the future, not least in terms of the consequences of actions. Actors can become aware that others too are temporal and conscious of the future. Thereby, predictions about social actions and their consequences can become temporally reflexive. Reflexivity means the capacity of actors to reflect on their conditions and place such that both can change and be changed. Temporal reflexivity involves awareness of the role of history-interpretation and future anticipations in shaping the future. For reflexive actors, the motivating power of stories about the past and the self-fulfilling or self-denying nature of anticipation may even be part of their very purpose. (Patomäki, 2019) To a degree, the decision-makers of the Cuban missile crisis provide an example of this (CF-2 above). They used counterfactual reasoning in thinking about the likely consequences of their actions vis-à-­ vis their adversaries whom they knew to be interpreting the past and anticipating the future.

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Futurological Pollyanna11 and Cassandra12 aim at shaping rather than just predicting the future, by affecting the opinions and moods of the audience. A futurist Pollyanna entertains an optimistic attitude about whatever is happening now or in the near future—with the effect of legitimising existing social relations and ongoing processes. A modern Cassandra anticipates dire futures in the hope of generating terror. The point is to trigger a change in the course of actions, public policies, and world history (Wagar, 1991, p. 5 et. passim). Cassandras such as Bernard Baruch in 1946—“we must elect World Peace or World Destruction”—must struggle to be heard. They also face the methodological implications of open systems and history. Whereas we know that Troy was destroyed, contemporary and future Cassandras are anticipating an uncertain and open future. I agree with Stefano Guzzini (2013, pp.  530–38) that knowledge can move towards higher orders of reflexivity. Increasing reflexivity does not apply only to theory but also to practice. For Guzzini, the first stage of reflexivity occurs when practice and the first-order reflection on that practice are united, that is, theory reflections arise from within the evolving field itself. A geohistorical practice can also be reified in terms of alleged law-like regularities. A second-order reflection emerges when theory is distinguished from practice, and practice is understood to be theory-laden and constructed at least in part through the application of theory. The second-order reflection requires a critical distance from the premises of its construction. This idea can be taken further and applied to social systems as organised wholes, the actors of which can become aware of how their constructions form and mould social realities. Effects of social systems are brought about by homeostatic causal loops, self-regulation through feedback, and reflexive self-regulation (Giddens, 1979, pp. 78–81). Homeostatic loops tend to reproduce existing social structures and as such are not conducive to adaptation requiring changes. However, system integration involves also higher-order (more reflexive) forms of organising the interdependence of actions. Self-regulation through feedback may involve something analogical to a mechanical information control apparatus that may work against the effects of simple homeostasis, e.g. an entrance exam system partly breaking a simple cycle of material deprivation and poor schooling in a social context. Finally, we can talk about reflexive self-regulation when knowledge about the way the social system functions is applied recursively in deliberate interventions that aim at avoiding unwanted or achieving desired outcomes. Reflexive self-regulation enables collective self-development through increased knowledge about the way systems work. A problem with this kind of reflexivity is that the object of its knowledge is also shaped by it. For example, an announced

 Pollyanna is a classic children’s novel from 1913, written by Eleanor H.  Porter. Pollyanna’s philosophy of life centres on what she calls “The Glad Game”, which is about finding something to be glad about in every situation. 12  In the ancient Greek mythology, Cassandra was a young woman who was given the gift of prophecy by Apollo. When Cassandra did not return his love, Apollo placed a curse on her so that no one would ever believe her predictions. Cassandra foresaw the destruction of Troy but could do nothing because she was not believed by the Trojans. 11

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policy change can become a self-altering prediction (or involve such a prediction), which is subject to contradictory and complementary determination, resulting either in net self-fulfilling or self-denying tendency (see Patomäki, 2019). A credible forecast of, say, increased inflation can bring about both self-denying (monetary and financial countermeasures by the government and central bank) and self-fulfilling responses (workers increase wage demands, corporations increase prices). Even when rising inflation is seen as a problem, relevant actors such as workers and corporations can be persuaded either to behave responsibly or to reach an agreement that counters the tendency towards prediction-accelerated cost-push inflation. This may, however, be difficult because of conflicts over income and power distribution. As a general rule, low inflation favours lenders and those who possess money capital; higher inflation favours debtors such as entrepreneurs and homeowners. Here we can see how higher-order reflexivity and the self-transformative capacity of formative contexts discussed in Chaps. 4 and 5 are closely connected. Formative contexts are clusters of institutional and ideological elements regulating (1) expectations of identities, (2) how things are to be done, and (3) routine conflicts over the distribution of key resources. With higher-order reflexivity and increased self-­ transformative capacity, actors learn that the future is not something that just happens and can be predicted, but rather becomes increasingly something that the actors, including “us”, make of it. In this light, we can reconsider the three scenarios (S-1, S-2, and S-3) about how the cold war will come to an end. Scenarios start with an analysis of the existing structures and processes and their inherent possibilities, coupled with the assumption that the future remains open until a particular possibility is actualised. There is always some continuity. History is not something that can be controlled by any particular actor. Social structures, mechanisms, and fields—and related transient demi-regularities—are relatively enduring. Scenarios are also conditional on actors’ understandings, exhibiting always at least some continuity, and their actions. While all this makes it possible to assess the likelihood of different scenarios (Patomäki, 2010), scenarios entail the recognition of others’ consciousness, agency, and freedom. Mutual recognition of this agency (cf. Wendt, 2003, to be discussed in Chap. 10) is itself a social process that can be shaped. It is possible to improve the social conditions of ethical-political learning and reflexive self-determination, thus incrementally widening the sphere of human freedom. Thus, future-oriented reflexive self-regulation may intervene—recursively—in the social conditions that enable the sphere of human freedom as collective self-determination. Anticipating possible futures is thus a dialectical learning process that can transform the temporality of the human condition. Gradually we come to realise that our existence is constituted by historical possibilities within which we find ourselves. These possibilities are open towards the future and meaningful only in relation to it. We rely on future-oriented narratives to describe ongoing processes, the (more comprehensive) end of which can only be seen from a vantage point later than the moment of action within that process. Moreover, the future is no more something that just happens but something that can be shaped, even if only in a structurally conditioned way.

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With gradually more reflexive, holistic, and future-oriented self-regulation of systems, the temporality of human existence is transformed. Although the rational direction is thus towards an increasing self-determining democratic control over the history of humankind, on this planet and at some point later perhaps elsewhere, new forms of emergence and complexity tend to have also unintended consequences. This is because it is difficult and oftentimes impossible to anticipate what has not yet been put together, invented, or created. World history will remain open-ended. Thus, the end of the cold war in establishing a legitimate global monopoly of means of mass violence and destruction (S-1) cannot be the end of history, just a moment interwoven with many ongoing processes. Moreover, the meaning of this moment is dependent on how later world history unfolds.

Conclusions To reiterate, the meaning of the Cold War (1947–1991) depends on how the era of the cold war in the deeper sense will come to an end. After 1991, the hindsight bias has served to reinforce the prevailing background assumption that it was not rational for either side to start a hot war because of the “mutually assured destruction”. This has legitimised the continued reliance on nuclear deterrence, even against the basic aim of the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT), which entered into force in 1970. This treaty has two sides. On the one hand, non-nuclear-­ weapon states agree never to acquire nuclear weapons. On the other hand, nuclear-­ weapon states are committed to total nuclear disarmament (NPT’s Article VI: “Each of the Parties to the Treaty undertakes to pursue negotiations in good faith on effective measures relating to cessation of the nuclear arms race at an early date and nuclear disarmament, and on a treaty on general and complete disarmament”). The main focus has been on the first side of the treaty. As I have argued in this chapter, the Cold War could have ended differently. We can estimate that the probability of a nuclear war sometime between 1960 and 1990 or so was about one in three and, in addition; also the peaceful end of the Cold War in 1989–1991 was contingent in many ways. The full-scale war in Ukraine (2022-) has resulted in discussions about “a new Cold War”, but the cold war never ended. I have introduced ideas such as non-fixed pasts, reflexive futures, and the transformation of the temporality of human existence to show how the cold war might finally come to some conclusion. Of the three scenarios, S-2 and S-3 are unstable and irrational. S-1 requires reflexive self-regulation of social systems conceived through the interdependence of actions. Reflexive self-regulation does not happen automatically but requires agency. Elements of such an agency exist already. Frustrated by the lack of progress towards complete nuclear disarmament, in 2007 a global civil society coalition started to advocate a treaty on the prohibition of nuclear weapons. Eventually, after various phases, this treaty was negotiated under the auspices of the UN. In 2017, a large number of countries adopted the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, which entered into force in January 2021 (by late 2022, c. 90 states have either ratified or signed the treaty). In sharp contrast to the role of the US

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in the 1940s and the basic thrust of the Baruch Plan, the US has actively opposed the 2017 treaty, including by sending letters to the signatories. Consider the classic model of the arms race developed by Lewis Fry Richardson, an English physicist, at the time of WWI and in subsequent decades (Rapoport, 1960, pp. 15–30; for discussions, Gleditsch, 2021). I am leaving aside the facts that the model has no unambiguous interpretation and that by changing some of the assumptions, rather different conclusions can be drawn. The point is that in its basic form, it provides a simple action–reaction model that describes unstable and irrational dynamics through interdependent actions (rather than simple homeostasis, Richardson’s system could perhaps be described as “homeodynamics”). If a state tries to keep a security margin by keeping itself somewhat better armed than its (potential) military competitors, and if relevant states—or even one of them—tries the same, the result will be an arms race, such as the nuclear arms race between the US and USSR during the Cold War. Being aware of the outcome and in principle its limitless costs, and the potential consequences of such an arms race, the actors may try to establish receptors, control centres, and targeted limits on aspects of this process, thereby taking steps towards reflexive self-regulation at the level of the system as a whole. However, these efforts remain curtailed by the absence of collective institutional mechanisms that could enable the systematic application of knowledge about the way the system functions recursively in deliberate interventions aiming at avoiding unwanted or achieving desired outcomes. The possibility of increasing human freedom lies in absenting of absences. From this perspective, agency and thus intentional causality consists of absenting. “Agency may be defined in the simplest way as embodied intentional causality or process, which issues in a state of affairs that, unless it was overdetermined […], would not have occurred otherwise, even if the real reasons which cause it […] are routinized, unconscious, multiple, contradictory and/or anterior (including lagged, delayed, long prior) ones” (Bhaskar, 1994, p. 76). Insecurity (typically involving mutual securitisation) can be seen as a constraint that can be absented by integration in the sense discussed in Chap. 5 (particularly Fig. 5.6.) and by building elements of world statehood in the functional area defined by the historical emergence and development of weapons of mass destruction.

References Allen, R. (2001). The rise and decline of the soviet economy. The Canadian Journal of Economics/ Revue canadienne d’Economique, 34(4), 859–881. Ashley, R. (1980). Political economy of war and peace: The Sino-soviet-American triangle & modern security problematique. Frances Pinter. Avenhaus, R., Brams, S. J., Fichtner, J., & Kilgour, D. M. (1989). The probability of nuclear war. Journal of Peace Research, 26(1), 91–99. Bandow, D. (2022, March 8). The Ukraine crisis could spark a new cold war (or a nuclear war). 19FortyFive. https://www.cato.org/commentary/ ukraine-­crisis-­could-­spark-­new-­cold-­war-­or-­nuclear-­war#.

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Barrass, G. (2016). Able archer 83: What were the soviets thinking? Survival: Global Politics and Strategy, 58(6), 7–30. Bhaskar, R. (1994). Plato etc.: The problems of philosophy and their resolution. Verso. Bohm, D., & Hiley, B. J. (2005). The undivided universe: An ontological interpretation of quantum theory. Routledge. (Originally published in 1993). Brincat, S., & Patomäki, H. (Forthcoming). Dialectics and critical realism. In S.  Brincat (Ed.), Dialectical dialogues. Springer. Checkel, J. T. (1997). Ideas and international political change: Soviet/Russian behavior and the end of the cold war. Yale University Press. Cronberg, T. (2021). Renegotiating the nuclear order: A sociological approach. Routledge. Crutzen, P. J., & Stoermer, E. F. (2000). The “anthropocene”. IGBP Newsletter, 41, 17–18. Available at http://www.igbp.net/download/18.316f18321323470177580001401/1376383088452/ NL41.pdf Deudney, D. (2008). Bounding power: Republican security theory from the polis to the global village. Princeton University Press. Deutsch, K. W. (1954). Cracks in the monolith: Possibilities and patterns of disintegration in totalitarian systems. In C. J. Friedrich (Ed.), Totalitarianism: Proceedings of a conference held at the American Academy of Arts and Sciences march 1953 (pp. 308–333). Harvard University Press. Dziewanowski, M. K. (1972). Death of the soviet regime: A study in American sovietology by a historian. Studies in Soviet Thought, 12(4), 367–379. Forsberg, T., & Patomäki, H. (2023). Debating the war in Ukraine. Counterfactual histories and future possibilities. Routledge. Galtung, J. (2003). What did the experts predict? Futures, 35(2), 123–145. Giddens, A. (1979). Central problems of social theory: Action, structure and contradiction in social analysis. Macmillan. Gleditsch, N.  P. (Ed.). (2021). Lewis fry Richardson: His intellectual legacy and influence in the social sciences. Springer Open. Available at https://link.springer.com/content/ pdf/10.1007/978-­3-­030-­31589-­4.pdf Kaplan, F. (2021, Feb 18). Apocalypse averted: The world came much closer to nuclear war than we realized in 1983. Slate. Available at https://slate.com/news-­and-­politics/2021/02/able-­ archer-­nuclear-­war-­reagan.html Keynes, J. M. (2008). A treatise on probability. Rough Draft Printing (MacMillan). (Originally published in 1921). Lakoff, G., & Johnson, M. (1999). Philosophy in the flesh: The embodied mind and its challenge to western thought. Basic Books. Lebow, R. N., & Stein, J. G. (1994). We all lost the cold war. Princeton University Press. Lebow, R. N., & Stein, J. G. (1996). Back to the past: Counterfactuals and the Cuban missile crisis. In P. E. Tetlock & A. Belkin (Eds.), Thought experiments in world politics: Logical, methodological and psychological perspectives (pp. 119–148). Princeton University Press. Lipset, S. M., & Bense, G. (1994). Anticipations of the failure of communism. Theory and Society, 23(2), 174–175. Mueller, J. (1988). The essential irrelevance of nuclear weapons: stability in the postwar world. International Security, 13(2), 55–79. Patomäki, H. (1992). What is it that changed with the end of the cold war? An analysis of the problem of identifying and explaining change. In P. Allan & K. Goldmann (Eds.), The end of the cold war: Evaluating theories of international relations (pp. 179–225). Martinus Nijhoff. Patomäki, H. (2010). Exploring possible, likely and desirable global futures: Beyond the closed vs. open systems dichotomy. In J. Joseph & C. Wight (Eds.), Scientific realism and international relations (pp. 147–166). Palgrave. Patomäki, H. (2019). Reflexivity of anticipations in economics and political economy. In R. Poli (Ed.), Handbook of anticipation: Theoretical and applied aspects of the use of future in decision making (pp. 555–580). Springer. Patomäki, H. (2022). The three fields of global political economy. Routledge.

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Pearson, F., & Simpson, E. (2022). How to de-escalate dangerous nuclear weapons and force deployments in Europe. International Journal: Canada’s Journal of Global Policy Analysis, 77(1), 125–136. https://doi.org/10.1177/00207020221100712 Pohl, R. (2004). Hindsight bias. In R. Pohl (Ed.), Cognitive illusions: A handbook on fallacies and biases in thinking, judgement and memory (pp. 363–378). Psychology Press. Rapoport, A. (1960). Fights, games and debates. University of Michigan Press. Risse-Kappen, T. (1994). Ideas do not float freely: Transnational coalitions, domestic structures, and the end of the cold war. International Organization, 48(2), 185–214. Rovelli, C. (2016). Reality is not what it seems: The journey to quantum gravity. (S. Carnell & E. Segre, Trans.). Allen Lane. Siracusa, J. (2008). Nuclear weapons: A very short introduction. Oxford University Press. Tetlock, P. (1999). Theory-driven reasoning about plausible pasts and probable futures in world politics: Are we prisoners of our preconceptions? American Journal of Political Science, 43(2), 335–366. Vuori, J. (2023). Chinese macrosecuritization: China’s alignment in global security discourses. Routledge. Wagar, W. W. (1991). The next three futures: Paradigms of things to come. Greenwood. Waltz, K. (1979). Theory of international politics. Addison Wesley. Weber, M. (1978). In G. Roth & C. Wittich (Eds.), Economy and society: An outline of interpretive sociology. University of California Press. (Originally published in 1921). Weberman, D. (1997). The nonfixity of the historical past. The Review of Metaphysics, 50(4), 749–768. Wells, H. G. (1971). The world set free. Leisure Books. (Originally published in 1914). Wendt, A. (2003). Why a world state is inevitable. European Journal of International Relations, 9(4), 491–542. Zurek, W. H. (2009). Quantum Darwinism. Nature Physics, 5(3), 181–188.

7

Resolving Problems and Overcoming Contradictions through Global Law and Institutions: A Post-Deutschian Perspective

Introduction In Chap. 5, I argued that emancipation as an open-ended process of global democratisation is closely tied to the problem of violence. A security community emerges from the dependable and institutionally guaranteed expectation of the possibility of peaceful changes. A key indicator of openness to peaceful change is whether preparations are made for violence against others, including (potentially) context-­ challenging actors within the relevant whole. In Chap. 6, I discussed how rising levels of reflexivity, and the possibility of reflexive self-regulation based on knowledge about the way a system of nuclear deterrence functions, can contribute to building institutional arrangements involving functions of stateness in the area spawned by the emergence of weapons of mass destruction. In this chapter, I extend these ideas to global political economy, while I also deepen and qualify the analysis of facilitating cooperation and absenting violence in social relations. The purpose of this chapter is to analyse the underpinnings and conditions of the emergence of systems of governance tackling salient global problems. These systems may adopt state-like properties and powers. Karl Deutsch’s claim discussed in Chap. 5 that a pluralist security community is more feasible than an amalgamated one is not a general argument against all steps towards amalgamation or constructing elements of world statehood, but it does suggest that the context and the type and quality of institutions matter.1 In this chapter, I argue from a post-Deutschian perspective that while common institutions may aggravate the problem, they can also be part of its solution. The context must be conceived dynamically. In the twenty-first century global political economy, common problems are manifold and new ones arise continuously because of complex and dynamic global and local  Amalgamated community refers to a single governmental unit with a process of political communication, a single supreme decision-making centre, some machinery for enforcement, and practices of compliance. 1

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 H. Patomäki, World Statehood, World-Systems Evolution and Global Futures, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-32305-8_7

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processes in which actors and issues are tightly interwoven and spatial scales interconnected. As Deutsch et al. contended, it is not possible to tame or freeze history for a long time. New purposes, identities, and interests will emerge and new claims demanding changes in some respects will be made public (even against restrictions and repression) (Deutsch et al., 1957, p. 66, 111, etc.). Consequently, changes will be attempted, either peacefully or by means involving violence. History is not going to stand still. Rather the opposite is true: nothing in history repeats itself exactly as such. Even the best of our historical analogies are only partial. Although focussing on processes and changes, Deutsch and his associates were looking for (complex, conditional, and probabilistic) regularities between variables. However, in open systems we can, at best, find only contrastive demi-regularities, which are context-bound, i.e. they are liable to change with the context. This raises a deeper question about what is it that could explain when and why conflicts are resolved by peaceful means and through peaceful changes. We need an account either of a mechanism or of a structured process that does not rely on any particular contrastive demi-regularity between events, factors, or variables, but is transfactually efficacious across a large number of geohistorical contexts. As suggested in Chap. 5, it is the self-transformative capacity of contexts that can generate dependable expectations of peaceful changes by qualifying the sense of community and by fostering malleable, tolerant, and pluralist group identities—assuming several conditions of concrete determination, such as sufficient socio-economic security, absence of unfair privileges, and several other context-bound factors. A normatively oriented question is whether the notion of a security community and the idea of global democratisation through peaceful changes imply pacifism in some sense. Categorical, context-independent ethical-political principles are hard to come by. This applies to pacifism too, especially if it is supposed to mean the rejection of the use of physical violence to obtain any aim by any actor under any circumstances. A problem with pacifism is that even when the law is not (primarily) retributive, it must rely on some notion of legitimate enforcement. This complicates the idea of achieving peace and progress through legal institutions. Pacifism would thus reject essential aspects of the institution of law, including future cosmopolitan law. A more plausible moral aim and priority is therefore to minimise the need for any kind of (threat of) violence. A position of strongly prioritising non-violence and seeking to minimise all forms of violence is called pacific-ism, in contrast to straightforward pacifism (see Ceadel, 1987, pp. 101–165). In this chapter, I first outline how common problems arise from shared processes, especially those of global political economy. Second, I discuss the gridlock and decline of global governance in the early twenty-first century. Going beyond the “pathways to gridlock” perspective—which I reinterpret and analyse further with help of the concept of complexity—I go on to explain how common problems can be understood and explained in terms of (1) disintegrative tendencies and (2) real contradictions, and how these can, in principle, be overcome through common institutions. Fourth, from the point of view of the self-transformative capacity of contexts (Fig. 5.6.), a key problem lies in fixed identities and self-other relations and what Deutsch calls “hard will”. The fourth and final part of this chapter consists of

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analysing further the different sides of the problem of will in terms of reflexivity, different orders of purpose, the axis of self-other relations, and the virtuous circle of non-violence. In the appendix, there is finally a brief discussion on the role of religion.

The Emergence of Common Problems Common problems arise from shared processes. From 1450 to 1800, European expansionism brought the major regional economies in Asia, Africa, Europe, and the Americas into increased contact (O’Brien & Williams, 2016, ch. 3). The process was often violent, but it also increased the scope of the division of labour in the world economy. The industrial revolution intensified these developments, sparking what Karl Polanyi (1957, p. 89) called an “indomitable surge toward a planetary economy” (more on Polanyi in Chap. 8). In the two centuries since the industrial revolution, the world economy has grown by a factor of 70 or 80. This massive process, where both population and per capita production and consumption have increased exponentially, has not only had physical consequences on a planetary scale but also compressed time and space. Interconnectedness has intensified through value chains, the overlap between different national jurisdictions, networks of informational and financial exchange, the regional and global formation of aggregate efficient demand, and so on. Intertwined processes change the meaning of space and the nature of the world system and society, generating new relations of dependency and power. Although not all processes can or should be reduced to political economy, global political economy forms a complex, dynamic mega-process, in which states and other actors are tightly interwoven and in which a large variety of issues arise. For instance, already the nineteenth-century rise of international organisations was a response to this interconnectedness. The evolvements of the peace problematic were part of the same complex. The First World War indicated how the wide-scale application of industrial technology to warfare has given collective actors an unprecedented ability to harm one another. Modern security complexes can arise from various political economy processes also more directly (Adler & Barnett, 1998; Chang, 2016). The same is true of the causes of environmental problems. Transnational and global environmental problems, including climate change, are outcomes of the processes of industrialisation and economic growth. Processes are open-ended and flowing, with one process capable of sliding into another, and with smaller processes combining to form larger processes. Entities such as states are not only products and manifestations of processes, but they are also relational, and nearly all relevant relations concern political economy directly or indirectly. In the late twentieth and early twenty-first century, the world economy has been grounded on cooperative institutional arrangements revolving around “free trade” and related ideas, but its dynamics can generate contradictions and instigate conflicts. The successive expansion of the area of “free trade” has constituted a movement from the classical international trade of material goods (in Ricardo’s

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classical example, with only two goods, wine, and clothes) to far-reaching liberalisation and de-regulation and, subsequently, neoliberal re-regulation of the economy. The failure of the WTO Doha round that started in 2001 and aimed at continuing this process can be explained in a variety of ways. The previous eight rounds of GATT/WTO negotiations were able to come to successful conclusions because of the domination of the US, and later the US and EU, enabling those two trading entities to get most of what they wanted into each successive agreement. Among other things, this all-encompassing definition of “trade” implies a demand to establish transnationally valid private property rights in many areas where they have never existed before; as well as sweeping programmes of privatisation. Apart from trade and property rights, the world economy is regulated in the areas of finance, investments, corporations and securities, telecommunications, transportation, labour standards, food, and the environment (Braithwaite & Drahos, 2000). While many of the most central international organisations originate in WWII or its immediate aftermath, particularly the UN system and the Bretton Woods institutions, a very substantial amount of new regulations have been negotiated in the subsequent decades. Since the failure of the Doha round, however, a widespread perception has emerged that global governance is in a state of decline. Thomas Hale et al. (2013) formulate this perception in the form of questions: “why global cooperation is failing when we need it most?”; “why is a state of ‘gridlock’ increasingly characteristic of international negotiations and organizations?”. In a follow-up book, they summarise the situation in the 2010s: [M]ultilateral institutions had stalled across issue domains ranging from the Copenhagen climate summit, to the Doha trade round, to the inability to agree effective financial regulation in the wake of the 2008–9 crisis. (Hale & Held, 2017, p. 3).

In the early twenty-first century and in the context of deepening and self-reinforcing interdependency, the global system is drifting into increasing uncertainty. As a consequence, different functional areas of governance seem ever more likely to involve cataclysms that in turn feed into a wider crisis that can affect life chances and life expectancies of people all over the world. The fact that common problems arise from shared processes does not mean that actors involved in those processes can resolve the emergent problems adequately. The knowledge or conditions for resolving some relevant or pressing problems may be absent or the actors who would know how to resolve them are powerless to do so. Alternatively, common problems are resolved in a unilateral and one-sided way, until power relations change and it becomes more difficult to make binding decisions. The capacity to make binding decisions depends in turn on the way the whole is organised. Hale et al. (2013) combine these and other explanations in trying to make sense of the decline of global governance. Table 7.1 summarises their argument, which consists of four interrelated parts: growing multipolarity, harder problems, institutional lock-in, and fragmentation. These are in part consequences of previous, successful attempts to cooperate multilaterally. Hale et al. are not claiming that these provide a full explanation or that these are the only drivers of

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Table 7.1  Pathways to “gridlock” in global governance and their mechanisms Pathway Growing multipolarity

Institutional lock-in Harder problems Fragmentation

Mechanisms 1 Increased transaction costs 2 Exacerbated legitimacy dilemma 3 Divergence of interests 1 Formal lock-in of decision-making authority 2 Entrenchment of cognitive and organisational focal points 1 Extensity: Scope of problems has increased 2 Intensity: Problems penetrate more deeply into societies 1 Increased transaction costs 2 Inefficient division of labour 3 Excessive flexibility

Source: Hale et al. (2013, p. 35)

governance outcomes in each issue area. “Rather, we argue that this basket of factors is responsible for many of the governance failures we see today, and that it is not possible to understand outcomes in each issue area without appreciating the role that these broad, general trends play” (Hale et al., 2013, p. 10). They provide a partial explanation in terms of changing circumstances and second-order problems that arise from the cooperative processes themselves. The four pathways to “gridlock” can also be conceived in terms of increasing complexity. System’s complexity and its tendency to generate uncertainty are connected (see Rebout et al., 2021).2 Since WWII, the world system has become more diverse in terms of the number of system elements (more sovereign states, some of them rapidly growing “emerging economies”, and other actors) and the number of categories of these elements and their relational positionings. These elements and their positionings vary more than before (for example, the rise of BRICS countries and changing and shifting country groupings). Both growing multipolarity and fragmentation of governance systems have complicated processes and made them “excessively flexible” and more costly to the actors. Deepening interconnectedness and the consequences of economic growth and technological developments have increased the scope of world-scale problems and intensified them and their effects on everyday life. All this has happened in the context of institutional inertia. The UN system is a case in point. Despite the changing circumstances and increasing complexity, the privileges given to the winners of WWII still dominate the  It is difficult if not impossible to measure complexity in quantitative terms. As Rebout et  al. (2021, p. 2) write, “[l]ike beauty or structure, complexity lies in part in the eye of the beholder, somewhere between order and randomness, which makes it difficult to define in an absolute sense”. They nonetheless develop a quantitative complexity index involving three major dimensions: (1) diversity based on the number of system elements and the number of categories of these elements; (2) flexibility which bears upon variations in the elements; and (3) combinability which refers to the patterns of connection between elements. The basic idea is that the more complex the system is, the less predictable its outcomes are (however, they do not define uncertainty and fail to discuss the difference between risk and uncertainty). While these may capture important aspects of complexity and can be assessed also in the context of systems of global governance, there is no way we can calculate numerical complexity indices for global governance systems. 2

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organisation and its decision-making. The entrenchment of leading states and cognitive and organisational focal points undermine the self-transformative capacity of these contexts. Moreover, the pathways overlap and interact and thereby either mutually reinforce each other or generate emergent effects that are greater than the sum of their parts, erecting further barriers to cooperation. Some of the historical details of the gridlock explanation can be contested. For example, Hale et al. (2013, p. 40) claim that “the end of the Cold War removed […] strict ordering of interests and the relatively easy bargaining it facilitated”. As discussed in Chap. 6, the idea that the Cold War (1947–1991) was peaceful and stable is an illusion stemming from hindsight bias. This idea also overlooks various proxy and other wars in the global south. It is equally important that the UN system was not particularly capable of making important decisions—oftentimes it was “gridlocked” also during the Cold War. While it can be argued that the end of the Cold War has increased the diversity of purposes, identities, and interests, it is hard to assess the validity of this claim. In some ways at least, the concurrent process of neoliberalisation has meant homogenisation in many dimensions (Patomäki, 2009, 2021). The “pathways to gridlock” perspective suggests that the absence of adequate institutions tends to exacerbate common problems, weaken cooperation, and further entrench the gridlock. The possibilities thus generated include “a return to great power rivalry” (Hale et al., 2013, p. 275). In other words, global problems left unresolved may exacerbate those very problems as well as generate social conflicts. As the global system is drifting into increasing uncertainty, various cataclysms become more likely. What this analysis suggests in terms of complexity theory and openness of systems is that uncertainty can be problematic and some aspects of complexity harmful. The point of many social organisations is to arrange social activities in a manner that generates some closure and thus also regularity, predictability, and control. These powers can be used for a wide variety of purposes, for anything from mere coordination of actions to manipulation of subjects. Whether these purposes are justified or legitimate must be assessed separately from the relative degree of complexity or openness. The achieved closure is not similar to the one achieved in laboratory experiments, it is of a “spurious kind”, yet implies some predictability, even though change is a constitutive characteristic of human societies (Danermark et al., 2002, p. 68 et passim). In effect, Hale et al. (2013, p. 303) argue that what is needed is less complexity. Global governance has neither been representative nor sufficiently coordinated and thus needs reform: “Breaking through gridlock cannot be achieved without representative and effective global governance institutions that have the capacity to create credible regulatory frameworks and to invest directly in the provision of global public goods and the mitigation of global public bads”. The analysis must be appropriately nuanced, however. Complexity has different dimensions and they do not always go hand in hand. When things and relations at a prior level of organisation are combined to generate emergent powers and properties, and thus a new entity and relations (see Volk, 2017), complexity in one sense increases; while at the same time, some things become more regular and uncertainty in those regards decreases.

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The purpose of global social organisation may be to reduce the diversity of possible and likely outcomes, especially through reducing global public bads. Moreover, to the extent that flexibility is part of the definition of complexity (see note 2), and to the extent that democratic representativeness means flexibility (compared to hierarchical forms of organisation), possibly indicating self-transformative capacity of the organisation, the achievement of some closure and thus also regularity is compatible with increased complexity in some dimensions. A detailed analysis of dimensions of complexity must be context-sensitive. In any case, from a post-Deutschian perspective, we can see how functionally adequate and capable common institutions can at least sometimes form a part of the resolution of common problems and related conflicts.

 Deeper Problem: Disintegrative Tendencies A and Contradictions in Global Political Economy The “pathways to gridlock” perspective suggests that the current gridlock—a dynamic process involving the potential for further conflict escalation—is to an important degree an unintended second-order effect of the liberal institution-­ building that occurred during World War II and its aftermath. Yet this is at best only a partial explanation of the world-historical situation in the 2020s. Indeed, in this section, I argue that the problem is deeper and involves disintegrative tendencies and the role of contradictions in the global political economy (Patomäki, 2018, 2022, chs. 7 and 8). The dynamic processes of the world economy shape conditions everywhere. States and other actors participate in bringing about and steering global political economy processes in various, but often short-sighted, counterproductive, and contradictory ways. Capitalist market economy tend to be unstable and crisisand conflict-prone. Liberals associate the capitalist market economy with growth, rising standards of living, rising productivity, and ever-improving health, but it can as well be associated with war-like competition, turbulence, uneven developments, and rising inequalities (Shaikh, 2016). Both types of effects have been shaped by the fact that  most real-world economies have been mixed (with private, public, and cooperative elements), in part as a result of waves of constructing markets and protecting society from the adverse effects of those markets (Polanyi, 1957; see Chap. 8). But whatever the prevailing institutional and ideological cluster in a given world-­ economic context, there is no a priori reason to  assume some sort of equilibrating process through negative feedback loops and preclude positive feedback loops and self-reinforcing processes (Pierson, 2004). The Bretton Woods system lasted from 1944 to 1973. The subsequent system has been characterised by a particular political project of globalisation that has revolved around the ideal of competitive markets. Free-market-oriented policies and related processes (e.g. commodification and reconstitution of forms of agency through reregulations) have released and strengthened various mechanisms that are typical to the capitalist market economy. For example, the world economy has been characterised by oscillations with increasing amplitude. Volatility has risen, especially in

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finance. The financial crisis of 2008–2009 was the most serious in the world economy since the 1930s and 1940s. As a result of these developments, overall per capita rates of growth have gradually declined especially in the OECD world, though the world economy is still growing; inequalities have risen within most countries and in some ways between countries; the “normal” rate of unemployment has risen, and work has become increasingly precarious. Many economic developments consist of chains of reactions in which supply induces demand and vice versa; these tend to become self-reinforcing both up- and downward. An increase in demand can lead to investments and higher productivity, creating a virtuous circle. Feedback loops can be positive also because of increasing returns (economies of scale). A consequence of increasing returns is that firms tend to get bigger and more dominant over time, in the context of developments whereby some industries expand and others decline in the world economy (Kaldor, 1972). In a like manner, technological asymmetries can be self-reinforcing, implying for the peripheral countries that their exports are concentrated in a few commodities with low income-elasticity of the demand and, often, declining terms of trade. In the absence of policies stimulating demand and realising structural change, peripheral countries can be barred from industrial development and are susceptible to facing recurring problems of external balance and debt (Cimoli & Porcile, 2011). A capitalist market economy involves manifold paradoxes and contradictions, which are closely related to the composition of the whole—especially to the fallacy of composition—and processes of cumulative causation. A paradox is a statement that is seemingly contradictory or opposed to common sense and yet is perhaps true. In economic theory, a paradox is a conclusion that seems to go against common sense but upon closer inspection turns out to be perfectly sensible. Economic theory since Keynes contains many apparent paradoxes, which are only so because they clash with certain everyday intuitions, which are often shared by liberal economic theory (see O’Hara, 1999, pp. 829–32; Lavoie, 2009, pp. 91–6, 110–11, 117–19). For example, the urge to reduce firms’ costs may be contradictory. The managers of firms tend to assume that cutting wages will increase profits and perhaps make it possible to hire more staff, which would improve employment levels. But if many employers follow this strategy at the same time, the overall consumption levels of wage earners will plummet, with a consequent drastic reduction in demand. Economic paradoxes, in general, arise when the aggregate effect of many individual actions of a similar kind has an effect that is more or less the exact opposite of what was intended. Because the whole is more than, and different from, the sum of its parts, a contradiction can arise from individual (including state) actions that are negligent about their overall or collective effects. Even a single actor can sometimes be large enough for producing similar effects. State expenditure has a strong effect on the aggregate demand of the economy. Paradoxes and contradictions, together with the composition of whole and cumulative causation, are highly relevant for understanding and explaining the dynamics and crises of the capitalist market economy. The dynamics of capitalist investment and growth are cyclical but in a non-regular manner. Up to a certain point, there is a spiral upward (growth phase), but when the turn comes, the same mechanisms start moving in the opposite direction (recession or depression, accompanied by high levels of unemployment).

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The contradictions of the global political economy can co-explain why states are unable to solve common problems. States’ attempts to be more “competitive” or “secure” than other states, or to have balanced budgets or ensure long-term fiscal sustainability, can result in self-defeating outcomes. The compositional fallacy occurs when it is assumed that what is possible for a single given actor at a given time is possible for all of them simultaneously.3 For instance, trade deficits and surpluses cancel each other out, so not all or most states may be simultaneously running surpluses. Countries with trade surpluses tend to accumulate savings surpluses, whereas countries with trade deficits tend to accumulate debt, resulting in global imbalances. Simultaneous attempts by all or most states to improve their trade balance tend to be contradictory. The likely overall result of such a goal is a reduction in effective aggregate demand in the world economy as a whole, affecting negatively most parts including in terms of rising levels of unemployment. What is more, existing international organisations—consider the cases of EMU and IMF—can be geared towards strengthening the contradiction. This in turn may lead to a spiral of responses that can aggravate the original problem, especially at the time of downturns and crises in the world economy. Short-sighted concerns over competitiveness can also override the potential for environmental cooperation. A similar analysis can be applied, mutatis mutandis, to issues of security. Real-world contradictions are not categorical because whether the contradicting forces cancel each other out—or whether one force, in the end, annuls the other— depends on contingent circumstances. It is possible for states to try to export their economic problems to other states by various means (e.g. through corporate tax competition), or even control exclusively conceived raw material sources and markets by imperial means, but if sufficient numbers of them attempt to do so simultaneously the result is a fallacy of composition, which tends to feed conflicts among states and other actors.4 This kind of problem-generating process can be deepened by uncertainty about the future and by boom-and-bust cycles in finance (Kindleberger, 2000; Minsky, 2008). Moreover, differences in demand problems can aggravate the unevenness of developments—long-run growth divergences across countries or regions. This is because processes of uneven growth in the world economy involve not only vicious but also virtuous circles of cumulative causation. Sustained uneven growth is likely to result in major imbalances in trade and finance, as can be seen, for example, from the US-China disputes over terms of trade and currency rates since the 2000s. Short-sighted and contradictory ways of responding to the existing and emerging problems of the world economy are both the cause and effect of those problems. The process tends to reinforce itself, partly because dynamics lead to political changes within and across states, often deepening and entrenching myopic self-regarding  For a general philosophical account of the fallacies of composition and division, see Rescher (2006, ch. 5); for an analytical social-theoretical account, see Elster (1978, pp. 97–106); and as applied to economic theory and global political economy, Patomäki (2013, chs. 2 and 8). 4  This is what J.M. Keynes realized already during the Versailles negotiations and developed more systematically during the World War II. For an excellent exposition, see Markwell (2006). 3

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orientations. Many mechanisms can work towards this. For instance, volatile public opinion responds to changing conditions, shaping state and other responses towards a more myopic and self-regarding direction. Rising unemployment, widening social disparities, and increasing uncertainty and dependence can generate existential insecurity among the citizenry. Economic downturns and crises can threaten identity, as not only one’s earnings but also one’s social worth, rights, and duties are tied to a position as an employee, owner, etc. Economic problems can endanger social integration (Habermas, 1988, pp. 20–31) and result in regressive ethical-political learning. Given characteristic difficulties and pathologies of socialisation in a complex market society, and related crises of embodied personality, the blend of capitalist world markets and separate national states involve great potential for increasingly antagonistic social relations. Most drastic turndowns or rises in unemployment or precariousness do not bring about revolutions or wars, but they do increase the proclivity to an escalation of conflicts, and this proclivity may actualise if there are enough other forces and processes pushing developments in the same direction (Patomäki, 2018, ch. 3). It is a plausible hypothesis that the self-reinforcing negative dynamics of the world economy explains in large part why the world has been reverting to nationalist statism, militarised conflicts, and arms races (see below for elaboration). Especially since the global financial crisis of 2008–9, the world has been reverting to nationalist statism, militarised conflicts, and arms races, apparently assembling the conditions for a global military catastrophe. A global military catastrophe does not need to happen, but it has become more likely.

 he Problem of Fixed Identities and Hard Will: Deutsch T and beyond The resolution of common problems and overcoming contradictions requires learning and the development of consciousness. This is a social process: since only agents in social relations can carry out context transformations, the conditions for individual self-transcendence and collective context transformation evolve together as part of the relevant context. To stress, contexts differ in their openness to change and this is crucial for the emergence and maintenance of a security community. Successful cooperation builds trust and other conditions for a pluralistic security community, while such a community, once in existence, can facilitate (further) institutional changes, including “amalgamation” in Deutsch’s sense. A lot hinges upon the structures and character of agency. A form of agency characterised by a hard will—connected also to the preparedness to use violence—is typically based on the necessitarian assumption about the unchangeable essence of oneself (members of the community) and relevant others (outsiders). Any sense of identity or community can develop and harden into a will that expects others to comply. Deutsch’s works (especially, Deutsch, 1966) provide preliminary conceptual resources for analysing this problematic. We live in a largely literate and partly secularised world, where actors are endowed with reflective consciousness and at

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least some degree of reflexivity. Even in simple game-like situations, interests must be recognised as such (ibid., p. 52). Actors operating in real-world contexts have multiple purposes (ibid., p. 59), which are dynamic through goal-changing feedback and learning that involves “internal rearrangements”. Learning capacity can be defined in terms of the range of available rearrangements (ibid., p.  92). Human agents and collective actors can learn not only superficially, in terms of first-order aims and means, but also more fundamentally by revising their inner structures including “relative preferences and priorities in the reception, screening, and routing of all signals entering the network from outside or originating within it” (ibid., p.  94). Human agents can monitor the monitoring of their performances and are capable of commenting upon them. The higher-order purposes too are, in principle, revisable. While types and forms of agency are formed through communication and learning in changing historical social contexts, the plasticity of actors varies. Actors are self-determining to the extent that they act out of their “character”—including their multilayered purposes and identity involving constructed interests—which they have formed through historical experiences. Their character is not a simple cumulative sum of their experiences. Rather the formative processes are selective. Only some aspects and parts of all the flows make it to the level of consciousness, whether we are talking about human actors (most mental operations are subconscious) or collective actors that deal with vast amounts of information, only some of which is screened, selected, processed, and made available for those involved in the will-­ formation of the organisation. The problem lies in the likelihood of processes that generate a closure of the character. Closure implies that if feedback and learning still have some limited capacity of being goal-changing, they only do so in a manner that reinforces or even deepens the already existing character and will. On a more negative side, this indicates the possibility of pathological and regressive developments. In Chap. 5, I argued that the self-transformative capacity of contexts is not compatible with reifications and naturalisations of others, or social realities more generally. Both conversions make social actors and realities appear unchanging and beyond human influence. They can contribute to a closure of the character by fixing in mind those relations that are constitutive of oneself and one’s character. Through illusions and mystifications, actors and social realities may be misrecognised as something they are not. Conversely, the denaturalisation of understandings and other reverse operations can contribute to the openness and responsiveness of human agents, organisations, and communities. More generally, actors’ openness to otherness and fundamental learning in terms of revising their inner structures and multilayered purposes promote the self-transformative capacity of the relevant contexts—up to a point. Deutsch (1966, p. 95) stresses the possibility of inconsistencies and related phenomena such as conflicts and indecision: [S]ince the net acquires its preferences through a process of history, its “values” need not all be consistent with each other. They may form circular configurations of preference, which later may trap some of the impulses of the net in circular pathways of frustration.

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Since the human nervous network is complex, it remains subject to the possibilities of conflicts, indecision, jamming, and circular frustration.

Complete openness to new experiences and learning implies the lack of any character and will. Arguably, the lack of character and will can work in the same way as inconsistencies, resulting, for example, in indecision or frustration and these may also aggravate problems or conflicts. This line of reasoning seems to point towards the conclusion that some degree of closure is needed for functionally adequate forms of human agency—similar to organisations and systems of global governance. As not all complexity is good, neither is all openness desirable. Nuanced and context-sensitive analyses are required to assess when a degree of closure—necessary for self-determination but can become constitutive of a will—starts to become counterproductive. From this perspective, selfhood, character, and autonomy are relational and processual, and thus systems of limited autonomy can become nested in wider systems of limited autonomy, and so on (ibid., p. 208). Deutschian analysis is a good point of departure for analysing complex systems of communication and learning, though it is not grounded in an adequate social ontology (cf. Patomäki, 2002, ch. 4; Patomäki, 2020). Deutsch’s conceptualisation lacks constitutive rules, internal relations, positioned practices, structural power, and political economy. Agency can be shaped by transforming the taken-for-granted background and related expectations and regulations. When actors, who are positioned in asymmetric power relations, utilise, invent, or innovate resources—normally to grasp or change the world—in the course of social interaction, they also produce discursive knowledge, techniques, practical knowledge, and skills, which can (re-)constitute internal social relations and identities. The consequent effects may be unintentional. For instance, building a risk-taking resilient subject—a subject that easily adapts to changing circumstances—is likely a response to the downsizing and erosion of public responsibilities and the continuing turmoil of capitalist market society (for example, Chandler & Reid, 2016). The post-Bretton Woods political project that can be labelled as neoliberalism (a contested concept, Patomäki, 2009) or market globalism (Steger, 2019, ch. 4), based on the ideal of self-adjusting competitive markets, has succeeded in transforming social contexts through agency, practices, and institutions (Chap. 8). This has had far-reaching effects, some of them explicit (e.g. consumers and customers replace voters, citizens, and students), some of them more tacit or implicit (e.g. the erosion of norms, values, and non-­instrumental knowledge). Moreover, the prevailing economic and social policies have had various causal effects such as rising inequalities, progressively more insecure terms of employment, and recurring economic crises. Such developments tend to generate existential insecurity and threaten identity, which may result—through social-psychological and other mechanisms—in regressive or pathological ethical-political learning. When these kinds of effects dominate, we should expect to see various degrees of closures in human agents and organisations, affecting also interstate relations. To reiterate, the combination of a capitalist world economy and separate national states tends to instigate antagonistic relations.

