Planetarism: A Paradigmatic Alternative to Internationalism

Stefan Pedersen, University of Leeds

s.pedersen@leeds.ac.uk

This is an original manuscript / preprint of an article published by Taylor & Francis in

Globalizations on 25 March 2020, available online:

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14747731.2020.1741901

Please access the peer reviewed, revised and published version linked to above and use

that as your reference if you want to cite this work.

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Planetarism: A Paradigmatic Alternative to Internationalism

Abstract:

What is a robust theoretical alternative to nationalism? For many seasoned

cosmopolitan thinkers the answer is internationalism, which is generally
perceived to be a sound foundation for creating a global polity in the form of a
federation of nations. But this assumption is here criticised on the basis that it is
founded on an inherent fallacy – internationalism is only a modification of
nationalism, where the latter remains the ideological nucleus in conceptual terms
– which therefore means that cosmopolitan thinkers such as Jürgen Habermas in
the last instance seek to build a global polity on the same divisive ideational
foundation that brought on the World Wars in the last century. Because of the
shared roots of nationalism and internationalism, the salient question is really;
what comes after the international? The answer argued for here is; a novel
paradigm of ‘planetarism’ that is not a compromise with the extant nationalisms.

Keywords: world order, global imaginary, cosmopolitanism, internationalism, planetarism,

planetarist.

Introduction

We live on planet Earth. For contemporary human beings this is arguably the primary

ontological facet of our shared existence. Take the Earth and its concomitant biosphere away

and there would simply not be any life or humans and certainly no human civilization. But

world politics is not currently centred on the fact that the Earth is the home planet of

humanity – world politics is centred on the primacy of the nation-state, a contingent political

fact stemming from the modern nationalism that took form during the French Revolution.

The reality of planetary existence in any other than the most basic geographical terms did not

start to make a mark on shared popular consciousness until the late 1960s and early 1970s.

This mismatch between our planetary home and the national confines of our democratic
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politics is becoming a liability for humanity – a realization that will only spread in the years

ahead. I will here by means of a conceptually centred political theory and the employment of

a conceptual scale pertaining to world order preference – from nationalism via

internationalism to the concept of ‘planetarism’ introduced here for the first time – theorize

what a recalibration of popular politics to planetary reality might mean for the future of world

politics broadly construed and more specifically argue that if this presently conceivable

development comes about, it will mean the end of belief in ‘progressive’ internationalism.

The fragility of the Earth’s biosphere is a newfound discovery in the grand scheme of social

development. This realization also carries potentially profound world political consequences.

For in political terms it means that conjoining world politics with scientifically verified

reality for the sake of crisis minimization, as determined by Earth Systems science in the

latter half of the twentieth century, will require us to leave the nation-state behind while we

aim to create a human civilizational polity of planetary proportions, or a planetary polity for

short. The cultural groundswell that could make this transition practically feasible will now

with the Anthropocene realization – that humanity is recognized to have become a geological

force impacting the planet – have reached a further stage of the formative phase that started in

the twentieth century. What now exists in rudimentary shape is therefore a planetary

imaginary or cultural background setting that is slowly changing how we as individuals

perceive our political place and role in the world in aggregate.1 This amounts to a tectonic

shift in the conceptual background terrain that should in theory make the new ideologies that

are bound to emerge on the world political scene in the near future become distinct in their

grounding principles from the present crop of prevailing ideologies.2 Crucially for this

argument, this now emerging ‘planetary imaginary’ should in conceptual terms in its world

1
See: Heikki Patomäki and Manfred B. Steger, ‘Social imaginaries and Big History: Towards a new planetary
consciousness?’, Futures, 42 (2010): 1056-1063.
2
See: Manfred B. Steger, The Rise of the Global Imaginary (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008).

3
order orientation substantially differ from not only nationalism but also the internationalism

which forms part of the now dominant ‘national-international imaginary’.

In the argument presented here the initial goal is to show how the conceptual groundwork

required for this complete reorientation of political awareness, from nation to planet, has been

taking shape since the late 1960s. I then seek to refine this emerging ‘planetarist’ conceptual

apparatus by elucidating how it is diametrically arrayed against what in conceptual terms is a

nationalistically grounded ‘national-internationalism’ that remains dominant. Finally, I show

how planetarism in conceptual terms represents a comprehensive paradigmatic alternative to

nationalism, including in its prevailing national-internationalist form.

The Dawning of Planetary Awareness

The Apollo astronauts on their way to and from the Moon photographed their
home planet. It was a natural thing to do, but it had consequences that few
foresaw. For the first time, the inhabitants of Earth could see their world from
above – the whole Earth, the Earth in color, the Earth as an exquisite spinning
white and blue ball set against the vast darkness of space. Those images
helped awaken our slumbering planetary consciousness. They provide
incontestable evidence that we all share the same vulnerable planet. They
remind us of what is important and what is not.3

Carl Sagan, the famous astronomer quoted above, was one of several notable thinkers who

during the course of the last century realized that from a scientific standpoint all human

beings are first and foremost ‘inhabitants of Earth’. Sagan’s conceptually ‘planetarist’ stance

was at least in part shared by philosopher and sociologist Edgar Morin, who pointed to the

same series of images captured of the Earth from an extra-terrestrial vantage point in the late

3
Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot. A Vision of the Human Future in Space (New York: Ballantine Books, 1994), 171.

