Choosing between cooperation and competition
While climate change has been an observable scientific reality for decades now, there seems no sign of the process slowing down. Scientists and interest groups have dedicated entire careers to lobbying and calling for thorough action to mitigate the effects of climate change to little avail. I myself was a participant in the massive global student climate strikes in early 2019. As an adolescent getting involved in politics for the first time, it felt incredibly empowering to see not only my generation, but seemingly people from all walks of life participate in those marches. It felt like we were writing history, like something was going to fundamentally change after we had let ourselves be heard… But then we all received an e-mail from school saying that anyone participating in a future strike would be written up for ditching school, and life returned to the o-so criticised business as usual.
Expressing concern over the climate became too political for daily life again. For many, climate action became more of a Zizekian performance integral to their identity and conscience rather than concrete action. Others were convinced by conservative rhetoric that people like Greta Thunberg or Belgium’s own Anuna De Wever were simply exploiting a hot topic for either personal or political gain. Status quo optimists even claimed that technological innovation would eliminate the factors causing climate change, so we really needn’t worry about it. As the system’s gears turned seemingly unstoppably, and the effort going into changing one’s individual consumption patterns appeared either worthless or too demanding, people just retreated into their destructive habits. Cognitive dissonance got the best of most of us.
Noam Chomsky famously claims that humanity today faces two unprecedented challenges that are only being exacerbated by current trends. The first of those is nuclear warfare, the second, climate change. Why then, have political actors found it so difficult to agree on an effective response to climate change? I dedicate this essay to trying to provide an answer to this question and give my two cents on where I think the true problems lie.
Laying the foundations
Below I try to identify and pick apart the different systems that I believe are the direct cause of climate change and its perpetuation. While to some it may seem that I am stating the obvious, I believe that we must understand the basics before getting into the details of any topic. Afterwards I expand on the conclusion that, while action within these systems to mitigate climate change is both necessary and useful, I believe a more fundamental shift is in order to truly address the issue of climate change. In analysing international relations, which is my field of study and thus the lens through which I view the topic at hand, I take a realist analysis and try to stitch it to a fundamentally anarchist belief system. Therefore, this essay also functions in part as a critique of the theory of realism, while also giving it its due praise. While this may seem an overly theoretical or futile endeavour, I believe my arguments hold some merit and relevancy, especially concerning the gravity of our topic.
The international political system
Through the lens of political realism, the international system can be understood as inherently anarchic. At the end of the day, states are competing for political power because it is claimed that only through power can one ensure security and wellbeing. Anarchy in this sense does not necessarily mean some sort of cartoonish chaos, but rather the lack of a higher authority. Prominent theorist John Mearsheimer put it as: “Countries can not exactly call 9/11 when somebody breaks into their house”1. This creates a sort of self-help dynamic where states aim to increase their power to be able to determine their fate independently, and in the process determine the fates of others elsewhere. All of this makes for a rather grim, Machiavellian picture. It also makes multilateralism, a kind of cooperation between multiple states where the interests of all members are considered, very difficult and tied to very rare circumstances where everyone happens to benefit.
Today, we speak of international relations being characterised by the Westphalian system. It derives its name from the famous 1648 Treaty of Westphalia signed to end the Thirty Years War in a particularly tumultuous period in European history. The system consists of sovereign states that have no right to meddle with each other’s affairs. Practically every contemporary society is organised in this manner, each state being a piece to the global puzzle. These states are locked in a zero-sum game where one states growth means another’s decline. This creates what we call a security dilemma where it is unclear whether a neighbouring state is acting defensively or offensively, often leading to provocation and conflict.
Within this zero-sum game for power and survival, the climate practically becomes an issue of secondary importance. As made evident by COP27 in Egypt2, if implementing climate friendly policies seems to mean losing a competitive edge regarding other states, states will generally choose not to implement them. It remains profitable to exploit our planet’s resources for all kinds of production processes. Even more profitable is to not regulate those industries to pesky humanitarian and ecological guidelines. On top of that, we’ve now got a global capitalist elite that are barely tied to any nation state running around with more capital than the GDP of certain nations, often playing a large role in determining the foreign policy of the states in or with which they do business.
