THE NEED FOR COSMOPOLITICS:

ECOLOGY AND THE STATE

Lieven De Cauter
RITCS colloquium ‘the Problem of the State’
10-12 January 2018

The diminished, complicit state

Globalization means the diminishing of state power. It is an obvious truth by now. Many
authors have signaled this, from Manuel Castells over Immanuel Wallerstein to Zygmunt
Bauman (and you could name many more). It is according to these authors the cause of a
profound feeling of uncertainty, leading to a politics of fear, and all sorts of phenomena like
fundamentalism, populism, nationalism and a resurgence of extreme right racist anti-migration
politics. The anxieties of globalization, Manuel Castells already foretold in 1995, in the second
volume of his trilogy on the Information Age, would lead to an epidemic of identity politics (in
The Power of Identity). Wallerstein has put it even more graphically: in Historical Capitalism, his
short ‘balance sheet’ of 5 centuries of capitalism he sees already in 1993 a global civil war as
inevitable. The Nation State, he writes, cannot any longer protect its citizens: ‘The scramble for
protection has begun’. So, should we party over of the loss of grip of the state? I am not so sure
about it. ‘Failed states’ in Africa and around the world give an idea…
Neoliberalism is seen by just as many authors (and the same ones too) as a conspiracy
(almost) between state power and transnational corporations. Neoliberalism is almost defined as
the merging of state power and corporate power. One can think of the horrendous Monsanto saga.
This corporation influences and manipulates both scientific research and political power and even
writes legislation to fit their interests. The same can be said about the lobbying for the German
car industries, the gas lobby, big pharma, etc, etc. All of this is proof of this most unhealthy
cohabitation between state and corporations. If Naomi Klein is right in her book This changes
everything, it is (as the subtitle says): “Capitalism vs the Climate”. So, if the state is on the side of
capitalism, then it is also logically “the state vs the climate”. [Beside Klein, we should also refer

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to Guerres et Capital by Alliez and Lazarato]. No good can come from the state and
conglomerates of states like the EU of the USA, to do something about climate change. So our
‘given question’ seems resolved: ecology and the state? Well, as the state is siding with
transnational corporations and capitalism, nothing good can come from the state. It could be the
end of the lecture. But is it that simple?

From Biopolitics to Zoöpolitics

At the end of the ancien regime, the sovereignty of the state shifted according to Foucault
from the right to take the life of individual subjects (what he called thanatopolitics, politics of
death) to the duty to cater for life of the population as a whole, what he called biopolitics. The
rise of biopolitics is an important feature of modernity: the rise of public health care and
urbanism are paradigmatic for the importance of biopolitics. The rise of the welfare state was the
end product of this biopolitics.
The state has now resorted to a new sort of politics: zoöpolitics. I introduced this term in
my book Entropic Empire to correct or complete Agamben’s use of the term biopolitics, based on
his own distinction between bios and zoë, between life cladded with rights and bare life, reduced
to its mere zoological functions. The diminished, complicit state resorting to zoöpolitics has an
ugly concreteness: a politics of control and repression of the unwanted, illegal migrants, the
reduction of individuals to their mere body, bare life, without real human let alone civil rights.
Think of the trading of people like slaves in Libyan camps, supported by the EU, meaning you
and me. Or, even more recently, the Belgian government turning over unwanted Sudanese
refugees/migrants to a regime that tortures them. This zoöpolitics is since the state of emergency
due to the war on terror also applied to the citizens, meaning us. The matrix of control at airports
makes this concrete: camera’s, iris scans, body scans, fingerprints, etc.
Combined with the thanatopolitics of the war machine zoöpolitics makes for a dire
politics. Again, this is very concrete: we invaded Afghanistan and Iraq, and by doing so set the
entire Middle East on fire (Iraq, Libya, Syria). The fall out of this thanatopolitics in the Middle
East is immense. Up to the present day we are not allowed to know how many people died in Iraq
during and after the invasion, but an early estimate from 2006 was around 1. million, with 2.5
million internally displaced and 2,5 million refugees. And now we need zoöpolitics to deal with

