It is misleading to describe ‘world order’ as consisting exclusively ofsovereign territorial states. This misimpression is further encouraged by the structure of the United Nations, whose members are states, and only states. The UN was established in 1945 in the aftermath of World War II, reflecting a West-centric orientation that emerged at the time, quickly morphing into the Cold War rivalry between the two states that were geopolitically dominant and ideologically antagonistic: the United States and Soviet Union.
Even in the UN, however, this surface allegiance to statism is misleading. The geopolitical dimension was highlighted in the UN Charter by conferring a veto power on five winners in the recently concluded war, which amounted to the grant of a right of exception with respect to international law.
But there are differences in hard and soft power that make the interactions among states within the UN exhibit more inequality than is suggested by this still prevailing Westphalian myth of the equality among sovereign states. Some states contribute far more to the UN budget than others, and their views carry more weight; others are richer, bigger, more informed about some issues, are better at lobbying for support, and some play above their diplomatic weight by clever political maneuvers. And there are several kinds of non-states active behind the scenes that exert varying degrees of influence depending on the subject-matter.
Global policy is mainly shaped outside the UN by a bewildering array of formal and informal actors that participate in a bewildering variety of ways in international life. The world economy is substantially controlled by business oriented alignments such as the World Economic Forum that meets annually in Davos, Switzerland, or the gatherings of economically powerful states grouped together as the G-7, later becoming the G-8, and more recently the G-20 to accommodate shifts in trade and investment patterns, and give recognition to such new alignments as the BRICs.
As such, the shorthand designation of world order by reference to the 1648 Treaties of Westphalia that brought the Thirty Years War to an end serves as a convenient starting point for understanding the way authority and power are deployed in the world. Yet it must be supplemented by the recognition that the Westphalian framework has evolved through the years. Beyond this, it is not sufficient to rely on a statist logic to explain the main patterns of behavior that constitute world politics in the 21st century, which reflect the agendas of political extremist groups and transnational corporations and banks, as much as they do states. In fact, national governments are often subordinated to and instrumentalized by individuals and groups promoting the interests of business and finance.
Statist Logic. Despite these qualifications, states do remain the main political actor on the global stage, and the principal agent of diplomacy. The doctrinal ideas of territorial sovereignty continue to provide the basic organizing principle for the conduct of ordinary transnational relations. It is further important to realize that most political leaders and their chief advisors are ‘realists’ who purport to act on the basis of maximizing national interests and accompanying values even when they are in actuality serving the interests of transnational capital to the detriment of their own citizenry.
The boundaries of the state shape the outer limits of political community for most persons living on the planet , but some states contain within their borders one or more specific ethnicity that deems itself a distinct people and nation, which if it perceives itself as the target of discrimination or even a victim of submerged identity, may regard itself as ‘a captive nation’ that seeks a separate political existence that ensures the preservation of cultural memory and national pride. In this sense, the ‘nation’ represented by such a phrase as ‘the national interest’ may be profoundly misleading if understood to refer to the interests of an entire population within its borders rather than that of the dominant ethnicity or religion. Throughout the world there are many internationally unrepresented peoples seeking to form their own state in accordance with the right of self-determination, which if carried to extremes, threatens the unity of almost all sovereign states.
Sometimes, this process is a forcible one as with the establishment of Kosovo with the help of NATO in 1999, sometimes it is a consensual separation, as with the establishment of Slovakia. Democratic states may offer restive minorities the opportunity to secede by referendum as in the recent case of Scotland, but some forms of secession are resisted as was the case with American Civil War or more recently, the PKK efforts to establish in eastern Turkey a separate state of Kurdistan, as well as Spain’s treatment of the main separatist movement of the Basque people as essentially a terrorist organization.
Many individuals depend on citizenship to avoid the acute vulnerability of ‘statelessness,’ which is a status without rights or protection, and suggests the primacy of states in the life of most people, whether consciously realized or not. The plight of economic migrants and refugees fleeing combat zones suggests the humanitarian ordeal experienced by many people who are not securely connected to a state capable of providing the fundamental ingredients of a sustainable lives. Refugees may be citizens with rights in the country they escaped from, but generally find themselves victimized anew by the country within which they sought sanctuary. Some governments adopt humane and generous approaches to refugees and stateless persons, but it is voluntary and the affected individuals are not the recipient of effective rights even if ‘human rights’ are based on being human, and not on citizenship or nationality.