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1960s and early 1970s which Sagan refers to,4 and noted that ‘Planet Earth has recently

revealed itself to the gaze of Earthlings’.5

For both Sagan and Morin, this revelation is profound in its significance. Seeing the Earth

from space turns what previously could only be inferred in the abstract and presented

subjectively through the mind’s eye of artists and cartographers into concrete and objective

reality. Our recent familiarisation with the image of the Earth itself have made apparent the

deep incongruities between the world as it really is and how it has been traditionally

represented – e.g. as composed of singular nation-states firmly separated by black lines.6

Sagan pointed this out too: ‘National boundaries are not evident when we view the Earth

from space’.7 He added both poetically and with a measure of hope to this observation that

‘Fanatical ethnic or religious or national chauvinisms are a little difficult to maintain when

we see our planet as a fragile blue crescent fading to become an inconspicuous point of light

against the bastion and citadel of the stars’.8 For Sagan, the implications of our newly

awakened planetary consciousness were unmistakeable. Humanity had now entered a new

era, where our species had become ‘the local embodiment of the Cosmos grown to self-

awareness’.9 This meant that from this moment on we should collectively realize that: ‘Our

4
See also: Denis Cosgrove, ‘Contested Global Visions: One-World, Whole-Earth, and the Apollo Space
Photographs’, Annals of the Association of American Geographers, vol. 84, No. 2 (1994): 270-294; William
Bryant, ‘The Re-Vision of Planet Earth: Space Flight and Environmentalism in Postmodern America’, American
Studies, vol. 36, No. 2 (1995): 43-63; Robert Poole, Earthrise. How Man First Saw the Earth (New Haven, CT:
Yale University Press, 2008); Benjamin Lazier, ‘Earthrise; or, The Globalization of the World Picture’,
American Historical Review, June (2011): 602-630; and; Kelly Oliver, Earth & World. Philosophy After the
Apollo Missions (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015).
5
Edgar Morin and Anne Brigitte Kern (1999). Homeland Earth. A Manifesto for the New Millennium (Cresskill,
NJ: Hampton Press, Inc., 1999), 24. This work was originally published in French with the title Terre-patrie in
1993. Note: Even though Morin and Kern are listed as co-authors, it appears evident from e.g. the
accompanying preface that the work primarily is a presentation of Morin’s ideas.
6
This is graphically depicted in an image of children contemplating a globe with ‘territorial boundaries,
boundaries that are concepts, not real markings on the planet’ that Carl Sagan helped pick out and send with the
Voyager space probe into interstellar space. See: Carl Sagan, et al., The Murmurs of Earth. The Voyager
Interstellar Record (New York: Random House, 1978), 107.
7
Carl Sagan, Cosmos (London: Macdonald Futura Publishers, 1981), 318.
8
Ibid., 318.
9
Ibid., 345.

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loyalties are to the species and the planet. We speak for Earth.’10 Morin, who for his part was

more cautious in his claims about how far we had now come as a species, wrote that ‘we are

witnessing an evolution toward a planetary consciousness or global mind’.11 It was for Morin

nonetheless evident that: ‘From now on, humanity and the planet can manifest themselves in

their unity, which is not only physical and biospheric, but a historical unity: that of the

Planetary Era’.12

What happens once sufficient numbers of strategically placed people have adopted the

planetary consciousness that properly belongs to Morin’s ‘Planetary Era’ as their own? Once

a great many minds have gotten to where Sagan was already shortly after the first lunar

missions had been conducted in the late 1960s, it is likely that they will come to conclusions

similar to him and other early adapters. Buckminster-Fuller, for instance, came up with his

now famous ‘Spaceship Earth’ metaphor at this time, where he argued that we must start

seeing ourselves as crew on a vessel with limited means traveling for eternity through

space.13 Lord Ritchie-Calder, who in the 1960s was a world famous science writer, argued

that ‘Homo Sapiens, the Earthling, has shrunk his world to the dimensions of a very small

planet’ and that ‘he’ must now face the consequences of this and ‘choose to use his science

and his wisdom to co-operate with all his kind in the peaceful enrichment of his Earth and of

the people who live on it’.14 Lastly, another early adapter that is still active in scholarly

debates to this day,15 Richard Falk, did more ominously note that:

We need to identify and clarify the limits of our planetary existence and plan
to live within those limits. The task is urgent. We may not have more than a
few years to make fundamental adjustments; we certainly do not have more

10
Ibid., 345. Emphasis in original.
11
Morin and Kern, Homeland Earth, 24. Added emphasis.
12
Ibid., 24.
13
R. Buckminster Fuller, Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University
Press, 1969).
14
Lord Ritchie-Calder, ‘Earthlings in the Space Age’, Unesco Courier 22, August-September (1969), 4-6.
15
See for instance: Richard Falk, Power Shift. On the New Global Order (London: Zed Books, 2016).

