Is the Green Good Life Achievable in a World of Sovereign States?
Kerri Woods (Politics: University of Glasgow) [1]
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This paper engages two different discourses of the good life[2] in conversation: what Beitz calls 'the classical theory of sovereignty', and green political theory.[3] Both have been concerned with questions as to how to realise the good life, but have recognised different obstacles to that end, and have taken relatively little notice of one another's insights and inquiries. This neglect has had the consequence of impoverishing green conceptions of the institutional arrangements required to deliver environmental sustainability, a necessary if not sufficient condition of the green good life. Likewise, classical theorists of sovereignty have been remiss in their failure to recognise the need to enlarge their understanding of threats to human security by including environmental concerns. |
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My argument has three main elements, all of which are necessarily summary in their presentation here. First, a brief outline of the role of environmental sustainability in the green conception of the good life. Second, the classical theory of sovereignty as it has been problematised by postmodernist and green critics, and its shortcomings specifically in terms of international (environmental) justice. Third, green scepticism about the viability of a world of arbitrary political borders in the context of global environmental problems.
i. |
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The World Summit on Sustainable Development held in Johannesburg 2002 confirmed that environmental sustainability is part of what Pocock would call the vocabulary of political discourse[4] and now has a similar status to concepts like 'democracy', 'freedom', and 'human rights': that is, almost everyone agrees that it is a fundamental good, such that oil companies and eco-warriors alike talk about the need to develop strategies for 'sustainable living'. The debate is over how such a concept is to be articulated, both in theory and in practice, and here opinions differ dramatically. |
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Sustainability first commanded significant attention following the UN commissioned Brundtland report of 1987, which advanced the project of sustainable development, defined as 'development which meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their needs'.[5] The difficulty arises from the practical fact that the earth, as a finite resource, cannot sustain infinite growth in (human) production, consumption and population. |
| 5 |
The core problem in green politics may thus be understood as how to sustain life indefinitely in the context of a finite environment. A sustainable life is self-evidently prerequisite for any kind of good life to be achievable. Few would now argue that current patterns of production and consumption are sustainable--most greens agree that we left the path of sustainability somewhere in the middle of the twentieth century. Green politics, in focussing on strategies for environmental sustainability, seeks to address this problem, both by identifying how we came to be in our present predicament, and how we can get out of it. |
| 6 |
There is an extensive literature on how we came to be here, in which Western modernist ideas separating man from nature are found to be deeply problematic. Although an important area of study, this is not of concern in the present discussion. Also not of immediate concern is what, precisely, the sufficient conditions of a green good life might be. Much has been written on this, and no definitive answer is readily apparent. It is enough for the moment to note that for any kind of good life to be achievable, a necessary condition is environmental sustainability. |
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That being the case, I want to focus on green suggestions on how we can achieve environmental sustainability. Sustainable development has, since the Brundtland report, been promoted by governments, NGOs, and inter-governmental bodies such as the United Nations and the European Union, as the path to sustainability. However, in Dobson's analysis, 'sustainable development' and 'sustainability' should not be conflated as they are in much of the literature.[6] |
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Furthermore, there is a paradox in Dobson's findings. There are general trends in the answers given to what he takes to be the core questions motivating green conceptions of sustainability, such that he can describe three broadly distinct conceptions: the anthropocentric conception A, which includes sustainability and does not adhere to the Precautionary Principle[7] advocated by many greens, the middle ground conception B, and the ecocentric conception C. However, he does not describe these three conceptions as corresponding to distinct ideas as to the institutional arrangements required to deliver sustainability. Indeed, theorists who have advanced radically different strategies for global institutional reform or restructuring might well find themselves in the same category in Dobson's typology. It is clear, then, that environmental sustainability is key to the green conception of the good life, but it is less clear what kind of institutional arrangements environmental sustainability requires.
