Planetary Politics

A Manifesto

Lorenzo Marsili

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781509544783
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Political Philosophy

The global crisis of our time involves a complex of ecological, economic, technological and migratory challenges that no state is able to control. The result is a provincialisation of our democracies with respect to the new planetary powers confronting humanity. It is from this that our increasingly impotent and rabid politics stems. Paradoxical as it may seem, it is precisely the decline of the nation-state that is the source of the great nationalist uprising of our time. We need a new planetary vision that is able to reclaim and liberate our world, starting today and engaging each of us. This is the task of philosophy as much as it is of politics, of theory as it is of activism. Connecting with a new generation taking to the streets across the globe, this book tells the story of the ever-closer union of our world, from the age of empire to the climate crisis, and presents a plea and a roadmap to step beyond the mental and material boundaries of our nations.

1
The twilight of universal Europe

The Avenida Central of Rio de Janeiro was built in 1904, following the latest European fashion: stone façades, domes and belle époque iron railings adorned a triumph of modernity. Photographers have left ample documentation of the elegant European architecture and of the people who frequented the street. Women are seen wearing outsized skirts and carrying black umbrellas, while men dress in dark tuxedos and top hats. We are at the equator: the temperature skyrockets and humidity causes the skin to sweat. These are not the right clothes to wear. But all climatic considerations are secondary, because il faut être absolument moderne. And being modern means disregarding distances, weather, and local customs, and thinking and acting as if we had all just left a café-concert on a Parisian boulevard.

It was in Brazil, in the hilltop village of Petrópolis, that Stefan Zweig took his own life in 1942. In his suicide note the great Austrian writer lamented the destruction of his ‘spiritual home’ – and, faced with the suicide of Europe, he committed his own. A continent in ruins lay on the other side of the ocean; a continent so dramatically different from the belle époque the planners of Avenida Central were out to imitate and so unlike that universal Europe that Zweig celebrated in 1916, in the middle of the First World War, with the following words of longing:

Thus it grew, the new Tower of Babel, and never had its summit reached so high as in our epoch. Never had nations had such ease of access to the spirits of their neighbours, never had their knowledge been so intimately linked, never had commercial relations been so close in forming a formidable network and never had Europeans loved both their homeland and the rest of the world . . . The monument was growing, the whole of humanity counted on assembling there for the consecration and music resounded around the edifice like a gathering storm.¹

Here is all the inebriation of universalism that captured a European elite that had united the world in a single political, economic and cultural network. With a rhetoric that much recalls the apex of another and more recent phase of globalisation, the early twentieth century introduced the lexicon of the end of borders, of the overcoming of distances and of the political and economic interdependence of nations. Industry developed integrated supply chains on a global scale, trade and finance crossed every frontier, while telegraph lines, railways and steam ships connected the world, allowing the transmission of ideas, aspirations and fashions on a planetary scale as never before. Europe, with porous internal borders that could still be crossed without a passport, was swept by common political, artistic and cultural currents. The bourgeoisie of Buenos Aires adopted the latest Parisian vogue well before this reached the sleepy towns of the French countryside. And while four-fifths of the earth were under the control of a handful of Western powers, every corner of the world had its own Avenida Central.

Liberal capitalism and free trade embraced the globe, with an impenetrable and apparently indestructible web that gave rise to a thriving literature on European unity and world government. This was not, surely, a democratic and egalitarian universality. British supremacy stood as a guarantee of the stability of the system, a Janus-faced power that maintained order with the double gaze of its gunboats and its financial capital. A handful of European metropolises decided the fate of the world, while a large part of humanity experienced the squalor and crime of colonialism. The shadow of European domination and the global projection of its economy and trade transformed the life of every inhabitant, in every country, on every continent. From the Ottoman to the Persian Empire, from India to Japan, the whole world had to respond to and was transformed by the developments in one of its parts. It was something extraordinarily new.

Indeed, even in the colonised world, the other side of the coin of European sovereignty, a new feeling of transnational solidarity between oppressed peoples began to develop. When Japan annihilated the Russian fleet at Tsushima and defeated the Russian Empire in 1905 – marking the first victory of an Asian people against a European power – Turkish, Persian, Egyptian, Chinese and Vietnamese newspapers celebrated. Sixteen-year-old Jawaharlal Nehru, future Indian Prime Minister; Sun Yat-sen, the future leader of the Republic of China; Mustafa Kemal, who under the name Atatürk would become the father of modern Turkey; all cheered in unison. The Turkish writer Halide Edip named her son Tōgō in honour of the Japanese admiral who secured victory, while the future Indian Nobel laurate Rabindranāth Tagore improvised a triumphal march with his students in a small school of rural Bengal.²