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 than a few decades. Unless we can adapt our behavior to the carrying
capacity of the planet, the future of mankind will indeed be bleak – assured
short-run deterioration of life circumstances, and a growing prospect of
human extinction. The stakes of this struggle are nothing less than the
habitability of the planet.16

Falk could at this time unambiguously state that ‘a world of sovereign states is unable to cope

with endangered-planet problems’ because ‘the political logic of nationalism generates a

system of international relations that is dominated by conflict and competition’. 17 Falk also

added another observation here that is as valid today as it was then: ‘Such a system exhibits

only a modest capacity for international cooperation and coordination’.18 In sum then, all

these early adapters to what both Sagan and Morin called ‘the planetary consciousness’ had

collectively realized that it was now imperative to start thinking in terms of species and

planet. And, no less crucially, that the major obstacle standing in the way for this necessary

development was the ideology of nationalism that both pervaded and sustained the existing

system of sovereign states.

The image of the planet Earth in all its unitary majesty and fragility led these thinkers to see

humanity conceptually as ‘Earthlings’ – to use the same expression as Ritchie-Calder – an

identity which they all understood as juxtaposed to the politically prevailing notion of the

human race as most meaningfully divided into a multiplicity of national ‘peoples’ though

none of them put it that explicitly. This nascent trend towards thinking about individuals as

first and foremost inhabitants of the planet led two contemporary international relations

theorists to conclude that ‘we find it reasonable to anticipate that outdated sovereignty and

narrow nationalism will continue to give ground, in practice if not in principle, before the

16
Richard A. Falk, This Endangered Planet (New York: Random House, 1971), 2.
17
Ibid., 37-38.
18
Ibid., 38.

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pressures toward a more integrated politics of the planet earth’.19 And they also understood

which course this new planetary awareness plotted for humanity: ‘It would obviously be

easier to cope with salient international problems of all kinds if the earth and its human

inhabitants composed a single community in a political as well as an ecological sense’. 20 But

they also worried that ‘the continuing fragmentation of the earth and the persistence of

tribalistic nationalism interpose obstacles that may yet prove insurmountable’. 21 They were

right to worry, as nationalism continues to persist to this day.

National-Internationalism

James Lovelock, one of the main contributors to the discourse shaped by the planetary

awareness that first emerged in the late 1960s, recently raised an existential question:

We are important not because of what we are now but because of our
potential as an intelligent, communicating animal that might eventually
evolve as an integral part of the Earth system. But will we evolve to the stage
where our tribalism and its offspring, nationalism, defer to planetary needs? 22

As we can see, Lovelock’s question picks up exactly where Sagan, Falk, and the others

mentioned, were already around 1970. And the challenge that this type of question essentially

poses remains the same; what would it take to evolve fully beyond the nationalism that

presently stultifies all attempts at coherent political organization at the world, or planetary,

level so that human civilization can begin to address ‘planetary needs’ effectively? The

majority of contemporary scholars still tend to think that the answer to this question lies in

replacing nationalism with internationalism. 23 But that, it is posited here, is a logical fallacy

19
Harold Sprout and Margaret Sprout, Toward a Politics of the Planet Earth (New York: Van Nostrand
Reinhold Company, 1971), 463.
20
Ibid., 485.
21
Ibid., 485.
22
James Lovelock, A Rough Ride to the Future (London: Penguin Books, 2015), 149.
23
Kant’s is commonly interpreted as one of the first articulations of an internationalist cosmopolitan standpoint.
This interpretation is based on his essay ‘Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Sketch’ (1795). See: Immanuel Kant,
Political Writings. Second Enlarged Edition, ed. H. S. Reiss (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991),

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due to the dependent nature of the very concept of internationalism to the concept of

nationalism.24 Internationalism, as a coherent system of thought, is no more fit to expunge the

nationality principle located at its own conceptual nucleus 25 than any living creature would be

fit to rid itself of the vital organs keeping it alive. The beating heart of internationalism is the

belief that the world is best ordered into nationally defined peoples, which is also the greatest

load-bearing plank within nationalism itself.

Over a century ago, historian Ramsey Muir argued that Napoleon was the ‘first among

modern statesmen’ to realize that ‘an effective Internationalism can only be rendered possible

by triumphant Nationalism’.26 Muir agreed with the insight he attributed to Napoleon:

‘Internationalism could not exist until nationalism had established itself’.27 This was because

the two were ‘twin causes’ as Muir argued,28 where an adherence to the former principle of

internationalism logically followed from an already established adherence to the latter

principle of nationality found at the core of nationalism. Today, the notion that

internationalism conceptually stems from nationalism is better understood by arguing that

they are both, through the latter, rooted in the same ‘national imaginary’. 29 Therefore, at the

fundamental level, these two ostensibly opposed modes of world ordering are really only

superficially different aspects of the same essentially nationalist worldview.

93-130; and; James Bohman and Matthias Lutz-Bachmann, eds., Perpetual Peace. Essays on Kant’s
Cosmopolitan Ideal (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997).
24
See: Martin Shaw, Theory of the Global State. Globality as Unfinished Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2000), 27-30.
25
It is here assumed, as long argued by Michael Freeden, that an ideological system of thought should be
understood as a multi-conceptual construct with its own ‘morphology’ centred on its core conceptual attributes.
See: Michael Freeden, ‘The Morphological Analysis of Ideology’, in The Oxford Handbook of Political
Ideologies, eds. Michael Freeden, Lyman Tower Sargent, and Marc Stears (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2013), 115-137.
26
Ramsay Muir, Nationalism and Internationalism. Second Edition. London: Constable and Company, Ltd.,
1919), 151. The first edition was published in 1916.
27
Ibid., 137.
28
Ibid., 137.
29
Steger, The Rise of the Global Imaginary, 17-125.

