Jonathan S Blake and Nils Gilman, Children of a Modest Star. Planetary Thinking for an Age of Crises. Stanford, Cal: Stanford University Press 2024.

This book sets the bar high in its ambition to radically rethink the present world order based on sovereign national states. The order is old but exposed to growing pressures. A major trend in this pressure proposes a dose of more nationalism and national state power to mitigate the stress. Others try to bring new order through geopolitics. We will come back to this point at the end of this review. Children of a Modest Star goes in the opposite direction arguing for transcending the national states. The book confronts the idea of the national state as being inevitable, irreversible, and natural. The national state is a product of historical contingency, the authors convincingly argue. This historical legacy of contingency is reasonably the condition for the future, too, meaning that the future isn’t goal-bound and that structures, trends and developments can be changed. 

The national states: The historical ballast

However, the historical heritage of the national states is a heavy obstacle not easy to overcome. The modern national states emerged five hundred years ago as an instrument of warfare. States made war and war made states, in the idiom of Charkes Tilly. New social problems of an unprecedented scale accompanied the industrial revolution, problems provoking protests and mass movements with revolutionary claims. The industrial revolution brought visions of a social revolution, experienced as promise or as threat, in an interest conflict between the representatives of labour and the owners of capital. Both sides appealed to the state whose representatives became involved in mediating the conflict. The military state became also the Rechtstaat, protecting interests of private property, and the Sozialstaat, protecting the interests of the working classes. The state was not a black box but a compact of conflicting interests and attempts to mediate between them, changing over time and between states in a variety of patterns depending on the specific interest and power constellation. 

The industrialization promoted trade and colonialism and vice versa. The industrializing states developed interstate and international cooperation and coordination, but also conflicts and warfare. Often the domestic interest conflict was canalized towards the external conflict between states competing on world markets and about colonies. The external conflict pacified the domestic social conflict, a development that together with nationalist ideology unified and mobilized the nations for the external conflict. The nineteenth century competition between them about power over world markets and colonies ended in the twentieth century era of the world wars.

The two world wars promoted, in reaction to them, more international cooperation under the umbrellas of the League of Nations and the United Nations with the purpose to pacify them reinforcing them as the basis of a new international order. With the decolonization in the 1950s and 1960s the former colonies became new national states making the order more global. International institutions emerged to promote trade and peace, development, health, social standards, communications, and technical standards. The internationalization of the national states in the 1950s and 1960s, and their global spread, occurred under the expectations of a better future through the extension of the Western living standard to the whole world. It was an optimistic time driven by the expectations of general affluence ahead, an optimistic time in reaction to the terror of the world wars and in the wake of the promises of decolonization. Development aid from the rich North would lead to the same living standards in the poor South.

However, the experiences of the two world wars did not lead to lasting peace and pacifism. The global conflict continued, and the old military state dimension remained and grew in power and destructive capacity through the bipolar competition of the superpowers in the Cold War. The threat of nuclear extinction froze the East/West conflict in the North but in the South the competition between the superpowers gave through the spread of conventional weapons a military dimension to the state building in the new national states. 

This outline is the historical backdrop against which Blake and Gilman develop their brave sketch for a new world order under the label of planetary governance.

The new world order: Planetary governance transcending the national states

The new order must transcend the national states which belong to the past, they argue. It must transcend the hierarchy within the national states and among them in their internationalization. Hierarchy between above and below highlights the concept of level. Through levels the order of hierarchical national states and its cementation through internationalization took shape. As opposed to this old order, the horizontally thought concept of scale will bring new order. Subsidiarity is Blake’s and Gilman’s key term that connects the scales from the local via the regional and the national to the planetary. To emphasize and understand their opposition to hierarchy one might imagine the scales as outlined on a world map where one, dependent on the problem and the task, zooms in or zooms out. Their proposal is not a single general-purposed global scale governing, a hegemonic Leviathan, they emphasize. A world government is not in their mindset.

The Children of a Modest Star’s radical reconsideration of the present world introduces five ethical and architectural principles of planetary governance and the idea of planetarity. The first principle, the most important and pathbreaking, is the enabling of flourishing multispecies and a thriving biosphere. The humans should not be seen as the coronation of life on Earth and its master but as an humble part of a totality evolved during billions of years Stable eco systems with diverse forms of life are the bedrock of planetary habitability. Blake and Gilman quote Achille Mbembe: “The epoch we have entered into is one of indivisibility, of entanglement, of concatenations, the biosphere as a whole system,” a “whole system” based on difference and diversity rather than sameness, and on ecological economizing and distribution of labour.

