## Metadata - Author: [[Jonathan S. Blake and Nils Gilman]] - Full Title: Children of a Modest Star - Category: #books ## Highlights - Giving independence to the African colonies, the British foreign secretary said in 1951, was like “giving a child of ten a latch-key, a bank account and a shotgun.” ([Location 572](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0CW1B9X8B&location=572)) - In these first, frenzied postwar years, many people concluded that national states were not the solution but the problem. As the University of Chicago’s Committee to Frame a World Constitution declared in 1948: “Iniquity and war inseparably spring from the competitive anarchy of the national states.” The only solution, the committee decided, was that “the age of nations must end, and the era of humanity begin.” To that end, they drafted a constitution for “the Federal Republic of the World” in which all states would pool “their separate sovereignties in one government of justice to which they surrender their arms.” ([Location 585](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0CW1B9X8B&location=585)) - The world political institution that was founded in the postwar era—the United Nations—enshrined rather than dethroned the principle of state sovereignty. The UN Charter emphasized “the sovereign equality of all its Members” and stated plainly that the UN was not authorized “to intervene in matters which are essentially within the domestic jurisdiction of any state.” ([Location 606](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0CW1B9X8B&location=606)) - As national economic development cemented its place as the paramount vision for the future, the national state increasing looked like the most natural form for achieving the dream of modernization. Thus it was the elevation of economic development as the ultimate purpose of collective political life that guided postwar decolonization in Asia, Africa, and the Caribbean toward the national state rather than other forms of political organization. ([Location 673](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0CW1B9X8B&location=673)) - Importantly, the European colonizing powers as well as the United States also came to prefer the national state as the institutional form to succeed empire. Once direct colonial rule became too costly to maintain—politically, economically, and morally—the world’s powerful states realized that it would be more advantageous to cultivate unequal relationships with politically and economically weak, nominally independent postcolonial national states. ([Location 725](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0CW1B9X8B&location=725)) - The national state’s hegemony was firm by 1965. After that point, there were no more new experiments in non-national state arrangements; self-determination meant having a national state. ([Location 746](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0CW1B9X8B&location=746)) - Two fortified barriers were erected in the 1950s and only one was built in the 1960s. But, coinciding with the entrenchment of the national state after 1965, five barriers went up in the 1970s, eleven in the 1980s, seven in the 1990s, seventeen in the 2000s, and thirty-four in the 2010s. ([Location 758](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0CW1B9X8B&location=758)) - The UN’s 1960 Declaration on Decolonization equated the “right to self-determination” with the “right to complete independence.”93 This logic took on a life of its own, foreclosing the possibility that some political communities might choose to exercise self-determination without independence. As it happened, the Cook Islanders voted in 1965 to have a constitution with domestic self-government but to place foreign relations and defense in the hands of New Zealand. The UN General Assembly balked, protesting that they had merely “attained full internal self-government,” not true self-determination, and committed “to assist the people of the Cook Islands in the eventual achievement of full independence.” ([Location 761](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0CW1B9X8B&location=761)) - Governance today is produced by the operational capacity of a wide range of institutions at diverse scales, but sovereignty remains stubbornly national. In other words, while operational responsibilities have migrated, sovereignty has not. ([Location 870](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0CW1B9X8B&location=870)) - Established just two months after the end of World War II, the UN was beset from birth with contradictions. It is “based on the principle of the sovereign equality of all its Members,” but five permanent members of the Security Council were blessed with a veto that gives them unequaled powers.18 The preamble of the UN Charter invokes the authority of “we the peoples” and speaks of “the dignity and worth of the human person” but was written by the architect of South African apartheid, who saw the new organization as a vehicle for maintaining European empires. ([Location 905](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0CW1B9X8B&location=905)) - The problem with the EU is that, at heart, integration through the EC and EU has been a neoliberal (or, more accurately, ordoliberal) economic project, that is, one bent on curbing redistributional politics, which (as argued in chapter 1) is a properly national function. By taking over economic governance from national states but refusing to engage in democratically determined distributional politics, the EU has gradually revealed itself as little more than a high-minded rationalization for commerce and the domination of societies by markets, all enforced from Brussels. The consequences of this position came into full snarling view in the aftermath of the global financial crisis of 2007–8. When Greece and other southern Eurozone members suffered severe economic emergencies, the EU had the opportunity to govern in many possible ways. Its supranational architecture didn’t dictate any particular position—if anything, the founding spirit of the structure would suggest a move toward pan-European solidarity. Yet the path it chose was the domineering imposition of neoliberal reforms and austerity measures. ([Location 1002](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0CW1B9X8B&location=1002)) - Starting around 1970, national states in both the Global North and South began to devolve governance powers to subnational tiers of government, such as regions, provinces, states, and municipalities.44 By one measure, countries on average undergo a reform that reconfigures the loci of governmental authority (from the national to regional level, for example) every thirteen years—in large countries it’s every eleven. ([Location 1029](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0CW1B9X8B&location=1029)) - There has also