Geopolitical Logic. As statist logic is premised on equality before the law and in formal diplomatic relations, geopolitical logic is premised on inequality and the right of exception with respect to that portion of international law concerning issues of war and peace, and what is called ‘national security,’ or more broadly, ‘vital interests.’ While statism is descriptive of the horizontal dimension of world order within the Westphalian framework, geopolitics constitutes the vertical dimension that has been present ever since the modern structure of world order emerged in Europe in the mid-seventeenth century. Various empires exhibited the formalization of this vertical dimension as did European colonialism, which at its height after World War I, dominated much of the world. The anti-colonial movements of the last half of the twentieth century produced many newly independent sovereign states, universalizing the horizontal development of world politics.
In the post-colonial global setting of the early twenty-first century the vertical dimension of world order is disguised to some degree because it was weakened and discredited in the past hundred years. These disguises make reference to certain normative justifications for the imposition of political will by the strong on the weak. Among the most prominent of these legal and moral arguments favoring otherwise prohibited uses of force are ‘self-defense,’ ‘humanitarian intervention,’ ‘responsibility to protect’ or ‘R2P,’ and ‘nonproliferation.’ In each situation, depending on the facts the rationalization may be more or less plausible as a cover for a strategically motivated geopolitical maneuver. It seemed somewhat plausible to liberate Kosovo from Serbia in 1999, given the threat of ethnic cleansing in the aftermath of the Srebrenica atrocity, but it was also clearly motivated by the interest in maintaining NATO as a useful instrument of coercion in a post-Cold War setting, a demonstration conveniently coinciding with the 50th anniversary of the alliance. Similarly, it seemed reasonable in 2011 to intervene in Libya to prevent a civilian massacre by Qaddafi forces in the city of Benghazi, although it was undoubtedly also true that the high quality oil reserves added a strategic incentive to the humanitarian impulse to protect threatened Libyan civilians. In contrast, without oil, the atrocities taking place in Syria produced a much weaker expression of international concern. Each of these situations is complex, opening the way for contradictory interpretations as to the humanitarian effects of action and non-action, as well as the assessment of the importance of the strategic interests at stake.
The geopolitical logic trumps statist logic in relation to international uses of force, and helps explain the marginalization of international law and the UN in the war/peace context. The constraints that are operative with respect to geopolitics derive from considerations of cost/benefit analysis, pressures exerted by group politics, prudential concerns about nuclear weaponry and avoiding casualties to its military personnel, and the sporadic anti-war restraints of public opinion (especially in liberal democracies). In the recent American-led coalition created as a response to threats posed by ISIS (‘Islamic State of Iraq & Syria,’ also known by other names), President Obama did not even bother to justify recourse to force by reference to either international law or the UN, and seemed concerned only that he had a legal basis within the American constitutional framework to act as he did. Significantly, as well, most of the domestic controversy focused on this issue of authorizing warlike behavior without any participation by Congress, showing no worries about acting contrary to international law and without a UN mandate for recourse to non-defensive force.
Cosmopolitan Logic. Partly as a result of economic globalization and partly due to the impact of global challenges associated with nuclear weapons and climate change, there is an emerging appreciation that neither statism nor geopolitics can protect overall hman wellbeing and survival aspects of what might best be called the human or global interest. Despite decades of aspirational language, there seems to be no prospect in the immediate future of freeing humanity from the looming threat of nuclear catastrophe. The challenge of the weaponry has been geopolitically degraded in the form of creating a nonproliferation regime that distorts priorities by conceiving of the main danger deriving from countries that do not have nuclear weapons rather than those that do. The 2003 aggressive war undertaken by the United States and the United Kingdom against Iraq was mainly rationalized as a counter-proliferation undertaking, epitomizing the subordination of cosmopolitan interests in getting rid of nuclear weapons to the geopolitics of managing their control and dissemination.