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Martin Shaw has argued on a similar basis that we ought to think of the present world order

as an ‘institutionally defined order of national-international relations’ and that we should

make care to note that ‘it is a national and international principle, or nationality-

internationality, that is pervasive’ within it. 30 What we need to escape the tribalism Lovelock

associates with the nationalist worldview is therefore not internationalism, but a post-

internationalist31 principle that is no longer founded in the same national ethos. And, as I will

now seek to emphasize, it would be a mistake to think that post-internationalism is what is

offered by contemporary cosmopolitanism.

Kwame Anthony Appiah, who together with for instance Martha Nussbaum has been one of

the foremost self-described cosmopolitan theorists since the Cold War ended, has recently

argued for a ‘reasonable cosmopolitanism’.32 This form of cosmopolitanism, which more

objectively can be described as moderate rather than reasonable, holds that the only aspect of

‘nationalism’ that ‘needs taming’ is its tendency to ‘explode’ into ‘hostility and

xenophobia’.33 Appiah thinks we should focus on the positive aspects of nationalism, such as

‘its capacity to bring people together in projects such as creating a social welfare state’ and

start appreciating that ‘nationalism and cosmopolitanism’ are not ‘incompatible’ but ‘actually

intertwined’.34 What Appiah argues for here is in its essence cosmopolitanism understood as

internationalism. Appiah also cites Martha Nussbaum favourably for maintaining that

‘requiring people to pay special attention to their own is [ ] “the only sensible way to do

good”’.35 Nussbaum’s explicit understanding of ‘their own’ – as found in the paragraph

30
Shaw, Theory of the Global State, 27.
31
The literal conception of ‘post-international’ employed here is alluded to in James N. Rosenau’s work on
‘postinternationalism’ but it is not identical to the way it is employed there. See: James N. Rosenau, ‘Beyond
Postinternationalism’, in Pondering Postinternationalism. A Paradigm for the 21st Century?, ed. Heidi H. Hobbs
(Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2000), 219-237.
32
Kwame Anthony Appiah, ‘The Importance of Elsewhere: In Defense of Cosmopolitanism’, Foreign Affairs
98, no. 2 (2019): 25.
33
Ibid., 25.
34
Ibid., 25.
35
Ibid., 25.

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Appiah here quotes an excerpt from – reveals what is actually meant by this position: ‘we can

and should give special attention to our own families and to our own ties of religion and

national belonging. In obvious ways, we must do so, since the nation-state sets up the basic

terms for most of our daily conduct, and since we are all born into a family’. 36 Nussbaum’s

insistence that ‘we must’ give special attention to the national people we ‘belong’ to is

consistent with both a nationalist and an internationalist worldview. But not with

cosmopolitanism as understood in the era before the rise of nationalism.

Prior to the French Revolution ‘cosmopolitan ideas’ used to be entertained by those that

‘longed for the destruction of national divisions and for the establishment of a Cosmopolis, a

world-state which should embody and strengthen the indestructible unity of the respublic

Christiana’, which in this particular instance was how Muir still understood the term a

hundred years ago.37 But it is worth noting that even an early expert of Muir’s calibre

struggles to keep the terminology correct, as it should be ‘dynastic’ rather than ‘national

divisions’ in his own account. Before the nation-state there was the dynastic state, as it was

ruled by hereditary monarchs, and not ‘the people’ of the nation itself or representatives

thereof. However, both Appiah and Muir note correctly that notions earlier associated with

the ideal of Cosmopolis became increasingly combined with novel concepts properly

belonging to nationalist thought throughout the nineteenth century. 38 This is why Appiah can

plausibly argue that nationalism and cosmopolitanism should be understood as ‘intertwined’

– because cosmopolitanism is now understood to mean multiculturalism. But Appiah fails to

note that this development has come at the expense of key aspects of early cosmopolitanism.

36
Martha C. Nussbaum, et al., For Love of Country. Debating the Limits of Cosmopolitanism (Boston: Beacon
Press, 1996), 135.
37
Muir, Nationalism and Internationalism, 136-137.
38
Appiah, ‘The Importance of Elsewhere’, 22-24.

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Muir is better at discerning exactly what it was that happened to cosmopolitanism during this

earlier moment of metamorphosis. The combined forces of first the Reformation and then the

rise of ‘nationality’ made it apparent that ‘the days of the world-state were gone for ever’,39

and this, it might be added, was unarguably the case for the particular respublica Christiana

variety of world state envisioned in the Middle Ages. For Muir, this realization meant that: ‘If

Europe was to find any political method for expressing the essential unity of its civilisation, it

must be in some new form that would respect the freedom and independence of the nation-

states’.40 And, this line of reasoning further led to the conclusion that: ‘Internationalism must

take the place of Cosmopolitanism. But Internationalism could not exist until Nationalism

had established itself’.41 Which, in short, explains the lag between the first internationalist

cosmopolitan theory, which was evinced by Kant in 1795,42 and the establishment of the first

permanent bodies aiming to govern international affairs in the twentieth century. In the

meantime, the old cosmopolitan tendency to think of humanity as ideally constituted in one

singular polity disappeared from view, and practically all thinking about supranational

organization came to focus on cooperation between nations, understood in the sense of

timeless organic units where the conceptual triad of the people-the nation-the state coincide.