ii. |
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Postmodernists such as Walker and theorists of justice such as O'Neill have complained that the sovereignty based system limits moral standing to the members of an artificially constructed and reified community, which does not include future generations, while greens hold that the tendency to approach political concerns in territorially limited terms is ill-suited to dealing with global environmental issues that do not respect state borders.[8] Beitz offers a fairly bleak assessment of how sovereignty operates in international affairs:
Regarded as a normative ideal, the conception of the world as an order of sovereign states is an expression of a view that I have elsewhere called 'the morality of states' and characterized as the analogue of nineteenth century liberalism: it combines a belief in the liberty of individual agents with an indifference to the distributive outcomes of their economic actions.[9]
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In other words, states are free to succeed or fail, and obligations between neighbours are non-existent in the absence of contractual arrangements that, in any case, there is no Leviathan to enforce.[10] Presented with the failure witnessed in much of the Third World, one might reasonably ask, as Berlin did, 'what is freedom to those who cannot make use of it?'.[11] |
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However, it would be imprudent to disregard the political goods valued in the political philosophy that sovereignty embodies. Bain is persuasive in arguing that, '[w]ithout the possibility of failure the value and meaning of freedom begins to lose coherence'.[12] That is to say, the freedom to define the (sufficient conditions of the) good life will only be valued if it also brings with it the possibility of not realising the good life, and the responsibility for that failure. In the past, however, appalling misdeeds have ensued from disputes over these conditions (witness, e.g. the Crusades, or in our own time, the Nazi inflicted holocaust). Jackson is indebted to Oakeshott when he stresses that sovereignty does not guarantee the good life, rather, it guarantees the space within which the good life becomes possible.[13] Sovereignty is therefore a necessary, enabling condition of the good life. |
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Clapham argues that the principle of sovereignty was espoused by the victors of the Second World War because it promised a means to avoid such devastating conflict in future.[14] Sovereignty is thus a mechanism for accommodating difference, institutionalised in the United Nations Charter in an era when the most urgent threat to human security was understood to be war between the great powers. The great powers thus face special obligations to the international community. It follows that, although sovereign states are equal in respect of authority and jurisdiction, they are not, in fact, equally free to pursue the good life in Jackson's terms. As Jackson explains:
Great powers have heavier responsibilities than other states: they are answerable for their conduct regarding the most important international issues which are often the most difficult and with regard to which only great powers can do anything very substantial about.[15]
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Jackson is undoubtedly sincere in charging the great powers with what he clearly regards as a moral duty--a moral duty that arises from specific actors' status in the international order, regardless of any contractual obligations that may or may not exist. Furthermore, he may well be correct in observing that there are urgent problems--for example, achieving sustainability--which become intractable in the absence of consensus among the great powers. |
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There is a familiar argument in international relations circles in favour of maintaining state sovereignty: greens criticise states, first and foremost, when they fail to adopt green policies, because (especially powerful) states are the agents most likely to be of instrumental value to greens. Reformulating state sovereignty would deprive greens of an effective route to power and influence. Such an argument is vindicated by the announcement last year that the ozone layer over the Antarctic is (slowly) recovering following the UN brokered Montreal Protocol (1990), agreed between states, on Precautionary Principle lines, to phase out the use of ozone depleting CFCs.[16] On the other hand, subsequent to what was at the time heralded as a watershed agreement, the USA has withdrawn its support from the Kyoto Protocol (1992) and greens have been frustrated by the lack of substantive agreement at the Johannesburg Summit (2002). |
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In sum: if the great powers fall out, the good life of all is in peril. It is thus a necessary condition of Jackson's theory of the good life that great powers honour their obligations. Environmental issues are among those concerns that most sharply divide the five permanent members of the UN Security Council--who, in virtue of holding a veto, may be considered approximate to Jackson's 'great powers'--including, of course, the world's only super power, the USA, one of the least green democracies. Yet, if green assessments of the scale of environmental problems are accepted then a viable strategy for environmental sustainability is at the very least a necessary condition of any kind of good life.