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 he Dialectic Among Three Logics of Identities in the Early T Twenty-First Century Closures of communication in the Deutschian sense ensue from actual processes of interaction and related cognitive, social-psychological, etc., mechanisms. Closures may also be inherent to layers of particular geohistorical epistemes. By adopting particular epistemes or structures of meaning and knowledge circulated in some social practices, actors may become entangled in closures involving fixed identities and hard will. From this perspective, and by way of illustration, I provide a sketch of dialectic among three prevailing logics of identities in the 2010s and 2020s. The first is market globalism (neoliberalism), which is a doctrine that frames and interprets social problems through theories of well-functioning price mechanisms in competitive markets and related ideals such as efficiency, freedom, and justice.5 This doctrine, which has largely but by no means exclusively been based on mainstream economics, includes variations and changes over time, yet the general thrust has been that problems identified within this framework can be resolved by expanding the scope of competitive markets (some political philosophers such as Friedrich Hayek and many conservative politicians have also stressed the role of traditional morals, often focussing on the family). Further ideas include: democracy must be limited to respect the liberal “free-market” boundaries of state intervention. The existence of a market requires the establishment of private ownership—private property is often taken as a sacrosanct cornerstone of society6—and commodification. While this supports outsourcing, privatisation, and the idea that markets are self-regulating (unless externalities or exceptional circumstances dominate), the

 Neoliberalism has been based more on the technical models of neoclassical economics than on the political philosophies of Hayek, Friedman, and other Mont-Pelerians. Economics education teaches “perfect competition” as a prototype of capitalist market economy, even if only as a constituent of a two-dimensional contrast space. This prototype moulds perceptions, framings, and interpretations. It should be noted though that economics incorporates New Keynesianism; not all mainstream economists have professed (only) neoliberal solutions; and a few have even become vocal critics of neoliberalism. On the other hand, while public intellectuals such as Hayek and Friedman were also political philosophers, by training they were professional economists—as were Frank Knight, Ludwig von Mises, George Stigler, and many others associated with the Mont Pelerin Society. Their political arguments presuppose the idea of well-functioning price mechanism, however conceived, as the foundation of self-regulating competitive markets. 6  In trying to justify private property, philosophers such Robert Nozick (1974) appeal to what is “natural” and use loaded ways of posing the question, implying that private property rights are universally and categorically valid independently of real-historical social processes. Most economists have been more inspired by the theory of general equilibrium, which can be read as an attempt to demonstrate mathematically that private property rights lead inevitably, through competitive markets, to an outcome that is optimal for all participants concerned. David Graeber and David Wengrow (2021, p. 66), however, see the sacrosanctness of private property more historically: “The European conception of individual freedom, in contrast, was tied ineluctably to notions of private property. Legally, this association traces back above all to the power of the male household head in ancient Rome, who could do whatever he liked with his chattels and possessions, including his children and slaves”. 5

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basic idea can be broadened through a wide range of analogical and metaphorical shifts of meaning. Economics is usually equated with the methodologies of mathematical modelling and statistical analysis (econometrics). At the core of economics is the “optimisation under constraints” approach. Economics has disciplinary effects functioning both internally and externally (Gueldry, 2015), while especially the external effects are at the heart of economics imperialism (Mäki, 2009). Market globalism is concomitant with the episteme of economics and from its standpoint—which functions among other things as a powerful system of control, reward, and punishment—it is difficult to see differences in social contexts or among purposes and identities of actors. At an abstract level, everything is always the same. People and individual-­ like collective actors have “preferences”, optimise under constraints, and respond uniformly to incentives no matter who or what they are.7 Different forms of agency are largely reduced to one basic scheme and thus misrecognised. As a transformative political programme, this episteme has performative and constitutive effects. It shapes contexts and thereby actor categories and forms of subjectivity, including in terms of metaphorical extensions of the idea of competitive markets (for example, New Public Management applied to public organisations). Moreover, market globalisation tends to have manifold causal consequences, many of them unintended. This episteme is capable of learning in terms of first-order aims and means, but only to a rather limited degree beyond that, not least because it tends to be indifferent if not intolerant and hostile towards other epistemes. How prone to antagonism and authoritarianism is neoliberal thinking? Although Friedrich Hayek  (2001, p.  143), for example, criticised demagogy based on the category of the enemy, there is, for one thing, a tendency to construct “collectivists” as enemies of freedom. This feeds into populist imaginaries of antagonisms. If we look at the wider purposes constituted within this episteme, we can see that these purposes include particular preferences for political order (Patomäki, 2020, pp. 119–123). The most preferred order is a combination of constitutionally limited democracy and “free markets” within a state, although some neoliberal philosophers such as Milton Friedman or Hayek have perceived authoritarianism in certain circumstances as indispensable, albeit only as a temporary step to prevent a slide to collectivism and to preserve freedom. Nonetheless, while a significant part of mainstream economics (for example, general equilibrium theory, public choice theory) is in line with neoliberal political theory, and while parts of economic theory have evident anti-democratic implications (for example, Arrow’s impossibility theorem has been widely used against democracy; Mackie, 2009), most economists are likely not comfortable with a resort to temporary authoritarianism. What is

 This is the standard scheme, but there are various modifications. Behavioural economics distinguishes between the abstract optimisation-rationality and regular patterns of actual human behaviour. Currently popular empirical microeconomics relies on quasi-experimental techniques, including natural and randomized controlled experiments, and claims to be largely theory-free as an approach, although it presupposes the atomism of closed systems and although its explanatory concepts are theory-laden and derived from the corpus of mainstream economics. 7

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nonetheless notable in terms of (explaining the lack of) self-transformative capacity of the early twenty-first-century institutions is the idea that global arrangements can be used to insulate private property and free markets from sovereign states and from potentially dangerous democratic demands (see Slobodian, 2018). Concurrently, the goal has also been to safeguard state sovereignty to ensure exit options for individuals and capital and encourage governments to compete for capital by providing “business-friendly” policies (Harmes, 2012). In other words, neoliberalism aims at locking in particular kinds of institutional arrangements. This is in line with, and can in some part explain, the gridlock of global governance in various functional areas (see, e.g., Hopewell, 2016 on trade). Market globalism can acknowledge neither identity-constituting differences nor the significance of socio-economic privileges, although many aspects of globalisation are possible only to the best-educated and wealthiest. The wealthy and powerful may celebrate market globalism, but this becomes a source of resentment for many, especially if they experience increasingly uncertain living conditions and existential insecurity. Causal outcomes such as inequalities, increasingly insecure terms of employment, and economic crises generate concerns and anxieties in everyday life but unevenly, subject to various asymmetries.8 The concerns and anxieties of everyday life can be mobilised for antagonistic politics, mostly in terms of frames, categories, metaphors, and myths that have been sedimented into the deep structures of national and/or religious imaginary (Patomäki, 2018, chs. 2–4; Patomäki, 2020; on the role of religion, see Appendix). The second is nationalist-authoritarian populism. The global financial crisis of 2007–8 was a world-history saddle point, inducing stasis and regression. Populist mobilisations have relied on and exploited frames, categories, metaphors, and myths that have been sedimented into the deep structures of national and religious imaginary, from where they are drawn for multilayered purposes. Although anti-elitism can generate calls for more direct democracy (e.g. referenda), populism involves tendencies towards closure of character and hard will. Usually, the concept of people (which tends to be exclusionary even within a given state) is equated with the primordial nation and the exclusively defined people-nation unity is then, in turn,  These asymmetries assume different constellations in different parts of the world economy. For example, deindustrialisation shapes many parts of the world economy, but unevenly across local contexts. Furthermore, several post-neoliberal contexts exhibit what could be called a reverse version of “asynchronous modernisation”. Populism rises in contexts where mass participation in politics and mass mobilisation of people are feasible, but where the habits and mentalities and well-organized institutions such as trade unions and political parties that correspond to “the advanced stages of modern democratic politics” have eroded and become less trusted (for discussion and sources, Patomäki, 2020, 110–114). A further asymmetry concerns educated well-off groups vs. dominated groups. Neoliberalism includes the idea that globalisation leads gradually to the equalisation of circumstances, wages, and working conditions across the planet. On this basis, the lower and middle classes of high-income countries are often told that they must make sacrifices. Dominated groups who find that socio-economic conditions have changed making life more insecure, and who anticipate that globalisation requires them to make further sacrifices, turn against “elites”—including “modernised”, pro-globalisation social-democratic parties (for details, Patomäki, 2020, pp. 115–121). 8

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connected to the idea of people’s sovereignty or something equivalent. These and other moves tend to lead to the denial of the legitimacy of political opponents, toleration or encouragement of violence, readiness to curtail the civil liberties of opponents, including media, and rejection of the democratic rules of the game (Levitsky & Ziblatt, 2018, pp. 23–24). The charismatic central figure of a successful populist movement is liable to become an authoritarian state leader or an autocrat. The rise of nationalist-authoritarian populism deepens the gridlock of global governance. Attempts at forging the unity of “the people” through negativity not only imply anti-elitism but frequently take also the form of othering and enemy construction. All this and much else provide fertile ground for generic sense-making narratives about the wider world-historical context, from national grievances about some past or present wrongdoings by others, to conspiracy theories and accounts of eschatological clashes of civilisations. Even in moderate versions of nationalism, the tendency to follow myopic self-regarding policies in the interstate field tends to make cooperation more difficult and increase the likelihood of conflicts and their securitisation (Patomäki, 2015). The ensuing processes may end up in cataclysms that in turn feed into a wider crisis. Hence, it seems that the second-order problems arising from the cooperative processes themselves are less important than the disintegrative tendencies and the role of political economy contradictions in explaining the decline of global governance and the “gridlock” obstructing paths of cooperation. The third logic of identity involves higher levels of reflexivity, built on layers of capacities. This logic appears more conducive to overcoming the gridlock and developing wider purposes, which likely involve global institutions. All reflectively conscious agents and organisations can exhibit some goal-changing feedback and learning that may lead to internal rearrangements in Deutschian terminology. All actors are sense-making and tell stories. Studies of simple game-like situations (such as Prisoner’s Dilemma, PD)9 show that actors “reflectively explore their historically developing situations, and frequently (re)construct their social relationships and (eventually multi-move) strategies as the game proceeds, until a stable pattern of play, based on mutually supporting interpretations, has developed” (Alker, 1996, p. 320). This is a cognitive process that involves redefining situations on the basis of comparisons with previously experienced or known situations. The past situations exist as richly described incidents in individual and collective memory. These incidents are typically structured as sequences of action, as narratives, the elements of which are selected and linked together by causal and intentional connectives to yield a plausible ordering or configuring. Actors’ capacity for story-telling is dependent on the context and level of consciousness. For example, actors can develop cooperative goals more easily in the iterated PD as a result of a recognition of each other’s behaviour as communication of motives, intentions, and  The prisoner’s dilemma refers to a game-theoretical model in which individual utility maximisation appears to be self-defeating, or at least contradictory to some kind of social or collective rationality. Various “market failures” and systems of subordination have been analysed in terms of this model, but it has had numerous other applications; the “tragedy of global commons”, as well as interstate insecurity, arms races, crisis bargaining, etc. 9

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expectations. What is more, PDs are more easily resolved when the game is redefined as a problem for moral discourse that resembles certain ideal conditions (recognition of equality, free expression, sufficient time, etc.). This accords, at least in part, with the Vicoan idea that a narrative can become true (verum ipsum factum) when it is lived by people in their practices and institutions—even though social meaning and identity are constituted by actors’ multiple and often clashing interpretative perspectives, and although unintended consequences often dominate. Market globalism and nationalist-authoritarian populism too encompass narratives. However, a reflexive project of identity is not content with some inherited or “primordial”, tradition-based, technical, or economistic identity, but tries actively and consciously to reflect on, monitor, and occasionally shape one’s identity, purposes, and interests. Reflexivity can include individual or collective self-­development through increased knowledge about the way natural, personal, and social systems function. Reflexivity has a temporal dimension: a reflexive actor is aware that narrative integrates a reconstructed past, perceived present, and imagined future. Identities and purposes can be multiple, context-bound, and nested (e.g. Deutsch, 1966, pp.  92–93, distinguishes between four overlapping orders of purposes, see below). Different narratives can combine purposes in various ways. Awareness of these possibilities raises normative questions, which I discuss in the next section. In the early twenty-first century, it has been common to conceptualise the logic of reflexive identity in terms of the “struggle for recognition” (derived from Hegel, Honneth, 1996; cf. Wendt, 2003; for a discussion, Chap. 10). Citizens seek recognition for some differences that have hitherto not been recognised in terms of either (1) rights and law or (2) substantial solidarity. These kinds of struggles will continue to diversify claims and open up new possibilities. To the extent that these claims and possibilities can be confined to the private sphere, they may be compatible with the economic liberalism of market globalism. Claims for recognition can, and typically do, politicise market globalism, in particular in terms of problematising its characteristic privileges and inequalities. There are other ways of organising democracy and relations of production and exchange. This logic of identity is reflexive to the extent that it is based on active monitoring of the general relationship between socio-economic equality, freedom, and identity. Honneth advocates experimentation involving different combinations of institutional arrangements and mechanisms in contexts shaped by transnational power relations and global interconnectedness. Reflexive attempts to avoid heteronomy and alienation require a globalist consciousness. In Chap. 8, I will discuss this under the rubric of holoreflexivity.

 eflexivity, Self-Other Relations, and the Ethical Circle R of Non-violence Deutsch (1966, pp. 92–93; see also pp. 128–142) distinguishes between four overlapping and nested orders of purposes. A first-order purpose is an immediate goal of some sort. The means of achieving this goal or the goal itself can be adjusted in terms of feedback that at the simplest level can be understood in terms of

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satisfaction, punishments, and rewards, while these are not necessarily “material” but can assume more abstract forms, for example, in line with Maslow’s hierarchy of needs10 or through causal and moral learning. Higher-order purposes are linked to reflexive self-regulation. A second-order purpose concerns internal monitoring and forming of the self that makes first-order purposes possible. This requires memory and knowledge about how the self and its parts function. A third-order purpose is concerned with the continuation of the process development of first- and second-­ order purposes within a wider social whole that precedes an individual self and continues to exist beyond its lifetime. Finally, a fourth-order purpose is concerned with still wider processes that make purpose-seeking as such possible. To give an example, the widest layer may include purposes based on, or derived from, the Terra Hypothesis according to which the future of humanity is bound to Earth for centuries to come (Deudney 2020, p. 57; see Chap. 3). A fourth-order purpose can shape lower-level purposes. In this vein, I argued in Chap. 3 that cosmic hopefulness can facilitate attempts to build trust, solidarity, and ethical-political commitments. Ideas such as cosmic hopefulness, Big History, and the Terra Hypothesis can provide an overall framework for thinking about who “we” are, but they cannot mean abolishing cultural and historical differences. The backlash against neoliberal globalisation is indicative of possible future developments also under more cooperative circumstances. Even the most optimistic readings of Big History and related processes of temporal othering involve horizontal self-other relations here and now. The higher-order purposes and related identities do not determine the contents of lower-order purposes and identities. A possibly shared higher-order purpose and identity does not exclude incompatibilities, contradictions, or conflicts at lower levels of purpose. Evenven if every human person living at a given moment will eventually adopt a future-oriented, critical, and reflexive globalist identity of some sort (which is at best a conjectural possibility), the processes of learning and development are necessarily non-synchronous—and sedimentation to the longue durée takes time. Numerous actors would be “lagging” in the progressivist temporal axis, which they may also try to challenge and change. The disruption between the self and its background and the overall context can occur in various ways (e.g. Hardy, 2012, 131–7). Purposes and identities are defined within the evolving and complex systems of language, the layers of which involve manifold differences. The open-­ systemic historical processes of causal determination are not reducible to language, but what matters is that these causal processes can accentuate language-constituted differences into intensely and at times perhaps violently negative self-other relations. These kinds of processes  can  lead to disintegration, polarisation, and the return of violent possibilities.

 According to Abraham Maslow’s (1943) theory, human needs are organised hierarchically and range from merely physical (food, clothing, shelter, health, and safety from bodily harm) and social (the affectional ties of family and friends) to esteem (dignity, achievement, mastery as well as status, recognition, prestige) and self-actualisation (realisation of person’s potential and selffulfillment). In self-actualisation, motivation increases as needs are met. 10

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To stress, even when everyone is fully aware of the vastness of the long-term matrix of Big History and shares some planetary purposes, the smaller-scale differences are significant to everyday lives. Furthermore, closer interactions and experiences of interdependency not only create new points of contact but may also engender new points of conflict. Encounters with otherness are enmeshed with practical concerns and anxieties of everyday life and mundane things such as securing jobs under the conditions of un- or underemployment in a market-society based on wage labour. The concerns and anxieties of everyday life can be mobilised for support for antagonistic politics (activism, platforms, mobilisation, etc.). Various labels, ways of legitimisation, and myths are sedimented into the deep structures of language, from where they can be drawn also for strategic purposes. Tzvetan Todorov’s (1984) three axes of self-other relations are useful in analysing the ethical and political theoretical problem of how to deal with differences. The first axis is epistemological. What does the self know about the other? The ego can either know or be ignorant of alter’s history, identity, and purposes. Knowledge or ignorance of the other can have deep roots. From many standpoints, relevant differences are difficult to see. Answers to the questions “what is there in the social world”? and “how can and should we acquire knowledge”? enable and constrain visions and knowledge of others. There is no absolute knowledge about the self and others but an endless gradation of the lower or higher and more or less adequate states of knowledge. The axiological axis, the basis for value judgments, is at least partly independent of knowledge. The other can be seen as good/bad or superior/inferior (or perhaps something more nuanced?). Coming to know the other better can help to understand and evaluate it more positively, but more knowledge can also make the value judgement more negative. How and on what basis this judgment is made varies significantly. The “desire to grasp the unknown by means of the known” (Todorov, 1984, p. 128) often means that improved knowledge about differences makes the evaluation of the other worse, perhaps just by increasing sensitivity to these differences. Distinctions play an important role in social differentiation in the most familiar everyday contexts (Bourdieu, 2010) and these distinctions are instinctively used in evaluating also the more different or distant others. A lot depends of course on what is known—on the ego’s experiences and familiarity with frames, metaphors, and myths—and the cognitive level of ethical and political reasoning. Todorov’s third axis, the praxiological axis, has to do with rapprochement with or distancing from other’s real or imagined identities and values in practical terms. The inability to perceive relevant differences and thus otherness on the epistemological axis precludes any position on the praxeological axis. If the existence of alterity—relevant differences and otherness—is denied, the others can be only either identical (implying assimilation) or inferior (justifying submission). Both possibilities have effects of power—that is, they imply the reconstitution of social realities—and the process can involve violence. If real alterity can be perceived, a possible stance is an ethical or legal indifference based on the capacity to take distance, which is one of the potential functions of higher and especially fourth-order purposes. Moreover, the different others can be recognised as equal in terms of legal

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and other entitlements or rights, such as universal human rights. A problem is that the more precisely and comprehensively these entitlements and rights (and the possibly corresponding duties) are defined, the more this recognition is liable to making others identical, implying assimilation. Todorov writes (1984, p. 249) that “we want equality without its compelling us to accept identity; but also difference without its degenerating into superiority/inferiority”. When equality is taken to mean rights to equal participation or representation, the implied ideal of global democracy must be made compatible with ontoethical pluralism. In our complex, multilayered, and open-systemic world, uncertainty prevails. The planning of a policy or initiation of transformative action involves anticipation of possible and likely consequences but must take into account uncertainty.11 The uncertainty-inducing complexity of reality is accentuated by the range of differences amongst actors, who participate in capitalist market society and states-­ system and experience their causal effects; uncertainty is not due merely to what Hale et al. (2013) call growing multipolarity. My point here is that various manifestations of uncertainty have implications to the ethics of violence.  More specifically,  complexity and uncertainty matter from the point of view of the goal of absenting or at least minimising the role of violence. As briefly explained in the introduction, pacific-ism is a position prioritising non-violence and seeking to minimise forms of violence, including cultural violence (Galtung, 1990; cf. Derrida, 1988, pp. 112–116). Different dimensions of pacific-ism can be understood in terms of the ethical circle (Fig. 7.1.).12 This figure combines the three major approaches to ethics: virtue ethics (emphasising virtues or moral character), deontological ethics (emphasising duties or rules), and consequentialism (emphasising the consequences of actions). All three are important and must be taken into account when evaluating policies and actions. The success of achieving goals set at different orders of purposes depends to a large extent on whether the agents are capable of latching on to some tendential processes and stretching them in the desired direction (Bhaskar, 1993, p. 266). This requires that they can adequately anticipate possible and likely consequences of such activities (for discussions on the methodology of rational anticipations, see Næss, 2004, 2019; Patomäki, 2006, 2010, 2019). Uncertainty means, however, that we should expect surprises, which may be decisive, particularly when irreversible and ampliative effects dominate (Derbyshire & Morgan, 2022). Uncertainty is an important reason to stress the role of rules and virtues, instead of mere consequentialism.13 This is the case in Fig. 7.1, which focusses on the absenting of violence  Risk means a quantity that is susceptible of sufficiently accurate measurements. Uncertainty refers to unknowable future-historical developments in open systems. For different meanings of uncertainty, including epistemological and ontological chance, openness of social systems, and reflexivity of anticipations, see Patomäki (2017a, 2019). 12  Developed from the chart of ethical circle in Bhaskar (1993, p. 266). 13  This point reflects rounds of ethical discussions. For example, philosopher G. E. Moore argued that the main difficulty for ethical actions is that our knowledge about the effects of our actions and thus about the future is limited. Thus, Moore concludes, it is obligatory to follow the conventional rules of one’s society, since this will usually generate a state of greater good (especially in the form 11

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Consequences -rule: minimize (the risk of) violent consequences -uncertainty about the future

Actions shape agents and norms

Agent -virtue: non-violence -virtue: reflexivity about uncertainty

Actions -norm: no violence -the possibility of legitimate enforcement of norms

Fig. 7.1  The ethical circle of non-violence (pacific-ism)

and recognises that actions and policies can shape both actors and norms or rules. From a pacific-ist point of view, the main virtues are non-violence and reflexivity about uncertainty. Similarly, the basic norm or duty is non-violence, as in Kantian ethics reflected also in the UN Charter (“All Members shall refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state, or in any other manner inconsistent with the Purposes of the United Nations”). Whether Kant advocated categorical non-­violence in all circumstances is controversial.14 On the other hand, the loopholes of the UN Charter and its definitions of self-defence and collective security are well known.15 The ethical circle embraces the goal of minimising (the risk of) violence under the general condition of uncertainty. The circle can become virtuous when actions of social harmony) than violating them. J. M. Keynes (2008, pp. 309–310) countered that although consequences in the distant future may be unknowable, we can often distinguish between likely relatively short-term consequences of actions and we should prefer the one with preferable consequences. Apart from virtues and some rules (not necessarily the conventional ones), also consequences matter. 14  It is not controversial, however, that Kant’s theory of law justifies the use of coercion to secure the legal framework of “the Right”, in particular against those who offend against the Right by committing crimes, causing harm to others, or refusing to perform their contractual commitments (Fletcher, 1987, esp. p. 536). What is controversial is whether Kant’s international theory made any concessions to the idea of “just war”. For example, Howard Williams (2012, pp. 91–112) distinguishes between Kant’s scholarly treatise on morality and the more popular Perpetual Peace and argues that the latter is more categorical (and polemical) about the denial of any justification of war than the former, while both aim at the full prohibition of war. 15  The main loophole of the UN Charter is the right to self-defence, especially when it is interpreted in a manner that enables self-defence even when an armed attack has not actually occurred (or when it is open to interpretation whether it has occurred). This problem is aggravated by the fact that there is no supreme interpreter of international law or its applications (see Chap. 12). Moreover, collective security is a kind of asymmetric principle of deterrence based on “bandwagoning” and the principle of “all for one, one for all”. This may be different from the logic of military alliances—where the current allies may pose a threat in the future, should alliances change—and based on some sort of lasting “friendship”, but still entails widespread preparedness to use military violence (cf. Wendt, 1999, p. 106, pp. 299–306).

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strengthen the virtues and norms of non-violence and when their consequences reduce or eliminate expectations of future violence. However, the ethical circle involves ambiguity because it does not exclude—even when it shares the Deutschian caution concerning the risks of amalgamation—the possibility of legitimate enforcement of norms. Moreover, it can be argued that the goal of nonviolence implies a commitment to engage with the relevant set of common institutions. For example, it is not possible to profess the enforcement of norms or legal rules that restrict the use of force and at the same time refuse to participate in (the creation of) such common institutions that would reduce preparedness for violence (for example, through dismantling military armaments) and establish the rule of law (implying that norms are similarly applicable to everyone—no double standards). More generally, a commitment to the moral universalisability or legal validity of an international or cosmopolitan norm is inconsistent with attempts to evade participation in the relevant institutions.

 vercoming Contradictions through Learning and Building O Common Institutions Many problems and contradictions can be resolved through collective action and by revising old or building new institutions. Contradictions can arise from incorrect beliefs about how things work or from the lack of generalisability. To reiterate, the fallacy of composition is a typical but not the only form of social contradiction. For instance, contradictions can also occur at the level of social systems, if there are organising principles that work against each other. Agents, structures, and social relations change through absenting of absences, overcoming contradictions, and creating something new. This process, however cooperative, is laden with potential for conflicts at various spatial scales and also in non-territorial social contexts (defined functionally, in terms of identity, etc.). However, geo-historical processes are also laden with further potential for cooperation. The overcoming of contradictions involves learning and the development of consciousness (Patomäki, 2022, pp.  103–109). Actors must first recognise that their environment consists of other similarly concerned and (potentially) reflexive actors, interwoven in the same complex and problematic as “we”. When actors realise that others are facing the same or similar situation, the problem of organising collective actions may, in their minds, appear first as a strategic game. If the costs of initiating and organising collective action seem high, instrumentally rational calculation indicates that there is no point in collaborating. Even after some joint activities have been organised, many actors might still refrain from action assuming that their participation is redundant. Hence, there is a contradiction specific to each moment of the learning process (for more details, Patomäki, 2022, pp. 103–109). Each contradiction has to be overcome before efficient collective action becomes possible. Trust and solidarity facilitate organising collective actions, but in any social system trust and solidarity not only depend on the prevailing modes of agency but are potentially subject to manipulation by the powerful actors (for instance, in terms of “divide and rule”).

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Communication is the first key and the development of trust and solidarity is the second key to the successful organisation of collective action. Trust, solidarity, long-term commitments, and common institutions can be absent or present to different degrees in different contexts, including in transnational civil society and interstate relations. In the past, effective communication required physical presence, although some messages have been sent across distances for millennia. Correspondence became a fashion in eighteenth-century Western Europe. A postal system to support this fashion was achieved through a series of reforms in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, culminating in the founding of the Universal Postal Union in 1874. With the emergent twentieth and twenty-first-century technologies, actors can communicate across space in real time. However, recurring social interactions on a face-to-face basis continues to facilitate the development of trust. Although we know that contradictions can be overcome through collective action and by building better common institutions, collective action can be arduous to organise, especially in a world characterised by disintegrative tendencies. In any event, these processes take time. Moreover, collective actors such as states are multifarious systems and this can complicate the movement from counterfinality to change. Those acting in the name of a state occupy simultaneous positions at multiple sites of power and levels of organisation and this increases complexity.16

 onclusion: Reflexivity and the Ethos C of Critical Responsiveness Global governance has experienced a decline in the first two decades of the twenty-­ first century. According to the “pathways to gridlock” perspective, the absence of adequate institutions tends to exacerbate common problems, weaken cooperation, and further entrench the gridlock. This suggests a certain circularity of causation, which is further reinforced by the unstable and crisis- and conflict-prone nature of the capitalist world economy. Apart from economic growth and rising standards of living, the characteristic mechanisms and tendencies of the world economy involve oscillations of growth, cumulative causation, uneven developments, self-reinforcing processes, inequalities, commodification, unemployment, and occasional financial and other crises. As argued in this chapter (also in Patomäki, 2018, 2022), the blend of a capitalist world economy and separate national states tends to instigate antagonistic relations, not least by breeding identities and purposes that contribute to the gridlock and the underlying disintegrative tendencies. Furthermore, also contradictions in interstate relations can explain the inability of states to resolve salient global problems. Short-sighted and self-regarding ways of responding to the problems generated by the world economy are both an essential cause and a typical effect of those contradictions. Global dynamics tend to shape developments at all spatial scales. Independently of the scale, the conditions for collective context transformation involve also global  In International Relations, a well-known articulation of this idea is that of Putnam (1988); a more structurally oriented political economy perspective is provided by Jessop (2012). 16

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rules, principles, and policies. The institutions of governance of the world economy ought to be adequate in relation to the characteristic tendencies of capitalist markets, which in turn are repeatedly strengthened by the often contradictory state actions in the interstate field. What I have also argued in this chapter is that uncertainty can be undesirable and some aspects of complexity harmful. A characteristic purpose of social organisation is to reduce the diversity of possible and likely outcomes through reducing public bads—especially by countering harmful tendencies—while the goal may be also to steer the relevant processes towards a desired direction (for example, ecological sustainability, full and secure employment, or egalitarian distribution of the fruits of growth). As far as functional organisations are concerned, it is not necessarily true that the more these organisations have transformative capacity (power), the more amalgamated the overall community is. The Deutschian definition of amalgamation implies hierarchical centralisation of decision-making, whereas a functionalist system can be quite decentralised (more on this in Chaps. 12 and 13). However, when a functional organisation is capable of making a significant difference in some area, it is likely to become a focus of processes of political communication; it may also involve some machinery for enforcement and practices of compliance. Enforcement is connected to the hardness of will and may work against the underlying security community or potential for it. Earlier in Chap. 5, I argued that self-transformative capacity qualifies the sense of community and fosters malleable, tolerant, and pluralist group identities (given various contextual features). In the current chapter, I have deepened this analysis. This deepening is important also because the resolution of common problems and overcoming of contradictions requires learning and the development of consciousness towards higher levels of reflexivity. While all actors learn from feedback and while this learning can change goals, learning processes may take also pathological and regressive forms, resulting in closure and hard will. Moreover, while closures of communication may ensue from processes of interaction, they may also be inherent to layers of geohistorical epistemes. From this perspective, I have discussed the dialectic among three logics of identities prevailing in the early twenty-first century (the list is not exhaustive). Most strands of market globalism (neoliberalism) exhibit only limited forms of learning and have difficulties in recognising different goals, purposes, or identities. The aim of locking in the prevailing set of institutional arrangements co-explains the current gridlock of global governance. Moreover, numerous actors have experienced the consequences of these arrangements as increasingly uncertain living conditions and existential insecurity. The consequent rise of nationalist populism has instigated tendencies towards closure and hard will, further deepening the gridlock. In contrast, reflexivity enables actors to reflect on, monitor, and shape their identity, purposes, and interests. Reflexive identity can take, for instance, the form of “struggle for recognition”, in which citizens seek recognition for some differences that have hitherto not been recognised, thus opening up new possibilities (an idea which I discuss critically in Chap. 10). Reflexive avoidance of heteronomy and alienation point towards a globalist consciousness, a topic for Chaps. 8 and 9. Here

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I have connected reflexive identity to four overlapping and nested orders of purposes, to the three axes of self-other relations, and to the virtuous circle of non-­ violence. A key point is that a higher-order purpose—say, awareness of the Big History perspective and a planetary identity—cannot undo more limited scale differences or their importance in everyday life. A world political community cannot eliminate negative differences, conflicts, or tragedies of social action. Understanding this, reflexivity should take also the form of “ethos of critical responsiveness” (Connolly, 1995, p. xv). This means a commitment to the idea that the self-­ confidence and congealed judgements of dominant identities and understandings of the community should be opened to challenges. This implies that the basic onto-­ logic of identity needs to be repeatedly and reflexively rethought from a perspective that is compatible with both the criticism of false universalisms and the basic tenets of Big History or something equivalent (cf. Chap. 3; and from a legitimation viewpoint, Chap. 13). All policies and transformative actions are subject to uncertainty. The ethical circle of non-violence is based on the observation that uncertainty prevails in our complex, multilayered, and open-systemic world. The ethical circle includes the goal to minimise (the risk of) violent consequences under the general condition of uncertainty. Uncertainty is an important reason to stress the role of virtues and duties or rules, instead of mere consequences of policies and actions. This is critical for transformative activities as well. The organisation of collective action to resolve a problem or contradiction and to revise existing or build new common institutions requires trust, solidarity, and long-term commitments. Such a project is, however, likely to generate opposition and thereby invoke all three axes of self-other relations and concern all three moments of the ethical circle.

Appendix: On the Role of Religion In the partly desecularised world of the early twenty-first century (see Berger, 1999), an important aspect of many ethical-political identities concerns religion. The world religions that were born during the axial age (800–200 BCE) and became dominant in the course of the first millennium, respond to the deep existential and moral questions that emerged during this period.17 The problem is that world religions have oftentimes generated a hardened will among some of their adherents. Abrahamic religions and their main narratives have time and again taken the form of a Manichean struggle between good and evil. Also other axial world religions have shown potential for antagonistic self-other relations and violence—even Buddhism, which is often thought to be the most peaceful of religions.18 It is not a  Karl Jaspers (1953, p. 2) explains: “What is new about this [axial] age, in all three areas of the world, is that man becomes conscious of Being as a whole, of himself and his limitations. He experiences the terror of the world and his own powerlessness. He asks radical questions. Face to face with the void he strives for liberation and redemption”. 18  For a simple but informative overview of the latent and actual “fundamentalism” of all world religions, see Ruthven, 2007, on Buddhism, e.g. p.104. 17

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religion in isolation that generates violence. Rather social processes can activate the inner structures of religious systems, shape religious meanings and practices, and provide justifications for struggles that originate elsewhere. For instance, globalisation has prompted developments towards religious intolerance and hard will.19 There is no simple automatic logic or deterministic law according to which monotheism—or religion more generally—must lead to intolerance, repression, and violence. Religion can just as well underlie pacifism and tolerance or pluralism.20 And notably, modern scientism can also be Manichean insofar as it tends to juxtapose religious violence against secular rationality. In the early twenty-first century, this form of Manicheanism is most typically antagonistic towards political Islam.21 A lot hinges upon epistemology: how certain are actors about beliefs and stories constituting their group identities and interests? How fixed are these beliefs and narratives? A belief in literal and necessary truths, whether revealed in sacred texts or by reductionist theories of modern science, is liable to constitute a hardened will (Reitan, 2009, pp. 210–220). It is, however, possible to combine ontological realism about god and divinity with epistemological relativism. The latter implies that god or divinity can manifest itself in a variety of ways, and is accessed by different people in different traditions in a plurality of ways.22 “Obviously once you accept epistemological relativism you must accept tolerance and pluralism” (Bhaskar, 2012, p. 32). Relativism does not mean that we cannot have better or worse grounds for adopting some particular god-oriented beliefs or spiritual practices. Our claims to knowledge of god are fallible, like anything else. While any hypothesis about god or divinity can fail, it does not mean that they all must necessarily or ultimately fail. Globalisation in the deeper sense, as a coming-together of humanity, requires an open-ended dialogue about the fundamentals, including in terms of religion (whatever forms it may assume). This dialogue has ethical-political implications, for giving a voice to others is not neutral; dialogue entails recognition of equality and institutions corresponding to such recognition (Patomäki, 2003). Dialogical, planetary religions and philosophies thus accord with the notion of a global “democracy-to-come” (Derrida, 1992, pp. 35–42, 76–83).23 Resultant forms of religion are unlikely to cultivate anthropomorphic conceptions of god and more likely to see  Anthony Giddens (1994, p. 85) explains that the “defence of tradition only tends to take on the shrill tone it assumes today in the context of detraditionalization, globalization and diasporic cultural exchanges. […] This is why fundamentalist positions can arise even in religions (like Hinduism and Buddhism) which have hitherto been very ecumenical and tolerant of other beliefs”. 20  An interesting contribution to the ongoing debate, arguing that faith in god can be consistent with reason and morally benign, is Reitan (2009). 21  This is typically a second-order form of Manicheanism, becoming Manichean by way of accusing especially Abrahamic religions of Manicheanism: “Christianity used to be the most dangerous religion. Now Islam is”. Richard Dawkins in an interview by Samuel Osborne (Osborne, 2016). 22  Ontological realism, epistemological relativism and judgmental rationalism, as applied to religion; see Bhaskar (2000, e.g. p. 20, 89). 23  Any contemporary specification of rights or democracy also excludes and, thereby, tends to be violent. For Jacques Derrida, the democracy-to-come recognizes this aporia and thereby opens 19

References

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divinity in the mystery of being and in the processes of cosmic evolution, of which we humans are a part. Religion is only a possible source for articulating identity-constituting differences. Moreover, as I have argued in this chapter, a variety of causal processes can accentuate language-based differences into intensely and perhaps violently negative self-other relations. Deliberate attempts to facilitate the emergence or sustainability of a security community (see Fig. 5.6.) require explanations of these causal processes, characteristically in terms of social psychology and political economy, and critical understandings of the underlying logic of differences (Patomäki, 2017b). At a deep level, criticisms may also concern, for example, the alienation and oppression characteristic of the capitalist market economy (Bhaskar, 1986, p. 194).

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itself up to the possibility of further transformations, to taking up other directions, to becoming its other, also by means of dialogue and interactions with concrete others at any point in time.

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Deutsch, K. (1966). The nerves of government: The study of political communication and control. The Free Press. Deutsch, K., Burrell, S.  A., Kann, R.  A., Lee, M., Jr., Lichterman, M., Lindgren, R.  E., Loewenheim, F. L., & Van Wagenen, R. W. (1957). Political community and the North Atlantic area: International organization in the light of historical experience. Princeton University. Elster, J. (1978). Logic and society: Contradictions and possible worlds. John Wiley & Sons. Fletcher, G. (1987). Law and morality: A Kantian perspective. Columbia Law Review, 87(3), 533–558. Galtung, J. (1990). Cultural violence. Journal of Peace Research, 27(3), 291–305. Giddens, A. (1994). Beyond left and right: The future of radical politics. Polity. Graeber, D., & Wengrow, D. (2021). The dawn of everything: A new history of humanity. Allen Lane. Gueldry, M. (2015). The double discipline of neoclassical economics: When the map both hides and reveals the territory. Real-World Economics Review, 72, 27–57. Habermas, J. (1988). Legitimation crisis (T. McCarthy, Trans.). Polity Press. Hale, T., & Held, D. (2017). Introduction: Pathways beyond gridlock. In T. Hale & D. Held (Eds.), Beyond gridlock (pp. 1–27). Polity. Hale, T., Held, D., & Young, K. (2013). Gridlock: Why global cooperation is failing when we need it most. Polity Press. Hardy, C. (2012). Hysteresis. In M.  Grenfell (Ed.), Pierre Bourdieu: Key concepts (2nd ed., pp. 126–145). Acumen. Harmes, A. (2012). The rise of neoliberal nationalism. Review of International Political Economy, 19(1), 59–86. Hayek, F. (2001). The road to serfdom. Routledge. (Originally published 1944). Honneth, A. (1996). The struggle for recognition: The moral grammar of social conflicts. (J. Anderson & T. McCarthy, Trans.). The MIT Press. Hopewell, K. (2016). Breaking the WTO: How emerging powers disrupted the neoliberal project. Stanford University Press. Jaspers, K. (1953). The origin and goal of history (M. Bullock, Trans.). Routledge and Kegan Paul. Jessop, B. (2012). Obstacles to a world state in the shadow of the world market. Cooperation & Conflict, 47(2), 200–219. Kaldor, N. (1972). The irrelevance of equilibrium economics. Economic Journal, 82(328), 1237–1255. Keynes, J. M. (2008). A treatise on probability. Rough Draft Printing/MacMillan. (Originally published 1921). Kindleberger, C. (2000). Manias, panics, and crashes: A history of financial crises (4th ed.). John Wiley & Sons. Lavoie, M. (2009). Introduction to post-Keynesian economics. Palgrave Macmillan. Levitsky, S., & Ziblatt, D. (2018). How democracies die: What history reveals about our future. Penguin. Mackie, G. (2009). Democracy defended. Cambridge University Press. Mäki, U. (2009). Economics imperialism: Concept and constraints. Philosophy of the Social Sciences, 39(3), 351–380. Markwell, D. (2006). John Maynard Keynes and international relations: Economic paths to peace. Oxford University Press. Maslow, A. (1943). A theory of human motivation. Psychological Review, 50(4), 370–396. Minsky, H. (2008). Stabilizing an unstable economy. McGraw Hill. Næss, P. (2004). Prediction, regressions and critical realism. Journal of Critical Realism, 3(1), 133–164. Næss, P. (2019). ‘Demi-regs’, probabilism and partly closed systems. Journal of Critical Realism, 18(5), 475–486. Nozick, R. (1974). Anarchy, state, and utopia. Basic Books. O’Brien, R., & Williams, M. (2016). Global political economy: Evolution and dynamics (5th ed.). Palgrave Macmillan.

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O’Hara, P. (1999). Encyclopedia of political economy (Vol 2, L–Z). Routledge. Osborne, S. (2016, May 30). Richard Dawkins responds to the suggestion atheists are violent. The Independent. Accessed October 15, 2018, from https://www.independent.co.uk/news/people/ richard-­dawkins-­responds-­to-­the-­suggestion-­atheists-­are-­violent-­a7056301.html. Patomäki, H. (2002). After international relations: Critical realism and the (re)construction of world politics. Routledge. Patomäki, H. (2003). From east to west: Emergent global philosophies – Beginnings of the end of the Western dominance? Theory, Culture & Society, 19(3), 89–111. Patomäki, H. (2006). Realist ontology for futures studies. Journal of Critical Realism, 5(1), 1–31. Patomäki, H. (2009). Neoliberalism and the global financial crisis. New Political Science, 31(4), 431–442. Patomäki, H. (2010). Exploring possible, likely and desirable global futures: Beyond the closed vs. open systems dichotomy. In J. Joseph & C. Wight (Eds.), Scientific realism and international relations (pp. 147–166). Palgrave. Patomäki, H. (2013). The great Eurozone disaster: From crisis to global new deal. Zed Books. Patomäki, H. (2015). Absenting the absence of future dangers and structural transformations in securitization theory. International Relations, 29(1), 128–136. Patomäki, H. (2017a). Praxis, politics and the future: A dialectical critical realist account of world-­ historical causation. Journal of International Relations and Development, 20(4), 805–825. Patomäki, H. (2017b). On the possibility of a global political community: The enigma of ‘small local differences’ within humanity. Protosociology. An International Journal of Interdisciplinary Research, 33, 93–127. Patomäki, H. (2018). Disintegrative tendencies in global political economy: Exits and conflicts. Routledge. Patomäki, H. (2019). Reflexivity of anticipations in economics and political economy. In R. Poli (Ed.), Handbook of anticipation: Theoretical and applied aspects of the use of future in decision making (pp. 555–580). Springer. Patomäki, H. (2020). On the historicity of social ontology. Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour, 50(4), 439-461. Patomäki, H. (2021). Neoliberalism and nationalist-authoritarian populism: Explaining their constitutive and causal connections. Protosociology. An International Journal of Interdisciplinary Research, 37, 101–151. Patomäki, H. (2022). The three fields of global political economy. Routledge. Pierson, P. (2004). Politics in time: History, institutions and social analysis. Princeton University Press. Polanyi, K. (1957). The great transformation: The political and economic origins of our time. Beacon Press. (Originally published 1944). Putnam, R. (1988). Diplomacy and domestic politics: The logic of two-level games. International Organization, 42(3), 427–460. Rebout, N., Lone, J.-C., De Marco, A., Cozzolino, R., Lemasson, A., & Thierry, B. (2021). Measuring complexity in organisms and organizations. Royal Society Open Science, 8, 200895. https://doi.org/10.1098/rsos.200895 Reitan, E. (2009). Is god a delusion? A reply to religion’s cultured despisers. Wiley-Blackwell. Rescher, N. (2006). Philosophical dialectics: An essay on metaphilosophy. State University of New York Press. Ruthven, M. (2007). Fundamentalism: A very short introduction. Oxford University Press. Shaikh, A. (2016). Capitalism: Competition, conflict, crises. Oxford University Press. Slobodian, Q. (2018). Globalists: The end of empire and the birth of neoliberalism. Harvard University Press. Steger, M. (2019). Globalisms: Facing the populist challenge (4th ed.). Rowman & Littlefield. Todorov, T. (1984). The conquest of America: The question of the other (R.  Howard, Trans.). Harper & Row. Volk, T. (2017). Quarks to culture: How we came to be. Columbia University Press.

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Wendt, A. (1999). Social theory of international politics. Cambridge University Press. Wendt, A. (2003). Why a world state is inevitable. European Journal of International Relations, 9(4), 491–542. Williams, H. (2012). Kant and the end of war: A critique of just war theory. Palgrave Macmillan.

8

On the Dialectics of Global Governance in the Twenty-First Century: A Polanyian Double Movement?

Introduction Multilateral institutions have stalled across issue domains ranging from the Doha trade round (preceded by the Battle of Seattle in 1999) and climate summits to the inability to agree on effective financial regulation in the wake of the 2008–9 crisis. In Chap. 7, I assessed a possible explanation of this gridlock in terms of unintended second-order effects of the post-WWII liberal institution-building. These second-­ order effects occur in the context of growing multipolarity, harder problems, institutional inertia, and fragmentation of governance and may involve self-reinforcing dynamics. I also argued the problem is in fact deeper and involves attempts to lock in particular institutional arrangements as well as disintegrative tendencies and contradictions in the global political economy. The sweeping shift towards individualised responsibility and private competitive markets has transformed agency and social contexts. Causal outcomes such as inequalities, increasingly insecure terms of employment, and occasional economic crises have generated concerns and anxieties and these concerns and anxieties have been mobilised for antagonistic politics, typically in terms of national imaginary. Even in moderate versions of nationalism, the tendency to follow myopic self-regarding policies in the interstate field tends to make cooperation more difficult and increases the likelihood of conflicts and their securitisation. Many social scientists and political economists have used Karl Polanyi’s concept “double movement” in trying to make sense of the current phase of world history and to anticipate the next phase. Following decades of intense economic globalisation and market-oriented reforms across the world, Polanyi has been invoked not only to explain what is happening but also to give reasons for being in some sense hopeful about a different future.1 In the flux of world history, nothing is eternal. The  The following papers will be briefly discussed in this chapters: Blyth (2002); Burawoy (2010); Cox (1996); Dale (2012); Gill (2008); Lie (1991); Maertens (2008); Meier (2008); Munck (2007); 1

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 H. Patomäki, World Statehood, World-Systems Evolution and Global Futures, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-32305-8_8

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assumption is that from Polanyi we know that society is bound to protect itself against the market, and it seems certain that one change will be followed by a different one. In The Great Transformation (1957), Polanyi argued that the Economic Man and self-adjusting markets are neither natural nor universal. Rather, they are relatively recent socio-historical constructs. The rise of (i) the calculative gain orientation, (ii) the modern market economy, and (iii) the modern liberal state are essentially connected. Before the great transformation in modern Europe, markets existed as an auxiliary avenue for the exchange of goods that were otherwise not obtainable. The market society was born out of the changes that emerged first in Britain. Polanyi wrote The Great Transformation during WWII. The book opens with the words: “nineteenth-century civilization has collapsed; this book is concerned with the political and economic origins of this event” (Polanyi, 1957, p.  3). Polanyi argued that in the age of industrial mass production markets have had detrimental social effects. He reasoned that a market society is not sustainable and without a well-functioning economic basis, also the Gold Standard and balance of power system were bound to collapse: […] the idea of a self-adjusting market implied a stark utopia. Such an institution could not exist for any length of time without annihilating the human and natural substance of society; it would have physically destroyed man and transformed his surroundings into a wilderness. Inevitably, society took measures to protect itself, but whatever measures it took impaired the self-regulation of the market, disorganized industrial life, and thus endangered society in yet another way. It was this dilemma which forced the development of the market system into a definite groove and finally disrupted the social organization based upon it. (Polanyi, 1957, pp. 3–4)

This and other similar passages suggest that Polanyi saw the double movement (construction of self-regulating market ➔ social self-protection and decommodification) as inevitable. The self-regulating market has social effects that evoke society to protect and reassert itself against the commodification of land, labour, social relations, and many natural things. Assuming that this holds also in the twenty-first century, we should expect society to rise once again to protect itself from the present-­day version of the utopia of self-regulating markets. In an alternative but compatible interpretation, which apparently explains also the shift to neoliberalism, maybe what we are experiencing is a political pendulum characteristic of the industrial civilisation: a swing from markets to society leading, in the next phase, to a swing from society to markets, and so on, perhaps ad infinitum (or perhaps the pendulum will gradually come to a standstill as it loses its energy). Without the pendulum metaphor, however, the contemporary countermovement may look more uncertain, since the conditions in the early twenty-first century appear rather different from those of the late nineteenth and first half of the twentieth century.

and Silver and Giovanni (2003). My aim, however, is to develop the idea of double movement further.

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Instead of an empirical regularity or occasional historical connection, however, the double movement can also be understood dialectically as a description of an irreversible historical development following its own inner laws or schemes of development. The best-known dialectical scheme is “thesis & antithesis ➔ synthesis”. Although Hegel and Marx rarely (if ever) used this trichotomy, it has been applied widely also to thinking about the double movement.2 From this perspective, the post-WWII democratic welfare state was, as a synthesis, a historical novelty. It re-embedded markets in social relations and ethical-political considerations and decommodified aspects of society (e.g. health and education), but differently from the medieaval guilds or the absolutism of the mercantilist state. Welfare state developments lasted for a few decades. Relatively soon, however, the twin processes of economic globalisation and neoliberalisation started to fashion a new antithesis. During the process, the spatial scale has been changing. Arguably, the next synthesis must be a globally orchestrated response to the dominance of the markets and the protection of society on a planetary scale. In the following, I explicate the limits of this tripartite scheme and develop it further by drawing on ideas from critical realist philosophical dialectics (Bhaskar, 1993, 1994), political theory, and global political economy. Critical realist dialectics enables complicating and enriching the scheme of potential transformations. Mere negative critique or antithesis, perhaps understood in terms of reversing the process of commodification, is not sufficient for transformative action. A new synthesis solving the conflict between the thesis and antithesis, by uniting their common truth in a new way, would be required. Contra some interpretations of Hegel, a dialectical synthesis is neither preservative nor fully determined ex ante. Something is always lost; and many responses to a given contradiction (problem, lack, etc.) are possible. (Bhaskar, 1993, p. 320). While many responses and figures of change are possible, not all of them are equally rational or viable. Ethico-political critique presupposes the plausible possibility of purposeful changes towards better context-dependent practices and institutional arrangements. (Sayer, 2000, p.  161). Agency and concrete eutopias are prerequisites for any future transformations. Actors need to have an idea of what possible, desirable, and sustainable futures may lie in the twenty-first century. As history moves on and contexts change, abstract normative claims should rationally assume new directions. There are also concrete geo-historical reasons why a simple Polanyian synthesis, such as a democratic welfare state writ global, would not work. Even during its  It is often forgotten among Hegelians and Marxians that the central concepts and categories of dialectics are metaphorical extensions of dialektikē tekhnē, the ancient Greek art and craft of persuasion and argumentation. In the original context, the scheme thesis & antithesis ➔ synthesis made a lot of sense; and it can be a helpful way of thinking about various other processes as well. Similarly, in contemporary contexts of dialogue, debates, and processes of collective will-formation, involving political struggles, this basic scheme can be used fruitfully for the purpose of rationally reconstructing the ways in which arguments are built and actors are positioning themselves. See Rescher (1977) and Eemeren and Grootendorst (2004, 1984). The tripartite dialectical scheme is applied to the Polanyian double movement, e.g., by Cox (1996). 2

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heyday, the welfare state was contested, often for good emancipatory reasons; and soon it became increasingly contradictory due to globalisation. The scale, complexity, and cultural pluralism of the world system as a whole make the global replication of the mid-twentieth century national-territorial solution unlikely. Overcoming the contradictions of the (neo)liberal world economy is best seen as an evolutionary and path-dependent process of institution-building. Moreover, in the dialectical development of human understandings and social relations, the double movement is but an aspect and moment of a wider world-historical process towards critical-­ reflexive planetary ethics and politics. For decades, it has been realised that contemporary global conditions comprise overpopulation, shortage of energy resources, ecological crisis, including global warming, and “the enormous enlargement of the risks involved in human activities and conflicts” (Apel, 1978, pp.  82–4, see also 1991). This multiplies relevant lacks, problems, and contradictions, and thus also possible rational responses to them.