When ‘cosmopolitanism’ morphed into internationalism, the only possibly viable theoretical

alternative to a world politics centred on nation-states and national peoples practically

vanished. Appiah and Nussbaum might well be ‘moral cosmopolitans’43 in some sense that

remains meaningful, but one would be hard pressed to distinguish their purported political

cosmopolitanism from internationalism conceptually. Hans Kohn, one of the chief historians

39
Muir, Nationalism and Internationalism, 137.
40
Ibid., 137.
41
Ibid., 137.
42
Kant, Political Writings.
43
Anthony McGrew, ‘Liberal Internationalism: Between Realism and Cosmopolitanism’ in Governing
Globalization. Power, Authority and Global Governance, eds. David Held and Anthony McGrew (Cambridge:
Polity, 2002), 280.

12
of nationalism around the middle of the last century, could see ‘internationalism as a vision of

the unity of mankind, frequently called cosmopolitanism or universalism’44 but the problem

we are faced with today is that both internationalism and cosmopolitanism continue to be

broadly perceived as universalist while those who advocate these positions are demonstrably

not promoting universalism in any post-national and post-international sense of that term.45

We therefore arrive at a point of extreme conceptual vagueness, where today both

cosmopolitanism and internationalism appear to be rooted in nationalist conceptions of

community. How can we then distinguish from nationally rooted conceptions of world order

and the truly global world order that both the ideas associated with ‘cosmopolitanism’ and

‘internationalism’ earlier were thought to signify? In an effort to bring back that distinction

and regain terminological clarity, it is suggested here that we set the national imaginary,

which with greater precision should be called ‘the national-international imaginary’, to one

side and consider what kind of world order there is that would properly correspond to the

emerging ‘planetary imaginary’ on the other. I suggest that the principle for world ordering

the planetary imaginary leads us to, in place of the nationalism that is an endemic property of

the national-international imaginary, even in internationalist or cosmopolitan guise, is a

‘planetarism’ that takes human civilization and the wider Earth system as its starting point.

The Planetary Imaginary

Manfred B. Steger has suggested that humanity has now entered a phase in its ideational

development where we are seeing a ‘rising global imaginary’ beginning to dislocate ‘the

44
Hans Kohn, ‘Nationalism and Internationalism’, in History and the Idea of Mankind, ed. W. Warren Wagar
(Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1971), 119.
45
A typical example is the recent work of Jo Leinen and Andreas Bummel, who argue for establishing a world
parliament – but within a world order where ‘the states will remain the most important organs of governance in
the world’ and that ‘each country would send at least two delegates’ to it – i.e. their design applies an
internationalist ordering principle. Jo Leinen and Andreas Bummel, A World Parliament. Governance and
Democracy in the 21st Century (Berlin: Democracy Without Borders, 2018), 376 and 381.

13
centrality of the national in the modern social imaginary’. 46 Steger here applies Charles

Taylor’s notion of ‘social imaginaries’ which is a term that in the singular denotes a specific

broad conceptual understanding that frames the bounds of reality, as collectively constituted,

for a given society. According to Taylor, a ‘social imaginary’ is how ‘ordinary people

“imagine” their social surroundings’, an understanding that is commonly expressed through

‘images, stories, and legends’ rather than ‘in theoretical terms’.47 For a social imaginary to

function as the social imaginary for an entire community it has to be ‘shared by large groups

of people, if not the whole society’. 48 Once a sufficient number of societal members subscribe

to a certain social imaginary, it becomes ‘that common understanding that makes possible

common practices and a widely shared sense of legitimacy’. 49 What is very important for the

present argument is that a given social imaginary can be subject to alteration or even

complete replacement.50 Or, as Taylor puts it: ‘It often happens that what start off as theories

held by a few people come to infiltrate the social imaginary, first of elites, perhaps, and then

of the whole society’.51

It is also crucial for this argument to be aware of the difference between a social imaginary

and a political ideology. The social imaginary, as Steger emphasises, provide a ‘context’ or

an ‘implicit background’ that advocates of political ideologies have to operate within the

parameters of to be able to garner sufficient popular support for their more specific package

of views on how society ought to be governed.52 The pre-modern social imaginary was in

Europe in large part a religiously sanctioned worldview, where biblical scripture and the

clergy who held sermons from it were widely seen as the unquestionable authority on the

46
Steger, The Rise of the Global Imaginary, 8 and 11. See also: Patomäki and Steger, ‘Social imaginaries and
Big History’.
47
Charles Taylor, Modern Social Imaginaries (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004), 23.
48
Ibid., 23.
49
Ibid., 23.
50
Steger, The Rise of the Global Imaginary, 7.
51
Taylor, Modern Social Imaginaries, 24.
52
Steger, The Rise of the Global Imaginary, 6.

