Romain.Su

Explorateur de données biodiversité en région Grand Est

2025-11-30T09:00:00+01:00

Explorateur de données d’observation de la biodiversité en région Grand Est développé en R Shiny en réponse au concours de datavisualisation 2025 organisé par DataGrandEst.

Voir la version déployée et le code source

How much GHG emissions can be cut by new EAFs in steel production?

2025-06-30T22:00:00+02:00

Commentary published by SteelWatch on 30 June 2025 about the role of electric arc furnaces (EAF) in reducing greenhouse gas emissions in steel production.

Read the full commentary

Dépenser pour la défense ou le climat : un même combat ?

2025-04-17T17:30:00+02:00

Article publié par Telos le 17 avril 2025.

Même sans questionner la nécessité du réarmement de l’Europe, les militants des causes climatiques et écologiques peuvent éprouver une certaine amertume devant l’apparente facilité à débloquer des moyens considérables alors que les crises climatiques et écologiques ne reçoivent pas de réponse de la même ampleur. Pire, la priorisation des efforts de défense pourrait s’effectuer au détriment des politiques de protection du climat et de l’environnement. Ce risque est d’autant plus réel que les politiques de défense et les politiques climatiques partagent une série de points communs. Peut-on imaginer une articulation ?

From European impotence to Europe puissance

2025-03-13T09:00:00+01:00

Essay selected for the topic cluster “The international chessboard. Checkmate to Europe?” at the conference “Europe in crisis: re-inventing the continent” organized at the College of Europe (Bruges, Belgium) on the 5 October 2013.

While Europeans have quickly understood during the past few years how the “crisis” impacts their day-to-day lives – fearing unemployment, struggling to make both ends meet –, the concept of “decline” seems to retain the attention of a narrower group of people, essentially consisting of conservative scholars and columnists. For the others, not only it goes relatively unnoticed but it is even often accepted with resignation or relief as the natural consequence of Europe’s shrinking weight in the world, be it in demographic or economic terms.

“Our Golden Age is over”, many of us think, and after all it may be fair for other countries now to take into their hands the fate of the world. In this new order, Europe would simply retire and live her own life in a peaceful manner, protected from the tragedies of war and poverty thanks to her “unique” model which has allegedly succeeded in keeping them at bay for over half a century. To some extent, the European Union (EU) has already entered this “post-modern” era described by Cooper (2002). The problem is that the rest of the world hasn’t followed her, and that the EU cannot stand as an island isolated from it.

The process of globalization has gone much deeper than political authorities – predominantly national – have desired or even imagined. Along with it have come up global issues such as climate change, sustainable development or affordable access to food and energy which are relevant to every single nation but have been so far hardly regulated for want of adequate structures. What is worse, since the turn of the century, the rise of emerging powers and the advent of a “nonpolar” world (Haass, 2008) have also paralysed the few international organizations which had been until then relatively functional, e.g. the World Trade Organization. Examples of the successive COP on climate change or the UN Security Council’s inability to react to the Syrian civil war – in contradiction with its “responsibility for the maintenance of international peace and security” (UN Charter art. 24, para. 1) – have made the failure of multilateral approaches to protect global public goods all the more blatant.

This shift affects the EU in a particular way because among all the “big” players, the European Union is certainly the most committed to a multipolar international order based on rules and organizations. In a sense, such a model would not be very different from the EU’s own internal mechanism, recalling Jean Monnet’s prediction that “the Community itself [was] only one step away from the forms of organization of tomorrow’s world” (Monnet, 1976, p. 617).

However, when defending her interests, the EU very often confuses means and ends and behaves as if this multipolar order were already in place while in reality, it remains to be built. This is one of the reasons why the effectiveness of her foreign policy is not proportionate to her status and weight in the world. Even when she is ready to resort to policy instruments from the “modern” “action repertoire” (Tilly, 1984) to achieve her goals – for instance by extending the ETS to all airlines flying from or to her territory, including third-country based companies –, other powers easily disarm the EU with the use of threat as they know she will not put up resistance. In comparison, the United States have much less scruples in enforcing extraterritorial sanctions through e.g. the well-known d’Amato-Kennedy and Helms–Burton Acts.

If the EU wants to be heard on the world stage, it does not suffice, like some federalist wishful thinkers pretend, that she speaks with one voice. She must also be able to speak a language that the rest of the globe can understand, and this language cannot rule out the vocabulary of might. This is not to say that the EU should give up on her ambition to model the world on her system, but as long as the international order will remain predominantly “modern”, she must play by its rules to be strong enough and have a chance to overhaul them.

Such a change would require more of a fresh mindset than of a single policy proposal since it would apply to every field, from climate to defence to trade – for the latter, the EU is on the right path with a recent Commission proposal to reinforce anti-dumping and anti-subsidy instruments (European Union, 2013a). Yet, because the success of Europe puissance would greatly depends on her credibility in the eyes of others, she must demonstrate that she masters the full range of the modern action repertoire by putting emphasis on the most symbolic realm of power: security and defence.

It is therefore proposed to establish a new political agreement, in the first step outside the framework of EU treaties thus without ECJ oversight, that would set two targets for defence policy. First, each state party to the agreement shall commit itself to respect a minimum threshold for defence expenditure relative to GDP, similarly to NATO recommandations. Considering current levels (European Union, 2013b), a 1.3% objective would already oblige 13 out of 28 potential members to increase their military budget. A second target would require members to earmark a share of this budget – at least a quarter in order to be meaningful – for spendings of EU “common interest” in the form of joined R&D programmes, operations or other initiatives which contribute to meet the challenges defined in a revised European Security Strategy and acknowledged as such by peer countries.