A similar dynamic is present in relation to climate change, and the failed effort to contain the emission of greenhouse gasses, especially carbon dioxide.The UN mechanisms for lawmaking treaties have been unable to agree upon an obligatory framework that takes account of the scientific consensus on the need for strict regulation of the buildup of carbon in the atmosphere, and the resultant harmful effects of global warming. As a result the situation worsens, and irresponsibly the growing burdens of adaptation are shifted to the future.
Without the formation of a political community of global scope it is unlikely that cosmopolitan logic will have any significant impact on behavior that reflects strong national interests and geopolitical priorities. The preconditions for such a development do not seem present as nationalist ideologies continues to maintain the dominance of statism and geopolitics despite their dysfunctional implications for the future of the human species. This persistence raises some deep questions about whether there exists a sufficient species will to survive. Until the advent of the Anthropocene Age such an imperative did not exist, and survival threats as they occurred were directed at particular societies or civilizations, that is, posing sub-species threats, but not endangering the species itself. What distinguishes the Anthropocene is the impact of human activities on the fundamental balances that have allowed life and social development to proceed.
There have been past cases where cosmopolitan concerns have been addressed because competing logics were not seriously engaged: public order of the oceans, prohibition of ozone depleting technologies, ecological preservation of Antarctica. Until the atomic attacks on Japanese cities in the closing days of World War II the cosmopolitan horizons of human activity were treated as matters of idealistic and spiritual concerns, but not relevant to issues of bio-political persistence. Even Woodrow Wilson’s dream that the League of Nations would cause the institution of war to fade away was never taken seriously by the political leaders of the day, especially in Europe, who well understood that their privileged position of vertical control (that is, colonial system) rested on an atmosphere of permanent war to ensure that ‘the natives’ would not get uppity.
Civil Society Logic. The perspectives and activities of civil society occupy a broad and diverse spectrum of concerns, and contain elements of the other three logics that together compose world order. The normative motivations of transnational civil society actors do establish an existential constituency disposed toward the realization of human and global interests. These actors have been active in relation to the promotion of human rights, environmental protection, nuclear disarmament, and climate change. That is, civil society perspectives often merge in these venues with cosmopolitan perspectives, and present unified critical responses to statism and geopolitics. The counter-conferences at global policy events illustrate such encounters, and are likely to intensify as the awareness of global crises grow and the experience of the seriousness of unmet global challenges deepens. A distinctive feature of civil society logic is engagement with values and change, and a certain distrust of detached thought that presents itself as ‘neutral.’ The spirit of civil society was expressed unforgettably for me by a graffiti written on a wall in the city of Vancouver: “Thought Without Action Equals Zero.”
In a larger historical sense, the question before all of us is whether civil society can become an agent of historical transformation in relation to cosmopolitan logic, thereby joining thought with action. Only such a reconstituted political imagination has any chance of producing policy and behavioral adjustments that make the human future a brighter prospect than now appears to be the case.
Hope to balance despair depends on our according unrealistic confidence in the capacity of civil society movements to achieve transformative results, what I have called in the past ‘the realism of a politics of impossibility’ or ‘a necessary utopianism.’ Nothing less seems responsive to the magnitude of the civilizational challenges already negatively impacting on human wellbeing. I have little doubt that those ‘realists’ we rely upon as dutiful, taxpaying citizens are leading us down a path heading toward doomsday. It is time we shifted our allegiances and energies to the citizen pilgrims among us who are pointing us toward a humane and sustainable future for life on planet earth.
Global Justice in the 21st Century 
A Gathering Global Storm
24 Oct[This is a longer than usual post. It is my chapter contribution to The Great Awakenkng: New Modes of Thinking Amid the Ruins of Capitalism (2020) edited by Anna Grear & Davd Bollier. My text is preoccupied with the decline of the state as an efficient problem-solving instrument in a period where global scale challenges are generating an ethical-ecological-bio crisis. The intensity of the crisis is magnified by the absence of globally oriented geopolitical leadership, which had previously been supplied by the United States. Restored liberal internationalism would likely give more time to devise more functional responses to the gathering storm, but would not address the underlying structural causes of the crisis: predatory capitalism, global military, apathetic empathy, materialism.
I urge reading The Great Awakening and bringing the book to the attention of friends. It is an undertaking of love and commitment by the editors.