14
nature of the divinely created reality they saw themselves as occupying. 53 With the advent of

modernity, along with the American and French Revolutions, the people comes to take the

place of the divine as the purveyor of legitimacy and, with it, political authority. We here

witness the birth of ‘the modern concept of a nation based on popular sovereignty’. 54 And this

is the basic ideational change that Steger identifies as of pivotal importance for the

emergence of the national imaginary. 55

The people’s will, like that of God’s before it, must be interpreted before it can be given a

constructive direction – as opposed to destructive intent, which the people, in the form of a

rioting multitude, is capable of on its own. Political ideologies therefore arise at this point as

secular56 articulations of the will of the people. These different suggestions for what the

popular will ought to be, or ideologies in the plural, were in the context of the French

Revolution first given physical expression when the National Assembly formed into a ‘right’

and a ‘left’ faction.57 This division materialized as ‘the friends of the people’ positioned

themselves on the left side of the assembly while ‘those who were loyal to religion and the

king took up positions to the right’.58 What is special in this particular case is that the right

was still at this point composed of adherents of the pre-modern imaginary utilized by the

ancien regime, or those who wanted to conserve the monarchist status quo, while the left had

adopted the modern national imaginary. What happens later in almost all of Europe is that

this conflict between the left and the right is resolved completely in favour of this original

53
See: Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2007).
54
Steger, The Rise of the Global Imaginary, 20.
55
Steger, The Rise of the Global Imaginary, 19-22.
56
For Taylor, that ‘secular time’ replaces ‘higher time’ is one of the distinguishing features of modern thinking
and the modern state. For an early articulation of this position, see: Charles Taylor, ‘Nationalism and
Modernity’, in The State of the Nation. Ernest Gellner and the Theory of Nationalism, ed. John A. Hall
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 198-199.
57
See: Marcel Gauchet, ‘Right and Left’, in Realms of Memory: Rethinking the French Past. Volume 1:
Conflicts and Divisions, eds. Pierre Nora and Lawrence D. Kritzman (New York: Columbia University Press,
1996), 241-298.
58
Ibid., 243-244.

15
left’s insistence on adopting the norm of popular sovereignty. 59 Though the monarchist right

does not give in to this demand freely before it has achieved a compromise which by the

1870s gave birth to a highly conservative form of nationalism60 – which in practice made it

possible for the erstwhile monarchists to stay in power, albeit now with the added benefit of

popular acclaim. But Steger’s key point concerning this development is that even the

conservatives who initially defended the French ancien regime with their lives on the line

came to adopt the national imaginary, however grudgingly in the beginning, so that gradually

all of the available ‘ideational systems pursued their specific political goals under the

background umbrella of the national imaginary’. 61 Today, the national imaginary frames

practically all the still politically significant ideologies which were developed from the

French Revolution to the late 1800s. Steger refers to these as the ‘grand ideologies’, and sees

British liberalism, French conservatism, and German socialism as the chief early examples. 62

After having reached something of a plateau around 1950, after the United Nations had

cemented the principle of national sovereignty in its Charter, the national imaginary begins to

show signs of structural fatigue in the second half of the 20th Century. The post-war

hegemony enjoyed by conservative, liberal, and social democratic interpretations of the

national interest in the Western world begins to be challenged from 1968 on when ‘the New

Left helped create a global culture’ in what has been described as a ‘first act of an unfolding

species-consciousness’.63 It is at this point, according to Steger, that we see the emergence of

ideologies that instead of adhering to the national imaginary start to show signs of having

made adjustments to fit an embryonic ‘global imaginary’. 64 This signals a profound shift in

59
For insight into this process, see: Mike Rapport, 1848. Year of Revolution (New York: Basic Books, 2008).
60
Charles S. Maier, ‘Leviathan 2.0: Inventing Modern Statehood’ in A World Connecting, 1870-1945, ed. Emily
S. Rosenberg (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2012), 178-179.
61
Steger, The Rise of the Global Imaginary, 9.
62
Ibid., 44-83.
63
George Katsiaficas, The Imagination of the New Left: A Global Analysis of 1968 (Boston, MA: South End
Press, 1987), p. 82. This work is also cited in Steger, The Rise of the Global Imaginary, 160 and 162.
64
Steger, The Rise of the Global Imaginary, 155-163.

16
the cultural background understanding that forms the social imaginary and enlarges the arena

where political contestation can occur, since from this moment on a completely new class of

‘global’ ideologies can in theory start garnering popular support. Or, in Steger’s words:

Like the conceptual earthquake that shook Europe and the Americas more
than 200 years ago, today’s destabilization of the national affects the entire
planet. The ideologies dominating the world today are no longer exclusively
articulations of the national imaginary but reconfigured ideational systems
that constitute potent translations of the dawning global imaginary. 65

Empirically, Steger’s notion that ‘today’s destabilization of the national affects the entire

planet’ is basically an indisputable observation – the present resurgence of nationalist politics

chiefly confirms that the national imaginary is generally perceived to be facing an existential

challenge from a whole host of phenomena with a global presence within nations worldwide.