The combination of these two targets is first of all to ensure that every country benefiting from the public good of security in Europe feels more responsible for its maintainance and participates accordingly in its costs. It is also to show to the rest of the world that the EU does not intend to fall into military irrelevance. Moreover, since a single EU defence policy that would entirely substitute its national counterparts is irrealistic in the short or medium term, the proposed double target is to foster from the bottom up harmonization not only of hardware but also of defence planning, as a country that “over-invests” e.g. in territorial defence may not meet the “common interest” criterion for insufficient contribution to projection capabilities or cyber-defence. This is to lay the ground for further integration in the field of security and defence, from a material as well as from a strategic point of view.

While it is expected that some Member States will not be very keen on increasing their military budget or accepting peer review in this domain, other countries which consider as unfair the current burden sharing may seize the occasion of the next EU treaty reform to make the existing mutual assistance clause (TEU art. 42 para. 7) conditional upon meeting the forementioned double target. Thus, free riding will no longer be an option, nor disinterest for world affairs. The EU cannot indeed afford to give up on global responsibility without endangering her own independence and prosperity. In this context, Europe puissance is not tantamount to nostalgia for a glorious past, it is a guarantee for the future.

References

- Cooper, R. (2002). The Post-Modern State and the World Order. Demos.
- European Union. (2012, October 26). Consolidated version of the Treaty on European Union. Official Journal C 326.
- European Union, European Commission. (2013, April 10). Proposal for a Regulation of the European Parliament and of the Councilamending Council Regulation (EC) No 1225/2009 on protection against dumped imports from countries not members of the European Community and Council Regulation (EC) No 597/2009 on protection against subsidised imports from countries not members of the European Community. COM(2013) 192 final. Brussels.
- European Union, European Defence Agency. (2013). National Defence Data 2011. EDA participating Member States. Brussels.
- Haass, R. N. (2008). The age of nonpolarity: what will follow U.S. dominance. Foreign Affairs, 87(3).
- Monnet, J. (1976). Mémoires. Paris: Fayard.
- Tilly C. (1984). Les origines du répertoire d’action collective contemporaine en France et en Grande-Bretagne. Vingtième Siècle. Revue d’histoire, 4(4), 89-108.
- United Nations. (1945, October 24). Charter of the United Nations. 1 UNTS XVI. Retrieved from http://www.un.org/en/documents/charter/index.shtml

Zachód nie będzie umierał za Kijów

2025-03-12T18:00:00+01:00

Artykuł opublikowany dn. 14 marca 2022 roku na stronie Więzi.

Pomimo dzisiejszej ogromnej fali sympatii dla Ukrainy ze strony Zachodu, jej perspektywy wstąpienia do UE i NATO są obecnie w istocie bardziej odległe niż przed wybuchem wojny.

(Inter)dépendance : une histoire longue et multidisciplinaire de la protection sociale

2024-12-02T08:00:00+01:00

Essai présenté au Prix 2024 de la fondation Europa Cultural sur le thème : « Origines et évolution de la protection sociale ».

Télécharger l’essai complet

Tout est morne, il fait noir…

2024-11-13T17:00:00+01:00

Traduction-révision du polonais vers le français des textes de l’exposition Tout est morne, il fait noir… (Ciemno wszędzie, głucho wszędzie…) installée à la Bibliothèque polonaise de Paris du 13 novembre 2024 au 31 janvier 2025 sur le thème des illustres Polonais enterrés au cimetière de Montmorency.

Catalogue en ligne de l’exposition

Citizenship and democratic governance in the Anthropocene

2024-11-04T09:00:00+01:00

Essay submitted to the 2024 Berggruen Prize Essay Competition on the theme of “planetarity”.

In human awareness, the intuition or belief that we live in a finite world, whose constituents are somehow related, can be traced back to the oldest known civilisations. Even in absence of earlier written evidence, it is not unreasonable to suppose that the idea could also have occurred to some of our more ancient forebears. Closer to us, modern theories and observations have helped us refine our understanding of both the boundaries of our world, and the innumerable bonds that hold it together.

Religion and natural science, in opposition or in complement to each other, have been able to combine the boundaries and bonds in fairly coherent conceptions of the world. An example of such a worldview can be read in Laudato Si’, Pope Francis’ encyclical “on care for our common home”, published in 2015 and articulating a Christian interpretation of integral ecology.

However, the social and political institutions that have eventually become dominant in our societies tend not to treat the boundaries and bonds in an integrated manner. Throughout history, successive models of human institutions have recognised the finite character of the world they covered, but being primarily tasked with ensuring peaceful coexistence within and despite this finiteness, they have mostly led to divisions of the world in smaller units, where groups and individuals would be granted a high degree of self-rule.

While not negating the reality of the innumerable bonds and interdependences linking these smaller units, our modern institutions give precedence to the general principle that subjects are sovereign. Therefore, the spillover effects these subjects may cause, intentionally or not, are addressed only if these subjects have the will to do so, unless a solution is imposed with the use of force, possibly by a higher authority.

Above individuals and their extensions in the form of private property, states are such authorities. Over their respective territories, states may even deny to the persons present there any kind of autonomy or self-rule, ultimately assuming responsibility for regulating the lives of these persons and the relations between them, though with variable levels of effective enforcement due to cognitive and practical limitations.

In fact, this model was common in ancient civilisations under arbitrary rulers, and as archaic as it can sound, it provides on the paper a logical answer to the need for coordination and adequate management of the spillover effects of individual behaviours.

