Conceptualizing Politics

4.   The two present challenges
Which threats qualify as potential global challenges is an empirical, not a philo-
sophical question; the answer is therefore subject to the changing scientific evi-
dence. Human biotechnology or nanotechnology or artificial intelligence or other 
items may have chances to become global challenges; but not even a thin body of 
evidence that one or more of these developments are on their way to becoming so 
is available at the time of writing, and I may surmise that this is going to remain so 
for some further years. With other items that are often presented by the media with 
the label of global challenge, such as AIDS, an unstable worldwide financial system, 
cyber terrorism, water scarcity and the like, at a closer view they are neither global 
(a part of humanity can shield itself ) nor lethal for civilisation; or actors are not in 
sight that are likely to become able and want to make a catastrophic usage of that 
possibility in order to establish their worldwide domination. It is true that advances 
made by science and technology in the last decades offer – well beyond nuclear 
physics – various chances for humans to modify or subvert the structures of matter, 
life and the mind; but political philosophy does not speculate like futurology or 
literary musing on the future and sticks to what normal science offers as evidence 
at the time of writing.
Mention must be made of non-anthropogenic lethal and global threats such as 
the collision with a large asteroid or comet or a volcano explosion of a size never 
seen, the latter with consequences similar to a nuclear winter. Not being man-
made, they are politically not relevant, but they become so as soon as a technical 
chance is identified to prevent or minimise them, as is the case with attempts at 
deflecting the asteroid’s trajectory. To put it on the agenda and mobilise the global 
governance resources necessary to take action would truly be an ultimate challenge.
A last remark before we address the only existing man-made lethal challenges. 
As the reader may have noted, I do not use the notion of risk with respect to them, 
as otherwise typical, and also advise against using it. To fully explain why would 
require too long an epistemological discussion.
7
 Instead, let us plunge into the 
specifics of 
α. nuclear weapons and β. climate change. They are not examples of a 
wide array of global challenges, but the only two cases that are presently recognis-
able as such.

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136  World politics and the future of politics
α. Hardly any reasonable person would doubt that the presence of nuclear weap-
ons on the planet (perhaps even on satellites) satisfies the criteria for being regarded 
as a global threat. It is not only the immediate effect of a nuclear exchange, but even 
more the ensuing nuclear winter that would let civilisation unravel, primarily by 
destroying agriculture and food trade, not to speak of the long-range radiative side 
effects on all living beings. The few safe havens for wealthy people and dignitaries 
would either not hold or later be submerged by masses of desperate survivors. But, 
as more optimistic observers believe, this would never happen, because nuclear 
weapons (or nukes, as they were flippantly called in the 1950s) are there not to 
fight a war, which everybody concurs should never be fought and could never be 
won, but on the contrary to make war impossible, because everybody knows that a 
nuclear war would be lethal for both sides. Those weapons’ existence in the hands 
of rational state actors is thus seen as a guarantee for peace.
This is the theory of nuclear deterrence, which by some theorists of extreme realist 
orientation
8
 has been further developed up to the proposal of putting all relevant 
states, such as Germany and Iran, in the possession of nuclear weapons (‘More 
may be better’, was Waltz’s motto in Sagan and Waltz [2003, 45]) in order to let all 
participate in the nuclear balance and responsibility. This theory claims to find con-
firmation in the sixty or so years in which the balance of terror, which dates from 
the mid 1950s, has had the appearance to work.
Sixty years is however too short a time for testing the robustness of nuclear 
deterrence, which is supposed to work for centuries. As a variation on one joking 
analogy by Thomas Schelling, the most astute nuclear theorist since 1945,
9
 to feel 
perfectly safe after the Cold War and episodes such as the Cuban missile crisis of 
1962 is to think like the guy who, after just one round of Russian roulette, tells his 
friends ‘It’s not that dangerous after all!’ It is rather true that the longer nukes are 
around, the higher the chance of a war by misperception or technical failure may 
become. More importantly, nuclear deterrence still entails nuclear war as the answer 
to its own failure; the alternative, that is doing nothing if attacked, would mean that 
deterrence is bluff, in which case deterrence would be definitively toothless. Also, 
deterrence may work between rational actors like states and empires, as it did dur-
ing the Cold War despite the sharp ideological war that divided West and East; but is 
less credited to do so if the number of nuclear armed actors (not just states, but also 
less accountable groups) grows, which will probably happen despite all attempts to 
stop proliferation. In this regard, we must remember that the problem for humanity 
is not nuclear proliferation, which is a side-phenomenon, but the sheer existence of 
nuclear weapons. Checking nuclear proliferation and the chances of nuclear terror-
ism eliminates a minus to nuclear deterrence, pace Waltz, but entails no plus to the 
solution of the problem of nuclear weapons. This problem, while less sharp for the 
contemporaries of this book, written in a relatively stable nuclear situation, is likely 
to become more worrying as time goes by, and to represent the most poisoned 
legacy the twentieth century has left to future generations.
What would the solution be like? The elimination of nuclear weapons altogether 
seems to be the optimum solution, but still has dangers: first comes the cheating 