iii. |
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A common theme in green discussions of global institutional arrangements is the arbitrariness of the contemporary nation state. Greens argue that, in contrast to say, bioregionalist proposals (the viability of which I will not explore here[17]), there is nothing natural about the state as it currently exists. Even island states, though apparently clearly defined territories, have boundaries in territorial waters which are more or less arbitrary. Environmental sustainability, it is claimed, will not be achieved by dividing the territory of the earth and giving each state exclusive responsibility for its patch. |
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However, those who promote alternatives to the state often seem to assume that harmonious relations between man and nature will inevitably entail harmonious relations between man and man. If that were the case, Jackson's defence of the society of states as a mechanism for accommodating difference would be of little interest. It is not clear, though, on what grounds greens might hold to such a naïve position. |
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On the other hand, those greens who theorise within the terms of a sovereignty based regime tend to be either authoritarian (which I will not discuss here), or to be concerned to reform the Western industrialised state.[18] The reformist approach takes as its point of departure a relatively stable, successful, liberal democratic state. Such a state is not a universal feature of the current world order. Indeed, much tension at environmental summits is evident between First World, stable, successful liberal democratic regimes, and Third World states, which may or may not be democratic, are often unstable, and are rarely economically successful. |
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To ignore the sovereignty based system's indifference to outcomes, as Beitz put it, and the problems that entails for environmental sustainability, is to ignore the realities of the world as we find it today. The different experiences of the First and Third Worlds raise important issues for environmental sustainability. Much of the existing pollution and environmental degradation, and the current patterns of globalised production and consumption that characterise the international economy, are a product of First World action, and often a product of First World exploitation of Third World resources, thus raising questions of transnational justice. O'Neill finds the problem of compensatory justice to be more or less intractable--if reparations are to be made, how are the appropriate agents to be identified? |
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Yet, it is in the First World's long term interest to see that the necessary funds are available to secure environmental sustainability in the Third World, as well as to put its own house in order. There are two principal reasons for this: first, recent work by academics and the United Nations Environment Programme has highlighted the links between armed conflict and scarcity of environmental resources, particularly water, and particularly in the Third World and the Middle East.[19] Secondly, while First World population rates are stabilising, population growth in the Third World continues to rise alarmingly. Notwithstanding the fact that First World populations consume many times more resources per capita than Third World populations, legitimate concerns about exponential population growth remain. |
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Third World governments have also resented First World demands that action be taken to promote environmentally sustainable practices whilst the First World simultaneously profits from an international economy that encourages states to use their comparative advantage in order to succeed--a strategy not readily compatible with environmental protection, given that the comparative advantages most Third World states have are finite natural resources and weak health and safety and environmental regulations.[20] Green conditionality has been a feature of IMF loans and bilateral aid in recent years, but Bryant and Bailey complain that
structural adjustment programmes often simultaneously reduce the ability of states to respond to environmental problems and increase the seriousness and intensity of those problems.[21]
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The relevance of these issues here is twofold: First, the rhetoric of sovereignty continues to be a powerful defence against external demands for environmentally sound reforms, and indeed the protection of human rights. Particularly in the Third World, the legacy of colonialism makes many sensitive to pressure from First World agents, and indeed they often employ the rhetoric of sovereignty to express their concerns.[22] Second, the sovereignty based system is held to be closely linked to global patterns of production and consumption which are themselves problematic from the point of view of environmental sustainability. Since its emergence as the key political agent, the nation state's primary functions have been defence of the territory and people of the state and defence of the resources necessary to achieve that end. In short, maintaining the military and maintaining the economy. |
| 23 |
According to rational choice theory, a state is required both as a coercive agent to ensure contracts are not broken, and to provide public goods, such as communications infrastructure and workforce education, that it would not be rational for individual agents to incur the expense of providing in the context of a Hobbesian anarchy. Hardin's famous 'tragedy of the commons', in which each individual actor rationally increases his use of communally held land to the point of overcapacity and thus eventual universal ruin, is held to illustrate why a Leviathan is needed to conserve the global commons.[23] |