That is why it is sometimes presented nowadays as a solution to global crises, for example under the names of authoritarian environmentalism or eco-authoritarianism to tackle climate change. At the planetary level, the idea that a world government, free from conflicting interests of states or other particular groups, would make better decisions for humanity as a whole, derives from the same inspiration.

Why centralised authoritarianism isn’t the answer to managing interdependence

Yet there are good reasons why this model eventually did not prevail in the formalisation of relations between individuals and states, nor in the construction of the international order. There are also good reasons why it would be no sound foundation for a governance system favouring multispecies flourishing and whole-planet thriving.

If one retains a minimal definition of private property as an object of a dominion recognised to a person by others with a certain permanence over time, then private property can be envisaged with no guarantee from a higher authority. Indeed, it can be just a practical principle of organisation between equals, with the purpose of ensuring some predictability and responsibility in the use of land, dwellings, and goods.

However, when a society grows in size and complexity, with more members and more possessions of increasingly diverse types, sticking to a decentralised mode of administration and enforcement gets more difficult. At a certain point, it might therefore become desirable to delegate the execution of these missions to a dedicated apparatus, and necessary to provide it with adequate means.

This, in turn, creates the risk that the persons in charge of such a powerful apparatus use it for their private profit rather than in the pursuit of the initial purpose of maintaining a social order. From a practical principle of organisation between equals, private property can then evolve into an instrument of defence of a certain social order and of individual autonomy against possible abuses of power by officials.

Interestingly, in history, this evolution has not been accompanied by an overall contraction of the state understood in a wide sense. Probably because it was recognised that large modern complex societies could not be managed without dedicated bodies for coordination and administration, the solution found to mitigate the risk of power abuse did not consist in reducing the size and power of the sphere of public authorities, but in redistributing the attributes of the state to distinct organs of power within that sphere.

That is the idea behind the limitation of executive power by law and independent courts defending individuals’ rights, and more generally behind the principle of separation of powers. Later, the limitation of legislative power by constitutions, followed by the decentralisation of state power towards local governments and independent administrative authorities, added new checks. By contrast, some of the projects that attempted to manage complexity through extreme power concentration – Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union – ended up failing in blood and ruins.

Up to a certain point, the development of the concept of state sovereignty has followed a similar path. Historically, the will of a group of individuals sharing a sense of belonging to the same political community to self-govern, without interference or pressure from others perceived as outsiders, was first a matter of fact, though frequently challenged by wars, invasions, and other attempts at subjugation. In that context, periods of peace were less of a principled recognition of other polities’ right to self-rule, and more of a truce until the next conflict.

The formalisation, acceptance of, and respect for the concept of state sovereignty as the rule by default in interstate relations is attributed to the Peace of Westphalia, signed in Europe in 1648. While it did not prevent subsequent wars, it nonetheless represented a breakthrough as it implied that peace could be envisaged as a stable state, based on the coexistence of autonomous polities recognised as such by their peers, rather than a temporary stage until the day when one empire would succeed in conquering the entire world.

However, unlike the deployment of the institutions of private property and public power within state borders, the adoption of state sovereignty as the foundational principle of the international order has not led to the creation of a higher authority equipped with the means to maintain, protect, and possibly restore this order in case of disturbance. In other words, there is no world government with supranational coercive forces enjoying what the sociologist Max Weber famously called, in relation to states, a “monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force”.

The planetary superstate, an unlikely outcome

Some of those appalled by the international wars and crises we witness every day may long for the creation of such a superstate, but this project would face a major obstacle. Whereas states tend to have originated from groups of individuals sharing a sense of belonging to the same political community, later imposing this sense of belonging on other persons present on their territory and getting rid of the reluctant, it is unlikely that in the foreseeable future, a comparable process will take place at the planetary level and shift allegiances from nation-states to a cosmopolitan polity.

At the same time, if the intended planetary superstate is to be democratic, it would have to consider individuals as persons equal in rights, on top of their quality of members of groups of various sizes with equal claims for the rights to exist and to participate in decision-making. Otherwise, citizens of less populated nation-states would understandably fear being systematically outvoted by larger groups which would game the system in their favour. Built on the primacy of states over individuals, the United Nations attributes one vote to each member state, regardless of its population.

By contrast, in the European Union (EU), this tension resulting from the dual nature of citizens – individuals equal in rights and nationals of different member states – has been specifically addressed in the design of decision-making institutions. Members of the European Parliament are directly elected by citizens and usually vote by simple majority, with no obligation to follow national considerations. However, each member state has a set number of seats which is not fully proportional to its population, with bonuses given to smaller countries. At the Council, all member states are represented by one official, but when a decision fails to be adopted by consensus, the qualified majority voting system requires a double majority based on the number of member states and their respective populations.

The adoption and extension of this voting system has been a decades-long struggle, and even today, pooled sovereignty is not accepted in matters that states deem existential. For example, a decision taken by the EU institutions in 2015 to relocate asylum seekers across member states has never been fully implemented by these states. In the foreseeable future, it is also very unlikely that national governments and public opinions would consent to a mechanism which could trigger military action under majority voting, so possibly against the will of certain member states. Likewise, EU member states have so far consistently defended their autonomy in the definition of their energy mix, despite a vast number of collective and cross-border implications related notably to pollution and safety, climate change, energy security and electricity grid stability.

If the EU has not been able, up to now, to fully deliver on its attempt to effectively manage interdependence while respecting the principle of equality between human beings and the legitimacy of national communities, achieving this at the planetary level, with a greater number of polities which are also more heterogeneous and sometimes outright hostile to each other, seems a very distant prospect.