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The globalised world  137
by one or more states, which would then become the Masters of the world, and 
could be contained only by the strictest monitoring and control regime, regardless 
of the complaints of the states, which would see the rest of their sovereignty vanish. 
Then comes the non-eliminable nature of technical knowledge, which could be 
re-used in later times by pact-breakers – though the journey from a re-activated 
know-how to the effective production of weapons is verifiably long and tortuous 
and could be interrupted by a determined control authority. We can say that the 
solution has technical aspects, but is primarily – how could it be otherwise? – a 
political and institutional problem: how to establish a supranational authority capable 
of keeping existing weapons, technological knowledge, would be-cheaters under 
control? It needs to be supranational, because an intergovernmental body, which 
can act only on unanimity, would be too weak and disruptive as to assert itself in 
such a deadly and supreme matter. Even if supranational (with qualified major-
ity and weighted vote), the authority would still fall short of a world state, which 
nobody would accept, and would refrain from invading any other field than nuclear 
security. This is, on the other hand, the supreme dimension of power and order, and 
its actions would, by default, spin off to all issues of world politics. On the whole, 
it is a puzzling job of designing a new worldwide authority (the UN throughout 
their history does not qualify as a supranational institution), while making it accept-
able to all major players, keeping possible not-yet-nuclear free riders at bay and 
containing its tendency to expand its power beyond the nuclear issue and into an 
unauthorised world government. Unlike cosmopolitanist thinkers, I am not going 
to outline a blueprint of such an institution; I only want to underline that, unlike 
climate change, it is the very nature of the nuclear weapons issue that makes a mere 
convergence of national (disarmament) policies coordinated in an international 
treaty insufficient and requires a central authority capable to act swiftly on its own 
and without much bargaining with the states, for example in point sanctions to 
freeriders.
The record of both politics and philosophy in front of nuclear weapons and war is 
disappointing, not to say appalling. The endeavour to put nuclear arms under bind-
ing international control flared up briefly between 1945–1946 and soon collapsed 
in the environment of the dawning Cold War; it was never seriously resurrected, 
and even the intention to do so expressed by Barack Obama in his speech at Prague 
in May 2009 could not be implemented. World leaders have long since adapted to 
deterrence as the best available regime in which to frame nuclear weapons, whose 
‘overkill’ capacity has been reduced while they remain numerous enough to ignite 
a planetary catastrophe. Nuclear arms come on the agenda of international politics 
only in the shape of initiatives against cases of proliferation, but the existing nuclear 
powers have never moved towards that ‘treaty on general and complete disarma-
ment’ they pledged to work for in Art. VI of the Non-Proliferation Treaty of 1968 – 
thus making the Treaty less palatable for nuclear have-nots.
Only in the first two decades of the nuclear era have a few philosophers (Günther 
Anders, Norberto Bobbio, Karl Jaspers, Bertrand Russell and later the British his-
torian Edward P. Thompson musing on ‘exterminism, the last stage of civilisation’) 

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138  World politics and the future of politics
made the possible suicide of humankind in a nuclear war a crucial theme of their 
reflections. In later years, all possible novelties and evils (alienation, commodifica-
tion, gender oppression, intolerance, imperialism of the social system, distributive 
injustice, pervasiveness of bio-power and others) were made the matter of philo-
sophical consideration and complaint, while a veil of ignorance or denial came 
to cover the existential questions: how could humankind bring about its possible 
self-destruction? What does it reveal about the human being and its civilisation? Is 
a change of course still possible? What are the cultural, motivational and political 
forces – if any – to count upon for a change?
β. Anthropogenic climate change due to global warming, discovered in the mid 
1970s, became a political issue shortly thereafter: in 1992 the first summit of the 
United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change was held in Rio de 
Janeiro, in 1997 the first agreement aiming to reduce greenhouse gases (GHG) 
emissions in developed countries was signed in Kyoto. Yet it took eighteen more 
years for a follow-up agreement including nearly all of the countries on Earth to 
come to fruition (Paris Agreement, December 2015). In the time between 1992 
and 2015, worldwide emissions have only gone up and the side effects of climate 
change (mass migration, climate wars, desertification, drought, spreading of diseases) 
have worsened; the Kyoto Protocol was politically a step forward, signalling the 
possibility of international climate cooperation, but was physically not particu-
larly relevant. The 2015 Paris Agreement – of modest relevance because based on 
voluntary pledges to bring down emissions by single countries and lacking robust 
mechanisms of monitoring and compliance – is again a political step forward, all 
countries having recognised the necessity to act in concert, while its physical effects 
are expected to fall widely short of the announced goal of keeping the increase 
of Earth atmosphere temperature in 2100 by 2°C. Hence, more, further reach-
ing and more binding agreements will have to be negotiated and implemented in 
order to slow down global warming. If this does not happen by the deadlines set 
by climatology, that is by nature, the already serious consequences of the warming 
threaten to go beyond certain thresholds and generate in the next century cata-
strophic effects that would bring down food production worldwide, drive hundreds 
of millions out of their regions and continents, worsen global health and generate 
wars around resources, borders and welfare levels.
Unlike nuclear war, which can happen or fail to happen and unleash a global 
catastrophe if it happens, global warming already happens – as a wealth of scientific 
evidence regarding, among other things, greenhouse gases proves – and will con-
tinue at least for a long time as it still grows incrementally, thus making the predic-
tion of its effects on humans and nature more and more reliable, the more climate 
models are refined. Please see Figure 7.1. 
More explicitly than the nuclear threat, climate change affects our responsible 
or irresponsible attitude towards future generations. The threat of nuclear war and 
the threat of major climate-related catastrophes, though different in many regards, 
can be subject to joint consideration because of their global dimension and their 
involvement of the generations of the far future.

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