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the refugees we created in the first place: the refugee crisis of 2015, with a real camp in the very
centre of Brussels, consisted mainly of Iraqi, Afghan and Syrian refugees, a refugee stream that
the neocon warmongers of the West, so ‘we’ created. Both the thanatopolitics of the US led war
machine and the zoöpolitics of the new repressive state, make us turn away from the state.
The undermining of the Welfare state as one of the core elements of neoliberal politics
since Thatcher and Reagan is part of this shift from biopolitics to zoöpolitics. We need to defend
the good biopolitics of the welfare state, to bring back the principles that Polanji exposed in his
seminal book The Great Transformation: reciprocity and redistribution as the basis of all society.
Instead of imbedding society into the economy, we should re-imbed economy into society. In the
light of climate change and globalization, biopolitics will not not enough, we need a
cosmopolitan and cosmic politics, in one word (that I take from Stengers and Latour):
cosmopolitics. ‘Environmental justice’ can only be a combination of welfare and climate
measures on all levels, that is biopolitics and cosmopolitics. ‘Environmental justice’ is the word
that tries to capture that synthesis. But how to make it happen? The rediscovery of the commons,
points towards this idea of cosmopolitics.

The commons as political paradigm?

The rediscovery of the commons, as one of the most hopeful events of our time, and the
revival of anarcho-communism that came with it (and fired it as well: think of Negri and Hardt
and other Italian autonomists), has added to the anti-state reflex. The indignations about the new
neoliberal wave of enclosures (essentially privatizations of our common wealth), the possibilities
of horizontal networks and digital technology (think of open source) and the awareness of the
global commons, the ecosystem, being under threat – all these things have contributed to this
rediscovery of the commons. However great this return of the commons, there is a risk. If the
renewed interest in the commons and cooperatives, in bottom up, in self-organization and so on,
remains just based on an apolitical idea of active citizenship and participation, it will not change
much. It might, some fear, even lead to ‘depoliticisation’, and in that respect become part of post-
politics. Or even worse: the commons might be captured and absorbed within capitalism. If the
circular economy of sharing, the peer to peer movement, the stress on care and the return of the
concept of craft, are absorbed by capitalism, they will not change one iota. Facebook, Uber and

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Airbnb show how bottom up self-organization, sharing and ‘commoning’ can be captured by
powerful multinationals. That is why for many political theorists (like Dardot and Laval, Negri
and Hardt, Harvey) the crux of the matter is: can the commons become the backbone of true
alternative political paradigm? That remains a matter of debate and one of the stakes of our
political theory and practice today.
In the world of real politics, of agonistic and pluralistic democracy, we will need in my
opinion what I call a dialectical theory and practice of the commons, where the state, often in the
guise of local authorities, and the private initiative, often in the shape of social entrepreneurship,
find each other in and via the commons. These hybrid experiments of cooperatives of commoners,
helped by public and private support (like crowdfunding), happen already in many forms of cultural
production, circular economy, bio-farming, urban gardening and urban activism. But however
inspiring, these ‘small revolutions’ are not enough to protect and govern the global or universal
commons (the air, the oceans, etc). Indeed, as David Harvey has stressed in his beautiful chapter
on the creation of urban commons in his book Rebel Cities (2012), the Achilles heel of the
commons is scale. Ostrom’s vague gesturing towards ‘polycentric governance’ will not do the trick,
he states. He points to the work of Murray Bookchin as one of the most thorough attempts to make
a blueprint of a political system based on gender-equality, ecological principals and horizontal self-
organization. (Implemented and realized by the Kurds in Rojava, YPG)

The need for Cosmopolitics (at a global scale)

