Patriotism for Humanity: The Quest for a Humane Global Governance

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.

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.