It seems, then, very unlikely that states will take any sort of action regarding climate change as long as it does not somehow increase their power. As this is simply the nature of power politics and will remain so, as its theorists boldly claim, it may even almost be silly to think about climate when we’ve got potential wars to avoid, or win.
This all sounds rather dooming. If the system is geared to only implement climate policies when they are within the often narrow interests of individual states, why should we even bother? It seems like the best we can do is to cross our fingers that states will give priority to the issue and simultaneously look for a diplomatic solution. While I don’t doubt that this could hypothetically be achieved, and find the work being done by climate activists and lobbyists trying to get the gears of the system to turn in a way that alleviates pressure on the climate of immense importance, I can’t help but ask myself if all of that work will be worth if we don’t tackle the deeply rooted systematic problems that are causing, not only climate change, but most of human quails throughout our history.
When one makes an argument for deep systematic change, one is often confronted with the general conservative argument that questioning and changing human society on such a deep level is unproductive. This stems from -often rather lazily if you ask me- having accepted that “things are the way they are for a reason” or “the system projects the essence of human nature”. On the contrary, I believe that we have to take a few steps back and question some things that we may be taking for granted too quickly. Below I try to explain why it would be dishonest to claim that a) the development of the Westphalian system to a global scale is simply the inevitable expression of human nature and b) because this is how most organize, it is therefore good.
The arbitrary nature of the development of the Westphalian state and Western primacy
I refute grand appeals to human nature like the one mentioned above. While I believe certain tendencies of human action are evolutionary in their roots and explanations, I also believe that humans are much more politically creative than we tend to give ourselves credit for. This idea is based on the rich empirical foundation laid out by David Wengrow and the late David Graeber in their book The Dawn of Everything. They claim that we should no longer make the mistake of thinking that human society somehow followed a necessary evolution from small bands of egalitarian hunter gatherers toward our contemporary large, unequal but ‘developed’, societies based on private property. Furthermore, they demonstrate that it is not only possible to organize large societies in an egalitarian fashion, but that there are plenty of examples of it occurring throughout human history and pre-history. Their thesis fundamentally puts to sleep the idea that our status quo and existing hierarchies are by any means a result of human nature and therefore necessary developments. On the contrary, they argue that egalitarian cooperation is as much in line with human nature as any kind of hierarchical organization of society. For example, according to their evidence, plenty of human societies across the globe would experiment with rotating, seasonal hierarchies where, during a hunting season, a strict hierarchy would be established but abolished during the off-season. What this goes to show is that our status quo today is simply the result of an arbitrary addition of circumstances that could still be radically altered. We seem, however, to have forgotten this capacity to change and remain stuck in a hierarchy that aims to perpetuate itself, with all the necessary violence.
Applied concretely to today’s context, the reason the Westphalian system is the dominant one in international relations is not due to some kind of vaguely selfish human nature, but to the spreading of the system to all remote corners of the globe at the hand of European, and later American imperialism. While some still argue that Western imperialism was somehow inevitable due to some sort of inherent superiority of Western societies, most serious scholars know better than to make determinist and supremacist claims like this. When one delves into the history books, one will discover that the rise of European powers was only possible due to numerous lucky circumstances occurring throughout the multiple centuries it took to gain any kind of international primacy. The scope of this essay does not permit me to go into the extensive detail I would like to. This being said, consider the following (as it is also one of my favourite history facts to tell uninterested people at the pub).
