Freshpolitique

A New Feature of The Global Civics Initiative

Welcome to my first Substack offering. I’m calling it Freshpolitique; it’s a made-up word intended to sound French and to contrast with Realpolitik, the German word behind the Realist philosophy of foreign affairs that characterizes international relations as a relentless game of power, wherein national and geopolitical “interests” dominate foreign policy at the expense of moral values, sacred principles, historic affections, mutual sympathies, the rule of law, and everything else of importance to the Idealist school of thought.

You’ll have noticed the buzz in the news about the demise of the Liberal World Order (framed largely by idealists and managed largely by the United States and its allies) and the rise of an Illiberal Authoritarian order, led by China, and including a constellation of states as diverse as Russia, Turkey, Iran, Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Indonesia. We should include the seven EU member states with far right parties in control as potential recruits. What used to be “the West” is now called the Weird countries--Western, industrial rich and democratic—and they are confronted by an enlarging BRICS conglomerate (originally Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) that purports to represent the Global South, i.e. most of the people on earth.

The so-called Unipolar Moment after the end of the Cold War wherein the United States reigned supreme as the world’s reluctant sheriff but deserving hegemon ended after 9/11 and the unnecessary and prolonged wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. As notable authority Richard Haass and many others have observed, Geopolitical rivalry and armed conflict between countries “are back”. Realpolitik is resurgent, but it doesn’t have to last.

My aim is to take a fresh approach to the many topics that comprise the multi-faceted domain of international affairs. Tempting as it is, I will purposefully avoid suggesting a “New World Order”, so as to distance my project from the conceit of a would be manifesto and to distinguish “freshness” from designs already trotted out by ambitious parties, politicians, and pundits in recent years. The world order I envision borrows pragmatic aspects of both realism and idealism while blending ancient and modern concepts; it’s not so much a Middle Way or anything “New”, but rather a perspective imbued with high hopes and a love of life.

Freshpolitique is, or will be, as it comes to fruition, a brief history of the very recent future. I know that sounds odd, and audacious, but I hope you’ll give me a shot at pretending to know how things can turn out as we journey beyond tomorrow and the day after that. As the months progress in real time, the book will emerge in three parts: Prismatics (in which I explain facets of a lens through which to discern patterns and outcomes of dynamic relationships across the world); Constructs (an inventory of reconstituted communities and conflict resolution schema, as revealed in a series of Dispatches from the field); and Prescriptions (recommendations from a self-described Doctor of Nations who will communicate via Memoranda from the Office of the State Philosopher). Do I sense a grimace, a guffaw, some snickering? Your eyes may be rolling a bit, but please don’t bail out on me just yet.

For this initial Substack endeavor, I’m starting in the middle. Here’s what I mean. In a series of bimonthly missives, fashioned as Dispatches from a wide array of locations, I will be leapfrogging from the present to the year 2045; i.e., two decades--a generation-- ahead. The reports will thus be retrospective, looking backward toward the present, describing and explaining how a number of seemingly intractable conflicts between and within nations were resolved—never completely, of course, but sufficiently to avoid continued conflagrations, all-out war, genocidal violence, regional and worldwide catastrophes.

Through the voice of my unnamed agent—an unlicensed freelance para-diplomat sending his cables voluntarily to the office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights—I will be re-imagining world order in the midst of an ongoing polycrisis, wherein sovereign states are compelled to cooperate across borders to resolve disputes, uphold international law, protect human rights, and avoid the destruction of political institutions and ecological systems necessary to sustain life and enable civilizations to flourish.

Here's a little context. Yuval Noah Harari has characterized our current circumstance as “the first time in history when we’ll have no idea how human society will be in a few decades.” That’s hard to swallow, notwithstanding the author’s highly respected profundity. I believe we DO know a lot about the future, and what the next few decades are likely to bring forth, because even though humanity does evolve, it does so slowly, even when scientific and technological breakthroughs accelerate conditions of material life. I don’t expect there to be a revolution of consciousness in the next few decades, no matter how stunningly different our social and environmental conditions may be as a consequence of climate change, global pandemics, quantum computing, hybrid warfare (on earth and in space) and artificial intelligence. (For a contrasting view about humanity’s paradigm shift toward transhuman cyborg driven behavior see Harari’s Homo Deus: a Brief History of Tomorrow and his latest work Nexus.)

I’m also taking cues from the new-found theory of Emergence, described by M. Mitchell Waldrop as “the arising of novel and coherent structures, patterns and properties during the process of self-organization in complex systems.” That’s the overarching concept for Freshpolitique—an emerging doctrine for understanding the world of nations and states, improving the prospects for conflict resolution, and achieving justice and peace on a global scale.

Unlike this lengthy introductory piece, each Dispatch will be necessarily brief—there is a limit to readers’ patience that I respect and share—but not so much as to be cryptic. Clarity is the prime directive. I will be positioning my peripatetic agent at the edge of chaos, operating in highly complex arenas in various parts of the world where events are still predictable, even if a bit wild. You’ll see what I mean as these quasi-diplomatic cables-like missives issue forth in the year ahead.

The sociologist Benedict Anderson famously characterized nations as “imagined communities”. That insight will be at play in forthcoming Dispatches. In this time of liminality, where we are suspended between disparate world orders and facing multiple existential threats to human survival, I’m big on imagination.