Polanyi’s Historical Double Movement What Polanyi sets out to explain in The Great Transformation is the occurrence of great power peace and war. Polanyi’s method is dialectical (in the sense of Rescher, 1977, 1987, and 2006). He starts with a puzzle, a contrast between the nineteenth and mid-twentieth centuries, and moves along complex cycles which criss-cross the same ground from different angles in assessing claims, all in view of constructing his own explanation of the world-historical situation at hand (the end of laissez-­ faire, the rise of fascism, the Second World War). Thus, Polanyi first outlines his main contrast and then proposes a far-reaching hypothesis: it was the nineteenth-­ century self-regulating market system that led to the turmoil of the twentieth century. To prove his hypothesis, Polanyi’s next task is to show that the real ground (and thus self-understanding) of economic liberalism is false. Thus, he argued that the nineteenth-century system was an artificial and fairly recent historical construction. This takes him to scrutinise the emergence of the Economic Man, by using studies from anthropology to economic history.3 By showing that humanity is social, not economistic, by nature, he cleared the ground for a political economy analysis of the effects of economic liberalism and the ethical and political responses they evoked. Given the Hundred Years’ Peace of the nineteenth century, disturbed only a few times by limited wars in Europe (though major colonial and other wars occurred  See also Polanyi’s later works on tribal economies and early civilisations, such as the volume edited by Polanyi, Arensberg & Pearson (1957, and esp. ch. XII by Polanyi himself). Polanyi stressed that only a few societies in the universe of all societies have been characterised by markets. For a debate about how to update Polanyi in the context of currently available data about Mesopotamian civilisations, see Renger (2005); Silver (2007). The problem with this debate lies in the assumption that people in the early civilisations had reflective consciousness, although there is evident archaeological evidence that reflective consciousness was only gradually emerging at the time; see Jaynes (2000); see also Patomäki (2020a, 2020b), for a systematic discussion and a 7-stage model of the rise of reflective consciousness. 3

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outside Europe), the Great War and the subsequent turmoil came as a surprise to most Europeans. The collapse of the nineteenth-century civilisation led to two world wars and other catastrophes of the early twentieth century. Polanyi also makes use of another historical contrast. Whereas in the eighteenth century, power-balancing practices had resulted in endless wars, following the great transformation and industrial revolution the worldwide context had become different. Given the market and financial interdependencies of the nineteenth-century industrialising world economy, the power-balancing system worked for peace—as long as it could be sustained. It was widely concluded that trade and investments require peace at least among great powers. “[W]hile business and finance were responsible for many colonial wars” (Polanyi, 1957, p. 16), it was “by functional determination [that] it fell to haute finance to avert general wars” (Polanyi, 1957, p.  13). Apart from the carefully orchestrated strings of finance, the nineteenth-­ century system of peace was also premised on stable exchanges (the Gold Standard) and free trade. These foundations of great power peace within the industrial civilisation were precarious, however, and not only in their own terms but also because of their problematic market underpinnings: “[T]he origins of the cataclysm lay in the utopian endeavor of economic liberalism to set a self-regulating market system” (Polanyi, 1957, p. 29). Self-regulating markets were created by the modern nationally centralised states in Europe, evolving through the phases of mercantilism and the eighteenth-­ century economic liberalism. Evolving technologies reinforced and speeded up these processes, which then generated the nineteenth-century industrial world economy. Productivity growth and other economic improvements, characteristically related to seaborne trade (i.e. mass production for external markets) and associated economic opportunities, came at a high social cost at home including: • mass-scale human dislocation • the commodification of human labour • unemployment fluctuates with business cycles These developments are essentially connected. Mass-scale dislocation occurred typically through enclosures of common land, a process widely experienced as violent and unjust. This process meant in practice urbanisation, especially after The Poor Relief Act of 1662 was partially repealed in 1795, and more fully in 1834 (the 1662 Act established the parish to which a person belonged and thereby strongly hindered physical mobility). The commodification of human work involves the rise of labour markets in industrial cities, where all or most of the means of living have to be bought from the market with money.4 Employment contract generates power relations within the workplace and constitutes a new category, unemployment, for

 In spite of the overall positive Mortality Revolution of the nineteenth century Britain and other countries, urban life expectancy initially dropped quite significantly, especially among the slum dwellers and factory workers, due to the lack of hygiene and poor living conditions in the early industrial cities. Life expectancy in the cities was far lower than in the surrounding countryside. (Szreter & Mooney, 1998) Also the mean height of men declined in this period (Komlos, 1998). Thus, arguably human degradation in the early industrial period was absolute; but see also note 7. 4

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those who are involuntarily without work and thus income. For the first time in human history, self-regulating markets, setting prices competitively by adjusting to supply and demand,5 started to constitute social relations and determine the distribution of goods, employment, and income, rather than the other way round.6 The market makes a multitude of people vulnerable not only to the power of employers but also to sudden economic changes, fluctuations, and crises. This is how the category of unemployment emerged. The level of unemployment varies depending on the phase of business cycles. During a downward turn, a multitude of people may find themselves in the most miserable parts of slums without any proper means of living or any real standing in the community. Business cycles are closely connected to changes in the world economy. In the nineteenth century, they were connected especially through the Gold Standard. When a nation’s internal prices diverged from international price levels, the only legitimate means for that country to adjust to the decline of gold reserves was by deflation. This meant allowing its economy to contract until declining wages reduced consumption enough to restore external balance. This implied dramatic declines in wages and farm income, a sharp rise in business and bank failures, and increases in unemployment. Despite what the nineteenth-century “dismal science” may have indicated, the question was not about mere survival, not even for the very poorest slum dwellers, but also about human sociability and dignity, and moral standing. Because the gain-­ seeking Economic Man is a socio-historical construction, and “because the commodity description of labor, land, and money is entirely fictitious” (Polanyi, 1957,

 Even in Polanyi’s own formulation there is a risk of reading the present into the past (cf. note 6). “[The market system] assumes markets in which the supply of goods (including services) available at a definite price will equal the demand at that price.” (Polanyi, 1957, p. 68). Theories of value— from natural and just prices to the commodity-theory of money and the land- and labour-theories of value—are constitutive of economic practices and their governance. Labour theory of value is compatible with industrial economy and markets, but the fully-fledged doctrine of price mechanism as the meeting of independently operating supply and demand originates in the second half of the nineteenth century. This doctrine rose with value subjectivism, which was adopted and developed by neoclassical economists. 6  Polanyi criticises the Whig interpretation of history (cf. Butterfield, 1950) as linear long-term progress towards the nineteenth century market society. Polanyi’s (1957, p.  45) criticism still applies to neoclassical economics: “[…]the same bias which made Adam Smith’s generation view primeval man as bent on barter and truck induced their successors to disavow all interest in early man, as he was now known not to have indulged in those laudable passions. The tradition of the classical economists, who attempted to base the law of the market on the alleged propensities of man in the state of nature, was replaced by an abandonment of all interest in the cultures of ‘uncivilized’ man as irrelevant to an understanding of the problems of our age”. The standard reply by neoclassical economists tends to rely on Milton Friedman’s instrumentalism: all assumptions are false anyway; what matters is whether the theory can “predict” (e.g. Rottenberg, 1958). Thus North (1977) maintains that the logic of the Economic Man can be expanded (by taking into account side payments, etc.) to “predict” (i.e. postdict) at least some of the principles of earlier societal forms. See also McCloskey (1997) for a cavalier dismissal of Polanyi’s account on the basis of an appeal to one authority (Philip Curtain) and a very brief discussion of classic Mayan civilisation before 800 AD (providing some indirect evidence that Mayans understood “production-costs” in terms of distances from the raw material sources). 5

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p. 72), the effects of gain-seeking and self-regulating markets concern our natural environment and the moral life of real human beings, and they must be, and have been, evaluated as such.7 Polanyi distinguishes between constant tendencies towards the pollution of nature and degradation of human life and development (Marx would have talked about “exploitation”) and the periodic cycles in which further and more acute destruction may occur. Overall, in the mid-nineteenth century …[t]he effects on the lives of the people were awful beyond description. Indeed, human society would have been annihilated but for protective counter-moves which blunted the action of this self-destructive mechanism. (Polanyi, 1957, p. 76)

This is the double movement: the first moves consist of creating the market society; the second of counter-moves to protect nature and society from the market. For instance, the fictitious commodity of labour came to be shielded from the working of the market mechanism through protective institutions such as trade unions and factory laws, struggling gradually into being from the 1870s onwards. Towards the turn of the century, suffrage became increasingly universal, and the working class an influential factor in the state. The state administrative functions had expanded already with the creation of laissez-faire. The clash of the organising principles of economic liberalism and social protection intermingled with the conflict of social classes via the state. The organising principles were articulated through concepts, ideas, and theories that also constituted responses to various turns of history. The conflicts tended to be aggravated by the downturns and crises of the markets, nationally and worldwide. Polanyi is ambiguous on the role of theories and ideologies in constituting social protectionism. Polanyi gives a major role to classical political economy and related theories (that among other things “discovered society”) in grounding the construction of laissez-faire market. Yet, he also maintains that from the last quarter of the nineteenth century onwards the reasons for the self-protection of society were so undeniable that all parties—their ideological differences notwithstanding—started to favour protection against the market. This seems to conflate nationalist and socialist measures; the general logic of market intervention (that may rely on the market mechanism), and the more specific logic of decommodification.8  What really happened to the material standards of living of working people in the early phase of industrialisation from the 1790s to mid-1800s remains an open question. Accounts vary and have changed over time (cf. the optimism of Lindert and Williamson (1983) vs. the pessimism of Feinstein (1998). Polanyi (1957, p. 129) was not concerned only with aspects such as wages or life expectancy. Citing Robert Owen, he maintained that poor people’s situation in the first half of the nineteenth century was “infinitely more degraded and miserable than [it] was before the introduction of those manufactories”. Even though the employed workers might have been somewhat better off financially than before, in terms of their social environment, neighbourhood, standing in the community and craft (skills), the new situation compared very unfavourably. 8  This conflation is understandable given Polanyi’s aim to explain the rise of fascism and nationalsocialism. However, there is an important conceptual difference between the politics of conservative social protection (expressed as protectionism) and the politics of decommodification (which has, at times, been the driving force of “anti-market” and later “anti-globalisation” or “alter-glo7

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Transnational industrial production involves long-term investments which are risky for investors. “Unless the continuance of production was reasonably assured, such a risk was not bearable” (Polanyi, 1957, p. 75; italics HP). These risks were often addressed in military-security terms. The dangers of deflation posed by the Gold Standard and the dependence on trade even for the basic means of living intensified the interdependencies and dynamics of the world economy, within which struggles over the power and fate of national states took place. These dynamics had the potential of escalating conflicts. While the speed of economic growth in this period was unprecedented in human history, the Hundred Years’ Peace of the nineteenth century was thus vulnerable to the complex and contradictory dynamics of global political economy.9

The Return to the Market: A Puzzle to Polanyians Following thirty years of crises and wars (1914–45), few people believed that the nineteenth-century laissez-faire system would have any future—except a handful of old-school economic liberals, some of whom joined the Mont Pelerin society in the late 1940s. From the mid-1930s to the 1970s, the world was dominated by various nationalist, socialist, and social/democratic movements and developments. Orthodox economic liberalism was all but dead. In the twenty-first century, it is evident, however, that history did not come to an end with the second part of Polanyi’s double movement. The “stark utopia” of the market has returned, albeit in a new form and a new context. Whereas economic liberals find it difficult to explain the early-to-mid-twentieth century rise of the principle of social protection in its various guises,10 the opponents of neoliberalism may

balisation” political struggle). Polanyi (1957, p. 144) lumps together all contra-free-market developments: “When around the 1870s a general protectionist movement—social and national—started in Europe…”. See also the long list of various measures and phenomena that Polanyi provides on the same page, including what many Marxists would see as manifestations of monopoly capitalism. 9  For an explanation of the First World War along these political economy lines, see Patomäki (2008), chs. 2 & 3). Following the financial crisis and downturn of the early 1870s, and within the overall deflationary institutional and structural context, Britain’s attempt to secure demand for its industrial goods, also by protectionist and imperialist means—however half-hearted those means might have been in practice—was perceived not only as a model to be followed but frequently also as a threat to the vital industrial interests of the new industrial countries. Some states responded in kind. The overall context was gradually becoming (also for the initiators of the process) more competitive and territorialist, as well as nationalist, imperialist, and militarist. These developments constituted a process of mutually self-reinforcing securitisation. From the 1890s onwards, this process of securitisation led to a process of alliance reformations, then arms race and finally the war. The war was not unavoidable, however, and democratisation and social reforms could have contributed to changes in the international context already in the 1920s. 10  Polanyi (1957, p. 148) calls their interpretation as the legend of antiliberal conspiracy”, according to which it is ideological preconceptions or narrow group interests, or “impatience, greed, and short-sightedness” (1957, p. 142), which are to be blamed for the rise of social protection at the end of the nineteenth century and early twentieth century. In contrast, after having discussed this issue

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find it equally difficult to grasp why the world has since the 1970s and 1980s moved in the opposite direction.11 Diverse explanations have been proposed to make sense of these geo-historical twists and turns, especially the developments of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Several of the available explanatory narratives have been told in terms of Polanyi’s “double movement”. Some authors invoke Polanyi simply to suggest a historical analogy. Thus, Stephen Gill (2008, p. 24) uses Polanyian degrees of “embeddedness” to classify different “world orders in socio-political structures at the national or transnational levels” and then indicates a broad historical analogy between the two eras (Gill, 2008, pp.  78–9, 146–7). Similarly, Mark Blyth (2002, p.  4), in his study of economic ideas and institutions, argues that “the political struggle between disembedding and re-embedding the market continues today, even though its contours have shifted”. Blyth follows Polanyi in thinking that the ideas behind embedded liberalism were a rational response to a real crisis. Yet, he appears puzzled by the late twentieth-century process of disembedding liberalism. Why a return to the market? In Blyth’s assessment, the second set of transformations might have been less consequential than the first, though this is debatable. What is clear is that the nineteenth-­ century institutions have not been restored as such. These qualifications aside, Blyth contends that neoliberalism is “simply a warmed-over version of the ideas that embedded liberalism had seemingly defeated back in the 1930s” (Blyth, 2002, p. 126). Geo-historical economic and institutional conditions may have facilitated the revival of the market utopia, and Blyth makes a strong case for thinking that ideas matter, yet the reasons he gives for the rise of neoliberalism are far from compelling. Eppo Maertens (2008, p. 143) points out that we need “to look for an ideologically grounded theory to explain the persistent influence of the idea of self-­regulating markets”. He suggests that Hegel’s theory about negotiating freedom and recognition could provide a clue for understanding the wide appeal of neoliberalism. The liberal notion of freedom, which is closely associated with private property, is at some length, Polanyi concludes that “everything tends to support the assumption that objective reasons of stringent nature forced the hands of the legislators” (1957, p. 148). 11  Many neoclassical economists maintain that currently prevailing “modern” economic theories have been a rational response to the problems of Keynesianism. The critics of neoliberalism disagree with this story, of course, but they do not provide a shared single interpretation to replace it. The French regulation school equates Keynesianism with the Fordist regime of accumulation and neoliberalism with post-Fordism, presupposing the classical Marxist base/superstructure distinction (e.g., Amin, 1994; Boyer and Durand, 1997; and Tonkiss, 2006: ch. 4). David Harvey (2005) attributes the rise of neoliberalism to an ideological attempt to restore the position of upper classes, while Peter Gowan (1999) focusses more on a related to restore the position of Britain & US in the world economy. These are at best partial accounts. For instance, what is called “post-Fordism” is actually a result of a mixture of processes that include the deepening of consumerism and product differentiation (an important explanation of economic concentration); the development of new communication and information technologies; transformation of relations of power within the workplace in favour of professional management and owners, and the application of ideas of neoclassical economics to management first in private and then in public organisations. Thus “postFordism” is more a result of the hegemony of neoliberalism than its explanation.

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deeply ingrained and cognitively forceful. The thrust of Maertens’ argument is that neoliberalism can be ideologically appealing, although ultimately it is illusory and cannot provide a genuine experience of freedom. More concrete in his discussion than Maertens, Brian Meier (2008, p.  160) observes important differences between the two geo-historical eras. In the era of neoliberal globalisation, despite formal democracy in the core countries, capital seems to be in control of states and their policies, whereas mass media exerts powerful sway over the minds of citizens. Meier asks whether it “[will] take another crisis of such a magnitude as the Great Depression or worse to mobilize against the market utopia?” Perhaps it will, but Meier does not explain why capital has turned so all-powerful and why the media is spreading the message of neoliberalism rather than ideas stressing the values of the social. Meier’s explanation of the geo-­historical turn to neoliberalism is unsatisfactory, although he is correct in stressing the power of media to propagate ideas and images. In the absence of a convincing and sufficiently comprehensive explanation, should we be content with a simple pendulum model of modern history? Perhaps the organising principles of economic liberalism and social protection and all the forces behind them interact in such a manner as to generate a pendulum. Perhaps each swing will take a crisis of some sort? Under the current circumstances, it may thus be asked whether “the recent global financial crisis heralds a pendulum swing from neoliberalism (or ‘market fundamentalism’) towards a form of socially coordinated capitalism, or towards ‘more of the same’” (Dale, 2012, p. 3; also Gill, 2008). The pendulum metaphor would seem to fit broadly with the contour of historical facts, indicating that a new swing is possible in the future. Is there anything more we need to know?

Towards a Better Explanation of the Market-revival It seems difficult to explain the revival of the market in Polanyian terms. Michael Burawoy (2010, p. 307; also Dale, 2012, p. 11) points out that in the 1940s Polanyi explicitly rejected Marxism. For that reason, Polanyi downplayed the possible explanatory role of private ownership of means of production and the related imperatives for new sources of profit and capital accumulation. The democratic welfare state regulated workplace practices and corporate behaviour in many ways but did not question profit-seeking and private property per se or the autonomy of the owners (or corporate managers as their representatives) to make investment and other operational decisions. Perhaps herein lies the key to explaining the rise of neoliberalism? What is more, the post-Second World War model of embedded liberalism (democratic welfare state) relied on the institutional arrangements of the original Bretton Woods system that lasted from 1944 to c. 1973. The essence of the embedded liberalism compromise of the Bretton Woods system was to devise a framework that would safeguard and even aid the quest for domestic stability and legitimisation, “without, at the same time, triggering the mutually destructive external

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consequences that had plagued the inter-war period” (Ruggie, 1982, p. 393). The aim was to avoid imposing deflation and trade wars and to keep the world economy open and expanding. Moreover, the Bretton Woods system also represented a partial victory of productivism over financial capital: the Bretton Woods systems deliberately constrained the freedom of movement of financial capital. The Bretton Woods arrangements worked for a while. Rounds of free trade negotiations ensured the expansion of the world economy and increased the openness of national economies. Transnational corporations re-­ emerged in the 1950s and 1960s and assumed again the centre stage of the world economy. The evolvement of offshore financial centres, tax havens, and Eurodollar markets further increased the transnational mobility of capital. Globalisation in this sense implied new exit options for private, productive capital and new room for manoeuvre for financial capital. Less bound by the national state, those responsible for the investment and other operational decisions have been increasingly able to set tacit or explicit conditions on state policy (“business confidence”). Power relations have changed. Assuming with Michał Kalecki that the private owners of means of production and managers of corporations are structurally liable to the utopia of the market,12 economic globalisation would seem to explain the transformation of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Due to globalisation, state strategies based on attracting trade, production, and finance in terms of “business confidence”, or by improving capital’s position in the world economy, may work to a degree and for a while, and thus be represented as a model to be followed by the others. Media too can be privatised and bought, and thus brought closer to conveying the utopic message of the market. The ambiguities of the Hegelian theme of freedom and recognition can be exploited to strengthen the popular attraction of this utopia. If this picture is basically correct, as Robert Cox (1996, p. 528) among others insists, we should expect the next step to be a protective response on a global scale. While the first Polanyian double movement was instituted through the modern national states, the second must be realised largely via emerging systems of regional and global governance.13 Looking into the future, Cox is explicit in using the language of thesis and antithesis in describing the overall movement: […] a protective response at the level of global society has yet to take form. Yet the elements of opposition to the socially disruptive consequences of globalization are visible. The question remains open as to what forms these may take, as to whether and how they may  Kalecki (1943) famously argued that the business leaders and capitalists tend to wish to create circumstances in which policies depend on their confidence; the scope of free markets is maximised; and hierarchical power relations in the workplace are ensured. Thus, they are willing to do in spite of the real (but contested) macroeconomic effects of their preferred free-market policies (less growth, more unemployment and inequality, and more volatility, turbulence, and crises). 13  The relatively recent rise to prominence of the term “governance” is closely associated with the market-oriented theories, stories, and blueprints of neoliberalism (e.g. Taylor, 2002), and more generally with the prevailing geo-historical formation that Foucault (1991) has labelled as “governmentality”. Aware of the risk of reifying neoliberalism, I will rather use other related concepts whenever appropriate, such as arrangement, government, organisation, and rule. 12

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become more coherent and more powerful, so that historical thesis and antithesis may lead to a new synthesis.

Cox talks about a new synthesis but does not develop this idea further. “People, collectively, may be confronted with an opportunity, but whether or not they take it is up to them. Human agency, conditioned by past experience, is the ultimate maker of history.” (Cox, 1996, p. 533). What is evident from Cox is that global collaboration and new forms of global political agency are required. At the same time, Cox warns about “moral exhortation” and “utopian schemes”. It is indicative of his attitude that he emphasises the progressive aspect of the 1990s multilateralism and discusses briefly debates within the UN system. He also mentions that international organisations should be made democratic. But are Cox’s remarks enough for understanding the conditions and goals of the possible turn away from the market and towards new global forms of social embedment?

Constructing the Double Movement: The Problem of Agency There is more than a trace of functionalism in Polanyi. The double movement is not only supposed to be inevitable but also to occur almost semi-automatically. (Cf. Dale, 2012, p. 10, citing Ronaldo Munck’s unpublished manuscript). This presumption does not accord with the historical record. While the working class movement in England and elsewhere emerged from a variety of socio-economic conditions, it was actively made by socialists who believed in its world-historical role. In other words, whereas trade unions, various associations and societies, and labour or socialist parties constituted the pivotal transformative agency of the modern world (roughly from the 1870s into the 1970s), the agency itself was made by active human and social actors. In E.  P. Thompson’s (1966 p.  194) well-known catchphrase: “The working class made itself as much as it was made”. This process of making a class identity was based on shared understandings about problems (lacks, contradictions, etc.); shared values (solidarity, collectivism, mutuality, political radicalism, and Methodism); and a sense of common fate defined in terms of specific goals and socialist utopias. Democratic political actors must also learn to recognise universal equality, accept political pluralism and the legitimacy of different viewpoints, and approve the rule of law. Overlapping traditions and proximity in industrial cities facilitated the development of common ethical-political ideas and, as their counterparts, effective organisations. Working class ideas (and related debates around theories of political economy, history, etc.) became constitutive of the identity and interests of trade unions, left political parties, etc. The process of making a movement in this sense can take decades. These experiences can be generalised. Any new ethical and political “synthesis” is dependent on human conceptual and organisational work. Moreover, the simple tripartite scheme of dialectical change (thesis ➔ antithesis ➔ synthesis) should be demystified and pluralised by using further dialectical categories and conceptual possibilities. Dialectic itself is not a unitary phenomenon but consists of many

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figures and topics (Bhaskar, 1991a, p. 146; Collier, 2002, p. 157). In the abstract, dialectics cannot provide a theory of any particular changes. Yet, its metaphors, analogies, narratives, and schemes can yield various insightful hypotheses both for explaining past changes and for scenarios about possible and more or less likely future changes. Thus, the dialectical notion of the unity of opposites can be used critically to reveal the inner tensions and complexities of Polanyi’s basic categories, the market and the social. It has been pointed out that Polanyi’s concept of the market is highly idealised and abstract, in effect neoclassical (Lie, 1991). It is thereby stripped down of the necessary social underpinnings of real markets, such as communication, cultural meanings, trust, knowledge, competencies, relations of power, and institutional structures. This makes it difficult to explain how real capitalist markets function (for instance, marketing leading, via cultural meanings, to product differentiation that co-generates degrees of monopoly and barriers of entry). It also hides different possible ways of organising markets (for instance, workers’ cooperatives or democratising finance for new enterprises). Because of Polanyi’s highly idealised and abstract concept of the market, he is then misled to lump together all forms of “social protection”, even when the protection may serve the purposes of, say, large landowners’ specific interests or militarist nationalism. The curtailing of the market—as in Nazi Germany to some degrees and more systematically in Soviet Russia—may also coincide with an assault upon the rules, customs, and institutions that protect labour rights. Against Polanyi, it is also true that an enlightened capitalist may realise that healthy, highly skilled, and motivated workers are better for production than miserable slum dwellers with barely any substantial know-how or skills (in the OECD world, the latter have been largely replaced by machinery). In other words, there is no singular “thesis ➔ antithesis ➔ synthesis” movement. Rather reality involves complex multi-path developmental processes that can be interwoven or contradictory in various ways. There are many possible outcomes of the dialectic of thesis and antithesis: a simple refutation of a relevant proposition; a combination of the opposing assertions; a synthesis by making a general claim, preserving the insights of both thesis and antithesis; or a qualitative improvement of the dialogue by means conceptual complexification and innovation, perhaps taking the dialogue to a new path or level. Many dialectical moves are un-anticipatable. Similarly, one can argue (i) that there are many possible rational directions of world history, some of which can be at least in some regards un-anticipatable and (ii) that these directions are also a matter of dialectical disputations, always occurring under concrete world-historical circumstances. This is what the openness of world history means. Any claim about the rational tendential directionality of world history has to be understood as a normative dialectical argument within the meaningful human sphere of the cosmos. It is thus clear that the new double movement will not come about semi-automatically, but can only be realised through transformative praxis. The rational tendential directionality of world history is contingent upon a transformative praxis, a process that is in turn dependent upon the rationality of participating individual actors (Bhaskar, 1993, p.  91). Rationality cannot be

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confined to any particular agent, agents, or collective category. The minimal meaning of rationality is openness to reason and learning. Once context-specific learning has taken place and a reasonable direction has been set, the next logical step is the process of constructing transformative agency, in a manner analogical to the making of the working class in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. But is there anything analogical in the twenty-first century? A lot has been said about the new social movements, NGOs, and global civil society. Among others, Ronaldo Munck (2007) discusses the anti-globalisation movement and various local transnationalisms and transnational political actors as possible carriers of the Polanyian second movement in the global age. The problem is that most of these actors tend to be reactive rather than proactive, responding to the latest round of neoliberal initiatives by trying to mobilise resistance against them. When these civic actors are proactive (pushing, e.g., a global financial tax or debt alleviation), they try to shape public opinion via mass media, lobby law-makers within national states, and influence negotiators in international organisations. On a few occasions, this proactive road has been successful, but usually only after a long delay and in rather exceptional circumstances. Non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and advocacy groups and networks have limited agendas and legitimacy. They need the support of states to initiate any changes. Since 2001, the World Social Forum (WSF) has been forging links and ties of solidarity among diverse actors. Although the WSF may seem a party of opinion when defined negatively against neoliberal globalisation, imperialism, and violence, it remains a rather incoherent collection of diverse actors with no common direction; and the WSF itself is usually defined as an open space, lacking agency. At best the WSF is based on a minimally shared understanding of the problems (lacks, contradictions). It is divided over whether the aim is to defend local or national autonomy or build new regional or global institutions, and there are many disagreements over specific proposals as well. The question of transformative global agency concerns rationality and developments that may take decades. It cannot be settled on the basis of available empirical evidence in the early 2020s. The making of a collective agency is a process of active and reflexive engagement within the world in which we seek to achieve the unity of theory and practice in practice (Bhaskar, 1993, pp.  8, 158–61). Therefore, if the argument is that new global institutions and powers are needed and that they have to be democratic, theory/practice consistency requires that the transformative praxis itself has to be capable of collective will formation and democratic decision-­making. Transformative praxis has to be also processual, developmental, and directional, involving political programmes specifying aims and concrete eutopias. Its organisational forms must be compatible with these requirements. The transformative praxis itself can be transformed on the basis of past experiences and criticism of them. There is a quest for new forms of agency such as a world political party (see Chap. 9). A democratic organisation must be capable of learning from past setbacks. Political parties have tended to become elitist, if not outright hierarchical. A global political party would have to recognise, on the one

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hand, the limited practical possibilities of many to become transnational activists, whether members of the party or not. Therefore, the party should work systematically to widen the social basis of activists and dedicate a substantial part of its resources to this purpose. It would also have to be committed to the re-organisation of institutions of mass media and systems of education to encourage public virtues and make citizens well-informed. The main purpose of the world political party—or global Polanyian movement more generally—would be to transform existing global institutions and to create new ones, to overcome the structural power of transnational capital and manifold contradictions of global political economy. By democratising globalisation, the movement would enable processes of decommodification and new “syntheses” concerning the market/social nexus.

Overcoming Contradictions in Global Political Economy In some senses, the world economy has existed much longer than a truly planetary economy. Polanyi (1957, p. 89) describes the development of the latter vividly at the time of the industrial revolution in the early nineteenth century: “the old world was swept away in one indomitable surge toward a planetary economy”. Yet in his mid-­ twentieth century book, Polanyi failed to consider alternative ways of organising and shaping what he called “the new and tremendous hazards of planetary interdependence” (Polanyi, 1957, p. 181). This was a major lacuna in his work. In the first half of the twenty-first century, planetary interdependence is the key to understanding action conditions. Common institutions are best seen as rational responses to various problems, lacks, and contradictions. Often especially contradictions trigger change. What is a contradiction? Incompatibility at the most general level means that something cannot be and be not in the same respect and at the same time. Also actions may be contradictory if they can and are likely to defeat their purpose. Contradictions in this sense can arise from incorrect beliefs about how things work (e.g. if one mistakes a poisonous substance for medicine) or from the lack of generalisability (e.g. if everyone wants simultaneously to avoid losing money by withdrawing all their savings from a bank that is considered shaky). The latter is a case of the fallacy of composition, which can lead to a self-fulfilling prophecy and a bank run. Finally, contradictions can occur also at the level of social systems, if there are organising principles that work against each other, or if an organising principle generates a force that either tends to produce or is itself the product of conditions that simultaneously or subsequently produce a countervailing force (Bhaskar, 1991b, p. 110). Real-world contradictions are not categorical because whether the contradicting forces cancel each other out—or whether one force, in the end, annuls the other—depends on contingent circumstances (e.g. false beliefs: how much poison one takes; bank runs: how many individuals are withdrawing their savings simultaneously).

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There are diverse contradictions in global political economy. They depend on real geo-historical interdependencies and processes: what actors believe and how they behave, how markets are organised, and what kinds of collective institutions are available. Consider a few characteristic examples of contradictions in the early twenty-first-century global political economy. A Keynesian welfare state can be contradictory in an open and liberal world economy simply because corporations can move their tax base elsewhere if they consider the level of taxation to be too high. This depends of course also on what factors other than taxation determine investment decisions. Current account deficits and surpluses cancel out—their total sum is always zero—and in that sense, all the states cannot be in surplus simultaneously. The degree to which states prioritise current account surplus varies, however, and some of them can find deficit acceptable, at least for a while. The real causal effects of this incompatibility depend thus on complex circumstances. Many states are committed to improving their current account balance by enhancing their “competitiveness”. The problem is that attempts to increase cost competitiveness through internal devaluation tend to prove contradictory. Imagine a simplified world of only two countries. Both try to enhance their competitiveness by putting down wage-level or taxes and social benefits. As a result, neither country emerges as more cost-competitive than before, but due to deflation in both countries, they face smaller export markets. There will be less aggregate demand in the system as a whole, thus a weaker basis also for economic growth (or worse, there will be a recession or even depression in both countries). The characteristically dire social consequences of this kind of policy turn out to be counterproductive also from the viewpoint of its own publicly expressed rationale, namely GDP growth. In the world economy of almost 200 states—all much wealthier and more populous than in the nineteenth century, and many with in-built automatic stabilisers and inclination to resort to Keynesian measures in downturns despite the prevailing neoliberal prescriptions—the policy of competitiveness generates a deflationary tendency. Because of the erosion of the Bretton Woods system, and how the IMF and World Bank in fact function, the world monetary system now works partly analogically to the Gold Standard, that is, pro-cyclically, as a rule leaving the burden of adjustments to the deficit countries. It should be noted, however, that the actual working of the historical Gold Standard depended on the evolving central bank practices and policy priorities, and the anticipation of these by private investors (see Eichengreen, 1996, 25–44). As argued in Chap. 7, political economy contradictions can be resolved through collective actions and by building more adequate common institutions (see also Patomäki, 2022, pp. 103–109). For instance, it is possible to build a mechanism that balances world trade surpluses and deficits automatically, possibly involving tax and transfer (based on Keynes’ International Clearing Union, the Brandt Commission proposals, and other more recent proposals). These kinds of institutions can be characterised as global Keynesian, framing questions of public economic policy and politics reflexively on the world economic scale. Global Keynesianism aims to regulate global interdependencies in such a way as to produce stable and high levels of

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growth, employment, and welfare for everyone and everywhere, simultaneously. This requires new common institutions. New common institutions will evolve in an evolutionary fashion by replacing aspects of the authority of territorial sovereign states with more adequate (social, Keynesian, democratic, etc.) global arrangements and organisations; in other words, by overcoming definite lacks, absences, problems, and contradictions step by step, institutional reform by reform. There is no reason to think about these kinds of reforms and evolutionary changes as piecemeal and always separate, however. From a dialectical perspective, processes are seen in relations of mutual dependency (Ollman, 2003, pp.  18–19, 157–8). Different processes are often connected and interwoven through internal/conceptual relations; but they do interact causally, too. A series of feasible and compatible political economy reforms can be put together and forged into a strategy of democratic global Keynesian transformations (see Chap. 12). Accumulation of relatively small (“quantitative”) changes in specific areas may lead to ruptures and sudden transformations (“qualitative changes”) in others, as issues and processes are linked. After a critical point, changes towards a particular direction can become mutually (self-)reinforcing, and this may also be their deliberate purpose. As a result, one world-historical developmental path comes to be replaced by another.

Collective Learning Towards Holoreflexivity Like Cox and many others, Joseph A. Camilleri and Jim Falk (2009, ch. 5) propose that the colonisation of society by market forces is now proceeding on a truly planetary scale. Camilleri and Falk try to find empirical evidence of an emerging Polanyian trend for global social protection. The problem is that they do not look beyond the current empirical patterns. They avoid discussing the rational and normative basis for a transformative agency. With great difficulty, Camilleri and Falk depict a few positive trends: the internet and global civil society indicate emergent forms of agency. Disappointed, they see more reasons to be hopeful in the field of environmental protection. Camilleri and Falk are right, however, in arguing that contradictions are not confined to political economy. From a dialectical perspective, learning to absent various lacks and to overcome contradictions is at the heart of all human geo-historical developments. Human developments at one moment tend to result in new lacks and contradictions in the next geo-historical moment. Further learning, conceptual work, and collective actions may or may not take place. If this does take place, new levels of human consciousness make new social practices and institutions possible. This holds also for the contemporary industrial world, the growth of which has resulted in manifold unintended consequences, potentially counterproductive to the sustainability of planetary systems of life. Ethics and politics are increasingly concerned with the future of life. (Apel, 1992, p. 224). This claim is closely related to the higher-order purposes discussed in Chap. 7.

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Camilleri’s and Falk’s (2009) concept of holoreflexivity is a remarkable attempt at contributing to the making of a global transformative agency. The Greek term holo means “whole”. Holoreflexity, Camilleri and Falk envisage, is the next logical step in the mutually reinforcing processes of increasing organisational complexity and personal and institutional reflexivity under planetary conditions. Reflexivity denotes the capacity to reflect upon the conditions of one’s being, agency, and actions, also to shape the relevant planetary conditions. Thus, holoreflexivity involves a comprehension of the mechanisms, structures, and processes of the whole. As a form of understanding, “it is global in that it encompasses all social groupings, communities cultures and civilisations, and planetary in that it comprises the totality of relationships between the human species and the rest of the biosphere” (Camilleri & Falk, 2009, p. 537). Global warming, overpopulation, pathogens, shortage of resources, weapons of mass destruction, and so on are often understood as risks that require global responses (Beck, 1999). Many of these problems can also be conceptualised as self-­ generated contradictions, especially in terms of counterfinality. For instance, resistant pathogens can result from the widespread use of antibiotics and global warming from industrial growth. As the number of risks, problems, and contradictions multiplies, so does also possible rational responses to them, constituting reasons for holoreflexivity. Material conditions are pushing moral learning. Arguably, holoreflexivity (or something equivalent, such as Apel’s  (1991, 1992)  planetary macroethics) is a condition for the rise of global movements promoting more functional and legitimate common institutions. This raises a further question: is it possible to deliberately facilitate collective learning towards holoreflexivity? The task becomes twofold: (i) to enable maximal moral learning among the world population by and large; and (ii) to create adequate global institutions to ensure and facilitate planetary cooperation, overcome contradictions, and resolve social conflicts. These are two aspects of the same task. The mechanisms and processes of collective learning can be illuminated by employing an evolutionary model of social change (adopted, with modifications, from Harré, 1979, pp. 355–83). Mutations (M) are rules, practices, and institutions. Selection conditions (S) are part of the context(s) of action of the actor who innovates, adopts, or supports the adoption of Mi. The design of common institutions should thus aim at creating a social context in which the S-conditions are supportive of maximally wide and as high-level ethical-political learning as possible. This kind of context would also be predisposed towards changes and innovations (M-conditions), which, if established, will become part of the new S-context. A virtuous circle may emerge. Moreover, as different processes are connected and interwoven, the Polanyian double movement and attempts to respond to global environmental and other problems can be linked in many ways. For instance, it may be that global warming requires global Keynesian responses, such as a democratically organised global greenhouse gas tax and world public investments, rather than a cap and trade system premised on the market (Chap. 11). Breakthroughs in any one area of governance can become a model to be followed in others. In a world where processes are in

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relations of mutual dependency, collective learning towards holoreflexivity, and new institutional innovations, may well contribute to the end of the dominance of the market utopia.

Concluding Remarks We are inhabitants of a world of multiple processes and tendencies. As Bhaskar (1993, p. 261) argues, this world is characterised “by complex, plural, contradictory, differentiated, disjoint but also coalescing and condensing development and antagonistic struggles”. World history is not a smooth, linear development in any direction, however rational that direction may be. As processes are subject to regression, entropy, and roll-back, we cannot expect real geo-historical processes to be anything but a messy affair. It would be a mistake, however, to conclude that because developments are not smooth and linear, and because many developments seem regressive or chaotic, there is no rational tendential direction to world history. My argument suggests rational tendencies towards global Keynesian and other holoreflexive systems of governance, enabling processes of decommodification and new “syntheses” concerning the market/social nexus. The rational tendential directionality of world history is contingent upon a transformative praxis. If and when the transformation becomes self-reinforcing, learning will occur across the political spectrum and different organisations. A global political party—or parties—may nonetheless prove crucially important in this medium-­ term future transformation. Once at least some democratic global Keynesian and holoreflexive institutions are in place, democratic political parties will be essential for their legitimate operation. Simultaneously, local, national, and transnational political possibilities are expanded by constructing adequate worldwide institutions to regulate, tax, and shape transnational capital. Thus, ethical-political aspirations to move beyond the limitations of the past welfare state models—these aspirations were vocal already in the 1960s and 1970s, before the rise of neoliberalism14—can be met by reforming the social and ethical-political underpinnings of the market. The point of global reforms is also to increase autonomy and new possibilities. Emergence is real. At any given time, it is possible that new powers, structures, and mechanisms emerge and existing ones disappear. Democratic global Keynesianism is only a provisional end-point, subject to contestations and debates about its merits. It will generate lacks, problems, and contradictions of its own and will be followed by other possibilities. World history is an ongoing, unfinished, and unbounded process that can only be anticipated to a point.

 For instance, in Sweden in the 1960s and early 1970s, processes of ethico-political learning and unlearning; responses to various glocal problems and skirmishes, and the ideals of the socialist emancipatory project led in many places to aspirations to move beyond that model. This happened at the time when the intrinsic and extrinsic conditions of social-democratic power-mobilisation were already rapidly changing (Patomäki, 2000, pp. 125–8; Ryner, 2002). 14

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References Amin, A. (1994). Post-Fordism: A reader. Blackwell. Apel, K.-O. (1978). The conflicts of our time and the problems of political thics. In F. Dallmayr (Ed.), From contract to community. Political theory at the crossroads (pp. 81–101). Dekker. Apel, K.-O. (1991). A planetary macroethics for humankind: The need, the apparent difficulty, and the eventual possibility. In E. Deutsch (Ed.), Culture and modernity. East-west philosophic perspectives (pp. 261–278). University of Hawaii Press. Apel, K.-O. (1992). The ecological crisis as a problem for discourse ethics. In A. Øfsti (Ed.), Ecology and ethics. A report from the Melbu conference (pp. 219–260). Nordland Akademi for Kunst og Vitenskap. Beck, U. (1999). World risk society. Polity Press. Bhaskar, R. (1991a). Dialectics. In T. Bottomore (Ed.), A dictionary of Marxist thought (2nd ed., pp. 143–150). Blackwell. Bhaskar, R. (1991b). Contradiction. In T. Bottomore (Ed.), A dictionary of Marxist thought (2nd ed., pp. 109–110). Blackwell. Bhaskar, R. (1993). Dialectic. The pulse of freedom. Verso. Bhaskar, R. (1994). Plato etc. problems of philosophy and their resolution. Verso. Blyth, M. (2002). Great transformations: Economic ideas and institutional change in the twentieth century. Cambridge University Press. Boyer, R., & Durand, J.-P. (1997). After Fordism. (S. H. Mair, Trans.). Macmillan. Burawoy, M. (2010). From Polanyi to Pollyanna: The false optimism of global labor studies. Global Labour Journal, 1(2), 301–313. Butterfield, H. (1950). The Whig interpretation of history. G. Bells & Sons. (Original work published 1931). Camilleri, J. A., & Falk, J. (2009). Worlds in transition. Evolving governance across a stressed planet. Edward Elgar. Collier, A. (2002). Dialectic in Marxism and critical realism. In A.  Brown, S.  Fleetwood, & J. M. Roberts (Eds.), Critical realism and Marxism (pp. 155–167). Routledge. Cox, R. W. (1996). Approaches to world order. Cambridge University Press. Dale, G. (2012). Double movements and pendular forces: Polanyian perspectives on the neoliberal age. Current Sociology, 60(3), 3–27. Eichengreen, B. (1996). Globalizing capital. A history of the international monetary system. Princeton University Press. Feinstein, C. H. (1998). Pessimism perpetuated: Real wages and the standard of living in Britain during and after the industrial revolution. The Journal of Economic History, 58(3), 625–658. Foucault, M. (1991). Governmentality. In G.  Burchell, C.  Gordon, & P.  Miller (Eds.), The Foucault effect: Studies in governmentality. (R. Braidotti, Trans., and revised by C. Gordon) (pp. 87–104). University of Chicago Press. Gill, S. (2008). Power and resistance in the New World order. (2nd ed, fully revised and updated). Palgrave Macmillan. Gowan, P. (1999). The global gamble. Washington’s Faustian bid for world dominance. Verso. Harré, R. (1979). Social being. Basil Blackwell. Harvey, D. (2005). A brief history of neoliberalism. Oxford University Press. Jaynes, J. (2000). The origin of consciousness in the breakdown of the bicameral mind. Houghton Mifflin. Kalecki, M. (1943). Political aspects of full employment. The Political Quarterly, 14(4), 322–331. Komlos, J. (1998). Shrinking in a growing economy? The mystery of physical stature during the industrial revolution. Journal of Economic History, 58(3), 779–802. Lie, J. (1991). Embedding Polanyi's market society. Sociological Perspectives, 34(2), 219–235.

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Lindert, P. H., & Williamson, J. G. (1983). English workers’ living standards during the industrial revolution: A new look. The Economic History Review, 36(1), 1–25. Maertens, E. (2008). Polanyi’s double movement: A critical reappraisal. Social Thought & Research, 29(1), 129–153. McCloskey, D. N. (1997). Other things equal. Polanyi was right, and wrong. Eastern Economic Journal, 23(4), 483–487. Meier, B. (2008). Book review of the great transformation. Social Thought & Research, 29(1), 155-160. Munck, R. (2007). Globalization and contestation. The new great counter-movement. Routledge. North, D. (1977). Markets and other allocation systems in history: The challenge of Karl Polanyi. Journal of European Economic History, 6(3), 703–716. Ollman, B. (2003). Dance of the dialectic. Steps in Marx's method. University of Illinois Press. Patomäki, H. (2000). Beyond Nordic nostalgia: Envisaging a social/democratic system of global governance. Cooperation and Conflict, 35(2), 115–154. Patomäki, H. (2008). The political economy of global security. War, future crises and changes in global governance. Routledge. Patomäki, H. (2020a). On the historicity of social ontology. Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour, 50(4), 439–461. Patomäki, H. (2020b). Appendix: Stages of development from the era of archaic humans to the axial age. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.3984609 Patomäki, H. (2022). The three fields of global political economy. Routledge. Polanyi, K. (1957). The great transformation. The political and economic origins of our time. Beacon Press. (Original work published 1944). Polanyi, K., Arensberg, C. M., & Pearson, H. W. (Eds.). (1957). Trade and market in the early empires. Henry Regnery Company. Renger, J.  M. (2005). K.  Polanyi and the economy of ancient Mesopotamia. In P.  Clancier, F. Joannès, P. Rouillard, & A. Tenu (Eds.), Autour de Polanyi: Vocabulaires, théories et modalités des échanges (pp. 45–65). De Boccard. Rescher, N. (1977). Dialectics. A controversy oriented approach to the theory of knowledge. State University of New York Press. Rescher, N. (1987). Forbidden knowledge. D. Reidel. Rescher, N. (2006). Philosophical dialectics. An essay on metaphilosophy. State University of New York Press. Rottenberg, S. (1958). A review of trade and market in the early empires: Economies in history and theory. The American Economic Review, 48(4), 675–678. Ruggie, J. G. (1982). International regimes, transactions, and change: Embedded liberalism in the postwar economic order. International Organization, 36(2), 379–415. Ryner, M. (2002). Capitalist restructuring, globalization and the third way: Lessons from the Swedish model. Routledge. Sayer, A. (2000). Realism and social science. Sage. Silver, B. J., & Giovanni, A. (2003). Polanyi's ‘double movement’: The Belle Époques of British and U.S. hegemony compared. Politics and Society, 31(2), 325–355. Silver, M. (2007). Redistribution and markets in the economy of ancient Mesopotamia: Updating Polanyi. Antiguo Oriente, 5, 89–112. Szreter, S., & Mooney, G. (1998). Urbanization, mortality, and the standard of living debate: New estimates of the expectation of life at birth in nineteenth-century British cities. The Economic History Review, 51(1), 84–112. Taylor, A. (2002). Governance. In G. Blakeley & V. Bryson (Eds.), Contemporary political concepts: A critical introduction (pp. 35–53). Pluto Press. Thompson, E. P. (1966). The making of the English working class. Vintage Books. Tonkiss, F. (2006). Contemporary economic sociology. Globalisation, production and inequality. Routledge.

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van Eemeren, F. H., & Grootendorst, R. (1984). Speech acts in argumentative discussions: A theoretical model for the analysis of discussions directed towards solving conflicts of opinion. Floris Publications. van Eemeren, F.  H., & Grootendorst, R. (2004). A systematic theory of argumentation: The pragma-dialectical approach. Cambridge University Press.

9

Transformative Agency: Towards a World Political Party

Introduction The organisation of collective action requires trust, solidarity, and long-term commitments. The making of the working class provides a partial historical analogy to the possible development of new forms of transformative agency in the twenty-first century. In Chap. 7, I thematised the notions of reflexive identity and higher-order purposes; and in Chap. 8, I argued the rational tendential directionality of world history is contingent upon a transformative praxis and suggested that a global political party or parties may prove critically important in the process. In a sense, the world historical emergence of world political parties occurred already in the nineteenth century. The roots of the contemporary quest for global transformative agency go back to the formation of the first transnational political associations intertwined with the burgeoning peace and labour movements. In particular, the earliest analogues for a new world party are the socialist internationals of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Marx and Engels’s declaration “Proletarians of all countries, unite!” helped inspire the International Workingmen’s Association, which has subsequently become known as the “First International”, and successive internationals, including those organised by social democratic, liberal, and green parties. For many advocates of democracy, civil society has carried the banner of transformative hope, expressed through the pursuit of such values as peace, justice, democracy, economic well-being, and ecological sustainability. In the 1960s and 1970s, a good century after the first socialist international was established, new movements fighting for gender and racial equality, nuclear disarmament, and environmental justice sparked global activism. In the 1980s, globalisation became an era-defining issue and as the Internet started to further facilitate instant worldwide communication and the Cold War was ending, the concept of global civil society took hold. The term “global civil society” surfaced in 1989–91 and since then, it has

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become part of the common ethical and political language—although the peak of its popularity was in the early 2000s. In 2000–2001, in response to the growing dominance of neoliberalism, the reflexively political part of global civil society formed the World Social Forum (WSF). Reflexivity means the capacity of actors to reflect—in consciousness and discourse—on their conditions and positioning while acknowledging that both can change and be changed. Holoreflexivity means that one can see oneself as an active part of a dynamic global whole. The rise of WSF can readily be perceived in Polanyian terms (Chap. 8): a phase of neoliberal globalisation is followed by the emergence of attempts to create new structures of global solidarity. However, the aspirations that have been attributed to the WSF are ambiguous. The main slogan is “another world is possible”. The implicit promise is that the WSF can facilitate the bringing about of “a better world” and yet, the main organising principle is that of open space. How could a mere open space make another world possible unless the only political aspiration of participants concerns the form of togetherness itself? Political agency requires transformative capacity, which a mere open space necessarily lacks. As the WSF has remained hesitant to move into the realm of action, interest in it has waned. Moreover, the world historical context has changed. In the post-Cold War context, many dared to hope for further emancipatory changes in terms of global democracy and solidarity, but that hope has since then waned. As discussed in Chap. 7, if anything, the world seems to be disintegrating as a result of the contradictions of global political economy and the rise of nationalist populism. This rise has been strongly fuelled by the 2008–9 global financial crisis and its consequences, but its deeper causes are related to the process of neoliberalisation that started much earlier, in the 1970s and early 1980s (see Palley, 2022; Patomäki, 2021). Throughout this era that has now lasted for more than four decades, civil society has been fragmented across a plethora of organisations, issues, and places. Except for the WSF (to be discussed in more detail below), it has lacked frameworks for fostering wider solidarity, shared vision, and synergistic action. The dilemmas of global civil society have re-opened the question about transformative political agency in explicitly global (referring to social relations) and planetary (referring to life on the planet) contexts (for this distinction, see Chakrabarty, 2021). Legitimate and efficacious collective agency in world politics takes the construction of social meanings and relations organised systematically in such a manner as to enable the turning of reflexive individual agency into a transformative collective agency. In the following, I analyse the dilemmas and contradictions of contemporary global and planetary civil society in the context of de-democratising tendencies and discuss a possible form of future transformative agency. I understand the world political party as an open ethical and political association constituted by a collective programme of societal re-organisation. In their capacity as members and democratically elected representatives of the party, the supporters of this programme can pursue their common agenda in public spaces. Developing the idea of a world political party requires conceptual resources, which we can find in past attempts to imagine

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such a party. The world historical context of the 2020s and 2030s raises critical questions including “what could a world political party do, given the absence at this world-historical conjuncture of representative global institutions such as a world parliament?”. Moreover, how could a world political party respond adequately to the criticism of the conventional (mostly centre-right)1 national political parties and cultivate the critical-pluralist ethos of political civil society? The process of creating a world party will take time and the past and current forms of activism and experimentation can give us clues about the conditions, phases, and potential pitfalls of this process. In this chapter, I spotlight and examine one such experiment, the Democracy in Europe Movement 2025 (DiEM25). Its successes and failures can provide critical lessons also for those seeking to forge organs of collective agency beyond one continent. In the normative and future-oriented spirit of the early World Orders Model Project (WOMP, the heyday of which was in the 1970s and 1980s),2 I sketch a possible way of organising a world political party and specifying its purposes, both grounded on the lessons of the past experiences and on thought experiments. I conclude by discussing briefly some key practical issues of organising such a party.

 Thomas Palley (2022, pp. 14–15) argues that centre-left has become centre-right since the 1980s: “The first shift was the initial turn to Neoliberalism initiated by Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan. Their political success, the capture of political-economic thinking, and the capture of the public’s imagination, combined to pull the entire political spectrum to the right and redefine it. That redefinition is evident in the Third Way movement which saw center-left social democracy collapse and redefine itself according to the parameters and terms of debate set by Neoliberalism. Consequently, today’s social democrats would have been deemed center-right in 1980 in terms of their view of the economy, economic policy possibilities, and target economic outcomes”. 2  WOMP was an academic movement launched in the late 1960s. It was widely perceived to have been led by such US-based public intellectuals as Saul Mendlovitz and Richard Falk but included scholars from all around the world such as Johan Galtung, Rajni Kothari, and Ali Mazrui. Each scholar was meant to bring a regional perspective to the project—African, Latin American, North American, North European, and so on—and different concerns and values. (See McKeil, 2022). In his early response to the critics of WOMP, Falk (1978, p. 536) summarised the idea: “WOMP has been seeking to evolve a new orientation towards the subject matter of international relations. This orientation is normative (goals are made explicit), futurist (a concern with trends and countertrends), systemic (the interrelations of the overall system; a planetary scale of inquiry), constitutive (the design of alternative institutions and procedures), and transdisciplinary (including politics, economics, sociology, philosophy, religion, and cultural anthropology). It is also an academic exercise that has aspirations as yet mainly unrealized. WOMP is addressing a single message to the world: the present system doesn’t work; it cannot be incrementally repaired; it can be replaced by one that does work, but not quickly or easily; the prospects for replacement are not encouraging, but are themselves a function of the seriousness and representativeness of the search”. WOMP, however, lacked a coherent account of transformative agency. 1

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Different Meanings of Modern Civil Society: Four Possibilities The category of civil society is historical, contested, and linked to the evolution of capitalist market society in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries Europe. The idea that there exists a distinct “civil society” emerged from perceptions such as (i) the creation of society conceptually precedes the creation of government; (ii) there is a sphere of relations formed voluntarily among individuals; and (iii) this society of civic individuals is at least potentially self-organising (Calhoun, 2001, p. 1897). John Locke was perhaps the first modern liberalist to argue that legitimate government must be based on the consent of the citizens. Locke thought that a representative government has to be brought into being to fully safeguard property. Hence, the priorities are property rights and the freedom from state-imposed constraints of male persons conceived as possessive individuals or, more precisely, property-­ owning men.3 Following Kant and others, Hegel incorporated the basic idea of Locke into his complex and all-embracing processual system involving logic and philosophy of world history. Marx in turn observed new social conditions and responded to Hegel, seeking to transcend the inhuman and repressive conditions created by the institution of private property, capitalist market society, and the industrial revolution. Marx envisaged the emergence of a new socialist mode of production and society. Since Hegel, there have been several conceptions of civil society, each of which accords with different ethical and political aims of public associations (for an in-­ depth discussion, Cohen & Arato, 1994). The German term that Hegel used— bürgerliche Gesellschaft—fails to make any clear or systematic distinction between the capitalist market economy, constituted by private property rights and competition, and civil society connected to the idea of collective self-determination of citizens through the state. Since the late 19th, there have been many Western debates about the nature, role, and value of civil society. Often, these more recent Western debates have been set in terms of certain oppositions, including: • capitalist market economy versus self-organising civic activities of the citizens • procedural democracy versus participatory democracy These non-exclusive distinctions yield 2 x 2 combinations of possibilities. Table 9.1 summarises these four conceptions of civil society. They are not universal categories but outcomes of particular conceptual discussions and historical developments. Consider, for instance, category 2 in the English-speaking world and democracy claims by such theorists as J. S. Mill and John Rawls. The systems of British parliamentarism and American constitutionalism became more democratic once, after a series of struggles in the nineteenth and early twentieth century, franchise was made more equal and gradually extended to the adult population as a whole.  For details, see C. B. MacPherson (1964, p. 3 and ch. 5). MacPherson also claims that Locke systematically confused different meanings of civil society. Sometimes civil society was supposed to guarantee “life, liberty and estates” for everyone, sometimes only goods and land, that is, material property for those who have it. With the help of this ambiguity, Locke justified inequalities and class rights (see ibid., pp. 247–248). 3

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Table 9.1  Approaches to civil society

Procedural democracy (Hegel—liberalism)

Participatory democracy (Marx—republicanism)

Focus on property rights and market economy 1. Lockean-Schumpeterian approach: the primacy of stability in the capitalist market economy 3. The idea of participatory democratised, economic organisations and systems

Focus on moral or political civil society 2. Fair participation in political processes and similar ideas (often associated with Mill and Rawls) 4. Political associations; dissident ideas and “Green” political theory; the New Left; “post-material values”

These developments were based on but also created momentum for claims about fair participation and similar ideas. However, in reaction to the equal and universal suffrage established in many countries in the aftermath of WWI, and demands to democratise society also otherwise, Joseph Schumpeter (1976, p. 269) argued, because there is no uniquely determined common good discernible to all, that “democratic method is that institutional arrangement for arriving at political decisions in which individuals acquire the power to decide by means of a competitive struggle for people’s vote”. Democracy is thus a method of replacing the ruling group or party with another section of the elite. Schumpeter and his followers have seen the positive value of democracy largely in Lockean terms: government must be based on the consent of citizens, and representative government has to be brought into being to fully safeguard private property and the functioning of the capitalist market economy. Approaches 2–4 go beyond the Lockean-Schumpeterian idea that democracy is only about periodical elections. These approaches emphasise the importance of widespread political participation either as an end in itself or as a means to another end such as economic and political success; justice; or democratic socialism. Often the focus is on civil society, as variously conceived by different theories and approaches. The Millian-Rawlsian approach extends the liberalist political theory to cover also knowledge production (liberty in Mill) and the development of real power relations (political sociology in Rawls). Republicanism, in turn, can be articulated as the basis of freedom of association and public debate; morally responsible post-material (civic) society; or rendered in the service of post-Marxian ideas, as in theories of democratised and pluralised market economy. The categories are not always distinct and key theorists may have engaged with different ideas at different times (e.g. late Mill was also a socialist in the sense of 3, see Persky, 2016). A political party can be seen as an instance of public association. Although laws and organisational forms differ across national and other contexts, a typical national political party is a particular kind of association that has achieved the right to nominate candidates in elections and thereby contest and claim the political power of the state and other public organisations. In contrast to other associations, however, a party needs a wide programme involving multiple complex issues, for its aim is to take part in making laws and budgetary decisions covering all areas of policy.

