The Planetary Costs of Nationalism

The Planetary Costs of Nationalism

By Whitney A. Bauman

Invisible things matter. I’m not only talking about whatever we might call spirits, souls, or divinities, but also about reason, ideas, numbers, and language. These invisible things all materialize in the world, co-constructing our worlds in various ways. The same can be said of the “imagined community” of the nation. The arbitrary geo-political boundaries that cut our lands and oceans into various separate entities have very real material costs. In a time when these boundaries are being reinforced and reified, nations tend to spend more and more resources protecting the fragile border precisely because of how vulnerable it is.

I want to think about three different ways (though there are surely more) that the imagined boundaries of nationhood are bad for the planetary community. The first has to do with protecting what’s “in” and “out,” primarily through military/legal means. This generates massive carbon footprints on top of the social injustices it creates. The carbon footprint of the department of defense and homeland security is not even known since the United States and the EU argued successfully within the UN that divulging the national annual carbon footprints of military and defense to the UNEP could cause a breech in security. Considering Defense is the largest single line in the US budget, and that they have operations all over the world, Though we don’t know precisely what the emissions are, one study looking at the “geopolitical ecology” of the Defense Logics Agency (the agency that provides fuel for the US military), the US military alone emits the annual equivalent of some countries. At the time of that study (2019), the US military when compared with the top 50 countries was 47^th in terms of annual emissions. On top of these more direct planetary costs, there are also the costs of keeping certain peoples out, and trying to keep certain species out, while keeping others in. And, of course the costs of the data and other centers and servers related to commerce, AI, and cyber security. One climate watch organization argued “that training GPT-3 emitted roughly 500 metric tons of carbon dioxide (CO₂)—the equivalent of driving a car from New York to San Francisco about 438 times.” Adding up all of these costs, we begin to see the enormous impact these imagined boundaries make.

The environmental history of the modern world is a history of terraforming, which is a second set of the costs of nationalism. As European colonizers began to lay claim to indigenous lands, and enslave and kill indigenous peoples, they also tended to destroy the flora and fauna those indigenous peoples relied on and replace them with things more familiar to their original homelands. In other cases, the European colonizers attempted full on “omnicide”–the destruction of the peoples, their histories and cultures, and their places. Omnicide ensures that the land is then “empty” for the colonizers to terraform to their own likings.

Still a third and related cost of nationalism is war itself. The decimation of cultures and peoples and city spaces are not the only costs of war; we ought to consider the decimation of flora and fauna as well. It is not hard to see how deforestation, the burning of fields and crops, and the slaughter of animals that peoples depend on are huge parts of tactical warfare. Modern warfare can be just as costly as colonial projects of omnicide: create a situation in which the earth looks “terra nullius” and you can then recreate that place (terraform) in your own image. This is why Trump, for instance, uses language of total devastation, or “bombing them back into the stone age” in reference to Iran (among other places).

If we are to address the costs of nationalism we need to imagine new, planetary communities and politics. I would argue that we need something like a trans-national governing mechanism at the planetary level, an understanding of “nations” as “caretakers of places,” at the more local levels, and a politics that is not based on future progress but on facing the past, learning from our planetary ancestors, and re-membering new worlds in the present. Such a past-looking planetary politics is one that is focused on mending the scars caused by nationalism, rather than some sort of “progressive” vision (for some).

A planetary politics calls for something like a terrapolitanism (Taylor), cosmopolitanism “from below” (Kurasawa), Earth democracy (Shiva), a Gaian politics (Latour), or what  each of these argues for an understanding of humans as part of the rest of the natural world. Furthermore, they represent some of the current political concepts helping us give animus back to the rest of the natural world. As parts of the rest of the natural world, we can never have a “god’s eye” view. Rather we think “with and from” where we are embodied and grounded in the earth. We are planetary citizens among other citizens and we need to ask what our “civic” duty is at the local levels. If we are to keep the understanding of nations, then perhaps the civic duty of humans within a specific place is to care for the local places in which we live: as caretakers of a place for a time. A good citizen means allowing the voices of all the flora and fauna that make up a given place to be heard. These are not places in isolation, but places entangled with other places that eventually make up the planet. So, mere localism or bioregionalism, is not enough to think planetarily. We also need trans-national political bodies that matter.

The scale of the problems created by global climate change and the globalization of extractive, neo-liberal capitalism can only be addressed from a planetary context. We are, all of us, human and more than human life, planetary citizens. Our emergent, entangled existence makes up the very planet of which we are a part. We can’t escape this planetary entanglement. As Latour argued, the “critical zone” is the biosphere, and we can’t escape that context without losing the very thing which makes us human. Retreats to nationalistic protectionism simply will no longer be possible the more climate change begins to affect us on a day to day basis. Even those billionaire bunkers won’t save people forever. And if we are earthlings, Elon Musk won’t save earthlings by taking a small slice of our life here together to a different planet. This linear, fossil-fueled understanding of progress is literally out of this world. Perhaps a planetary imagination might focus more on tending to the one planet we all have in common.

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