Punctum Books is a progressive, independent publisher. To learn more about its vision and the book go to its website, and check out links below:
the official press release about The Great Awakening, published by Punctum Books:
https://punctumbooks.pubpub.org/pub/the-great-awakening-edited-by-anna-grear-and-david-bollier
https://punctumbooks.com/titles/the-great-awakening-new-modes-of-life-amidst-capitalist-ruins/
….and here is where you can download a (free) PDF of the book:
https://library.oapen.org/handle/20.500.12657/42480]
Twilight of the Nation-State (at a Time of Resurgent Nationalism
The presence of systemic challenges in a world order reality that is sub-system dominant (that is, shaped by sovereign states, especially those that are dominant) has yet to be sufficiently appreciated. True, there is attention given to the advent of the Anthropocene, in recognition of the extent to which human activities are now principal drivers of important changes in the quality and even sustainability of the global habitat.[16] Yet problem-solving is still caught up in the structures, practices, and procedures of the Holocene, which dealt with habitat and security challenges by way of sub-systemic responses and policies that assume that crises could be devastating, but not threatening to the system as a whole.[17] In different ways, climate change and nuclear weapons are illustrative of the global challenges facing humanity in the age of the Anthropocene, but there are others— the protection of biodiversity, eradication of poverty, the prevention of hunger and malnutrition, and the control of pandemic disease.
From a conceptual perspective, climate change is a clear instance of the limits of statist problem-solving in circumstances where the global scope of the problem is acknowledged. The unevenness of state responsibility for the buildup of greenhouse gases, which is aggravated by the difficulty of establishing causal connections between emissions and harm, creates controversy and tensions. With a strong consensus within the community of climate scientists and among civil society activists, the governments of the world came together to negotiate an historic agreement to control greenhouse gas emissions sufficiently to minimize increasing harm from global warming. The result was a notable achievement: 193 governments signed onto the Paris Climate Change Agreement in 2015, and there resulted a celebration among the participating diplomats. Yet the success of the Paris Agreement, as measured by maximizing the cooperative potential of a statist problem-solving procedure, was, from another point of view, an ominous failure. The Agreement, although impressive as an exercise in inter-state lawmaking, was disappointing if the measure of success was prudently addressing the challenge. The Paris Agreement was neither responsive enough to the dangers nor sufficiently obligatory to provide a credible and responsible response to the dangers of global warming if measured against the limits on CO2 dissemination urged on governments by the overwhelming majority of climate specialists.
Until ten years ago, the idea of a statist twilight was seen mainly as a recognition that the state, as it had evolved in Europe since the seventeenth century, was being displaced transnationally by economic globalization and was newly threatened by transnational mega-terrorism and cyber attacks.[26] At the same time there was an emerging awareness that the most manifest threat to human wellbeing was being posed by the effects of global warming brought about by the accumulation of greenhouse gas emissions. The recent confrontation between North Korea and the United States, which has featured apocalyptic threats from the leaders of both countries, has reawakened the world to the dangers of nuclear war and to the fragility of existing global security arrangements.
Overall, the increasingly global scope of policymaking and problem-solving was regarded as making it dysfunctional to rely on state-level governance and calculations of national interest. This is because the items on the political agenda most likely affect the totality of lives and the collective destiny of humanity—especially future generations—regardless of where one is situated on the planet.[27] Revealingly, these globalizing concerns have not led governments to create stronger structures of global governance. The dangerous inability to protect at-risk global and human interests might have been expected to induce more responsible governments and their citizens to work feverishly to establish a more independent and adequately-resourced United Nations, but this failed to happen. Addressing global challenges successfully seems impossible without augmented instututional capabilities backed up by the level political will required to generate and implement appropriate legal norms. [LR1] Whether and how these norms will be delimited is a major adaptive challenge to a fundamental realization that the Westphalian framework, even if responsibly reinforced by geopolitical leadership—which is presently at low ebb—cannot satisfy minimum requirements of world order. It is a disappointing part of these dire circumstances that there is such a weak popular mobilization around this twenty-first-century agenda of challenges. It is time to acknowledge that, despite the seriousness of global challenges, states separately and aggregately have shown little ability, and inadequate political will, to respond in a manner that is adaptive.[28] In effect, the non-decline of the state, or even its seeming resurgence as an exclusivist nation-state, is accentuating the weakness of global governance when it comes to global, systemic issues. In this respect, the state continues to bask in sunlight, as if awaiting twilight to subdue its anachronistic orientation and priorities.