Yet the need for reform in the realm of global governance is widely acknowledged. A first group of proponents and arguments points to the unfair character of the current institutional system. Established in the 1940s, it is accused of giving disproportionate powers to the United States and certain Western European countries, despite their relative decline in demographic and economic terms compared with other regions of the world. At the same time, this group does not necessarily question, at least in law, the primacy of state sovereignty – quite the contrary.

A second group of reformists may not disagree on the unfairness criticism, but adds that a key weakness of the current system is its inefficacy in achieving its purposes, starting with the maintenance of international peace and security as stated in the United Nations Charter. Some of those reformists consider this ineffectiveness is actually caused by the excessive weight given to respect of state sovereignty over the pursuit of goals such as respect for human rights and the provision of global public goods – peace, public health, a safe climate, just to name a few. The corollary is that the pursuit of these goals can justify limitations on state sovereignty, and in urgent cases even interferences from outside, based also on a broader understanding of state sovereignty that includes a “responsibility to protect” as well as other responsibilities towards human beings.

What has changed in the world since the 17th century and the Peace of Westphalia to support calls for such a deep overhaul of the international order? It is not that back then, states were hermetic entities with no uncontrolled interaction with each other. In fact, borders were more porous, and effective control of state authorities over their territory and population less robust than today.

A governance system fit for the Anthropocene

However, technological change has made these interactions stronger, in the same way it has enhanced humans’ capabilities both individually and as a species, up to the point we have become a geological force opening a new epoch named after ourselves the Anthropocene. Our ability to travel and communicate more, faster and over longer distances has multiplied and accelerated interactions between people across the globe, and even beyond the atmosphere.

In parallel, the growth of increasingly complex systems, based on accumulated knowledge and materials as well as longer chains of action, combined with our ability to harness larger and larger amounts of energy, has magnified the impact of our decisions and actions: global nuclear annihilation could technically be designed to be triggered just by pressing a button.

Not only the power and range of our actions have risen dramatically over the past decades, but we have also become more aware of the existence on our planet of billions fellow human beings, and many more non-human beings. While this increased awareness has not systematically led to more compassion with other living beings and to sufficient reflection about the consequences of our actions on these beings, it has made interdependence more difficult to ignore, even if the result has sometimes been attempts at retreating ourselves in smaller units – the nation-state, the household – and severing ties with the outside world.

Yet such attempts are very unlikely to succeed, at least without acceptance for a major fall in population and/or wellbeing from today’s levels, for both have precisely been enabled by a combination of division of labour and technological change and can’t be sustained if human beings’ individual and collective capabilities were to decline. Leaving aside scenarios of population shrinkage occurring through other means than the result of freely taken individual decisions, we posit that the Anthropocene will not end soon, and that the question is not about reducing human beings’ individual and collective capabilities, but how to bring them under some form of agency, preferably in a democratic manner.

We argue that in a similar way as state power has not been reduced in total, but increasingly decentralised and distributed, the institutions that channel human beings’ individual and collective capabilities should also become more decentralised and distributed. Concretely, because of the externalities in space and time created by our decisions and actions, no single entity, be it an individual, a company, or a state, should be acknowledged a sovereign right to make these decisions only according to their own will. Furthermore, even if the entire humanity could be represented in and by a decision-making institution, its legitimacy to decide in a sovereign, absolute and unconstrained way would still be challenged for not including non-human beings as well as future human beings.

Not being collective ownership or whole-of-humanity sovereignty, the advocated governance system would be based on two premises. First, because there can be no institution truly able to include and represent all interested parties, decision-making needs to be exercised with humility, restraint, and awareness that many interactions and consequences have not been foreseen. Second, while pretensions to absolute ownership or sovereignty should be dismissed as illegitimate because of the existence of externalities, it does not follow that there can be no attribution of responsibility for things and people to concrete entities. However, these entities must be held accountable not only before their own constituents, but before other stakeholders as well, and therefore they need to consider also these stakeholders’ positions.

Extending democratic citizenship beyond political institutions

Starting from existing democratic institutions within states, transitioning to such a governance system would be less about further democratising these institutions (though there is certainly progress to make in this regard), and more about expanding the application of democratic principles and decision-making processes to other realms of social life.

For example, because of the externalities they generate and the resources they use, companies should not be solely regarded as the property of their owners, but as organisations combining resources of various types in order to achieve certain goals. Persons who provide these resources – i.e. investors, but also workers –, and those who are affected by the activities of the company, e.g. neighbours or clients, should be enabled to have a say in how the company is run through different mechanisms like works councils, representatives at the board of directors, public consultations and sufficient information disclosure to allow scrutiny. These mechanisms should also convey interests of non-humans, though in absence today of clear communication channels with them, these interests can only be advanced by human advocates.

Implementation of such mechanisms and the level of stakeholders’ inclusion would of course be commensurate to the size and external impact of the company. The method of assessing these two criteria – the strength of impact and its effects in the considered jurisdiction, regardless of the country of registration of the company – to determine jurisdiction is already used today by competition authorities to possibly intervene outside their borders, in an extraterritorial way.

Stakeholders’ inclusion would mainly, albeit not exclusively, take place through representation by entities such as trade unions and associations. These entities would also need to be more democratic than they are today, because while they often claim to speak in the name of public interest, their internal decision-making processes tend to make them accountable only before their members and/or funders, with limited transparency and external oversight.

