Fractalizing Public Power for Planetary Politics: A Neo-Confucian Approach

• In Event: Democracy Theory and Chinese Political Thought

Abstract

The attempts to reconfigure global political order for new realities of global and planetary interdependences have focused on constraining the agents of public powers, in particular sovereign states. Various cosmopolitan approaches sought to constrain the power of sovereign states to protect and promote the universal rights of individuals as members of a species-wide moral community. However, the focus on restraint is not sufficient when the main challenge of global, increasingly planetary, politics is using public power to address existential threats such as nuclear catastrophe and climate crisis. In particular, what is missing in the existing discussion on global politics is the rewriting of the very constitution of public power, a vision of how a public power comes into being, that can promote collective actions to address planetary challenges. I argue international normative theory should provide such a new constitutional vision of public power and offer a Neo-Confucian approach for such re-constitution.

I first critically examine how cosmopolitan approaches to global justice have sought to restrain sovereign states and secure universal human rights in the world of global interdependence. I especially focus on Thomas Pogge’s work on Global Resource Dividend because his work comes closest to redefining public power while the practicality of his vision provides concrete points of comparison. Cosmopolitan approaches provided a stepping-stone to an alternative constitution of public power by evaluating the legitimacy of public power from the perspective of the species-wide moral community. However, they fall short of reorienting the use of public power for planetary problems and offering a new constitutional vision that can give political legitimacy to the forms of public power that are more suited for such planetary use than the existing sovereign states.

Second, I draw from classical realist approaches to illustrate why it is essential in coping with existential threats to use public powers such as sovereign states for progressive planetary purposes. They show why sovereign states should and can be a progressive force for tackling existential planetary challenges. With a complexified notion of national interest, the states can lead the global efforts to address shared threats even as they retain political legitimacy and support from their domestic constituencies. The classical realist reconstruction of sovereign state contributes greatly to re-constituting the public power of sovereign states, but it still falls short of redefining the very standard of political legitimacy of the state, which remains national interests of states. Also, their accounts do not address other important centers of power, such as multinational corporations.

Third, building upon the classical realist approaches, I provide my reconstruction of the Neo-Confucian vision of public power for planetary politics. Neo-Confucianism was developed around the 12th century and has greatly influenced politics in East Asia. Neo-Confucianism provides an alternative definition of ‘publicity’ of power, whether it is the power of the state or non-state actor. A power is public if and only if it is exercised by an agent whose mind impartially reflects the significance of the entire cosmos for its action. In practical terms, it means a legitimate public power must possess the capacity of the mind to perceive the possible effect of one’s action to its farthest reach. This apparently mundane definition of public power resolves two shortcomings in the classical realist approaches. It relocates the standard of political legitimacy for the states from national interest to the cosmic significance of the states’ actions, which encompass their significance for domestic constituencies. Also, it renders non-state actors as public powers with the same duty to cultivate an impartial mind toward its cosmic effect. Adapting Marilyn Strathern’s reflection on fractal perspectives, I call this Neo-Confucian re-constitution fractalization of public power as it recursively installs the same impartial cosmic mind as the basis of public power across different scales.

Finally, I test the efficacy of fractalized public power, compared to the classical realist approaches, by applying it to two pressing planetary challenges of nuclear weapons and climate crisis. For the former, I focus on the nuclear threats exchanged between the former US president Trump and the North Korean regime and illustrate how they would have been compelled to act differently had the public powers been fractalized. For climate crisis, I will show how fractalized public power has a better chance than the classical realist alternatives at coping with the dissonance between the variable scales of climatic threats and the national mode of mobilizing collective action and obtaining political legitimacy.

Author

• Inho Choi, Bilkent University