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The Emergence and Development of Global Civil Society From the republican viewpoint of Hannah Arendt (1958, pp. 199–220), the public sphere, or the “space of appearance”, comes into being whenever actors are together in the manner of speech and action. This kind of space precedes all formal constitutions of the public realm and the various forms of government or governance and ways of organising political life. In this sense, the meeting on 28 September 1864 for the reception of the French workers’ delegates that took place in St. Martin’s Hall, London, and established the basis for the First International, evoked a transnational public sphere. In various manifestations, the transnational public sphere existed already in pre-1914 Europe. Some of these manifestations started to attract also non-European participants, especially from within the British and French Empires. How explicitly and reflexively political were these efforts? The answer depends also on our conception of the political. Usually, the nineteenth and twentieth-century movements—especially liberalist and socialist, but also feminist—focussed on state powers and articulated their universalism in terms of “internationalism”. The focus on state power notwithstanding, a series of new multilateral and cosmopolitan visions emerged during the late nineteenth-­ century era of globalisation and competing neo-imperialisms. The twentieth-­century catastrophes interrupted and distorted the formation of transnational public sphere, tending to re-nationalise politics. Nevertheless, critical cosmopolitan activities were strikingly strong at the end and in the immediate aftermath of both world wars, resulting among other things in the establishment of the League of Nations and its successor, the United Nations. The so-called new social movements have arisen since 1968, at first responding to the Vietnam War and the threat of nuclear war (cf. Chap. 6). In the 1970s and 1980s, such new organisations as Greenpeace—the Greenpeace Foundation was established in 1971, and the Greenpeace International in 1979—started to attract attention in the media and academia. The origins of Greenpeace lie in the protests against nuclear weapons testing, the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, and the peace movement more generally, while also focussing on ecological issues. Parallel developments occurred in the global south, although usually on a relatively small scale, and to some albeit more limited degree within the fairly closed Soviet bloc (eventually civil society played a decisive role in democratisation of states in these regions). The World Order Models Project (WOMP) discussed the “new” phenomena under the rubric of critical social movements; the world-systems analysis preferred to categorise these emergent actors and networks as “anti-systemic movements” (see, e.g., Arrighi et al., 1986; Eide, 1986; Mendlovitz & Walker, 1987 and Walker, 1988). An explicitly and reflexively political and worldwide civil society surfaced in the late 1980s and early 1990s and, in this self-consciously global and civilisational sense, for the first time in human history. When the concept of societas civilis is employed globally it entails that civilising processes, legality, and politics are recognised as global in scope and that there thus is a planetary civilisation in the making (cf. Elias, 1978; Linklater, 2020; for discussion, Chap. 13). This recognition is

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compatible with the notion that the word “civilisation” will continue to be used in both singular and plural (Braudel, 1995, p.  8). Elise Boulding (1988) discussed global civic culture in her 1988 book, but the earliest mention of the term “global civil society” seems to have been a 1991 scholarly article published by Stephen Gill (1991; see also Ghils, 1992, Peterson, 1992, and Lipschutz, 1992). In the 1980s, despite the existence of well-known peace and environmental organisations, and human rights advocates, global civil society actors may have looked almost as insignificant as the Mont Pelerin society did in the 1950s or 1960s.4 Soon, however, civil society played an important role at the end of the Cold War and the establishment of the Ban on Landmines and the International Criminal Court. A new force in world politics seemed to have emerged. The Asian financial crises of 1997–98 triggered a global mass movement that gained widespread and often dramatic attention in the global media, especially through the counter-summits to big international summits. It was at this point that global civil society assumed new meanings and became increasingly explicit as a new global political force and constitutive of a new form of agency. Civil society actors were protesting against neoliberal globalisation and professing institutional alternatives such as international debt arbitration and the currency transaction tax, CTT (for a full story of the movement, Patomäki, 2007). ATTAC, founded in Paris in 1998, was a key building block of the movement that emerged following the crisis of 1997–98. The acronym ATTAC (indicating orientation towards forward “attack” rather than towards “defence”) was conceived before deciding what it would stand for (Association pour une Taxe sur les Transactions Financières pour l’Aide aux Citoyens)—the vision being that in the late 1990s, it was time for more proactive politics after years of reactive opposition to neoliberalism. The idea of global taxes was a particularly appealing one in terms of creating new worldwide structures of solidarity. Counter-events and mass demonstrations in the context of G8 and other summits and targeted campaigns protested against the power asymmetries, injustices, and environmental impacts of the world economy. Global media made the protests of this “alter-globalisation” movement visible to people around the world. In January 1999, various organisations started preparing a counter-event to the World Economic Forum (WEF) under the banners of “another Davos” and “anti-Davos”. The practical difficulties of reaching Davos and ethical-political considerations concerning the importance of taking the initiative led to the idea of an alternative forum, the World Social Forum (WSF). It quickly became evident that ATTAC, Le Monde Diplomatique, and other influential organisations within the transnational activist networks would support the initiative. Eight Brazilian civil society organisations  The members of the small Mont Pelerin Society, founded in 1947 around the ideas of Friedrich von Hayek, depicted themselves as “liberals”. Milton Friedman was a member of that society. At that point, the nineteenth century era of classical laissez-faire liberalism seemed over. For many it appeared that Keynes and social democracy reigned in the West, Lenin in the East, and the idea of national liberation and state-led development in the South. The commitment of Friedman, Hayek, and others to the ideals of individual (negative) freedom and to the free market principles of neoclassical economics made them appear insignificant and marginal. (Harvey, 2005, pp. 20–22, 36). 4

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decided to form the Organising Committee of the forum. In March 2000, they formally secured support from the municipal government of Porto Alegre and the state government of Rio Grande do Sul, both controlled by the Workers Party PT (Partido dos Trabalhadores). Since 2001, the WSF has been organised annually, at first in Porto Alegre, Brazil, and later also in other places, such as Mumbai, India (2004) and Nairobi, Kenya (2007). In the first years, the Forum was an apparent success, quickly growing from 15,000 to 50,000 and then more than 100,000 participants from around the world. It garnered a lot of media attention and raised hopes about global transformative possibilities. By 2004–5 the Forum had become so big that the organisers began to consider alternatives to a single forum. Yet by 2005, it was becoming increasingly clear that the WSF process would fail and that none of the global reforms envisaged by its transformative and globalist participants would be realised anytime soon. The WSF process started to lose momentum. While the momentum for global reforms faded away, the organisers began to see the annual mass meeting in part also as a practical-financial burden, over-expending on their limited resources that would have been needed for other purposes as well. In retrospect, already the neoconservative turn and related “war on terror” that started in 2001 proved a turning point that gradually sidelined the alter-globalisation movement (George W. Bush took office in January 2001 and 9–11 happened eight months later).5 Another turning point was the global financial crisis of 2008–9, which increased the socio-economic insecurity and anxiety of people across the world, inducing further stasis and regression. Apart from a partial temporary coordination of new-Keynesian economic policies in 2009, the main state responses to the 2008–2009 crisis and its repercussions were national and contradictory. No new worldwide transformative movement emerged because of the crisis and since then global civil society has remained much more marginal for high politics than it was in the aftermath of the Asian crisis (1998–2002).6 In the 2010s, participation in the WSF process declined to such a degree that in 2019, with the rise of Jair Bolsonaro and his regime in Brazil, the WSF seemed all but finished. While it continues to  At this time, also funding for civil society organisations waned. Several key NGOs forming global civil society come from Western Europe and often are to a significant degree dependent on funding from public sources and private foundations. Neoliberalism shaped these practices: funding criteria became increasingly about standard metrics, value for money and establishing specific goals, often involving identifying what would be achieved beforehand. Big charities such as the Ford Foundation followed suit adopting a short-term project-format, strict and laborious reporting, public–private “partnerships”, and the like. At the same time, many states downsized funding to civil society organisations. 6  The so-called Occupy Movement (“Occupy Everything, Demand Nothing”) was a spontaneous short-term protest that spread across the world in 2011, but lasted only for a year or so, or at most for two years. It was criticised for having no clearly defined demands, to which some activists responded that such demands would be counterproductive, while others resorted to the by then well-established demands of the ATTAC movement (closing tax havens, a global “Robin Hood” tax on currency or financial transactions, etc.). I do not count this as a new movement, as a movement must involve organised activities for a sustained period and include some specified aims and goals. 5

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exist, the enthusiasm is gone. The 2021 WSF occurred only virtually, and the 2022 forum that took place in Mexico City was poorly organised and invisible to all but a small crowd of participants.7

Ambiguities and Limits of Global Civil Society Activities Among the many diverse conceptions of civil society is the one espoused by Mary Kaldor (2003, pp. 44–45), who defines civil society as “the medium through which one or many social contracts between individuals, both women and men, and the political and economic centres of power are negotiated and reproduced”. This definition, which resonates with type 4 in Table 9.1, goes beyond standard state-centric definitions by including efforts to negotiate regional and global political “contracts” and to counter-balance transnational centres of power. The “civility” of civil society comes from settling conflicts by peaceful means through public deliberation and in accordance with acceptable legal procedures. This kind of norm and virtue of civility accords with the notion of security community (Chap. 5) and the virtuous circle of non-violence (Chap. 7). For Kaldor, global civil society also involves elements of active citizenship, political self-organisation, and thus expansion of democracy. The concept of global civil society in this sense is often linked to the promise of future transformations towards global democracy and social justice. Already, civil society plays a role. In the multilayered, multidimensional, and multi-actor systems of global governance, NGOs and transnational advocacy networks are “playing a role in various domains of global governance and at various stages of the global public policymaking process” (Held, 2010, p. 35). The participants in transnational public spheres and associations create the conditions of communication that enable the exercise of public influence across diverse and dispersed institutional structures (Bohman, 2007, p. 189). From a critical political economy perspective, it can be further argued that global civil society involves a new “post-modern Prince”, which “may prove to be the most effective political form for giving coherence to an open-ended, plural, inclusive and flexible form of politics and thus create alternatives to neo-liberal globalization” (Gill, 2008, p. 248). The social conditions of successful transformations and ethical-political limits of global civil society remain under-theorised, however, with a variety of exceptions. Sometimes, it may be recognised that the capacity of global civil society actors to be effective “depends to a great extent on recognizing and exploiting discursive opportunity structures by crafting framings that resonate across cultural, racial, ethnic, national, social-class and experiential boundaries” (Benford, 2011, p. 83). On the other hand, as Kléber Ghimire argues, the national setting and dynamics of engaging with global processes matter. Typically, civil society organisations must work with a state or states to make a difference (Ghimire, 2010). In addition to these  Teivo Teivainen, personal communication, e-mail 24 November 2022 (Teivainen has participated regularly in the meetings of the International Council of the WSF). 7

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contradictory demands, most civil society organisations are pushing for changes in the context of a single issue or, at best, a few related issues. While they may well be capable of authentic public reasoning in that context, this does not give them deliberative authority over any other issues, and there is always the suspicion that they may be acting on behalf of sectional interests. Moreover, there are also general practical and normative limits to the use of advocacy, deliberation, and negotiation in global governance. For instance, Christopher R.  Pallans maintains that civil society organisations may lack the legitimacy to serve as an authority in transnational rule- and policy-­ making because they are accountable only to their members, and because their constituency and membership are usually limited.8 Andrew Kuper argues that deliberation theorists fail to take seriously the problems and opportunities of scale and demand too much from persons and institutions. So although civil society, as widely conceived, can be important in communicating ideas and demanding responsiveness, a large number of institutional mechanisms at various social layers are required to ensure democratic responsiveness and representation (Kuper, 2004, ch. 2). Mere negotiation or perhaps consultation about “social contracts” is not enough. In the late 1980s and 1990s, global civil society succeeded in bringing about some changes in policy or institutions in certain issue areas, especially peace and security, and human rights. As mentioned, civil society organisations contributed to the end of the Cold War and to the creation of the International Criminal Court and Ban on Landmines. They have been able to further human rights, perhaps in particular women’s rights, and shape framings about the causes of extreme poverty. However, no “post-modern Prince” inspired by Karl Polanyi or Antonio Gramsci has risen so far. Arguably, the opposition to neoliberal globalisation has contributed somewhat to the formation of agenda in some forums, but civil society actors have failed to achieve significant changes in policy or institutions. In particular, the movements and organisations taking part in the World Social Forum have not proven effective in providing alternatives to the gridlock of neoliberal global governance, despite campaigns for global taxes, debt arbitration mechanisms, and the like. The World Social Forum is a space that, according to its Charter of Principles, “brings together and interlinks only organizations and movements of civil society from all the countries in the world”. According to Article 6, “the meetings of the WSF do not deliberate on behalf of the WSF as a body… The participants in the Forum shall not be called on to take decisions as a body” (World Social Forum, 2001). Debates have been waged in and around the WSF about whether it should be considered simply a space for these movements or whether it could become some kind of movement of movements itself. Many would have liked to see the WSF evolving into a fully-fledged political movement, the idea being that it should make a real political difference by altering the course of globalisation. The official line in the WSF process has, however, been that political projects that go beyond the Charter of Principles can be conducted by the organisations that take part in the WSF but never by the WSF itself.  See Chap. 11 for the possibility of using lottery to overcome this limitation.

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In principle, the WSF might be conceived as a parliament in the original, Latin sense of the term, as a place to talk and converse (parlar means to talk, mentum a place or space). However, there has never been any general session of deliberation, and neither have there been other mechanisms for democratic will formation. Even if George Monbiot (2003, pp. 88–90) once suggested the WSF could form the first moment of the process of building a world parliament, the WSF cannot be considered anything like a parliament in the deliberative sense, nor does it have powers to create any sort of legislation. There have been many groups within the WSF that aim at building global-democratic institutions, and some of them have placed considerable emphasis on the world parliament as a key to any global democratisation (Chap. 12). Only some of these groups, however, have contended that the WSF itself could be transformed into a world parliament. What else could the WSF accomplish? Defined negatively, the WSF may appear as a party of opinion when in terms of opposition to neoliberal globalisation, imperialism, and violence, but in more positive ideological terms it has been a relatively scattered and incoherent collection of diverse actors. Although some researchers claim that “justice globalism [the set of ideas prevalent at the WSF] displays ideological coherence and should be considered a maturing political ‘alter’-ideology of global significance” (Steger & Wilson, 2012, p. 439), this is more true at the level of widely used terms than at the level of substantial direction (all political texts are somewhat ambiguous and vague for this reason).9 The participants of the WSF during its heyday included various political ideologies: anarchism and autonomism; ecological localism; nationalist, internationalist, and cosmopolitan versions of Marxism; cosmopolitan liberalism, sometimes verging on neoliberalism in terms of its anti-statism and preferred economic policy, but involving global-democratic aspirations; and cosmopolitan social democracy. Each of these gives somewhat different meanings to the key terms of modern political ideologies (for an analysis of “global justice” in a similar manner, Patomäki, 2006). Apart from the diversity of meanings of many key terms such as justice, democracy, and sustainability, major disagreements have included whether the WSF should take public positions on political issues and whether creating democratic global institutions—perhaps involving the possibility of a democratic world state— is a desirable direction. In two surveys conducted in 2005 and 2007, about half of the respondents agreed that the WSF should remain an open space and not take public positions on political issues, while the other half disagreed. Moreover, the option of empowering local communities was noticeably more popular than the  When based at the RMIT University in Melbourne (until December 2010), I took part for a short while in this project based on Michael Freeden’s “morphological discourse analysis” (summarised in Freeden, 2003, chp 4), where morphology means the study of words, how they are formed, and their relationship to other words in the same language. The formalistic aim of searching for “central decontested” words and their patterns in a set of texts can lead to seeing coherence where there is none (or only some), even when it is recognised that words can have different meanings. Moreover, this approach detaches ideologies from actors’ self-understandings and associations as well from the relevant practices and institutions; it also detaches ideologies from any assessment of truth or normative adequacy. 9

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creation of democratic global institutions, although more than half of the respondents wanted to abolish the IMF and the World Bank and replace them with democratically run international institutions (Chase-Dunn & Reese, 2007, pp. 69, 79–84; Chase-Dunn & Reese, 2009). This indicates that although holoreflexity and the aim of constructing a global transformative agency were shared by many WSF participants, they were not necessarily shared by the majority of them—though answers depend also on the framing of the question. Christopher Chase-Dunn and Ellen Reese modify this conclusion by noting that it is “respondents from the semi-­ periphery [that] are statistically less likely than other respondents to prefer the creation of democratic global institutions as the best strategy for solving the problems of capitalism, to support democratic world government proposals, and to support the replacement of the WTO and IMF with more democratic global institutions”. Chase-Dunn and Reese (2007, pp. 84, 86) suggest that this is due to different historical experiences, reflecting “the long history of peripheral and semi-peripheral nations being colonized and marginalized within global institutions”. Thus, many actors from the periphery and semi-periphery tend to favour strengthening the nation-state, conceiving this as a continuation of the process of decolonisation.

 redecessors of World Party and the Decline of Democracy P Since 2000 Political parties—as we now know them—emerged in Europe and the Americas in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Although there were parties of opinion and cliques in the ancient city-communities of Hellas, and in similar communities in India and elsewhere, the metaphor of body politic and related organistic—and Aristotle-type communitarian—ideas dominated political imagination in most places until European modernity. The basic idea was that it is not “healthy” to have conflicts or contradictions within one organism or body. Organised political parties as legal associations were invented only when this metaphor was replaced with the individualist idea of the social contract (as noted above, this idea has in part grounded also the concept of civil society). (Ball, 1988). In the nineteenth century, the organistic metaphor came to be substituted by a progressivist philosophy of history. Following the Russian revolution of 1917, the idea of a party representing the universal interests of humanity contributed to the construction of one-party states, characteristically with violent and totalitarian implications (for a critical discussion on Samir Amin’s proposal for a “fourth international” in this light, Patomäki, 2019). In the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, however, the model of competitive electoral democracy with two or more major parties and freedom of speech and association has prevailed in the West and various other parts of the world. In the liberal democracies of the contemporary world, multiple parties are accepted and members of political parties stand as candidates in elections and for various state offices. Thereby the elected party representatives gain access to the process of law- and policy-making in terms of deliberation and voting. Other political actors may lobby representatives and officials or pressure them

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through the media. Even though in reality the powers of national legislators and policymakers have been increasingly limited and the relations of accountability are in effect also trans- and supranational (see Chap. 5), a relatively unambiguous idea of what politics is remains dominant. As already mentioned, there have been several historical examples of internationalist party formations dating back to the mid-nineteenth century. The Communist League, a secret international association of workers founded in the 1840s, commissioned Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels at the Congress held in London in November 1847 to write for publication a detailed theoretical and practical programme for the Party. The 1848 Communist Manifesto called for international unification. Following the International Workingmen’s Association (1864–1876)—the “First International”—a series of competing socialist internationals succeeded each other, including: • • • •

Communists: the second international (1889–1916) and Comintern (1919–43) Trotskyists: various fourth internationals (1936–) Anarchists: International Workers’ Association (1922–) Social democrats: The Socialist International (1951–)

The nationalist fervour of the First World War seemed to signal the end of internationalism, but as can be seen from this list of internationals, various left-­ internationals have remained active through the twentieth century and into the twenty-first century. Whereas internationalist communism collapsed in Stalin’s era, the social democratic Socialist International and some of the fragmented Trotsky-­ inspired Fourth Internationals continue to exist. Especially after the mid-twentieth century, non-socialist parties, such as the liberals and the conservatives, have also built international structures. The Liberal International, established in 1947, and the International Democrat Union, founded in 1983, have remained relatively small organisations, by no means much more than the mere sum of their member parties. There is also a similar international for Christian parties. The transnational links of the Green parties that emerged in the final decades of the twentieth century can, on the one hand, be considered distant offspring of earlier internationalism. Rauli Mickelsson (2005, pp. 78–91) has suggested that Green parties tend to have more global and postnational identities than traditional internationals. Green party activists in different parts of the world sometimes consider themselves members of the “Earth’s only global political party” (Myerson, 2001). Nevertheless, the Global Green Network (GGN) is merely a network of representatives of national Green Parties from around the world, established in 2001. The Transnational Radical Party that was founded in Italy in 1989 is, however, a related example of a single supranational party formation. The fact that there are no global elections or parliaments means that building party-like transnational organs tends to remain a relatively unattractive idea. If there are no offices to capture, why bother? The global elite has its political forums, such as the Bilderberg Society, Trilateral Commission, and Mont Pelerin Society, but there are few signs of the emergence of dynamic global right-wing organisations in the form of a political party. The network form of elites is sometimes used as an argument for relying on a similar form

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in resistance and transformative activities, and here the WSF has been seen as a possible manifestation. (Hardt & Negri, 2004, pp. 79–90). One of the most important existing spaces for transnational party formation has been the European Parliament, a result of the European integration process. The European Parliament was first elected through direct elections in 1979. The experience of the European Parliament shows that parties can become transnational. Members of the European Parliament have generally grouped according to political affiliations rather than in national blocs. In 2003, the EU adopted regulations for governing and funding political parties at the European level. Since then, several European political parties eligible for funding from EU institutions had been formed based on Europe-wide party alliances. It is equally noteworthy that since the 1970s and 1980s, most European and other political parties have evolved into a direction that Colin Crouch classifies as “post-­ democratic” (Crouch, 2004). The shrinking of the blue-collar working class in the OECD countries has eroded the traditional mass base of social-democratic and socialist parties (for a deeper analysis including in terms of changing levels of education and shifting identities and interests, see Piketty, 2020, pp.  534–551, 807–861).10 In nearly all mainstream parties, membership has been in decline, often for decades. The various circles of leaders and activists have been, by and large, replaced by an overlapping network of professional advisers, consultants, and lobbyists of various kinds, the latter mainly for corporations seeking favours from the government. Party elites are now networked with business elites while trying to reach the voters directly via the media (without the mediation of party members). Instrumentalist responses to marketing research and media campaigns have replaced explicit ideological commitments and visions. The globalisation of regulation and structural power of transnational capital has reinforced the sense that “there is no alternative” (TINA) to neoliberal globalisation or the current forms and gridlock of global governance (Chap. 7). In the perceived absence of alternatives concerning economic policy and globalisation, conventional parties have tended to lose legitimacy among large parts of the citizenry in many countries. These developments have made numerous citizens suspicious not only of the existing political parties but also of the idea of a political party, and these suspicions resonate with the general decline of democracy. In the first phase in the 1980s and 1990s and during the so-called third global wave of democratisation (Huntington, 1991), the rising socio-economic inequalities started to undermine established liberal democracies by making political systems ever more selectively responsive to the ideas and interests of wealthy individuals and big corporations (e.g. APSA Task Force on Inequality and American Democracy, 2004; Solt, 2008). In the second phase—that in certain liberal-democratic countries started already in the 1990s and in others in the 2000s or 2010s—the rise of nationalist-­ authoritarian populism has problematised mainstream parties and generated  “Socialist, Labour, and social-democratic parties have gradually come to be seen as increasingly favorable to the winners in the educational contest while they have lost the support they used to enjoy among less well-educated groups in the postwar period.” (Piketty, 2020, p. 712). 10

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authoritarian tendencies across the world. These changes have led to rising public openness to non-democratic forms of government, i.e. leadership hierarchies with no separation of powers and/or sufficiently free and fair elections. Several prodemocracy researchers have declared “warning signals are flashing red!” (Foa & Mounk, 2016, 2017; for discussion, Brownlee & Miao, 2022; Mounk, 2022). In the 2022 annual report, the International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance (IDEA, 2022) estimates that half of the democratic governments around the world are in decline (while many or most others are stagnant), undermined by problems ranging from restrictions on freedom of expression to distrust in the legitimacy of elections. At the same time, a significant number of authoritarian countries have become increasingly repressive.

Future-oriented Democratic Visions of Global Political Parties Transformative praxis requires agency. My hypothesis is that the formation of a world political party is likely to be a key moment in the process of constructing such an agency, though a world political agency can assume different forms. As the trends during the first three decades of the twenty-first century confirm, a movement towards democratic cosmopolitanism is hardly linear or inevitable. Not all social learning is progressive. Past lessons can be forgotten and cognitive developments can be regressive and undermine prospects for future learning. Regressive developments can also be induced by technological changes, as discussions about the de-­ democratising effects of “algorithmic capitalism” indicate.11 Even more importantly, economic uncertainty can amplify existential insecurity and anxiety, triggering regressive learning. Religion or nationalism can provide a framework for expressing resentment and angst originating in socio-economic conditions. Asymmetric power relations can undermine the learning process by directing public consciousness towards conceptions that serve particular identities, interests, or elites. Are there already existing conceptual resources from which one could draw in developing the idea of a world party? In terms of political imagination, the idea has been historically associated with that of a world state. Hence, it comes as no surprise that H.  G. Wells was a pioneer in imagining and scrutinising the idea of a world party and that Wells in turn has inspired many others, including W. Warren Wagar.12 Wells developed the idea of a transformative movement in his fictional  James H. Mittelman (2022) argues that the widespread use of algorithms and automated procedures shapes moral and political agency in various ways, for example: “Initially, big tech companies such as Facebook heralded their operations as vehicles for free expression, data democratization, citizen empowerment, and civic action. But they subsequently allowed consulting firms to harvest data for use in political campaigns that aimed to tilt the outcomes of elections and referenda (an issue to which we will return). So, too, under the banner of free speech, ‘alt-tech’ platforms have fueled the radical right and bolstered authoritarian populism.” (p. 451). 12  For the debates generated by Wagar’s world party idea, see, e. g., the thematic section of Journal of World-Systems Research (Chase-Dunn, 1996). See also Chase-Dunn and Boswell (2004). The World Party proposed by Chase-Dunn and Boswell would be a “network of individuals and repre11

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stories and analytical essays from the first decade of the twentieth century onwards.13 Probably the most important of these works is The Open Conspiracy (1933), an account of a pluralist mass movement for world unity that would eventually create a functionalist world state. To date, Open Conspiracy still appears as a daring conceptual effort to envisage what a global political party could mean, even though Wells often prefers to use the term “movement” and denies that it would be any sort of simple centralised organisation. Tellingly, chapter XIV is entitled “The Open Conspiracy Begins as a Movement of Discussion, Explanation and Propaganda” (Wells, 2002). While in some regards reminiscent of global civil society as it evolved in the 1990s and early 2000s, Wells’ open conspiracy is a mass movement in a deeper sense than, for instance, the WSF process. The open conspiracy is constituted by partially shared world understandings, starting with Wells’ cosmopolitan humanist portrayal of world religion, world history, and the potential of humanity. It answers the question about the purpose of human life at this historical moment, despite equally real and valuable diversity and pluralism. “Let us get together with other people of our sort and make over the world into a great world civilization that will enable us to realize the promises and avoid the dangers of this new time” (Ibid., p. 54). A non-anthropomorphic religion has faith in the development and “soul” of the human species-being “which lived before he was born and will survive him” (Ibid., p. 65). Wells even demands a quasi-­ religious devotion to the new movement: We see life struggling insecurely but with a gathering successfulness for freedom and power against restriction and death. We see life coming at last to our tragic and hopeful human level. Unprecedented possibilities, mighty problems, we realize, confront mankind to-day. They frame our existences. The practical aspect, the material form, the embodiment of the modernized religious impulse is the direction of whole life to the solution of these problems and the realization of their possibilities. The alternative before man now is either magnificence of spirit and magnificence of achievement, or disaster. (Ibid., pp. 67–68)

Wells seems to have believed that only a mass movement of truly committed individuals and groups could have the power to transform the world political organisation, by creating a rational and, probably, democratic world commonwealth or republic. What is truly novel about The Open Conspiracy is Wells’ pluralist perception of the multitude of actors that would constitute this movement, from the remnants of communist parties and labour movements to progressive bankers and other professionals; as well as the multitude of different national and religious cultures. Moreover, Wells refused to accept what would now be called the domestic analogy according to which the experiences and institutions of modern domestic polity can and should be applied to the society of states or the world as a whole. “We may sentatives of popular organisations from all over the world who agree to help create a democratic and collectively rational global commonwealth”. 13  The idea was already present in his early non-fictional bestseller Anticipations of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon Human life and Thought (1902). The phrase “open conspiracy” was picked from the preface to the 1914 edition; see MacKenzie and MacKenzie (1973, p. 345 et. passim).

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have systems of world controls rather than a single world state” (Ibid., p. 72). These systems of control of different functional areas—for instance, the practical regulations, enforcement, and officials needed to keep all humans in good health to the extent possible—may be only loosely related to each other. In this sense, Wells stresses that the institutions of the world political organisation probably would, and perhaps also should look different from the institutions of modern liberal-­democratic states. Finally, he argues against any stable utopia, whether democratic or not: Mankind, released from the pressure of population, the waste of warfare and the private monopolization of the sources of wealth, will face the universe with a great and increasing surplus of will and energy. Change and novelty will be the order of life; each day will differ from its predecessor in its great amplitude of interest. Life which was once routine, endurance, and mischance, will become adventure and discovery […]. We believe that the persistent exploration of our outward and inward worlds by scientific and artistic endeavour will lead to developments of power and activity upon which at present we can set no limits nor give any certain form. (Ibid., p. 83)

So by the early 1930s, Wells had concluded that world political re-organisation would require (i) strong ideational devotion and a shared worldview involving higher-order purposes by (ii) competent people participating, in different ways, in a worldwide mass movement for a new world organisation, and, possibly, also (iii) a major worldwide catastrophe preparing the conditions for the success of this movement in realising its visions. Moreover, although advocating conscientious objection in national contexts, Wells did not hesitate to talk about the need to defend, also violently, the new world commonwealth (Ibid., p. 86.). This is one of the problems of Wells’ conception, since a security community cannot be built on violence—perhaps indicating a lack of “civility”. Wagar (1999) has written a single-path scenario entitled A Short History of Future, involving a world-transformative political party. More consistently a democrat than Wells, Wagar tells a story—following the model of Wells’ The Shape of Things to Come—of a nuclear war in 2044, consequent mass starvation, and, finally, the founding of a democratic socialist world state in the 2060s. In Wagar’s story, the World Party is secretly founded already well before the Catastrophe of 2044. After the Catastrophe, it starts to gain ground, both through elections and by conquering the hearts and minds of political elites.14 Gradually countries and regions start to join the new democratic and socialist Commonwealth, occasionally, however, only following a violent struggle. There are also debates between the “Gandhians” and “Leninists” within the Party. The last skirmishes between Commonwealth militias and local resistance groups take place in 2068. The new world state is governed by a democratically elected  The idea of a world party probably seemed more remote in the late 1980s than in 2009 and that may be one of the reasons why Wagar assumed that a catastrophe is necessary to make a global party possible. But why did he assume that by the mid-twenty-first century there would only be one global party, using the name “World Party”. It is probably more realistic and clearly more democratic and pluralistic to expect that there will be many party-like formations, with different and competing ideologies. 14

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world parliament and built on a sustainable ecological basis. In Wagar’s story, also the socialist world state is transitory and lasts only for about a century. It is eventually replaced by a community of smaller political communities, some of them living outside planet Earth and reaching further into space by 2300. Wagar has taken Wells’ vision of an open conspiracy towards a direction that sounds, in terms of its identity and organisational structure, very like a globalised version of many of the twentieth-century political parties. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, on the other hand, have tried to envisage the possibility of a new kind of global political identity and organisation, a “multitude”, consisting of a complex network of a plurality of actors and thereby constituting a space of communication. Even if in part inspired by the recent experiences of the globalisation protest movements and can be read as a modern substitute for the Marxian working class, the idea of a “multitude” also bears some resemblance to Wells’ open conspiracy. In their widely discussed book Empire, Hardt and Negri (2000) argue that the network has become the dominant economic model and indicate that resistanceor change-oriented movements may mirror this. It’s follow-up, Multitude. War and Democracy in the Age of Empire, elaborates on the idea of a network form of power, from warfare to networks of global struggle (Hardt & Negri, 2004). When asked about how the notion of multitude compares to that of Marxist class, Hardt replies: […] Multitude is meant to recognise what the class formation is today and, in describing that class formation, to recognise forms of its possibilities of acting politically. In the incorporating sense—the connotations of class as industrial working class are also important. When we talk about the Multitude today we are talking about recognising what the forms of labour and forms of production are and trying to name them—because that’s what Multitude is doing—it certainly doesn’t exclude the industrial working class. There are plenty of people still working in the factories, in fact the numbers globally working in the factories has not declined. It has only declined in the most dominant parts of the world—but like I said—the industrial workers are one part of a much wider range of forms of labour that cooperate together in production and need to be understood in a much broader let’s say horizontal mode of the possibilities of political organisation. (Morgan, 2006)

This understanding is different from the Wellsian concept of multitude, which include also people from outside the category of labour, however widely conceived, that is people from any class, category, or identity.15 However, similarly to Wells’ account, Hardt and Negri have developed these ideas to a significant degree in response to the global problem of war, focussing on the war against terror that started after 9–11. For them, a quasi-permanent Orwellian war against a largely unspecified enemy can also be a way of justifying and reinforcing one-sided domination and legitimising the use of violence and other exceptional means against any

 Wells (2002, pp. 84–86) is also critical of the Marxist dogmas of class and class antagonism. Wells argued that attempts to infer self-regarding and other-exclusive collective interests and solidarity from objective socio-economic positions are not only sociologically unsound but can have highly problematical practical-political consequences. “In practice Marxism is found to work out in a ready resort to malignantly destructive activities, and to be so uncreative as to be practically impotent in the face of material difficulties”. 15

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opponent (basically, any suspect identity). In response to war and asymmetrical domination, Hardt and Negri argue, the multitude should become a basis for a reformist, transformative worldwide network, aiming at global democracy. “The multitude is one concept, in our view, that can contribute to the task of resurrecting or reforming or, really, reinventing the Left by naming a form of political organization and a political project” (Hardt & Negri, 2004, p. 220; see also Hardt & Negri, 2009). This alludes to the possibility that the multitude could even organise itself into a political party, but so far Hardt and Negri have not explicated this possibility in any detail. In Chap. 8, I discussed how the nineteenth-century working class identity was actively made by socialists who believed in its world-historical role. In other words, whereas trade unions, various associations, societies, and parties constituted a major transformative agency of the modern world, that agency was systematically constructed (Thompson, 1966). The process of making a class identity involved education and was based on shared understandings and values and a sense of common fate defined in terms of goals and utopias. Working class ideas and related debates around theories of political economy, history, etc. became constitutive of the identity and interests of trade unions and left political parties. However, since the 1970s the working class has been largely unmade both as a result of impersonal processes and deliberate attempts to undermine it. Employees may constitute a majority in some sense and the global share of factory workers may have remained stable at roughly 20%, but as an ethical and political category “working class” has all but ceased to exist. Traditional working class ideas have been replaced by neoliberalised social democracy, neoliberalism, and various forms of populism—and all these lack a vision of the future. If conceived widely, the concept of multitude comes close to that of demos. Originally, “demos” was the Greek word for “village” or, as it is often translated, “deme”, the smallest administrative unit of polis. As a young man was enrolled in his deme, he became a member of the demos, referring to the body of citizens collectively (often translated as “people”, but this is somewhat misleading). (Blackwell, 2003). The formation of a world political party could contribute to the process of constructing a global demos, seen as a pluralist, evolving political community of world citizens exercising political rights in a globalised public sphere. While there must be some kind of shared framework of meanings and purposes, a world party could embrace a range of different ideological agendas concerning how common global institutions ought to be organised. Over time differences are likely to lead to the establishment of many world parties. Each of these parties constitutes a transnational public sphere, where the sufficiently like-minded—i.e., members of the party—could freely debate issues and make collective decisions. The raison d’être of the world party ultimately lies in advancing new institutional forms for re-­ organising the global public realm. The development of global transformative agency for the twenty-first century can come about only through a learning process towards qualitatively higher levels of reflexivity and higher-order purposes. It is neither possible nor desirable to go back to what Axel Honneth (2017, p. 63) calls the intellectual fiction of the age of

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the Industrial Revolution, namely that historical progress is necessary and that it will be carried forward by a particular class with fixed interests. A more promising way to counter parochial ideologies is to locate the contemporary problematic in a macro-view of cosmological, biological, and social evolution. The Big History (BH) approach expands our understanding of “where we are” and visions of “where we want to go”. In a quasi-Wellsian manner, this sweeping narrative can help motivate transformative and progressive politics in the twenty-first century. The point of departure of BH is that our common human capacities have emerged from the evolution of life, itself an emergent layer of cosmological unfolding. This framework also puts into context and underscores the import of the Anthropocene: the new geological age defined by the human impact on the Earth’s climate and ecosystems. BH encourages narratives and values that reflect a sense of global belonging—the Earth as our cosmic home. David Christian (2019) expresses the positive part of the idea eloquently: the challenge is to construct “a new and inspiring vision of where we humans are today, a vision that can inspire optimism and ambition about the planetary task of building a sustainable future” (Chap. 3 is a scrutiny of the potential of BH). Democratic will-formation about planetary issues in the public realm requires well-informed citizens. A central concern of the party is to nurture positive learning that makes the public knowledgeable about global and planetary affairs and receptive to higher-order purposes and pluralist cosmopolitanism. This requires strategies for shaping the economic and social conditions that support individual and collective learning and for improving upon the skills and knowledge required for effective participation in the learning process. To the cosmic vision of BH can be added other and perhaps more specific concepts such as “emancipation and democratisation” (Chap. 5), “reflexive self-regulation of global security systems” (Chap. 6), “resolving common problems and overcoming contradictions through institutions” (Chap. 7), and “world risk society”. The concept of the world risk society, developed by Ulrich Beck (2012), refers to the second phase of modernisation, in which actors and movements begin to respond to the problems generated by modern science and technology and the consequences of the first phase of modernisation. A key primary effect of a world risk society is the creation of a common world, a world that has no outside or exit. The risk society is necessarily oriented towards the future. Speaking of societal risks does not, however, only mean the dangers and threats of the future. A risk is a two-sided coin as our increasing powers create also new opportunities. A world risk society refers also to new ethical, political, and technological opportunities, and possible alternative futures and modernities.

DiEM25: A Seed Crystal? The construction of democratic world political agency takes time and will be an experimental process. Can we see the rumblings of a world party today? Future historians are likely to point back to many precursors now at play, but one that may prove salient is the Democracy in Europe Movement 2025 (DiEM25). Established

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in early 2016 in the aftermath of the Euro crisis, DiEM25 has assumed many characteristics of a world party, thus offering valuable insights for the larger project. It can be seen as a testbed for cultivating transnational ethical and political consciousness, deploying new technologies for enabling widespread participation, overcoming legal obstacles to a supranational political party, and transcending identity-political fragmentation. Its roots lie in the problems of contradictions of the European integration project and more specifically in the Euro crisis of 2010–2015. Following the 2015 defeat of the Greek left-wing party Syriza in its struggle against the Troika (the International Monetary Fund, European Central Bank, and EU Commission), Minister of Finance Yanis Varoufakis resigned. Subsequent political meetings in France and Germany convinced him of the need to “band together regardless of nationality and transcend the divide between debtor and creditor countries”. The solution was clear: a new pan-European political movement to prevent a “descent into a post-modern 1930s” (Varoufakis, 2017, pp. 483–485). DiEM25’s strategic aim is to convene a constitutional assembly that would reflect a genuine European democracy. Its original intention was to have a new draft constitution for the EU prepared by 2025 that, if adopted, would replace all existing European treaties. Beyond this process, the movement has strived to overcome austerity and harmful competition in Europe with concrete policies proposals, including the dedication of 500 billion euros per year to green investment and industrial conversion, a European anti-poverty plan, a universal-European basic income (financed through a “public” percentage of companies’ profits), and a common and humane migration policy. (DiEM25 Italia, 2018). Rather than adhering to a single political ideology, DiEM25 is resolutely pluralistic, aiming to attract all, whether leftists, social democrats, Greens, and liberals. Participants are united by their dissatisfaction with Europe’s economic and political establishment, and their advocating of a government by the people of Europe. In contrast to the authoritarian, nationalistic populisms that have been on the rise throughout Europe, DiEM25 exemplifies a form of democratic, transnational populism. Its concept of “we” is an imagined pan-European demos, not tied to the prevailing national imaginaries. DiEM25 inclusionary transnationalism manifests in the common front it is building for political activism. But it is also transnational in a second sense: its commitment to helping the most vulnerable people in the global political economy, especially refugees (see Panayotu, 2017). As noted in its manifesto, DiEM25 aspires towards “an Open Europe that is alive to ideas, people and inspiration from all over the world, recognizing fences and borders as signs of weakness spreading insecurity in the name of security” (DiEM25, 2016). The movement thus offers an alternative to Fortress Europe. Not surprisingly, given DiEM25’s encompassing political philosophy, its participants are not exclusively European. Joining many well-known European intellectuals are visible international figures such as Julian Assange and Noam Chomsky. The Coordinating Collective that organises and integrates DiEM25’s actions exhibits wide international experience in various movements and organisations, including in the peace movement, the ICC campaign, Occupy, and the World Social Forum.

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What is particularly interesting about DiEM25 is how it has experimented with new forms of direct participation in a truly transnational setting. In 2020, DiEM25 had allegedly more than 100,000 members in more than 195 countries and territories (at that point there was no membership fee and only a fraction of this notional number was participating in DiEM25 activities). Policies at all levels—local, regional, national, and pan-European—are approved in all-member votes. Even when a policy concerns a local or national issue, all members must approve it through an all-member vote. Votes are taken and decisions are made regularly. Each member has a unique password and the voting is done electronically. Policy proposals can emerge from the Coordinating Collective (CC) or members. Proposals are put out to the membership for consultation and discussion and then subjected to an all-member vote. If no one proposal is supported by 50% of the voting members plus one, then a run-off vote is organised between the two more preferred proposals. DiEM25 is registered as an International Non-Profit Making Association (INPMA) under Belgian and European Union law, “so that it has legal standing throughout the EU without the need to establish DiEM25 as an NGO in 28 different member-states” (DiEM25, n.d.). This legal form has created some problems though. Belgian Law, under which DiEM25 has been recognised as an INPMA requires a particular governance structure that does not fully correspond with DiEM25’s Organising Principles. This has led to a rather peculiar arrangement: To guarantee the primacy of DiEM25’s Organising Principles over the official DiEM25’s constitution, all DiEM25 members and elected/selected officials (e.g. members of the Coordinating Collective, the Advisory Panel, the Validating Council etc.) pledge to adhere to the following Letter of Agreement courtesy of joining DiEM25 and being elected/ selected to serve in any official capacity[: …] “as submitted to and approved by Belgian authorities, I shall do so on the understanding that, in that context, I must abide fully by the decisions and instructions given to me and to my colleagues from the decision making bodies defined by DiEM25’s Organising Principles. In short, I pledge to respect the primacy of DiEM25’s Organising Principles and the decision-making bodies defined in the latter over DiEM25’s bodies defined by the official constitution.” (ibid.)

DiEM25 has four constituent parts, namely a Coordinating Collective (CC), a Validation Council (VC),16 Spontaneous Collectives (DSCs), and an Advisory Board. Except for the “advisory board”, these terms are neologisms and thus likely to be difficult to grasp for most people. DiEM25 itself stresses that the Coordinating Collective does not act as some sort of central committee that makes policy. With weekly meetings, its tasks and powers are limited. While the first twelve members of DiEM25 formed the first CC, half of its members are elected in a year (originally this was six months). Although the coordinating body seems to follow a rather strong version of the principle of rotation, this has been mitigated over time (now

 The point of the VC is to legitimise CC’s quick decisions. For decisions that need to be validated quickly, it is often not possible to mobilise the whole DiEM25 membership to vote within a tight deadline. “As all-member votes normally run for 7 days and require at least another week in preparation time, urgent issues may be submitted to a Validating Council vote instead”. 16

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each elected member serves a two-year term and it is possible to run as a candidate for consecutive terms without arbitrary term limits). Spontaneous Collectives (DSCs) are the “local” chapters of DiEM25. They can be organised nationally or in terms of subnational regions or municipalities. In some countries with several DSCs, there are also National Collectives coordinating activities at that level. Moreover, DSCs can also be organised along thematic lines, based on their members’ common interest in the same policy area across Europe (e.g. concentrating on climate change issues). DSCs are self-organising and need no validation from above. “The idea of DiEM25’s Spontaneous Collectives reflects the ideas or practices of self-management and cooperatives, the Scottish Enlightenment’s notion of ‘spontaneous order’, as well as, Rick Falkvinge’s ‘swarms’, etc.”17 DSCs are supposed to be small, with 5–50 active members only (the number of passive members is unlimited). In May 2020, there are 168 DSCs located territorially in a place, mostly inside the EU, but not exclusively so (DSCs exist also in Australia, Kosovo, North Macedonia, Serbia, Switzerland, Turkey, Ukraine, and the USA). Thematic DSCs can be accessed by members only and are mostly just sporadic initiatives. In principle, DiEM25 combines participatory democracy with the capacity to adopt policies and programmes, organise actions, and take part in elections. DiEM25 has the so-called electoral wings, which are a tool of the movement to get involved in electoral politics and bring its program to the ballot box. Also in this sense, it is a political party. Despite such mobilisation, DiEM25 has yet to become a high-profile actor in European politics. Its membership and budget remain small compared to those of the major national political parties, and the mainstream media largely ignore its activities and positions. Even after years of relative decline, Germany’s Christian Democratic Union, for instance, commands a budget of tens of millions of euros per year, while DiEM25’s is less than a million. Given this deficit, it was expected that DiEM25’s success in the elections of the European Parliament in 2019 to be modest at best. It was one of several new parties in the 2019 elections and fared less well than some of them. Yanis Varoufakis made a bold move and ran as a candidate in Germany, failing to secure a seat. DiEM25 got 1,4 million votes but no seats. Only the Greek electoral wing MeRA25 has succeeded in getting nine seats in the national parliament, but in May 2023 elections it lost its seats. It is too early to know whether this is only the beginning of DiEM25’s long and successful role in European (and to a degree in global) politics, but what is already clear is that the movement and party will have failed to achieve satisfactory democracy in Europe by 2025. The future of the EU does not look too good either. DiEM25 was founded on the prognosis that “Europe will be democratised. Or it will disintegrate!”. Varoufakis (2020) acknowledges that the aim of democratising the EU quickly failed: “Well, Europe did not democratise its EU institutions and is now  This was the formulation in the proposal for the rules and principles of DiEM25 that was adopted in an all membership vote in September 2016. I cannot find this formulation anymore on the DiEM25 website in December 2022, but it remains visible, for instance, here: https://www.loomio. com/d/U6JxT3Si/diem25-saannot-ja-paikallisorganisaatiot 17

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disintegrating. What should we now say and do?”. European politics seems locked into reproducing the currently prevailing institutions, and the EMU in particular, even though those institutions are both unpopular and (cyclically) dysfunctional. Varoufakis explains that the combination of a single market, currency, and central bank with no state to control them leads to a situation where the national governments find it ever more difficult to redistribute wealth and incomes. However rational it would be from the point of view of the union as a whole, the EU is exceedingly difficult to transform because of the one-sided class politics of “the Northern oligarchs” more focussed on distribution than on generating ecologically sustainable new wealth. The fate of DiEM25 depends on the dynamics of wider and deeper developments. It is nonetheless possible to analyse the potential and likely effects of its organisational structure. Its departure from familiar terms, the frequency of all-­ member votes often on very complex issues and multifaceted programmes, and its radical principles of rotation have not empowered large masses of citizens but rather led to a situation where the active membership consists only of 1000–3000 persons. For instance, in February 2020 about 1500 members took part in the vote for a Code of Conduct for DiEM25. The principle is that only full members, who joined DiEM25 before a vote is called and have accessed their account in the last three months and verified their identity, can vote. The total number of people that fit these criteria in November 2022 was about 7000.18 To follow the discussions and read and carefully consider all the relevant materials requires a considerable commitment on the part of ordinary members, many of whom never—or only rarely—meet physically other members. Activism is concentrated in the clusters of active DSCs. This seems to confirm the point (mentioned above) that deliberation theorists fail to take seriously the problems and opportunities of scale and therefore may demand too much from persons and institutions. The principle of rotation may imply that the public has only a little time to learn to know those who are supposed to be able to speak on behalf of DiEM25. The local members are often young activists with limited access to the public sphere. In the media, DiEM25 is associated with public figures and celebrities ranging from Varoufakis himself to Pamela Anderson and Julian Assange to Noam Chomsky, Saskia Sassen, and Slavoj Žižek—all except Varoufakis better known from other contexts. The truth is somewhat more complicated as the two founding members— Varoufakis and Srećko Horvat—are members of the CC also in early 2023. It is clear that at least so far DiEM25 has not become a widely known concept in the way, for example, Greenpeace was already in the 1970s and 1980s—and remains in the 2020s. Moreover, DiEM25 seems to have little or no regular staff, and thus the

 This information is included in every all-membership voting result, which is accessible to members only. For example, the 7 November 2022 “Results of DiEM25’s Peace Proposal for Ukraine” page includes this statement: “Only full members, who joined us before the vote was called, verified their identity and were not behind on membership fees, could vote on this. The total number of members that fit these criteria, excluding those without activity in over a year, was 7182. Turnout was 19.1%, therefore 1372 people” (about the proposal, see DiEM25 Communications, 2022). 18

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voluntary activists have to assume all the laborious tasks of the organisation, from record-keeping to practical arrangements of events. Many activists are participating also in other movements and organisations and are thus torn between commitments.

Learning Lessons: A Sketch of a Possible Global Political Party DiEM25 has succeeded relatively well in deploying new technologies for enabling the participation of its members (though the relative absence of physical meetings seems an impediment); overcoming legal obstacles to a supranational political party (though there would be other possible solutions),19 and perhaps transcending identity-­political fragmentation at least among its limited membership. Similarly, a world party must encourage and facilitate its members to be directly involved in the processes of will-formation and decision-making. Yet, in the case of DiEM25 the high frequency of all-member votes, often on very complex issues and multifaceted programmes, and its principles of rotation, have not empowered large masses of citizens but rather led to a situation where the active membership consists of a fairly small number of people. This would seem to indicate that a world party should not demand too much from all of its members or citizens more generally, but should allow for the possibility of division of labour. DiEM25 operates within the institutional framework of the EU and its member states, and this framework includes the European Parliament. The main context of a world party would be the much wider plurality of organisations in the global political economy and the currently gridlocked system of global governance.20 Learning from the earlier WOMP project (see note 2), each member is supposed to bring a particular geohistorical perspective to the project—including African, East Asian, South Asian, Latin American, North American, European, and so on—and different concerns and values. If those who favour resolving global problems through common institutions and democratising global governance conclude that they share the basics of a worldview, “a common spirit” (cf. Wells) and are ready and willing to engage in the process of collective will formation, they must first address the

 For example, Greenpeace consists of Greenpeace International registered as stichting in Amsterdam and 26 regional offices operating in 55 countries. A stichting (“foundation”) is a Dutch legal entity with limited liability, but with no members or share capital, existing for a specific purpose. This legal form has an “offshore” character, which has made it useful for states or corporations keen to avoid state-sanctions, taxes or laws. For Greenpeace this legal form has ensured independence from the legislation and control of any particular state, including Holland. Other Greenpeace entities operate in accordance within the legal framework of the country they are set up in. The regional offices work “autonomously but under the supervision of Greenpeace International”. 20  See, however, Chap. 12 and the section on “the campaign for a United Nations Parliamentary Assembly (UNPA)” for the possibility that a newly formed global institution instigates a process of formation of world political parties, which could then begin the cycle of three moments of transformative global-democratic action. 19

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dilemmas of democratic political agency in world politics. In the absence of adequate and democratic global institutions, the question is what a non-state global political actor, taking the form of a political party, can do to further the common aims and purposes of its members. The raison d’être of the party must lie in furthering transformations and various new institutional forms in which the planetary public realm can be organised. For this purpose, the sufficiently shared opinion will be forged into a programme of change. We can distinguish between three moments of transformative global-democratic action: 1. Activities within the confines of established institutions. 2. Advocacy to transform global institutions and create new ones. 3. Participation in the newly formed global institutions. These three moments also form a logical order: (1) activities within existing institutions can include (2) advocacy of, and legislation for, global-democratic institutions; while successful attempts at creating institutions of planetary democracy (3) make participation in them possible. Over time, new institutions will become established, and the cycle can continue from (1) to (2) to (3). There is no end to history, and not all new institutions will have to be planetary in scope. Jan Aart Scholte (2007) has helpfully analysed different types of possible activities within the confines of the currently existing institutions. The first concerns education and discussion. Educating the public about global affairs is a condition sine qua non for authentic will-formation concerning planetary res publica, i.e. all those issues that belong to the global public realm. Of course, the boundaries of the public realm are part of democratic contestation. Non-global issues can be decided independently of wider considerations, and non-public issues do not require common decisions. Secondly, a global political party can take part in the operation of the existing institutions. Nonetheless, it does not have to occupy a national and local executive office; it can also opt for acting as a mere watchdog for public accountability, particularly in the context of multilateral negotiations on various planetary issues. Like civil society organisations, a global party can engage with the already existing systems of global governance as an advocacy group (Scholte, 2007, pp. 24–28). On the other hand, by occupying state or EU office, the party could directly shape the state’s policies on global issues and also take part in creating new international law, turning it into increasingly cosmopolitan law. This is important also because, in the near or foreseeable future, it is impossible to create new international laws without sovereign states. The third moment, namely the advocacy to transform existing global institutions and create new ones, can assume various forms. The development of Greenpeace provides an interesting precedent case (see Greenpeace, n.d.). In 1979, Greenpeace was facing financial difficulties and its members were divided over fund-raising and organisational direction. David McTaggart lobbied the Canadian Greenpeace Foundation to accept a new structure, which would bring the scattered Greenpeace offices under the auspices of a single global organisation.21 With these ideas,  David McTaggart was a former badminton champion, construction millionaire, and ski-lodge operator, when in 1972 he joined up with Greenpeace, then virtually bankrupt, and provided his 21

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McTaggart went against the anti-authoritarian ethos that prevailed among environmental activists. Under the new centrally led structure, the local offices would contribute part of their income to the international organisation, which would take responsibility for setting the overall direction of the movement. Greenpeace’s transformation from a loose network to a global organisation made it possible to concentrate on selected environmental issues, assessed to be of global significance. McTaggart summed up his approach in a 1994 memo: “No campaign should be begun without clear goals; no campaign should be begun unless there is a possibility that it can be won; no campaign should be begun unless you intend to finish it off” (cited in Pearce, 1996, p. 75). To establish clear goals and form realistic expectations the party has to have plausible, scholarly scenarios about possible and likely futures. The problem is that knowledge and power are intimately linked. A key reason for democracy stems from the epistemological argument that we cannot trust anybody to know a priori better than others (for a critical and illuminating discussion about why also substantial values are needed, see Erman & Möller, 2016). Anticipations of the future start with an analysis of the existing structures and processes and their inherent possibilities, but the future remains in many ways open until a particular possibility is actualised. Anticipations are reflexive: whether a particular scenario is realised depends also on actors’ understandings and their actions. The future is an increasingly shaped and structured possibility of becoming, mediated by the presence of the past. The closer (in some sense) the future is to us, the better we are usually positioned to make a judgement about the probability that a particular scenario will be actualised (Bhaskar, 1993, p. 142–144). Nonetheless, the precise content of the future remains contingent on multiple concept-dependent actions, until it gradually fades into the past.22 Without fully established free speech with all its institutional guarantees and everybody’s equal access to will formation, a community or organisation such as a political party may be led astray in its anticipations of the future. There is also the spectre of a vicious circle of the accumulation of power in the hands of powerful groups or individuals, just because they are powerful, not because they know any better (they may know worse). Therefore, the establishment of too fixed a centre that is authorised to set the overall direction of the organisation may create more problems than it solves—especially so if there are no sufficient guarantees of responsiveness and change, i.e. that the direction-setting mechanisms are democratic, accountable, and capable of learning and thus revising its anticipations and goals. This is particularly important when the aim is to democratise practices and

own boat for its first protest against French nuclear tests at Mururoa. In subsequent years, it was McTaggart who moulded the organisation, setting up national offices first in Europe and then round the world from Moscow to Latin America, and creating a uniquely powerful and centralised non-governmental organisation. 22  The meaning of the past is not fully fixed either; it depends on the way the ongoing processes turn out in the future, and thus also on what we do (see Weberman, 1997; and my discussion in Chap. 6).