A possible mechanism to make these entities more representative, democratic and accountable would consist in granting each citizen a number of vouchers they would freely allocate to organisations recognised as of public benefit, as it has been experimented in Seattle (USA) for political campaign finance or in a few French companies for financing trade unions. Unlike the system more frequent today of tax reliefs for membership fees and donations paid to public benefit organisations, the voucher system empowers all citizens, including those who pay little or no income tax.

Within what constitutes today the sphere of public authorities, further democratisation means reducing the power of central institutions, be they political or administrative such as ministries or municipal countries, over entities like schools, hospitals and cultural institutions, and greater involvement of groups like workers, users and local residents.

In this model, citizens would be active, decision-making individuals not only in relation to political institutions like national parliaments and local authorities, but also in other realms of social life where they currently tend to be reduced to passive functions of users or employees. In addition of being multiplied in various realms of social life, a more active citizenship model would involve less delegation to officials or specialists, and more direct responsibility both in decision-making and material implementation, so that the costs and other consequences of decisions are more intensively felt by those who take these decisions. Accordingly, these decisions would be more anchored in reality and its constraints, and would carry more empathy towards those beings who are to suffer from the decisions.

From ownership to stewardship

In our reasoning, sharing decision-making prerogatives currently granted to single entities such as private owners does not lead to the abolition of private ownership or other types of privileged relations between a legal person (natural or juridical) and a thing. As mentioned earlier, a minimal definition of private property as an object of a dominion recognised to a person by others with a certain permanence over time can be a practical principle of organisation between equals, with the purpose of ensuring some predictability and responsibility in the use of land, dwellings, and goods.

On the other hand, the institution of ownership reserves the benefits derived from the use of owned resources to a single entity, despite the facts that land and most other resources are scarce and that their value is more social than intrinsic. It follows from these two facts that at a minimum, every human being, living today or to be born, is entitled to some claim over every unit of resource, and in a more progressive vision, the scope of claimants could be as well extended to non-human beings.

The impracticality of trying to have everything managed by everybody makes necessary to accept a form of compromise based on the preservation of owners’ positions as they stand today, but complemented by two mechanisms. First, claimants’ lost profits resulting from the practical difficulty of making use of their claims should be compensated by an ownership tax whose revenue would be redistributed among or used for claimants’ benefit. Second, while this tax would incentivise owners to put their assets to productive use, the range of possible uses would be restricted with better consideration for externalities and long-term effects. In particular, the use of resources should avoid inflicting harm and exceeding regenerative capacity as this would negatively affect future generations’ access to and claims on these resources.

Certain types of resources are already managed today under such mechanisms, for example fish stocks and bands of the electromagnetic spectrum whose scarce nature is not disputed. In the case of fish stocks, after science determines sustainable catch limits, fishing quotas can be auctioned to fishermen, with the raised revenue going to public authorities’ coffers, while fishing practices can also be regulated to forbid the use of techniques that endanger other species (negative externalities) or are considered excessively harmful to animal welfare. Regarding frequencies on the electromagnetic spectrum, their attribution can take into account criteria such as media pluralism.

In this model, there are no longer owners and ownership rights in the full, traditional meaning of the term, but stewards who are granted management powers for a definite period and with certain restrictions as to the use of resources. In exchange, they have the right to retain a share of the resulting profits. That is in fact not very different from the minimal definition of private property provided above.

It also reflects the vision expressed in Laudato Si’ encyclical that private property has a social purpose which goes beyond the maintenance of a certain social order, and that things should be administered for the good of all, under responsible stewardship rather than dominion. In other words, whereas private property tends to have been considered over the last centuries as a human right to be upheld by public authorities, stewardship is here defined as a contract between a community and the steward, who obtains management powers over a resource only conditionally, with restrictions in how the resource is used and for what purposes, and receives in exchange some benefits.

Greater powers and responsibilities for non-state actors at the planetary level

What would such a governance model look like at the planetary level, given the persistence of nation states? One way forward would be to grant a more official role in decision-making bodies to non-state actors such as local authorities, civil society organisations and companies. The presence of these actors is already well established in certain areas like climate negotiations, global public health and the setting of technical standards, with considerable resources brought by private entities, but their role should be at the same time enhanced and more formalised.

The corollaries of this larger heft are two-fold. First, these non-state actors or their representative organisations must be more democratic, as explained earlier in relation to expanding the application of democratic principles and decision-making processes beyond political institutions. Second, in the case of for-profit organisations which benefit the most from globalisation and its underlying physical and non-physical infrastructure such as trade regulations, freedom of navigation, undersea cables and normative harmonisation, these organisations should contribute more to the costs of providing these public goods, notably through the creation of global, group-level taxes whose revenue would be shared between global, national and local public authorities.

There is already some recognition that large multinational companies should be subject to specific tax regimes coordinated internationally. In 2021, 136 countries participating in the OECD/G20 Inclusive Framework on Base Erosion and Profit Shifting agreed “a two pillar solution to address the tax challenges arising from the digitalisation of the economy”, consisting in a global minimum tax rate of 15% combined with a reallocation of some taxing rights from a company’s home country to jurisdictions where it has business activities and profits. However, this scheme falls short of changing the recipients of tax revenue.

Nonetheless, a global levy that would directly fund an international organisation would not be unprecedented: the International Oil Pollution Compensation Funds, providing financial compensation for oil pollution damage occurring in member states and resulting from spills of persistent oil from tankers, receive contributions paid by entities receiving oil by sea transport.

Another industry particularly suitable for such a tax system would be maritime shipping, which is currently subject to sector-specific tonnage taxes instead of general corporate income taxes and has been exempt from the OECD/G20 two-pillar solution. The global levy could especially be calculated on the basis of greenhouse gas emissions, with the resulting revenue used to finance climate change mitigation and adaptation projects, in priority in poorer countries.