The second principle deals with the enhancing of planetary sapience, a quest for truth-based knowledge, the epistemological and teaching dimension for a learning planet with a galvanizing will to learn more about the conditions for life and cohabitation on Earth. The third principle is about institutional effectiveness and legitimacy. The institutional architecture is a key precondition for the planetary governance order but still a label without much substance and listed rather than outlined. The fourth principle is about transforming statehood. The national states are not going to disappear but will remain as only one element in the multiscalar system far from being its centre as now. Governance is a social practice conceptually and practically distinct from the national state. The latter are no longer sovereign like in the present world order and no longer the focus and legitimate source of governance. A deliberating multiscalar governance structure allocates authority based on the principle of planetary subsidiarity. The fifth principle deals with the rethinking of sovereignty, rights and responsibilities.

The plan is brave but vague and the authors emphasize that they are aware of it. They want to deliver a vision, an idea of how a future order of planetary could look like, and arguments for the necessity to break up from the prevailing order based on sovereign national states. Therefore, it doesn’t make sense to criticize them for the lack of concretion. Instead, one should congratulate them to a convincing input for a necessary critical reflection on a new world order and let concretizing ideas and proposals follow upon the congratulation. Blake and Gilman invite to hard work on the shape of a new world order. One can only hope that many frustrated over the present order of the things will accept the invitation.

A new language for a new understanding of what is self-evident

The information, the planetary sapiens, on which they build their vision is already overwhelming in its demonstration of the abyss towards which the planet is heading if not radical steps are taken. The authors do not provide new data in this respect. Their achievement is the argument that the available information must be brought together in new ways by thinking the planet as a whole system. Planetary sapiens means connecting knowledge in biosciences (life), geosciences (space), historical sciences (time), social and economic sciences (community) into a new knowledge order, trans- rather than interdisciplinary to analyze and configure the planet as a synergetic system. The second and connected achievement is the argument that a synergetic system does not mean an automatic self-regulating order but human action and responsibility and political management, planetary governance.

The task is as tremendous as it is necessary, and it is hard to understand it as the work of a mastermind following a preset model. To demonstrate that, the book takes a fundamental shift in the eighteenth century as a point of departure. Proposing in Europe in 1715 that sovereignty be formally vested in the people rather than in the monarch would have been seen preposterous, they argue (p 204), and it is not difficult to agree. However, over the course of the eighteenth century, the concept of sovereignty shifted meaning both as a principle and as a practice on exactly those lines. By the late 1780s, revolutions in America and France transformed the theory of royal to a theory of popular sovereignty through successful political action. Speech became achievement and implementation. Speech was action

The development did not follow a master plan but fumbled its way along although guided by controversial ideas giving the development a direction. Insisting on attention and urging on action, protagonists struggling for a new order created opinions which scaled up the political pressures difficult to steer in detail but overwhelming in their combined impact. The road had a direction and a goal, broadly shared although not in detail, but at the same time, the road was the goal, easier to see when looking backwards than when looking forwards. The building took time and patience. The transformation of the old order required action and did not follow any historical necessity or structural dictates. It was rather a fight against historical tenacity and structural inertia. The minds were struggling about shaping the future, but the outcome was mainly discerned in retrospect. The master plan was the outcome rather than the beginning. At the end, in the 1780s, what was unthinkable was beginning to become self-evident and a new hegemony was beginning to take over.

One might to Blake’s and Gilham’s historical reference point add that the 1780s was no end point or final breakthrough of new imaginations of sovereignty and, in its extension, democracy. The struggle abut sovereignty, and later democracy, continued until our own time and continues. Strong visions of an alternative future rather than a master plan guided the struggle. The 1780 was at most a milestone on a road where nobody knew its final destination, although the visions often pretended that there was a final goal. The future of the 1780s dealt with the ideas of sovereignty and democracy and how to implement them through political action and compromises. Interpretations of the meaning of sovereignty and democracy were different from ours. This long history is how we must understand our time’s vision of planetary governance of how to secure sustainable planetary cohabitation and peace through insistent work on implementing the visions by means of political action.