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institutions. To avoid both performative contradictions and counterfinality, actors’ aims and means, just like their theory and practice, must cohere. How would it be possible to combine (i) the capacity to establish an overall, binding direction to the activities of the party with (ii) a democratic process of will-­ formation that also maximises its learning capacity? In an Arendtian or republican manner, a global party could combine a self-selected core of cosmopolitical activists with a wide basis of more or less passive supporters. However, unlike Arendt,23 the party should not fail to theorise the social conditions and structures co-­ determining the self-selection of those who care and are willing to commit themselves and their time to the activities of the party. What Arendt (1956, p. 277) calls “the obvious inability and conspicuous lack of interest of large parts of the population in political matters as such” would not be a given condition but something that can be, at least in part, changed. In this connection, it is important to emphasise that global institutions can, and in many cases should, increase the overlapping and multilayered autonomy of actors in various local and glocal contexts. A key problem of Wells’ open conspiracy plan was the absence of a plausible sociological account of the conditions of those who could partake in such a movement and organisation. In effect, Wells was assuming that anyone could be like him, a free-floating successful writer who would eventually become so wealthy as to possess several households in at least two countries (UK, France) and have time and resources to travel across the Northern hemisphere, to interview Lenin and meet Maxim Gorky in Moscow, and then to go to New York to negotiate another lucrative book contract, meet his mistress, or attend an interesting conference on de-militarisation. It is telling that the cosmopolitical activists have often been NGO professionals; academics and students; free researchers, writers, and journalists; and internationally oriented functionaries of nationally based movements or trade unions. A world party would have to recognise, on the one hand, the limited possibilities of many to become cosmopolitical activists. On the other hand, the party should work systematically to widen the social basis of activists and dedicate a substantial part of its resources to this purpose. It would also be committed to advocating the re-­ organisation of the institutions of mass media and systems of education in a way that would encourage public virtues and engender well-informed citizens. For instance, as part of the idea that the choice of institutions “determines in part the sort of persons they want to be as well as the sort of persons they and their children will become” (Rawls, 1973, p. 259), the party could advocate the notion that every citizen of the world must be granted free and equally good public education. If local chapters of the party take part in elections, some of the activist members will inevitably become professional politicians in a relatively limited setting (the local and functional or issue-based chapters would also be autonomous in some regards). The possible and likely social consequences would have to be countered  A political theorist rather than a social scientist, Arendt had a tendency to mystify the pre-given qualities of the self-selected elites and reify the prevailing tendencies of the masses (see, e.g., Arendt, 1956, pp. 273–279). 23

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by utilising rotation. The self-selected core members would not have only rights but also duties to participate in elections, meetings, and other activities of the global party itself, including various (self-)educational activities. The number of core members must remain open. Anyone can freely opt either for being a core member or just a fee-paying supporter or sympathiser, fees being steeply progressive on incomes, and, of course, also a voter. Those who cannot or would not like to be core activists can nonetheless be fee-paying support members. Only continuously active participants can consistently sustain their status as core members. What is important is that the line between the two categories can be made fuzzy. Global activities of the party would be planned by its Global Board, elected in a general election among members. The process of will-formation would also include ongoing republican discussions among the members and supporters and binding referenda among the activists. The Board would follow the principle of rotation, but as indicated by the problems of DiEM25, the rotation cycles should not be excessively short. The principle of rotation can be operationalised to mean, for instance, that no one person can be Chairperson for two consequent periods; and no member can be on the Board for more than three or four consecutive periods. The length of the periods could vary from one to three years depending on the body and wishes of the members. The global board, discussions, and referenda would set the overall programme and direction of the organisation across its various chapters. The chapters would decide everything else. Despite various procedural safeguards built around rules of representation, rotation, public finance, and other key issues, the global party would recognise a generic tendency towards post-democratic forms of governance—in effect, towards oligarchy or even autocracy—and face it as a permanent challenge for its legitimacy as well. Hence, oligarchic tendencies would have to be countered also in terms of cultivating the republican virtues and courageous participation of its constantly shifting groups of activist members. This is a necessary yet not a sufficient condition for ensuring democratic responsiveness and learning; manifold efforts and mechanisms are needed.

Concluding Remarks and Two Additional Issues World party is a particular kind of civic association based on long-term commitments and solidarity. A world party can combine different approaches to civil society in terms of its goals. As specified in Table  9.1, these goals may include fair participation in political processes and similar ideas; the idea of participatory democratised, economic organisations and systems; and dissident ideas such as furthering post-material values in the world risk society. Yet, many goals such as non-­ violence and peace (minimisation of violence in social relations), generic human flourishing or welfare, learning, social justice, full employment, equal socio-­ economic developments, balanced macroeconomic dynamics, as well as ecological diversity and sustainability are not reducible to these orientations of civil society. A world party frames its goals, however specified, reflexively in terms of higher-order

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purposes, including global, planetary, and cosmic. As world history unfolds and situations change, the party must be capable of revising its ideas and aims through free and public communication. Learning involves feedback from the consequences of its own activities but concerns also much wider stories about history and anticipations of the future. While some of the goals can be readily understood in Polanyian terms as an attempt to create new structures of global solidarity following the phase of neoliberal globalisation, many global and planetary problems are better conceived in terms of world risk society or other concepts. These include weapons of mass destruction; contradictions of global political economy fuelling regressive learning and interstate conflicts; planetary consequences of economic growth and technological developments, and the need for global cooperation to regulate cosmic expansionism and tackle cosmic risks (e.g. asteroid collision or solar super-storm) and possibilities (e.g. finding life elsewhere) that I will discuss in Chap. 10. Changing realities require new ideas. The idea of transformative global agency is purported to make a wide rational appeal across different social classes: “this is what is reasonable for us to do!”. The idea of a world party is not entirely new, in some way it emerged in the nineteenth century and in a more explicit form in the first half of the twentieth century, not least in the writings of H. G. Wells. However, world parties are yet to emerge as a political practice and institution. The making of a collective agency is a process of active and reflexive engagement within the world, which can result in learning. The latest rounds of developments have turned most national parties post-democratic. Many examples of local or national Leftist parties have shown that in the long run, they are unable to sustain themselves without a wider front. Consider the fate of Syriza in Greece, for instance.24 What happened was not simply an example of how Michels’s law of oligarchy works. More importantly, the debacle of the summer of 2015 is an illustration of the power of creditors over debtors in the world economy and the lack of equitable rule of law in worldwide financial relations. During the past decades, a large number of countries in the global south went through similar experiences. These experiences instigated the emergence of global debt campaigns in the 1980s and 1990s. The main lesson of these kinds of episodes is that democratic politics needs to self-organise on scales wider than national states. The fate of Syriza reveals  Syriza was formed in 2004 as a coalition of several parties and left-wing groups. It rose to a broader awareness with the euro crisis and won the parliamentary elections in January 2015 in Greece with a near-majority of parliamentary seats (149/300). However, Syriza’s attempt to persuade EU leaders as to the irrationality of the rules of the Economic and Monetary Union, austerity policy and privatisation failed. In a sudden turn, as in a classical tragedy, amidst a deep economic crisis Alexis Tsipras ignored the results of the Greek referendum and surrendered to the Troika, which consisted of the European Commission, the European Central Bank, and the International Monetary Fund. Yanis Varoufakis resigned, and soon the party was split. Syriza and Tsipras remained in power after the September 2015 elections, but from that point on they started to implement the program of their former “enemy”, the Troika, and was able to achieve only some minor concessions. In the July 2019 elections, Syriza lost to the centre-right New Democracy party, although it was able to secure its position as the main opposition party with 23.8% of the votes. In May 2023 elections, it lost 15 seats with 20.07% of votes. 24

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how difficult it is to make even a moderate and cautious Polanyian turn (not to mention other goals) unless there is a broader transnational, regional, or worldwide movement or political organisation behind it. In this chapter, I have discussed various experiments pointing, in different ways, towards the direction of a world party, from the WOMP and WSF to Greenpeace International and DiEM25. WOMP offers ideas about how to think globally about such a party; WSF indicates that a mere open space is not enough for the emergence of transformative agency; and Greenpeace and DiEM25 provide lessons about how to—or how not to—organise such a movement. I have, however, omitted a few important issues that must be considered as well. A central question concerns fund-­ raising. The future world party must rely on the activism of its members involving a lot of voluntary work, but that is unlikely to be sufficient. The history of really existing democratic politics is also a history of struggles over the rules of funding. When the accumulation of privileges is allowed to continue, the rule of money in politics strengthens, implying “post-democracy”. The democratic aim is to counter these tendencies and open up further transformative possibilities, yet no large-scale party in a complex market society (however open to emancipatory transformations) can do without sources of funding or professional work. The party may learn from the fund-raising experiments of the past and present progressive movements, yet it should also develop new ideas. Another important question concerns language. English may currently be the cosmopolitan lingua franca—the number of non-native speakers has surpassed that of native speakers—but in the coming decades, its role may gradually decline relative to some other languages. Currently, English functions as the default language for intercultural communication for a large number of people around the world. Because it is the most likely common language in a variety of contexts, it makes sense to study English as the first foreign language. English has become a solution to a coordination problem. Thus, organisations such as DiEM25, the EU, and the UN rely in practice on English, even though they may profess plurilingualism and spend a lot of resources on translations. This does not make English historically or geopolitically neutral. If English is used as the lingua franca, native speakers are privileged and this is likely to affect social positioning within the organisation. This in turn has political consequences also in terms of substance, because people originating in different geohistorical contexts carry with them different taken-for-granted backgrounds and understandings. Moreover, only a relatively small elite of non-native speakers are truly fluent in English, and even they may not experience it as the language for effortlessly expressing their inner selves and emotions. Arabic, Hindi, and Indonesian have roughly the same number of native speakers as English—and Mandarin many more. There are some two thousand widely used languages. Thus, any world party would have to have a carefully designed but revisable language policy. The most obvious alternative to English would be Esperanto. However, the growing prominence of English as the global lingua franca and the rise of machine translation have diminished the need for a constructed common language such as Esperanto. Because of the small number of Esperanto speakers in the world (only

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10,000 people speak Esperanto fluently and use it often, while 100,000 people know how to use Esperanto relatively well for oral and written communication), it is not a practical alternative to English. It is worth mentioning that Esperanto is based on Indo-European languages and especially its European branches. This is why, for example, many of its structures and vocabulary are familiar to speakers of IndoEuropean languages spoken in Europe, but not to others. Another alternative to English is the simultaneous use of several languages. Professional interpreting is expensive, however. For example, the EU spends about a billion euros per year in converting documents and discussions from one language to other languages (often from English to the national languages of the member states). The world party could reduce costs by relying, in part, on voluntary work, but given the amount of work— and also to keep its standards high—the party would need to spend a significant share of its meagre funds on these kinds of activities. The new possibilities opened up by machine translation and AI may change this. Even if a world party cannot but rely on English as the global lingua franca, it must do its utmost to relativise the position of English and to profess plurilingualism, especially as it grows over time and acquires more resources. First, the party could formally adopt Esperanto as its official language, meaning a commitment to spread Esperanto, for instance through educational activities and by supporting organisations that advocate its use. Second, the party could use multiple languages in a multilayered way. All major documents would have to be translated into several other languages. While the party may rely on English in some of its discussions, meetings, and congresses, the principle of rotation should also be applied to languages. For instance, in every second major meeting or congress, the main language(s) could be something else than English. In those occasions, only native speakers would be allowed to use English—translated into the main language(s)— whereas anyone can use the main language(s). Third, as machine translation becomes more context-sensitive, adequate, and precise, the party could rely increasingly on automated systems of translation. In the future, the choice of language may be less of an issue.

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Part III World Statehood and Beyond

Emergence of World Statehood: A Processual and Open-Ended Account

10

Introduction The planetary perspective on the future of world politics is commonly associated with life and complex ecological systems on Earth. The process of economic growth since the industrial revolution has shaped the Earth system and led to multiple ongoing and interconnected ecological crises. Meanwhile, global processes have already extended their reaches beyond the globe and into outer space (Dickens & Ormrod, 2011). Of the more than 8000–9000 satellites orbiting Earth in the early 2020s, a bit more than half are active. Non-military uses—often commercial—include communication, weather forecasting, navigation, broadcasting, and scientific research. The orbit is used also for space tourism and there are plans to build, for example, “space business parks”. The expansionary tendencies built into the dynamics of the capitalist market economy have also spawned plans to exploit raw materials from asteroids and the Moon. Moreover, space technology has become central to the military-­ security practices of states. Despite the 1967 Outer Space Treaty and other attempts to demilitarise space and regulate the use of space (see Wolter, 2006), many military planners see the control of near-Earth space as a way to dominate places on Earth militarily and, perhaps, politically. Moreover, the rapidly growing global space economy—in the early 2020s between €350–400 billion pa and due to growth to one trillion by 20401—remains largely unregulated. The Outer Space Treaty may, under some interpretations, allow for private property rights on the Moon, asteroids, Mars, and other celestial bodies (Dickens & Ormrod, 2011, p. 545). While these developments have generated the problem of how to regulate human activities in space (preferably under the progressive rubrics of the common heritage of humankind and global commons), growing capabilities to operate in space create  This is an estimate given by Professor Kai-Uwe Schrogl—the President of the International Institute of Space Law—in his “Inaugural Astropolitics BISA Working Group” first annual lecture given remotely on 20 February 2023. 1

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new types of problems and raise new questions. These problems and questions go beyond the current disintegrative tendencies that have resulted in militarisation of space and growing risks and threats (Sönnichsen, 2021). For example, climate change could be mitigated by climate engineering on a planetary scale through space, including by means of solar geoengineering (e.g. Wadhams, 2012). The problem is not only that uncertainty prevails and engineering on such a scale could have massive side effects. The question is also: who could take legitimate decisions about resorting to such actions? Moreover, technologies can be and already are developed that could deflect any asteroid or comet found to be on collision course with Earth. However, “any method that can be devised to destroy or deflect an approaching large near-Earth object can be used, on a much shorter time scale, to do great damage” (Sagan & Ostro, 1994, p. 70). Among other things, this raises questions about control over such technologies. Space technologies concern also the possibility of encountering other forms of life. The argument of Chap. 3 may be taken to indicate that the Copernican principle—“we don’t occupy a privileged position in the universe”—has been taken too far by modern science and by many philosophical systems. Nonetheless, even weaker versions of the principle indicate that if life has emerged on Earth, it must have emerged in numerous other places.2 If the cosmos is fine-tuned for life, it seems likely that there are at least microbial forms of life also in other parts of our solar system or nearby regions of the galaxy, perhaps even on Mars. This raises questions about the protection of life systems. Who, or what institution, is entitled to take decisions that can have far-reaching consequences for entire planetary systems of life, including on Earth? Existing voluntary guidelines, such as the COSPAR Planetary Protection Policy, are hardly enough. The possibility of detecting an alien signal—or traces of alien civilisation—raises similar but potentially even more difficult questions. Currently, guidelines are provided by the International Academy of Astronautics (IAA) SETI Protocols, but these are entirely voluntary and unenforceable. Who can decide on the risks of potential extraterrestrial contacts or speak in the name of humanity? These questions suggest a need for a planetary community with appropriate political institutions. (Crawford, 2021). These planetary problematics are relatively new, but the underlying problem was summarised by Reinhold Niebuhr in his The Children of Light and the Children of Darkness already in 1944: The crisis of our age is undoubtedly due primarily to the fact that the requirements of technical civilization have outrun the limited order which national communities have achieved, while the resources of our civilization have not been adequate for the creation of political instruments of order, wide enough to meet these requirements. (Niebuhr, 2011, pp. 153–154)

In 1942, the German V-2 rocket (Vergeltungswaffe 2, “Retaliation Weapon 2”) became the first artificial object to travel into space by crossing the Kármán line  It is also possible that life on Earth originates elsewhere. The idea that life can be distributed across (parts of) the universe, or at least from planet to planet within a solar system, is called panspermia. 2

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(edge of space). The development of space technology originated in war and continues to be dominated by military-security purposes (Deudney, 2020). However, the topic of this chapter is not the space expansionist programme as such, but rather the underlying problem as summarised by Niebuhr: the possibility of the development of such cultural resources and political institutions that are adequate for the requirements of the technological civilisation of the twenty-first century. Is there anything general that can be said about such a process of global political integration? First, I review the 1940s debates about a world state. What may be the general lessons that we can learn from these discussions, either at the level of theory or, more abstractly, at the level of ontology? The beginning of the Cold War stifled these discussions. With a few exceptions, most notably World Order Models Project (Falk, 1975) and World-Systems Analysis (see Chase-Dunn, 1990), these debates remained on the margins or in the background until the end of the Cold War. Globalisation talk, the third wave of democratisation, and the end of the Cold War created a context in which the idea of global democracy (re-)emerged in the 1990s (a key text of this era is Held, 1995, see Chap. 5). Alexander Wendt’s, 2003 article “Why a world state is inevitable” started a new round of discussions on world state and is worthy of a critical discussion also because of its generic account of the process that is likely to lead to such an outcome. I conclude this chapter by outlining a processual and open-ended account of the formation of interconnected elements of world statehood.

Debates About the World State in the 1940s The idea of the world state first appeared during the French Revolution and its immediate aftermath (Chap. 2). In early twentieth-century Europe, this idea was most famously championed and developed by H. G. Wells. However, it was during WWII and especially in the USA that the idea became a focal point of discussions (before that the great US debate was whether to stay neutral or take part in the war). Many of the most important participants in the discussions in the USA were either second-generation migrants from German-speaking Europe, such as Niebuhr, or scholars who had fled the Nazi rule, such as Hans Morgenthau and Arnold Wolfers. In addition, the world federalist movement was especially strong in the USA but involved many people and organisations around the world. Wendell Wilkie’s One World (1943) inspired the movement—including Albert Einstein, Mahatma Gandhi, and Jawaharlal Nehru—and advocated worldwide cooperation on the basis of broad equality. Emery Reves’ The Anatomy of Peace (1947) helped popularise the cause of world federalism. For Reves, the federal authority would have to have legislative powers to create international law, although its powers would be confined to intergovernmental relationships. Most of the disputants of the 1940s, many of whom have been classified as “political realists”, advocated far-reaching global reforms or a world state (Scheuerman, 2011). These debates are relatively complex and multifaceted—for example, some of the main participants were later accused of Anti-American Leftist

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activities—and as this chapter is not intended to be a nuanced history of ideas, I focus on a few key arguments of the debates. The realists were opposed to the idea of world constitutionalism, to the idea that liberal domestic principles are directly applicable in the world as a whole (e.g. Morgenthau, 1947, pp. 28–9, 57, 96–107). The presumption that all social conflicts, domestic or international, can be settled on the basis of established rules of law, is misleading and especially so in the international sphere. In an article provocatively entitled “The Myth of World Government”, Niebuhr (1946) traces this kind of legalism back to the abstract liberal “social-­ contract” theory of government, where free individuals or states are supposed to have formed a contract for once and all. Moreover, the then (and now) common analogy to the real historical experiences of the USA is equally misleading. By the time of the establishment of the US constitution, many factors worked to produce the cohesion of the American colonies of Britain—but even that could not prevent the Civil War of the 1860s. Yet, Niebuhr (1946, p. 313) stresses that there are compelling motives towards world unity in the age of technical civilisation. Economic interdependence “generates insufferable frictions if it is not politically managed”. There is potential for a world community in various philosophies and religions. “There is, finally, the fear of mutual destruction”. The realist counterargument against liberal legalism but in favour of a world state can be summarised as follows: PREMISE 1: The world-state has become essential to the survival and development of humanity because of technological developments. PREMISE 2: The world state requires a political community in which forces converge. PREMISE 3: Simple arguments can show that there is no global political community yet and that there is a long way to go. INTERMEDIATE CONCLUSION: A world state is not possible in the immediate or clearly foreseeable future. PREMISE: Ethical diplomacy helps us survive; and functionalist and other forms of cooperation contribute to the formation of a global political community. _______________________________ CONCLUSION: Ethically and politically, the most important thing is to cultivate the rules of wise diplomacy and to support functional cooperation and thereby create the conditions for gradual changes towards a world political community and state. In The Children of Light and the Children of Darkness, Niebuhr (2011, p. 159, 162) states somewhat ambiguously that the “children of light” see universalism and globalisation as providing an opportunity to create a world community, but “they underestimate the power of particular forces in history”. What is equally problematic is that “the instruments of universality can be temporarily borrowed by the forces of particularity”. Similarly, for Morgenthau and other realists, false universalisms in the service of particular interests or aspirations co-generate tragic chapters in world history. Niebuhr (2011, ch 5), however, was not opposed to the use of law in creating a more peaceful and cooperative world; rather he sought to integrate

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some quasi-constitutional principles (including democratic checks and balances) with the more organic processes of history. That formulation of Niebuhr may be nuanced, but oftentimes the “realists” of these discussions seem to have thought in either-or terms about political community and forces vs. law. The liberals assume that law as such establishes a community, whereas often the realists seem to think that law and institutions are a mere epiphenomenon, i.e. a secondary effect or by-product that arises from but does not causally influence a process. While the assumption of the epiphenomenal nature of law and institutions seems unfounded, the core of the realists’ criticism is plausible. As argued in Chaps. 5 and 7, the conditions of the security community are complex and dynamic, and neither the law nor any constitutional mechanism alone guarantees a lasting or legitimate peace. Furthermore, the realist argument points in the direction of process ontology. The substance is subordinate to the process: things such as individuals or states are constellations of processes involving actions, institutions, laws, etc. (for a systematic philosophical discussion, Rescher, 1996). From this point of view, the juxtaposition of a community (forces) and law (institutions) is too simplistic. In a modern society characterised by reflexivity, constitutive and regulative rules are often or typically legal, but the thus constituted entities are constellations of many processes. I develop this argument more concretely in Chap. 13, where I analyse relevant processes further.

Wendt’s Argument About the Inevitability of World State In the world state literature, it is common to emphasise that the current worldwide interstate system is a historically specific constellation sustained by ongoing socio-­ economic processes. Moreover, the main trend over the last millennia has been towards the enlargement of the average size of political units and the decrease in the total number of such units. (Chase-Dunn, 1990, p. 109). By means of simple extrapolation, the world seems to be heading towards a single political unit, and, from a process ontology point of view, one could also argue that today’s nation-states are “dynamic elements in an ongoing process of global state formation that Elias traced back to feudal times”. This process is unlikely to involve wars of conquest—“force is no real option”, and certainly not a sustainable option under modern circumstances (Bummel, 2021, pp. 326–327). These kinds of accounts mingle empirical megatrends with elements of a process ontology and often include assumptions about the driving forces of the process, for example, a Marxian “mode of production”. Although there may be various oscillations and some irregularities in the overall developments, the world system as a whole seems closed and thus it appears possible to predict the emergence of a world state in the coming centuries—unless there is a global disaster. However, these kinds of predictions are unfalsifiable and it is unclear what their practical value might be. Although Wendt (2003, p. 503) too refers to the megatrend of larger size and a smaller number of political units over time, he contributes to this literature in a methodologically interesting way, by relying on self-organisation theory and by

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defending teleological causal explanation. Wendt (p.  505) is also explicit that a Deutschian security community is a necessary condition for a world state (cf. Chap. 5). In Wendt’s account, the movement towards a world state is not just a trend or based on an empirical regularity, but stems from a structural tendency that drives a world-historical process that “is neither deterministic nor linear, and forward movement may be blocked for periods of time” (p.  491). Wendt proposes two sets of dynamics that together constitute the overall structural tendency, but he is explicit about leaving the socio-economic process (and especially “the logic of capital”) out of his account. The first of these dynamics concerns civil society. Although national state practices sustain homeostatic logics that are resistant to change, territorial states are not stable in the long run. Wendt (pp. 510–16) relies on Hegel’s metaphorical story about the “struggle for recognition” in arguing that only a global political community can fully ensure an equal, symmetric, and stable collective identity (recognition can be taken to mean “the granting of a certain status”). The assumption is that actors desire recognition, that is, to be constituted by others as subjects with a legitimate social standing in relation to them. This desire is ultimately existential: one can be a subject only by being recognised as such by others. Recognition can be asymmetric and focus on differences, but the problem is that asymmetric recognitions are unstable, although they may appear relatively stable in a given historical context (asymmetric recognition constitutes hierarchies where a subject satisfies its desire for recognition by denying full recognition to some others; such a system is costly to maintain and tends to lead to struggles over freedom and equality). Mutual recognition implies the constitution of solidarity and collective identity. The struggle for recognition operates on two levels simultaneously, between individuals and between groups. For individuals, the counterpart of the recognition within a particular group is that people in other groups do not recognise them and that they do not have the same rights. Wendt (p. 516) assumes further that when groups are entering into a larger identity, they want their difference recognised (which seems to indicate a preference for a form of federalism). What Wendt calls the macro-level “logic of anarchy” serves only to constrain possible avenues for seeking recognition, in particular, asymmetric recognition by means of force. While it is possible to seek recognition through force and violence, the competition among groups (states) generates “improved military technology that makes such violence increasingly intolerable” (p.  517). In other words, attempts to use violence in Hegelian struggles over recognition have become increasingly expensive and also dysfunctional due to the development of technology, especially weapons of mass destruction. Therefore: At the macro-level this struggle [for recognition] is channeled toward a world state by the logic of anarchy, which generates a tendency for military technology and war to become increasingly destructive. The process moves through five stages, each responding to the instabilities of the one before—a system of states, a society of states, world society, collective security, and the world state. (p. 491)

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This follows the scheme of Wendt’s earlier Social Theory of International Politics (1999), where he uses the philosophers Hobbes, Locke, and Kant to name certain paradigmatic patterns of interaction in international relations, or “cultures of anarchy”. In Wendt’s theory, mutual learning can lead to a rise from Hobbesian towards Lockean and Kantian anarchy and finally to world statehood, but a downward slide, i.e. regression, is also possible.3 The Hobbesian anarchy is characterised by relations of existential enmity, where the ego’s actions reflect the ego’s image of the other like a mirror—and vice versa. In a Lockean society of states, states recognise each other’s legal sovereignty as independent subjects, with some mutually constraining rules, and constitute each other as rivals rather than enemies. Limited “positional” as opposed to “constitutive” wars remain possible, though also they have been becoming increasingly costly and are often unacceptable to citizens (especially if they have to die in these wars). Moving towards a Kantian culture of “friendship”, the reciprocal recognition of states starts to include also positive rights, mutual aid, and finally collective security. For Wendt, the final stage in this idealised process is the establishment of a world state. Although Wendt follows the standard (Weberian) definition of the state as an organisation possessing a monopoly on the legitimate use of organised violence within a society, he emphasises that “the systemic changes needed for a world state could be fulfilled in various ways, and so a world state might look very different than states today” (p. 506).4 Wendt is keen to show that the final stage of this world-­ historical process is stable and to do that, he responds to three potential objections. The first is that the world state can become despotic and start a new cycle of asymmetric recognition, hierarchies, struggles, and possibly wars over freedom and equality. While recognising the possibility of a democratic deficit, Wendt resorts to a simple conceptual argument and posits that only a world state based on mutual recognition of equality is stable. Second, he argues that nationalism is evidence of the force of the logic of recognition (especially in the context of struggles for freedom from empires) and that a world state can and must embrace diversity and thus nationalism. Finally, the world state does not need an external other to  In my recent works (Patomäki, 2008, 2018, 2022), I have detailed the political economy and other causes that have led to such a decline since the end of the Cold War (see also Forsberg & Patomäki, 2023). 4  This formulation looks open-ended, but in a transcript of a presentation Wendt (2015) specifies his idea of a world state in a fairly conventional and unambitious way that fails to address most real issues: “I’m only talking about sovereignty over violence, not education policy, taxation, culture, or the vast majority of things governments do on a day-to-day basis. All of those issues might remain privatised to separate countries and as such a world state in my view might be a quite minimalist entity focusing just on the issue of violence, and not a gigantic bureaucracy of territorial states we have today. Second, even in the area of organized violence a world state might be quite decentralised in practice, with each current state retaining its own armed forces, much like in the U.S. each of the 50 states has its own state and local police forces, national guard, and so on. It might help to have a UN army, but I don’t see this as essential to the idea of a world state. All that is essential is that the authority to use violence and the power to back up that authority no longer be private—a private unilateral right of the today’s 190 states—but a collective right of the whole. So ‘no national level of violence without UN authorization’ might be a slogan”. 3

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recognise itself, it can be recognised by its parts and vice versa. Moreover, the “world state could compensate for the absence of spatial differentiation through a temporal differentiation between its present and its past” (p. 527).

A Critique of Wendt’s Account Compared to the 1940s discussions, Wendt’s scenario about the emergence of a world state is an improvement because it provides a dynamic account of community formation (cf. premises 2 and 3 in the above summary of the realist argument against liberal legalism). Although Wendt is not explicit about the role of law, in the Hegelian scheme the solidarity and common identity acquired through mutual recognition attains objective validity in legal relations (although for Hegel, law can also separate individuals and pose problems for ethical theory). Moreover, Wendt’s scheme of “cultures of anarchy”, combined with the concept of the security community, makes conceptual distinctions that can be useful for analysing geohistorical variations in interstate relations. It is also positive that Wendt is analysing mechanisms and tendencies in relatively open systems rather than mere trends or empirical regularities, although ultimately his argument implies that world history as a whole forms a closed system with a stable and fixed end-point.5 Despite these kinds of improvements, his scheme of world history is too simple and as such misleading. Wendt shares the premise of most of the participants in these discussions that a world state has become essential to the survival and development of humanity because of technological developments, but his interpretation of this premise is narrow and essentially similar to those who wrote in the 1940s, focussing on nuclear weapons. This interpretation excludes, for instance, the ecological crises caused by two centuries of rapid economic (including population) growth and the actual and potential consequences of space expansionism and related capabilities. Recently, the rapid development of artificial intelligence (AI) has become a major existential concern. Moreover, even if we focus only on the costs of war, it is arguably the case that already Norman Angell’s The Great Illusion (originally 1910) provided a deeper and more nuanced explanation of the problem.

 In a footnote, Wendt (1999, pp. 532–533, fn 34) qualifies this closedness: “Organisms may die before they reach maturity, and in international politics one can imagine various exogenous shocks that could prevent world state formation—an asteroid impact, plague, ecological collapse, and so on. All real-world systems are partially open systems and thus vulnerable to disruption. On the other hand, a constitutive feature of any teleological system is that it restricts the flow of energy across its boundaries, enabling it within limits to determine for itself which stimuli it will respond to [...]. Sometimes shocks will overwhelm a system and it will collapse, but in their absence a normal teleological system will indeed inevitably finish its development”. Moreover, at the end of his essay, Wendt (p. 528) stresses that the end-point does not mean the end of all history: “[O]nce a world state has emerged those struggles will be domesticated by enforceable law, and so for purposes of state formation will be no longer important. Rather than a complete end of history, therefore, it might be better to say that a world state would be the end of just one kind of history. Even if one telos is over, another would be just beginning”. 5

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It is true that Wendt (p. 519) writes that “today, even conventional wars between equal states can be enormously destructive, and will be only more so in the future, a fact which may help explain their contemporary rarity”, but Angell (1913) went beyond an analysis of economic and human costs of war itself. He discussed the consequences of an interdependent world economy and in that context the effects of credit on trade and warfare, the financial futility of military conquest, and why it is difficult if not impossible to use the military to shape trade relations for one’s own benefit. Although war does not make economic sense in an interdependent industrial world, Angell did not imply that this would prevent a great war among the biggest states and empires. Rather Angell (1913, p. 387) wrote in the appendix entitled “on recent events in Europe” that “[w]ar is not impossible, and no responsible Pacifist ever said it was; it is not the likelihood of war which is the illusion, but its benefits”. While Angell was right about the delusional and pointless logic of the European great powers (none of them gained economically from the destruction of WWI), like most of his contemporaries, he was powerless to shape world history. More generally, Wendt’s analysis is based on just one basic logic of development, which occurs through Hegelian recognition within the macro-level constraints and instabilities of the prevailing “culture of anarchy”. This should be contrasted with the notion that entities and large-scale processes are constellations of many processes. Although it is not plausible to give any generally or universally valid assessment of the explanatory power of different types of processes in relation to a particular explanandum (the types themselves vary and change historically),6 what is nonetheless important is the exclusion of socio-economic processes from the scenario. As argued elsewhere (Patomäki, 2002, pp.  87), the exclusion of political economy leaves a priori out both possible transformations of states as social systems and related emergent structures. It precludes the possibility that states, their foreign policies, and the relevant intra-, trans-, and interstate relations are systematically misidentified by theories that assume that states are (like) persons and focus on interstate relations in terms of conventional categories of International Relations theory. The interstate field has its characteristic practices and powers, but it is also one of the three fields of global political economy, which are intra- and interacting through positioned actors and geohistorical contexts. Contemporary states are open systems, intra- and inter-related to other systems consisting of, for example, practices and processes of the capitalist world economy and systems of governance of the world political economy. The dynamics of the fields constitute the overall

 Many practical explanations in open systems take the form of specifying causes as Insufficient but Non-redundant elements of a complex which is itself Unnecessary but Sufficient for the production of a result (so-called INUS-conditions; Mackie, 1974). A number of other INUS-conditions are involved in generating any outcome. What we single out as the cause depends largely on our practical capacities and expectations of normality. In the social world, the relational and processual components that form these INUS-conditions are themselves historical and changeable (for example, the historical constitution of the category of the “economy”). It is also worth noting that the problem with the INUS-scheme is that it makes it difficult to analyse systematically and theoretically how the structure of a field or the organisation of an environment may be the cause of what happens within it, or how these structures and organisations may evolve. A field-theoretical account can help to explain, though only to a degree, the movement of the whole. 6

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movement of the whole, which involves oscillations in economic growth and distribution of incomes and wealth, and outcomes such as wars. (See Patomäki, 2022, esp. ch. 6) Leaving political economy considerations aside for a moment, Wendt’s Hegelian story is instructive, but its epistemological and ontological status is unclear. It is based on assumptions of human desire and the constitution of the self that may appear plausible to some or many, yet his formulations of these assumptions do not seem to be grounded on claims with falsifiable implications. Wendt maintains that one can be a subject only by being recognised as such by others. This may be an implicit reference to George Herbert Mead’s theory of the emergence of mind and self out of the social process of communication in childhood through a transition from non-significant to significant and symbolic interaction. From a process-­ ontological perspective, “[t]he self is something which has a development; it is not initially there, at birth, but arises in the process of social experience and activity, that is, develops in the given individual as a result of his relations to that process as a whole and to other individuals within that process” (Mead, 1963, p. 135). Society is a processual whole within which individuals, once they have acquired subjectivity, define and position themselves through participation in social acts. However, the development of language and sociopsychological constitution of the “I” and “me” is a process that can occur in a small-scale group within a complex society. Beyond that point, the expression “one can be a subject only by being recognised as such by others” is ambiguous, depending on what exactly is meant by recognition and by being a subject. Once formed, the mind and the self exist, i.e. the existence of a subject does not necessarily imply anything particular about political processes, although the evolving identity and subsequent positioning of subjects require “recognition” in some sense. Hegel (2003, pp. 104–112) developed the idea of recognition in the famous story about the development of the lord-bondsman relationship in The Phenomenology of Mind (originally 1807). This story is an abstract allegory of human history understood in terms of freedom, but its real-world basis lies in the process known as the Enlightenment, the French revolution, and developments such as the Haitian Revolution 1791–1804. Before the time of European political revolutions and non-­ European revolts, generations after generations of subjects lived in communities and societies characterised by steep, formalised, and ritualised class-hierarchies, numerous popular revolts from the fourteenth century onwards notwithstanding. Hegel’s allegory explains neither this stability nor those changes that occurred and started to accelerate during early European modernity. In the eighteenth century, the revolutionary framings and responses—for example to the fiscal crisis of the French state in the late 1780s—were made possible by changes in the background, such as the proliferating ability to read silently, mass printing of books, the transformation of the temporal framework of concepts, and moral learning (Patomäki, 2022, chs 3–5).7 In  To these one should add the European ideas of freedom and equality came to a significant degree from the outside, emerging from encounters with others such as American “indians”. David Graeber and David Wengrow (2021, chs 2 and 11) stress the role of actual encounters especially 7

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other words, what philosophers call “the logic of recognition” is a normatively attuned philosophical principle of development that may in some regards mimic the real-historical outcome of multiple intertwined processes, rather than a systematic causal explanation of those historical changes that resulted from a complex constellation of processes. Axel Honneth (1995, chs. 2 and 3) outlines the specific intellectual context, in which early Hegel tried to incorporate some starting points of the social contract theory (especially Hobbes) into a dynamic account of the emergence and development of ethical life in modern society. This background highlights the fact that the point of the lord-bondsman dialectic is both hypothetical (a thought experiment verging on metaphysics) and normative much more than explanatory in any real-­ historical sense of the term, though it includes claims about stages of consciousness and their temporal relations. In the introduction to Part II of his book The Struggle for Recognition, Honneth (p. 68) writes “that every later attempt to revive [Hegel’s] philosophical theory was obliged to make contact with the empirical sciences in order, from the outset, to avoid falling back into metaphysics”. This is not, however, what Wendt (2003) does. Rather Wendt presents the basic Hegelian logic of recognition as a force that in itself constitutes a structural (presumably causal) tendency that drives world history towards a world state, thus avoiding normative questions. A good decade later, Wendt (2015, 2018) has second thoughts and writes that “one issue that I set aside in my 2003 piece was the normative or political question of whether a world state would be a good thing; my argument back then was simply, ‘like it or not, it’s coming to a neighborhood near you’”. Now he is explicit that the idea of a world state is essentially about a desirable future: In a truly liberal world all people would have the same rights before citizenship, including presumably the right not to be killed arbitrarily. Similarly, what democratic justification is there to exclude people from politics in “our” country if our decisions affect them? Democracy is about making power accountable to those it affects. Today’s Canadian and Mexican citizens are hugely affected by decisions taken in the U.S.—so why shouldn’t they have a say in how that power is used? (Wendt, 2018, no page numbers)

The normative contradiction between the principles of liberal democracy and the principles of territorial state sovereignty is essentially the same as the lack of symmetry and congruence among decision-makers, citizen-voters, and the people in a bounded territory, as identified by David Held (1995). This normative reframing of the world state problem leads to a gap between the desideratum (something that is needed or wanted) and real-world processes. The world state becomes a mere unrealistic thought experiment that could in principle resolve major normative with indigenous Americans and their often highly critical opinions about European societies, although, for instance, Lahontan’s influential “Curious Dialogues with a Savage of Good Sense Who Has Travelled” (1703) added and changed all kinds of things and the claims of the Iroquoianspeaking chief Kandiaronk were exaggerated, involving romantisation of his own society. At any rate, the mere possibility of taking critical distance from the European hierarchies and class systems made a big difference in the context where books were mass-produced for markets and literacy was becoming increasingly widespread.

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problems, but in reality, does not. In effect, Wendt’s reframing takes us back to the Kantian dichotomy between moral reason and the phenomenal world, which I have discussed in Chap. 5. Moreover, Wendt implicitly presupposes both the “all-affected principle” and the idea that global democracy requires a world state.8 Anyhow, as a result of this reframing, the Hegelian logic driving geohistorical processes towards a world state subsides into the background or disappears altogether. The lack of a systematic explication of agency in Wendt’s (2003) original analysis contributes to deepening the problems of his account or scenario. To the extent that intentional agency plays a role in the process, Wendt must assume that the struggle for recognition is a key concern of actors and as a reason for their actions, paramount to other preferences, interests, and purposes. Any concept can be extended—consider the role of “preference” in rational choice theory—to such an extent that it covers almost everything, but the result tends to be tautological. If “recognition” is to have a well-defined and restricted meaning, it must be possible to distinguish actions driven by recognition from other types of actions. Indeed, in his response Wendt (2005, pp. 589–590) notes the importance of other “motives” like security and wealth, admitting that he does not know how to measure or quantify whether the effect of other motives outweighs that of recognition. Moreover, there seems to be a contradiction between the idea that agency matters and the inevitability of the process leading towards a fixed end-state. (Shannon, 2005). Wendt supports his argument with the assumption that all different motives drive world history in the same direction. However, if that is the case, why should we expect the process of world state formation to take up to two centuries?

 onclusion: A Processual and Open-ended Account C of the Formation of World Statehood There is broad agreement that the requirements of technological civilisation have outrun the limited problem-solving capacities of national-territorial states and that some new state-like institutions are needed on a global and planetary scale. The “realists” of the 1940s debates maintained that there is no global political community yet and that the process will take a long time (premise 3). The achievement of a world community is difficult and complicated and “[i]f it is within the possibilities, only desperate necessity makes it so” (Niebuhr, 2011, p.  168). Yet, as  As Eva Erman (2019) points out, in the political theoretical literature, the question of whether global democracy requires a world state has with few exceptions been answered with an unequivocal “No”. A world state, it is typically argued, is neither feasible nor desirable. Erman distinguishes between different moments of democratic processes and their different functions and argues that global democracy requires some stateness, especially supranational legislative entities and perhaps supranational judicial entities but not necessarily supranational executive entities. Chapters 11 and 12 can be read as comments on this idea: in Chap. 11 I argue for a combination of different democratic principles in a specific context of a functionally differentiated of system of governance, and in Chap. 12 that a world parliament can have an important function with regard to international and cosmopolitan law without being a “sovereign” legislator. 8

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Morgenthau (1948) contended, wise diplomacy and functional cooperation can pave the way for a world political community. In addition, for instance Niebuhr seeks to integrate quasi-constitutional principles—including democratic checks and balances and restraints upon the authority of great powers—with the more organic processes of history. Niebuhr’s organic processes are not that far from the “struggles of recognition” serving as the basis of Wendt’s scenario. However, these two sets of discussions have revolved around a relatively narrow but important agenda focussing on peace and war and weapons of mass destruction. A more comprehensive agenda includes the consequences of uneven economic growth, contradictions of the world economy, ecological crises shaping the Earth system, new problems that have arisen because of space expansionism, and many other results of technological civilisation such as AI. As argued in Chaps. 7 and 8, the complex and multilayered dynamics of the world economy tend to breed disintegrative tendencies in the absence of adequate common institutions. Transformative actions would need to break these kinds of vicious circles. Transformations may happen through crises, problem-solving, and learning, or a global catastrophe. The currently existing systems of governance may be gridlocked, but states are not separate persons interacting; rather they are open systems, intra- and inter-related to other systems involving processes of the world economy and systems of global governance. For example, to use an abstract example, state structures can become globalised. In a dynamic world, processes are more fundamental than things and things are temporary products of processes (and sustained by many ongoing processes), even when they are relatively enduring. The term “process-in-product” indicates that the past is always present in anything or any entity, and this applies also to elements and functions of world stateness. In turn, “product-in-process” refers to the iterable or non-iterable exercise of the product’s (entity’s) causal powers. When an entity changes (because it is a product-in-process), its causal powers will change as well. (Bhaskar, 1993). Moreover, above I have argued that large-scale processes are constellations of multiple processes that can be nested or interwoven but also contradictory. This is also a way in which we can see institutional products such as interrelated elements of global governance and world statehood. Further, the allegory of “the struggle for recognition” consists necessarily of multiple constitutive and causal processes if translated into an explanatory account of some real historical outcomes. Indeed, I have argued in this chapter that the logic of recognition is a normatively attuned philosophical principle of development that may in some regards mimic the outcome of multiple intertwined processes, but it is not a systematic causal explanation of anything concrete such as the Haitian Revolution 1791–1804 or the decolonisation process after WWII.  The multiple constitutive and causal processes can include, for example, technological changes, conceptual transformations, and ethical-­political learning; they also include civilising processes (see Chap. 13). Some of these processes have to do with the background of social activities. All practical judgements and actions have an unconscious and taken-for-granted background of concepts, dispositions, and competencies, even if aspects of this background can sometimes be brought to the level of conscious deliberation. Also, social

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institutions are embedded in the taken-for-granted background of practical competencies and social imaginaries. The background can and does change. The problem in the 2020s is that ongoing changes in the background of competencies are ambiguous with regard to the rise of the long view, global imaginary, and holoreflexivity (see Chaps. 8 and 9). For example, while progressive time has not disappeared from the taken-for-granted background, it has been problematised, changed its meaning, and become commodified. Where common sense has incorporated a commercialised and technologically oriented sense of progressive time, and where Whiggish neoliberalism has succeeded in claiming the direction of this “progress”, hope about the future has eroded (Patomäki, 2022, p. 123–125). The resulting hopelessness has been aggravated by climate change and the fear of global catastrophes—including through militarisation of space. Moreover, by going with the flow of history in this way, and without providing hope and imaginative directions, the attraction of social and democratic dispositions has tended to weaken especially in the OECD countries. Technological developments—especially those related to social media—have inflamed rather than moderated these tendencies and, at least in some or many contexts, reduced collective learning. From a wider world-historical perspective, these are of course relatively short-term developments, but given the crisis tendencies of the first half of the twenty-first century, the short-term is acutely important. These considerations provide the conceptual and historical context for the chapters that follow. In Chap. 11, I make a case, with Jamie Morgan and Johan Wahlsten, for a planet-political approach to climate change governance based on factual evidence as well as on conceptual and theory-informed claims. We argue first that carbon taxes should be preferred to carbon trading, and second that there is a need for the organisation and coordination of this taxation at a global level. A global greenhouse gas tax is a rational global Keynesian solution to the aporia of current climate governance and the global climate movement constitutes the basis for a relevant transformative agency. We propose to establish a new, democratically organised yet inclusive global organisation. Moreover, building a global tax system is a process. From this perspective, for example, a border levy can be defendable as a part of an increasingly inclusive global system—especially if that system is widely seen as vital for the future of life systems on Earth. Chapter 12 is an attempt to rethink the idea of world parliament from a novel angle. Apart from the task of coordinating the activities of functional-democratic systems of governance, a world parliament can be seen as a response to a deep problem of international law: its indeterminacy. The need for a world parliament has to do with determining what international or world law is. A world parliament could also speak in the name of the world community and thus respond, among many other things, to the questions raised by space expansionism and the rise of related capabilities. I conclude by situating the proposal in the context of an open-ended vision of an evolving world civilisation, the topmost layer of which is for now organised along functionalist-democratic lines but requires also coordination and generic rules and principles of (meta-)governance. In the final Chap. 13, I return to the larger time scales of the first part of this book. While the chapter focusses on the possibility, legitimacy, and sustainability of a

References

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world political community, it also makes an argument about the nature of world-­ historical processes. An ethical-political goal for world history as a whole can only be set from within history; must be fallible; and can only make sense in terms of a particular story or scenario on a particular time scale. Thus conceived, the process leading to an end-state is in many ways more important than the telos itself. Even more fundamentally, every telos is necessarily temporary and transitional in some scale of time. There are no ultimate ends in the world of multiple simultaneously ongoing processes. Independently of how dominant the layer of world statehood becomes within a system of multi-spatial (meta)governance, that layer will require political support, authorisation, and validation in a complex and pluralistic world. By focusing on legitimacy, we can analyse the feasibility of different paths towards global-scale integration, on the one hand, and the potential for conflicts, divisions, and subsequent disintegration, on the other. From this perspective, I discuss normative legitimacy, functional differentiation in complex societies, the civilising process, stages of ethical-political learning, and the potential for disintegration in a world political community. Among other things, I argue that a world political community is unlikely to emerge or be sustainable without a civilising and story-telling process appropriate for the identity of world citizens, involving a global and planetary imaginary constituting some sense of “we”-ness. This is less a matter of formal education than a potential result of the dialectics of institution- and community-building.

References Angell, N. (1913). The great illusion. A study of the relation of military power to national advantage. G.P. Putnam’s Sons. (originally published in 1910). Bhaskar, R. (1993). Dialectic. The pulse of freedom. Verso. Bummel, A. (2021). Towards a planetary polity: The formation of global identity and state structures. In I. Crawford (Ed.), Expanding worldviews: Astrobiology, big history and cosmic perspectives (pp. 325–340). Springer. Chase-Dunn, C. (1990). World-state formation: Historical processes and emergent necessity. Political Geography Quarterly, 9(2), 108–130. Crawford, I. (2021). Who speaks for humanity? The need for a single political voice. In O. Torres et  al. (Eds.), Astrobiology: Science, ethics, and public policy (pp.  313–338). Scrivener Publishing (Wiley). Deudney, D. (2020). Dark skies. Space expansionism, planetary geopolitics & ends of humanity. Oxford University Press. Dickens, P., & Ormrod, J. (2011). Globalization of space. From the global to the galactic. In B. Turner (Ed.), The Routledge international handbook of globalization studies (pp. 531–553). Routledge. Erman, E. (2019). Does global democracy require a world state? Philosophical Papers, 48(1), 123–153. Falk, R. (1975). A study of future worlds. The Free Press. Forsberg, T., & Patomäki, H. (2023). Debating the war in Ukraine. Counterfactual histories and future possibilities. Routledge. Graeber, D., & Wengrow, D. (2021). The dawn of everything. A new history of humanity. Allen Lane (Penguin).

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Hegel, G.  W. F. (2003). The phenomenology of mind. Transl., with an introduction and notes, J.  Baillie. Dover Publications. (translation originally published in 1910, German original in 1807). Held, D. (1995). Democracy and the global order. From the modern state to cosmopolitan governance. Polity Press. Honneth, A. (1995). The struggle for recognition. The moral grammar of social conflicts. Transl. J. Anderson. Polity Press. Mackie, J. (1974). The cement of the universe. Oxford University Press. Mead, G. (1963). Mind, self & society. From the standpoint of a social behaviorist. Ed. with introduction by C. Morris. The University of Chicago Press. (originally published in 1934). Morgenthau, H. (1947). Scientific man vs. power politics. Latimer House. (originally published 1946). Morgenthau, H. (1948). Politics among nations. The struggle for power and peace. Alfred A. Knopfler. Niebuhr, R. (1946). The myth of world government. The Nation, 162, 312–314. Niebuhr, R. (2011). The children of light and the children of darkness. A vindication of democracy and a critique of its traditional defense. With a new introduction by G. Dorrien. The University of Chicago Press. (originally published 1944). Patomäki, H. (2002). After international relations. Critical realism and the (re)construction of world politics. Routledge. Patomäki, H. (2008). The political economy of global security. War, future crises and changes in global governance. Routledge. Patomäki, H. (2018). Disintegrative tendencies in global political economy: Exits and conflicts. Routledge. Patomäki, H. (2022). The three fields of global political economy. Routledge. Rescher, N. (1996). Process metaphysics: An introduction to process philosophy. State University of New York Press. Reves, E. (1947). The anatomy of peace. Penguin. (originally published 1945). Sagan, C., & Ostro, S. (1994). Long-range consequences of interplanetary collisions. Issues in Science and Technology, 10(4), 67–72. Scheuerman, W. (2011). The realist case for a global reform. Polity. Shannon, V. (2005). Wendt’s violation of the constructivist project: Agency and why a world state is not inevitable. European Journal of International Relations, 11(4), 581–587. Sönnichsen, A. (2021). Militarization and securitization of outer space. In K.-U.  Schrogl, C.  Giannopapa, & N.  Antoni (Eds.), A research agenda for space policy (pp.  89–102). Edward Elgar. Wadhams, P. (2012). The Arctic “death spiral”. Scientific American, 307(6), 12. https://doi. org/10.1038/scientificamerican1212-­12 Wendt, A. (1999). Social theory of international politics. Cambridge University Press. Wendt, A. (2003). Why a world state is inevitable. European Journal of International Relations, 9(4), 491–542. Wendt, A. (2005). Agency, teleology and the world state: A reply to Shannon. European Journal of International Relations, 11(4), 589–598. Wendt, A. (2015). Why a world state is democratically necessary. Transcript of a presentation given at Hiram College, posted as a blog at the World Orders Forum, https://www.wgresearch. org/world-­orders-­forum. Wendt, A. (2018). Latest thoughts on the world state project. A blog at the World Orders Forum. https://www.wgresearch.org/world-­orders-­forum. Wilkie, W. (1943). One world. Cassell and Company. Wolter, D. (2006). Common security in outer space and international law. United Nations.