Love it as I do, John Lennon’s hauntingly beautiful Imagine has never rung true for me. You know how it goes: Imagine there’s no countries/It isn’t hard to do/Nothing to kill or die for/And no religion too/Imagine all the people living life in peace… Nicely put, but I cannot happily contemplate a world without countries, without flags, without the Olympics! I am better suited to Graham Nash’s concluding refrain on his first solo album, Songs for Beginners: We can change the world/Rearrange the world. Let’s get started.

David Brooks wrote a column in the New York Times in 2021 entitled The Awesome Importance of Imagination. In it, he references Aristotle’s belief that imagination is one of the foundations of all knowledge. Brooks later quotes Charles Darwin: “The imagination unites former images and ideas, independently of the will, and thus creates brilliant and novel results.” This is heady grist for Freshpolitique, and I aspire to bring some novelty at least to the page. Brooks asks, “Can you improve your imagination?” His answer fits right into my project: “Yes, by creating complex and varied lenses through which to see the world.”

That’s the ideal segue to my freshly minted construct, The Global Civics Lens.

The grand premise of my Global Civics pitch is this: There is such a thing as a Just and Benevolent society. There are different pathways to achieve this social condition. The best summation of what a just society entails is the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, along with subsequent Treaties and Conventions designed to implement this 1948 document that was crafted by a committee led by Eleanor Roosevelt following the creation of the United Nations after the Second World War. In short, the truest and best competition in the world of states is not about power, but rather about which country—not alone, but in communion with friends and allies--can bring about the progressive realization of universal human rights.

Human rights regimes can be diversely constructed, as representative democracies, social democracies, constitutional monarchies, benevolent despotisms, or even people’s republics, but they must comprise a stable balance of three intersecting principles of governance: sovereignty, legitimacy, and subsidiarity. In brief, sovereignty is about ultimate authority within a political jurisdiction. Legitimacy derives from a combination of domestic public acceptance (if not broad and deeply felt approval) and external recognition. Subsidiarity concerns the degree to which political authority is decentralized both within and among states.

This triad of principles can be interconnected to form a sort of prismatic lens to analyze the quality of life and general social conditions in individual countries as well as the state of the world community writ large. Think of this lens as “polarized” --not polarizing in a political sense—to provide clarity by seeing beneath the surface of trends and events when examining seemingly endless conflicts within and between sovereign states.

As I’ve said, delving further into these component facets in the Prismatics section of the book will come later, probably in some other format, as the effort will require lengthier exposition than will fit the normal Substack platform. But don’t be surprised if several short Dispatches carry signals about how the interwoven concepts of sovereignty, legitimacy, and subsidiarity are playing out in 2045, and how they combine to form the lens through which to ascertain and reshape the rights and responsibilities of global citizenship.

Human rights are at the horizon of my world view. They are both near and far. They are what we are aiming to protect and advance, in the moment, and everywhere. They are what we seek to realize, progressively, as far out in time as I can imagine. In the year 2045, when my feeble and febrile mortal self is due to expire, I want them to be more closely held and adhered to than they are now.

The paradox of the human rights ethos will play a central role in forthcoming correspondence; that is, the state (aka “sovereign nation state”) is, in most cases the political construct that violates human rights. (Terrorist groups do it too, but on a much smaller scale.) At the same time, universal human rights can only be realized, as scholar Yoram Hazony points out, by separate, independent states.

Is this seeming conundrum immutable? Perhaps yes, if we persist with Realipolitik. But it ain’t necessarily so. Jurgen Habermas, a contemporary German political theorist, has posited a transnational order in which a global organization that is not a world government nonetheless has sufficient power to impose peace and implement human rights. To me, this aptly applies to a much reformed and improved United Nations. In the forthcoming series of Dispatches, my agent in the field will encounter just the sort of multilateral and duly empowered organization that Habermas was hinting at.

To reiterate, Freshpolitique will be an exercise in quantum thinking—being simultaneously in two places in time, entangling both with speculative non-fiction. That’s just one of an array of oxymoronic phrases coming your way, like limited sovereignty, electoral autocracy and liberal empire. Collectively, the Dispatches from various arenas of geopolitical conflict will amount to an abbreviated history of the very near future. Your correspondent will outline how catastrophes were avoided. He (who is me, as you know) will be reporting both from places I have been--to add elements of entertaining verisimilitude--but also from exotic locations beyond the scope of my limited international experience. I suspect you’ll be able to tell the difference. I hope you will enjoy the imagined venues and scenarios as much as the real ones. Some readers will doubtless want to send me corrective comments about places they’ve visited and things they’ve witnessed that I haven’t. Feedback of any kind will be most welcome.

In sum, the state of the world two decades hence will be much like it is today in some respects—just like the characters in Star Trek, people don’t change much over vast spans of time and space—but markedly different in others. In 2045, the great game of nations will have shifted course, in the direction of human rights. Life on earth will be better, overall: more stable, more sustainable, more just, more peaceful. Imagine that.

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Please look for Freshpolitique/Dispatches every two weeks, roughly towards the middle and end of each month. I am offering this work for free to all readers for as long as they are willing to enjoy (or endure) the journey. Of course, if the spirit moves you, there is the option to upgrade your support to a paid subscription. Such revenues would underwrite additional travels and the furtherance of the Global Civics Initiative. In the meantime, please share the connection with friends and colleagues who might be ready for a creative take on the shape and content of things to come.