SWJ El Centro Book Review – Children of a Modest Star: Planetary Thinking for an Age of Crises
Daniel Weisz Argomedo
Jonathan S. Blake and Nils Gilman, Children of a Modest Star: Planetary Thinking for an Age of Crises. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2024 [ISBN: 9781503637856. Hardcover, 307 pages]
The world is currently facing a planetary governing crisis, and authors Blake and Gilman propose a unique transformation of our modes and systems of governance. The authors ambitiously build a vision for the future of governance by using their interpretation of the principle of subsidiarity and applying it to our condition of planetarity. Jonathan S. Blake and Nils Gilman wrote the text. Jonathan S. Blake is a Los Angeles-based political scientist, writer, and associate director of programs at the Berggruen Institute, where he leads the Planetary program. He is also the author of Contentious Rituals: Parading the Nation in Northern Ireland, published in 2019. Nils Gilman is the Chief Operating Officer and Executive Vice President at the Berggruen Institute. He has previously worked as Associate Chancellor at the University of California, Berkeley, as Research Director and scenario planner at the Monitor Group and Global Business Network. He is author of Mandarins of the Future: Modernization Theory in Cold War America (2004) and co-editor of Deviant Globalization: Black Market Economy in the 21st Century (2011). He holds a Bachelor's, Master's, and Doctorate in History from U.C. Berkeley. Blake and Gilman's book serves as a timely critique of our current governance architecture and presents a path to redesign governance institutions for a planetary age.
Children of a Modest Star is organized into three main sections with six chapters, including an introduction, notes, index, and conclusion. The first section encompasses Chapters 1 and 2 and provides a historical understanding of the nation-state, its evolution, and its functional strengths and weaknesses. The second section includes Chapters 3 and 4. It sets the theoretical and conceptual foundation of the book, explaining the author's understanding of the concept of the planetary and the principle of subsidiarity. The last section includes Chapters 5 and 6, which outline the author's redesign of governance institutions for a planetary age that outlines crucial features for a possible new model of planetary governance.
Chapter one, “How the National State Became Hegemonic,” explains that the hegemony enjoyed by sovereign national states as the preferred container of governance is a recent phenomenon that became the global norm as late as 1960. The chapter goes through the nation-state's history and details its evolution throughout the world. The quick end of empires led to the rise of nation-states as the predominant political form worldwide. In the aftermath of the world wars, many people advocated for forms of global governance but failed as the United Nations enshrined the principle of state sovereignty. The authors detail how, in the postwar period, both communists and capitalists understood the nation-state as the best vehicle for realizing economic modernization and the preferred institutional form to succeed in an empire. The authors finish the chapter by reminding us that the concept of the nation-state once too seemed impossible and alien and opened the door to imagining new forms of political organization.
Chapter two, “Governing beyond the National State,” describes the multilevel global governance system built around the sovereign national state. The authors explain how the ideological victory of the sovereign national state was not fully reflected in actual governance practice. This unfulfilled reflection led to governance superstructures that sit above, below and beside nation-states, creating subnational and international institutions with differing levels of control. The issue is that as operational responsibility has expanded, sovereignty has not, thus creating a tension between the expectations of what a government should do and what it can do. As the authors describe, “Governance today is produced by the operations capacity of a wide range of institutions at diverse scales, but sovereignty remains stubbornly national” (p. 44). The authors do an incredible job of noting the tension between multilateral governance that is designed to work for member states versus the general good. Then, they detail how supranational governance in places like the European Union has been limited due to the underlying neoliberal economic design that refutes cross-national distributional politics. Decentralization has shifted power below the nation-state, but the state's hold on sovereignty has constrained the power of these subnational units to govern themselves. Multilevel governance is thus uneven in practice as some spaces and issues are well governed while others are poorly governed.