The Transformative Potential of Responding to Climate Change: Towards a Dynamic Global Tax

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Introduction World Scientists’ Warning of a Climate Emergency 2022 (Ripple et  al., 2022, p. 1149) starts with two short sentences: “We are now at ‘code red’ on planet Earth. Humanity is unequivocally facing a climate emergency”. Average global temperatures are 1.2C above the pre-industrial level and in 2021 the global emissions of carbon and other greenhouse gases reached a record level. Exceeding 1.5C of warming risks reaching several tipping points, defined by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (Hoegh-Guldberg et al., 2018, p. 262) as a threshold that, when crossed, “can lead to a significant change in the state of the system, often with an understanding that the change is irreversible”. Even The Economist (2022) has argued that there is no way Earth can now avoid a temperature rise of more than 1.5C. “There is still hope that the overshoot may not be too big, and may be only temporary, but even these consoling possibilities are becoming ever less likely”. Given the openness of the Earth systems, the future remains uncertain, but the problem is that the standard ways of estimating the range of uncertainty may be misleading. James Derbyshire and Jamie Morgan (2022) make a strong case for the precautionary principle when there are asymmetric effects from under-response and when these effects can be irreversible and ampliative. Planetary reflexive self-regulation occurs when knowledge about the way the Earth system functions is applied recursively in interventions, aiming at avoiding unwanted or achieving desired outcomes (cf. Chaps. 6, 7, and 8). These interventions can be transformative in institutional terms to varying degrees. Diplomatic climate change negotiations are not only relatively conservative in ways that will be indicated below but also have a tendency to stall (Frey & Burgess, 2022). Various international organisations and other actors taking for granted the currently prevailing market-reliance and the field of interstate relations advocate “deep societal This chapter has been written with Jamie Morgan and Johan Wahlsten, published here with their permission. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 H. Patomäki, World Statehood, World-Systems Evolution and Global Futures, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-32305-8_11

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transformations”. By this they mean systemic changes from the buildings people live in to the food and energy they consume “towards climate-resilient societies” (e.g. UNDP, n.d.; Eco-Business, n.d.). Others go further and call for mobilisation equivalent to war-footing (see Biermann, 2021; Gills & Morgan, 2021; UNEP, 2021). This call amounts to securitisation. Actors can bring about securitisation by presenting something as an existential threat and by dramatising an issue as having absolute or very strong priority. An existential threat justified exceptional measures, which in the securitisation theory is often associated with de-democratising and militarising effects (Guzzini, 2011; Patomäki, 2015; Wæver, 1995). Even in those contexts where securitisation may be justified, its effects can nonetheless be counterproductive or otherwise problematic in various ways. For example, Jeroen Warner and Ingrid Boas (2019) argue that “the strategic nature of the speech acts and the aim to make them sound highly dramatic, makes audiences sceptical, thereby weakening their success”. Shirley Scott (2012) anticipates that global securitisation of climate change would make the UN Security Council to assume a lead role in the global policy response. Counterproductivity is not desirable and we agree with Scott that a pluralist multilateral process is preferable to Security Council dominance. An apparently radical leftist framing of climate change follows from the claim that capitalism is the pivot of today’s biospheric crisis. Works in this mode often conclude by making vague calls for new politics outside the value system of the circuit of capital or some sort of a planned economy at the scale of nation-state or the EU (e.g. Malm, 2016; Moore, 2016). In some contrast, in their manifesto for “planet politics”, Anthony Burke et al. (2016, p. 500) appeal to our collective learning in a world where “the local, national, and global no longer define our only spaces of action”. Instead of a world organised around a managed anarchy of nation-­ states, the new imaginary of planet politics should be based on the idea of collective human interaction with the biosphere. “Our anthropocentric, state-centric, and capital-centric image of international relations and world politics is fundamentally wrong; it perpetuates the wrong reality, the wrong commitments and purposes, the wrong ‘world-picture’” (p. 504). Furthermore, “Planet Politics must be simultaneously a practice of governance and of subversion, of regulation and resistance, at multiple scales and locales” (p.  507), involving “a coordinated, accountable, and democratic global machinery” (p. 509). So far, the reflexive self-regulation of the planetary system vis-à-vis climate change has tended to assume the forms of locally, regionally, or globally coordinated systems of carbon pricing, accompanied by various attempts at societal transformations towards climate-resilient societies. The critical analysis of this chapter focusses precisely on carbon pricing, which has for decades been a major pillar of policy and a key issue of European and global governance. In the spirit of the manifesto for planet politics, we develop the idea of a global greenhouse tax as simultaneously a practice of governance and of subversion, and of regulation and resistance, and envision a coordinated, accountable, and democratic global machinery that is adequate for such a purpose. A global tax thus conceived implies a qualitatively new

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emergent layer of governance and world statehood, because taxes and fiscal policy have been the exclusive domain of sovereign states. As the 2022 version of the World Bank State and Trends in Carbon Pricing indicates, as of spring 2022 there are almost 70 carbon pricing initiatives in operation and a great number of states are considering implementing carbon pricing (World Bank, 2022, p. 15). Carbon pricing has two main forms. First, carbon taxes, which typically (though not exclusively) intervene in markets, according to logic that adjusts costs to “internalise” an external cost. Second, carbon trading (“cap and trade” or in some contexts “baseline and credit”), which effectively creates a synthetic market by allocating property rights over emissions in the form of permits. The EU Emissions Trading System (EU ETS), for example, functions on the cap and trade principle and speaks to the global policy issues we highlight. While many firms are required to acquire permits for the carbon emissions that their production generates, the EU ETS has encountered numerous problems in addressing the vital issue of “carbon leakage”, which refers to the possibility that because of the cost of permits and regulations within the EU, production may be moved to non-EU countries that have less ambitious emissions rules. To combat this leakage, large corporations that dominate sectors such as steel have continued to receive their initial emissions permits for free under the EU ETS.1 This dynamic exacerbates the many underlying problems of carbon trading systems—not least excess permits at the systemic level and the low prices of these permits. As a result, the EU is now beginning to experiment with taxation. To stress, historically taxation has been confined to sovereign states, also in the EU. In December 2022 the European Parliament, however, agreed on the details of the so-called carbon border adjustment mechanism (CBAM), in essence, a border carbon tax on particular goods imported from outside the EU.2 The idea that the EU should place a carbon price on certain imports from less climate-ambitious countries implies a recognition that not only climate change itself but also the implementation of climate measures are a global problem that concern the planetary system as a whole. Yet, the CBAM is a unilateral attempt to rescale climate measures in terms of taxes. The levy is targeted against outsiders: it can be used to sanction those countries that fail to meet their Paris Agreement commitments or other reasonable climate objectives and firms that try to exploit regulative laxity to increase their “competitiveness”. As cross-border mechanisms such as border adjustment mechanisms and climate clubs are gaining some traction, the example of the EU serves to illustrate also how a regional scale does not ensure structured coherence between the economy and political organisation for rational responses to salient problems. Although

 Phase four of the EU ETS anticipates more than 6 billion free allocations will be made in 2021–2030, using a 54 benchmarks system of eligibility (European Commission, n.d.-a). 2  The agreement consists of imposing CO2 emissions costs on imports of iron and steel, cement, fertilisers, aluminium, and electricity. Companies importing those goods into the EU will be required to buy certificates to cover their embedded CO2 emissions. The scheme is designed to apply the same CO2 cost to overseas firms and domestic EU industries. (Reuters, December 13, 2022). 1

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the need for a carbon border tax stems from global interconnectedness, the CBAM is a one-sided measure and thus speaks to the need for a more broad-based approach to carbon taxes. In particular, some actors may take it as a violation of the principle of free trade. Anticipating this, the European Parliament has proclaimed that the carbon border tax is WTO-compatible and will “not be misused as a tool to enhance protectionism”. Moreover, the aim is to use the received revenues as part of a basket of the EU’s “own revenues” to support the objectives of the European Green Deal (European Parliament, 2021). In the midst of the prevailing disintegrative and protectionist tendencies in the world economy and the related gridlock of global governance (Chap. 7), contestations over the rules and principles of free trade may play a decisive role—ultimately subverting the process and delaying action, despite good intentions of some participants. For example, John Kerry, the first US Special Presidential Envoy for Climate since 2021, told the EU in March 2021 that a carbon border tax adjustment should be considered as a “last resort”, to be adopted only when all other attempts fail (Hook, 2021). Even as a last resort, it remains conceivable that some states will challenge the EU carbon border tax in the name of free trade, to which the EU itself remains committed. Hence, under the current circumstances of global politics and economy, the limited sub-global and unilateral nature of the CBAM can undermine its ultimate objectives. The Paris Agreement is premised on the institution of state sovereignty and is based on voluntary commitments. For some limited international purposes, the EU is functionally equivalent to a sovereign state. Furthermore, the EU’s climate policies occur in a field constituted by free trade, a pervasive objective for market competitiveness, an emissions trading system, and technological changes. The notion of the EU carbon border tax arises from the consequent problematic. The aim is to create a global level playing field in global markets: all states have to play by the same set of rules. The problem is that attempts to impose rules on others tend to result in tit-for-tat responses (cf. The Economist, 2021). Although Democrats have proposed a similar border tax for the USA as well (Friedman, 2021), unilateral actions by the EU and the USA involve the risk of adverse reactions and even trade wars. A more expansive cumulatively inclusive approach able to achieve a global scale is thus called for. In this chapter, we make a case for a planet-political approach to climate change governance based on factual evidence as well as on conceptual and theory-informed claims. We argue first that carbon taxes should be preferred to carbon trading, and second that there is a need for the organisation and coordination of this taxation at a global level. Moreover, there is also a case to be made for a market-disruptive rather than market-conforming approach to carbon taxes (cf. Gills & Morgan, 2020). After this introduction, the rest of the paper proceeds as follows. We first flesh out some of the deficiencies of carbon trading and related approaches by considering the examples of the EU ETS and also other arrangements that involve synthetic markets, such as the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) of the Kyoto climate regime. We then turn briefly to the Paris Agreement’s Article 6, which is the main part of the Agreement dealing with relevant issues. After this, we illustrate some of the most important ways in which carbon taxes can overcome the shortcomings and contradictions of carbon trading. However, too provincial a carbon tax, such as the

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EU’s CBAM, is also fraught with contradictions. Thus, we assert that a global greenhouse gas tax (GGGT) is a rational global Keynesian solution to the aporia. In the final sections of the paper, we illuminate the benefits of the GGGT and discuss how it could be feasibly implemented both technically and—especially—as a global-democratic political organisation.

Characteristic Problems of Carbon Trading In the field of global climate policies, carbon trading continues to be a prevalent approach to carbon pricing and indeed a crucial pillar in attempts to reduce emissions more generally. The crux of the system of emissions trading lies in establishing private property rights over an aspect of the atmosphere. In economic theory, the idea of extending property rights as a solution to environmental problems is associated with Ronald Coase (1960) and discussions of the system, for example, with John Dale and Thomas Crocker. The legal creation of well-defined property rights has been supposed to enable efficient markets and the functioning of contract mechanisms (for critical discussion, see Hepburn, 2007). Even though in the early 2010s difficulties with carbon markets led to some scepticism towards their suitability, the Paris Agreement’s Articles 6.2. and 6.4. contributed to re-establishing carbon markets as an important instrument in meeting mitigation targets. Paralleling the direction set in the Paris Agreement, a number of new regional, national, and subnational carbon markets have been implemented or initiatives aiming for such markets have been established. As a recent World Bank Report indicates, states are moving “in particular” towards emission trading schemes (World Bank, 2021, pp. 60–72). The best-known and most deep-seated example is the EU ETS that covers around 40% of the EU’s greenhouse gas emissions. The European Commission is currently proposing to revise and expand the cap and trade system. Under the system, a cap is set on the total amount of greenhouse gases that can be emitted by participating installations. The permits for emissions can be allocated freely or auctioned and firms or countries can trade emission allowances with one another as required. Also in the EU, auctioning has become increasingly common over time, generating some public resources. This trade takes place within a wider context of the EU’s internal single market and, more generally, a worldwide system of free trade. It is self-­ evident that for the system to be efficient in terms of reducing emissions, the ceiling on the maximum amount of permitted emissions must be aggressive, making permits both a constraint for any individual participant and scarce in general. However, the more aggressive the ceilings, the more the incurred costs will affect the competitiveness of EU firms in the context of international trade and world markets, with both domestic and global implications, placing contradictory pressure on those responsible for setting allocations (for a more detailed analysis of these complexities, see Kennard, 2020; Genovese, 2021). A further problem is that a cap and trade system is an administratively created synthetic market that requires detailed regulations. Setting up caps and emission certificates and their trading system is complicated due to many intricate technical issues (e.g. the proposal needs to

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determine how allowances will be created and distributed), typically entailing high administrative costs (Avi-Yonah & Uhlmann, 2009). In addition, given the effects of uneven economic development, business cycles, and various economic crises, it is difficult to determine the appropriate amount of emissions permits required to induce rapid emissions reductions. While various corrections have occurred since the early 2010s and prices have risen rapidly in the early 2020s, economic slumps and subsequent (if brief) reductions in overall emissions tend to lead to an unanticipated over-supply of permits and declining demand and thus a drop in their prices. In the past, together with price volatility, lax ceilings and overallocation of permits have tended to be a constant problem in trading schemes, not just the EU ETS (McAllister, 2009). It is precisely because the system imposes a fixed overall quota without regard to the cost of attaining that quota that there is uncertainty concerning the exact costs the cap and trade programmes impose on actors; the system lacks cost certainty (Avi-Yonah & Uhlmann, 2009, pp. 37–40). Addressing price volatility—crucial for meaningful mitigation—also requires complex and contentious regulatory administration, especially so, as in the case of the EU ETS, if this occurs after the initial creation of the market. The EU has had to implement several reactive mechanisms (such as removing carbon allowances from the market and creating the Market Stability Reserve (MSR) for unallocated allowances) in an attempt to address the persistent problem of the low prices of emission permits due to their recurrent over-supply (European Commission, n.d.-b). This surplus derives from a number of factors, not least, as mentioned, the tendency for loose emission caps (see Ervine, 2018). “Market stability mechanisms”, similar to those implemented by the EU, “which aim to avoid both major price spikes and significant depressions in the market” are becoming more prominent elements of emissions trading designs (World Bank, 2021, pp. 31–32). After its inception in 2019, the EU’s MSR filled its purpose well, reducing the number of permits and thus contributing to the increase in their prices. However, the very need for such mechanisms is indicative of the underlying tendencies of carbon trading. Furthermore, developments in the EU in 2022 also display how such a stability mechanism can in fact create further adverse incentives and exacerbate the issues of carbon trading such as uncertainty. The EU Commission indicated that it is planning contrary to the MSR’s purpose, and in the form of exceptions, to sell some of the permits accrued with the objective of raising 20€ billion worth of funds for the EU and easing the shift away from Russian energy sources. Already the announcement led to a substantial fall in permit prices and their release to the markets would reduce the cost of emissions even more considerably, thus also making it even less likely that the system substantially accelerates the transition to more sustainable technologies (The Economist, 2021). Moreover, a system of tradable permits entails significant transaction costs to the market actors themselves, especially to small and medium-sized businesses.3 They  We acknowledge that transaction costs are relatively fixed so they appear high especially for small companies, much less so for larger ones. This is reflected in minimum emissions thresholds for being covered in all current ETSs, an arrangement that however implies exemptions. 3

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have to search for traders, engage in negotiations, seek approval for deals, and take insurance (e.g. for an empirical assessment of the transaction costs for German firms under EU ETS, Heindl, 2012). Merely the process of “discovering prices” is often an arduous and resource-intensive task (Robertson, 2007). It is also difficult (especially in sectors with sensitive supply networks) to measure emissions and estimate the numbers of permits for some future duration so as to enable reasonable foresight and planning by economic actors. To reiterate, the likely although not necessary consequence of the combination of factors—uncertainties and concern for competitiveness—is that too many permits will be available and the ceiling on emissions will be too generous. This is what much of the available empirical evidence concerning past developments suggests. For example, Patrick Bayer and Michaël Aklin (2020) estimate that the EU ETS reduced emissions by just 3.8% of total EU-wide emissions between 2008 and 2016 compared to a world without an EU ETS.4 While this is not failure in so far as it is a reduction it is hardly commensurate with the problem of urgent and rapid decarbonisation. As such, so far, the corrective measures taken have not overcome the underlying tendencies. Most current solutions, furthermore, rely heavily on uncertain future technological developments. In particular, carbon trading as a price signalling system relies on strong expectations about incentives for technological change (as do carbon taxes, as we will soon argue). While it is widely acknowledged that the bulk of the research done in laboratory and R & D units is often publicly funded and organised, a key assumption of standard economic theory is that higher prices will generate dynamic incentives for the development and diffusion of less emitting technologies. Despite this assumption, the costs generated by the cap and trade system do not seem to make a difference in terms of inducing technological change.5 While cost cutting and innovation for profits is an essential part of the dynamics of capitalist market economy (this is also part of the concept of real competition developed by a leading heterodox economist Anwar Shaikh, 2016), it is not plausible to assume that a desired rate of particular technological change will automatically result from the relatively low costs imposed by traded permits or distributing permits free in an overly generous system subject to contradictory pressures. A further set of assumptions concern the acceptability and feasibility of new technologies. New technologies may be too risky or incompatible with basic human rights or various social and ecological values. Their side effects or unintended consequences may be more important than their intended effects (for a more detailed discussion, see Morgan & Patomäki, 2021, section 2).

 All the studies analysed by Lilliestam et al. (2021) find that the EU ETS has had no or low effect on short-term emission reductions and no effect on technological change. Surveys of findings tend to find mixed but generally insufficient (in the context of climate emergency) results, see also Green (2021). 5  For a survey of existing research concluding that there is no empirical evidence of the effectiveness of increased carbon prices in promoting technological changes, see Lilliestam et al. (2021). This survey includes also studies on existing carbon tax schemes, including the relatively highlevel carbon taxes in Nordic countries implemented decades ago; we will come back to this point. 4

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 he Clean Development Mechanism and Article 6 of the Paris T Agreement: Global Carbon Markets? In 1997, the Kyoto Protocol established the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM). This is another carbon trading design based on the so-called baseline and credit system instead of a cap and trade one. The mechanism defined in Article 12 of the Protocol made it possible for the richest industrialised countries to offset their emissions against emissions-reducing projects elsewhere (among non-Annex 1 parties). The idea derived from standard economic theory was that the CDM allows industrialised countries to buy Certified Emission Reduction units and to invest in emission reductions where it is cheapest globally. In this sense, it is a market-based mechanism. As is well known, some of the major polluters such as the USA and China did not join the Kyoto Protocol and thus the market concerned mostly European countries.6 After the initial “emergence” phase, in the mid-2000s there developed a vast demand for the units (Michaelowa et al., 2019b, pp. 4–5). Yet, soon the system was troubled by low prices and, not least due to the effect of the Euro crisis, the market essentially collapsed in 2012 as prices of the mechanism’s carbon credits and thus the number of new emissions-reducing projects plummeted (Michaelowa et  al., 2019b, pp. 9–12). What is more, evidence indicates that a great number of the emissions reductions accounted for by the CDM would have occurred also without the mechanism, this is to say—in the jargon of the field—that the reductions were not “additional” (Cames et al., 2016; Newell et al., 2013). The mechanism also failed to fulfil much of its promise of providing sustainable development gains to the Global South. Rather, several of the projects carried out under the CDM were hit by various corruption scandals and accusations of human rights violations (Newell, 2015). As a comprehensive review (Michaelowa et al., 2019b) of the literature on the fortunes of the CDM between the 1990s and 2010s showcases, the Kyoto regime’s market mechanism was faced with continuous difficulties, those mentioned above and others. As the first attempt for a global carbon market mechanism, it provided an initial experience of the many challenges that tend to be part of such schemes. Some of the problems may have been either specific to, or at least more significant in, the contexts of weak institutions. Moreover, during the past decade there have been attempts to respond to various perceived problems in terms of institutional improvements. Yet, the question remains whether carbon trading in any form is a good instrument to tackle climate change. Through Article 6, the Paris Agreement continues to be committed to carbon trading on a global scale. However, for several years now the precise content of the policy mechanisms that build on Article 6 has been a central and a highly contested  To be clear, the USA did not ratify the first round of Kyoto (which ran to 2012) nor the second (extending activity to 2020) and so did not acquire formal commitments. It did, however, remain a participant in the COP process and continued to work on international responses such as the 2007 Washington Declaration, which favoured a global carbon trading system including developing countries. 6

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issue at international climate negotiations. After years of arduous negotiations, Parties to the Agreement finally found a compromise at COP26  in Glasgow in November 2021. The key disagreements have had to do with the Article’s subsections paragraphs 2 and 4. The former allows a country to sell any extra emissions reductions it generates to another party through bilateral agreements and the purpose of the latter is to create a new global carbon market. While the global carbon offsetting system under the Paris Agreement of course differs greatly from not only the cap and trade system of the EU ETS but also the CDM of the Kyoto regime, the many uncertainties and difficulties outlined above also resonate with Article 6 and the intended new global carbon market. Particularly the complicated technicalities of such market mechanisms are omnipresent in the intricate negotiations revolving around the form and content of the Article—which many have continuously feared could sabotage the whole Paris Agreement if the rules are not composed appropriately. As a group of researchers pointed out on the eve of COP25 in Madrid, “if not robustly designed and implemented … carbon markets could lead to greater emissions and higher costs and thus undermine the agreement” (Schneider et al., 2019, p. 181). To further quote one of the researchers of this group, Lambert Schneider (2021): “as with a bathtub, one large hole can be sufficient to drain the whole thing”. However, precisely the strenuous and complex exercise of assembling artificial markets and the serious possibility for various loopholes that thwart intended objectives make such a robust design difficult. Tracking the emission reduction transactions between actors requires complex and common international registry, monitoring, reporting, and review systems and mechanisms. However, here too it is not only the inter- and supranational governance and oversight of international transfers that is at stake. Carbon offset projects require meticulous monitoring on the ground to guarantee they contribute to emissions mitigation and that the mitigation is “additional” (for one proposal on how to guarantee this, see Michaelowa et  al., 2019a). At least under the CDM, monitoring seems to have often led to high costs for offset projects, underlining the cost inefficiencies and uncertainties that tend to be part of carbon markets and it is not clear if the Paris Agreement can overcome these characteristic problems (Shishlov & Bellassen, 2016). A difficult question in the Article 6 negotiations has involved the accounting methods applied to the emissions reductions created through international carbon trading. While much of the discord has been political, technical complexities abound. For example, a vital question was how to ensure that the so-called double counting does not occur. Double counting refers to the act of counting emissions reductions twice towards the climate mitigation targets of both the seller and the buyer of the allowances. The issue has been aggravated by the fact that Parties have relatively heterogeneous national commitments in both metrical and temporal terms. This makes accounting for reductions and transactions in a manner that guarantees that climate targets are met a demanding task (Lo Re & Vaidyula, 2019). The negotiators at Glasgow were able to resolve many of the possible threats related to accounting and agree on a set of rules many observers consider relatively robust (Depledge et al., 2022, pp. 153–154).

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Concerns, however, remain. For instance, the agreed rules allow for Parties with single-year NDC targets to choose between two approaches on how to account for their “Internationally Transferred Mitigation Outcomes”. As such, Parties may have incentives “to strategically pick for each NDC implementation period the accounting approach which requires less effort to achieve a given NDC target”—as Schneider and his colleague Anne Siemons (2022) underline, and this fact may threaten the environmental integrity of the carbon market. This issue hence speaks not only to the technical complexities but also to the troublesome ethical-political incentives profit-oriented carbon trading tends to have, which we will discuss below as part of the transitional argument in favour of carbon taxes.

An Alternative to Carbon Trading: A Greenhouse Gas Tax Because of concerns over firm- and state-level competitiveness and uncertainties related to business cycles and other changes, carbon trading gravitates toward, from a climate perspective, inappropriately generous ceilings, and hence also involves a tendency for an over-supply of emission permits that drive down carbon prices, the actual manifestation of which depends on manifold conditions in open systems. Moreover, the approach generates excessive administrative and other costs and relies on unwarranted optimism about markets and induced technological change. The overall result seems to be that the balance sheet of carbon trading is hardly positive, as it has not led to substantial reductions in carbon emissions—or at least not to the extent the climate emergency necessitates. There has been relatively little progress in emissions reduction in the past decade. Emissions have continued to rise to record levels indicating a widening gap between what has and is occurring, and what is required (Christensen & Olhoff, 2019; IEA, 2022). A carbon tax can be seen as an alternative to carbon trading. Firstly, although we know that real-world carbon tax schemes have exemptions too, there are reasons to believe that in terms of scope and, possibly, dynamic effects, a tax can be more efficient than a trading system. A key advantage is that taxes have broad, generic effects, even though it is true that past tax rates have been too low and rates too uncertain for taxes to be as effective as they might otherwise be (Haites, 2018, p.  961).7 A carbon tax can readily extend to all carbon-based fuel consumption, including gasoline, home heating oil, and aviation fuels. The scope of tax on carbon and sources of other greenhouse gases is thus extensive and can comprehensively cover different sources of emissions (about the impact of power relations on exemptions, etc., see below). A further advantage of the tax is that it offers more certainty and thus can be a permanent incentive to reduce emissions to the extent that it creates a well-understood significant cost. As we have seen, the dynamic effects inferred for carbon trading have not been forthcoming due in part to uncertainty. The prices have been volatile and at times excessively low and this can make the purchase of permits more appealing than other measures. Although the EU ETS  We will discuss the issue of power relations and their effects below.

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prices have in the early 2020s increased rapidly and although recent implementation of ETSs in some regions such as California, Québec, and South Korea indicates institutional learning from EU ETS (Narassimhan et al., 2018), it nonetheless seems that a tax can more readily be set at a stable and preferably high level to induce constant dynamic effects, including incentives for technological dynamism. Furthermore, in comparison with carbon trading with its high administrative costs and technical difficulties, a tax system can be specified in a relatively concise legal text. Even more importantly, there are vital ethical-political and political-­ economic reasons to favour a tax, and many of these have empirically observable causal consequences. Firstly, like other types of financial instruments, EU allowances can be bought and sold for purposes directly relating to business activities and for purposes of investment and speculation. The EU ETS also includes trade with various financial derivatives. As with speculative finance more generally, this encourages a search for quick profits and reinforces short-term temporal horizons, which tend to generate volatility. The number of investment firms and funds holding ETS allowances futures has increased since the late 2010s. In 2020–22 there was a price hike in ETS allowances. Several European states and parties have seen a significant correlation between increasing price levels and the increased presence of non-incumbents in the market (e.g., the non-paper of the government of Spain, Spanish Annex, 2021). Many economists and market analysts are sceptical about these claims (for analytical discussions on the role of speculation in this price hike, see, e.g., Eich, 2022; Taylor, 2022). While volatility is a concern, what also matters is that in secondary markets for pollution permits, ecological sustainability appears as a subordinate concern after money-making and the accumulation of profits. Given this orientation, it is arguably no wonder that profit-oriented carbon trading has been liable to manipulation leading to, in worst cases, instances of outright corruption. Although corruption affects some countries and regions more than others, also the EU ETS has been subject to problems in this regard. Corruption has, for example, enabled and facilitated the re-sale and misreporting of used carbon offsets, sophisticated computer hacking schemes for theft from national carbon emission registries, and value-added tax fraud. Apart from conventional forms of corruption, “corruption in this sector has also taken more original forms, such as the strategic exploitation of ‘bad science’ and scientific uncertainties for profit, the manipulation of GHG emissions market prices, and anti-systemic speculation” (UNEP, 2013, p. 2). While the precise forms change, the tendency seems generic and inherent to the aim of profit-making. We maintain that norms matter for meanings and actions and mere economic incentives are often counterproductive (this point is based also on social-ontological considerations and is therefore not reducible to the domains of the actual and empirical).8 For example, as argued by Michael Sandel (2012, pp. 72–6), systems  While we cannot develop the argument in this context, the domain of the real is larger than the domain of actual which is itself larger than the domain of empirical (Dr > Da > De). The actual is only a part of the real world, which also consists of non-actualised possibilities and unexercised powers of the already existing structures and mechanisms that are transfactually efficacious in 8

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that involve carbon trading tend to undermine the sense of shared sacrifice necessary for future global cooperation on the environment, while also encouraging an instrumental attitude towards nature. As an example, consider once more the negotiations around the Paris Agreement’s Article 6. A key dispute has related to the carry-over of the unspent carbon credits created under the CDM to be used under the new climate regime. Some countries, especially Brazil and India—both host to a great number of projects and in possession of much of the credits—pushed for such a transition so as to sell the old credits. In fact, they were successful in their efforts, even if not all credits were carried over. All the same, these credits undermine mitigation efforts since they embody reductions made years ago (Newell & Taylor, 2020). Moreover, as we have seen, the “additionality” of these reductions was dubious in the first place. What is more, there were long-standing fears that if the CDM credits would be allowed a complete carry-over to the new system, this would lead to an over-supply of credits in the new global carbon market and thus a deflation in prices and an impairment of the whole mechanism by reducing supply-­ side incentives (Lo Re & Vaidyula, 2019). Since the amount of CDM credits that are allowed a transition to the new system was heavily restricted, these fears will not necessarily materialise. At least a partial motive for those arguing for carry-over seems to be the notional profits from the unspent credits. Brazil, for example, has suggested that to tackle the drop in prices induced by the influx of carbon credits due to the carry-over, a “price stabilisation mechanism” of guaranteed prices for CDM credits could be created (Timperley, 2019). Such motives should be understood as a typical institutional feature of carbon markets. Institutional arrangements tend to reinforce, reshape, or undermine prevailing understandings and discourses, which in turn affect trust and expectations among actors and condition possibilities for realising the purpose of institutions (Rothstein, 1998, pp. 72, 100–104, 165; for different orders of purposes, including planetary, see Chap. 7). Market institutions that encourage self-regarding behaviour or profit-seeking may undermine the purpose of protecting the stability of Earth’s climate. A different attitude is now required—albeit not a new one: regard for nature, a long temporal horizon, and a moral sense of shared sacrifice. These facets are essential for achieving the purposes of an effective global climate change regime. As carbon trading encourages self-regarding short-termism, it contradicts the values and norms that are required for tackling climate change. In particular, markets enable the outsourcing of one’s moral obligation to reduce excessive greenhouse gas emissions. If the well-off can pay themselves out of this obligation and thus buy the right to pollute legally, the whole point of climate governance is compromised. It reinforces a counterproductive attitude—that nature is a dumping ground for the wealthy (Sandel, 2012, pp. 75–6). Taxes, on the other hand, involve a moral obligation to reduce excessive greenhouse gas emissions and can encourage feelings of common shared sacrifice, as indicated, for example, by higher carbon tax elasticity than price elasticity (of these elasticities, see, e.g., Lawley & Thivierge, 2018). open systems. Moreover, pre-existing structure may become more dominant and new structures may emerge (Bhaskar, 2008, pp. 2–4).

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Having said this, empirical evidence about some of the effects of existing carbon taxes, too, is ambiguous. This is especially the case with the incentives for technological dynamism. Studies on the Nordic and British Columbian carbon taxes indicate some minor or modest effects on emissions through operational shifts, reductions in transport, and the public use of the carbon tax revenues (rather than the price mechanism). While there is evidence for higher consumer response to carbon taxes than to other price developments, there is little to no ex post evidence of dynamic long-term technological effects (Lilliestam et al., 2021, p. 12). Arguably, the issue here is more one of the context of the tax, its level, and communication regarding its meaning and necessity—quite different issues than those confronted by carbon trading. In particular, there is a case to be made for a more market-disruptive approach to carbon taxes (as a subversive aspect of planet politics), one that may sit awkwardly with the standard market-conforming approach to internalising an externality. This approach deviates from the logic that an equilibrium point can be identified where the price includes all external costs. While in standard economic theory external costs are assessed, priced, and internalised in order to produce efficient outcomes, in reality calculating and apportioning costs is difficult and estimates of costs and implementations tend to be low. This leads to limited impacts in so far as tax becomes a signal that one is paying some share while continuing to engage in an activity rather than a fundamental inducement to redirect out of it. Thus, the idea of market-disruptive approach is not to make markets function optimally, but to reduce certain kinds of market activities and find alternatives to them. The overall aim is to galvanise change rather than merely assuming it is induced as a smooth process through incentives and to push the world economic system to transition or transform. Moreover, the market-disruptive approach can also take into account the role of power relations. As ecological economists also note, historically the application of taxes often fails to account for how and in what sense some cost became “external”, i.e. corporations influenced regulation and the law and/or engaged in practices that transferred responsibility in the first place (Spash, 2002). This also explains many exemptions in the existing tax schemes. What matters are power relations rather than merely abstract market transactions. Recognition of this (the political economy of taxes) undermines the standard usage of the concept of efficiency in economics and suggests the need for a more pragmatic climate emergency-focussed sense of “effective” over “model efficiency”. As classic ecological economic works on the problem note, there are no absolute “true” prices in a market system, only relative prices. Hence, it is incoherent to suggest that a tax corrects an externality by creating a true price merely because it currently facilitates “clearing a market”. Once real situations of corporate power are recognised, the intention ought to be to transform markets and power relations with a given goal in mind—i.e., rapid transition. In the context of climate emergency, in turn, this speaks to the need for a more aggressive approach to carbon taxes that potentially overweight rather than underweight costs. However, as we shall see, this too needs some further consideration when thinking about distributional effects—both domestic and global. In any case, given the need for drastic action to achieve climate stabilisation, this debate cannot continue to be

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deferred. Planet politics necessarily involve politics in different senses and on different scales. In this context, it is important to recognise that while taxes can be set aggressively they need not be punitive for the vulnerable. An uncompensated carbon tax (rise) would disproportionately affect lower-income households and is thus likely to increase poverty and inequalities, which can generate a political backlash. However, a tax system can be designed to recredit, compensate, and redistribute, and this may be critical for the feasibility and viability of the system—since this can render taxation consistent with different senses of justice (about the contested nature of justice, Patomäki, 2006). Compensatory measures can include increases in social welfare benefits and the state pension. For example, a study concludes that in Ireland in the early 2020s, “poverty can in fact be reduced and the lowest-income fifth of households left better-off using a third of revenues from a carbon tax rise on targeted increases in welfare payments” (O’Malley et  al., 2020, p. vii). However, politics concerns ideas about best arrangements and states’ circumstances, position in the world economy, and capacities differ, and thus a one-size-fits-all approach would not work. A feasible possibility is that the participating states make commitments and outline plans about how to use their national share of revenues—or a substantial part of them—for such compensations. Finally, it should also be noted that a tax regime can cover the full range of relevant greenhouse gases such as methane, nitrous oxide, chlorofluorocarbons, and hydrofluorocarbons. Moreover, while the purpose of greenhouse gas taxes is to influence and shape activities, it is critically important that they also generate revenues that can be used for environmental purposes and other common goods, including through publicly organised research, development, and investments.

The Case for a Global Keynesian Greenhouse Gas Tax To reiterate, it is a key principle of the current international system that taxation is linked exclusively with state sovereignty. Taxes helped to create and form modern legally sovereign states. The theory and practice of fiscal sovereignty emerged in Europe in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, elsewhere later, and were transformed in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. They are thus relatively recent and continuously evolving inventions, and also for that reason open to changes (Cameron, 2008; cf. Patomäki, 2022, ch 5). In the early twenty-first century, states’ capacity to tax effectively varies greatly (van Apeldoorn, 2018) and in the neoliberal era state sovereignty has been commercialised especially through creating tax havens (Palan, 2002). Fiscal sovereignty is fluid and yet, although several global taxes have been proposed over the recent decades for the sake of tax justice and many other reasons, deep scepticism about the near-future prospects for such taxes prevails. Aware of the political difficulties, in this section we make a case for a novel global approach to taxing carbon and other sources of the greenhouse effect, which accords with the processual account of world statehood. The starting point is that

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climate change is an acute problem requiring global-scale responses. The EU, for example, accounts for considerably less than 1/10th of the world’s carbon dioxide emissions. Because of the issue of carbon leakage, a greenhouse gas tax only within the EU would make an EU carbon border levy even more necessary than the EU ETS and other prevailing measures. The problem is potentially more serious than actual developments may indicate. Many studies have concluded that the leakage rates are in the range of 5–20% (e.g., Bird, 2015), but future leakage depends on the carbon price and various contingent developments. We also know that there has been a major transfer of produced emissions from wealthy countries to China, while the latter has increased its global share of the problem also for other reasons, not least because economic growth continues to be coupled with the rise of emissions (Smith, 2020). A carbon border levy seems necessary, but as indicated in the introduction, a key difficulty is that a levy can be seen as protectionist and, as such, challenged even if the WTO takes a positive stance towards it—and challenge is even more likely, the higher the levy is. This is a key reason why restriction to the statist or regional spatial scale is insufficient for expanding the temporal horizon of policy in a manner that would be consistent with tackling climate change—that is, the capacity to take effective action to stabilise Earth’s climate for decades and centuries to come. A shift towards a more globalist and planetary framework can help to overcome the aporia that under the prevailing assumptions appears unsurpassable. This shift is as ambitious as it is necessary, and there is tentative evidence that it may also be feasible. This kind of shift is evident, for example, in the recent G7 and G20 deal on global corporate tax, which aims to put an end to tax havens and harmful tax competition (e.g., Islam, 2021). There is also evidence that citizens can lend their support to a global carbon or greenhouse gas tax, although this depends on its design (Carattini et al., 2019). We suggest a “global Keynesian” approach for future development. From a (post-)Keynesian perspective, unadulterated price signalling is unsuitable to organise major transformations of the economy for reasons that include uncertainty, problems of coordination, and increasing returns. Rather than trying to correct prices in relation to an externality, the focus is on investments and achieving changes (Mason, 2022). Moreover, the holistic perspective of global Keynesian theory allows one to see economic developments from the standpoint of all actors and countries at once. The conditions of action form a whole in which the various parts are dependent on each other. Applying this perspective methodically is the basis of global Keynesianism. In the twenty-first century, the main challenge is to move beyond the self-generated “imperative” of economic growth and achieve social and ecological sustainability. While historically Keynes is associated with stabilising capitalism through domestic aggregate demand management for the purposes of continual growth,9 there is no reason why at a global level an adaption of Keynes need be  Effective aggregate demand can be defined in relation to continuously changing real production potential. Allied with modern science and engineering, capitalist market society constantly creates new powers of human knowledge and work, including facilities formed by real fixed investments 9

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considered incompatible with a steady-state approach within planetary boundary limits—though whether this would be capitalism as we know it is an additional area of discussion (Herr, 2022; Spash, 2002). The term “global Keynesianism” entered the literature in the early 1980s, mainly used by critics of the prior Brandt Report but was then adopted by advocates of the approach (Mead, 1989; for an overview of the viewpoints of both critics and supporters, see Strange, 1981). The Brandt Commission developed the idea of world civilisation and proposed a new international and global economic system. Presciently a key theme of the Report concerns the urgency of transition away from fossil fuels and to renewable sources of energy. Fossil fuels are limited, and their emissions can “produce climatic change with potentially catastrophic consequences”. The basic principle is that “the biosphere is our common heritage and must be preserved by cooperation”. Therefore, the Report advises that “all nations have to cooperate more urgently in international management of the atmosphere and other global commons” (Independent Commission on International Development Issues, 1980, pp.  73, 114, 283–84). Broadly conceived, the point is not only to facilitate a transition to post-fossil fuel economy but, more generally, also to shape the direction, composition, distribution, and speed of economic change (including possible degrowth) towards more sustainable paths (including in terms of reducing emissions of all greenhouse gases). For this, strong public policies and new kinds of global institutions are required. From a global Keynesian perspective, it seems possible to address the ambiguities of the EU carbon border levy and similar unilateral measures. Building a global tax system is a process. We recognise that in this process “compromises between efficiency and acceptability for various rates and revenue uses” are necessary (Carattini et al., 2019, p. 291). The new system will inevitably be a fusion of multiple understandings and interests. The processual approach enables new possibilities, however. A border levy becomes defendable if it is part of an increasingly inclusive global system, and if that system is widely seen as vital for the future of the life systems on Earth. A key conceptual and political innovation is the idea that the process of establishing a global tax can be started by a coalition of willing states with the support of global civil society movements and organisations. This is similar to some arguments for a “climate club” (for a cautious review of various climate club proposals, see Falkner et al., 2022) but more dynamic and based on a market-­ disruptive approach. An initial say twenty states, including the EU or parts of it, would be sufficient for establishing a tax organisation. The aim would be to increase the number rapidly over time. If all countries applying the global tax imposed countervailing duties or levies on imports from countries outside the tax regime, and given the moral and political pressure, it seems plausible to assume that over time— under the changing circumstances—other countries would find it favourable to opt and by new ways of utilizing external sources of energy. The planning horizon for investments is often protracted. Without mechanisms to ensure a sufficiently high level of effective demand for the goods and services produced, these developments will result in excess capacity and unemployment.

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in and, again, there is scope for different ways to adjust or coordinate the tax. The scheme is thus dynamic: the levy serves as an incentive to join the system and adopt greenhouse gas taxes within a common global framework, as specified in a constitutive treaty. While establishing a global climate tax is a political problem, it is also a matter of (climate) justice. Taxes, and specifically global taxes, can generate revenues for purposes of planetary common good such as climate stability. Furthermore, a global tax approach for carbon could provide motives for technology transfer from richer to poorer nations, achieving what the CDM did not. These important possibilities raise issues of justice. A crucial problem is that the world economy is characterised by uneven geo-economic developments. Historical paths of different countries and parts of the world have been and are diverse, and those historically most responsible for the emissions tend to be different from those facing the most severe consequences. In addition, there is also the general issue of colonial and imperial past (O’Hara, 2009). Many poor people especially in the developing countries are vulnerable to rises in energy prices. The call for distributive justice can be met in different ways.10 For example, the price of carbon (and other sources of greenhouse gases) could vary and be determined through a weighting system. Raphaël Boroumand et al. (2022) suggest the use of Human Development Index (HDI) as a basis of benchmark prices. If a country emits more CO2 than the amount allocated according to its HDI level, it will have to pay a higher price than the established reference price, and vice versa.11 Chris Bataille et  al. (2018) recommend that carbon price levels should be tailored to a country’s income level and the quality of its institutions.12 Different prices in different countries require further consideration regarding the problem of carbon leakage and in terms of trade-offs between simplicity, certainty, complexity, and justice. It is probably reasonable to conceive the deviation from the ideal of a uniform carbon price on the path to a global carbon price as temporary, but the period of transition would have to be very long, since one has to take into consideration what causes emissions—the planet may not distinguish between sources, but from an

 Tahseen Jafry (2020) covers a number of issues, while Henry Shue (2014) is more systematic. There are a number of competing ways of claiming what is just/unjust in the context of global climate change: those that focus on inequalities between the North and South divide in international political economy, those that focus on procedural justice in global climate change policy, and those that look to distributive and re-distributive justice regarding the impact of climate change for future generations, to name but a few. On the metaphorical constitution and models and ideologies of justice, see Patomäki (2006). 11  A further point of Chris Bataille et al. (2018, p. 649) is worth stressing, namely that carbon price may matter little in many contexts of global south where “price signals may be swamped in a myriad of contradictory information and incentives in the presence of incomplete markets, informal exchanges, lack of regulatory enforcement, instability of institutions and fast-evolving infrastructures affecting access to information and foresight stability”. 12  Cf. the IMF proposal to establish an international carbon price floor among large emitters and allow for flexibility in carbon price and other measures even among that group (Parry et al., 2021). 10

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ethical-­political point of view there is a difference between, say, emissions from subsistence farming and jet skiing.13 Global taxes and funds could be vital for creating the resources needed for tackling the causes and consequences of climate change and for global sustainable development. The auctioning of emission allowances generates some revenues (in 2019, the generated total revenues of the EU ETS were €14 billion, see European Commission, n.d.-c), but the revenues from taxes can be many times higher. The funds now available to, say, the UN system are minuscule (the UN budget approved for 2020 was a mere $3 billion, see UN News, 2019) and have no effect on the overall developments of the world economy. The revenues of a global tax could be much more substantial and are likely to involve real potential for steering and regulating economic activities across the planet for the common good, including in terms of public investment programmes. Funds are also needed for the alleviation of the consequences of climate change. We argue for a hybrid solution mediating between domestic use of tax revenues (to give further incentives for states to join) and revenue sharing (to address the causes of climate change and mitigate its consequences on a global scale). The allocation of revenues re-raises the question of distributive justice. Assuming that those with a long industrial history should bear the main burden of fighting global warming, a promising possibility is to use a weighting system in determining contributions to a global fund. Senses of justice differ, the share of Europe and the USA in global emissions is declining, and compromises are necessary, so the precise shares must be open to negotiation. Yet, the direction required by distributive justice is clear: the bulk of contributions to the global fund should come from those who have historically benefitted most from the economic activities that have produced the problem of climate change. For example, the OECD countries could pay some 70% or 80% of GGGT revenues to the global fund, while the least developed countries could keep up to 90% of the revenues for their own use, low middle-income countries 70%, middle-income countries 60%, and high middle-income countries perhaps 40% or 50%. A strictly uniform approach to global tax would treat everyone similarly, but some people are more vulnerable and the positions of countries differ. The denial of historical differences has been at the heart of the deadlock in negotiations at the various climate summits—another instance of the gridlock discussed in Chap. 7 (Hale et al., 2013; Hale & Held, 2017). Background issues of justice, development, and distributions have dogged both the Kyoto Protocol and the Paris Agreement (see e.g., McGinn & Isenhour, 2021; cf. Scobie, 2021, pp.  277–80, who find that the preambles of environmental treaties including Paris 2015 fail to recognise power imbalances and are mostly silent on salient justice issues). Indeed, while the core meaning of justice may be “similar treatment for similar cases” and some form of equality in general, there are various ways to frame the concept and understand its  It should also be immediately obvious here that the focus of carbon pricing has been carbon dioxide rather than the full range of greenhouse gases so there is need to consider on what terms a system deals with different gases. 13

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precise substance. Above we mentioned the necessity of compromise and, in that light, discussed the interrelated issues of price formation and contributions to the global fund. Another key consideration concerns procedural justice. The recognition of the moderately relativist nature of sentiments of justice, and thus of the wide scope of legitimate disagreements, prompts a quest not only to facilitate dialogue about different understandings of justice but, most importantly, also to organise common global institutions in a democratic manner. Without free speech, adequate public spaces for critical dialogue, and everybody’s equal access to collective will formation, any community may be led astray (Patomäki, 2006). In this regard, Extinction Rebellion, for example, already advocates for domestic Citizen’s Assembly on climate and ecological justice. Still, such a line of argument raises complex new issues. There is no existing international organisation that would match the membership and aspirations of those setting up a GGGT or provide the needed functions. This suggests that instead of giving the task of setting up a Global Greenhouse Gas Tax (GGGT) to an existing international organisation, a coalition of the willing should establish a new democratic organisation. What, then, should the organising principles of the GGGT organisation (GGGTO) be especially in terms of legitimacy? An adequate answer must recognise social complexity and uncertainty and involve experimental problem-solving (see Fladvad, 2021). There are many possible ways to combine different understandings and principles of democratic legitimacy: equality of states, representation of people, and active civil society participation. These can be innovatively blended in a two-pillar system to gain legitimacy from different points of view. For example, all states are invited to participate and states’ votes could vary from one to three depending on their population. The Council of Ministers could follow qualified majority decisionmaking with secret ballots. The second pillar would consist of a representative and participatory system, which is endowed with real powers such as motions, veto rights, and budgetary rights. The pillar could consist of an assembly of, say, 600 seats, 350–400 representing national parliaments weighted roughly (with only a few categories) on the population of these countries, and 200–250 representatives of global civil society covering a range of actors from NGOs and trade unions to various worldwide associations. This kind of system would encourage all states to join the organisation and their governments to participate fully in its Council of Ministers independently of their political system. The second pillar of the GGGTO, for its part, would give full rights of representation to national parliamentarians elected in free and fair multi-party elections and representatives of global civil society. It is possible to verify the spontaneity of civil society actors by a combination of a screening process and lottery, thus putting some ancient Greek procedures to work in a new context. Again, deliberation, negotiations, and compromises will be necessary. The political process of establishing the GGGTO is likely to require further experimentation with possible institutional arrangements until a viable but also rationally justifiable solution is found.

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Conclusions The market-conforming and state-centric approaches that have dominated so far have proven ineffective and in some cases actively counterproductive in the face of the climate emergency and requirements of adequate planet politics. We now require something more fundamental, if not entirely original, that can address a planetary problem globally and allow for more aggressive yet not necessarily punitive strategies. We have argued in this chapter that there is an alternative: a global Keynesian GGGT established by a coalition of the willing. A more market-disruptive approach may galvanise action and open up space for further development of global public policy. Our preliminary proposal is to establish a new, democratically organised yet inclusive global organisation. Moreover, we have argued that building a global tax system is a process. From this perspective, a border levy can be defendable as a part of an increasingly inclusive global system—especially if that system is widely seen as vital for the future of life systems on Earth. In principle, there is thus a strong case for introducing a global tax via the diplomatic systems and global summits such as the UNFCCC Conference of the Parties (COP). However, the November 2022 COP held in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt, has been widely seen as yet another failure. Given the dynamics of the COP, it seems unlikely that a GGGT would initially be adopted universally via this forum. It may, therefore, be more effective if a government, supported by the global climate movement, takes the initiative and invites a meeting of a potential coalition of the willing to establish a new global regime. As Peter Newell recently argued, there is a great need to undo the concentration of power that has underpinned unsustainable trends in energy systems (Newell, 2021). As such, a GGGT might play a role in “just transitions” that bring together different participants at various scales. Finally, we should note that taxation as an incentive mechanism and regulation, in order to suppress some activities and expedite social redesign, are best seen as complementary. It is now widely recognised that massive public investment is required to facilitate a process of transition towards a sustainable world industrial system, compatible with planetary boundaries, including the natural carbon cycle. Clearly, states participating in a GGGT may determine the emission prices differently and retain a part of the revenues in accordance with their position in the world economy and agreements on justice. A democratically controlled global fund, however, could be seen as the beginning of domestic economic policy on a global scale, an emergent element of world statehood. Thus, it would be a step towards a different kind of globalisation, one built around rational and deliberative responses to a finite world, rather than breakneck growth, wanton destruction, and extraction. A global tax administered by a global body may help to generate the means for public investments on a global scale. As such, future historians may look back on it as a step in “the long march of mankind toward its unity and better control of its own fate” (Triffin, 1968, p. 179).