But the second claim Steger makes, that ‘the ideologies dominating the world today’

‘constitute potent translations of the dawning global imaginary’, is one I dispute. On the

contrary, I think it is precisely because there are, as of yet, no existing ‘potent translations’ of

the global imaginary that we see such large sections of the populace take refuge in the

perceived safe haven of the familiar, i.e. the nationally based politics that continues to

confirm to the national imaginary.

Steger argues that a range of ‘globalisms’ adhere to the global imaginary, including

neoliberal ‘market globalism’ and alter-globalist ‘justice globalism’.66 But under closer

scrutiny these ideologies are internationalist rather than planetarist and conceptually still

adhere to what I have here emphasized should really be understood as the national-

international imaginary.67 Today’s ‘global’ ideologies are therefore anomalies indicating a

65
Ibid., 12.
66
For the most recent iteration of Steger’s ‘globalisms’ typology, see: Manfred B. Steger, ‘Political Ideologies
in the Age of Globalization’ in The Oxford Handbook of Political Ideologies, eds. Michael Freeden, Lyman
Tower Sargent and Marc Stears (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 214-231.
67
Present author (forthcoming).

17
possible, future, adaptation to a global paradigm from within the paradigmatic framework that

is already provided by the national-international imaginary itself. That is to say, Steger’s

theoretical conception of the turn from a national to a global imaginary seems to have

leapfrogged an important intermediary step. This is where ideologies still grounded in the

national imaginary start adjusting to the general movement towards a new globally

constituted imaginary, through the means of emphasising the internationalist politics that the

national imaginary is able to accommodate. However uneasy this makes those who perceive

this process as a weakening of nationalism in favour of internationalism, it is still a means of

preserving the system of nation-states while simultaneously making popularly sought

adjustments to demands stemming from a heightened ‘global’ awareness.

Planetarism

To explain my point with greater precision, I will now deviate further from Steger’s original

terminology to underline that what he has really identified with his examples is an ongoing

movement within what should properly be called ‘the national-international imaginary’

towards its international side. It is perhaps the logical inconsistency involved in this process –

that it is impossible to create a coherent alternative to nationalism while still adhering to the

national imaginary in fundamental respects – that have by now resulted in a popular backlash

against these yet incomplete forms of ‘globalism’. Since Steger’s ‘globalisms’ conceptually

are ‘internationalisms’, it clarifies the critical divisions better if we replace his notion of the

global imaginary with ‘the planetary imaginary’. 68 Because first when we realize that we are

facing a shift away from the national-international imaginary to the planetary imaginary is it

possible to conceive properly of the range of ideological characteristics that the latter

imaginary in theory should give rise to. And more to the point I explicitly seek to address

68
Steger, together with Heikki Patomäki, have also used this phrasing when mentioning ‘a global or “planetary”
imaginary’, though in this instance they apparently see the terms as synonyms that are conceptually identical.
Patomäki and Steger, ‘Social imaginaries and Big History’, 1062.

18
here, in world order terms, ideologies configured with the planetary imaginary as its

contextual background should theoretically aim exclusively for the creation of a

comprehensively post-national ‘planetarist’ world order rather than an ‘internationalist’ one.

What this means is that rather than imagining a binary split between the national and the

global imaginary, where the former promotes nationalism and the latter internationalism, we

should conceive of a continuum, with autarkic nationalism at one extreme and ‘planetarism’

at the other, where various types of internationalism occupy the middle section (see Table 1).

Table 1

Old Paradigm Anomaly New Paradigm

Nationalism Internationalism Planetarism

(National-International Imaginary) (Planetary Imaginary)

Nationalist Autarky Liberal World Order Planetarist Polity

(Fascism, Nazism, (liberal internationalism, (ecologism, universalist

Stalinism, isolationism, globalism, internationalist cosmopolitanism,

right-populism) cosmopolitanism) Scientific Humanism)

Planetarism is conceived as a concept no longer rooted in the nation-state that indicates a

future world order where the key political subject no longer is ‘the people’ but instead what I

here conceptualize as ‘the planetarists’, or those individuals who prioritize perpetuating

human civilization through finding a symbiotic pathway ahead where the wellbeing of

individual human beings and life on Earth in general are seen as inextricable factors. While

the national imaginary ushered in the nation-state, it is now conceivable that that the

planetary imaginary might be the harbinger of a ‘planetary eco-civilization’ organized as a

politically coherent ‘planetary polity’. It is the basic ideational preconditions for this

19
planetary polity we can begin to discern the contours of now, after years of appearing as only

a slight glimmer on the theoretical horizon.

It is also of material importance to recognize, as argued earlier, that any and all forms of

internationalism remain grounded in the same national imaginary as that which also grounds

the more extreme forms of nationalism. The conceptual stretching of the national imaginary

first reaches its breaking point on the threshold where the national-international imaginary, or

paradigm, ends and where the planetary imaginary, or planetarist paradigm, begins. So, to

underline my main point in this section: Internationalism should be understood as a Kuhnian

‘anomaly’69 pointing towards a future paradigm shift where the leap from the national-

international imaginary to the planetary imaginary is completed – first in ideological, and

later, as the theory would predict, also in world political terms. A turn to international

principles of organization should conversely not be understood as something constituting a

paradigm shift on its own because internationalism is an anomaly indicating a future

paradigm shift from a nationally grounded imaginary to a planetarily grounded one.

