Patriotism to the Earth A Quest for Humane Global Governance
Produktdetaljer
Biografisk notat
Richard A. Falk is the Albert G. Milbank Professor of International Law and Practice, Emeritus at Princeton University, and was Visiting Distinguished Professor in Global and International Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He is a member of the Editorial Boards of The Nation and The Progressive, and Chair of the Board of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation. He is a former advisory board member of the World Federalist Institute and the American Movement for World Government. He served a six-year term as United Nations Special Rapporteur on human rights in the Palestinian Territories. During 1999–2000, Falk worked on the Independent International Commission on Kosovo. He is the author of over twenty books and maintains a blog at richardfalk.org/.
Sasha Milonova is a political economist by training, and a writer, researcher, and activist. She has also produced an award-winning documentary short.
Falk makes an eloquent argument for an energized global movement to make the nation-state system more responsive to growing environmental.
Foreign Affairs
At a time when the prevailing world order seems to promise only ecological catastrophe, economic impoverishment, tyranny, war, and the threat of nuclear annihilation, Richard Falk's <i>Patriotism to the Earth</i> provides crucial guidelines for halting and reversing the thrust to human self-annihilation. Falk presents a clearsighted alternative: A 'patriotism to the Earth’ rooted in a vision of human solidarity and led by global social movements and civil society.
Jeremy Brecher, author of Common Preservation in a Time of Mutual Destruction
Some day people will look back at Richard Falk as a prophet who had the moral courage, visionary imagination, and encyclopedic knowledge to critically assess world affairs and chart the requirements of a more just, ecologically wise, and flourishing future. This book is a gift. Falk and Milonova explain the indispensability of global solidarity for building a livable future and demonstrate how normative commitments are far from intellectual blinders but incisive tools for understanding the present and envisioning a better world. Monumental in scope yet poetically and humbly written, this book stands among the greats of global political thought and practice.
Paul Wapner, American University
Richard Falk draws upon a lifetime of research and personal experience in international law and politics, to identify the form of global governance best suited to resolving the existential threats facing humanity. His message remains resolutely optimistic, in the belief that if we nurture global solidarity we might yet create a form of cosmopolitanism which could underpin the global governance that we need for a safe future.
Helen Camakaris, Honorary Fellow in BioSciences, University of Melbourne
This book, carefully crafted and beautifully written, is a must read for all students and practitioners of world politics and for the concerned public as they consider the future of politics, society and our planet. Richard Falk, one of the world’s great thinkers in international law and politics, demolishes the misplaced, often hypocritical claims of regressive, violent and reactionary modes of thought and practice of many ruling forces in world order today. Falk calls, convincingly, for a new “patriotism to the Earth”, grounded in an ethics of ecological and social sustainability and political and humanitarian mobilization in the making of a new, more just and sustainable, world order.
Stephen Gill, York University
This book of essays is preoccupied with the contrast between prevailing loyalty to the sovereign state—patriotism—and an emergent alternative of loyalty to the species and its natural habitat. Such an orientation toward ecological patriotism focuses on conditions of human survival, ecological stability, and cosmological awareness in the Age of the Anthropocene. It is a patriotism guided by empirical and normative assessments regarding the deficiencies of the existing world order and its inability to provide the biological, economic, political, ecological, cultural, ethical, and spiritual foundations for the future viability of life on earth.
Falk’s assessment rests on a growing inability of existing policies, practices, and problem-solving arrangements to protect and promote the global, national, and local public goods; on the increasing marginalization of international law, global ethics, internationalism, and spiritual imperatives; on a prevailing anachronistic nationalism and related conceptions of national self-interest; on the unsustainable market-driven and state-centric world order, reinforced by the non-accountability of Great Powers; on a vital, but currently weak, disempowered, and disoriented UN; on a potentially fatal identification of military capabilities, arms sales, and policing with the pursuit of security, as well as for the fulfillment of the extra-territorial ambitions of a few rival states and alliances. These deficiencies imperil humanity as never before in world history—not only the viability of sovereign states, regions, or localities, but the entirety of human experience and overall ecological sustainability.