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European Parliament. (2021, March 10). MEPs: ‘Put a carbon price on certain EU imports to raise global climate ambition’. EU Press Room. Retrieved July 28, 2022, from https://www.europarl.europa.eu/news/en/press-­r oom/20210304IPR99208/meps-­p uta-­carbon-­price-­on-­certain-­eu-­imports-­to-­raise-­global-­climate-­ambition. Falkner, R., Nasiritousi, N., & Reischl, G. (2022). Climate clubs: Politically feasible and desirable? Climate Policy, 22(4), 480–487. Fladvad, B. (2021). Rethinking democracy in times of crises: Towards a pragmatist approach to the geographies of emerging publics. Social Science Information, 60(2), 230–252. Frey, U. & Burgess, J. (2022). Why do climate change negotiations stall? Scientific evidence and solutions for some structural problems. Global Discourse (published online ahead of print 2022). Retrieved December 20, 2022, from https://bristoluniversitypressdigital. com/view/journals/gd/aop/article-­10.1332-­204378921X16431423735159/article-­10.1332204378921X16431423735159.xml. Friedman, F. (2021, July 19). Democrats propose a border tax based on countries’ greenhouse gas emissions. Senators introduced a plan on Monday to tax iron, steel and other imports from countries without ambitious climate laws. New York Times. Retrieved July 28, 2022, from https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/19/climate/democrats-­border-­carbon-­tax.html. Genovese, F. (2021). Market responses to global governance: International climate cooperation and Europe's carbon trading. Business and Politics, 23(1), 91–123. Gills, B., & Morgan, J. (2020). Global climate emergency: After COP24, climate science, urgency, and the threat to humanity. Globalizations, 17(6), 885–902. Gills, B., & Morgan, J. (2021). Postscript, an end to the war on nature: COP in or COP out? Globalizations, 18(7), 1311–1322. Green, J.  F. (2021). Does carbon pricing reduce emissions? A review of ex-post analyses. Environmental Research Letters, 16(4), 043004. Guzzini, S. (2011). Securitization as a causal mechanism. Security Dialogue, 42(4–5), 329–341. Haites, E. (2018). Carbon taxes and greenhouse gas emissions trading systems: What have we learned? Climate Policy, 18(8), 955–966. Hale, T., & Held, D. (Eds.). (2017). Beyond gridlock. Polity. Hale, T., Held, D., & Young, K. (2013). Gridlock: Why global cooperation is failing when we need it most. Polity. Heindl, P. (2012). Transaction costs and tradable permits: Empirical evidence from the EU emissions trading scheme (ZEW Discussion Paper No. 12-021). Zentrum für Europäische Wirtschaftforschung GmbH. Hepburn, C. (2007). Carbon trading: A review of the Kyoto mechanisms. Annual Review of Environment and Resources, 32(1), 375–393. Herr, H. (2022). Transformation of capitalism to enforce ecologically sustainable GDP growth: Lessons from Keynes and Schumpeter. European Journal of Economics and Economic Policies: Intervention, 19(1), 159–173. Hoegh-Guldberg, O., D.  Jacob, M.  Taylor, M.  Bindi, S.  Brown, I.  Camilloni, A.  Diedhiou, R. Djalante, K.L. Ebi, F. Engelbrecht, J. Guiot, Y. Hijioka, S. Mehrotra, A. Payne, S.I. Seneviratne, A. Thomas, R. Warren, & G. Zhou. (2018). Impacts of 1.5°C global warming on natural and human systems. In Masson-Delmotte, V. et al. (Eds.) Global warming of 1.5°C. An IPCC special report on the impacts of global warming of 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels and related global greenhouse gas emission pathways, in the context of strengthening the global response to the threat of climate change, sustainable development, and efforts to eradicate poverty (pp. 175–312). Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009157940.005. Hook, L. (2021 March 12). John Kerry warns EU against carbon border tax. Financial Times Retrieved July 28, 2022, from https://www.ft.com/content/3d00d3c8-­202d-­4765-­b0ae-­ e2b212bbca98 IEA. (2022). Global CO2 emissions rebounded to their highest level in history in 2021. International Energy Agency press release 8 March 2022. Retrieved July 28, 2022, from Global CO2 emissions rebounded to their highest level in history in 2021 -­News -­IEA.

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Parry, I., Black, S., & Roaf, J. (2021). Proposal for an international carbon price floor among large emitters. IMF Staff Climate Notes, 2021(001), 1–21. Patomäki, H. (2006). Global justice: A democratic perspective. Globalizations, 3(2), 99–120. Patomäki, H. (2015). Absenting the absence of future dangers and structural transformations in securitization theory. International Relations, 29(1), 128–136. Patomäki, H. (2022). The three fields of global political economy. Routledge. Reuters. (2022). EU strikes deal on world-first carbon border tariff. Reuters. December 13, 2022 by Kate Abnett, available at https://www.reuters.com/markets/carbon/ eu-­strikes-­deal-­world-­first-­carbon-­border-­tariff-­2022-­12-­13/. Ripple, W., Wolf, C., Gregg, J., Levin, K., Rockström, J., Newsome, T., Betts, M., Huq, S., Law, B., Kemp, L., Kalmus, P., & Lenton, T. (2022). World scientists’ warning of a climate emergency 2022. Bioscience, 72(12), 1149–1155. https://doi.org/10.1093/biosci/biac083 Robertson, M. (2007). Discovering price in all the wrong places: The work of commodity definition and price under neoliberal environmental policy. Antipode, 39(3), 500–526. Rothstein, B. (1998). Just institutions matter. The moral and political logic of universal welfare state. Cambridge University Press. Sandel, M. (2012). What money can’t buy: The moral limits of markets. Allen Lane. Schneider, L. (2021, November 15). #COP26  in Glasgow delivered rules for international carbon markets  – How good or bad are they? The Öko-Institut e.V (blog). The Öko-Institut. Retrieved July 28, 2022, from https://blog.oeko.de/ glasgow-­delivered-­rules-­for-­international-­carbon-­markets-­how-­good-­or-­bad-­are-­they-­cop26/. Schneider, L., Duan, M., Stavins, R., Kizzier, K., Broekhoff, D., Jotzo, F., et al. (2019). Double counting and the Paris agreement rulebook. Science, 366(6462), 180–183. Scobie, M. (2021). Treaty preambles and the environmental justice gap. Global Policy, 12(3), 273–285. Scott, S. V. (2012). The securitization of climate change in world politics: How close have we come and would full securitization enhance the efficacy of global climate change policy? Review of European Community & International Environmental Law, 21(3), 220–230. Shaikh, A. (2016). Capitalism: Competition, conflict, crises. Oxford University Press. Shishlov, I., & Bellassen, V. (2016). Review of the experience with monitoring uncertainty requirements in the clean development mechanism. Climate Policy, 16(6), 703–731. Shue, H. (2014). Climate justice: Vulnerability and protection. Oxford University Press. Siemons, A., & Schneider, L. (2022). Averaging or multi-year accounting? Environmental integrity implications for using international carbon markets in the context of single-year targets. Climate Policy, 22(2), 208–221. Smith, R. (2020). China’s engine of environmental collapse. Pluto Press. Spanish Annex. (2021). Non-paper on energy and electricity markets. Retrieved July 28, 2022, from https://www.euractiv.com/wp-­content/uploads/sites/2/2021/10/Spanish-­Annex20210920-­Non-­Paper-­on-­Energy-­markets.pdf. Spash, C. (2002). Greenhouse economics. Routledge. Strange, S. (1981). Reactions to Brandt: Popular acclaim and academic attack. International Studies Quarterly, 25(2), 328–342. Taylor, K. (2022, February 3). EU carbon market blurred by volatile prices and speculation, Greens warn. EURACTIV.com. Retrieved July, 28, 2022, from https:// w w w. e u r a c t i v. c o m / s e c t i o n / e n e r g y -­e nv i r o n m e n t / n e w s / e u -­c a r b o n -­m a r k e t blurred-­by-­volatile-­prices-­and-­speculation-­greens-­warn/. The Economist. (2021). Carbon border taxes are defensible but bring great risks. The EU’s proposal may set off another trade war. The Economist (Leaders 17 July 2021). Retrieved 28 July 2022, from, https://www.economist.com/leaders/2021/07/15/ carbon-­border-­taxes-­are-­defensible-­but-­bring-­great-­risks. The Economist. (2022). The world is missing its lofty climate targets. Time for some realism. Global warming cannot be limited to 1.5°C. The Economist (Leaders 3 November 2022). Retrieved 20 December 2022, from, https://www.economist.com/leaders/2022/11/03/ the-­world-­is-­missing-­its-­lofty-­climate-­targets-­time-­for-­some-­realism.

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Rethinking World Parliament: Beyond the Indeterminacy of International Law

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Introduction The concept of world parliament combines two distinct ideas. The first is that humanity forms a unity (e.g. Vasudhaiva Kutumbakam, “the whole world is one family”, in ancient Indian texts, or critical cosmopolitanism in the sense of Chap. 2). The second is that legitimate authority is based on citizens’ will and requires elected decision-makers (e.g. Marsilius of Padua’s Defensor pacis, “the defender of peace”, first published in 1324). Most attempts to develop, advocate, and realise either one of these two ideas have been fragile and occurred in specific historical contexts, usually meeting fierce resistance and opposition, while occasionally they have had context-bound success and in some cases also cumulative long-term effects. For the first time, the two ideas came together during the European Enlightenment in the eighteenth century. In Chap. 2, I identified Jean-Baptiste “Anacharsis” Cloots (1755–1794) as the earliest writer to articulate the concept of world parliament— although it is possible to argue that for example, Christian Wolff’s (1679–1754) abstract mid-eighteenth century concept of Völkerstaat preceded Clooth’s conception. As pointed out in Chap. 2, constant warfare or threat of war against the revolutionaries favoured the adoption of prototypes, metaphors, and framings based on the category of the nation during the French Revolutionary Wars (1792–1802) and Napoleonic Wars (1803–1815). Following the rather unique works of Karl Krause— and despite Baháʼu’lláh and a few others—it took nearly a century before the concept of a world parliament was again rearticulated in any systematic manner. Moreover, it is also worth stressing that until the twentieth century, citizens were usually conceived either as property-owning men or adult men. This changed with the rise of feminism and socialism and such radicals as K’Ang Yu-Wei and H. G. Wells.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 H. Patomäki, World Statehood, World-Systems Evolution and Global Futures, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-32305-8_12

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Particularly K’Ang’s (2005/1913) Ta T’Ung Shu, “The Book of Great Unity” provides a descriptive account of how a “great unity” understood in terms of a rigorously egalitarian world federation ruled by a global parliament might emerge step by step. In the first stage, “The Age of Disorder at the Time the First Foundations of One World Are Laid”, territorial states remain sovereign and law-making powers reside with them, yet “the laws made by international conferences, being public law, are superior to the laws of the individual states” (K’Ang, 2005/1913, p.  107). Functional cooperation has evolved in various issue areas, but some states may still decide to be out of particular arrangements. There are global legal processes, however. “All cases of international litigation are sent to the international conferences for litigation”. (K’Ang, 2005/1913, p. 122). In stage two, in “The Age of Increasing Peace-and-Equality, When One World Is Gradually Coming into Being”, the states are gradually subsumed under the authority of global bodies. “The laws made by the public parliament certify the laws made by the individual states” (K’Ang, 2005/1913, p. 107). Parts of the world such as the high seas—amounting to areas of the planet that Ambassador Arvid Pardo of Malta half a century later, in his 1967 speech at the UN, called “the common heritage of mankind”1—would be at this point directly governed by global public bodies. Furthermore, “there is the public government and the public parliament to deliberate on cases of undecided and divergent laws of the individual states, including cases in which the laws are defective or erroneous” (K’Ang, 2005/1913, p. 109). K’Ang’s stage three, “The Age of Complete Peaceand-Equality When One World has been Achieved” is a description of a singular and centralised world state, run by a global parliament, from which all differences and borders have been eliminated. While few if any twentieth century visions of world parliament have been as strictly unitarian and centralised as K’Ang’s, most proposals from the “Preliminary Draft of a World Constitution 1948” (Hutchins et  al., 1948) to the single-path scenario of W. Warren Wagar (1999) have envisioned the world parliament as a sovereign body making decisions about laws and a common budget. Thereby many proposals have been based on an analogy between the institutional development of a federal territorial state such as Switzerland or the USA and the emergence of global state structures. In these kinds of schemes, blueprints, and draft constitutions, world integration amounts to (sometimes instant) amalgamation in the Deutschian sense. In Chap. 7, I argued that although a pluralist security community is indeed in many ways easier to realise and more viable than an amalgamated one, this does not exclude steps towards amalgamation through

 Pardo’s concept was embodied in the now ratified Law of the Sea Treaty. In the Preamble of the 1982 UN Convention for the Law of the Saw, it is stated: “Desiring by this Convention to develop the principles embodied in resolution 2749 (XXV) of 17 December 1970 in which the General Assembly of the United Nations solemnly declared inter alia that the area of the seabed and ocean floor and the subsoil thereof, beyond the limits of national jurisdiction, as well as its resources, are the common heritage of mankind, the exploration and exploitation of which shall be carried out for the benefit of mankind as a whole, irrespective of the geographical location of States”. 1

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constructing elements of world statehood. However, the process, context, type, and quality of institutions matter. In an earlier work, I concluded that a world parliament is an interesting yet ambiguous possibility (Patomäki & Teivainen, 2004, pp.  139–149). At least for now, the social conditions for a world parliament do not seem to exist (though an aspect of the assumption about the lack of social conditions may be tested by means of a global proto-referendum). This is especially true for the kinds of world parliament proposals, which aim at giving the world parliament considerable scope and real powers and would thus seem to imply a movement towards a centralised world state. Hence, to reiterate a point already made a few times, it seems that the priority is to establish the conditions for a pluralist and global security community. The building of a security community is a long and complicated process of institutionalisation of mutual acceptance, trust, procedures, and practices of peaceful change, and it is always vulnerable to the escalation of conflicts. The more centralising an attempted large-scale political community is, the more risks there may be. This is even though it is also true that democratisation is closely connected to the conditions of a security community (as argued in Chap. 5), and that a legitimate and well-­ functioning world parliament would enable non-violent conflict resolutions and peaceful changes. This chapter is an attempt to rethink the idea of world parliament from a novel angle. First, I discuss the current (2007–) campaign for a United Nations Parliamentary Assembly (UNPA). Second, I consider possible roles for global parliament that would neither make it a sovereign legislative body nor reduce it to a mere symbol or a place to talk. Third, I propose a new way of thinking about the scope and powers of a world parliament. Apart from the task of coordinating the activities of functional-democratic systems of governance, a world parliament can be seen as a response to a deep problem of international law: its indeterminacy. The need for a world parliament has to do with determining what international or world law is.2 A world parliament could also speak in the name of the world community. Finally, I conclude by situating my proposal in the context of an open-ended vision of an evolving world civilisation, the topmost layer of which is for now organised along functionalist-democratic lines but requires also coordination and generic rules and principles of (meta-)governance.

 Here, I leave aside discussions about the International Court of Justice (ICJ) and the article 38 of its statute (see, e.g., Kennedy, 1987), which stipulates that apart from explicit legal agreements among states, the sources of international law include custom, general principles of law, as well as judicial decisions and “teachings of the most highly qualified publicists of the various nations”. Suffice it to say that (i) ICJ has been founded on liberalist legal idealism discussed in Chap. 10 and that (ii) as an institution ICJ and the article 38 exhibit the problem of indeterminacy rather than solve it at the practical-institutional level (this should be distinguished from the deeper philosophical problem of interpretation). 2

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 he Campaign for a United Nations Parliamentary T Assembly (UNPA) The “Preliminary Draft of a World Constitution 1948” and other similar documents include proposals for a world parliament,3 but under the conditions of the Cold War, only a little world federalist movement survived. The current idea for a UN People’s Assembly arose in the context of the post-Cold War global democracy discussions (e.g. Camilleri et al., 2000; Galtung, 2000). The subsequent UNPA campaign was initiated in 2007. Its aims are designed on the models of the Parliamentary Assembly of the OSCE (the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe) and the European Parliament. Basically, the Parliamentary Assembly of the OSCE passes resolutions and makes recommendations. These are meant to ensure that all participating states live up to their OSCE commitments. The first-stage aim of the UNPA campaign is equally modest. The UNPA would be made up of deputies from national parliaments and would serve as an advisory parliamentary body to the UN General Assembly. This would not be a world parliament as such, but the idea is that the UNPA will be organised around political orientations, as in the European Parliament. “The path to a world parliament would thus help to encourage the formation of global parties” (Leinen & Bummel, 2018, p. 371). The plan is that a newly formed global institution instigates a process of formation of world political parties, which could then begin something like the cycle of three moments of transformative global-­democratic action envisaged in Chap. 9. On the other hand, a global parliamentary assembly or a world parliament might be unnecessary for that purpose. “The first step could also consist in the establishment of a parliamentary assembly with a narrower specialised remit, for example the WTO or the UN Climate Change Conference” (p. 372). The Global Greenhouse Gas Tax Organisation (GGGTO) outlined in Chap. 11 might be even better, since it is meant to decide upon substantial resources and regulations. The democratic assembly of the GGGTO—possibly organised around political orientations—would be endowed with real powers such as motions, veto rights, and budgetary rights and involve both representatives of national parliaments and global civil society. In any case, in the proposals for a world parliament, usually only two possibilities are considered: 1. world parliament either as a mere place to talk or to make recommendations and symbolic decisions (this includes various proposals for a global e-parliament such as Tenbergen, 2006) or

 The “Preliminary Draft of a World Constitution 1948” calls it “The Federal Convention”, which “shall consist of delegates elected directly by the people of all states and nations, one delegate for each million of population or fraction thereof above one-half million, with the proviso that the people of any extant state… ranging between 100,000 and 1,000,000, shall be entitled to elect one delegate, but any such state with a population below 100,000 shall be aggregated for federal electoral purposes to the electoral unit closest to its borders”. 3

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2. world parliament as a sovereign legislative body, which also decides upon a significant budget A parliament is a place to talk for representatives of the citizens (parlar = to talk, mentum = a place), but it can also have real powers. The UNPA campaign plan is explicitly processual and the aim is to gradually develop a parliamentary assembly into a world parliament in the sense of 2: Initially, states could choose whether their UNPA members would come from national parliaments, reflecting their political spectrum and gender equality, or whether they would be directly elected. Eventually, the goal is to have all members directly elected. Starting as a largely consultative body, the rights and powers of the UNPA could be expanded over time as its democratic legitimacy increases. The assembly will act as an independent watchdog in the UN system and as a democratic reflection of the diversity of world public opinion. In the long run, once its members are all democratically elected, the assembly could be ­developed into a world parliament which—under certain conditions and in conjunction with the UN General Assembly—may be able to adopt universally binding regulations.4

This is a description of a possible process leading to a legislative world parliament, but there is hardly any account of the causal forces or mechanisms leading from one step to another, with two notable exceptions. First, as mentioned, the idea is that the world political parties formed through the UNPA could turn out instrumental in that regard. Second, the assembly itself “could become a political catalyst for further development of the international system and international law”.5 However, the positioning of the parliamentary assembly within the UN system sets strict limitations to expanding its remit and powers. The campaign planners recognise this: “The UN General Assembly cannot confer more powers on the assembly than it has itself” (Leinen & Bummel, 2018, p. 372). As a whole, the UN system is very difficult to reform. The permanent members of the Security Council have a veto over all amendments and any review of the UN Charter. Consequently, Security Council or General Assembly reforms appear unlikely. Moreover, the gridlock of governance and the disintegrative tendencies of the global political economy are making it ever more difficult to reform the UN system. The USA dominates the contemporary UN system not only by its veto but through financial conditionality and by translating its other resources into bargaining power within the UN. In addition, the location of the UN headquarters in New York makes the UN staff and representatives susceptible to the influence of US culture, media, and public opinion. Besides the consistent opposition of the USA, a veto by China, Russia, or the ex-colonial powers Britain and France would similarly suffice to block any reform. Moreover, even a very modest UNPA proposal seems to face major obstacles. The Wikipedia page on the campaign for a United Nations Parliamentary Assembly 4  From the UNPA campaign page, “The proposal of a UN Parliamentary Assembly”, at https:// www.unpacampaign.org/proposal/ (retrieved 15 November 2022). 5  From the UNPA campaign page, “Appeal for the establishment of a Parliamentary Assembly at the United Nations”, at https://www.unpacampaign.org/about/declarations/unpa-appeal/en/ (retrieved 15 November 2022).

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(UNPA) describes it as a “global network of more than 300 non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and 1500 current and former parliamentarians from around 150 countries devoted to establishing a United Nations Parliamentary Assembly” (Wikipedia, 2022). However, signing a petition is not necessarily a strong commitment to a cause, which is for each signatory only one among many. The contrast between the current situation and the desired outcome is stark. The UNPA campaign plan cannot avoid postulating a world-historical moment of a new social contract that once and for all would establish the desired state of global affairs (as discussed in Chap. 5, e.g. perpetual peace for Kant or cosmopolitan democracy for David Held). Because of the legal and political difficulties of changing the UN system, the campaign planners must “ultimately picture an intergovernmental treaty which would amend all the relevant existing agreements and establish the [global parliamentary assembly] as a common body with respect to all the relevant institutions of global governance” (Leinen & Bummel, 2018, p. 373). In Chaps. 5 and 7, I have argued against the Kantian split between moral reason and causal processes. Actors can be self-determining; the conditions for individual selftranscendence and collective context transformation can evolve together, and systems can exhibit reflexive self-regulation. But because the world is processual and always involves a lot of continuity, the establishment of a new multicultural and -lingual political community through a constitutional moment can only occur in a very specific historical context, as when the EU was formed in 1993 on the basis of the European Communities. Something partly analogical has occurred on a global scale only twice, namely at the end of the two world wars (establishment of the League of Nations and the UN and Bretton Woods systems). This raises the question of whether the idea of a world parliament and the process leading to it could be understood in some other way.

World Parliament: In a Search for a Third Way The two conventional options for a world parliament—either a symbolic place to talk or a sovereign legislative body—do not exhaust possibilities. Held (1995, pp. 273–83) has taken a step towards a different direction. In his model for cosmopolitan democracy, a world parliament would be a “framework-setting institution”. Yet, the global assembly could also become “an authoritative centre for the examination of those pressing global problems which are at the heart of the very possibility of the implementation of cosmopolitan democratic law”. Issues would include health and disease, food supply and distribution, the debt problem, and the instability of global financial markets. However, it is not obvious what the role of a parliament in these functional areas of governance should be. Perhaps, Held’s suggestion accords with that of Jo Leinen and Andreas Bummel (2018, p. 374), who discuss parliamentary oversight that would be required following the establishment of such new institutions as a global tax or world central bank (as in Keynes’s ICU-plan; Patomäki, 2022, pp.  89–94; in-depth analysis of proposals, Kotilainen, 2022).

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Nevertheless, Held’s suggestion for a framework-setting institution remains somewhat vague in terms of its institutional design. Building on Held’s idea, however, it is possible to think about coordinating, say, global economic policies of states and various functional organisations without creating an over-arching territorial layer above all these other spaces and layers of global governance. Yet, the coordinating body can be an elected representative assembly, with limited and relational (i.e. non-sovereign) powers, which may include the function of parliamentary oversight as suggested by Leinen and Bummel. The constituencies of this body can be defined in terms of identity or functional areas rather than territorial location—or a combination of these. A part of the seats could be allocated employing lottery in various ways and for various purposes, for example: • a fraction of the seats could be reserved for non-governmental organisations interested in taking part in the functioning of this body (as in the case of GGGTO, see Chap. 11); • alternatively, there could be a separate civil society chamber selected through a screening process and lottery, with well-defined powers and responsibilities; • lotteries could also be used to select representatives from countries that do not practice free and fair elections (similar to the selection of participants for deliberative forums) Institutionalised opt-out mechanisms could ensure that not everybody would have to follow (all) the rules and principles of this assembly all the time—the point is to preserve and cultivate pluralism. Once we have relieved our institutional imagination from the standard categories of modern Europe, many kinds of new possibilities might appear plausible and worth exploring. It is also important to ask what would emerge, in the longer run, from a series of global democracy reforms confined to particular functional areas of governance. Modern social worlds are functionally differentiated. Many of the existing international organisations are functional rather than territorial, in part following the idea that task-based cooperation—with possible “spill-over effects”—is the most realistic path towards gradually overcoming the territorial authority of sovereign states (Haas, 1964; Mitrany, 1943). Different functional organisations have different memberships, consisting mostly of states and non-governmental organisations. In other words, their membership may be overlapping but it is not identical, inclusive or exclusive, territorially or otherwise. Also, new organisations can be founded. Whether old or new, any of these organisations can be (re)constructed on various democratic rules and principles. Logically, what would emerge is a non-centralised, non-territorial, and non-exclusive system of complex multilevel and multi-spatial global governance involving manifold rules and principles. In some ways, this is the situation already. A key problem is that these laws and regulations tend to be not only overlapping but also ambiguous and contradictory and thus indeterminate in various ways. How should elements of world domestic policy be coordinated? How should different considerations be prioritised? Who or what should determine what the law is?

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The Indeterminacy of International Law Apart from providing coordination and consistency, a world parliament can also be seen as an institutional response to a deep problem of international relations, namely the indeterminacy of international (or world) law. An easy-to-grasp aspect of the problem concerns deciding which treaties –some of which are constitutive of functional systems of governance—should prevail in any given context, for example, whether the norms of human rights should prevail over the rules and principles of the WTO (see, e.g., Petersmann, 2004; Simma & Pulkowski, 2006). This problem can be generalised: how can we identify valid international legal norms and apply them in concrete cases? For instance, were the unilateral attempts to justify legally the 2003 US-UK invasion of Iraq acceptable? Or to give another kind of example, is basic education a universal human right given relevant sources of law, and if yes, with what implications to whom? David Kennedy (1980) and Martti Koskenniemi (2005), among others, have argued that the structure of international law is indeterminate. The deep assumption behind many administrative, legal, diplomatic, and military practices is that external sovereignty remains analogical to exclusive private property, and a sovereign state is, metaphorically, a possessive individual. The contradictory system of meanings, stemming from the definition of sovereign states as possessive individuals, is perhaps most plainly visible in international law. As possessive individuals, sovereign states owe apparently nothing to international society, the same way possessive individuals owe nothing to society. (Cf. MacPherson, 1964). Yet the rights and duties of sovereignty and consequent relations between sovereign states are regulated in international law, which can be conceived in various ways (as natural law, world communitarianism, justice, progress, or any other universal principle). Moreover, states do not anymore exhaust the subjects or objects of law, which may be seen to support the case for supranationalism. Yet, critical studies of modern legal practices (Koskenniemi, 2005) show that if you start from the premise of possessive individualism, you end up arguing from a supranational basis; and if you start with supranationalism, you end up recognising the implications of possessive individualism, i.e. actual state practices. Given the basic premises and institutionalised practices, these options are mutually implicating, yet contradictory. This problematic merits a short theory discussion. I do not agree with those critical legal scholars that maintain that modern social systems cannot be characterised by the rule of law in any meaningful sense (for a well-known criticism, see Solum, 1987; and for a review of debates, Tushnet, 2005). Some critical legal theorists, including Koskenniemi, claim that law itself is never binding and that there can never be any “legal constraints” in any meaningful sense. The predictability of law applications depends merely on the institutional and structural bias of its appliers which is related to their ethical-political and professional orientation and position. (For an elaboration of these aspects of the indeterminacy thesis, Koskenniemi, 2005, pp.  590–617.) While it is true that all social rules, including explicit legal rules, are in some ways vague and ambiguous, require interpretation, and are dependent on at least partially reciprocal expectations of social

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actors (Patomäki, 2002, pp. 106–107), arguments against the possibility of rule of law are mistaken for reasons that I can outline here only briefly. The generic critical argument that seems to go against the rule of law stems usually from an all-purpose post-structuralist theory of language that reduces everything—and not only law—to a set of binary oppositions, the contents of which are ultimately empty (for a sympathetic criticism of Jacques Derrida and his vacillating position on reality and realism, Norris, 1997). However, various rules from syntax and grammar and tacit rules of many practices to explicit legal rules are real and they can be and are followed; rules that are widely followed must be a key part of any social context for society to be possible. For instance, without the concept of widespread rule-following in social practices, it would not be possible to make sense of the sufficient sameness of meaning in any context, including in critical legal scholarship itself (cf. Habermas, 1989, pp. 18–19). The ongoing process of (re)constructing meanings is social and, in some moments, also explicitly political, but this does not make meanings or rules indeterminate or arbitrary in any devastating sense; relatively well-functioning communication is a possibility realised by actors sufficiently often to make the coordination of actions and many forms of cooperation possible, including in the context of international law (cf. Koskenniemi, 2005, p. 600). Moreover, in typical post-structuralist theories and analyses, there is a tendency to set the idea of categorically objective rules against the real conditions of ethical-political judgements and to draw overtly dramatic conclusions from the ordinary human condition of diversity and controversies (cf. the analysis of the origins and nature of law and justice in Patomäki, 2006). Yet, plausible judgements about truth, morality, and legal validity are achievable also in the absence of transcendental grounds or actual full consensus. In critical legal scholarship, there is a tendency to use disagreements and disputes as evidence for the fundamental indeterminacy of law, although controversies are part of the very idea of justice and law as a rhetorical and dialectical practice (cf. Perelman, 1963; Rescher, 1977). It is a key idea of just legal institutions that plausible judgements can be made following public and fair debates about factual interpretations and relevant legal rules and principles. In many legal institutions, it is also possible and legitimate to resort to a majority vote to reach a verdict. Finally, it is also worth mentioning that attempts to deconstruct the idea of rule of law tend, in effect, to turn law appliers—lawyers and judges—into law-makers (or at least reinforce their de facto role in this regard). Although the legal theory is often less concerned with the implementation of policies that assume a legal form, the same applies, mutatis mutandis, to the role of civil servants and bureaucracy. The (possibly self-fulfilling) assumption that the interpretative and argumentative powers of legal professionals or civil servants are decisive in determining what the law is has anti-democratic implications. It ignores the role of citizens and their democratic representatives in law-making and determining what the law is. From a democratic point of view, the idea that the real ethical-political difficulty concerns “promoting the experience of responsible human freedom among the experts who govern our world” is thus problematical (this is how Kennedy, 2005, p. 5, summarises the point of critical legal studies; see also Koskenniemi, 2005, pp.  572–3, for a similar

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statement, according to which the critical project “seeks to liberate the [legal] profession from its false necessities”).6 My critique of the general indeterminacy thesis notwithstanding, I concur that law is always to an extent indeterminate at some level, i.e. that there are always at least some degrees of freedom for interpretation of both law and the relevant social realities. This kind of limited indeterminacy does not necessarily pose serious problems to the (legitimacy of the) rule of law when legislators, judges, and citizens share understandings and values and follow legitimate institutional procedures to a sufficient degree. There are at least three sets of constraints for possible legal interpretations: 1. first set of constraints: legal materials—at times legal positivism appears sufficient for legal judgements and professional legal practices. 2. second set of constraints: discursive and practical backgrounds of an ethical-­ political community—even legal positivism tacitly presupposes many shared understandings and values, and this common sense may also amount to a hegemonic ideology. 3. third set of constraints: the real—both actual and possible—social situations and episodes that are referred to and interpreted in legal disputes. While the law imposes constraints on the adjudicators in the form of substantive rules such as statutes and case law, this may not be enough to bind them to come to a particular decision in a given particular case (not even when they agree on the depiction of the relevant social situation). The three sets of constraints are thus in many contexts backed by a wider institutional framework that defines procedures for making plausible and legitimate decisions also in controversial or ambiguous cases. However, in the absence of both sufficiently shared backgrounds and institutional procedures that could settle disputes over interpreting social situations and episodes and determining what the relevant law is, either hegemonic consent (based, for example, on a systematic structural bias) or mere cynical power politics must prevail. This is related to a chief problem of contemporary international politics. Moral and legal opinions are often expressed in the name of the “international community”, but who can speak legitimately in its name? The wealthy and powerful can always find an interpretation—however implausible for many or most legal scholars, practitioners, and concerned citizens—that supports their case. Moreover, they have the means to propagate it as the opinion of the “international community”. To avoid this, there is a need for a body that could legitimately settle conflicts between understandings and values and create a framework within which law can be legitimately determined. The main point of critical legal studies is that “law is politics” at least in some sense. Jürgen Habermas (1999, pp.  454–457) has specified this  Similarly, Koskenniemi, 2005, p. 615, claims that “[i]nternational law is what international lawyers make of it”. However, the basic thrust of his argumentation is apparently contradicted on p. 601 where he writes that “nothing in this book suggests that there should be a turn towards a ‘more political’ jurisprudence”. 6

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point in a re-constructive way: legal systems are not closed systems of formal rules but substantial and thus in various ways open towards processes of political will-­ formation. There is an internal relationship between the rule of law and democracy. The point is to organise the openness of law in a legitimate, i.e. in a sufficiently democratic manner. Citizens must be enabled to judge and shape via some mechanisms whether the law they enact (even if only indirectly) and must follow (even if only as members of particular states) is legitimate. In international law, where the role and powers of the existing courts are limited (see note 2; cf. Patomäki & Teivainen, 2004, ch. 4) and the diversity of background assumptions is wide, there is a need for a legitimate body that could interpret and determine what the law is. Direct worldwide elections could give democratic legitimacy to this body. However, the new body should not be conceived as a world supreme court, because its authority stems mainly from the processes of citizens’ will-formation, rather than merely from the best legal expertise. A world parliament could assume the function of interpreting the law. Moreover, this body may also have powers other than legal adjudication concerning rules and principles and their application. An assembly with a global scope does not have to replicate the institutional designs of the already existing parliaments.

 orld Parliament: Beyond the Categories of Modern W Liberal-Democratic States So far I have argued that it is possible to go beyond the conventional options of seeing world parliament either (i) as a mere place to talk and forum of symbolic representation or (ii) sovereign legislation. A world parliament in this sense does not constitute or require a centralised world state. Its powers for direct enforcement may be limited or function-specific. Enforcement of law may continue to follow the rules of existing treaties, customary law, etc. Yet, a world parliament in this sense enables a democratic and legitimate public opinion—including opinio juris—of the world community, replacing the current notion of the “international community” that masks the power of a few self-chosen states and, via them, specific interests and purposes. For the first time, humanity would have a representative body that could speak on behalf of the world and the planet. The states may be unwilling to accept the authority of a court that is based on mere legal expertise, especially given the current structural problems of international law. The new proposal raises many questions, however. For instance, what are the mechanisms that may limit the decisions of the new body to determining what the already existing law is, instead of simply creating new law out of non-legal ethical-political considerations? Something, or somebody, should ensure that the first set of interpretative constraints—legal materials—remains essential to the formation of democratic and legitimate public opinion in the world parliament. One possibility is a world parliament of two chambers, with the second chamber given limited veto powers, following certain well-specified procedures (or there could be three chambers if there is one for civil society as well). Whereas the first chamber is

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a body of citizens’ representatives (elected or drawn), the small second chamber may consist of legal experts. The second chamber would rule, through well-­specified procedures and will limited powers, whether the decisions of the first chamber are reasonably based on the current body of law (with the understanding that law is, to an extent, politics, and open to different interpretations). The second chamber could be nominated by (i) states, (ii) existing international courts, and (iii) law schools of various universities representing different parts of the world in an equal manner, weighed in terms of population. Its task would be to maintain the idea that law is a particular style of reasoning in terms of current rules: […] one particularly important feature that legal norms share with moral norms, and which distinguished both of them from policies: it is the principled character of application. Not only can one not make legal rules as one goes along, even if such decisions were to command substantial majoritarian support, but “legality” requires the evenhanded application of rules in “like” situations in the future. (Kratochwil, 1989, p. 208; italics in the original)

The decisions of the world parliament would become an important source of determination of law in the future. This new idea of a world parliament specifies a significant task for a global parliament without a simple commitment to liberal world federalism. Most or many of the powers of law-making would still reside in states. Parallel to this, national parliamentarians and civil society organisations would play a decision-making role, for instance, in the GTTTO (Chap. 11). Gradually, however, other actors such as world parties could play an increasingly important role in regulation and resource-allocation through systems of functional governance and their coordinating body, the world parliament. Over time, the new global framework, constituted by emergent legal principles (functional, parliamentary, etc.), could evolve into a new layer of world organisation, gradually replacing the functions and powers of the already anachronistic UN system (see Patomäki, 2002 for an argument that the era of the UN is drawing to a close).

A Feasible Process of Establishing a World Parliament In the absence of a major global catastrophe or some such, the idea of establishing a new social contract that once and for all would create a desired state of global affairs does not look plausible in the 2020s or the foreseeable future. However, a world parliament can be established at first by a mere grouping of like-minded countries, similarly to the way the International Criminal Court was created in the 1990s. The Chap. 11 proposal to establish a global greenhouse gas tax by a coalition of the willing is based on the same idea. In a like manner, it may be possible to achieve relatively rapid progress with a grouping of states, even though the aim must be a truly global parliament. Although it would not be a sovereign legislative body, a world parliament can have real powers. When there is no consensus on what the existing international or world law is, the basic principle is majority decision-­ making. The second chamber could check whether the decision is within the scope of legal reasonability, given the existing legal materials. A possibility is that in the

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future, all multilateral treaties must be ratified by the world parliament, as a condition of the validity of the new law. There are many further hard questions, however. An important difficulty concerns defining the procedure of taking important legal cases to the world parliament. Some kind of principle of the subsidiary is needed. On the other hand, the world parliament should also have the right to initiate a process of scrutinising existing legal rules, principles, priorities, and applications. Another potential problem is excessive politicisation that may generate undesirable volatility, controversy, and strife that may, under certain conditions, regress to antagonisms. The second chamber could play a role in calming down the effects of law-interpretation, but there are further complementary possibilities. One possibility is to develop rules and principles to limit how often a case can be opened; and the terms of office of the world parliament could also be made relatively long, from six to eight years (there could be regular elections and lotteries covering always only a part of seats). As the world parliament would be the first body entitled to speak legitimately on behalf, and in the name, of the world, its powers are not confined to the sphere of legal disputes only. I have already mentioned the need to coordinate worldwide economic policies and activities of different functional organisations. The powers of parliamentary oversight could include, at least under certain conditions, new treaties between states (analogically to the limits of freedom of contract, e.g., Trebilcock, 1993, also as practiced in international law). Moreover, the world parliament could develop and advocate policies for the global common good. All this could be done without creating an over-arching territorial layer above other spaces and layers of governance. Global taxes—such as a currency transaction tax (Patomäki, 2001) or the GGGT (Chap. 11)—could provide a source of revenue. This would guarantee autonomy vis-à-vis the member states in terms of resources. The world parliament could also have its own sources of funding. The list of possible sources of income is long (cf. South Centre, 1997, pp. 88–91). The proposed international or global taxes include: • • • • •

Pollution taxes (including substances other than greenhouse gases) Arms sales tax (a levy on international sales of designated weapons) Travel tax (a flat tax on all passenger flights, already in use by many states) A fractional tax on the day’s telecommunications Proceeds from mining the seabed (taxation of the proceeds of the Seabed Authority, established under the 1982 UN Convention for the Law of the Sea)

And the proposed other possible sources of revenue include: • • • •

The establishment of a world lottery A percentage of proceeds earned through national lotteries A credit card under the control of the world parliament A dedication to a special fund of the proceeds from one day’s sale of stamps by the world’s post offices every year

A question is whether this kind of parliament could be sufficiently exciting and powerful to stimulate political imagination. The European Parliament, for instance,

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has not been a particularly good example in this regard (see Patomäki & Teivainen, 2004, pp. 142–3). It was created from above by elites, not through citizen pressures. For decades, the low and falling electoral participation seemed to indicate that the EU citizens have not found the European parliament particularly relevant to their lives. In 2019, the turnout rose from 42.61% to 50.66%, possibly marking a turning point, but this may also be a by-product of growing anti-EU sentiments. Another intricacy is deciding how to allocate voting districts of the world parliament. Strictly proportional representation is unlikely to work in a world where various boundaries and particular collective identities remain powerful forces, so various compromises may be necessary. An important possibility is that the constituencies of this body may be defined also in terms of (self-chosen) identity rather than territorial location. Moreover, it is technically possible to vote without any territorial voting districts. Alternatively, the voters could choose whether they want to belong to a territorial district or not. More possibilities can be imagined. A combination of election and lottery could contribute to the formation of world citizenship, global demos, and world political parties.

Conclusions Bob Jessop (2012, p. 200) argues that although a world state may well be possible in formal, institutional terms, it is unlikely to become the dominant scale within the system of multi-spatial metagovernance because its substantive operation “will be strongly shaped by the uneven development of the world market and the survival of a world of states”. On the other hand, one could also argue that the currently dominant juridical form of global governance is the new constitutionalism of “disciplinary neo-liberalism” (Gill, 2000). This form makes changes difficult. The locked-in rules and principles may sustain unsustainable growth, uneven developments, high and increasing inequalities, etc. To counter the currently prevailing problematic tendencies, substantial political and economic changes are needed. A world parliament in the above-discussed sense could—at least to a degree—democratise and change prevailing interpretations of international or global law. Moreover, it is possible to create various political and democratic procedures within existing or emerging functional systems of governance, increasing the self-transformative capacity of global and planetary contexts and thus facilitating future peaceful changes. All this is consistent with the idea that from the legal point of view, the world parliament is primarily a solution to the problem of indeterminacy of international law and its unnecessary, unwanted, and unneeded consequences. A world parliament in this sense can contribute to the establishment of the rule of law globally, in a manner that is consistent with what is known in legal theory about the politics of law, about interpreting the law, and about making legal judgements in contemporary reflexive contexts.7 Parallel with other developments in international legal  Many legal practices continue to be based on legal positivism. Positivism can also be seen as an ethical code that says that legal material should have the first priority in determining what the law is. This kind of normative code is important for democratic governance to work in complex societies, based on elaborate division of labour and multiple overlapping and contradicting contexts. It 7

References

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principles, the aim is to transcend the contradictions of modern international relations and law. Contestations over law continue but in terms of legitimate democratic and legal procedures. The new design would have both real transformative effects and simultaneously avoid the well-known pitfalls of world federalism. Moreover, the world parliament can be given powers other than those related to legal interpretation and adjudication in coordinating and setting a framework for various (often overlapping) areas of functional governance. An autonomous world parliament needs independent sources of funding to facilitate its activities and implementation of its decisions. This kind of world parliament has the potential for becoming a focal point in world political activities of citizens, movements, and parties—indeed providing a context in which world parties could form. An important question is, however, whether this proposal is best understood as a step in a process or as an end in itself. From a simple teleological point of view, it is easy to see this proposal as a step in a process of building a centralised world state, as a stage in a pre-given, universal teleological scheme of building a unified world and world government—perhaps somewhere between K’Ang’s stages one and two. This is not my intention. World history is and must remain open and it is reasonable to proceed experimentally and evolutionarily. The problem with teleological visions is not only that they may be wrong but also that they may themselves contribute to disastrous outcomes. By experimenting with past and emergent possibilities, and by proceeding gradually (the process may involve breakthroughs), there is time to see what is working and what is not. Moreover, in evolving new contexts, others may come up with new and better ideas. This kind of gradual process may thus lead to an outcome that goes beyond what we—whoever the “we” may be—can now foresee or even imagine. At least we can cultivate this possibility as an opportunity to create something new, something that may be truly important for the long-term development of humanity within, and as part of, the biosphere of planet Earth.

References Camilleri, J., Malhotra, K., & Tehranian, M. (2000). Reimagining the future: Towards democratic governance. The Department of Politics, La Trobe University. Galtung, J. (2000). Alternative models for global democracy. In B. Holden (Ed.), Global democracy: key debates (pp. 143–161). Routledge. Gill, S. (2000). The constitution of global capitalism [Paper presented to a panel]. The Capitalist World, Past and Present at the International Studies Association Annual Convention. Retrieved July 29, 2022, from https://stephengill.com/news/wp-­content/uploads/Gill-­2000-­Constitution-­ of-­Global-­Capitalism.pdf. is nonetheless true—as critical legal scholars maintain—that as a metaphysical position legal positivism tends to suppress critical reflectivism on possible and plausible interpretations and their presuppositions. My point is simply that although as a general account of law positivism may mask certain unnecessary, unwanted, and unneeded practices of power, as an ethico-political orientation it is vital for democratic practices to work.

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Haas, B. (1964). Beyond the nation state: Functionalism and international organization. Stanford University Press. Habermas, J. (1989). The theory of communicative action (Vol. 2, T. McCarthy, Trans.). Polity. Habermas, J. (1999). Between facts and norms. Contributions to a discourse theory of law and democracy. (W. Rehg, Trans.). The MIT Press. Held, D. (1995). Democracy and the global order: From the modern state to cosmopolitan governance. Polity Press. Hutchins, R., Borgese, G., Adler, M., Barr, S., Guérard, A., Innis, H., Kahler, E., Katz, W., McIlwain, C., Redfield, R., & Tugwel, R. (1948). Preliminary draft of a world constitution 1948. The University of Chicago Press. Available at https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/ Preliminary_Draft_of_a_World_Constitution_1948 Jessop, B. (2012). Obstacles to a world state in the shadow of the world market. Cooperation and Conflict, 47(2), 200–219. K’Ang, Y. (2005). Ta T’Ung Shu. The one-world philosophy of K’Ang Yu-Wei (L. G. Thompson, Trans. and introduced). Routledge. (Original work published in Chinese partly in 1913 and fully in 1935; in English in 1958). Kennedy, D. (1980). Theses about international law discourse. German Yearbook of International Law, 23, 353–391. Kennedy, D. (1987). The sources of international law. American University Journal of International Law, 2(1), 1–96. Kennedy, D. (2005). Challenging expert rule: The politics of global governance. Sydney Law Review, 27(1), 5–28. Koskenniemi, M. (2005). From apology to utopia. The structure of international legal argument (a reissue of the 1989 edition with new epilogue). Cambridge University Press. (Original work published 1989). Kotilainen, K. (2022). Towards an international clearing union (at last)? Normative underpinnings and elements of institutional design. Helsinki Centre for Global Political Economy Working Paper, 06/2022. University of Helsinki, available at https://www2.helsinki.fi/en/ networks/global-­political-­economy/working-­paper-­62022. Kratochwil, F. (1989). Rules, norms and decisions. On the conditions of practical and legal reasoning in international relations and domestic affairs. Cambridge University Press. Leinen, J., & Bummel, A. (2018). A world parliament. Governance and democracy. Transl. R. Cunningham. Democracy Without Borders. MacPherson, C.  B. (1964). The political theory of possessive individualism. Hobbes to Locke. Oxford University Press. Mitrany, D. (1943). A working peace system, an argument for the functional development of international organization. Royal Institute of International Affairs/Oxford: Oxford University Press. Norris, C. (1997). Against relativism. Philosophy of science, deconstruction and critical theory. Blackwell. Patomäki, H. (2001). Democratising globalisation. The leverage of the Tobin tax. Zed Books. Patomäki, H. (2002). Kosovo and the end of the UN? In P.  Van Ham & S.  Medvedev (Eds.), Mapping European security after Kosovo (pp. 82–106). Manchester University Press. Patomäki, H. (2006). Global justice: A democratic perspective. Globalizations, 3(2), 99–120. Patomäki, H. (2022). The three fields of global political economy. Routledge. Patomäki, H., & Teivainen, T. (2004). A possible world. Democratic transformation of global institutions. London. Petersmann, E-U. (2004). The ‘human rights approach’ advocated by the UN High Commissioner for Human Right and the International Labour Organization: is it relevant for WTO law and policy?. Journal of International Economic Law, 7(3), 605–627 Perelman, C. (1963). The idea of justice and the problem of argument. Routledge and Kegan Paul. Rescher, N. (1977). Dialectics. A controversy-oriented approach to the theory of knowledge. State University of New York Press. Simma, B., & Pulkowski, D. (2006). Of planets and the universe: Self-contained regimes in international law. The European Journal of International Law, 17(3), 483–529.

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Solum, L. (1987). On the indeterminacy crisis: Critiquing critical dogma. The University of Chicago Law Review, 54, 462–503. South Centre. (1997). For a strong and democratic United Nations. A south perspective on UN reform. Zed Books. Tenbergen, R. (2006). Towards a world parliament: A summary of the debate and a proposal for an electronic world parliament on the internet organized by civil society. Paper presented at the 1st virtual congress on world citizenship and democratic global governance. Trebilcock, M. (1993). The limits of freedom of contract. Harvard University Press. Tushnet, M. (2005). Critical legal theory (without modifiers) in the United States. Journal of Political Philosophy, 13(1), 99–112. Wagar, W. W. (1999). A short history of the future. (3rd ed.). University of Chicago Press. Wikipedia. (2022). Campaign for the Establishment of a United Nations Parliamentary Assembly (date of last revision: 14 March 2022). Retrieved 26 December 2022 from https://en.wikipedia.org/w/ index.php?title=Campaign_for_the_Establishment_of_a_United_Nations_Parliamentary_Ass embly&oldid=1077023620

After World Statehood? Legitimation and Potential Conflicts in a World Political Community

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Introduction The emergence of new organisations and institutions must be accompanied by the development of a world political community (WPC)—these can be conceived as aspects of the process.1 The term political community has multiple theory-laden meanings, but in general, it refers to normative standards, identities, purposes, political judgements, and actions that enable living together as part of the same interconnected whole. In the modern world, this whole comprises of at most a few hundred people one knows personally, and millions or, globally, billions of strangers. A political community is thus necessarily an imagined community (Anderson, 2006). This imagination is grounded in geo-historically evolving assumptions, competencies, and facilities. The endurance of a political community depends on its legitimacy involving legal and ethical-political considerations. There is a difference between descriptive and normative claims about legitimacy, although ultimately it is impossible to keep them strictly separate. For Max Weber, legitimacy is not a normative concept, except in the legal-positivist sense. Weber  As discussed in Chap. 10, the possibility of world political community was at the heart of the world state debates of the 1930s and 1940s. For instance, Hans Morgenthau (1960, pp. 522–4) defines a world community as a community of at least partly shared moral standards and political judgements and multiple but convergent political actions. He articulates the problem of legitimation in terms of three questions (p. 511). (1) Are peoples willing to accept world government, or are they at least not so unwilling as to erect an insurmountable obstacle to its establishment? (2) Would they be and able to do what is necessary to keep world government standing? (3) Would they be willing and able to do or refrain from doing what world government requires of them so that it may fulfil its purposes? Morgenthau thought he can settle these questions with a few “obvious” examples. Would the Americans be “prepared to give a world government the powers to open up the borders of the United States for the annual immigration of, say, 100,000 Russians, 250,000 Chinese, and 200,000 Indians?” (p. 513). Thus, “so long as men continue to judge and act in accordance with national rather than supranational standards and loyalties, the world community remains a postulate that still awaits its realization” (p. 524). 1

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(1978, p. 31) argues that from a sociological point of view, legitimacy is the first and foremost an empirical concept: […] social action may be guided by the belief in the existence of a legitimate order. The probability that action will be actually so governed will be called the validity of the order in question.

