This seminar as part of the EUI Climate workshop will feature a presentation by Prof. Daniele Conversi, Visiting Fellow at the European University Institute's Robert Schuman Center for Advanced Studies.
Climate change is an uncontainable phenomenon which doesn’t know national, class, ethnic, gender or geographical boundaries and hence cannot be tackled, or even comprehended, within the limits of a nationalist worldview. Yet, the international system is dominated by nation-states which are in turn imbued by the ideology of nationalism. Despite this, the relationship between climate change and nationalism has been largely unstudied until 2020.
This presentation first identifies the key political obstacles to global climate action. For years, the pressures exerted by the fossil fuel lobbies hampered action by the main Western governments. However, it does not analyse these lobbies, about which there is a vast literature, but explores a scarcely identified set of obstacles caused by the current division of the world into nation-states, powered by their own ideology – nationalism. Nationalism has become the dominant ideology of the contemporary world in tandem with the expansion of capitalism. Nationalism is therefore an ideology that it is impossible to ignore, nor we can pretend that it does not exist. We must understand its limits, which will also help us to understand the apparently escape-less situation before us.
A new approach is considered and developed by asking: if nationalism is the core ideology around which contemporary political relations turn, is it possible to involve it in the fight against climate change? It thus explores the possibility of an emerging green nationalism largely related to "non-state nations" where the environmental dimension is accompanied by an emphasis on the perceived need to fight against climate change, but also related to a few "exemplary nation-states" where sustainability pervades political and social relations. The examples of these pathbreaking, trendsetting nation-states should, however, be placed against their major opponents, the "top polluting nation-states".
The paper concludes that riding the wave of nationalism may appear as a desperate gesture by those who have renounced confidence in the capacity of human awakening from a pervasive state of "mindlessness verging on collective suicide. Yet, trying to involve nationalists only makes sense if, at the same time, non-national solutions are also considered.