Against such a background, the most immediate challenge is to create sufficient political traction to overcome settled ideas, special interests, and habitual ways of acting. This does not now seem possible despite the urgency of the situation. Empirical indicators suggest strong trends that on balance are reinforcing and accentuating the deficiencies rather than their moving toward their correction. Confronting such a reality is not meant to be taken as a recipe for despair. On the contrary it is meant to ground prospects for a hopeful future in the realities of our time, which presuppose learning to respect the limiting conditions of the carrying capacity of the earth. As such it is calling for ‘a politics of impossibility,’ an engagement at all levels of social order with the struggle for a future that exceeds the bounds of perceived feasibility yet from the vantage point of humane global governance that constitutes necessity and equity, warranting struggle for the various futures needed and desired by the peoples of the world. There are, of course, no assurances of success, but we do know that current modes of sleepwalking into the future do not offer solutions, and rather reflect a collective species death wish as the failure to respond in time and scale amounts to a virtual death warrant for many species and their habitats, including the human. We have always lived amid uncertainty with respect to our own life and death, but now we are also challenged by the precarious mortality of the species and planet earth. It seems the worst of times, but it may yet just possibly become the best of times!
The inclusion of law, ethics, and spirituality acknowledge that the values prevailing in civic culture and among the peoples of the world are an essential element of the transformative vision of patriotism being proposed. The challenge is not just functional. It is a matter of how we choose to live together on the earth, what relationships to its resources and limitations are developed, and of whether people can be mobilized in ways that overcome obstacles posed by entrenched special interests and civilizational habits deeply embedded in social consciousness. The chapters that comprise this book seek to be both down to earth, that is grounded in the realities of the present and yet animated by and rooted in a spiritual and cosmopolitan imaginary of what lies ahead. It hopes for a reinvention of nationalism by reference to the sky above and land below, that is, by cosmic cycles of being and by the intimacies of local existence.
Introduction
Knowledge and Activism without Adaptation or Justice
Historical Circumstances
Dysfunctional Structures, Norms, and Ideologies
Evolutionary Relevance
References
Part I: A Frame for Inquiry
- Toward a Global Imaginary for the 21st Century
Explaining the Gaps
Four Fundamental Features of the Westphalian World Order
Modifying Expectations
References
- Nonviolent Geopolitics: Law, Politics, and 21st Century Security
The UN Charter and a Legalistic Approach to Nonviolent Geopolitics
The Political/Ethical Argument for Nonviolent Geopolitics
Concluding Observations: Opportunities, Challenges, Tendencies
References
- Failures of Legitimacy: Global Governance and International Relations
Global Governance and Legitimacy after World War I
Global Governance and Legitimacy Crises after World War II
Global Governance and Legitimacy Crises during the Cold War
Global Governance and Political Legitimacy in the Era of Neoliberal Globalization
Failures of Global Governance in the 21st Century
A Concluding Comment
References
- A Pluralist Cosmopolitanism
Preliminary Consideration
A Framework for Assessment
Why and Which Cosmopolitanism?