In an era of accelerating history one might argue that we do not have the time. If so, the answer can in that case not be resignation because everything is anyhow too late but to emphasize the urgency even more and to intensify the work on a discourse for a new world, a discourse the germ of which is already there but needs more dynamics, innovative and galvanizing conceptualizations, and stronger pressures for institutions and norms for action. The discourse is about bringing together knowledge from several special fields, knowledge which is already there about threats to life on Earth but still with considerable lack of concretization about how the new planet will look like.

The concept of governance and the kind of national state to transcend

The key concept of ‘governance’ in Children of a Modest Star has its origin in the neoliberal vocabulary. [1] It is not an argument per se against it but one must be aware that the term is not neutral and ‘innocent.’ It is always possible to redefine the meaning of a concept. Until the 1980s, the term was unknown in politics and political sciences. The reference before that was government which connoted state and hierarchy, yes, the state dimension of the national, exactly the target of Blake’s and Gilman’s critique. In the 1980s the World Bank began to use governance in its campaign for more transparent and anti-corruptive politics in the developing countries. In this campaign, government connoted corruption and appalling resource management. The World Bank localized good governance in the civil society. Governance became a key concept together with network, civil society, and market in the neoliberal globalization rhetoric, which was another, although different, attempt to abandon the national states forty years before Blake and Gilham. It is important to emphasize that governance in the globalization language about one borderless self-propelling market planet, was different than the planetary governance that Blake and Gilman propose.

Which national state do Blake and Gilman confront? Their historical outline of national state building culminates with the Keynesian welfare states in their international cooperation in the 1970s (Chapter 1. “How the National State Became Hegemonic”). However, the national states they confront are reasonably not the Keynesian welfare states but the more nationalistic and authoritarian national states that mushroom today and seem to do so in reaction to the neoliberal excesses. Little or nothing is said about the neoliberal attempts to eliminate the previous Keynesian versions of welfare states. How does Blake’s and Gilman’s transcendence of the present national states relate to the previous neoliberal confrontation of the Keynesian national welfare states?

These critical remarks on the concepts of governance and the transcendence of the national states do not question the vision that Blake and Gilman present. The present world situation and problem accumulation (‘polycrisis’) strongly needs a new conceptualization around the Earth as the planet instead of the world as geopolitical confrontation or as an unbounded self-propelling market, a new conceptualization around ideas of planetary cohabitation as opposed to the rich world trying to barricade itself against mass migration and refugees escaping hunger, inundations, droughts, wars, and violence. 

Fields for further exploration of the meaning of planetary governance

There is, as already emphasized, no reason to criticize Blake and Gilham for problem fields that they do not cover, and there is no reason to put them off as dreamers out of touch with reality. Who defines what is reality, and what is possible and impossible? There is a strong need for new ideas about the future in a time when it seems to have disappeared. 

The following comments on what is missing should be read as a contribution to a debate on the planetary vision of Children of a Modest Star. The book is worth a serious debate on its vision and how to implement it. A crucial question concerning the planetary governance is territorial jurisdiction and responsibility in a world where planetary governance doesn’t mean a world government and scale replaces hierarchy. Who decides about subsidiarity? Blake and Gilman are aware of the problem but do not say much more.

The book does hardly mention the word capitalism or discuss the connections between planetary governance and a planetary economy that can make governance sustainable and economic theories that can legitimize it. What/who would constitute the planetary economy? The global giant corporations which operate heedlessly eliminating nation-state borders and governments claiming the rights of market governance? What about the planetary capacity to redistribute resources between those who have more and those who have less? Or is such redistribution at all desirable? Was is the political/ideological implication of Blake’s and Gilman’s proposal? How could a planetary taxation order look like? What is the normative underpinning of the economy? Are ideas of private profit and economic growth compatible with the guarantee of biodiversity, with the enabling of flourishing multispecies and a thriving biosphere? Could economics prioritizing carrying capacity guided by concepts like resource region enrich/be made compatible with/replace our present economic system and manage the planetary resource exhaustion? Is growth based on recycling possible? All these questions deal with the planetary governance of the planetary economy, some would say the planetary management of it to avoid a confusion with the neoliberal market governance. How would such management connect to the scales and the subsidiarity principle? 