As said, reciprocity and redistribution (via what I call good biopolitics) will not suffice,
we need a new form of politics that is at the same time age old. We have called it (with Stengers)
cosmopolitics. The beauty of the concept of cosmopolitics is that it remains completely undefined
in the work of Stengers and barely in the work of Latour. It is a name. It is pointing towards
something. It has a messianic, utopian ring. The beauty of it, and for me,that is the core of it: it
contains the unity of cosmopolitanism, embracing global culture and ‘interculturality’ (or
‘superdiversity’) and ecology. The consciousness that all our doings, have a cosmic dimension is
a new beautiful if not sublime side of our time.
Maybe the first to point towards cosmopolitics (without using the word), was Guattari.
True cosmopolitics should play out in the ‘three ecologies’ he outlined in his essay of that title:

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on the level of new subjectivities, on the level of society and on the level of the ecosystem. A
circular thinking he called ecosophy. Permaculture might be the most developed form of this
cosmopolitics, at least a micropolitical scale. But the cosmopolitical conscience is spreading. A
concrete example of this new subjectivity is the wave of vegetarianism and veganism amongst
the younger generations and a general tendency in the Belgian population to eat less meat, an
awareness around frequent flying, etc. So, even if cosmopolitics should play on all levels and on
all scales, and is almost defined by the holist embrace of all scales at once, the individual changes
(or new subjectivities as some would now call it, in the wake of Guattari) like the transition
towards vegetarian or vegan diet, and all the wonderful local initiatives under the sign of the
commons, like urban farming, local producing, short chains, etc, will not suffice to save the
planet. We need an international policy to fight climate change to impose deep structural changes
to save the ecosystem: a transition towards a low and then zero carbon economy and life style .
This can only be done, ultimately on a global, planetarian scale. That is of course the true
cosmopolitical scale.

The role of the UN, states, activism and global civil society

The UN, and super-states like the EU are probably the only instances that somehow can
force unbridled capitalism to change it ways. Like stopping Monsanto, or putting fines on Google
and Facebook, and forcing them to change their behavior, but the lobbying, the war machine of
capital, is so intense that it is rather the state which is bridled. And yet Margarete Verstaeger
shows the power super-states, like the EU and how they can be a counterforce to the transnational
giants.
Even more important is the role of the ‘international community’, embodied in the UN,
the United Nations. The IPPC, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, has been very
important in the creation of awareness about climate change and in the concrete steps to take
measures during the Climate Summits. We simply need such international bodies, even if we
should be critical about them. Just imagine if we would not have the IPPC, climate denialism
would still be more rampant. Or think what would happen without Climate summits. Nothing at
all. For the time being the political power (of states and the UN), fired by the social movements

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and NGOs, by a radicalizing civil society, is our only hope. The UN and the states are most
probably the only instance that can tackle the ecological doom scenario.
Latour’s ‘parliament of things’, where beside humans also non-humans are represented is
in a sense taking place in these climate summits as several NGO’s and civil society or scientists
groups like IPCC speak for the oceans, the mammals, the forests, etc. The distance between the
Paris climate summit, COP 21, and Bonn COP 22, proves how it will be politics, states like
China and the US that make or break a transition towards a low carbon economy, or that there
will be no transition at all. The role of civil society is crucial: the climate cases in Holland,
Belgium and Switzerland prove that civil society can and should force states to deliver on
transition politics. And the protests during all these climate summits have played their role to
give a strong signal. But ultimately it is the states that should revert to both emergency measures
and structural measures towards transition. There is for the time being no other instance. Public
protest and pressure is crucial, but it will be the states that have to implement the agreements of
the climate summits.
Of course, for the time being, it is all too little too late, the climate summits give away
their loose structure in their names, COP, Conference of Parties. That could also just as well be a
‘party of conferences’. The concept of an ‘international community’ has disappeared the moment
we really need it.