During the expansion of the Mongol empire, the Mongol leaders explicitly claimed that they planned to invade Western Europe and pillage it in the exact same manner they did all their other territories. As we know, they never got much farther than the outskirts of Eastern Europe. A pro-Western sophist would likely claim that this was due to Europeans being superior fighters with better fortified bastions. While the latter is true, this analysis fails to consider numerous other, and by far more impactful, circumstances that lead to the Mongols eventually retreating out of Europe. First, as their forces were stretched out, they hadn’t the siege equipment necessary to tackle Europe’s stone walls. The weather also played an important role in muddying the fields in which they were to fight, bogging down their fearsome but short legged cavalry. Finally, and most importantly, by unforeseen circumstances, the heir of Genghis Khan had passed away, causing the high officials of the Mongol army to regroup in order to select the new heir to the throne, leaving Europe behind forever3. While this is only one out of at least four similar occasions where Europe’s slow development almost got yanked by its roots, it tells us a lot about the nature of how powerful states develop. Not through some sort of inherent superiority, but through the careful and slow accumulation of capital and technology with an immense drop of pure luck and circumstance.
By this analysis, the spread of the Westphalian state system is just as much an outcome of lucky circumstance that allowed for Western imperialism to impose itself upon geographies who had never had anything remotely similar to the Western Westphalian state in their entire history. Just think of Africa. While it too had its fair share of power politics and the suffering that comes along with it, none of that ever came close to the legacy of European colonialism. Africa today is a continent riddled with conflict and horrible poverty and exploitation, largely due to the random lines some European leaders once drew on a map in Berlin in 1885. A continent rich with incredibly diverse modes of political organization completely foreign to the West has been raped, exploited, and forced into arbitrary prisons drawn by people consumed by hubris to the point that they believed that their lucky break that history had granted them proved their moral and physical superiority. Nothing new, really. Just this time on an unprecedented scale thanks to the technological development typifying the era.
The necessary state?
Adding the insights gained from thinkers such as Wengrow and Graeber (often humorously referred to as “The Davids”, given they share a first name) to a fundamentally realist analysis leaves us with an interesting takeaway. While realist theory is useful to analyse and interpret international politics, it misses the mark quite often in trying to justify the existence of the state. While often times the rhetoric that (because states are necessarily selfish) a zero-sum game develops and necessitates one’s own state to either play or perish seems to provide arguments for the state’s existence, I believe it only proves that organizing humanity into seemingly homogenous competing states may be a bad idea to begin with that is no way necessary.
While the current system of international politics does not seem promising for those advocating for climate-friendly policies, I believe it is the realization that not a single part of how we organise this system is bound to human nature is essential in broadening our horizons for future action.
The international economy
While critiquing the state is necessary, it would be irresponsible to leave the economics aside. In recent decades, global capitalism and neoliberalism have created a web of trade and commerce that is truly unprecedented. Global productivity has gone up, companies have never before generated wealth on the scale they are doing right now, and there seems to be a silly Amazon product for every niche interest and desire consumers could have. However, obviously this unprecedented free trade has numerous dark sides.
The principle point that most critics of capitalism address most prominently is that there is no incentive within the system to provide for anything other than increasing profit margins for shareholders and do better than competitors. In this system, economic growth is seen as the biggest virtue. As long as our economies are growing, it is argued, all will be well. Obviously, this causes severe problems of inequality, shaky labour circumstances, and disregard for the climate when left unregulated.
A system that does not have a direct incentive to pay attention to climate sustainability and is based on competition for (economic) power… That sounds awfully familiar to the realist international system described above.
When described in this fashion, one could again wonder why one should even bother with climate change in the first place. After asking critical questions in the public debate, one is usually confronted with familiar conservative arguments. You see, capitalism -and society at large for that matter- is incredibly complex and developed naturally throughout time. It is a product of a cumulative process of centuries and tinkering with it is therefore foolish as one cannot simply radically restructure a society based on reason and ideological principles. Capitalism is therefore -just like the international system- a) a reflection of human nature and b) therefore good.