The third chapter, “The Planetary,” explains the origin of the term planetary. The authors describe two concepts of the global. The first is a human-centric approach referred to as the global versus an earth-centric global approach which is referenced by the authors as the Planetary. They describe the historical evolution or epistemological break that has led many intellectuals to move from the concept of global to the Planetary. This move to the Planetary is driven by technological changes as well as the failures of globalization. Globalization has created an extraction-based model based on the idea of ever-expanding extraction and not sustainability, which has thus led to planetary destabilization. Planetary issues are necessary for a flourishing biosphere, inseparable from life's history. They occur over immense timescales and spaces and are affected by human intervention. These issues extinguish the distinction between foreign and domestic and are bounded only by the Earth system, and these issues' effects are not evenly distributed. The importance of the Planetary concept is that it is designed to remind humankind that they are guests on Earth. It also encourages a new focus that is founded on sustainability and habitability that would help prioritize which planetary issues to address and how.
The fourth chapter, “Planetary Subsidiarity,” focuses on the etymology of the concept of subsidiarity and the author's unique interpretation of the principle of subsidiarity. The existing governance architecture fails to recognize the self-determination of diverse local communities and address planetary problems. The authors focus the reader's attention on the issue of allocation of powers and the decision behind these allocations. The authors propose the system of subsidiarity as a framework. They describe the principle of subsidiarity as the idea that larger-scale governing institutions should not intervene unless and until a smaller scale is unable to carry out a specific task. The principle of subsidiarity, in this sense, becomes a tool for assessing the proper level of institutional governance to address a specific issue. The authors describe Planetary subsidiarity as addressing pressing planetary issues while maximizing local empowerment.
The fifth chapter, “Local Institutions for Local Issues,” outlines new roles for local institutions and recommends that these units network to share ideas and resources. A specific example the authors provided is how the cities of Jakarta and Rotterdam cooperate to promote climate change adaptation. These lateral linkages help empower local governance and introduce flexibility to jurisdictional boundaries critical to more functional and efficient governance. The system proposed “protects pluralism by giving communities the maximum feasible self-governance while also providing for coordinated action on planetary concerns” (p. 162). This system's brilliance lies in its flexibility, functionality and reliance on human cooperation and creativity to collaboratively produce local and planetary solutions.
The Sixth and last chapter, “Planetary Institutions for Planetary Issues,” focuses on a model for planetary governance. The authors make a compelling argument about the current ungovernability of specific planetary challenges under the current administrative authority. The authors trace a possible model for a planetary authority that could address climate change. This institution would be responsible for creating research and knowledge about the issue, setting hard targets with enforceable rules and developing, deploying, and regulating new technologies to help stabilize Earth's atmosphere. The authors also propose an international institution for dealing with pandemics that addresses the current WHO deficiencies that limit its enforcement mechanisms and ability to monitor disease outbreaks. The uniqueness of this approach lies in the understanding that human flourishing is inextricably tied to broader multi-species flourishing. This approach requires nation-states to give up their absolute sovereignty and introduces a flexible concept of governance with a new planetary outlook.
In conclusion, the authors do an incredible job of describing the limitations of our current governance architecture. They explain how the absolute sovereignty of the nation-state is impeding the proper functioning of subnational and planetary governance. They also detail how the anthropocentric understanding of the global has been a detriment to the habitability and sustainability of our planet. The authors note the importance of reframing our understanding of human flourishing to include the planet and other species. These two poignant criticisms are the foundation for the author's construction of a new form of planetary governance. The authors dare to break through the stale limitations of a governing system that is failing us by daring to imagine a better form of governance with a better understanding of human flourishing.
Children of a Modest Star is a valuable contribution to several areas of study, including political theory, national and international governance, and environmental and health studies. The authors criticize our current governing architecture, showing points of tension as well as enormous gaps in governing authority. They also show the critical problem with concepts of the global that are human-centered and treat the planet and other species as separate. The true bravery of these authors is in their proposition to imagine a better system that can better integrate various levels of governance with a focus on planetary flourishing and stability. We can only hope that the leaders of tomorrow see this as a guide to a better future and take seriously the criticisms and proposals set out by this book.