Jonathan Blake
Jonathan Blake is a Professor of Politics at the London School of Economics, where his work explores global governance, planetary politics, and the institutions needed to address shared global challenges.
Essay
Planetary Subsidiarity
Jonathan Blake
The nation-state is, by design, limited—by its often arbitrary territorial boundaries, by the claims of sovereignty made by every other nation-state, by its indulgence of short time horizons (on the order of decades, at most), and by its intractable modes of governance. Such features of the modern nation-state render it woefully ill-equipped to take on many of the urgent problems of the present and future that transcend, ignore, or supersede its historical happenstance. Problems like climate change, biodiversity loss, pandemic diseases, and chaotic, forced mass migration—problems its very form contributed to creating—inherently flout borders that the nation-state perforce defines and insists upon to planetary peril.
Moreover, the nation-state, as a political form, is limiting. Just as it is constrained by physical—but fundamentally imagined—borders, the nation-state constrains the imagined—but palpable—political field of vision. In bridling the political imagination, the nation-state functions as a giant pair of blinders, pallidly propped up by patriotic paraphernalia like flags, anthems, and tombs of unknown soldiers.
The nation-state’s preeminence as the institution of governance radiates the world round, contorting political creativity to fit within its shape and quashing those that do not. The result is a stunted and stagnant political imagination mired by inaction, apathy, and deviant turpitude. Citizens of the nation-state commonly complain of the political class’s terminal lack of imagination and aim their anger at their national elites. It is hard to disagree with the sentiment, even if I reject the often-fascistic political response.
A more empathetic, expansive consideration of politicians and their ilk who handle (and manhandle) les affaires de l’état might identify the cognitive constraints placed on them by the system in which they operate. As the basic unit in global politics, the nation-state determines “what sorts of political actions and political problems are possible or impossible,” in the words of Chinese political philosopher Zhao Tingyang. And so our elites’ persistent tunnel vision is the symptom of the nation-state itself—now unmoored, and thus unfit for purpose, in what we might call the planetary age.
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What if we were to start anew? Where could we venture if unencumbered by national constraints to our thinking, what social scientists have condemned as “methodological nationalism”? How might we organize politics? Specifically, how would we develop new modalities of governance for what we at the Berggruen Institute are defining as “the planetary age”? And what will life become under new modes of planetary governance?
Nils Gilman and I propose a heterodox institutional matrix that heeds that fundamental question: “planetary subsidiarity.” The principle of subsidiarity, on its own, is an old idea for arranging political power. Originating in early seventeenth-century Europe, it states that higher governing institutions, like states, should not intervene in the work of smaller-scale institutions, like cities—unless and until a smaller-scale body is unable to carry out a particular task. In its original formulation, for instance, the principle was devised to protect the local autonomy of a Calvinist town, Emden, against the imperious imposition of its Lutheran provincial lord and Catholic emperor. “It is an injustice and at the same time a grave evil and disturbance of right order,” penned Pope Pius XI, one of the principle’s leading theorists, in 1931, “to assign to a greater and higher association what lesser and subordinate organizations can do.”
Planetary subsidiarity is our philosophical and political extension of subsidiarity’s original context fit for our emergent episteme, building on a generative historical idea, and retuning it in a planetary key. Political yeast, it is the activating principle for allocating authority over an issue to the smallest-scale unit that can govern the issue effectively to achieve habitability and multi-species flourishing. Some arboreal matters, for instance, are effectively resolved at the root; others require intervention at the level of the particular grove or forest; still others can only be governed at the scale of what political theorist Stefanie Fishel calls “the global forest.” Planetary subsidiarity thus lifts powers and responsibilities from the nation-state, placing them instead within both planetary and local institutions.
In this new model of governance, collective life and individuals’ lives will assume new orientations, facing two loci: the local and the planetary. These are the sites toward which we will direct our physical, intellectual, and emotional labor. They will be where we root our identities, aim our aspirations, and train our efforts. They will come to be understood as the twin foundations of “home.” Realigning our vision locally—to the places where we dwell, the places that we know—will ground us in the specific human communities, multispecies networks, climatic zones, and ecologies that in so many ways already shape how and how well we live. These modes of being exist but are under-appreciated. Under planetary governance, I hope, their appreciation will grow: from families breaking bread (or baking bread), to neighbors sweating together to build a resource for their community, whether a ditch, a berm, or a garden. A renewed focus on local life—and how it connects to other “locals” elsewhere and at differing scales as well as to the planetary whole—will imbue new urgency and meaning to face-to-face practices and encounters.