The questions about the economic preconditions of the planetary governance are closely related to the question of a legitimizing normative framework. How could a planetary meta norm look like? The planetary perspective requires reasonably some kind of universalism. An overall normative order with institutions to implement it. The term planetary connotes per se universalism. International law is the existing instrument that regulates the world order beyond the national states. However, it doesn’t transcend them and their sovereignty but builds on them. Furthermore, international law has its origin in colonialism and imperialism, and it has a Western bias. [2] What would a normative world order beyond international law and the national states look like? The UN, too, is based on the national states confirming the principle of one member state, one vote in the General Assembly. However, the major problem is that not the GA, but the Security Council is the power centre of the UN. The power there is still to a considerable degree determined by the powers which defeated Nazi Germany and held the world in a stalemate during the Cold War. Can a reformed UN become a normative centre of planetary governance? 

A third and connected problem field deals with planetary migration and its relation to planetary cohabitation. Planetary migration requires a world economy which is more than a market encouraging the recruitment of cheap labour or enforcing people to flee catastrophes and persecution. When Kant reflected on the movement of people across state borders, he distinguished between the rights as a habitant and as a guest. It was before ideas of free movement of labour where, against historical experiences of slave trade and other forms of coercion, the question is who are the free people choosing their place to live? The question is, of course, closely related to the question of how a future world economy would look like. There are convincing arguments for a future planetary migration pattern different than today’s but how? How can planetary cohabitation and planetary movement of people be connected in less exploitative ways than for the present? And how can cohabitation and migration/free (as opposed to “free”) movement be made compatible with a rich biodiversity? The answers to such questions require a planetary economy managed differently than the present and a strong accompanying normative order.

Towards a planetary world order

The backdrop of Children of a Modest Star is the accelerating accumulation of planetary problems connected in what is labelled a polycrisis (Tooze). A considerable amount of knowledge with policy proposals has been collected in several problems fields. However, there is little about an overall political approach, a planetary political perspective.

Blake and Gilman move into this vacuum. It is a beginning which needs to get followers to develop a discourse around the planetary perspective where governance is central but the same goes for economic system and normative order for cohabitation and migration and how they interplay with governance. Blake and Gilman present a vision which some would call a dream. It may be a dream, but it is not a daydream. The vision is a proposal that deserves a deep reflection on and discussion of how it connects to key policy fields and how it can promote political action. The reflection and the discussion could be the point of departure for a discourse on what planetary means in a new world view. A contentious discourse on planetary politics for the householding of/economizing with the planet.

The vision that Blake and Gilman sketch is a contrast to a strong ongoing trend that sees nationalism and ever more authoritarian rule as the escape from the polycrisis. The world is shifting from being a global market to becoming a geopolitical competition about space and resources between political blocs. Some debaters are welcoming the geopolitical turn. Others are more critical but see it nevertheless as inevitable. They all use the trend to make prognoses about the future through trend progression. Old politics that ended in catastrophes is coming back. There is a need for alternatives to this trend of thinking the future.

Last time of prognostic trend progression about a future without alternatives is not long ago. It was the neoliberal globalization narrative about the one market world and, in some overstrung versions, the end of history. Academic knowledge producers confirmed massively and made what began as a political ideology ‒argued to be economic theory ‒ the truth about the future. The discourse became hegemonic before it collapsed in a finance bubble in 2008. The future was given and without alternatives as political leaders like Margret Thatcher and Angela Merkel proclaimed. Without alternative meant that the world needed to be market compliant. What the market was or who it was, was never thematized. It was a fiction and a fetish declared to be true reality. Is the world in reaction to the collapse of the globalization discourse about to repeat the mistake? To see the future as predictable and without alternatives although in a very different direction? The trend towards a new hegemony about a geopolitical ordering of the world is obvious.

Continue reading: The Geopolitical Future. A Forecast Déjà Vu

Nothing is more needed in this situation than visions and dreams about alternatives. The future is not given from ideas about History in the singular and with a capital H. However, the alternative futures require work on them meaning that the visions should not remain dreams but initiate action. Children of a Modest Star is a very welcome contribution in this situation.

[1]  Hagen Schulz-Forberg and Bo Stråth, The Political History of European Integration. The hypocrisy of democracy-through-market. London: Routledge 2010: 105-107.

[2]  Martti Koskenniemi, The Gentle Civilizer of Nations. The Rise and Fall of International Law 1870-1960. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2001.

How to quote:
Cit. Bo Stråth, “Planetary Governance for Children of a Modest Star.” Blog. https://www.bostrath.com/planetary-perspectives/ordering-of-space-and-time/planetary-governance-for-children-of-a-modest-star/ Published 07.08.2024