To sum up, Steger’s theory has identified a trend in the movement away from the national

imaginary towards what he calls the global imaginary that inherently has great explanatory

power. But a lack of examples of ideologies that have managed a full transition from one

imaginary to the other means that it is still a distinctly theoretical undertaking to identify

what conceptual shape a variety of ‘planetary ideology’, i.e. an ideology devised by

individuals fully engrossed in a post-national, planetary imaginary, might actually take. It is

inconceivable that a planetary ideology can be both internationalist and post-national in a

conceptually coherent manner that fully detaches it from the national imaginary. A logically

69
Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Third Edition (Chicago: The University of Chicago
Press, 1996), 52-65.

20
coherent ideology is either internationalist, and therefore not yet post-national, or it is

planetarist and therefore completely post-national and adhering to the planetary imaginary.

Conclusion of the Argument

I have here argued that ‘planetarism’ is a term that might be better employed to describe a

new paradigm in our thinking about world order that represents a break with the national-

internationalism the present system is suffused with. Planetarism, in distinction to

internationalism, follows the logic of ‘planetary consciousness’ all the way to its conclusion,

which in essence means that it goes beyond current centre-right globalism, centre-left

cosmopolitanism, and both older and present notions of socialist internationalism.

The point I have intended to make here is that the ascent of this new planetarist worldview

does not logically culminate with an embrace of internationalism globally – closer

cooperation between nation-states is not its logical endpoint – it is the complete abandonment

of the whole concept of nations as politically meaningful units that is inherent in this

newfound planetary awareness. To be able to tackle the wealth of global problems with either

global solutions or none that we are now faced with, the political significance attached to

belonging to a specific people must in essence be sacrificed on the altar of human unity.

States will have to yield their claim to sovereign prerogative over the portions of the Earth

that they have controlled. New means of authority will have to be devised to ensure that the

burdens and benefits of planetary co-existence are evenly and fairly spread among the myriad

of sub- and trans-national communities and economies that operate on the Earth’s surface.

And, if all this did not already appear as an ambitious undertaking, this transformation cannot

be the creation of some techno-scientific elite or privileged economic upper strata. It will

have to be the organized result of a coming together of ordinary persons the world over intent

on forging a singular planetary community with the express purpose of coordinating the

21
common efforts of human civilization for the wellbeing of all and the perpetuation of

humanity’s creative and joyful endeavours into the far future.

The key to achieving the inherent goal of facilitating legitimate decision-making structures

that can be operative at the planetary level of human civilization lies in finding an approach

that does not rely on any kind of nationalism to motivate the participation of the core players

in this drama, namely individual human beings. And not even the varieties of nationalism that

have mostly been perceived of as beneficial up until now, such as liberal or cosmopolitan

versions of internationalism. We need to think about possible foundations for a new paradigm

in world politics, and it is here argued that the ideal candidate for taking the pivotal

conceptual role in such a novel ideological arrangement, similar to the role of the nation in

the national imaginary that gave us nationalism, is our shared planet. Recent collective

perceptions of the planet Earth are already forming the basis for an emergent planetary

imaginary that could potentially be equally as powerful an ideational force for the next eon as

the national imaginary proved to be for the previous couple of centuries. This planetary

imaginary, it is also argued, would logically form the basis for a ‘planetarism’ that would be

completely incompatible with nationalism and therefore allows for world political

organization into a planetary polity that is fully and comprehensively post-national. This

theoretically resolves the problem posed by the paradoxical nature of internationalism –

which cannot but work against the goal of creating a unitary world order since it is rooted in

a nationalist ideational framework whose default position is to prioritize the welfare of

particular peoples ahead of that of human civilization considered as a whole.

The here theorised consequences of a world political replacement of the national-

international imaginary with the planetary imaginary offers a foursquare solution to the

problem of what comes after the national; 1) a post-national subject in the planetarists, 2) a

post-national imaginary in planetarism, and 3) a post-national planetarist world ordering

22
principle, which theoretically enables 4) the establishment of a future post-national planetary

polity. This replaces, in respective order; a) the people, b) nationalism, c) the internationalist

world ordering principle, and d) the currently operative system of states and its attendant

international institutions. Cosmopolitanism, as presently constituted, or globalism, or leftist

internationalism for that matter, still retain a), and c), and therefore only prod b) without

actually offering an independently viable alternative to it which is both post-national and

truly global in the universalist sense of that term (and not the modernizing sense) – as such

these systems of thought collectively fail to come up with a comprehensive alternative to d).

And this failure to come up with a genuine alternative stems from an inability to realize that

the key characteristic of the presently failing system is not its nationalism alone - but the

national-internationalism that gives rise to the internationalist world ordering principle. It

should therefore be considered an absurdity that internationalism could somehow be applied

to transcend nationalism. The only exception to this would be in a singular instant, when in a

decisive moment the transition to a planetary polity is instigated once a series of governments

composed of planetarists rather than internationalists reach agreement to begin the

metamorphosis from state system to incipient planetary polity.

23