Instead of a rational and convincing pattern of adaptation, this rendering of a radiant twilight has produced a series of institutional innovations that were supposed to serve as a vehicle for the pursuit of multilateral cooperative arrangements on world affairs. This gave rise to such diverse arenas as the G-7, G-8, G-20, annual gatherings of the IMF and World Bank, BRIC meetings, Shanghai Infrastructure Investment Bank, as well as to private sector initiatives such as the World Economic Forum, the Council on Foreign Relations, and the Trilateral Commission. Such constellations of institutional configurations contribute to the impression of organizational decline, as does the emergence of a variety of anti-capitalist initiatives associated with the World Social Forum, Non-Aligned Movement, including commoning in various forms.[29]
With the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, the United States chose to constitute itself as the first “global state” in history, relying on a network of hundreds of foreign bases, navies in every ocean, and the militarization of space and even cyberspace, aiming to establish a global state that eclipsed the sovereignty of all other states, which are unwilling to dilute the traditional scope of their sovereign rights when it comes to national security (except to some extent China and Russia).[32] This American global state relies on the consent of many, and on coercion toward a few, in pursuit of its goals. This is most clearly evident in relation to the conduct of counterterrorist warfare and counter-proliferation diplomacy, using non-territorial innovations such as drones, cyber sabotage, special ops elite covert forces, as well as relying on traditional territorial instruments of hard power such as military intervention. Such a heavy investment in achieving globalized military control is also seen as supportive of neoliberal capitalism, it also tends to downgrade the relevance of the Westphalian state to either of its prime roles— in relation to development and to internal and external security.[33]
In addition to war, the dense causal complexity of global warming, in terms of the locus of greenhouse gas emissions being substantially disconnected from the locus of harm, offers another kind of deterritorializing in which ecological security depends on the behavior of the global whole as well as on that of certain national parts. Related issues of biodiversity pose analogous issues in relation to the global dependence on on diversity being out of sync with the territorial sovereignty relied upon to preserve the world’s most biologically diverse rainforests.
[1] Emblematic of this zeitgeist was the first World Forum organized by TRT World (a Turkish English-language radio and TV channel similar in format and intent to CNN or to Al Jazeera English) around the theme of “Inspiring Change in an Age of Uncertainty,” featuring several world leaders, prominent media personalities, government officials, and even a few academics, including myself. Hotel Conrad, Istanbul, October 18-19, 2017. No one took issue with this theme, which would never have been chosen in the last half of the twentieth century when the structure of international relations, at least, seemed stable, if not certain, and hardly worth problematizing.
[2] The linearity of the metaphor can also be questioned and subjected to doubt in this chapter. The degree of certainty that night will follow twilight does not pertain in the political domain where reversibility and stagnancy could persist, that is, the state could recover its salience or at least achieve a new stasis.
[3] This is the central argument of Richard Falk, Power Shift: On the New Global Order (London: Zed, 2016).
[4] On the U.S. providing a global leadership that achieves many of the positive goals associated with world government, see Michael Mandelbaum, The Case for Goliath: How America Acts as a World’s Government in the Twenty-First Century (New York: Public Affairs, 2005).
[5] For an understanding of the scale and scope of past catastrophic change see Jared Diamond, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed (New York: Viking, 2005).
[6] Richard Falk, “Does the Human Species Wish to Survive?” in Falk, Power Shift, 253-262.
[7] We perceive the future “through a glass, darkly” if at all, which provides ample reason to rely on an epistemology of humility to sustain hope. That is, since we cannot know the future, we should strive for what is necessary and desirable. This view is elaborated upon by Falk, “Horizons of Global Governance,” 101-128.