Ultimately, recognising the existence of innumerable interdependencies between all living beings, human and non-human – “everything is connected”, Laudato Si’ reads – must lead to the acknowledgement that everything is common heritage, though to various extents and with a different definition from the one currently used in international law.

Indeed, similarly to the evolution of thought on nature conservation which started questioning whether protected, but delimited reserves (land sparing) are the best approach compared with integrating conservation measures on working lands (land sharing), the concept of common heritage needs to abandon the distinction between, the one hand, spaces considered as of being common heritage and non-subject to appropriation, and on the other, leaving everything else under the regimes of national sovereignty and property rights.

A right to and duty of hospitality

Such an acknowledgement would also have a major impact on how we define citizenship and residence rights on a given territory. Currently, both are intimately interlinked, as it is visible in the fate of stateless persons who may not have any place on Earth to live in legally. At the same time, it is commonly accepted that every state has the right to regulate the flows of non-citizens entering its territory, with some self-admitted concessions – not always respected – regarding refugees.

The expansion of the common heritage principle does not necessarily question the rights of members of a given political community to set rules on who can become a citizen and under which conditions, but invites to reconsider the content of the relationship between this political community and the land it occupies – a fundamental attribute of statehood.

This should not be confused with visions of a world without states nor borders, for such projects would be socially inacceptable and practically very difficult, if not impossible to implement. It should also be reminded here that most persons see themselves both as individuals equal in rights and nationals of different states.

A possible compromise could follow these two principles. On the one hand, acknowledging that every human being, living today or to be born, is entitled to some claim over every unit of resource means that they also have a claim to live in a different place than the one they were born, possibly in a different country. This claim would not need to be supported by serious threats to the claimant’s life or freedom, in contrast to the refugee regime.

On the other hand, because it can be expected that many such claims would be in effect competing with each other for the same places, possibly exceeding local physical capacity to accommodate claimants, political communities and their representing national states and local authorities should be entitled to set quotas of admissible non-nationals, with spots allocated in a random way, similarly to the American Green Card Lottery. Quota setting would be coordinated internationally and should reflect what is each polity’s “fair share”, like the EU has done in its migration and asylum rules for internal distribution.

As an argument to make the compromise acceptable, the recognition of limits in accommodation capacity, and therefore the legalisation of quotas, would indeed be a step back compared with the current refugee legal framework. Yet it could be retorted that these limits already exist in practice with a significant number of countries, including wealthy ones, not respecting the refugee legal framework.

While this compromise falls short of guaranteeing every claimant the possibility to effectively use its “universal claim” to move to another country, it would nevertheless better take into account the technological changes that have taken place in the realm of mobility and communications since the end of the Second World War, the new risks to life that were not considered at the time of the creation of the refugee legal framework, in particular in relation to climate change, and the evolution of individual aspirations and expectations. If economic, social and environmental rights are indeed parts of human rights, as a growing consensus has tended to assert in recent decades, then it is not absurd to envisage that the effective exercise of these rights can involve migration. Albeit quantitatively limited, the recognition of a right for persons to reside in a country different from their own, without the obligation to provide a justification, would finally materialise Immanual Kant’s idea of “general hospitality” over two hundred years after it was formulated.

Concluding on Kant recalls, if it was necessary, that the vision underpinning this essay is idealistic, and assuming that it describes a desirable future – this is what we believe, though we suspect many would disagree –, making it a reality will be a long road with a lot of resistance on the way. However, we also attempted in this essay to propose concrete solutions which, although probably unpopular in certain circles, are realistically feasible in the short term and are backed by the strength of precedents, for example in the domains of taxation and delegation of power to non-state actors, both within states and internationally. Therefore, we hope to be luckier than Immanuel Kant and see some of these proposals come to light within our lifetime.

From the Atomic Age to the Age of Atomization: a tentative history of the 21st century

2023-11-01T10:20:00+01:00

Essay written in November 2015 for a contest organized by the Fountain Magazine.

During the summer 1989, a few months before the collapse of the Berlin Wall and with it, of an ideology and a geopolitical scheme that had structured the world for almost half a century, Francis Fukuyama argued in his famous essay “The End of History?” that we may have reached “the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution”, that is “the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government”.

This somehow optimistic vision of the 21st century has been repeatedly mocked, especially after the 9/11 attacks. For Fukuyama’s opponents, they are indeed the symbol that far from being on the way to become universal, the Western model of liberal democracy is still facing enemies and that for millions, if not billions of people on Earth, alternative sets of values and forms of government remain not only possible, but also preferable.

Maybe one of the sources of this dispute can be found in the type of object taken for analysis. In his article, Fukuyama painted a landscape mainly composed of nation states, but a closer look at what has been happening inside them reveals a different picture, where Western liberal democracy has been increasingly criticized even within the countries that are its historical birthplaces.

True enough, one of the key features of this model is its ability to deal with internal “contradictions”, for example through peaceful mechanisms of political changeovers which do not fundamentally question the rules of the game. Yet in the course of this essay, we shall argue that due to the very success of the liberal democratic undertaking, as well as disruptive technological changes, the relatively stable structures which have been underlying the Western liberal democratic order are becoming more and more fragmented, threatening the edifice standing on it.

In order to understand how these processses, being themselves the products of Western liberal democracy, are devouring their father, we shall first look back at history and recall the main goals, steps and achievements of this centuries-long enterprise.