The upheaval was total. ‘A new model of life’, wrote the economist Karl Polanyi, ‘unfolds on the world with a universal aspiration without parallels from the time when Christianity began its history.’³

The mind in crisis

The carnage of the First World War destroyed the illusion of having rebuilt the universality that Greek philosophy, Roman law and Christian religion had imprinted on the collective unconscious of European elites. The words with which Stefan Zweig continues his narration of the new Babel are those of a trauma: ‘And it was precisely this generation of ours, who believed in the unity of Europe as if it were a Gospel’, he writes, ‘that was inflicted the annihilation of all hope, the experience of the greatest war among all the nations of Europe; our spiritual Rome was once again destroyed, our Tower of Babel once again abandoned by the builders.’

A feeling of loss, of disorientation and of inexplicable anger became a key element of the literature of the time. Here is how guests woke up in a morning of 1914 in a Swiss sanatorium; a place that, with its cosmopolitan diversity, its neuroses, and its privilege, provided the perfect representation of old Europe: ‘What was this, then, that was in the air? A rising temper. Acute irritability. A nameless rancour. A universal tendency to envenomed exchange of words, to outbursts of rage – yes, even to fisticuffs. Embittered disputes, bouts of uncontrolled shrieking, by pairs and by groups, were of daily occurrence.’

Hysterica Passio is the title of the penultimate chapter of Thomas Mann’s masterpiece, The Magic Mountain. The next and necessarily last chapter is The Thunderbolt, referencing the shot that would bring all mountain guests back towards the valley, each behind his own border and with a bayonet at hand. Hannah Arendt, reflecting in 1951 on the consequences of the First World War, relied on almost identical words to Thomas Mann’s narration:

Nothing perhaps illustrates the general disintegration of political life better than this vague, pervasive hatred of everybody and everything, without a focus for its passionate attention, with nobody to make responsible for the state of affairs . . . It consequently turned in all directions, haphazardly and unpredictably, incapable of assuming an air of healthy indifference toward anything under the sun.⁴

They are words that sound a strident note of familiarity in today’s Europe and indeed in today’s world. With a continent and a planet once again torn by political conflict and dominated by divisions, hatred, and the spasmodic search for a scapegoat.

The fracture of 1914 and the collapse of universal Europe were experienced as a moment of great anguish and of psychological disorientation. Trauma touched everyone’s life. Tens of millions of people found themselves without a homeland, expelled and rejected, in the first real crisis of refugees and stateless peoples of the modern era. But even those who still kept a place to call home felt the new division of the continent on their skin. Just think of Jules and Jim, the beautiful film by François Truffaut, where the playful prewar ménage à trois is divided by a hard border, by mutual distrust and by the cruel looks that French and Germans exchange on the trains. It is not surprising that for the intellectual and economic elite the collapse of the Tower of Babel was perceived as an expulsion from Eden and as a crisis of European civilisation.

The words pronounced by Paul Valéry in 1919, in the aftermath of the armistice, are telling and well known: ‘we, civilisations, now know ourselves mortal’. The feeling of a civilisational breakdown was well captured by the external gaze of Liang Qichao, one of the leading modern intellectuals of early twentieth-century China. In 1919 Liang found himself representing the new-born Republic of China at the Versailles peace conference; he travelled through a continent in rubble and noted his disillusionment with Western modernity. In his diary we find the following revealing encounter with an American journalist: ‘And once back in China’, the journalist asks Liang, ‘will you take Western civilisation with you?’ ‘Sure!’, Liang answers dutifully. ‘Oh no!’, the journalist replies, ‘but Western civilisation is bankrupt!’ Silence follows. ‘And you’, Liang finally dares to ask, ‘once back in America, what will you do?’ And the answer, which will profoundly influence the Chinese thinker, comes caustically: ‘I will lock myself in my house and wait for you to bring Chinese civilisation.’

This ‘crisis of the spirit’ provided the focus for much of the writing of the period. But this was a crisis in bad conscience, a cultural and spiritual turmoil that actually represented the flip side of the structural crisis of European domination over the world. The crisis of civilisation of the 1920s stemmed largely from the provincialisation of Europe, from the diminishing economic and political role of the Old Continent at a time when the world was surpassing its old masters and beginning its path of emancipation. It was the emergence of a world beyond Europe that put Europe itself in crisis.

The First World War took away the universal system that hinged around the undisputed dominance of the British Empire. The central empires of Austria and Germany crumbled. France and Italy c...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Introduction
• 1 The twilight of universal Europe
• 2 The human zoo
• 3 The last ideology
• 4 Before the revolution
• 5 All under heaven
• 6 A glimpse into a politics for the planet
• 意味
• End User License Agreement