Conceptualizing Politics

FIGURE 7.1
   These IPCC graphics showing the huge upsurge of three greenhouse 
gases in the atmosphere in the last century in comparison to the preceding 
10,000 years are a vivid picture of one of the global and lethal challenges 
politics is recently confronted with.

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140  World politics and the future of politics
5.   What to do with future generations?
The novelties in world politics we are analysing raise problems modern politics was 
and is not equipped to address, while we are reminded of the changing civilisational 
roots of politics. Do we have reasons to speak of post-modern politics?
By modern politics let us understand politics as it has been managed for the past 
five centuries by territorial states (later nation states) on an increasingly representa-
tive and democratic basis and having the wellbeing of their peoples as separate enti-
ties as official and legitimate purpose. The totalitarian monsters of the twentieth 
century were the distillate of the failures of this process and hopefully the last 
devastating reaction to it.
Other features of modern politics are:
•  politics had to come to terms with moderate challenges, which endangered 
nothing more than the individual life or freedom, though in the colonies entire 
populations were exterminated.
• 
technology was a morally neutral tool or regarded as an instrument of progress.
• 
politics (remember its definition in Chapter 1) was the activity settling distri-
bution conflicts around divisible goods, which it allocated authoritatively.
•  distribution or identity conflicts unfolded in a narrow timeframe and a rela-
tively stable civilisational environment; even after the ruinous Second World 
War it was possible in fifteen-twenty years to rebuild Berlin, Dresden, Warsaw, 
Stalingrad and Hiroshima.
• 
the external security of the states was entirely entrusted to the sovereign state 
and was by nature disjunctive (my security weakens whenever you feel fully 
secure and vice versa) until the rise of common security, which is however still 
a fragile and infrequent component of international politics.
•  the Roman principle salus reipublicae suprema lex esto (the safety of the com-
monwealth has to be the supreme law) presides over all domestic and foreign 
policy.
What is different in post-modern politics? Please remember that my hyphenated 
wording signals that my use of this expression differs almost completely from the 
(mainly French) postmodernism of the 1980–1990s, which was, in my view, a 
reproduction of modernity with a negative mark rather than an effort to radically 
rethink the human condition after modernity.
We are in a transitional time, in which features of modernity coexist but also 
collide with new elements, among which we note the following:
• 
global and lethal challenges, at least the two we are examining.
• technology – not just nuclear, but, say, reproductive technology – becomes 
morally significant.
• 
we have some solid knowledge about the future of our actions and omissions, 
not in the sense of the all-inclusive scenarios designed by futurology, but with 

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The globalised world  141
regard to well-defined physical processes and their immediate social conse-
quences (for example desertification
→mass migration).
•  in particular we know that we are putting global commons in danger, which 
are to be saved or lost as a whole, that is not subject to adversarial distribution.
• the 
salus reipublicae (safety of the commonwealth) is now possible only within 
the salus humani generis (safety of humankind), which to be preserved requires 
everybody’s participation.
•  the modern state has turned out to be an insufficient provider of security 
and has rather created supreme insecurity by disproportionately widening the 
destructiveness of its weapons, and failing to keep the perverse effects (global 
warming) of ‘progress’ under control. The first of these shifts can be regarded as 
the nuclear culmination of the ‘security dilemma’ that has always accompanied 
international politics: to enhance its own security state A has grown so power-
ful that its adversaries B, C, and D see A as a potential aggressor and enter an 
arms race with it or wage war in order to undercut its might before this has 
overgrown theirs.
10
It is sufficiently clear that the tools of modern politics cannot match the severity 
and novelty of the new threats; we have displayed above the theoretical reasons and 
the empirical evidence for that. Politics-as-usual does not even seem capable to 
come to terms with the problems created by economic globalisation. But it is not 
enough to proclaim the necessity and rightness of a turn to a new understanding 
of politics: the political philosopher as I conceive of this figure is neither a preacher 
nor a persuasive politician seeking consensus, though both these professions are 
respectable and useful. It is the philosopher’s task to investigate the motivations for