Citizenship and democratic governance in the Anthropocene

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.