been a growth in subnational democracy, with more lower tiers of government holding elections and having elected assemblies.46 Even China has held elections for village leaders since 1988.47 Subnational governments are thus more powerful and more representative than they were in the mid-twentieth century. ([Location 1037](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0CW1B9X8B&location=1037)) - The trend toward decentralization was often accompanied by a proliferation of subnational governance units. India, for example, has doubled the number of states in its federation since independence; Nigeria went from three regions at the time of independence in 1960 to twelve states in 1967, to nineteen in 1976, to thirty-six in 1996, with these latter further divided into 774 “local government areas”; after apartheid, South Africa doubled its number of provinces and quintupled the number of municipalities; and Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and Brazil each increased their municipalities by about 50 percent during periods of democratic reforms. ([Location 1059](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0CW1B9X8B&location=1059)) - Governance today is provided by multiple actors working at multiple scales and on multiple levels. Put another way, world maps display claims to sovereignty, not actually existing governance. ([Location 1126](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0CW1B9X8B&location=1126)) - Through a mix of delegation, cooperation, and usurpation, the various institutions above, below, beside, and of the national state have forged countless modi operandi for dealing with challenges at all scales. But these institutions do not operate on a level playing field. While all of them govern, only the national state is sovereign. And sovereignty gives the national state the legitimate authority to interfere in the work of the others. ([Location 1131](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0CW1B9X8B&location=1131)) - Two challenges that manifest at scales incompatible with the national state are climate change and infectious diseases. Neither carbon nor microbes care about human jurisdictions, and each exposes the interdependences, rather than independence, of all political communities. These characteristics, we will argue in the next chapter, distinguish them as planetary challenges. In other words, they are challenges that emanate, not from the international arena or global flows and competition over human concerns such as goods, services, people, and money, but rather from the dynamic biogeochemical ferment of the planet itself. Yet the governance architecture for addressing each of these planetary challenges remains firmly anchored in national states: they are the institutional form with the right of first refusal and the right to authorize action at other levels. ([Location 1136](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0CW1B9X8B&location=1136)) - Kyoto and Paris each failed to reduce emissions in their own way. Kyoto failed to get major emitters inside the strong and binding multilateral framework; Paris got them inside a multilateral framework, but it is weak and unenforceable. Either way, multilateral climate agreements have not reduced or even stabilized global carbon emissions. But neither have the efforts of individual national states, subnational governments, or nonstate actors. The problem is too big to be solved absent a planetary-scale collective solution. Subglobal institutions can (and should) take important efforts to not make the situation worse, but they cannot make things substantially better on their own. ([Location 1164](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0CW1B9X8B&location=1164)) - From the neighborhood level through the village, city, provincial, national, and regional levels and up to the planetary level, a riot of institutions collide, cooperate, or ignore each other to produce the variegated totality that is experienced as governance. ([Location 1285](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0CW1B9X8B&location=1285)) - The result of developments in what have rightly been called “the humbling sciences,” the Planetary as a scientific and philosophical category comes from a place of ontological and epistemic humility, acknowledging that we are not so fundamentally different from other creatures and that we are only barely beginning to understand (much less control) the complexities of our interdependencies with planetary systems. ([Location 1379](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0CW1B9X8B&location=1379)) - If Copernicus’s heliocentrism represented the First Great Decentering, displacing the Earth from the center of the heavens, and Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection the Second Great Decentering, this time of God as the intentional maker of all creatures, then the emergence of the concept of the Planetary as described in this chapter represents the Third Great Decentering, and the one that hits closest to home, supplanting the figure of the human as the measure and master of all things. ([Location 1383](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0CW1B9X8B&location=1383)) - “To a Martian,” ventured Teilhard, “the first characteristic of our planet would be, not the blue of the seas or the green of the forests, but the phosphorescence of thought.” ([Location 1470](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0CW1B9X8B&location=1470)) - What defines a “planetary issue”?95 Planetary issues are, at their base, defined by four core characteristics: they are critical to multispecies flourishing; they are enmeshed in the history of life on Earth; they operate on scales of time or size that are beyond direct, individual human experience; and they exhibit some degree of human involvement. ([Location 1762](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0CW1B9X8B&location=1762)) - As Margulis, coauthor of the Gaia hypothesis, put it: “We delude ourselves if we believe that as 3 million year old punks we can threaten the 3,500 million year old planetary patina in which we are embedded.” However, she warns, “That we can foul our nest, convert the garden of Babylon to the sands of the Sahara . . .