A planetary orientation, meanwhile, will reveal our Earth-bound nature at scale. It will bring our human dependence on the planet and our interdependence with its biosphere to the fore through the practice of quotidian tasks and profound experiences alike. With every act, our new mindset will insist that we remember, as the Russian polymath Vladimir I. Vernadsky wrote in 1945, that “all organisms,” humans included, “are connected indissolubly and uninterruptedly, first of all through nutrition and respiration, with the circumambient material and energetic medium”—and that, therefore, “no living organism exists on Earth in a state of freedom.” With every bite, for instance, we will no longer be able to obfuscate our food’s origins and paths to the plate—nor will we be interested in obfuscation, having fostered intense curiosity about our planet! And as we celebrate every birth and mourn every death, we will recognize our place in the planetary metabolism, fed by the sun and maintained according to the laws of physics: or, “earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust,” saith the Book of Common Prayer.
This bipolar reorientation means embracing ways of thinking, feeling, and living that are at once embodied, bounded, and locally specific and disembodied, boundless, and celestial. The tension of the awesome difference between the scales underlines the difficulty of thinking planetarily, but to do so, in the words of anthropologist of science Lisa Messeri, requires “that we grapple with intangible modes of being.” A planetary orientation that honors local, community-based, embodied knowledge must be enacted through mechanisms both familiar and novel: on the one hand, there is the need for strong, personal relationships with fellow humans as well as non-humans. We need more and better friendships and kinships across all manner of difference. This will open ourselves to careful and empathic observation of and interventions in the lives of human and non-human others, perhaps even abiotic interlocutors. On the other hand, we will rely on scientific and technical advances in sensing and computation that will make the planet, its processes, and its life forms more knowable through amplified and careful modes of detection and comprehension.
It will take intellectual and emotional labor to grasp our new reality. But whether we like it or not, it is our new reality. Indeed, it is the only reality to which we must adhere and practice if we are to continue human life on this precious planet.
Positing the emergence of a bounded, contiguous sense of local belonging concomitantly with a shared sense of planetary belonging, however, does not imply that human squabbles and hatreds will suddenly dissipate. Planetary subsidiarity will not usher in an Edenic future; it offers no promise of human or planetary redemption. What it does provide, however, are mechanisms that open the possibility of order at all scales heretofore disjointed. Planetary subsidiarity proposes institutions with the authority and jurisdiction to address planetary problems, like rising greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere, and local ones, like adapting to the climatic chaos caused by unnatural atmospheric chemistry. A planetary climate institution would have the prudential mandate to tackle climate mitigation at the proper scale: the planet itself. Local climate governance, by contrast, would be scaled to manage climate adaptation in coherent geographic zones—geographies that would be networked with other local institutions facing corresponding challenges. A new matrix of governance institutions like these, each with fine-tuned authorities allocated by the principle of planetary subsidiarity, will work at all the necessary scales to foster the conditions necessary for multispecies flourishing.
Planetary subsidiarity is a political experiment born of the increasingly obvious impotence of reigning political institutions—that is, the institutions of anti-planetary modernity—in an ineluctably planetary age. But it is only one experiment. The world needs many more ambitious proposals to break out of the stagnation of contemporary political ideas and institutions. One form such experimentation might take is expanding our conception of political community to include non-human others—animals, yes, but also plants, fungi, and even whole ecosystems like rainforests. Doing so would enfold cutting-edge science and Indigenous knowledges into inescapable but impuissant Western politics that revolve around the nation-state. Drawing on experimental, embodied modes of sensing and knowing the world will remodel political institutions. They will rely on more than just the ballot box as an input to planetary decision-making through collective action including but beyond humans.
Radical political institutions attuned to the planet we live on offer possibilities that are currently foreclosed: a thriving biosphere, a stable climate, and a truly democratic governance that is responsive to all forms of life impacted by relational, dynamic decisions. We want governance that fosters flourishing; we need governance that, as the Indian philosopher and polymath Rabindranath Tagore put it, encourages the living of “life in its completeness.”
What will life become? What should life become? What can it become when the institutions that adumbrate the form of life shift their focus to more nourishing practices of governance?
By focusing on what life will become, we can begin to sketch material modes of planetary subsidiarity to the benefit of humans and other lively creatures on Earth.
Life, then, will become the container of vast possibilities.