Though the birth of the Western liberal democracy model is generally associated with Revolutions, be they Glorious, American or French, which defined who was to rule (the People, understood as the Nation) and how (through elected bodies and within the boundaries of the rule of law and civil rights), one should not forget where this power was to be exerted. The answer to this question had been provided a few decades earlier, when in 1648 the Treaties of Westphalia set the principle of states recognizing each other’s sovereignty and as a consequence, restraining themselves from interfering in their neighbours’ domestic affairs.

Put together, these bricks form a fairly coherent system in which a plurality of states should be able to coexist peacefully next to each other but in an independent manner, so that decisions taken in one state should be only binding for its people and on its territory, and should be adopted by a single organ – first the Monarch, then the Parliament – which together with the government enjoy a monopoly on power and its most extreme instrument of enforcement, i.e. violence.

Education and Constitutions check power

As later events showed that this ideal-type was unable to deliver on its promises of peace and prosperity, additional mechanisms had to be find out to improve the model. Concerning who should rule, the initial intention to include every single man – gender here matters – in the “People” quickly appeared illusory in regard to the low literacy levels prevalent at that time. From this perspective, the fight for universal, free and compulsory education, mainly carried out by Liberal politicians – with a capital letter – during the whole 19th century should be considered as an integral part of the Western liberal democratic model.

Yet after the experiences of authoritarian, or even fascist regimes from the 20s to the 40s of the 20th century, liberal democrats – referring this time to a wider group of politicians and intellectuals than those explicitly labelled as such – came to the conclusion that educating masses did not provide a sufficient guarantee against “bad government”, and that tyranny of the majority, though in a certain sense expressing “the people’s will”, is no more desirable than tyranny of one.

The way how to rule has therefore become enshreated in Constitutions, so that even a majority could not be allowed to do anything they like, in particular with rights deemed as fundamental such as the right to life, property, voting and minority rights. Such “supra-legal” rights, which preserve a minimal sphere of autonomy for individuals and minorities against potentially abusive state intervention, have been designed to ensure that a majority which gains power cannot change the rules of the game in a manner that would render political changeover impossible in the future.

Last but not least, the territorial definition of public authority, that is where it is expected to produce effects, has had to be revised. This has been primarily caused by technological progress, especially in the fields of transport, communication and industrialization in general. Before the invention of the steam machine, the railway and the telephone, human actions could only have a limited, local range, thus hardly able to generate cross-border or even far-reaching effects with the potential of running amok.

Throughout the 20th century, the examples of nuclear accidents, Internet and climate change, to mention only a few, have illustrated that how state sovereignty has become virtual and ineffective in dealing with global issues, whose origins as well as consequences are disseminated all around the planet. In other words, states no longer have the option to ignore what is going on not only behind their neighbour’s border, but even in any point on Earth, since it can potentially host a terrorist base, a tax haven or the source of a new pandemic that can affect them more or less directly.

The necessary redefinition of the territorial scope of political power, deriving from growing material interdependence at the global scale, has not yet delivered a solution which would be at the same time effective and acceptable for a majority of states – still at the core of the international public order – and people(s). Worse, the globalization process is reopening the questions of who and how to rule, as the increasing density of international law more and more often challenges the supremacy of national legal orders, including constitutional provisions.

This is for example visible in the European Union, despite the fact it represents the most deeply integrated supranational form of public authority in the world. It still lacks a lot of legal competences to tackle contemporary problems, from tax evasion to border management, while at the same time its power is considered as nondemocratic in realms where it actually has some decision-making capacity, for instance trade or asylum policy (cf. debates around the project of Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership or the Commission’s proposal to dispatch Syrian refugees throughout the EU-28).

This dilemma is even more serious at the international level where integration, understood as the propensity to play in a cooperative manner, pooling decision-making power and relinquishing veto rights for the sake of maximizing collective gains, is in general weak or non-existent, except for a few cases like the World Trade Organization.

Waning middle class

The political feasability of setting up global democratic structures which would be able to take up planet-wide challenges is all the more doubtful that certain characterics deemed as essential to the proper functioning of “classical” Western liberal democracies, at least within the boundaries of nation states, are disappearing. One of these pillars is a large middle class.

Since the outbreak of the 2008 financial crisis, the theme of socio-economic inequalities, which had been discarded during the 30-year domination of Reaganomics and other variations of neoliberal policies, has made a major comeback on the intellectual scene, and to a lesser extent in public policies. In academia and in the media, this has been the enormous success of Thomas Piketty’s book, Capital in the Twenty-First Century – over 1.5 million copies sold, a record for a 700-page economic publication – while in politics, the shift can be noticed in Barack Obama’s recent speech about “middle-class economics”.

Generally speaking, unfair fiscal policy has for sure contributed to deepen the gap between the rich and the poor, but is only one part of the explanation. Structural factors, such as increasing capital and labour mobility, the superstar effect and automation, permitted by technological developments in the fields of transport, communication and computer science, have played at least a comparable role, if not bigger, in eroding the middle-class from both ends to lift a happy few and suck the rest down to the bottom.

The middle class is also disappearing from a sociological point of view. For example, before the Internet era, a few TV channels and press titles dominated the media landscape, providing to their audiences a relatively coherent vision of the world shared by the vast majority of people. The multiplication of available sources of information on the Web has on the one hand made this landscape more pluralistic, but has on the other hand contributed to fragment societies into small and unstable “communities” with more and more polarized opinions due to the lack of common language and experience with other groups of the traditional, national community.

Paradoxically, the quest for authenticity and the “true self” has also been facilitated by the Liberal achievement of universalizing public education. The general rise of educational levels, which was aimed at supporting liberal democraties with “enlightened” citizens, has at the same time contributed to undermine all forms of authority, be it political or “technical” such as that usually enjoyed by doctors, lawyers or teachers.