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All this depends upon states perceiving it to be irrational to incur the costs involved in environmental sustainability, not least for fear that other actors will renege on their obligations. Global environmental initiatives such as the Kyoto agreement, explained by Johnston in game theory terms, can in fact tolerate a few 'free riders' (who enjoy the benefits without incurring their share of the costs), 'assuming that the few were not extremely strong relative to all the others'.[24] Although Jackson is not concerned with environmental issues, this confirms his contention that the great powers have special obligations to the international community, which arise in virtue of their status and independently of contractual obligations. Specifically, contractual obligations could be ignored by a few free riders and still survive as effective environmental regimes, but the great powers, in virtue of their special status, cannot be free riders if the contractual regime is to succeed. The difficulty is that the USA is indeed strong, relative to all the others, and is responsible for one fifth of the total emissions that were to be covered by the Kyoto agreement. In withdrawing from Kyoto in favour of its own, far weaker, programme of reforms, the USA is not honouring what greens perceive to be its obligations to further global environmental protection. |
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It has been argued, however, that we can and do achieve international co-operation on matters of mutual interest, without a coercive global authority and within the existing system of states. The Montreal Protocol is one highly successful example, precarious agreements on the status of the Antarctic and some international waters less so. |
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A further point is that not all actors involved operate in game theory terms. Many greens stress that environmental sustainability is not just one option within a neutral matrix of choices. In a number of widely discussed studies, when asked to indicate how much they would be prepared to pay for various environmental goods, subjects have often given protest values, either ridiculously high or low, suggesting, not that they do not understand the idea of environmental value, but rather that they do not recognise cost-benefit analysis as an appropriate mechanism for dealing with substantive moral and political issues.[25] In other words, it is facile to ask how much one would pay for goods essential to a good life. These goods define the terms of the good life, the alternatives are thus valueless. If a good life is achievable if, and only if, it is (environmentally) sustainable, then the price of environmental sustainability becomes meaningless. The alternative cannot be any kind of 'good life'. |
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The difficulty is that the relevant agents in a society of sovereign states can behave as though environmental sustainability is just one option within a neutral matrix of choices. In Jackson's terms, sovereignty is understood to be a necessary condition of the good life, it enables states to pursue their various preferences about the sufficient conditions of the good life, it creates the space within which a neutral matrix of choices is possible. Environmental sustainability has a similar quality to sovereignty in this respect. It is a necessary condition of any kind of good life, in that it enables actors to make choices about sufficient conditions. Sustainability cannot be an option within the neutral matrix of choices because, if it is not chosen, all other choices become unrealisable. That being the case, while collective action to achieve sustainability can probably tolerate a few, small free-riders, if those with the greatest responsibilities do not honour them, the system that allows them to do so with impunity must itself come into critical relief.
iv. |
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To conclude, the sovereignty based system entails more than a cost-benefit analysis of the potential gains and losses of international agreements, humanitarian interventions, etc., it both necessitates and facilitates critical discussion about the value of political autonomy and the demands of justice. The emergence of global environmental issues and the need for effective strategies for environmental sustainability add new dimensions to both these moral and political issues. Green alternatives to the state have not paid sufficient attention to the values that the sovereignty based system seeks to protect--most notably plurality with respect to conceptions of the good (sufficient condition) and strategies for avoiding the most destructive form of war, i.e. that between the great powers (necessary condition). In the twenty-first century, however, intra-state conflict and environmental degradation have come to be among the most significant threats to human security and the two are often related. While it would be premature to herald the demise of the sovereignty-based system just yet, it is nonetheless imperative that the project of environmental sustainability should not be impeded by inadequate institutional arrangements. In so far as sovereignty is an obstacle to sustainability, it will increasingly be viewed in a sceptical light. |
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[1] Thanks to Chris Berry, Stewart Davidson, Cristina Johnston and anonymous reviewers for comments on a previous version of this paper.
[2] The 'good life' may be understood as a life worthy of human dignity--a definition that allows for a plurality of conceptions of the good.
[3] C. Beitz, 'Sovereignty and Morality in International Affairs', D. Held (ed) Political Theory Today (Cambridge: Polity Press 1991) pp.236-254, p.243. Throughout the paper, the term 'greens' refers to green political theorists, specifically those interested in strategies for achieving environmental sustainability within a broadly liberal democratic framework. Obviously, there are significant differences of opinion within this field which cannot be fully explored in the space available here.