—in short that we can make our habitat hideous for our children—is certain.” ([Location 1793](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0CW1B9X8B&location=1793)) - what we call “deliberate” multiscalar governance architecture should be based on explicit and consistent functional criteria for determining where authorities for various decisions should be allocated within the system. The idea is to develop the parts in light of the goals of the whole. ([Location 1937](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0CW1B9X8B&location=1937)) - Rather than trying to match functions to units, which is how most governance allocation decisions work today, we should do the opposite. In the current system, one type of unit—the sovereign national state—is the default governor: it is given the right to decide whether or how to manage any issue that emerges, including the metadecision of whether to delegate decision rights to others. National states get first and exclusive rights to decision-making, not because they are best suited for it, but because the international system, by recent tradition and international law, favors national sovereignty. Our argument, by contrast, is to begin with the issue or problem in need of governance and then consider all governance units that might have a role in the matter. The result of this fundamental rethink is that national states should give up many of their governance functions, tasks, and decision rights: planetary functions should move to planetary institutions, while many other functions should move to local institutions. The allocation of authority isn’t a one-time event, however; the system must be dynamic. Putting function first means recognizing that the appropriate unit or scale can change over time. A robust multiscalar system has the capacity to morph to resolve new problems as they emerge or existing problems as they change over time, moving functions between units as warranted. ([Location 1994](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0CW1B9X8B&location=1994)) - Note: Working with domains in a sociocracy is a good way to practice this - Limiting the governance responsibilities of the national state wasn’t just about weakening it, but also about focusing it. Pius XI argued that placing limits would in fact restore the authority of modern states that are “overwhelmed and crushed by almost infinite tasks and duties.” ([Location 2128](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0CW1B9X8B&location=2128)) - Despite subsidiarity’s many reformulations, however, one tenet remains unchanged: subsidiarity eschews the ambition for total political victory. At its core, the concept is a pragmatic way to manage pluralism via local empowerment. This antiuniversalist, antitotalizing vision is an important check on any political project. For us, the principle of subsidiarity provides a safeguard against the impulse toward political centralization and homogenization that the expansive, holistic concept of the Planetary might otherwise seem to justify. ([Location 2198](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0CW1B9X8B&location=2198)) - For the purposes of planetary governance, we draw four lessons from the EU’s experience with subsidiarity. First, subsidiarity must be applied seriously and intentionally: the presumption for smaller-scale decision-making must be real. This means that the bias toward smaller-scale governance must trump some sound reasons for moving authority to larger ones.56 If we truly value self-government, we must tolerate some inefficiencies. ([Location 2236](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0CW1B9X8B&location=2236)) - For a counterexample of what we mean here, look to the European Court of Justice, the European institution tasked with adjudicating disputes over subsidiarity between the levels. In deciding whether decision-making authority over an issue should rest with the EU or the member states, the ECJ has the legal authority to consider only the EU Treaty, not national laws or constitutions. The dispute-resolution body is thus structurally biased toward the higher level—it is wired against subsidiarity. ([Location 2242](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0CW1B9X8B&location=2242)) - To have proposed in Europe in 1715 that sovereignty be formally vested in the people rather than in the monarch would have seemed preposterous. Yet over the course of the eighteenth century, the concept of sovereignty was reconstructed in both principle and practice on those lines. By the late 1780s, revolutions in America and France put the once-outrageous theory of popular sovereignty into action: the Americans had made “We the People” the ultimate source and bearer of legitimate authority, and the French had declared, “The principle of any Sovereignty lies primarily in the Nation. No corporate body, no individual may exercise any authority that does not expressly emanate from it.” ([Location 3604](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0CW1B9X8B&location=3604)) - Given that absolutist national state sovereignty is as appropriate to a world defined by the condition of planetarity as absolute monarchy was to a world defined by popular political participation, national states can remain technically sovereign (perhaps remaining a focal point of a population’s psycho-political energies, much as the House of Windsor continues to be for many Brits), but they won’t govern many of the issues that they do now. ([Location 3619](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0CW1B9X8B&location=3619)) - The economist Milton Friedman was right in this regard: “Only a crisis—actual or perceived—produces real change,” he wrote. “When that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around. That, I believe, is our basic function: to develop alternatives to existing policies, to keep them alive and available until the politically impossible becomes politically inevitable.” ([Location 3732](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0CW1B9X8B&location=3732)) - Institutions protect their authority and power, and it’s only when they’re brought face to face undeniably with their own limitations that they usually agree to cede control. Crises in fact often midwife institutional creativity previously thought risible. The basic idea behind the League of Nations and United Nations, for instance, had been around for a long time (since at least 1795, when Immanuel Kant called for a “federation of nations” in his philosophical sketch for “Perpetual Peace”), but it took the convulsions of the two world wars for it to finally flower. Likewise, the creation of the US Federal Reserve Bank went from a wild idea adamantly opposed by private bankers to an institutional reality in the wake of the Panic of 1907, which had very nearly produced a massive economic catastrophe. Similarly, it took the currency crises and stagflation of the 1970s and 1980s to convince politicians across the Western world of the necessity of independent central banks focused on fighting inflation. ([Location 3740](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0CW1B9X8B&location=3740)) - Indigenous epistemologies—for so long represented in many Western literatures as a relic from the past—in this sense are in fact exactly the reverse: an epistemology of the future. ([Location 3757](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0CW1B9X8B&location=3757))