[8] Among recent instances, Scotland, Iraqi Kurdistan, and Catalonia are of relevance. For an analysis of the international issues in the political and historical context of the 2017 encounter of Spain and Catalonia see John Dugard, Richard Falk, Ana Stanic, and Marc Weller, The Will of the People and Statehood (report at the request of Esquerra Republicana de Catalunya, 30 October 2017). For a focus on the conflictual aspects of internal struggles to reshape the dynamics of self-determination see Mary Kaldor, New and Old Wars (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 3rd ed., 2012).
[9] See Richard Falk, “Ordering the World: Hedley Bull After 40 Years,” in The Anarchical Society at 40: Contemporary Challenges and Prospects , eds. Hidemi Suganami, Madeline Carr, and Adam Humphreys (Oxford, UK: Oxford Un iversity Press, 2017), 41-55, in geopolitical sequel to role of “Great Powers.” On role of Great Powers, see Hedley Bull, The Anarchical Society: A Study of Order in World Politics (New York: Columbia University, 1977).
[10] See Stephen Krasner, Sovereignty: Organized Hypocrisy: Change and Persistence in International Relations (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999); see also Joseph A. Camilleri and Jim Falk, The End of Sovereignty: The Politics of a Shrinking and Fragmenting World (Hants, UK: Edward Elgar, 1992).
[11] Most extravagantly expressed by Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (New York: Free Press, 1992). Even Huntington’s far more accurate anticipation of renewed conflict was based on a new era of inter-civilizational rather than inter-state warfare, see: Samuel Huntington, Clash of Civilizations and the Making of World Order (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1997). Both of these influential formulations can be read as alternative expressions of the twilight hypothesis. For a negative assessment of economic globalization as shaped by neoliberal ideology see Richard Falk, Predatory Globalization: A Critique (Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2000).
[12] For discussion see unpublished paper, Richard Falk, “After 9/11: The Toxic Interplay of Counterterrorism, Geopolitics, and World Order,” presented at a workshop on “Is there an After After 9/11?” Orfalea Center on Global and International Studies, University of California Santa Barbara, January 20-21, 2018.
[13] There was some thinking along this line, most explicitly by Robert D. Kaplan, Coming Anarchy: Shattering the Dreams of the Post Cold War (New York: Random House, 2000); also, Huntington, Clash of Civilizations, but Fukuyama’s twilight is followed by the presumed forever sunshine of globalized liberalism.
[14] Perhaps the most graphic assertions along these lines were made by the American president, George W. Bush, shortly after the 9/11 attacks: “We have the best chance since the rise of the nation state in the seventeenth century to build a world where the great powers compete in peace instead of prepare for war.” Further, “[m]ore and more civilized nations find themselves on the same side, united by common dangers of terrorist violence and chaos:” Address to the Graduating Class, West Point, June 2002; also, in the cover letter to National Security Strategy of the United States, White House, Washington, D.C, September 2002.
[15] Most significantly argued by Daniel Deudney, Bounding Power: Republican Theory from the Polis to the Global Village (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004).
[16] See Richard Falk’s chapter, “The World Ahead: Entering the Anthropocene?” in Exploring Emergent Thresholds: Toward 2030, eds. Richard Falk, Manoranjan Mohanty, and Victor Faessel (Delhi, India: Orient Black Swan, 2017), 19-47.
[17] These terms used to classify geological eras are here used metaphorically to identify the scope of problems and problem solving in the context of global governance.
[18] See the text of the Paris Agreement on Climate Change (2015) to discern its essentially voluntary compliance framework. “Paris Agreement,” New York: United Nations, 2015.
[19] Trump has not yet formally expressed objections to the Paris Agreement beyond suggesting, in vague generalities, that it is “a very bad deal for America” and hurts the competitiveness of American business by raising costs of production via constraints on carbon emissions.
[20] The climate change policies of California are a dramatic example, accentuated by the anti-environmental posture of the Trump presidency. Individuals and communities may voluntarily adopt climate-friendly behavioral patterns including vegan diets, electric cars, solar power.
[21] See “nuclear famine” studies. There are also other indications of toxicity and disruption of ecological and social structures on a more or less permanent basis. For human impacts via food see the briefing paper by Ira Helfand, “Nuclear Famine: Two Billion People at Risk: Global Impacts of Limited Nuclear War on Agriculture, Food Supplies, and Human Nutrition,” Physicians for Social Responsibility, 2013.