A Concluding Note
References
- Global Contexts of Power
Decolonization and the Decline of Hard Power
International Intervention
Post-9/11 Forms of Power
Consequences
Conclusion
- Constitutional Guidelines for Global Governance
Old Realism versus New Realism
Rethinking the Westphalia Structure of World Order
Reform Proposals within a Westphalian Framing: An Independently Funded UN Emergency Peace Force, Global Parliament, Peoples Tribunals
Toward an International Rule of Law
Subverting Westphalia
References
Part II: Pillars of Order: Horizons of Aspiration
- International Law: Overcoming War and Collective Violence
International Law as it Emerged in Europe
The Westphalian System
Just War Tradition
Primacy of Geopolitics
Outlawing War
Paradigm Shift
Reimagining Law and War
Reclaiming Realism
Envisioning Structural Reform
Avenues of Endeavor
The Archetypal Struggle Against Nuclearism
The Non-proliferation Treaty & Geopolitical Enforcement Regime
Treaty of Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW): Abolition Aspirations
No First Use (NFU) of Nuclear Weapons
Managing the Global Ecosystem
Challenging Informal Censorship
Revisioning Citizenship
References
- Appropriating Normative Geopolitics: Civil Society, International Law, and the Future of the United Nations
Points of Departure
Global North Critical Expositions of International Law
The Question of Agency: Military and Political Ascendancy
The UN Fits In
Note on the UN and the Israel/Palestine Conflict
A Concluding Note
References
- Global Inequality and Human Rights: An Odd Couple
Inequality Discourse in the United States and the Global South
Explaining the Disconnect
A Reframing of Human Rights and Inequality
Toward a ‘Universal Declaration on Human Rights and Inequalities of Income and Wealth’
Concluding Remarks
References
- International Law and Transformative Innovations: The Case of Criminal Accountability
Point of Departure
A Conceptual Prologue
For and Against Normative Determinism
The Nuremberg Judgment
Beyond Nuremberg
References
- Peoples Tribunals, and the Peace Movement’s Quest for Justice
The Judicial Dimension of Global Governance
Civil Society Justice
Investigating State Criminality
References
- Reparations, International Law, and Global (In)Justice: Extensions of Reparations to Global Governance
A New Frontier
Points of Departure
International Law: Authority and Instruments
Shadows of Misunderstanding
Some Limiting Conditions
Unevenness of Material Circumstances
Remoteness in Time
Absence of Individuation
Generality of Obligation
Extreme Selectivity
What International Law Can Do
References
- Transformational Justice in a Neoliberal and Statist World Order
Transitional and Transformational Justice: Conceptual Points of Departure
The Transformational Option After World War II
World Order Constraints on Transitional and Transformational Justice
The Failures of Transition in the Arab Spring
The Iranian/Islamic Revolution: A Sustained Transition and a Successful Transformation
Applying the Lessons of Transition and Transformation to the Palestine/Israel Struggle
The Liberal Bias Toward Transition without Transformation
Concluding Observations
References
- Revisiting the Earth Charter
References
Part III: Varieties of Cosmopolitanism
- Fred Dallmayr’s Visionary Cosmopolitanism
Sources of Inspiration
Choosing the Road of Spiritual Cosmopolitanism
A Concluding Comment
References
- Father Miguel D’Escoto’s The Spiritual Sources of Legal Creativity
References
- David Ray Griffin’ Postmodern Politics and Spirituality: Do We Need (or Want) World Government?
Why a Democratic World Government is Necessary
Why a Democratic World Government is Possible
Why the Advocacy of a Democratic Global Government is Not Desirable
References
- Edward Demenchonok’s Visionary Cosmopolitanism
A Cosmopolitan Visionary for Our Time
References
- Global Solidarity: Toward a Politics of Impossibility
The Imprisoned Imagination
On what is possible
References
- Global Solidarity as the Vital Precondition to Cosmopolitan Transition
Do We Have the Time?
Concluding Remark
About the Author
Produktdetaljer
Biografisk notat
Richard A. Falk is the Albert G. Milbank Professor of International Law and Practice, Emeritus at Princeton University, and was Visiting Distinguished Professor in Global and International Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He is a member of the Editorial Boards of The Nation and The Progressive, and Chair of the Board of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation. He is a former advisory board member of the World Federalist Institute and the American Movement for World Government. He served a six-year term as United Nations Special Rapporteur on human rights in the Palestinian Territories. During 1999–2000, Falk worked on the Independent International Commission on Kosovo. He is the author of over twenty books and maintains a blog at richardfalk.org/.
Sasha Milonova is a political economist by training, and a writer, researcher, and activist. She has also produced an award-winning documentary short.