(2024-04-18) Schroeder Retiring Geopolitics

Karl Schroeder: Retiring Geopolitics. I started Unapocalyptic with a couple of goals. Not quite manifestos, these are certainly lines in the sand.

One of them has been to imagine what I’ve been calling ‘a science fiction of the 21st century.’

What 21st-century political entities could replace the sovereign Westphalian nation-state?

This article explores the convergence of transnational plurinationalism, rights for nature, and ecosystem-based resource management in new constitutional proposals being made, chiefly in South America.

The modern nation-state has been with us since the Peace of Westphalia in 1648. The nation is the atomic unit of geopolitics

We briefly did get global hegemony, under Pax Americana, but that’s waning.

What I hear people talking most about these days is an emerging multipolar world

But this is not what I see happening.

The most interesting place in the world right now, politically, is South America.

Cybersyn had started an intellectual renaissance in Chile led by public intellectuals like Francisco Varela and Humberto Maturana (yes, the originators of the theory of Enactivism that I keep mentioning).

...the Bolivian constitution of 2009. This document gave us the first truly plurinational state

Plurinationalism is really interesting; Canada has always been a kind of plurinational state due to federal accommodations to Quebec’s integrity

We face a second round of soul-searching today during Reconciliation with the First Nations of our settled territories. I wrote about that in my short story “Degrees of Freedom.”

Now the land is being returned to its original owners; for example, much of downtown Vancouver has been given back to the three First Nations that originally claimed it.

Transnational Plurinationalism (say that five times fast)

indigenous groups whose traditional territories and cultural ties span national borders

These movements often focus on environmental protection, cultural preservation, and political rights, leveraging their transnational character to forge stronger alliances and advocate more effectively on the international stage. (tribe)

Meanwhile, In the Nonhuman World…

a parallel process has been happening in the rights of nature legal movement.

I wrote about this in Reimagining Rights, so I won’t dwell on it here. Briefly, the rights for nature movement extends legal rights to natural entities—rivers, forests, and landscapes

Countries like Ecuador and Bolivia have incorporated these rights into their constitutions, recognizing ecosystems as rights-bearing entities.

Ecosystem-based management (EBM) prioritizes ecological balance and sustainability, managing resources according to the natural capacities of ecosystems rather than arbitrary political boundaries.

global warming has quickly changed from being an abstract issue we leave in the lap of distant policy bodies, to being the lived experience of every single person on the planet

In Canada, the provinces and parliamentary opposition are pushing back against the federal carbon tax. The problem is, they have no credible alternative to it, and if we abandon it then Canada becomes a freeloader

We will be absolutely killed in the international arena if we do that.)

EBM could lead to a reevaluation of economic and strategic priorities, where states cooperate based on shared ecological interests rather than competing for resources

We stand together or we die; the Great Game of geopolitical maneuvering is no longer tenable

impose a new version of the doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction on humanity. This new MAD says that we either cooperate and coordinate with our economic priorities set for us by the needs of the natural systems in which our civilization is embedded, or we all go down.

Put it all together and we can envision a successor to geopolitics, which I’ll call Natural MAD

sustainability in turn demands, if not a dissolution of national borders, a recognition that some of traditional Westphalian sovereignty is no longer tenable.

transnational and plurinational arrangements are natural, and could become central to international strategy. Such a framework might obviate the multipolar geopolitical model,

Of course, this shift could also spawn new types of conflicts, especially where environmental and cultural interests clash with capitalistic demands for growth.

the new MAD offers us a path to a better world—one where capitalism and colonialism have been forced to accept that they operate inside a larger system

So This’ll Happen

Or not.

There is plenty of inertia in the old world, and while Natural MAD is likely a real thing, there’s no guarantee that humanity will recognize it in time.

In other words, don’t believe anything I just said—but think about how you can use it when you do consider the future. That’s what I’m doing.