[22] For elaboration see Richard Falk and David Krieger, The Path to Nuclear Zero: Dialogues on Nuclear Danger (Boulder, CO: Paradigm, 2012).
[23] Even when a cautious call for steps toward a world without nuclear weaponry is set forth, as by Barack Obama in his Prague Speech of 2009, nothing happens as the roots of nuclearism are too deep to challenge effectively.
[24] See Richard J. Barnet, Who Wants Disarmament? (Boston: Beacon Press, 1960) for a strong early critique of disarmament diplomacy that publicly advocated disarmament while bureaucratically opposing it. Over the decades, nuclearism has become entrenched in the governmental structures of the main nuclear weapons states that have been identified as the “deep state” or “military-industrial-complex.”
[25] See Richard Falk. “Challenging Nuclearism: The Nuclear BAN Treaty,” Global Justice in the 21st Century, July 14, 2017; “Nobel Peace Prize 2017: International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN)”, October 8, 2017, https://richardfalk.wordpress.com/2017/10/08/nobel-peace-prize-2017-international-campaign-to-abolish-nuclear-weapons-ican/
[26] For speculation along these lines see Richard Falk, The Great Terror War (Northampton, MA: Olive Branch Press, 2003).
[27] For stimulating conjecture along these lines, see Robert W. Cox with Timothy J. Sinclair, Approaches to World Order (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1996); Stephen Gill, ed., Global Crises and the Crisis of Global Leadership (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2012).
[28] See Falk, “Does the Human Species Wish to Survive?”—raising the biopolitical question as to whether there is a sufficient species will to survive as distinct from individual, communal, and national wills to survive that are robust, and actually, part of the distinctive problem of superseding and complementing responses at lower levels of social integration by reliance on species and global scale responses.
[29] See also the networked adaptation to the new era as depicted by Anne-Marie Slaughter, The New World Order (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004).
[30] The idea of nationality is purely juridical, given practical relevance by passport and international identity papers. In some countries, for example Israel, the state draws a distinction between citizenship and nationality, privileging the latter on the basis of Jewish ethnicity.
[31] The Trump presidency has illustrated the dynamic of the double coding of nationalism and love of country. For Trump’s white political base, the acclamation accorded to America is understood in a non-plural white-supremacist manner, which terrifies and angers those Americans who are non-white or socially vulnerable. It raises the critical question as to what is “America” as state and nation. Such interrogation should be directed at many states that are trying to build various forms of exclusionary governing structures. These issues are well explored in Mazen Masri, The Dynamics of Exclusionary Constitutionalism: Israel as a Jewish and Democratic State (Oxford, UK: Hart, 2017).
[32] This sense of establishing a global security system administered by Washington was most clearly put forward during the presidency of George W. Bush in the National Security Doctrine of the United States of America (2002): see advice to China to concentrate on trade, and not waste resources competing with the U.S. in the domain of security.
[33] The “Westphalian state” should be contrasted with the “global state” constructed by the United States, as well as with the concept of “empire.” See generally: Richard Falk, The Declining World Order: America’s Imperial Geopolitics (New York and London: Routledge, 2004), especially 3-65; also Falk, “Does the Human Species Wish to Survive?”.
[34] For instance, overseeing the negotiation of several multinational agreements, including the Law of the Seas Treaty in 1982, and generally seeking to combine its national interests with sensitivity to the interests of others, but still largely within a state-centric imaginary.
[35] See Gill, Global Crises and the Crisis of Global Leadership.
[36] See Mathew Horsman and Andrew Marshall, After the Nation State: Citizens, Tribalism, and the New World Disorder (London, UK: HarperCollins, 1994) somewhat prophetically arguing that the future will witness the decline of the state due to the rise of anti-internationalist values and political movements.
[37] Not explicitly formulated in Robert J. Lifton and Richard Falk, Indefensible Weapons: The Political and Psychological Case Against Nuclearism (New York: Basic Books, rev. 2nd ed., 1991).
Tags: global leadership, global militarim, nuclearism, predatory capitaalism, state system, ultra-nationalism\