As arguments in favour of capitalism are very similar as those in favour of the state and international system (usually put forward by the same people, but not always), we can go about critiquing them in a similar fashion.
Political economy
Economists love to pretend that they are natural scientists. It is the only social science that has convinced the masses that it is based on pure empirical evidence and rationality. While I do not pretend to have nearly the same knowledge of the intricacies of their models and integrals, I do not need to in order for me to critique their subsequent claims. For may the patient not critique the doctor for unnecessary damage caused during his operation?
I, and evidently many others, claim that economics is essentially political, rather than rational. To elaborate this, allow me to expand on a thought experiment more eloquently described by economist Yanis Varoufakis in a lecture given at Tübingen University4.
Let’s take the political economy of a small African village on the verge of subsistence. Their economy is mainly dependent on the growing and selling of crops. It alternates, depending on the harvest, between just above subsistence and just below it. In a good year, supply is high and thus price drops. They can sell enough to be able to buy just enough food to be just above subsistence. In bad years, supply is too low, and they subsequently suffer. At least, however, because of low supply the price rises, and they make up for some of the drop in supply. Despite good and bad harvests, the village on average remains at subsistence level.
Seeing the precarious situation of this village, a middleman arrives. During a good year he buys and stores a quantity of the excess that was produced in order to sell during a bad year. Due to this, supply rises during a bad year and the farmers can no longer sell at the usual higher price and starve as a consequence.
Up to now, I have only made positive observations. However, as we will see the normative claims about this situation can differ radically. Consider these two different interpretations below.
The first goes as follows. The middleman, on the strength of his capital, is profiting by pushing the village below a level of subsistence and thus starving and killing some of the villagers. As this could be seen as immoral, he should be forced through methods of governmental intervention such as price control, taxation, or redistributive legislation to halt this behaviour.
The second interpretation, rather contrastingly, claims that the middleman is providing a service to society. By buying during the good years and selling during the bad years he is stabilizing price, helping the local bakers -let’s say the village produces grain- that need to buy the grain to not have to adjust to the volatile prices.
Given that both interpretations flow out of the exact same empirical situation yet differ so fundamentally, we can confidently claim that economics, or at the very least economic theory, is largely based on politics and not rational, empirical analysis. We have to choose as citizens if price stability is more important than the lives of certain villagers. Varoufakis claims that this is why economics can never be a science in the sense that physics or chemistry are. It is at the end of the day determined by ethics and politics.
Deriving from this, it would not be too farfetched to conclude that neither the political nor the economic system are based on any kind of a single identifiable human nature, and that both are entirely consequences of arbitrarily developed circumstances and subsequent ways of thinking.
Competition
Humanity is faced with an unprecedented problem. Climate change, if allowed to develop further will eventually be detrimental to everybody. Of course, today it is caused and felt unequally. Those who pollute the least bear the heaviest burden, while those taking the decisions that lead to that pollution get away scot-free. But, as models predict5, it will only be a matter of time until the entire planet becomes an unpleasant place for everybody. In a certain sense, this is a very interesting predicament. As with any political predicament, we are left with a set of mutually exclusive policy options from which we must choose one. In this sense, climate change is really no different from, say, gender equality or tax reform. It is a fundamentally political question. Where climate change becomes a one of a kind case, however, is that, for the first time, humanity is coming face to face with the unsustainability of how it has chosen to regard her natural environment on a collective scale. Instead of one small tribe or bicycle club having to come to a decision, it is the entirety of humanity.
On top of that, the mutually exclusive policy choices that are presented to us by this predicament are also of unprecedented importance.
As I highlighted above, both the international and the economic system are based on competition and don’t have a built-in incentive to care for climate change. Both are legitimised in similar ways by appealing to human nature. Both are equally the outcome of a rather arbitrary development of human societies based more on lucky circumstances than human nature.
The fundamental issue in both systems is that they are organised around competition. While competition is argued to bring the best out of people, I have some objections to that idea.