Jürgen Habermas (1976, p. 97) criticises Weber’s empiricism. Legitimacy is not only a matter of institutionalised prejudices and behavioural dispositions but stems from normative validity claims—even though a lack of adequate normative reasons is only a potential source of conflicts and crises in a political community. What matters in this context is that anticipations of world statehood imply claims about its legitimation, i.e. possible normative reasons for the validity of its governance that could, under favourable circumstances, translate into a public opinion supporting or at least accepting it. The concept of “public opinion” is itself multilayered and complex, the generation of which is part of the problem of legitimation in a WPC (cf. Patomäki, 1997, pp. 165–73). The legitimacy of the current system of global governance has been studied in a Weberian manner in terms of elite and citizen attitudes (Dellmuth et  al., 2022). When a critical-normative perspective is included, the problem of global governance appears to be too little legitimacy accompanied by major deficits of governance capacity (Scholte, 2019). In this chapter, I go beyond the current situation and explore legitimation processes in a WPC.  Every argument about the possibility, desirability, and/or inevitability of common institutions—as elements of world statehood—entails claims about the legitimacy and sustainability of a future WPC. It is important to stress that to pose questions about the possible basis of legitimacy of such a system does not imply any strong commitments to any particular telos of world history. Although I agree (as indicated in most chapters of this book) with critical cosmopolitans that world history is in some way directed towards further global and planetary integration, it does not follow that the telos of this process is known. The whole consisting of community and formal organisations may turn out to be an emergent phenomenon; something that cannot be deduced from ex ante reasoning or anticipated in essential aspects and regards, but is fully known, only ex post to its emergence. An ethical-political goal for world history as a whole can only be set from within history; must be fallible; and can only make sense in terms of a particular story or scenario on a particular time scale. Thus conceived, the process leading to an end-­ state is in many ways more important than the telos itself. Even more fundamentally, every telos is necessarily temporary and transitional in some scale of time. There are no ultimate ends in the world of multiple simultaneously ongoing processes (for a more comprehensive and nuanced exposition, see Chaps. 3, 4, and 5). Independently of how dominant the layer of world statehood becomes within a system of multi-spatial (meta)governance, that layer will require political support, authorisation, and validation in a complex and pluralistic world. By focusing on legitimacy, we can analyse the feasibility of different paths towards global-scale

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integration, on the one hand, and the potential for conflicts, divisions, and subsequent disintegration, on the other. What are the deep but historically evolving normative and institutional underpinnings that could make a sustainable and relatively enduring WPC possible? What could provide legitimacy to a WPC and thus make it viable; and what are the potential and likely pitfalls of such an abstract, large-scale political community? What may come after the era of world statehood? Processes continue and world history will remain open-ended. First, I discuss the standard security and technical-functionalist arguments for a world state. Although these arguments are relevant and plausible, the question is whether they can provide a basis for the possibility of a legitimate world political community. As indicated by the (geohistorically biased) example of European integration (Patomäki, 1997, 2013, ch 6), the standard security-military and technical-­ functionalist arguments for global unification may work to a point, but after that, they become irrelevant and in some contexts may even be counterproductive or self-defeating. Mere security or functionalist benefits, especially if perceived in terms of the rationally calculative orientation of action, are not enough. At some level, there must be a variety of beliefs in normative legitimacy, many of which may be anchored in universalising principles such as justice, democracy, or some rights. Second, I analyse the intricate and multifaceted conditions of legitimacy in complex societies through the concepts of overlapping consensus and public opinion. There is an internal relationship between democracy and identity. Global-democratic self-­ determination presupposes a “we” and “us”, but identities tend to be particular—an issue I have tentatively explored especially in Chap. 7 in terms of layers of identities and lower and higher order purposes. In this chapter, I take up theories concerning civilising processes and stages of ethical-political learning and focus especially on their implications for the constitution and legitimation of a WPC. These theories illuminate the nature of the overall process. Finally, I make some tentative explorations into future possibilities beyond the era of world statehood.

 aterialist, Structuralist, and Functionalist Arguments M for a World State Every conventional argument for a world state is simultaneously a proposal for the basis of its legitimation after its establishment. For instance, those advocating the classical security-military argument try to convince, in a Hobbesian manner,2 the rational members of their audience to submit their wills to a central authority to  Hobbes’ Leviathan can be read as a rhetorical—but also onto-theological—argument that tried to convince readers to submit their wills to the sovereign authority of the absolute monarch. Unless they do this, they risk, under the conditions of a modern society, the peace of their society with devastating consequences. The “state of the nature” was thus an imagined future possibility, meant to be a “shock therapy” for those who doubted the validity of the rule of the Monarch. The argument was targeted against the Cromwellian reformers of Britain, who were, in Hobbes’ opinion, causing civil war(s) and political violence. See, e.g., Neal (1988), Connolly (1993, pp. 16–40), and Hobbes (1974, p. 101), about the historical non-existence of the “state of nature”. 2

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avoid risking a major military catastrophe in the future (Deudney, 2000 and 2008, ch 8; K’Ang, 2005; Morgenthau, 1960, pp. 530–9; Wagar, 1961, 1999; Wells, 1902; Wendt, 2003, pp.  516–28). As anticipated by Kant and later by K’Ang and H.G.  Wells, and as I have discussed in Chap. 6, the system of separate states is loaded with powers of destruction characteristic of the planetary-nuclear era: jet airplanes, rockets and missiles, satellites, nuclear explosives, and other technologies. These powers may remain idle for a period of time, yet under particular—however exceptional they may appear—future circumstances they can come to be used, resulting in a global and planetary disaster. Similarly, one can argue that to overcome “the tragedy of commons” (Hardin, 1968) which may threaten our survival as a species in the Earth system, we need a common state. When securitised in this manner, effects of the climate change and other critical biosphere-related issues can be seen as dangerous as those of a military catastrophe. Either way, the assumption is that once a world state is established, every rational actor is assumed to accept the validity of its rule out of (a generalised) self-interest. The security-military argument is conceptually ambiguous. It is ambiguous ex ante of the establishment of a world state or anything analogical because the Hobbesian argument is meant to justify obedience to an existing state (by warning people what would happen if they did not obey), not to justify creating a new one. From an ex ante perspective, the security-military argument is vulnerable to the collective action problem. (cf. Wendt, 2003, p. 509). Ex post, or after, the establishment of a global state, this argument may all too easily serve as a constant reminder of the potential threat posed by some others and related stories about their past wrong-­ doings. Moreover, this argument for legitimacy is highly conservative: it justifies any order against claims to change, thus diminishing rather than increasing the self-­ transformative capacity of contexts. Yet, there will always be disputes and conflicts between social forces. As argued in Chap. 5, there can never be a stable “order”, an eternally fixed set of practices and institutions. It is not possible to tame or freeze history for a long time. History is a changing and open-ended process. New interests and claims will emerge and new messages demanding changes will be sent and made public. The security-military argument may thus become counterfinal from the point of view of establishing a security community (Adler & Barnett, 1998; Deutsch et al., 1957; Lijphart, 1981; Patomäki, 2002, ch 8). To simplify if, despite sustained efforts, there is no responsiveness from the side of status quo forces, a regressive or pathological learning process may occur among those advocating changes. Over time, this may lead to the escalation of conflict and (threats of) violence. The preparedness to use large-scale violence inside and/or outside indicates non-integration and is a sign of an insecurity community. In contrast, security communities are characterised by the expectation that future changes are going to be peaceful; and that others can be trusted generically. Regional or global integration generates non-preparedness to use violence. The end-point of this process can be explicated as follows (see Patomäki, 2002, pp. 200–202):

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A1. If a social system has become integrated, no relevant actor has reason to prepare for the use of political violence. A2. As actors know (A1), they do not expect anybody to use political violence either to preserve status quo or to foster changes. B1. Non-preparedness becomes a generally followed and rarely if ever questioned rule of action. B2. In the course of social time, (A2) becomes an automatic, routine-like, and self-­ evident presupposition of political thought, argumentation, and action. Integration in this sense can be seen as an outcome of the successful functioning of the circle of non-violence (Fig. 7.1). Thus, in stage B, the security argument fades into the social background of the taken-for-granted; and the security community becomes an asecurity community, in which security is no more an issue. The case of European integration seems to support this generic conclusion. The Hobbesian security-military argument has been used to legitimise the EU, and it has motivated many European actors, but its factual role has been decreasing over time (it can of course be replaced by EU-scale securitisation related to some perceived dangers, such as flows of migration, Russia, or China). A key problem is that instead of contributing to “we”-feeling and collective identity, the Hobbesian argument justifying obedience may reinforce the separation of different identities and opinions and also for that reason, stage B2 may not be reached. These problems probably explain why—despite the dramatic force of the security-­military argument—regional integration processes have been usually justified more in terms of technical-functionalist arguments, as in the so-called Monnet method of European integration. Similar arguments have been used also in many global contexts.3 After the failure of the post-World War II federalist projects, the Western European integration process started as a functionalist system of cooperation loosely along the lines of the theories of Jean Monnet (as articulated by Schuman, 1994; earlier Mitrany, 1943). The rather economistic expectation of many functionalists is that political loyalties and, thereby mainstream beliefs in the legitimacy of the system, should more or less automatically follow the transfer of technical, economic, and welfare functions from the nation-state to international and supranational organisations. Despite some attempts to introduce explicitly political notions such as citizenship, this approach still characterises the development of the EU. However, the legitimation problems of the EU—as is evident from a series of historical events such as unfavourable referenda, the Euro crisis, and Brexit—have also shown the limits of the Monnet method (for critical conceptual analysis, see  Including those discussed in this book, as responses to common problems require trans- and supranational cooperation and institutions involving some centralised direction (cf. Chaps. 7, 8, and 11). Practical cooperations implying sovereignty-sharing and common institutions are steps towards world statehood (cf. Weiss, 2009). I have also argued that a world state may come to be organised, at least to a significant degree, along functionalist lines; it does not have—and is unlikely—to resemble existing territorial states (see Partington, 2003 on Well’s vision). 3

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Patomäki, 1997). Although functionalist and neo-functionalist theories are motivated by critical-reflexive moral considerations, they seem to presuppose the fulfilment of Weber’s (1978) anticipation that over time the abstract, quantitative, and impersonal media of money displaces other considerations. Weber presumed that the rationally calculative orientation will become increasingly prevalent in the next century—that is, by the early twenty-first century—replacing those action orientations that are based on ethical-political values or some (perhaps religious) meanings considered significant to the lives and actions of individuals and collectives. To the extent that (i) the instrumentalist orientation constituted by the media of money prevails in capitalist market society and (ii) trans- or supranational cooperation is widely perceived as technically more efficient than mere national operations, the functionalist argument—abstracted from a wider social context and its normative underpinnings—may work, to a point. However, these conditions can never be met more than partially. Although Weber may have been right about the overall long-term trends, the displacement of other action orientations can never be completed (as argued in different ways, e.g., by Habermas, 1984; Connolly, 1993). Moreover, there have also been counter-­ movements working against the powerful thrust of capitalist modernisation (and against related processes of commodification, Chap. 8). Thus, attempts to push functionalist political economy integration beyond the limits of prevailing loyalties, solidarities, and ethical-political sentiments are insufficient and may become counterproductive in terms of reactions against the implied instrumentalism, utilitarianism, and accompanying commodification, however moral the underlying motivation may be. Another problem with the security and functionalist arguments is that they ignore the lessons of the historical processes of modern state formation. Modern European states could not have succeeded in progressively establishing their legitimate monopoly over violence by just dispossessing their competitors of instruments of physical violence by stronger means of violence. Neither did they prove their worth by mere technical-functionalist means. They also engaged in what Norbert Elias (1978) calls the civilising process,4 involving the adoption of religious pluralism among states and, at times, also religious freedom within the state; and embraced new universalising principles while forging particular national imaginaries to justify and legitimise their territorial rule. This is how the nation became the main focus of political imagination. I will come back to the concept of civilising process shortly.

 It is worth noting that what is often considered as his principal work, The Civilizing Process. The History of Manners (1978, but originally published in German in 1939) is a study of the development of the social control of many basic bodily functions such as eating, urinating, defecating, mating, spitting, blowing one’s nose, etc. 4

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 n the Elusive Nature of Overlapping Consensus O and Public Opinion At this point, it is useful to have a look at John Rawls’s concept of overlapping consensus, to understand better the intricate and multifaceted conditions of legitimacy of governance and government.5 From a normative perspective, legitimacy concerns society’s main political, social, and economic institutions, and how they fit together in forming a system of peaceful conflict resolution and social cooperation. Rawls (1985, p. 226) argues that “there are periods, sometimes long periods, in the history of any society during which certain fundamental questions give rise to sharp and divisive political controversy, and it seems difficult, if not impossible, to find any shared basis of political agreement”. These periods are often associated with war, such as the European wars of religion from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century (e.g. conflicts in France between Protestants and Roman Catholics, the Thirty Years War, Toggenburg War) or the Chinese rebellions and civil wars of the eighteenth and nineteenth century (in particular the White Lotus Rebellion, Taiping Rebellion, and Dungan Revolt). Based on these kinds of historical experiences, Rawls (p.  225) argues that a workable conception of political justice “must allow for a diversity of doctrines and the plurality of conflicting, and indeed incommensurable, conceptions of the good affirmed by the members of existing democratic societies”. To the extent possible, the basis of political agreement and legitimacy should be independent of controversial philosophical and religious doctrines. In many contexts, a rather modest aim must suffice: to narrow the range of public disagreement. On the other hand, Rawls posits a historical learning process whereby firmly held convictions can gradually change. As a result, “religious toleration is now accepted, and arguments for persecution are no longer openly professed; similarly, slavery is rejected as inherently unjust, and however much the aftermath of slavery may persist in social practices and unavowed attitudes, no one is willing to defend it”. (p. 228) According to Rawls, behind this learning process there is a more fundamental idea of “society as a system of fair social cooperation between free and equal persons”. By the same token, he admits that even within this liberal conception, there are deep disagreements about the meaning of freedom and equality and the place of the good life (e.g. economic liberalism and private consumption and possessions vs. republicanism that stresses the importance of public virtues for good life and society). What different parties must accept is the principle of toleration, as  This suggestion is likely to raise two immediate objections: (i) Rawls’s theory is methodologically nationalist, based on the invalid empirical (or ontological) premise that at least some national societies such as the USA are self-sufficient—or at least can be self-reliant—thus making a strict distinction between the theory of justice (domestic) and the law nations (international); and (ii) Rawls follows the contractarian tradition in thinking that there must be a singular agreement or conception establishing the basic structures of society all at once, in contrast to the evolutionary and pluralist account developed in this book. For a critical short review and assessment of The Law of Peoples (Rawls, 1999) and its misleading underpinnings, see Patomäki (2007). The second problem does not make Rawls’s analysis of legitimacy in large industrial market society and constitutional government irrelevent for my purposes—and Rawls’s analysis can be expanded. 5

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the only alternative to a principle of toleration is the autocratic use of state power. “To secure this agreement we try, so far as we can, to avoid disputed philosophical, as well as disputed moral and religious, questions.” (p.  230) This is not because these questions are uninteresting or unimportant, but because there is no way they can be settled politically without resorting to violence. The notion of overlapping consensus illuminates some of the difficulties of legitimation in complex modern societies. The overlapping consensus is an area of agreement, supposedly shared by all reasonable doctrines. For Rawls, the two principles of justice understood politically remain that (1) each person has an equal right to the most extensive basic liberty compatible with a similar liberty for others, and (2) social and economic inequalities are to be arranged so that: a) they are to be of the greatest benefit to the least-advantaged members of society and b) offices and positions must be open to everyone under conditions of fair equality of opportunity. But what if this consensus seems different from the actually prevailing consensus; or if there appears to be no consensus on justice? Rawls argues that there must be such an agreement; otherwise, we are on a slippery slope towards political violence, towards new wars of religion. Romand Coles (2005, chs. 1–2) disagrees with what he calls Rawls’ politics of fear. The assertion that a fundamental choice between liberalism, with its assumption of some sort of neutral currency, procedure, or set of institutions, and a ubiquitous threat of violence is dogmatically stated—there is no real argument for it. In the Appendix of Chap. 7, I pointed out that there is no simple automatic logic or deterministic law according to which monotheism—or religion more generally— must lead to intolerance, repression, and violence. It can, but religion can also underlie pacifism involving tolerance or pluralism. In particular, if actors accept epistemological relativism, they will adopt a version of pluralism. Engaged pluralism is more than, and different from, mere tolerance; pluralism is about active interaction, debate, and learning about and from others (e.g. Rescher, 1993). In contexts where peaceful (or “civilised”, see below) dialogue about fundamentals is possible, it entails recognition of equality and institutions corresponding to such recognition. This argument can be generalised to cover a variety of discussions concerning the basic structures of society. For example, within the tradition of liberalism, there have been many thinkers from John Locke to Robert Nozick (1975) who have assumed that if property is justly acquired and freely transferred, then no political authority may touch that property, possibly not even via taxation. In this tradition, private property rights have often been perceived as sacred, metaphysically grounded, or, simply superior in terms of economic theories, and are therefore placed outside the sphere of rational dialogue and politics. Presumably, many lay actors have shared these or some such assumptions. The point is that to the extent that attempts to transform private property rights are poorly tolerated in a Lockean-Nozickian context, they can easily trigger reactions that may—depending on specific geohistorical circumstances—start a cycle of responses leading towards violence. This illustrates how the problem does not lie in religion as such, but rather in the propensity to fix aspects of social reality as something that cannot be legitimately changed—or even as something that does not allow

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for different opinions. In contrast, Rawls (1973, p. 61) contends that the right to own means of production is not a basic liberty (unlike the right to hold personal property). For Rawls, it is in large part an empirical question of whether a liberal-­ capitalist or liberal-socialist market economy is more efficient and better realises the ideals of justice (pp. 265–284). The choice of the institutions of political economy is not only instrumental, however, “[i]t determines in part the sort of persons they want to be as well as the sort of persons they are” (p. 259). Moreover, for Rawls justice has priority over efficiency and liberty over objective social and economic advantages. Thus, authoritarian institutions cannot be justified in terms of efficiency or economic benefits. Hence, the choice is not between a particular version of liberalism vs. the threat of violence. Rather it concerns the extent to which civilised dialogue, pluralism, and self-transformative capacity can be relied on—perhaps taken for granted—in a given context, which always involves a background, which may be constituted by a hegemonic or dominant “overlapping consensus” containing mystifications and illusions. Liberalism itself can fix aspects of social contexts as sacred or metaphysical or more generally as something beyond legitimate politics. All theories and ideologies do this to some extent (e.g., freedom of speech can be taken as absolute, although there are necessarily some limits). Here, it is essential to distinguish between Weberian positive and Habermasian normative legitimacy. On the one hand, the probability that action will be guided by the belief in the legitimacy of a given order may be at variance with a critical normative analysis of the reasons for such a belief. On the other hand, the failure to diagnose empirically the geohistorical contents of a context—including whether the prevailing overlapping consensus and sense of community involve, or may develop, into a will in the sense of Fig. 5.6.—can result in misleading anticipations of the consequences of actions (Fig. 7.1). These possibilities indicate the multifaceted and convoluted nature of the legitimation processes of governance/government. Some of these intricacies can be analysed through the concept of public opinion (here my analysis summarises some of the basic points of Patomäki, 1997; and Patomäki, 2018, ch 2). The dynamics of swings in public opinion are subtle, multilayered, and often reflexive. A typical understanding is that “public opinion” consists of privately held preferences and can be operationalised as a majority opinion on a given issue. By analogy to a referendum, public opinion can be represented, or perhaps simulated, by public opinion polls. Public opinion is rarely if ever unanimous. No matter what the issue is, and independently of how hegemonic or dominant a given overlapping consensus is, there are bound to be different opinions. Public opinion can be manipulated to a degree without losing entirely its uncontrollability and unpredictability. Ignorance can make actors particularly open to influences and susceptible to the manipulation of meanings. Public opinion is shaped by the prevailing institutional arrangements including those of the media. Public opinion can be self-referential as actors form their own opinions in part in relation to claims about what “the public opinion” is, while they can also appeal to the alleged essence of the national or other collectives, such as class or religious community. Public opinion has often been made to speak in the name of “the people”, “common

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people”, “silent majority”, “mainstream”, etc. Public opinion is thus a context-­ sensitive, relational, and also reflexive phenomenon. Even a limited first-order impact on opinions and sentiments can suffice to shift overall public opinion, especially if the overall learning and power dynamics resonate with that shift. Public opinion can be constitutive of social realities; it can authorise particular actions and practices. Public opinion concerns not only security and functionalist arguments for legitimacy, the latter habitually understood and measured in terms of money (economics), but also social issues, identity (self-other relations), higher-order purposes, various values such ecology, health, justice, and democracy, and at times also religion. Public opinion may exhibit stability over time, yet it can be difficult to identify any particular “overlapping consensus” merely by employing the often vague and vacillating opinion polls (Rawls’s claim about such a consensus is reconstructive, not empirical). The overlapping and sufficiently shared understandings may concern justice or any of the above-mentioned issues and values, but they may also reside in the background of practices (actors generally follow certain rules and procedures and accept rights and obligations in their everyday practices). All this can be compatible with an enduring system of peaceful conflict resolution and social cooperation. From this perspective, I will next have a closer look at civilising process and moral learning.

On the Idea of a “Civilising Process” To the extent that my criticism of the incompleteness and potentially counterproductive nature of the security-based and functionalist arguments for world integration is correct, a WPC is unlikely to emerge or be sustainable, without a civilising and story-telling process appropriate for the identity of world citizens. Thus, a WPC seems to require a global and planetary imaginary constituting some sense of “we”ness. In Chap. 2, I developed the idea that critical cosmopolitanism has historically been grounded in non-geocentric physical (NGP) cosmology, although the latter does not, as such, imply the former. In Chap. 3, I outlined how Big History (BH) attempts to overcome Eurocentrism and then explored two rather different accounts of non-geocentric physical cosmology that are compatible with established theories of science, making the case for the process- and life-oriented variant. In Chap. 4, I argued—by employing historical counterfactuals about the industrial revolution and its consequences—that modern Europe is merely a possible manifestation and moment in a process that is best understood as a global and planetary history of humanity and the process of its collective learning. The critical and emancipatory arguments of the rest of the chapters are based on such a cosmological and historical imaginary. Here, I aim to connect these framings to the ideas of civilising process and moral learning. Public opinion and legitimacy have a variety of possible sources and contents. These and their combinations change over time and space, as do the normatively or historically relevant constituencies of legitimation (e.g. other organisations, state

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elites, citizens, see Dellmuth et  al., 2022). As indicated above, especially in the liberalist tradition, a widely adopted historical lesson is that conflict- and violence-­ prone religious doctrines should be barred from the political sphere. Freedom of religion should prevail within the state and pluralism of religions among states. This historical lesson discussed by Rawls has also been part of what Elias calls the civilising process, which reduces the role of violence in social relations. In the appendix of Chap. 7, however, I stressed that globalisation in the deeper sense, as a coming-together of humanity, requires an open-ended dialogue about the fundamentals, including in terms of religious questions (whatever forms they may assume). What is more, many other issues—not least those concerning private property rights—can under certain circumstances become conflict- and violence-­prone. Some strands of liberalism have defended these rights as sacred, god- or naturegiven, or otherwise mystified. What matters for peaceful conflict resolution and social cooperation is the self-transformative capacity of contexts, which in turn requires the capacity and willingness of actors to engage in a civilised dialogue in an ethical and pluralist way and accept the possibility of such outcomes of political processes that are variance with their beliefs and convictions. The notion of “civilising process” can appear Eurocentric in three different ways: (1) the process started in Europe with deeper historical roots in imperial Rome; (2) the concept of being “civilised” has time and again created a contrast to the outsiders providing a rationale for colonialism and imperial expansion, and (3) the originally European transformations were imported to other regions under the pressure to modernise and acquire membership in the international society (Linklater, 2021). An easy response would consist of insisting that specific geohistorical actors are— and some of them must serve as—carriers of universal processes, also when the selection of those actors is contingent, even arbitrary, from a wider perspective (cf. the argument of Chap. 4). This response is not only simplistic but also normatively problematic, however. Three complications must be taken into account when analysing and assessing the Eurocentric nature of the “civilising process”. First, the tendency to distinguish between “us” and the barbarians (“non-civilised people”, savages, infidels, etc.) in the periphery or outside is more general than the civilising process described by Elias. For example, the compound words, “wenming” and “wenhua” used in opposition to “ignorance” and “barbarity”, have appeared in the Chinese language since ancient times (Xingtao, 2011, p. 2). What changed in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in Europe and China (and many other locations of the planet) was the adoption of the notion of evolutionary development understood linearly. Second, it is possible to distinguish among different contents of civilising processes. The eighteenth-century French court etiquette that provided a model to follow for many in Europe was no more universal than similar Chinese court habits and rituals. What is likely to be the more general and lasting features of the civilising process concern changing attitudes towards violence and modes of punishment and modern state institutions. These developments have often been uneven, Europe being a latecomer. For example, a civilising process of taming the warriors or military took place in China long before similar trajectories in Europe (Linklater, 2021, p. 19; for a more general account of the evolving Chinese

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civilisation and its role in East Asia, Kang, 2010). Third, it must be stressed that the Whiggish tendency to see progress as something leading inevitably, in a linear manner, to “our” advanced present must generate major disappointments in open systems, in which learning can be regressive or pathological, complexity can decline or collapse, and disintegrative tendencies may prevail for periods of time. Linklater (2021, p.  16; for a discussion, see Kallis, 2021) summarises the mid-twentieth-­ century European experience: Elias argued that, in the main, European peoples in the 1920s and 1930 were unprepared for the violence and cruelty that occurred under National Socialism—for a collapse into forms of savagery that had been supposedly been eradicated from Europe. The majority of people were blind to the “breakdown of civilization” and the “reversion to barbarism” […].

The moral shocks of the first half of the twentieth century shaped global relations of power. Following the cruelty and sufferings of WWI, the Nazi reversion to barbarism “broadened the assault on the old international distinction between civilized and semi-civilized or savage peoples” (p. 191). While this distinction has justified relations of domination and exploitation, it has also generated multiple reactions against what is perceived as Western arrogance (it is also notable that reactions especially within Russia against the rise of the European powers originally contributed to the emergence of “the West” as a concept; Heller, 2010). The inclination towards moral imperialism—the temptation to see oneself as the bearer and promoter of universal values in terms of “civilisation”—must be distinguished from critical cosmopolitanism. The latter involves distance taking from any particular “us” as a particular community, nation, or state (see the beginning of Chap. 2). A key to the successful overcoming of violent antagonisms lies, at least in some part, in collective learning via collective self-criticism. The BH perspective shares with critical cosmopolitanism the disapproval of Eurocentrism, Sinocentrism, or whatever centrism. If one looks deep enough, the history of every group, every class, and every country involves at least some episodes that not only could but also should have been otherwise.6 In that sense, it is always possible to locate negative otherness in one’s past—and from a universalist perspective, one knows that this applies to everyone. Moreover, the BH perspective is oriented also towards the future, anticipating the possibility of collective learning, a global security community, and adequate institutional responses to common global and planetary processes. The unification of humanity provides a new vantage point for writing world  For instance, a constitutive layer of my geohistorical identity concerns “Finnishness”. In accordance with the perspective of critical cosmopolitanism, I can, e.g., acknowledge (i) the horrors of the Finnish civil war in 1918 in which both sides committed unnecessary and unjustifiable acts of violence (there is nothing inherently civilised about Finland); and (ii) the role of Finland as an ally of Nazi-Germany in 1941–1944, which involved taking part in the murderous Siege of Leningrad from September 1941 to January 1944. The alliance with Hitler was legitimised as a payback for the costs of the Winter War and in terms of creating a Greater Finland by an eastwards expansion (people tend to remember only the Winter War of 1939–40 when the Soviet Union attacked Finland; however, with territorial concessions and exchange, it could have been possible to avoid that war as well). 6

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history and viewing “us”. What we are now—whoever we may be in terms of our specific relational geo-historical identity—constitutes a form of possibly negative otherness that will be otherwise in the future. From a critical perspective, it is easy to see that the meaning of particular geohistorical habits, rituals, and etiquettes lies often in self-other distinctions—including vis-à-vis other strata of society—rather than in learning the skills of non-violence and dialogue. Hence, these kinds of markers of being civilised may be more an expression of moral imperialism than critical cosmopolitanism. This indicates that the sustainable features of the civilising process should be distinguished from its particular forms or, to use a biological metaphor, phenotypes. The civilising process can manifest itself in a variety of ways and be practiced by different people in different traditions in a plurality of ways. Moreover, it can also result from unintended consequences. For example, parties of a conflict agree on some institutional restraints and procedures, which subsequently become established—even against the intentions of the actors. Institutional and ideological clusters are the results of contingent developments and in any world-historical context, these clusters can combine elements in a variety of ways (akin to “combined and uneven” developments). This does not imply that there is no directionality, but it means that Whiggish histories are misleading. Indeed, the abstract core of the idea of a civilising process should be distinguished from attempts to represent a selective distortion of the past as a story of inevitable progress towards the present and some particular “us”. Tzvetan Todorov (2010, pp. 21–22) defines civilisation as a process that consists of two stages. First comes a recognition that others live differently and, second, a recognition of the full humanity of these others, despite the differences. Civilisation makes it difficult to tell Whig histories. A key question is whether there are reasons to believe that world history is somehow—inevitably or otherwise—taking humanity in a cosmopolitan direction. Are attempts to civilise humanity and cultivate planetary stories about “our” common fate thus grounded in something? For example in Chap. 4, I indicated that some coherence and direction can be identified: the general direction of history is from less to more revisability (what Robert Unger, 1997 calls “plasticity” and “negative capability”). Andrew Linklater (1982, 1990, 1998, 2007) has articulated multiple— mostly normatively oriented—reasons for believing in the gradual emergence of a WPC. From the viewpoint of a type of ethical universalism (1982), he argues that the success or failure of the critical theory of international relations will be determined by the amount of light cast on present possibilities of change towards a moral world community (1990, p.  172). Linklater’s idea is that by knowing the factors contributing to the development of the moral community of humankind, or cosmopolis, it should be possible to strengthen, perhaps in an instrumentalist manner or through education, these alternative tendencies. For example, Linklater maintains that the capitalist world economy has generated complex interdependencies and various transnational forces that are assembling the conditions for a universal human community. (See Linklater, 1990, 1998, 2007). The overall argument is indicative: there seem to be several normative, sociological, and geo-historical reasons to expect the emergence and, then, consolidation of a WPC.

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Linklater’s (2007, 2021) interpretation of (Elias’s) civilising process points towards the same direction. His interpretation can be summarised in terms of shortand long-term patterns and contradictory tendencies in those patterns (Elias, 2008; Linklater, 2021, ch 7). First, the history of humanity has been characterised by rounds of a vast civilising process, involving new techniques, problem-solving, coordination of activities, and restraints on violence in increasingly large and complex communities (Camilleri & Falk, 2009, chs. 1–4). Overall, this process amounts to, however tentatively and unevenly, a collective learning process. Despite the ongoing integrative process, there has also been “a continuous conflict with countervailing, decivilizing processes”, which has resulted in the collapse of many complex societies (Elias, cited in Linklater, 2021, p.  225). The process can also be complicated by major discrepancies. In the early twenty-first century, the prevailing emotional and moral bonds lag behind the expanding and deepening human interconnectedness. Global we-identity has little if any meaning for many people and thus, from a normative point of view, “the task to construct a world order anchored in shared civilizational orientations” is “enormous” (p.  227). Linklater maintains that the loyalties to the national-territorial state have been strengthened by the early twenty-first-century national-populist revolt against neoliberal globalisation. Linklater’s interpretation is enlightening, but also problematic, not least in terms of mixing different time scales. In the early parts of human history, the scale is thousands if not tens of thousands of years; in the contemporary era, only decades at the most. It also falls short of providing an account of the mechanisms of learning.

 unctional Differentiation, Institutions, F and Ethical-Political Learning It is true that in the early twenty-first century, the metaphors that envisage the human world as a whole—from the “global shopping mall” or “global village” to the “spaceship Earth”—remain thin compared to the deep-rooted poetics of national imaginaries. The same holds for global and planetary memories, rituals, and ceremonies. Consider, for example, the United Nations (UN) Day on 24 October each year, marking the anniversary of the entry into force in 1945 of the UN Charter; Earth Day established by UNESCO (the UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization) in 1969, or World Environment Day established by the UN at the Stockholm Conference on the Human Environment in 1972. They are yet to capture political imagination in the same way as the national independence days. The process of constructing shared meanings, holoreflexive orientations, and higher-order purposes can be analysed in terms of complex ideological clusterings. Against Rawls, I have argued that there does not have to be a singular agreement or conception establishing the basic structures of society all at once. An evolving layer of interconnected elements of world statehood—many of which are functional organisations—does not require a general agreement in the contractarian sense or an all-encompassing set of constitutive meanings. Emancipatory and other changes may occur at the level of global regime complexity and involve tailor-made rather

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than one-size-fits-all responses to problems that are to an important degree issue-­ specific (Kuyper, 2014). In addition, the intricacies and complexities of shifting and possibly still nationally oriented public opinion can be, across many contexts, compatible with an enduring system of conflict resolution and social cooperation in any given area of large-scale functional governance. Meanwhile, in some areas, a global we-identity may become stronger than the national-territorial orientation. A global we-identity can emerge through context-specific meanings, even when actors’ political imagination remains largely confined to the meanings of a national-­ territorial state. Consider a planetary issue such as climate change. It is not a coincidence that the advocates and supporters of the current national-populist revolt tend to deny anthropogenic climate change or its importance, because the problem of global warming suggests a global “we”-ness. Although the protection of the climate (and similarly biological species against extinction, etc.) may be conceived in terms of a governance function that relates a subsystem to the world social system as a whole, the concept of the Anthropocene changes the framing entirely. The concept of the Anthropocene—adopted widely since the early 2000s—suggests more than just a common fate and identity in one functional area of governance; it suggests a reconfiguration of symbols on a more fundamental level implying the possibility of an ecological civilising process (Linklater, 2021, pp.  247–248). It identifies the human system as a part of a much wider and more fundamental Earth system, which it can nonetheless shape to a degree—often with detrimental effects. Moreover, as the Anthropocene is a historical phase in the evolution of life and society on planet Earth, it strongly suggests a BH perspective as the purpose of BH is to establish a sense of belonging to a wide planetary whole. As we remember from Chap. 3, the BH hope is that the modern origin story will forge global we-­ feeling and cooperation in our world plagued by global problems. This potential and framing raise ethical-political questions about responsibility, justice, legitimacy, and so forth, possibly constituting a space for non-violent and democratic world politics, as outlined especially in Chap. 11. Although rituals, ceremonies, and formal educational effort may play a role in the process of building a world political community, the mutually enabling dynamics of institution- and community-building is likely to be much more important, and perhaps especially so in a functionally differentiated world society (see Albert et al., 2013; cf. Albert, 2016, arguing that “world politics” is a subsystem of the political system of world society). Institutions that are perceived to make difference draw attention and generate political actions, discussions, and struggles. Thereby they can, even if only indirectly and contingently, facilitate the cultivation of shared practices and civilisational orientations. Oftentimes this process revolves around functionally differentiated professions, involving the possibility that the system of experts and abstract knowledge is seen to contribute to the collective good (Thomas, 2013, p. 40; cf. Peter Haas’s, 1992 concept of “epistemic community”). This kind of understanding establishes a higher-order purpose and a world identity—or at least the potential for it. However, as already indicated, technocratically conceived functionalism is precarious for a variety of reasons. Attempts to push functionalist integration beyond the limits of prevailing loyalties, solidarities, and ethical-political

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sentiments are insufficient and may become counterproductive. Expert discourses and practices associated with particular international or global organisations may be perceived as distant, undemocratic, or elitist. These kinds of perceptions tend to be strengthened or aggravated under particular political economy circumstances, especially if they generate existential insecurity among many (for analysis in the early twenty-first century world-historical context, Patomäki, 2018, 2020a). The practical and institutional context of learning matters, and we can talk about the dialectics of institution- and community-building. Every “we”-identity involves conflicts and politics within public spaces (these spaces may concern multiple fields, see Patomäki, 2022). Also through these conflicts, the dialectics of institution- and community-building can have wide transformative effects. Collective learning occurs via political debates and struggles that can take the form of consensus or compromise agreements; dialogues and debates; majority decisions; attempts to manipulate the background context; outright force, with its likely counterproductive effects; or a combination of these. Typically, asymmetric relations of structural power favour particular outcomes and directions of development. However, whenever there is a breakthrough in terms of institution-building, a new context emerges, which can enable new practical-political activities and further normative learning. While efficiency in terms of functional tasks and outcomes is important for legitimacy, often what matters is first-hand or second-hand experience of participation. The more there are opportunities to participate, the more widely the context matters to actors. Over time, the institutional context can become part of the taken-­ for-­granted background, even though it remains necessarily open to the possibility of later politicisation. The process leading to national states can be compared to a global civilising process. The two major institutional building blocks of the modern imagined communities of nation-states were the monopolisation of the means of legitimate violence and the development of systems of taxation. In Chap. 6, I discussed building elements of world statehood in the functional area defined by weapons of mass destruction (i.e.  monopolisation of some means of violence); and in Chap. 11, I made the case for establishing a global greenhouse gas tax (developing a system of taxation, enabling fiscal policy and redistribution). More generally, global taxes are possible and likely responses to perceived problems also in many other areas (for example, finance), while global governance of the world economy requires many other institutional innovations as well (for example, an international clearing union including a world central bank).7 While educational efforts are important  Behind trade wars and other trade disputes lies a simple contradiction. Trade deficits and surpluses cancel out. Countries with trade surpluses tend to have savings surpluses, whereas countries with trade deficits tend to accumulate debt. The compositional fallacy occurs when it is assumed that what is possible for a single given actor at a given time is possible for all of them simultaneously. Individual responses through unilateral measures can lead to a spiral of tit-for-tat retaliations, aggravating the situation further. To overcome the underlying contradiction and to respond to German plans for the post-WWII world, J.  M. Keynes developed the idea of International Clearing Union in 1941–44 (the basic historical story is summarised in Patomäki, 2022, pp. 89–92). The most prominent subsequent ICU proposals include those of the Brandt Commission, Paul 7

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throughout the process, various rituals, ceremonies, etc., are likely to follow the establishment of the importance of the institutional setting for practical activities. So at least in some regards, the global civilising process can mimic the establishment of “nations”.

 hy Higher-level Identifications and Purposes are W Normatively Better Many of the arguments of this book imply that a shift towards higher-level identifications and purposes constitutes rational learning. However, for a critical cosmopolitan, “later” or “higher” does not automatically mean “better”. Rather, there must be a normative-philosophical rationale for why a higher stage is a better stage, i.e. why each later stage is a better method of reasoning about social rules and principles and thus more adequate for human cooperation and resolving conflicts (stages and some of the more recent philosophical discussions about them are summarised in Patomäki, 2022, appendix). Lawrence Kohlberg’s articles “From Is to Ought” (1971) and “The Claim to Moral Adequacy of the Highest Stage of Moral Judgment” (1973) develop the argument that each higher stage can answer questions or problems unsolved at the next lower stage. Empirically it can be established that higher stages are both cognitively more difficult and perceived by subjects as more adequate (moreover, with collective learning, relevant contexts change and earlier stages may become increasingly obsolete and inadequate). Normatively, a key consideration is the degree of generalisability—indicating plausibility and stability of judgements in differentiated and complex multi-actor contexts—and the related capacity for abstract role-taking. Higher-stage reasoning is both more differentiated (implying a more nuanced understanding of social realities) and more integrated (implying symmetry and consistency) than the prior stage. (Kohlberg, 1973, p. 641). Stages represent successive modes of taking the role of others in one’s reflective consciousness developing through (i) practical conflicts, (ii) attempts to resolve them, and (iii) subsequent conceptual-logical re-organisations. A more adequate conceptualisation and logic of reasoning do not, however, determine the substance of moral judgement. Actors at the critical-reflexive level can have genuine disagreements about the right course of action, or the right rules and principles when they are dealing with complex normative problems. A partial analogy can be made between individual and collective learning, although there are major ontological and normative differences between the two. In both cases, the sequence of cognitive stages is conceptual-logical rather

Davidson, and Joseph Stiglitz together with Bruce Greenwald. Konsta Kotilainen (2022) assesses these proposals from the perspective of democratic, ethico-social, and existential concerns humanity faces. Although Kotilainen finds each proposal to have its own merits, none of them is fully satisfactory in all relevant respects. Besides eliminating trade wars, he concludes that an appropriately designed International or Global Clearing Union could play a helpful role in resolving also many other potentially fatal current and future issues of humanity.

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than just empirically correct. This explains why an individual can reach higher stages in a sufficiently enabling context spontaneously and why the order of learning must be roughly the same in both cases. The generative structures of reasoning may come to be embedded in social practices and institutions, although this is always contingent on many things, including political struggles. Learning is contingent and can be unlearnt, both individually and collectively. The societal composition of stages of moral reasoning is dependent on the learning and maturation processes of each generation of individuals. Moreover, the conditions of selection of the “normal” cognitive stage can change through (unrecognised) circumstances and (unintended) consequences of diverse social actions, also gradually over long periods of time. What matters is the practical and institutional context of learning. Any society is composed of individuals at different stages of reasoning, and these may conflict with the learning embodied in the prevailing institutions. Habermas (1979, pp. 91–3) emphasises the tendency to fall back to lower levels of moral reasoning under the stress of insecurity and conflicts, due to the operation of various psychological conflict avoidance mechanisms. Violence and war can have especially far-reaching consequences on moral learning (for a classic argument that violence and war as such are detrimental to democracy, see Malinowsky, 1944). Similarly, in many closed institutions such as prisons, the practices tend to exhibit low-level reasoning. (Kohlberg, 1971, p. 193). In such circumstances, high participation in the available—pre-moral—roles does not lead to progressive moral learning any more than casual formal lectures about moral behaviour may do. Rather, the discrepancy between the practical context, on the one hand, and the official aims of teaching high principles of morality, on the other, can generate cynicism and pathological learning and, thereby, result in counterproductive outcomes. Learning to reason morally involves something different from the mere capacity for abstract logical reasoning. Capacity for role-taking and for looking at a situation from others’ perspective is a part of this, the minimal requirement being that one can see the relevance of others’ intentions and meanings. Actors must also be motivated to reason morally. Already the law-and-order orientation (law and order to secure life and private property rights or the whole social order are taken as fundamental or sacred) requires some sociological imagination at least in the sense of recognising that for any relevant self, one’s subjectivity or at least one’s life-chances and action-possibilities depend partly on how social relations, practices, and institutions are organised. In addition to these requirements, at the critical-reflexive stage arises the quest for justifying the validity of morality and ethical-political principles independently of the authority of the groups or persons holding these principles. At this stage, social relations and institutions are thus understood as being dependent on actors, actions, and politics, not something natural or given. This stage includes not only the contractarian and universal ethical principle orientations, but also discourse ethics and planetary macro-ethics. The basic principle of discourse ethics is that “only those norms can claim to be valid that meet (or could meet) with the approval of all affected in their capacity as participants in a practical discourse” (Habermas, 1990, p.  197). Planetary macroethics builds on discourse ethics and shares its basic principle while proposing a novel temporal orientation. Its interest

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lies in the future of humanity and the sustainability of planetary systems of life. Planetary macroethics is about future-directed responsibility. (Apel, 1992, p. 224). The idea of democracy is at the heart of the ambivalence of the concept of civilising process. On other hand, collective human learning involves democratisation. According to the theories of cognitive and moral learning, when a critical-reflexive stage of learning is reached, rules are not anymore taken as something external to individual actors and thus sacred or conventional in the authoritative sense. Rather, they come to be felt as the free product of mutual agreement and an autonomous conscience. In other words, actors come to understand that collective rules are the product of their autonomy and free, mutual agreement. (Kohlberg, 1971, pp. 164–5; Piaget, 1977, pp. 24–5). On the other hand, the alleged special character of multi-­ party liberal democracies of the West has provided—particularly after the end of the Cold War—a justification for “civilising missions” to transform autocratic societies and thus for various (including military) interventions, which have been interwoven with various (often self-serving) strategic purposes. Democracy promotion in this sense has not only “certain continuities with the civilizing offensives of the colonial era” (Linklater, 2021, p.  201) but is also tied to a particular limited meaning of democracy and has specific liberal political economy underpinnings in terms of property rights and economic policies (Kurki, 2013). This is not a universal telos of democratisation, but rather a specific aim that can be challenged and transformed within democratic processes. This raises questions about the telos of democratisation. According to theories of cognitive and moral learning, at the critical-reflexive stage, we come to understand that morality and ethical-political principles must have validity and application apart from the authority of any particular groups or persons or individual identification with any particular groups or institutions—including nations and states. With human learning advancing towards discourse ethics and beyond, there is a further call for a more differentiated dynamic between the intra-humanity self and others. Various critical and post-structuralist theories can be seen as correctives not only to Rawlsian but also to discourse-ethical moral reasoning (see Patomäki, 2020b, pp. 452–4; 2022, appendix). At the stage of discourse ethics and beyond, people identify themselves critical-reflexively as world citizens (which is already a latent possibility at earlier levels). Thereafter, arguably, a global and culturally pluralistic social democracy becomes a temporary telos of democratisation, promoted democratically by world citizens while also contested by many of them. Global social democracy, even if it were to succeed and however specified, would be no more than a transient phase. Moreover, its actualisation is contingent and depends also on the constitution of self-other relations. As in processes of democratisation, differences should not be let degenerate into superiority/inferiority (see Chap. 7). Ethical-political progress is a possibility built upon earlier layers of material-­structural possibilities and learning. Yet, as I have argued several times in various chapters, there is nothing inevitable about human progress. History is open-­ ended: even if an end-point is achieved, the future must remain open. In this critical-­ reflexive sense, there is nothing final about any particular historical telos such as global democracy (in some sense) realised within the framework of a world political

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community of some sort. Thus understood, global democracy is not the only purpose or the ultimate end-point of human history; but it provides a normatively compelling direction to world history in the twenty-first century. Is a shared global political identity possible without different outsiders, understood largely in negative evaluative terms, perhaps antagonistically as enemies? Would a global identity thus require outsiders to humankind as a whole? Arash Abizadeh (2005) explains how many of the standard arguments, according to which collective identity presupposes others, are fallacious. Followers of Hegel and other identity theorists tend to commit the fallacy of composition. Even though individual self-consciousness may require recognition by others, and although the identity of individuals may be dialogically constructed, it does not follow that collective identities are constructed in the same way. It is true that international legal sovereignty (which is a collective identity) presupposes recognition by another sovereign (another collective identity), but international legal sovereignty is a contingent geo-­ historical institution, not a metaphysical or trans-historical truth. Collectively, nothing else is required than the mutual recognition of, and dialogues among, the individuals and groups who form that collective identity. Furthermore, the followers of Carl Schmitt infer the actuality and effectivity of collective physical violence from its abstract possibility and in effect define politics in terms of war (the Schmittians reify a contingent outcome as an eternal truth about the nature of politics). Although a shared global political identity is thus possible without negatively evaluating co-existing others, any construction of a collective identity is vulnerable to the effects of othering and any identity involves differences and contrasts.

 onflicts and the Potential Collapse of a World C Political Community For the sake of the argument, let us suppose that the evolutionary processes analysed and envisaged in this book lead to integration on a global scale. Thus, many or most global and planetary systems are regulated in terms of holoreflexivity and long time horizon. Functional cooperation and institutions have succeeded in developing (relatively) adequate responses to many global contradictions and problems. Weapons of mass destruction are controlled collectively and global taxes have been established as components of world fiscal policy. The emergent layer of world statehood includes elements such as a clearing union (world central bank), a world parliament, and world political parties. In this scenario, all this is accompanied by a formation of a multilayered WPC.  The freedom thus gained facilitates other changes, which (i) may concern the tacit background and formative context or (ii) be specific to functional areas, organisations, or (sub-)identities. To reiterate, every telos is necessarily temporary and transitional in some scale of time. There are no ultimate ends in the world of multiple simultaneously ongoing processes. Independently of how dominant the layer of world statehood may become within a system of multilevel (meta)governance and government, that layer will require ongoing political support, authorisation, and validation in a complex and

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pluralistic world. Those may fail to materialise in open systems where unintended consequences often dominate. New wants, needs, and demands emerge and public opinions shift either in limited contexts or globally. To stress once again, it is reasonable to assume that the more amalgamated a global security community, the more contingencies there are likely to be. Social and political developments may turn out to induce regressive or pathological learning. Various historical meanings, metaphors, and myths are sedimented in the deep structures of discourses, from where they can be drawn for various reconfigurative and strategic purposes. Negative othering is likely to generate conflicts, which may escalate and cause further regression. There are many scenarios about how a WPC may disintegrate. Scenario 1: The first scenario is a partial, peaceful, and democratic dissolution of an already achieved unity. Brexit may be a geo-historically limited (and Eurocentric) example (for analyses, Morgan & Patomäki, 2018; Patomäki, 2018, chp 2), but something similar will remain possible also in future world systems. Political actors may take disintegrative initiatives—also for strategic reasons— especially in a context where the “public opinion” is turning against the legitimacy of a particular system. Public opinion is volatile and although it can sometimes be relatively stable for a while, it tends to change quickly, also unpredictably. Any turn may thus be temporary only, yet some actors may try to seize the moment. There is no way future supranational organisations—functional or other—can exclude disintegrative possibilities that are at least partly analogical to Brexit, especially as socio-­ economic and political circumstances can evolve in unanticipatable ways (even as many relevant causal processes have to do with political economy and can be more or less anticipatable).8 Some states may decide to be out of particular functional or other arrangements. Brexit as a process of disintegration did not involve violence or threat of violence despite some minor fishing disputes. It is also noteworthy that the post-Brexit UK remains part of many shared systems of governance with the EU. Scenario 2: A more striking—but in some ways also more traditional—scenario comes from W. Warren Wagar (1999), who imagines (as part of his single-path scenario for the next two centuries) a socialist world state governed by a democratic world parliament that has full legislative and budgetary powers. In this scenario, opposition to a highly amalgamated community demands and finally realises the disbandment of the world community. For many decades after establishment of the World Commonwealth in the 2060s, the “World Party” dominates elections, but gradually diverse strands of the opposition grow stronger. Over time, the opposition comes together under the idea that there should be a diversity of small political communities, thus questioning the fundamental principle of world unity. In the mid-­ twenty-­second century, in the wake of elections through which the “Small Party” rises to power, the main structures of the Commonwealth are dissolved, and, in their  However, it is possible to think that in the case of organisations whose regulatory and power rights are sufficiently far- reaching to justify an analogy to a major constitutional amendment, more than a simple majority in a referendum should be needed for such a change. A qualified majority could consist of two referenda separated in time (for example, by five or ten years), or a supermajority, for example 60%. 8

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stead, a large number of small political communities are established. By the mid-­ twenty-­second century, the circumstances have become so different that the consequences of this disintegration are much more benign than what would have been possible in the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Humanity has acquired new competencies and levels of reflexivity. “Its tools, societal structures, genetic endowment, and world outlook were qualitatively unlike anything known in earlier times” (Wagar, 1999, p. 241). Under these kinds of radically altered circumstances, the rapid and near-total disintegration of the highly amalgamated world political community occurs peacefully. Scenario 3: The third scenario is Deutschian: a partly pluralist, partly amalgamated security community is liable to the escalation of conflicts through experiences of negative political economy or other developments that aggravate uncertainty, insecurity, or other negative future-oriented sentiments. In the course of these developments, meanings and memories sedimented in the longue durée of social time are drawn for reconfigurative and strategic purposes. This results in episodes of regressive or pathological learning, though at first only in some limited contexts. A limited first-order impact on opinions and sentiments shifts the overall public opinion or shapes its divisions to some significant degree, especially as this impact resonates with particular concerns and interests of actors whose positioning in relational practices is changing (this may involve effects such as hysteresis; see, e.g., Hardy, 2012). Some actors define the pronoun “we” in potentially antagonistic contrast to some other part of the world political community. It is not difficult to imagine a situation in which two different “we”-communities at some level of collective purpose interact in ways that are perceived to threaten the existential conditions of both. The result is a volatile dynamic, which can easily lead to the escalation of the conflict. This dynamic may concern different layers of identities and lower and higher order purposes (considering that the prevailing overlapping consensus and sense of community may develop into a will and that security-based or functionalist argument for legitimacy can become counterproductive); but it may also occur at the same level of identity and purpose. Either way, as a result, the virtuous circle of non-violence weakens and integration begins to unravel at least in some significant part of the global system or location of the planet. There are myriad scenarios of possible further developments from this point. At one end, the overlapping consensus about the importance of civilised, non-violent conduct and the shared meanings and higher-­ order purposes may hold despite contrary tendencies—but if conflicts escalate further and violence starts to spread, the spectre of large-scale war will eventually return. Ultimately, a global civil war is no less dangerous than a major interstate war. In addition, the cold war may return, as humanity retains the capacity to produce weapons of mass destruction. Such scenarios are meant to be self-defeating prophecies. They do not constitute a Hobbesian security argument demanding submission to the absolute power of the sovereign. In the functionalist and democratic layer of world statehood, it can only serve as a meta-principle guiding moral conduct, social practices, and systems of education in a decentralised manner. As collective learning, moves towards higher levels of reflexivity, and the civilising process are contingent, the future of humanity depends on them. Whereas in the past the civilising

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process was based mainly on learning lessons from history, now we have to learn even more from possible futures as well. As stressed in Chap. 6, with increased reflexivity, the future will be co-determined more and more by normative discourse about its desirability, informed by scenarios about possible and likely futures.

Conclusions While the standard military-security and functionalist political economy arguments for planetary unification and political community may work to a certain point, they are incomplete and can become counterproductive. There must also be a belief in normative legitimacy, which may be anchored in some universalising principles such as justice, democracy, or some selected rights (about the relative primacy of democracy, Patomäki, 2006). In this light, I have explored the idea of overlapping consensus, theories of civilising process, and stages of ethical-political learning. Legitimation is not merely an empirical problem. It is also normative: whether and why a given order or system deserves the allegiance of its members. Political economy outcomes are often decisive, but the civilising process and construction of imagined communities cannot be reduced to political economy. Although the abstract, quantitative, and impersonal media of money have to a significant degree displaced other considerations, also markets require trust and a sense of justice (a key question in large-scale industrial market society concerns distributive justice). Thus, I have argued that a WPC is unlikely to emerge or be sustainable without a civilising and story-telling process involving a global and planetary imaginary constituting some normative notions and a sense of “we”-ness. This is less a matter of formal education than a potential result of the dialectics of institution- and community-building. For common institutions to be feasible and viable, the relevant context must be characterised by dialogue, pluralism, and self-transformative capacity. Yet, a context-­constitutive hegemonic or dominant “overlapping consensus” can involve mystifications and illusions. This does not concern only ideas about religion or nation or some such, although they are important too; rather, I have argued that liberalism itself can fix aspects of social contexts as sacred, metaphysical, or something beyond legitimate politics, not least property rights. While various constellations of ideological clusters can be compatible with an enduring system of peaceful conflict resolution and social cooperation, the analysis of this chapter resonates with points made already in Chap. 5 concening the role of social sciences and humanities. Critical social scientific explanations work for enhancing the self-­transformative capability of contexts by criticising untrue naturalisations, reifications, and fetishations of social being and related mystifications of knowledge; by explaining social processes and their outcomes; by making arguments for peaceful transformations, and by creating mechanisms of learning towards higher forms of reflexivity. Functional differentiation is a principal determinant of how the complex layer of world statehood will be organised at various phases of world history. Functional

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differentiation does not concern only professions and expert discourses or epistemic communities, but human and social actors in general. A global we-identity can emerge through meanings that are specific to a particular functional context, even in a context where actors’ political imagination remains largely confined to the meanings of a national-territorial state. I second the conclusion of many scholars and scientists, according to which the Earth’s ecological crisis is particularly important in this regard. Importantly, the concept of the Anthropocene suggests more than just a common fate and identity in one functional area of governance; it suggests a reconfiguration of symbols on a more fundamental level implying the possibility of an ecological civilising process. It identifies the human system as a part of a much wider and more fundamental Earth system and thus resonates strongly with the life-­ oriented version of BH discussed in Chap. 3. The life-oriented storyline cultivates the idea that the past as we know it may be a mere beginning of beginning. From this perspective, world history proper is only about to start.

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