(Cosmo)political melancholy

The war machine of capitalism is turning full speed. [as Guerres et capital, (by Eric
Alliez and Maurizzio Lazarto) makes depressingly clear]. There seems no hope for capitalism to
stop its primitive accumulation and its extractivism. As the ecosystem deteriorates, the
demographic explosion unfolds and migration is going rampant, it will only militarize more.
Less biopolitics of care, more zoöpolitics of control and more outright thanatopolitics. Digital
technology is proving to have a disastrous ecological footprint, like the mining of bitcoins or the
keeping the Cloud in the air, etc. The alternatives are weak and small scale.
What to do? The Exodus Negri and Hardt are pleading for, can only be a minority fad.
[And then all of us living in yurts would be an ecological disaster in its own right (just imagine

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the surface we would need).] And all the protest waves we have seen, the insurrections are just
short waves of ripples on the surface (think of the other globalist movement, the indignado’s, the
occupy movement). The degrowth movement which should supply a framework for this needed
other economy, remains marginal.
In the words of Isabelle Stengers: we will not compose with Gaya, she, it will intrude. It is
intruding as we speak. The catastrophic times are here. And the most cynical is: these disasters
form a new gigantic market for the Military Industrial Complex. ‘Disaster Capitalism’ is the
future (Naomi Klein). The need for cosmopolitics is high, but its chances are unfortunately low.
Neither individuals will change their ways in sufficiently large numbers, nor will capitalism give
up in time its addiction to fossil fuels, growth, overconsumption and extractivism (as the
machinations of the car and gas lobby during the climate summit in Bonn last November prove,
or the tar sands, the deep sea drilling and the fracking prove, we are ‘in the age of extreme
energy’, once more Naomi).
The awareness of all this can be devastating. It might lead to what I have called
‘posthistorical political melancholy’, one could also call it cosmopolitical melancholy. Wwe all
suffer sometimes from it, I guess. Spleen of the Anthropocene.

Dirty realism

We simply cannot afford to somber away into this cosmopolitical melancholy, we cannot
but take our sense of urgency as starting point. ‘Pessimism in theory, optimism in Practice’. So,
we need cosmopolitics on all levels and we need it now. It is exactly why radical local activism is
so important (like the activism of the Laboratory of insurrectional imagination fighting against an
airport at Notre-Dame-des-Landes and implementing a different society in Le ZAD). I admire, an
praise, this local activism ( and practice it a little bit too), it is a true antidote for cosmopolitical
melancholy. But we need also the global level, the planetarian scale. It is exactly because of this
that we, activists, NGOs, civil society have to pressure states, corporations and conglomerates
like the EU to take action. Only really existing political structures can be a counterweight to all
too real capitalism. And only the international community, formed by the UN, states and
conglomerate states has the means to do biopolitics (welfare) and ecopolitics on a sufficient large

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scale and work towards the dreamed of synthesis of biopolitics and cosmopolitics: environmental
justice. The transition must happen now, not in a utopian future.
The only option is to try and force the states and the EU to take up this daunting political
task. Citizens, citizen’s movements, NGO’s , the IPCC, are doing it. We have to convince even
mulitnationals to divest in fossil fuels. Banks, pension funds and corporations are doing it as we
speak, as they are realizing that their future (and their future profit) is in danger. There is no
alternative to radical Realpolitik here. Of course we have to protest the commodification (the
commodification of the North Pole, Air, and everything else, even disaster itself) and the
‘financialization’ of Nature or even ecology itself, even far beyond greenwashing. But there is no
true alternative to climate summits to stop climate change on a global scale. We can all go vegan
and not fly individually, but that will not change enough on a structural level, we need global
measures. (That does by no means mean that we should not go vegan or not refrain from flying!
There is hope in this individual activism going viral, becoming mainstream). The emergency we
are in, is that alarming that some ‘dirty realism’ is required - to borrow a term of Rem Koolhaas.
Maybe we should not feast the diminishing of the state but capture it or at least weigh in on it,
like Podemos and Corbyn’s Labour try, or DIEM and other movements. The many smaller social
urban movements and urban activism do their part, but rarely on a sufficiently large scale.
Radical dirty realism might in fact be the only option. We have to fight the capitalist exploitation.
But if we want first a world without capitalism before saving it, we might end up having
capitalism without a world. (Thank you.)