Conceptualizing Politics

Further readings
A pluralist variety of views on world politics:
Held, David (2010) Cosmopolitanism, Cambridge: Polity.
Kissinger, Henry (2014) World Order, New York: Penguin.
Lebow, Richard Ned (2010) Why Nations Fight, New York: Cambridge University Press.

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Russett, Bruce (1993) Grasping the Democratic Peace, Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Schmitt, Carl (1951) Der Nomos  der Erde im Völkerrecht des Jus publicum Europaeum/The Nomos 
of the Earth in the International Law of the Jus Publicum Europaeum, New York: Telos, 2003.
Telò, Mario, ed. (2014) European Union and New Regionalism: Competing Regionalism and 
Global Governance in a Post-Hegemonic Era, Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate.

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Though states play an important role in the field we are now entering, this cannot 
be adequately defined as resulting from their international relations. The dimension, 
the causation and the effects of what happens here supersede the agency of states. 
We speak therefore of global affairs, whose space is the globe, along with forces such 
as the warming of the atmosphere that ignore borders, rather than acting within the 
grid created by states interacting with each other.
It is not too early to see all of this as a shift in world history and to make our 
eyes wide open to the deep changes politics is undergoing and will have even more 
to manage in order to repair its already indented ability to govern human societies. 
A philosophical scepticism as to whether this ability will actually not only materi-
alise, but do so in time, is more than appropriate.
The amount of novelty we are now watching and tentatively conceptualizing is 
boosted by the ambivalence of all discourse containing the notion of ‘global’. By 
‘globalisation’ we currently mean by default economic (and technological, social, 
cultural) globalisation. But this is only one facet of the truth, the part that will be 
discussed in Part 1 of this chapter. My point here is that the globalised world has a 
second component, which has little to do with economic globalisation and consists 
of man-made lethal threats to civilisation; it is up to politics to transform them from 
threats into challenges. Of these global and lethal challenges I shall examine, in Part 
2, the political consequences of the only two which we have a sufficient scientific 
knowledge of: the nuclear weapon, whose globalising effect that started in 1945 
pre-dates economic globalisation, and anthropogenic climate change.
Part I looks first at the essentials of economic globalisation in §1, then in §2 at 
its connection with politics, finally in §3 at global governance.
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