While the idea of competition being good for performance is far older, it got a scientific character with the publication of Darwin’s infamous On the Origin of Species. The catchphrase “survival of the fittest” has shaped the way in which we see evolution as a biological principle, but also has influenced social theory, with social Darwinism being its most vulgar form. While outright social Darwinism or even fascism are -for the time being- still marginal belief systems, the core principle that among humans only the strongest deserve to survive is what forms the core of many of our social and political institutions.
However, throughout history there have also been those that countered this interpretation of Darwin’s work. Peter Kropotkin, famous 19th century anarchist theorist and geologist, looked at Darwin’s work very differently. As a geologist, he also did quite a lot of research on animals. His works, the most famous ones being Mutual Aid and The Conquest of Bread, are dedicated to disproving that most dangerous interpretation of evolution that “only the strongest individuals survive”. Instead, he argues that evolution and the survival of species is based on cooperation within the species, not competition. He states that it is the species that have learned to cooperate most effectively that have managed to stay alive, specifically so for humans. If humans were truly the selfish creatures as described by the social Darwinists, society would have never been possible in the first place. We cooperate far more often than we would sometimes like to admit. Humans are, under certain conditions, rather compassionate.
Recently, this idea has been kept alive by thinkers such as Rutger Bregman6 and “The Davids” as mentioned earlier. Scientific research generally is getting quite good at disproving those lazy assumptions of competition being inherent to humanity.
The biggest problem we face is that, while human society depends on cooperation and humans tend to be rather compassionate, we still for some reason cannot see that we are at the end of the day the same group. This is why, despite Kropotkin’s analysis of cooperations evolutionary role, we have not been able to tackle our peculiar case of intra-species competition. We simply still perceive each other as a fundamentally different species based on rather silly criteria like language, skin colour or nationality. In order to escape from the toxic cycles that basing our societies around competition has caused, we need to start understanding better how we are much more similar than we tend to think.
I sometimes jokingly say that humans might only start globally cooperating if we were to be invaded by aliens. However, there may be some science to back up my joke. The Robber’s Cave Experiment famously resolved inter-group competition, rather simply, through abolishing the opposing group identities to form one new overarching group identity. Already in the mid-20th century have we scientifically proven that through cooperation and the pursuit of superordinate goals we can reduce tensions between perceived groups. Why could climate change action then not be that superordinate goal that humanity needs to start seeing herself as a single entity? Why should it not be seen as the “alien invasion” that we need? How many more wars do we need to fight in order to learn from the universal sorrows of war veterans throughout history? Voltaire once said that the world was a vast theatre in which the same tragedy is played under different names. I say we ought to rewrite the script.
We have been tricking ourselves into believing that we are somehow essentially different to each other and that this difference is inherently threatening. We have for far too long organised our societies around the wrong C-word. We must now, at this critical moment in our history, choose between cooperation and competition. I sincerely hope that we will make the right choice.
Notes
1. John Mearsheimer’s lecture on “Why China Cannot Rise Peacefully”. https://youtu.be/CXov7MkgPB4?si=c-pI93R81Sd5eHn4
2. The Climate Change Trap. P. Whiteley. The Loop. ECPR. https://theloop.ecpr.eu/the-climate-change-trap/
3. The section on the failed Mongol invasion of Europe is based on the tenth chapter of this book. Holslag, J. (2018). A political history of the world: Three thousand years of war and peace. Penguin UK.
4. Yanis Varoufakis’ lecture on economics titled “From an Economics without Capitalism to Markets without Capitalism”. https://youtu.be/9aK4OztueuE?si=OEJ-QG9vEKdzS991
5. The IPCC’s incredible interactive atlas showcasing the most recent numbers on climate change. https://interactive-atlas.ipcc.ch/
6. Rutger Bregman’s groundbreaking book. Bregman, R. (2020). Humankind: A hopeful history. Bloomsbury Publishing.
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