The gap reduction in education between traditional notables and the masses, democratization of political power through the extension of voting rights, easier access to knowledge – for instance thanks to the Internet – and the spread of relativist theories have given birth to an “opinion-based democracy”, in which statements can no longer be falsified against an “objective” truth but are only a matter of personal opinion and therefore, are all equally acceptable.

Illusion of sovereignty

In terms of power distribution and exercise, the distrust of large fractions of the population towards traditional elites and their aspiration to directly decide their own destiny, encouraged by liberal individualism, may indeed mean the realization of the liberal dream, but by further fragmenting societies instead of integrating them more closely, they may hinder the possibility to properly address global challenges.

This is for example visible at the United Nations, where the number of state members has never been so high, making global agreements all the more difficult to adopt, while in front of the growing complexity of problems, from tax fraud to climate change adaptation and cyber crime, the reality is that a large part of these states, though formally maintaining an illusion of sovereignty, do not have the capability to fulfill even basic duties like a minimum level of security against armed aggressions, internal disorder and natural disasters.

Even “old nation states” such as Great Britain or Spain are being torn apart by centrifugal forces like the awakening of regional identities (Catalonia, Scotland) and the failure of central authorities to fully compensate for the effects of today’s economic geography, which tends to concentrate wealth and activities in a few hubs intensively interacting with each other but with little or no positive spillover on their traditional hinterlands.

Though this fragmentation process could in theory be balanced by a reintegration at a higher level, be it regional (in the sense of supranational) or even global, the contemporary reality shows a gloomier picture where atomization goes unchecked.

This could lead to a world dominated by very large cities, extremely well interconnected thanks to airlines and Internet. However, unlike today’s international system, which covers the whole planet with sovereign state entites (minus certain exceptions like Antarctica), in the future the integrated part of the world would, territorially speaking, only consist of these huge metropolies, while the rest of the globe would be left on its own and would fall into a sort of permanent anarchy.

This breakup may be encouraged by the aggravating consequences of climate change, which will render a lot of regions inhospitable for human beings and will force people to concentrate their adaptation efforts on a few dozen spots secured not only against floods, storms and droughts, but also against epidemia and “undesirable” individuals allegedly originating from non-integrated lands.

In the 20th century, the Berlin Wall was the symbol of the division of the world in two blocs, already now we are witnessing the building of walls and fences on state borders (Mexico-United States, Israel-Palestine, Hungary-Serbia-Croatia) and in the future, such barriers are most likely to “protect” cities themselves against “external” threats, like in the European Middle Ages or nowadays in certain South American countries.

Thanks to further technological progress in terms of renewable energy and recycling, the circular economy will become a reality, but will cut off material interdependence between cities and their hinterlands. The industrial model of massive nuclear power plants or farms distributing their production all around will be replaced by decentralized grids of small energy producers and urban farmers grouped in cooperatives more or less coordinated.

Travelling and communicating between these secured hubs will be fairly easy, as the enclosure of cities will allow public authorities to regain control over their territories and populations, however it will be very difficult to go outside this network, and it will be even more difficult, if not impossible, for “outlanders” to get in.

The loss of spatial continuity will probably not cause much sorrow. Already in our decade, highly educated elites born in New York, Lagos and Singapore may have more in common than with their national or ethnic fellows. They share at least one language (English), have the same cultural references shaped by Hollywood and the Grammy Awards, might have attended the same Ivy League universities and work for the same global corporations.

These people may be able to form a new basis for a coherent political entity, and we might see in the future more and more transnational actions such as the Occupy movement. Yet they will appear as a map of interconnected spots rather than nation-wide “surfaces”. In this perspective, even if some polity inspired by Western liberal democrat values and principles emerges at the global level, it is very much unlikely to become truly universal as it will only cover a few dozen cities in the world, and not the entire planet and mankind. The inevitable tensions that such a system will create incline us to think that even in 85 years’ time, the “end of history” will remain an attractive idea, but still to be implemented.

Reprendre la maîtrise du pouvoir : démocratie et monde complexe au XXIe siècle

2023-11-01T10:15:00+01:00

Contribution à l’appel de France Stratégie lancé au printemps 2020 sur le thème « Covid-19 : pour un “après” soutenable ».

Collectivement, l’humanité est devenue si puissante qu’elle constitue aujourd’hui une force géologique à part entière. Individuellement, nous n’avons sans doute jamais eu autant le pouvoir de déterminer le cours de nos vies. Dans le même temps pourtant, convaincus de ne plus avoir la maîtrise du devenir de nos sociétés, nous nous faisons une vision pessimiste de notre avenir collectif et par adhésion sincère ou par protestation, nous donnons crédit à ceux qui offrent la promesse illusoire de « reprendre le contrôle » en restaurant le passé.

Le monde est-il devenu trop complexe pour pouvoir être encastré dans quelque système institutionnel que ce soit, a fortiori démocratique ? Reconcentrer le pouvoir et s’affranchir des liens qui nous attachent aux autres est-il l’unique moyen de recouvrer une forme de souveraineté et de maîtrise sur notre destin ?

Cet essai a pour ambition de démontrer le contraire : en démultipliant la citoyenneté, notamment dans le champ des entreprises et de la société civile, et en révisant les fondements de nos systèmes économiques, nous pensons possible de rendre à la démocratie sa force exécutoire tout en poursuivant son extension à de nouvelles sphères de la vie collective.

Télécharger l’essai complet sur le site de France Stratégie.