[4] J.G.A. Pocock, Politics, Language and Time (New York: Atheneum 1973) p.13.
[5] Quoted in T. Benton, 'Sustainable Development and Accumulation of Capital: Reconciling the Irreconcilable?', A. Dobson (ed) Fairness and Futurity: Essays on Environmental Sustainability and Social Justice (Oxford: Oxford University Press 1999) p.202.
[6] A. Dobson, Justice and the Environment: Conceptions of Environmental Sustainability and Social Justice (Oxford: Oxford University Press 1998), M. Jacobs, 'Sustainable Development as a Contested Concept' in Dobson (ed).
[7] The Precautionary Principle demands that a given practice is proven safe in advance of its acceptance, otherwise the practice should be banned. This can lead to rather different results than a health and safety strategy that acts only when a practice is proven to be harmful. See R. Attfield, The Ethics of the Global Environment (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press 1999) pp.185-7.
[8] R.B.J. Walker, Inside/Outside: International Relations as Political Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1993), O. O'Neill, 'Transnational Justice', D. Held (ed), J. Barry, Rethinking Green Politics: Nature, Virtue, Progress (London: Sage Publications 1999).
[9] C. Beitz, 'Sovereignty and Morality in International Affairs' in Held (ed) p.243.
[10] The 'Leviathan', in Hobbes' famous theory, was an absolute sovereign, necessary to bring order to the chaos that anarchy would inevitaly entail. See T. Hobbes, Leviathan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1996).
[11] I. Berlin, ': 'Two Concepts of Liberty', A. Quinton (ed) Political Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press 1967) p.144n.
[12] W. Bain, 'The Tyranny of Benevolence: National Security, Human Security, and the Practice of Statecraft' Global Society (2001 vol.15) pp.277-294, p.291.
[13] M. Oakeshott, 'On the Character of a Modern European State', On Human Conduct (Oxford: Clarendon Press 1990) pp.185-326, R. Jackson, The Global Covenant: Human Conduct in a World of States (Oxford: Oxford University Press 2000) p.308.
[14] C. Clapham, 'Sovereignty and the Third World State', Political Studies (1999 vol.48) pp.522-537, p.531.
[15] Jackson, p.173.
[16] R. Black, 'Ozone Benefits from Treaty', http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/3115409.stm, as at August 1st 2003.
[17] For a critical discussion, see J. Barry, Rethinking Green Politics: Nature, Virtue, Progress (London: Sage Publications 1999) pp.81-90.
[18] See, for example, W. Acheterberg, 'Can Liberal Democracy Survive the Environmental Crisis? Sustainability, Liberal Neutrality and Overlapping Consensus', A. Dobson and P. Lucardie (eds) The Politics of Nature: Explorations in Green Political Theory (London: Routledge 1993) and M. de Geus, 'The Ecological Restructuring of the State', B. Doherty and M. de Geus (eds) Democracy and Green Political Thought: Sustainability, Rights and Citizenship (London: Routledge 1996).
[19] K. Neefjes 'Ecological Degradation: A Cause for Conflict, a Concern for Survival', in Dobson (ed), A. Kirby, 'Environment 'can avert conflicts', http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/3584707.stm, as at April 1st 2004.
[20] R.L. Bryant and S. Bailey, Third World Political Ecology (London: Routledge 1997) p.60.
[21] ibid., p.61.
[22] Bain, 'The Political Theory of Trusteeship and the Twilight of International Equality', International Relations (2003, vol.17) pp. 59-77, p. 65-7.
[23] See G. Hardin, 'The Tragedy of the Commons', Science, 162 (1968):1243-48. Hardin contends that, in the absence of a global authority, we inevitably witness environmental degradation.
[24] R.J. Johnston, Nature, State and Economy: A Political Economy of the Environment (Chichester: John Wiley & Sons 1996) pp.145-47.
[25] Dobson 1998, pp.114-24.
eSharp issue: autumn 2004. © Kerri Woods 2004. All rights reserved. ISSN 1742-4542.
